tl;dr: A Turkish software developer recounts moving to Hamburg in 2017 for an internship and staying on, describing a workplace culture of trust, flat hierarchies, and social equality that defied his stereotypes about Germans. After eight years, extensive reading about German history, and learning the language, he embraced the country's rules and values—particularly its reckoning with its Nazi past—and recently obtained citizenship under the streamlined five-year residency rules.