The Flat White That Threatened German Identity
In August 2017, Jens Spahn—a CDU politician (Germany’s main center-right party) who would later serve as Health Minister—gave an interview to Die Zeit in which he expressed concern about Berlin cafés where the staff speak English. The problem, as he framed it, was young Germans who abandon their mother tongue the moment they enter a certain postcode, conducting their daily lives in English not out of necessity but out of what he called a fawning readiness to subordinate their own language prematurely. He coined the phrase "provincial self-diminishment," which is a very German way of accusing someone of being provincial.
The argument has a surface logic. He pointed out a real irony: Germany requires immigrants to complete German-language courses as a condition of integration, while the young cosmopolitan class of its own cities retreats into English. You can see why that reads as contradiction. What it misses is that a café in Kreuzberg where the barista code-switches between German, English, and maybe Turkish is not an immigration policy. Nobody is integrating anyone. They’re getting a coffee.
The "parallel society" framing is where the argument loses its footing entirely. What he’s describing—young internationals from around the world living densely together in a few Berlin neighborhoods, sharing a language that isn’t German—is, to anyone who has spent time there, simply what the city is. That permeability, that multilingualism, that specific chaos is precisely what draws people to Berlin rather than Frankfurt or Munich. Applying threatening language to a thing most visitors experience as ordinary urban life doesn’t make the threat real.
There is a real version of the complaint buried somewhere in here. The English-speaking Berlin bubble can be genuinely insular—people who have lived in the city for years without learning the language, relying entirely on a social network that never requires it. There’s a passivity to that, and it has costs. Whether those costs are borne by German society or just by the person who never learns where the exit is, I’m not sure. But "elitist" isn’t quite the word. Lazy, maybe. Comfortable. Human.
The original post on this journal ended with a joke: forget English, watch your American shows dubbed, play your games with German voice acting, give your Spanish friends a Duden for their birthday. It’s a good joke. The underlying feeling—that there’s something performative about a German who ostentatiously refuses to speak German in Germany—is also fair. Both things can be true simultaneously. Spahn was wrong and the hipsters can still be annoying.