At this company, we are family

Buying drinks or not doesn't really enter into it, particularly for people who don't drink.

"Voluntary" means that there will be no adverse effect on your employment if you decline to participate. Your characterization of the activity strongly implies that not participating will come with consequences to your job.

Absolutely not treu. You probably didn't read the part in my comment where I explained my experiences where needing the local language was a must for dealing with the bureaucratic paperwork you can end up facing regularly.

Maybe in northern Europe that might be true but it's definitely not my experience in Austria (and even in Denmark I have friend who met doctors' offices telling them they need to speak Danish). Language barrier is defiantly an issue here, especially outside the SW dev world.

Plenty of government offices you have to interact with don't or don't want to speak English (mostly due to older grumpy staff). Plenty of police officers don't speak English (also the older staff). Plenty of doctors, nurses and specialists don't speak English. Plenty(most?) companies outside of SW require German knowledge. Plenty of landlords and building management companies or utility companies don't speak or don't want to speak English. The list can go on, especially if you mostly land with older staff members. The language barrier is real. Sure, sometimes you can get lucky and land a young contact person who speaks great English and will want to help you, but that's quite rare, most will tell you "nur Deutsch" and then you're shit out of luck as a lot of the issues need to be solved over the phone or in person instead of email where you can fire up deepl.

I remember when a negligent driver hit me while cycling, the two police officers who came over spoke no English at all as they were a bit older. This happens quite often when you deal with older staff.

Saying English is all you need to get by is a gross over-exaggeration and does not match the struggles me and my friends had here at all. Sure, you can order a beer and a pizza in English just fine, but any and all official bureaucracy needs to be done in the local language, not in English, often on the phone or in person, on paper and the spot, without the possibility to easily google translate the thing you're signing, like you can on web forms (and even the stuff google translate camera app spits out is a lot of the time confusing as hell). And believe me, there's a lot of paper work: contracts, insurance forms, complaints, registration forms, etc.

Also, it's respectul to learn the local language to integrate, unless you want to make life difficult for yourself, and live in isolation in expat-only bubbles.

Anyway, my point is, from personal experience, it's still a huge hassle, to move and live in countries where you don't speak the local language as not everything and everyone is always geared to swatch to English for your convenience.

Wow. I've been part of interviewing teams for tons of people, at a number of companies, over decades. I have never once heard anyone express anything like this about an applicant.

The discussions are more about whether or not they can do the job and whether or not they'd be a good fit on the team, not whether or not anyone wants to socialize with them.