Growing up in Los Angeles with a father who was a big fan of Kraftwerk, I’d hear stories about a mystical highway in Germany with no speed limit called The Autobahn. “Someday,” I thought to myself, “I will drive on this magical freeway.”
Decades later, after sixteen years in NYC, I relocated to Berlin and went to film school. With my New York license, I was allowed six months of full driving privileges.After I finished school, I met a nice German lady (now my fiancé) who showed me the best lakes to visit in nearby Brandenburg. “Lake Day” became a fixture of our lives and I needed a German license.
Should just be a matter of paperwork and then Wir Fahr’n Fahr’n Fahr’n auf der Autobahn, right? Wrong.
Little did I know I was at the beginning of what would be a nearly two-year bureaucratic odyssey.
The ol’ switcheroo
As it turns out, both New York and California have zero driver license reciprocity in Germany. Some years ago, Germany evaluated each state’s driver requirements and deemed some states automatically reciprocal, many (like mine) not. My New York licence was effectively good for nothing. I would have to start at the beginning and pass a practical (behind the wheel) and a theoretical driving test, notoriously difficult and expensive in Germany.
I was bummed. Then, my older brother moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota, a state with “partial reciprocity,” meaning that while the German theoretical exam was required, the infamous practical test was not. It was spring. I would visit my brother in November for the Thanksgiving holiday. Could I transfer my New York license to a Minnesota license? Could there be a way?
After a bit of research, I learned that yes, I could get a Minnesota license, I would just need proof of residency, which a piece of mail addressed to me would cover, so I got my American bank to start sending paper statements to my brother’s address.
Thanksgiving came and I went to the Minneapolis DMV. They processed my documents and informed me that I would receive my license by mail in four to six weeks. It came and my brother mailed it overseas to me.
Back in Berlin, I made an appointment at the Bürgeramt for my Umschreibung einer ausländischen Fahrerlaubnis and discovered some unsettling fine print. Apparently, for a US license to achieve reciprocity, it must be issued to the driver before moving to Germany; one couldn’t just go back to America, get a license from a reciprocal state, and then come back to Germany claiming they had it all along. It seemed the authorities were familiar with that trick.
Or were they?
Brain strain
Sure it was true I went back to the US to get a new license … but I had originally held a New York license before that, and while that state had no reciprocity, it did qualify me as a licensed driver before my move to Germany. It seemed I had entered into a bit of a gray area, an unexplored corner of German bureaucracy that no reddit forum or even ChatGPT could definitively explain. I would simply have to have faith and hope for the best.
I arrived at my Bürgeramt appointment and was assigned to an incredibly friendly woman who processed my paperwork swiftly, with no suspicions. As she reviewed her computer screen, her face darkened. She explained what I already knew: I would have to take the Theoretical Exam. She looked as though she had run over my cat with her car.
The German Theoretical Driver License Exam is the most difficult test I have ever taken. It consists of 30 questions which one must answer in 30 minutes. I started taking practice tests on my phone, failed all of them and realized that I would have to study the questions first. All 1,300 of them. And so I did.
I attacked the material as if I was trying to pass the Bar Exam.
I screen-shotted difficult questions for later review, my photo library soon filling up with esoteric diagrams of German traffic situations. After studying topics like “Danger Theory,” “Behavior In Road Traffic” and even “Environmental Protection,” I reviewed the “questionnaires”, which divided questions into sets of 30. There were 77 sets of these.
I worked through them as much as my brain and schedule could stand, spending about thirty minutes to an hour almost every day huddled over the app. I continued to screen-shot pictures of extra tricky questions like “A single-axle trailer has an actual gross weight of 600kg. What is the minimum possible vertical load? A. 90kg (=15%) B. 24kg (=4%) or C. 60kg (=10%)” Answer: B.
After several months of working in this way, I was ready to attempt the test simulation in the app. My hard work had paid off and after enough 90-100 percent scores on the first try, it was time to go in and take the exam. On a cold morning in December, I trekked out to the testing center in Lichtenberg, took the test with a racing heart and passed on my first try, missing only one question. I received my Prufüng (test) complete with a signature from the test official and secured an appointment in January at the Fahrerlaubnisbehörde where I would have to turn in my paperwork and handover my original New York License.
Teenage freedom
I brought my German fiancee with me to this Termin, and as my paperwork was processed I still had a vague fear in the back of my mind that something would go wrong, that they would get wise to my Minnesota license-finagling and deny me at the last minute. But once the lady behind the counter printed a very official looking document and pulled out a stamp (always a sign of bureaucratic success) I knew I was golden. She stamped my temporary German license which allowed me to drive that day, if I wished, and handed me a piece of paper with a printed appointment date on it, three weeks in the future, when I could come pick up my license. No official email, just a piece of paper.
I would be out of town then, oh no! Not to worry, my fiancee could come in my stead, she would just need my official permission to do so, achieved only by a written permission slip from me, which had to be written by hand in pen, because in 2026 Germany, this is how things get done.
It was finished. After eighteen months and a transatlantic driver license side quest, I could finally do in Germany what I had been doing in the US since I was sixteen. Standing there on the steps of the Fahrerlaubnisbehörde on an icy day in Berlin-Mitte, I felt a sense of teenage freedom course through my forty-four year old body.
“So baby,” I said to my fiancee, “where do you want to go?”
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Read more about Germany here in Dispatches’ archives.
