A leading member of Angela Merkel’s party has lent his voice to a growing chorus of Berliners frustrated with the inability of restaurant staff to speak German.



Jens Spahn, a deputy finance minister and leading voice on the right wing of the German chancellor’s party, told Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung newspaper that “it increasingly drives me up the wall that waiters in some Berlin restaurants only speak English,” adding: “You would never find this craziness in Paris.”

Peaceful coexistence between the native population and newcomers to Germany relied on everybody speaking the local language, the 37-year-old said. “That is something we can and should expect of every immigrant,” he said.

Spahn’s complaint echoes a recent article in Berlin broadsheet Tagesspiegel, in which the author recalled a visit to a restaurant in the city’s fashionable Neukölln district where none of the four waiters spoke German.

“You shouldn’t be ostracised from Berlin life just because you can’t speak English very well,” wrote Dominik Drutschmann, an author.

Last week, three German MPs from separate parties wrote a letter to Merkel, calling on her government to support the use of German at official functions and within the institutions of the European Union.

Gunther Krichbaum of the CDU, Axel Schäfer of the centre-left SPD, and Johannes Singhammer of the Bavarian CSU said that too many documents in Brussels were only available in English and French, adding that German should not be relegated to the status of a “scrapheap language”.

In response, Merkel’s chief of staff, Peter Altmaier, vowed to push for more official correspondence to be kept in German as well as English and French, but partially rebutted the MPs’ complaint. He said: “A country that is as strong in the fields of science and research as Germany profits from intensive international exchange.”

The increasing use of English in the shops and restaurants of several Berlin districts such as Mitte, Kreuzberg and Neukölln does have some supporters. The German capital’s business senator recently called on institutions to improve their command of the English language. “Many haven’t clocked it yet that Berlin is also an English-speaking city,” said Ramona Pop, a Green party politician.

Berlin’s increasingly bilingual nature gave the city a head-start over Paris, Pop said. “Especially if an open and international city wants to attract young, urban entrepreneurs and specialists, then that’s a plus,” she said.