One of the most common writing tasks on intermediate-level German language exams is a formal letter of complaint. Other topics occasionally appear, such as writing an advertisement, but perhaps the exam designers understand that foreigners trying to make their way through this difficult country need to master one of its foundational skills: complaining. The scenarios vary. The washing machine was broken as soon as it was delivered. My refrigerator still hasn’t been delivered.

When I attended a German language school in Germany, there were many Syrian students. For some reason, every single one of them seemed to be a doctor. A., a Syrian man who lived in the same shared flat, or WG, as I did, told me that this was simply because Syria had a lot of doctors, but I wondered whether perhaps you more or less had to be a doctor to have the qualifications and resources to settle in Germany through a formal route such as language school rather than as a refugee. There were two Syrian men, A. and S., in my class. One day, when the topic of the lesson was social media, S. explained that in Syria, if a missile was launched from one area, people in another could see reports about it on Twitter and react quickly. Another time, a group of us went to watch fireworks by the Neckar, and one of them looked at the fireworks and said, “It sounds just like the war back in his neighbourhood.”

Sometimes I think the circumstances of our birth determine far more of our lives than we realize. Where and when we are born, and the conditions in which we grow up, establish much of what we later understand as normal: what we expect from life, what we consider possible, what we fear, and what we take for granted. Modern transportation has made physical distance something we can overcome to some extent, and easy access to information gives us ways to question the assumptions of the societies in which we were raised. Yet human beings are so adaptable that those assumptions can remain invisible until we directly encounter something that feels alien to what we have internalized. What I find particularly interesting is that when something bad happens, people often ask, “Why me?” Yet when something good happens, we rarely ask the same question. If you think about it, good fortune is every bit as accidental as bad fortune.

While A. was attending language school in Germany, his wife, who was still in Syria, gave birth to their daughter. A. told me that he could apply for refugee status if he wanted to, and that Germany would then provide financial support, but that doing so would mean he could not return to Syria, so he intended to pass his exam as quickly as possible and find a job. He always cleaned the shared areas until they practically shone and did his homework diligently. Everyone who knew him hoped that he would find a job soon and be able to bring his family to Germany.

Germany has a remarkably generous set of public systems that make many of the major hurdles of life easier to clear. Take university, for example. Many German university programs have no fixed admission quota, so once you have the Abitur, the secondary-school leaving qualification, you can enrol even with relatively poor grades. Popular subjects such as medicine and psychology require excellent Abitur grades, but the Abitur is a school-leaving examination rather than a separate university entrance exam. At the time, if your grades were not high enough for certain restricted programs, you could put yourself on a waiting list and, after waiting for several years, eventually gain admission. Things such as voluntary social service could also count in your favour. Many students went straight to university, but it was also perfectly common to spend a year or two doing voluntary work or travelling around the world after the Abitur. Once, while talking about this with a German, I told him that in Korea the national university entrance examination generally had to be taken again if you wanted to apply again the following year. He looked surprised and asked, “Then how are you supposed to travel around the world?” The Abitur used to rely more heavily on grades given by individual teachers, which led to problems such as inconsistent or biased grading, but the system was later standardized more extensively within each federal state. Once enrolled at a public university, students generally pay only two or three hundred euros per semester in administrative and student fees. In many places, that includes a public-transport pass covering the city or even the wider region. Students whose parents have relatively low incomes can receive BAföG, financial support for education and living expenses. As of 2026, the maximum rate is €992 per month, or roughly US$1,150 at current exchange rates, with part of the support later repaid under favourable conditions.

Germany also has a social safety net strong enough to provide people who cannot support themselves with basic living expenses and housing. The protection was extensive enough that I sometimes heard Germans describe even homelessness as a chosen way of life: if the state was prepared to provide the minimum needed to live and a place to live, then someone remaining homeless was understood as having chosen to remain outside that system. Growing up without having to fear for the basic foundations of life can also make someone else’s determination difficult to understand. It becomes possible to stand a few steps back from life, fold your arms, and sincerely ask, “Why do you work so hard? Why not take it a little easier?” Whenever I heard that, I found myself asking, “Could I have been standing where I am now if I had not kept working hard and making sure I did not fall behind?” I had spent enormous amounts of time and effort only to end up several steps behind something that, for someone else, was simply an ordinary right. A life spent constantly working forward and trying not to fall behind can be dismissed remarkably easily by someone whose own life has always rested on a secure floor.

And so, as we learned German and began a race simply to reach the starting line, we learned for our exams how to make safe complaints: complaints about what was or was not acceptable under “consumer rights,” complaints that could be made from the comfort of a safe home without anything truly being at stake. The real complaints could be pushed somewhere out of sight. We could close our eyes to real life as well. After all, we were in the developed country we had dreamed of reaching, the place we had chosen even though getting there meant putting down things large and small that we once had. “I couldn’t be happier … There’s a kind of a sort of cost / There’s a couple of things get lost … Because happy is what happens when all your dreams come true / Well, isn’t it?” — “Thank Goodness,” Wicked