The job ad is in English. The team channel is in English. The hiring manager moved to Berlin from Lisbon six years ago and has never written a German sentence at work. And at the bottom of the posting there is still a line asking for your Anschreiben. Germany never went along with the quiet death of the cover letter, and treating it as decoration is the fastest way to look like you did not really apply.
The letter is page one of a file, not an extra
A German application is called a Bewerbung, and recruiters think of it as a set rather than a message with an attachment. The set is the Anschreiben, the Lebenslauf, and your Zeugnisse: diplomas plus written references from previous employers. Employees in Germany have a legal right to a written reference when they leave a job, so local candidates arrive with a folder of them. Yours will be compared against that folder.
This matters more than it sounds. In a lot of US and UK hiring, the letter is the thing nobody reads. In Germany it is often the first PDF opened, because it is the only part of the file where you explain yourself in your own words. HR looks at it to check that you understood the role, that you can write cleanly, and that you bothered to look up who you are writing to. A missing Anschreiben is read as an incomplete file, which is a very German way of saying no.
DIN 5008, or why German letters all look the same
There is an actual standard for business correspondence in Germany, DIN 5008, and while nobody will measure your margins, the shape of the page is instantly familiar to anyone who has hired there. Copy the shape and you look native. Ignore it and you look like a template from a different country, which is exactly what you are trying to avoid.
The order on the page:
- Your sender block at the top: name, street, postcode and city, phone, email. Address included, even if you find that quaint.
- The recipient block on the left, a few lines down: company name, the department or the person, street, postcode and city.
- The date on the right, on its own line, usually with your city in front of it. Something like Hamburg, 14. Maerz 2026.
- A subject line in bold, and here is the trap: you do not write the word Betreff. You just write the subject. Bewerbung als Data Analyst, Kennziffer 2026-118. If the ad has a reference number, put it there, because that number is how the file gets routed.
- Salutation, body, closing, signature.
The reference number thing is small and it separates people who read the ad from people who mass-applied.
Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren is the fallback, not the goal
Everyone knows the phrase, which is why it reads as generic. Finding the name matters more in Germany than it does in the US, partly because German HR teams are smaller and partly because the culture rewards precision over enthusiasm. Check the ad first, most German postings name a contact person and a phone number. If not, look at the company site or the Impressum, which every German business website is legally required to have and which frequently lists the people you want.
Then write Sehr geehrte Frau Weber, or Sehr geehrter Herr Klein, with the comma. Two things trip up non-Germans here. Titles are not optional: if the contact is Dr. Weber, you write Sehr geehrte Frau Dr. Weber. And after the comma, the first line of your letter starts in lower case unless it begins with a noun. It looks like a typo to English eyes. It is not.
If you genuinely cannot find a name, Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren is correct and nobody will hold it against you. Hi there is not correct, even in English.
Einleitung, Hauptteil, Schluss
German cover letters have three named parts, and hiring managers read them in that order looking for specific things.
Einleitung
Two or three sentences. Which role, where you saw it, and one concrete reason you are writing to this employer rather than the twelve others. Skip the windup about being delighted to apply. If you spoke to someone at a trade fair or a former colleague pointed you at the team, say so in the first line, because a warm reference does heavy lifting in a market where people stay at companies a long time.
Hauptteil
Two or three tight paragraphs. Take the requirements the ad actually listed and answer them with evidence, in the ad's own vocabulary. If the posting asks for supply chain planning in an SAP environment, use the words supply chain planning and SAP. German recruiters tend to read the letter as a checklist against the Anforderungsprofil, the requirements profile, and they are not looking for you to be clever about it. This is not the place for a story about your childhood curiosity.
Schluss
Short. This is where the practical details go, and where most international candidates go quiet exactly when they should be specific.
The details you are expected to volunteer
Germans consider it normal, not pushy, to state the following without being asked twice.
Eintrittstermin, your earliest possible start date. Write a real date or a real constraint: "Ich kann zum 1. Juli 2026 beginnen." If you are currently employed in Germany, mention your notice period, because contracts for qualified roles often run three months to the end of a quarter and everyone plans around it.
Gehaltsvorstellung, your salary expectation, but only when the ad asks for it. When it does, silence is a problem, not a negotiating tactic. Give an annual gross figure in euros, either one number or a tight band, and say brutto so there is no confusion with net pay. A single sentence is enough: your expectation is 68.000 Euro brutto per year.
Relocation and work authorisation. If you are applying from outside Germany, say plainly that you are willing to relocate, and if you already hold an EU passport or a Blue Card, put that in one clause. It removes the single biggest silent objection in the reader's head.
Then close with Mit freundlichen Gruessen, your name, and a signature. Scanned handwritten signatures above the typed name are still common in German applications and cost you nothing. Keep the whole thing to one page. Not one page and four lines. One page is a hard convention here, and going over it reads as an inability to prioritise.
Berlin startup or Mittelstand: what actually changes
The layout is not a religion. Read the employer.
For an English-speaking startup in Berlin, Munich or Hamburg, write the letter in English, drop the sender and recipient address blocks, drop the scanned signature, and loosen the tone by maybe fifteen percent. Keep the subject line, keep the named salutation, keep the start date, keep one page. Startups there still ask for a letter, they just do not want it to sound like a 1990s bank.
For a Mittelstand employer, a manufacturer in Baden-Wuerttemberg, a family-owned engineering firm, an insurer, a public body: keep everything. Full DIN layout, formal salutation, start date, notice period, salary expectation if requested, Mit freundlichen Gruessen, signature. Write it in German if the ad is in German, even if the role itself is English-speaking. If your German is not strong enough for a clean letter, have a native speaker read it before you send it, because a letter with grammar errors in a company that values precision is worse than a competent English one.
The rough test: if the ad uses Sie and lists a Kennziffer, go full formal. If it uses du and links to a Notion page, go light.
What to do before your next German application
Build one master Anschreiben with the DIN structure in place, then keep two versions of it, formal and light, so you are only ever rewriting the middle. Whichever tool you draft in, Postulit included, the part that has to be rewritten per application is the Hauptteil and nothing else.
Then, before you send: check the ad for a contact name, check it for a Kennziffer, check whether it asks for a Gehaltsvorstellung, and put your earliest start date in the last paragraph. Four checks, about ninety seconds. That is the difference between a file that gets forwarded to the department and one that sits in HR marked unvollstaendig.