The English Problem

You walk into a bar in Kreuzberg and everyone’s speaking English. A CDU politician gets mad about it. Jens Spahn went to Die Zeit and basically said Berlin hipsters are elitists who’ve abandoned German—they’ve built this separate world where English is the only language that counts, and nobody else gets in.

He’s not entirely wrong about what’s happening. There’s something contemptuous there—watching people switch to English the moment a foreigner shows up, as if German is a burden. But then Spahn makes a stranger argument: we tell immigrants they have to learn German to integrate, and meanwhile these cosmopolitan kids are learning English instead. They’re building lives and community in it. That’s its own kind of parallel society, isn’t it—just one that’s young and global instead of foreign and old.

Except it’s not about language at all. Language is where the resentment shows. Berlin pulls people from everywhere. They come for art, freedom, a new life. They meet each other in English because English is weightless—nobody carries their childhood in it. You can become someone new in English in a way you can’t in German, where everything feels rooted.

Spahn wants them to speak German to prove they belong. But they don’t want to belong to his version of Germany. They want to build something else—something without history attached. That’s the whole point, and the reason it bothers him.

The original post ends with sarcasm: just speak German, watch dubbed American TV. But that misses what actually angers people like Spahn, which is looking at a city that’s remade itself without asking. Berlin is what it is because people didn’t assimilate. You can mourn that. Feel it as a loss. But you can’t have both—cosmopolitan Berlin and German-speaking integration at once.