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Looking through requirements for both junior/W3 professor positions and some fellowships at individual institutions, I keep seeing a requirement along the lines of the applicant's willingness to move to the location of the university/have their center of living at the location. Does anybody have experience with this or knows how strict it is?

My husband and I are experiencing the classic two body problem but there would be several options where we could live in a place together and either one or both would commute to their place of work on multiple days a week (within 2-3 hours). If I say during the interview that I would be willing to move but then would have to reconsider, if my husband's job doesn't allow for a move to that city, is there anything they can legally do? Would I be violating the terms of my contract? Either way, I would still have a room to stay in the city of the university but the place where I would be taxed would be elsewhere, possibly even in France or Belgium instead of Germany.

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    Note that international commuting (Grenzgänger) comes with its own set of hassles. For instance, I commute from Germany into Switzerland. I pay my joblessness contributions in Switzerland, but would get any benefits from Germany. So Germany in turn says that if I perform "a lot" of my work in the German home office, they want to get a portion of the contributions... which my Swiss employer does not want to deal with and therefore requires me to work in the office for at least 75% of my working hours. ...
    – Stephan Kolassa
    Commented May 1 at 22:21
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    ... I have zero knowledge about how this works out for a Beamter commuting within the EU, but would very strongly suggest you figure out how it does before you find out the hard way that your envisaged way of life is legally not possible. This may impact where you need to live, and/or whether you need to get a secondary residence.
    – Stephan Kolassa
    Commented May 1 at 22:22
  • @StephanKolassa Thanks! That is, unfortunately, a major issue in our case. We are both American and Switzerland-Germany might also be an option we'd have to consider, which seems complicated due to taxes and contributions and all that.
    – story_without_a_title
    Commented May 1 at 22:33
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    For the specific CH-DE situation, I recommend hallo-schweiz.ch (in German). I can't speak to intra-EU regulations. In terms of taxes, I would recommend getting a Steuerberater close to the border, who gets more Grenzgänger clients and therefore almost certainly has more experience than someone farther inland. (I had to explain the finer points of the Doppelbesteuerungsabkommen to my local Finanzamt, which was quite understandably not conversant with it, being about 120km away from the Swiss border...) Good luck!
    – Stephan Kolassa
    Commented May 1 at 22:37
  • @StephanKolassa Thank you! Those are some valuable pointers, should we actually be in this kind of situation. Here I was all idealistic, thinking financial advisors are for the rich only and that academia is the land of a mind freed from bureaucracy. I've since had a look at what this mythical German WissZeitVG is and I'm still recovering. I thought I was good at German... Now I feel like I'm just learning to read.
    – story_without_a_title
    Commented May 2 at 2:03

2 Answers 2

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This is not a complete answer. I know several Professors at German Universities that commute quite a long way (~2 hours either way). Note that a German Professor is not compelled to actually be in his office at any time -- the only requirement is to do their duties (teaching and admin) -- so you could actually work from home quite some time.

Having said that, the best way forward is to directly ask at the job interview.

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    It may be worth while to add that the duties are also looking after one's group and students.
    – cbeleites
    Commented Jul 19 at 13:58
  • Yeah, I have worked with professors who worked from home most days. It's more about what they might say if I said that I'd like to keep my center of life in my current city and if that would be in violation of their stated terms in any way. (It's also silly to worry about, I guess)
    – story_without_a_title
    Commented Jul 20 at 22:43
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I also think this is rather negotiable, not only nowadays but already 20 years back there was the term DiMiDo-prof (prof being at university only Tue through Thu, typically with a family several 100 km away and a room in town where they stayed when at university)

However, I also think that you need to think out carefully how you want to establish and run your work group, and the impact of not or only very slowly getting to know people at the university will have if you only commute in a day or two per week (multiple times per week at 2 - 3 h one way may get a downgrade in practice...).
I'd guess that this may be the more difficult issue.

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    thanks! I had an advisor who did the 3 hour commute each way on 3 days a week. It's quite tough. Depending on the train situation, it might be more or less easy to get some work done, especially those pesky small tasks that take way too much time.
    – story_without_a_title
    Commented Jul 20 at 22:45

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