“Sorry, I don’t speak German” - WELT

Quelle: Getty Images/Hinterhaus ProductionsThese days, you can only order in English in many cafés in Berlin. Many expats refuse to learn German. Their parallel society continues to expand. What is particularly worrying is how carelessly we are giving up our language. This must finally change.

The biggest problem with getting a coffee in Berlin these days is not that you have to choose between seven “milk” alternatives, call up the drinks menu using a barcode or pay six euros for a cup. The biggest problem is that a simple “A coffee, please” in trendy districts such as Kreuzberg or Friedrichshain is met with uncomprehending looks. “Sorry, I don’t speak German”, is the best case scenario; sometimes you are simply stared at aggressively until you get the idea to repeat your request in English.

Berlin attracts so-called expats, i.e. people from abroad who live and work in Germany without being naturalized, like sourdough bread attracts hipsters. They come from countries such as Australia, France, England, Italy, Egypt, Spain, Poland or the USA and work in start-ups, companies, bars, the creative scene or are self-employed. Their commonality is not based on a shared origin or culture, as in other parallel societies, but on a shared foreignness. Their distinguishing feature: English.

A friend from Amsterdam, who is currently learning German and was looking forward to testing her progress during a recent visit to Berlin, quickly reached her limits. The waitress in the restaurant didn’t understand her. Did my friend speak too badly, did she have a misleading accent? I reassured her: No, her German was very good; it was the waitress who didn’t understand German. I recently met a friend who had fled to Berlin at the beginning of the war in Ukraine and asked her if she had learned German in the meantime. She laughed. Before she came to Berlin, her German was better, she told me. In Berlin, she had forgotten everything she had learned in school in Ukraine because there was no opportunity to speak German here.

The problem is not limited to ordering coffee. Most of the group chats and circles of friends I belong to have at some point tacitly agreed to communicate in English as soon as even one person is not a native German speaker. Once, in a large group in a restaurant in Neukölln, we spoke English as a matter of course because – as I assumed – one of the people present didn’t speak German. When it turned out by chance that the woman had been living in Germany for fifteen years and had already acquired German citizenship, I exclaimed happily: “Oh, so we can speak German then, can’t we?” After all, we were in Germany, everyone present was German and spoke German. But she replied: “Yes, you can, but I’ll answer in English.” So we stuck to English so as not to impede the flow of conversation by balancing two different languages.

Do I – even after six years of expat experience in New York – lack empathy for the hardships of everyday life as an expat? Does my sometimes offensive rejection of English contribute to the fact that Germany is only in 50th place in this year’s “Expat Insider” survey, i.e. at the bottom of the ranking of the most popular countries for expats to live in? Or is the rule of thumb “Adapt to your host country and learn the language”, which was drummed into me like a survival mantra by the exchange organization before my one-year student exchange to Venezuela in 2008/2009, really outdated today?

Perhaps the case cannot be turned around. Perhaps it is not due to a general unwillingness to adapt, but to a specific inability that affects German. Just how susceptible the German language is to its own abolition can be seen in all those returnees who, after a year abroad in the USA, suddenly can no longer think of any German phrases or who are only able to shed their American accent in their mother tongue with great effort. Denglish inflation, i.e. the excessive use of English vocabulary in German, also speaks volumes. German tends towards masochistic self-repression.

How else can it be explained that people in Berlin speak English as a prophylactic measure, because a person with any kind of non-German background might happen to be in the vicinity? Or is the reason for the flourishing Anglophilia a malaise linked to German history? An interesting counter-example is the writer Katja Petrowskaja, who only began to learn German at the age of 28 and wrote her novel “Vielleicht Esther” about her great-grandmother in Kyiv, who was murdered by the National Socialists, in German rather than her native Russian. So she deliberately chose the more difficult path – in both senses of the word – and wrote in a foreign language as well as a “language of war”.

The Berlin English fetish is also surprising from another perspective: In their book “English in Berlin: Exclusion in a Cosmopolitan Society”, Moshtari Hilal and Sinthujan Varatharajah have pointed out the gentrifying logic of exclusion to which hip English-speaking pubs in Kreuzberg or Neukölln are subject. Despite their inclusive, cosmopolitan appearance, they not only exclude Germans who do not speak English (which is often classist and ageist at the same time), but also migrants from other countries seeking protection, who now have to learn English as well as German in order to participate in everyday life.

Expats who consistently speak English despite a lack of necessity are thus contributing to a two-tier society: Instead of widening the scope of tolerance, they are narrowing it. A double standard that is also noticeable in terms of content, for example when a Neukölln “bookshop for female and queer authors” discusses debates imported from the USA such as “Black Lives Matter”, which have little to do with the reality of life for people just one street away. Or, as the NZZ recently got to the bottom of the parallel society problem in the expat stronghold of Zurich: “If an expat avoids integration, the city can only look on. In times of skills shortages, expats are the privileged foreigners.”

In the new novel “Kommando Ajax” by Cemile Sahin, it is said that you learn the language of a new country much faster on a construction site “because everyone on the site is always a foreigner and communicates in the new language, which they learn by the skin of their teeth while working, in order to understand each other better, instead of all foreigners speaking to each other in their own foreign language so that no one ever understands anyone.” This doesn’t apply to expats because they already have their secret language that everyone understands – everyone except the construction workers, but they don’t go to their trendy cafés, bars and clubs anyway. This is due not only to the price barrier but also the language barrier.

A German friend, who is more involved in the Berlin club scene than I am, recently asked me to recommend specifically German novels to her, because since she only watches English series, reads English books and speaks English, her ability to express herself in writing in her mother tongue has become noticeably worse. Perhaps I should recommend a novel to her that is not set in Berlin.

This text was translated with Deepl. The original article in German can be found here.