Deutsche Bahn issues

Yes, you can at least get the seat reservation fees refunded. Stop at the Reisezentrum at Berlin Hbf.

In the event of a delay of more than 120 minutes, you are entitled to a refund of 50% of the travel price (and, of course, the full seat reservation). Ask for the relevant form at the travel center or, if you have booked online, make your claim on the DB website.

BTW. DB reports that the capacity of the line in the greater Hannover area is currently severely restricted due to damage caused by vandalism. I hope you will still be able to get to Berlin in a reasonably acceptable time.

On a related note, I tried to get a refund for a cancelled DB train last month and hit a dead end. DB wanted to refund to my bank account and asked me to provide all that information. Why wouldn't they just refund it to the credit card I used to buy the ticket?

Guess you had a Saver Fare ticket?
Well, to this day, DB adheres to the unreal fiction that they never have to refund a ticket due to their own fault, but only due to cancellation by the traveler. In which case the following rules apply: (1) Flexpreis = automatic refund to the original means of payment (credit card, debit card, bank account), (2) Sparpreis = refund against voucher minus €10 to your DB account, (3) Super Sparpreis = no refund. In the case of (2) or (3), they therefore have no mechanism for an automatic refund to a credit card account and must pay back manually to an account to be specified by the customer.

Of course, given the immense number of refunds resulting from DB's everyday failures, one would expect them to change this mechanism soon. But that would be tantamount to an admission of that failures. And in this respect, DB is still the Bundesbahn of old - it is never wrong and is never to blame for a disaster; they always see themselfs as a victims of adverse circumstances. Curiously enough, formally they are often right; if. e.g., the independent network company DB Infrago only informs the independent company DB Fernverkehr the evening before that it is closing a route, as it did during the European Football Championships, then the latter has hardly any room for reactions.

That whole DB conglomerate of roughly 600 companies has turned into one big Augean stable, but the government still believes that it doesn't need to send in Hercules because everything will be fine again in 4-5 years once the main network has been renovated. And it can say this without risk because it will certainly no longer be in office by then.

In addition to sla019's statement on reimbursement, if the delay is between 60 min and 120 min, you get a refund of 25%.
I introduced a claim on July 14 and got the refund on August 13, on my bank account (European, I live in Brussels).
As I joked to my German friend, at least that aspect of D-Bahn seems to work well!

Welcome to the new Germany. We visited Bavaria earlier this year and and had two trains cancelled on us. Also, every train was late, yes, only a few minutes, but we lived in Germany from 87-91 and trains were always on time.

If the DB train is now only a few minutes late, say max of 5 mins, I don't count that. It is on those occasions when it is more than 20 mins late that it becomes unnerving and you have to change trains later on the route. Trains in the 1970s and 1980s were hardly ever, ever late.

One can say my experience this summer was luckier than that of last summer when I experienced a train cancel on me, a first in over 50 years of train travel in Germany, ie Mannheim to Paris. Didn't happen this time.

Now I take a different route when going from Germany to France, more time and more circuitous, much less likely to be delayed or canceled.