My trash, your problem?

Here's a cultural question: what do you do about a bunch of trash bags on the sidewalk?

Do you a) pick them up and put them in a bin, dumpster, or receptacle of some kind,
or b) leave them there but call the city to find out why they have not been picked up, then post a sign about your conversation?
What I have learned recently is that if you are American, you choose a. If you are German, you choose b.

Normally, our ultra-complex garbage sorting system requires that we put yellow bags (with plastic and aluminum), and blue bags (with paper) out on the sidewalk on Wednesday nights for Thursday morning pick-up. But since our street has been under construction since October, that system is a little off. The trucks can't get through, and we have been using some dumpsters on the side street that the city put there for us. Once the street was half-finished, though, no one was sure whether pick-up would resume. The first week, several of the neighbors, including us, put our recycling bags out.

This is Sallstrasse. Our place is on the right, by the white car. The Indian restaurant is on the left.
That is not important to this story other than so that you can see just how close it is.

I did learn during this process that our sorted garbage is not necessarily recycled. A lot of it is incinerated to produce energy. There is some special combination of yellow bags, blue bags, and regular trash that produces the highest amount of electricity when it burns. Germany even imports waste from other countries to keep the incinerators going. 

After two days I was tired of looking at our own home-grown trash bags, and carried them all over to the dumpsters myself. This was probably mistake number one. Maybe people thought that the trucks had made it through. Maybe they thought the recycling fairy had come. I don't know what they thought, but I do know that in the last two weeks bags started to pile up on the sidewalk and just sat there. They got rained on, they got kicked, they got in the way of the bike cellar door. They were gross.

I resisted my American impulse to just pick them up again, since I knew that would only prolong the issue. At this point when an American would say "take care of your own damn trash," a German would say, "you pay very high taxes and once the trash is outside of your door, it's the city's problem." I suspected this might be the general attitude, but wasn't sure until I saw the sign posted in our stairwell by Meike, the ultra-organized woman on the first floor who led our fight against the landlady a few months ago.

People down the street did the same thing. Their bags are still out there.

Meike had called the city to complain. The sign she posted included direct quotes from the city employee responsible for such calls, who said things about trash/recycling generally not being picked up from construction zones, and dumpsters being available for this purpose. I could have told you that (though maybe not very eloquently in German). She did get them to agree to pick up the trash, just this once, on Monday morning. Then an even stranger thing happened. Some time between when she posted the sign on Saturday and when I left the house for the first time on Sunday late-morning, the bags disappeared. It would be strange if the city had come by on a Saturday night or Sunday. It would be even stranger if the neighbors had picked up all the bags themselves.

This is a mystery that may never be solved. And it's a cultural divide that may never be bridged. I would be embarrassed if my garbage, recyclable or not, was out on the street for days. If I were German, maybe I would rather pick up the phone than pick up my bags.