> I never got the German idea of humor.

A lot of foreigners say that. Actually mostly english speaking ones. I never heard a turk say this. Perhaps it's linked to the willingness to learn the language, which is often low with english-speaking people?

No idea, but back to the story: my answer to this "I don't get the humor" is: I don't get spanish humor.

And the simple reason is that I don't speak spanish good enough. I get SOME of the british & US humor. But only a bit ... my language skill, albeit perhaps ok if you look at it, is still not good enough to detect the subtle details. IMHO that is the reason why e.g. Mr Bean was easy to export: he doesn't talk :-)

In any case: to get the local humor, you MUST learn the language and even the culture quite good. Otherwise, you simply don't get it.

> I find it weird that I've been living in the same building for 7 years and I know basically nothing about my neighbors

Isn't this just par for the course when living in dense settings?

I've been living in my current apartment for more than three years, and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't recognize most of my neighbors if I randomly saw them in the street. We say hello when our paths cross coming and going, but that's it.

Many people come to the cities specifically looking to be more anonymous. You can't have that if everybody knows everybody.

The question is... what about the german culture do you know?

Do you know the "functional" Brother Grimm's tales?

Or the "dry" humor of Dieter Hallervorden if you're a bit older? (okay, Christian Ehring from extra3 is perhaps really dry ...)

Do you know the rigid songs of, say Nena or Einstürzende Neubauten? Or is the music of BAP functional to you?

Are the books of Andreas Eschbach dry? Or the lyrics of Ingeborg Bachmann?

Maybe local customs like or the cologne "Karneval" are dry you then? These days we have CSD's all over the place. Maybe not original german culture, but perhaps the german adaption is too rigid?

Do you actually KNOW german culture? Have you been here in school, for example? My guess: you don't really know german culture, at least not so much that you found stuff in it that you enjoy. But you certainly miss your home culture. This is the culture where you were brought up, where you know the language, the norms, the taboos etc. And something else is then alien to you, not comforting. But you already adopted german directness to express this non-comforting state in harsh and ugly words :-)

That's a pithy description of it all. If I hadn't met my (Greek) wife in 2015, I've probably would have left long ago.

And to come of think of it, I think there is another aspect that influences this: Germans are not having as many kids as the immigrants, so the overwhelming majority of the kids in the kitas and schools are from immigrant families or immigrant/native mixed parents. This means that (at this stage in life) any new friends you get to make are likely through your kids, and even there the pool is selected against Germans.

what are you talking about bro, I think you're really getting carried away here. Nobody cares about the direction of writing on the spine of a book. And your thing with sentence vs title case doesn't make sense because German doesn't even have that distinction.

no, it's the Berlin experience, even for many Germans

1. speaking German doesn't matter too much in Berlin, except older "Berlin Berlins" most people speak conversational English. I have even seen cases of _all_ personal in a caffe not speaking German..., more then once.

2. Over half the people in Berlin are "expat-like": ~20% of people in Berlin are not from Germany, 30-40% or so are not from Berlin and only there fro some years/decades to study or similar. And the distribution isn't uniform across Berlins, i.e. the areas you are most likely to end up as an (actual) expat (or similar) are the ones with way higher ratios. Like if you connect someone in such a area (weather physical or area-of-life) it's actually surprising if that person if "from" Berlin. Like you as a person "from" Berlin are more a special case then idk. someone from Poland ;).

1) I am certified C1 German - studied in high school for 6 years. Granted, I don't like speaking German and will use English when possible, but it's not a matter of not being able to connect with them.

2) Shortly after moving in, I started dating a German woman. Lasted close to a whole year. That was more than enough time to meet a lot of her friends, I got to meet her family, etc. That was more than enough time and opportunities to get a good insight into "native German" lifestyle, culture and values.

Want to try again?

It's a very common complaint in countries where one city is disproportionately dominant (London for the UK or Dublin for Ireland, say). It's arguably a bit more surprising for Berlin, because Berlin isn't so disproportionately huge (Berlin's metro area is 6 million out of 80 million, versus London's 15 million out of 70 million or Dublin's 2 million out of 5 million), and because Germany has other comparably sized cities (Hamburg's metro area population is about 5 million). You'd expect it to be a bit less of its own place just on that basis.

Yeah, "Moscow ain't Russia" is an idiom.

IDK if it's a complaint about London per se, but it's definitely not typical of much of England.

And yes, you can say the same about e.g. Amsterdam vs. The Netherlands. And others.

But also, neither of them were literally isolated like West Berlin.