The battle over how to address people in German

As the formal 'Sie' falls out of fashion some people are unsure of how to address people

Photo by Constantin Wenning on Unsplash

Dear Reader,

A couple of days ago I was taking a walk through an estate that once belonged to the Prussian monarchy when a young boy came panting up the hill on his bicycle.

He stopped in front of me and asked: “Entschuldigen Sie, können Sie mir bitte die Uhrzeit verraten?”

The phrasing of his question was so antiquated that I felt like I had literally stepped back into the Kaiser era. In English, it would sound something like: “excuse me, would you be so kind as to inform me of the time of day?”

In Berlin of all places, the boy’s exquisite manners stood out like a sore thumb.

The German capital is a place where people are almost proud of the coarse, direct way they talk to strangers. Born-and-bred Berliners are legendary for their skill in anmotzen (biting your head off). And anmotzen just doesn’t work as well if you are addressing someone with the formal Sie instead of the colloquial Du.

Scolding someone on the street who doesn’t get out of the way quickly enough with a “haben Sie all Tassen im Schrank?!” just sounds wrong.

West Germans who’ve moved to the capital quickly adapt to the local preference for duzen. It’s not uncommon to see a 50 year old dressed in sneakers and a hoodie calling the barista in his local cafe Du as he tries to throw off the deferential language of the province.

Then there is the Berlin start-up scene, in thrall to all things Cailfornian, where bosses have a clear “duz mich bitte” policy. This invitation to be on first name terms is believed to establish “flat heirachies” and make everyone in the company feel valued.

Sie-zen is in fact so rare in Berlin that the best way to get under someone’s skin is to loudly address them with the formal pronoun. Because the only people who are given a Sie are the elderly, your conversation partner will eventually grumble about “not being that much older than you!”

Much of this behaviour is still quite foreign to people from the rest of the rest of the country, where using Sie and surnames is still the norm in the workplace or out on the street.

But, what is fashionable in the capital almost inevitably spreads into the province.

Thus, uptight German companies looking to give themselves a cosmopolitan image are increasingly telling their staff to start calling bosses by their first names.