In the series “The duty defense“We take the word for people, animals, things or habits that are criticized and rejected by many. This article is part of time on the weekend, edition 15/2025.
In the lexicon of psychology, the following can be found on the subject of “initiation rite”: The adult status of young people is checked by undercuting them reminiscent of assault. In Ethiopia, for example, the young men of Hamar have to jump four times naked over a wild bull to be accepted as adults. And on the Canadian Baffin island, inuit boys from the age of eleven in the Arctic wilderness can be exposed because they demonstrate their survival to the fathers.
If you now want to classify something like this in this country naserfilling than antiquated, you should rather take back. We Germans have some initiation rituals that are no less archaic on outsiders. One of the most important: the theoretical and practical driver’s license test. Formally, it only entitles you to guide a motor vehicle in German road traffic, but the symbolic meaning is much greater.
Especially in the country: Anyone who exists there at the age of 18 or 19 is independent of the (often non -existent) local transport and the parental taxi service. It also does not have to run red with shame when your own peer group in the parking lot in front of McDonald’s compares your engines as soon as the Panini stickers on the elementary school station. He is now fully entitled to the German Road Traffic Regulations, and nowhere is Germany German than where it says: “Whoever participates in the traffic has to behave in such a way that no one else is damaged, endangered or more than in the circumstances inevitable, hindered or harassed.” Even Immanuel Kant couldn’t have put it better.
It is all the more concerned that Germany has to worry that, as has recently become known, more and more test subjects rattle through the driving test. Almost every second failed 2024 on the theoretical, more than every third in the practical driving test. Are the test subjects Schlapper or the examiners harder than before? Or has road traffic possibly become so rough and merciless that fewer and fewer prospective drivers can meet its rules? The driving test would be all the more important. But an exam that no longer passed loses social acceptance and thus the meaning. And that would be a shame. After all, it is not just about the tiresome prerequisite for the management of a (climate -political highly problematic) motor vehicle.
Because a driving test is also (and as much motor vehicle pathos is permitted at this point). And not even though, but because so many beginners would rather jump four times naked over a wild bull than to spend a medium-sized assets of being blocked, enclosed, humiliated and-perhaps-approved for the exam with a Bundeswehr sergeant overmated to the driving instructor. Because that is easy to forget: the lessons are part of the ritual before the exam. And the lessons are a larger ordeal than a motorway ride with an auditor could ever be on the back seat.
The moving humiliation mill
As a novice driver, you drive because the driving instructor roars that you should drive. You try to do everything right and that’s why everything is doing everything wrong. Until at some point the moment comes from which everything doesn’t matter. One wishes the accompanying sergeant into a military sports exercise according to Timbuktu and suddenly no longer drives because of it, but despite it. With every overland trip you not only internalize the rules of the road traffic regulations, but also gain distance from your guards and ask yourself: What kind of driver do I want to be? The juggernut and scolding for which every inadequacy of the others is punished? Or the driver who only drives because he has to and feels with everyone who works the same way. Because that really means driving ability. The driver’s license is only the certification of the internal ripeness obtained in front of the world. And the possibility of failing increases the status of those who have already escaped the humiliation mill.
Ultimately, it is not the driver’s auditor, but yourself about when the liberating moment of sausage came. In the exam, the examiner only wants to put a hook behind reverse parking and am-stop sign. The sergeant who sits in the car during the exam is much more important than him. Mine really got me on the palm in the last hour before the exam. God, what did we scream! When the examiner approached, I hardly noticed the inconspicuous male. My desire was so big to take revenge and to drive me in accordance with the rules and self -determined. At some point the male sat quietly in the back seat and just wanted to get out. For lunch. I gave it: around the block again and then drive on the mountain. With handbrake! Take the driver’s license Germany!
