Return to sender

I learned a new word in German the other day …

In and of itself, that’s probably not too surprising. After all, I’ve only been learning German for about half my life and, like any language, there are lots of words to learn. Even when you get past the swear words. And, depending on who you ask, German has a lot of words to learn: 15 000 in the average person’s active vocabulary, 135 000 in the official German dictionary, and a whopping 5.3 million in total (or 8x the total number of English words).

What is surprising, however, is that most Germans I asked didn’t know the meaning of the word either. The word? Entsendung. Translated into English, it means deployment or posting.

This immediately struck me as strange because the German prefix ent- is often used to negate the rest of the word. As in enthaaren (to remove hair from something), or entfrosten (to defrost), or even Ente (duck). Admittedly it does get tricky sometimes. Entgelt can mean either fee or reward (depending on which side of the transaction you’re on, I guess) and enthalten can be used to either abstain from something or that something is included (other than your participation presumably). And German does have entfallen, which among its several meanings can colloquially mean the same thing as fallen (to drop something). (So not quite the English flammable and inflammable, which both mean the exact same thing formally, but getting there.) In any case, Entsendung, linguistically speaking, should really be the act of not sending (deploying, posting, …) someone or, more charitably (again, at least in a linguistic sense), bringing someone back to the Fatherland.

But, it does indeed mean sending and not returning and translated into another English word I never knew existed until now, it means secondment. So, what prompted this sudden bit of bilingual illumination on my part? Admin, of course, and, even worse, European admin.

Since the middle of 2019, the A1 certificate (or “Statement of applicable legislation”) has come into force across Europe to indicate the European state an individual pays their social-security payments to. It’s supposed to be a safeguard for employees who work in foreign countries and especially those who have been temporarily posted in those countries by their employer so they only make the payments once. And said workers need to carry this certificate around with them or face some heavy-duty fines of up to 10 000 EUR if they get caught in some sting operation.

So what does this all have to do with me? Well, quite literally, it should be nothing really, but reality has its own opinions.

In filling out the application recently for a business trip on behalf of the University of Not-Bielefeld (which sounds a lot better than just going to a scientific meeting), there was this “new” requirement: for all international business trips within Europe, an accompanying application for an Entsendebescheinigung (i.e., the A1 certificate) also had to be filled out. (Now, I say “new”, but, as I said, the legislation has been around since mid-2019 and, somewhat embarrassingly, the statement about secondment requirement has also been on the form since about the same time. I just hadn’t noticed it until now. And I would have continued happily not noticing it except that one of my doctoral students questioned me about it for her own application for the same conference. Shows you how well I read through forms. Or, given that I have ignored it until now, how well the crosstalk between the admin-types here at the university is. Or how well I teach my students to ignore all the admin fine print.)

Admittedly, the university admin is largely just playing along with the decrees of their European idols. Nevertheless, the entire implementation of all this has all the hallmarks of really great admin.

1. It’s impractical

Getting an Entsendebescheinigung requires not one, but two levels of admin: the University of Not-Bielefeld, which makes the formal application as my employer and German Social Services, which officially issues it. If you thought that one level of admin was slow, a second one must make everything exponentially slower. So forget any spur of the moment meetings with colleagues outside the country unless those spurs are about two months long.

(Unfortunately, I wrote that before having applied for my first Entsendebescheinigung at the university. It is true. In theory. But the University of Not-Bielefeld has struck some sort of deal with German Social Services so that they can take care of the whole thing internally. In the end, the entire process took less time (a stunning two days) than for me to get over my shock. To paraphrase Thomas Henry Huxley: the great tragedy of Sarcasm—the slaying of a beautiful story by an ugly fact )

Be that as it may, worse yet is that the Entsendebescheinigung is country-specific. If you visit (sorry, work in) more than one country on the same trip, you need a certificate for each country.

And, to top it all off, it isn’t a certificate at all but a five-page document (for each country) that, according to the rules, I need to keep with me at all times. Right …

2. It’s pointless

I’m not being “deployed” or “posted” anywhere. Hence my initial confusion about the word Entsendung (once that I knew what it actually meant). Even secondment means that your superiors are sending you somewhere else. And, as much as my superiors would probably like to do just that sometimes, that isn’t the case here. I’m just going to a conference. On my own free will. And partly on my own dime or at least definitely not on the dime of the conference.

3. It’s not even an Entsendebescheinigung

Yup. Entsendebescheinigung is merely the 21-letter “colloquialism” for the official term, which, as the official website for the German pension plan stiffly informs us, is the 60-character catastrophe Bescheinigung über die anzuwendenden Rechtsvorschriften (A1). Uh huh. I’ll stick with Entsendebescheinigung. (My suggestion: colloquialize it even more by replacing Bescheinigung with the even shorter BS. Or at least change the word Entsende, which is phonetically and analogously way too close to entsetzt (horror).)

Nevertheless the Entsendebescheinigung is here to stay and mandatory. All of which makes me wonder if Angela Merkel had to apply for the damn things as well for each and every European trip she made since 2019 in her role as the German Chancellor. (And, yes, I know that Olaf Scholz is the current Chancellor, not Angela Merkel. But most people, and especially those outside of Germany, would probably just say “Who?”)

Worse yet, the same would presumably also be true of all German soldiers (and, in fact, any European soldiers) that are stationed outside of their home country. Can you imagine the paperwork? And, more importantly, how long that paperwork will take to process before they can go and shoot someone? Think about it. So long as some unnamed foreign leader doesn’t announce the planned invasion of a European country many months in advance, the rest of Europe cannot legally send troops to help defend that country. (Especially if that country is France or Austria, both of which seem to be real sticklers when it comes to the A1 certificate. Sorry guys.) Forget the fact that the A1 certificate could double up as some pretty effective additional body armour with its five pages. If the foreign soldiers can’t produce it during a battle to indicate which pension fund they might not be collecting from in the future, then they could be barred from the “company premises”.

In any case, my plan for the future is to simply claim that I’m in the country on holiday. (Hopefully you don’t need an Entsendebescheinigung for that now too.) And if I choose to meet with colleagues while I’m on holiday, so be it. Lots of Germans, especially those from the Rhineland, also purposely head to the North Sea for their holidays, something which I personally find to be a lot more inexplicable.