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I'm a simple emigrant, and Germany's public toilets are throwing down a challenge to me

3/16/2025, 7:08:00 AM

I'm a compact girl, and that comes with roughly a million advantages. For example, I'm always comfortable on public transport; even in low-cost carriers I feel like royalty. And also in ancient towers, bars, or apartments in Frankfurt for €2,500 a month, I can look around with a hop in my step while my friends lean to squeeze through doorways. But what's wrong with toilets in Germany? Apparently the people here are too tall, and people like me are simply an anomaly. I can't recall a single public restroom where I didn't have to apply my physics knowledge and first sit down (not on the toilet, of course) and figure out which ballet position I should take this time. Good that my apartment is in a new building, and at least at home I don't have to climb Everest. Naturally I googled toilet standards in different countries and found that it seems right to me! The height of toilets in Germany is 40–42 cm from the floor, whereas in the United States and the United Kingdom, for example, about 38 cm. So a difference of as much as 4 cm, quite significant, given that few people like to sit in public restrooms. But that’s not all—the standard height for urinals in Germany is 70 cm from the floor, and in the UK about 61 cm; somehow, it's lucky to be a girl somewhere! While I was looking up standards, I found that in the past toilets with the so-called "shelf" were quite popular in Germany, and the results of bodily functions would land there first. Then you could study them or take a sample for analyses and only then flush. I have only one question: how often does the average German resident study or carry their excrement to a laboratory so that full standards can exist? And while we’re on this topic, another quirk of Germany is the placement of toilets in cafés. Usually the route to them is roughly the same path our parents would have had to traverse to reach school. You’ll have to go down about 15 floors, walk three kilometers, figure out which of ten doors really leads to the right toilet, then realize that you don’t really want to go anymore and start looking for a way back. P.S.: translation of the image in the comments #curiosities