‘The Soul-Sapping Grind of Doing Business in Bureaucratic Germany’“Six years ago, Marco Scheel bought a 200-year-old estate in the hamlet of Teplitz on Germany’s Baltic Sea coast. After years of renovation that turned the stone-and-brick ruin into a tasteful company headquarters, Nordwolle, his organic outdoor clothing business, moved in.The problem: Scheel and his 40 staff are there illegally. The local authority initially deemed the dark metal roof fit to shelter horses, not human employees. Then it turned out the metal stairway serving as a makeshift fire exit rested on a granite slab—a “natural building material” that needs a special building authorization. A noncompliant smoke-evacuation window is still holding up the construction permit.
“I’m breaking the law just sitting here,” says Scheel. After years of negotiations and fines of €25,000, equivalent to over $28,000, he said, “the risk is that they come one day and shut us out.”“
- Bertrand Benoit