"Papers, Please"

Some, but not all, of my papers. In Germany, you are nothing without your papers.
You need papers to do stuff and you get papers for doing stuff.
Save them all. 

Long ago there was blog that showed flat lay photos of objects people would grab from their home if it was on fire. They photographed their most important, prized possessions – the things they couldn't live without. 

They were mostly designers, so the items they'd save were typically designer-ish: sunglasses, laptops, and hard drives. An awful lot of handguns appeared in the careful arrangements because, well, it was an American blog.

Put in the same situation in Germany, I would grab people before possessions and then I would grab my papers, all my important papers, because you are nobody in Germany without your papers.

When you arrive to Germany, you must register at the city's civil office. They give you a paper, an Anmeldung, that says you do indeed live where you say you live. You will need this for everything. If you lose it, no one will believe you exist, because they don't know if you really have a home. There's no paper to prove it.

You will sign a contract at your job. You must hold on to this. Your landlord will want to see it. And to get your Anmeldung, your landlord must give you a copy of your rental agreement. So, you can't get one paper without the other paper. 

You will show most of these papers when you open a bank account – you won't remember which papers you need, so you will bring them all to the bank, just in case. 

You will need the bank account to get paid by your job and pay your landlord. You will get papers from both: payslips and invoices. You must save these papers to prove people pay you and that you pay people. You may need your bank papers for later, but you don't know for what, so you keep them just in case the need arises.

As you bank with your bank, they will print out records of your transactions and mail them to you. You should keep those papers too, because, well, you might need them when someone official asks for them.

Did you keep those pay slips I mentioned earlier? Good. You need those papers to file your income tax statement. You will need more papers for your taxes, like receipts, statements, and bills of sale. 

After you file your taxes, they will send you a statement stating what they did with your tax papers. Keep that paper too. You should also keep a paper copy of your original tax return, just in case someone official asks for it. 

All these papers go somewhere. A box or a binder or somewhere safe. Because if you move, you will need to prove it with papers at the civil office and update your Anmeldung (remember that important piece of paper?), after you get new contract papers from your landlord.

If you renew your work permit, you need to go to the Pension Office and show a bunch of your papers to get another piece of paper that proves you've been paying into the pension fund. If you're like me, and they recorded you as a woman, they will correct that error in the system and give you a piece of paper saying that a piece of paper has been sent to someone upstairs who will correct that error in the records.

If you lose your job, you will go to the job agency and register as a jobseeker. In order to do this, you will need most of your papers. Make sure you have every single one of those papers. Your EU Blue Card comes with a piece of paper too big to fit in your wallet. It stays at home safe. You might forget that piece of paper and will have to return the next day with all your papers and that little piece of paper to get registered, for which you are given another piece of paper, for your records.

And so, if I am unlucky enough to see my home burn down, I will get everyone out and then run back into the inferno to rescue my papers, because what good is a laptop, disk drive, sunglasses, or a handgun if I don't have my papers in Germany.