The Ignorance and Inefficiency of the German Caste System and Its Procrustean Beds

I. The Bed

The Greeks told of an innkeeper named Procrustes who offered travellers on the road to Athens a bed for the night. He had a single bed, and every guest had to fit it. Whoever was too short was stretched until he fitted. Whoever was too long had his feet cut off. The bed was never altered. It was the measure, and the human being was what got adjusted.

Germany has many such beds. They are called degree, career track, qualification, master craftsman’s certificate, competence. They have their purpose, and we will come back to it. But they have one property that one notices only when one does not fit: they do not measure what someone can do, but which certificate he holds. And whoever holds the wrong certificate, or none at all, is not seen, even when he is urgently needed.

II. Caste?

The word caste is an exaggeration, and one should say so openly. In India one is born into one’s caste, and its lowest members were for centuries considered untouchable. Whoever is born in Germany without the Abitur, the university entrance qualification, can make up for it later, through evening school, the master craftsman’s examination or late study. The system is more permeable.

But how permeable? Of a hundred children from families in which one parent went to university, 78 begin a degree. Of a hundred children from families without a university degree, it is 25. This was found by the German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies in 2024, and it has hardly changed for years. Hereditary in the strict sense it is not. But it is passed on, generation after generation, and whoever lies in one drawer rarely gets into another.

In the public service this is even cast in regulation. There are the lower, the intermediate, the higher and the senior service, and which one a person enters is decided by the qualification he can show on entry. What he learns and achieves in the following thirty years changes little. Promotion into the next track is possible, but the exception.

III. Cut Short: the Doctor from Damascus

In Thuringia one doctor in five now obtained his degree abroad, more than two thousand. The largest group comes from Syria. A doctor from a country outside the EU must wait in Thuringia up to 671 days for a decision on her licence to practise, almost two years. At the end of 2025, 651 such cases were open there. First a language test, then a check whether the training is equivalent, then a knowledge examination, one after another, not side by side.

In the same period, rural hospitals search in vain for doctors. The doctor from Damascus stands at the door, and the bed is too short for her. So she is cut down: to auxiliary work, to waiting time, to years in which she forgets what she could do. No one disputes that it must be checked whether someone is a good doctor. The problem is that checking the paper holds up checking the ability for so long. Parliament has now recognised this: from November 2026 the knowledge examination is to become the rule, instead of the long comparison of documents.

IV. Stretched: the Career Changer

With teachers the country does the opposite. In the school year 2023/24, around 77,600 teachers in general schools taught without a teaching qualification, more than one in ten. In physics it is almost one in four. In Berlin, about two thirds of recent new hires lacked full teaching qualification, in Saxony-Anhalt four in ten.

Here the bed is not altered, but the person is stretched. A physicist who has worked twenty years in industry is needed and hired. But he remains the “career changer” who lacks the qualification, often paid less and for a long time without the security of civil-servant status. The school needs his ability and treats him by his paper. The bed stays the same. He is only laid in it because no other guest came.

V. The Master Craftsman’s Certificate

In 2004 the requirement of a master craftsman’s certificate was abolished for many trades. Whoever wanted to lay tiles or parquet no longer needed the certificate to found a business. In 2020 it was reintroduced for twelve trades, among them tilers, interior decorators and organ builders. The reasoning: quality had suffered, and businesses without a master hardly trained apprentices any more.

The argument deserves to be taken seriously, and we do not want to dismiss it. A master’s certificate attests ability, and training the next generation is a service the market alone does not pay for. But it attests ability at one point in time, and at the same time it protects those already inside from those who want to come in. A craftsman who demonstrably can do the work but lacks the certificate may still not do it as his own master. The bed has its good reason, and yet some are pressed into it who would sleep better otherwise.

VI. The Inventor Without Credentials

Felix Wankel left school in 1921 without the Abitur. His father had fallen in the war, and there was no money for a degree or an apprenticeship. He taught himself engineering, worked for a publisher, ran a small workshop and filed his first patent in 1929. In 1957 the first rotary engine ran at NSU. In 1969 the Technical University of Munich awarded him an honorary doctorate. He received the title when he no longer needed it.

Wankel is the famous case, but he stands for many unknown ones. In the mid-1990s, according to calculations by the German Economic Institute, about one in four patent applications in Germany came from independent inventors, that is, from people who invent without a company or institute. In 2022 it was around 2.3 percent. In absolute numbers, only a quarter of what was filed around the turn of the millennium remains.

The institute gives as the main reason that the state of knowledge has grown so much that an individual can hardly invent anything truly new any more. That is certainly part of the truth. Another part is that funding has declined and is directed at institutes and companies, at applicants with a legal form, a personnel department and a contact person. Whoever finds something new alone in his workshop fits no application form. He is the guest for whom the bed was never intended. In “One Could, One Should” we described what happens to people without title, without institute and without publisher who have something to say: they are heard and filed away. They lack the higher ordination.

VII. Tied Hands

The beds stand not only in schools, clinics and chambers of trade. They also stand in every funding programme, as a specification into which an application must fit exactly: age of the company, number of employees, turnover, legal form, sector, cut-off date. For the start-up loan of the state development bank KfW, for instance, no more than five years may have passed since the first revenue was earned. Each of these limits has a reason. Together they make a bed with very precise dimensions.

A case that happened just so: an applicant meets every condition of a programme, the project fits, the documents are complete. Only one thing does not fit. He has been self-employed half a year too long. The application is rejected. The examiner sees that the project is exactly what the programme was meant for, and can do nothing. His hands are tied.

This is the second, less noticed side of the Procrustean bed. It binds not only the one who is supposed to fit, but also the one who has to lay him in it. The rules have become so precise so that no one decides by favour, and that is an honourable reason. But they also leave no one any judgement. Where once a person weighed things up, today a tape measure measures, and the person holding it may not say that he sees what the tape does not measure. In “The In-Between Realm” we described the layer that stands between the means and their purpose and lives from passing them on. Its forms do not get shorter. Its measurements only get more precise.

VIII. Ignorance and Inefficiency

Ignorance here is not an insult but a description. A system that sorts by paper literally does not see what lies outside the paper. The doctor from Damascus appears in the files as an unresolved case, the physicist in the classroom as a gap in qualification, the inventor in the workshop not at all. What the system does not see, it cannot use.

From this follows the inefficiency, and it is expensive. A country that complains of missing doctors, missing teachers and missing inventions leaves the people it needs waiting at the door. These are not isolated cases, they are tens of thousands, and each of them loses years that do not come back. We described the same mechanism for politics in “The Long March through the Party”: whoever wants to rise in a party must serve out the steps, whatever he can do.

IX. How This Essay Could Be Refuted

The strongest objection: the beds protect. The medical licence protects patients from quacks, the master’s certificate customers from bad work, the career track the state from cronyism. The German professional civil service itself arose so that offices would no longer be awarded by birth and favour, but by demonstrable aptitude. That was progress, and it has remained so.

We do not dispute this. We distinguish between testing ability and testing paper. The first protects. The second often protects only the bed. Where a doctor may show her ability in an examination instead of waiting two years for her documents to be compared, no one is less protected, but many are better cared for.

The essay would be refuted if it could be shown that countries which hire and promote more by ability than by degrees are worse supplied and invent less than Germany.

X. Theseus

The legend has an ending. On his way to Athens the young Theseus passed Procrustes’ house, and he did to the innkeeper what the innkeeper had done to his guests: he laid him in his own bed. It did not fit him.

When will we begin to fit the beds to the people, instead of the people to the beds?