> nothing is fast here if you go the legal path and stay within the law
> and as you see everything costs a lot
this sounds like a system primed for corruption
if you can pay half the needed amount to do everything 5 times as fast, would you not do it?
But you can't. It's not like you can bribe the bureaucrat working on your form, and there is no regular fast pass.
> It's not like you can bribe the bureaucrat working on your form
are you trying to say "bureaucrat can't speed up" or are you doubting someone physically can't give someone else some cash?
It literally can't be done, in Germany.
There is corruption in Germany, but it simply does not exist at this level. It also wouldn't work in practice: You would have to find out who is the office worker working on your documents (you usually don't know that, and never in advance). Then that person has safeguards: He is part of a team, someone will check his work, usually at least a colleague and his boss. Assume you'd try anyway, you meet the person somehow alone - how would you find out whether he is corruptible? If you try to ask you will face severe consequences.
Plus, it's never worth it for him: If they were caught they would be facing jail time, lose their job, all the benefits already earned (the special pension state servants get, their health insurance, ...). You'd have to offer that much money that all of that is worth it. Not even twenty times the money we are talking about here would be enough.
As someone living in Germany, I would be very surprised if someone legit manages to bribe their way to skip a step somewhere. At an institutional level, perhaps it's more surprising if it never ever happens anywhere at all; but at an individual level, your particular case hitting a bribeable person and you knowing of it seems like worse odds than seeing a shooting star during a solar eclipse. Maybe if you are close family, or close enough plus a sob story, the person might have the ability to handle your case first; that sounds like something the computer system would allow in order to avoid getting stuck on a case they can't currently work on (for whatever reason) at the head of the queue. They're probably not the only step though so it might not help much
The third option is “they could speed up but won’t do it for a bribe”.