Yes, bureaucrats can act as gatekeepers for things that you are legally entitled to, and create various bureaucratic hurdles. It's usually mere thoroughness, sometimes incompetence, and if you cross them, vindictiveness.

I was told more than once by very knowledgeable people that if you anger a case worker, they can and will make your life hard by nitpicking every little detail and asking for as many documents as they can.

This happens for example if you get angry at their incompetence, or if you sue them for inaction (although in Berlin they see it as normal business by now).

This is so true . There is a word for it in German… behördenwillkür. Mean they can do with you as they please. Advocate insurance is a must here. I hate the bureaucracy here. Lawyers are the only help

Legal insurance does not cover immigration a lot of the time

Germany's head of state was involved in the biggest financial scandal of its existence and forgave a corrupt bank that stole millions of taxes just a few years before going into office.

corruption is spreading like a plague with no consequence in sight for anyone involved.

Olaf Scholz is the head of the government, Germany's head of state is its president, currently Frank-Walter Steinmeier.

If you believe corruption is just spreading now, you missed every single politician since the founding of Germany. Or every other country on the whole planet therefore.

Wikipedia documents that well enough.

This sounds like all of you are living in Berlin, which is known as "failed state" to the rest of Germany. ;-)

It varies form city to city, I live in one that I'd say is an exception on the positive side: Most clerks in the various offices are actually helpful and even giving you hints. I had to renew my passport in January and got an appointment the next day. I got the appointment online(!) in Germany(!!). Passport could be collected 4 weeks later. Meanwhile an ex-colleague who lives in Berlin had to wrestle with his nearest office to even get an appointment for a passport renewal, then gave up and made an appointment with the office in the neighboring district, where it was still a 4 weeks wait. He told me there are districts where it takes up to 6 months.

I guess if you want pain and suffering, move to Berlin. :o)

Unfortunately, this is not just a problem limited to Berlin :-( [1][2]

It's been an absolute mess trying to secure my wife's settlement permit ("Niederlassungserlaubnis"). She has a german Master's degree, works in a government-funded research facility, and has been in the system since December 2022. We've now been ghosted for 14 months, only to be told to make an appointment to provide additional documents (which were not on the 'required documents' list they initially handed to us). After checking the appointment booking website to no avail, I came up with a python script that sends a notification to our phones when a new appointment pops up. It took 40 days of scraping until a new free appointment was available, only to be allowed to provide paper documents in person.

Adding to that, every six months, her employer threatens to fire her if she can't prove her legal status in Germany. So she's constantly jumping through hoops to get this temporary paper permit called "Fiktionsbescheinigung" just to keep her job. It's a hassle, costs €13 each time, and involves cycling through multiple unhelpful bureaucrats at the Ausländerbehörde's hotline (they do not answer emails) until finding one that very reluctantly produces this document.

All of this is beyond frustrating.

[1] https://www.merkur.de/deutschland/muenchen-kvr-auslaenderbeh... [2] https://www.swr.de/swraktuell/baden-wuerttemberg/stuttgart/a...