“Sie” and “du” in everyday life – quite a touchy subject, as it turns out

Following on from my February blog on the use of “Sie” and “du” in German it was interesting to stumble on an article in “Die Zeit” on 13^th April under the heading “The problem with the DU”. Tanja Mokosch, a journalist who lives in Berlin asks, “Why do I talk to workmen and taxi drivers as if we were friends?”.

She recounts getting some renovation work done by two Arabic-speaking handymen. At one stage she decides to offer them a coffee or tea, and finds herself saying “Wollt ihr was trinken?” – “ihr” being the form in German with which you address more than one person with whom you are on “du” terms, i.e. friends or minors. Later on, one of the two workmen (both considerably older than she is) gives her some advice on some paintwork she has done herself, addressing her in perfectly good German – with “Sie”. This in turn leads her to ask herself why it is she takes the liberty of addressing workmen and Uber-drivers with “du” while being addressed by them in the polite form.

She resolves to get a definitive answer to the question and calls up a Knigge trainer who unhesitatingly states the rule: Use the “Sie” form until such time as both sides explicitly agree to abolish it and start calling each other “du”. This means that an offer must be made – and this has to come from the higher-ranking person in terms of business. That means if you are the customer, you are that person. If you are the boss, then that’s you. Among peers it is the older person, and – interestingly – among men and women, it is the woman!

Of course, you may find it bewildering that in the age of democratization and the flattening of hierarchies the Germans should still use a loaded term like “higher-ranking”. The author of the article was clearly perplexed, too, and decided to call up that venerable institution of the German language, the DUDEN. Where she was told, in no uncertain terms, that the “du” form should be used only among and towards children, and that in all other cases the recommendation was to use “Sie”. This was applicable, she was told, also to people who spoke German at non-native level or had only just started to learn the language. Using “du” in any of these cases, the DUDEN people said, showed a lack of respect and was a sign of arrogance and intolerance.

There you have it.

As I am writing this blog, in comes a mail from a well-known manufacturer of household appliances, who clearly do not know me by name. It’s an invitation to their coffee-making tutorials:

Du bist stolzer Besitzer einer Espressomaschine oder möchtest mehr über Kaffee erfahren? Dann sind unsere Tutorials und Masterclasses genau das Richtige für Dich. Unsere Kaffee-Experten erzählen Dir alles über Third Wave-Spezialitätenkaffee und geben Dir viele nützliche Tipps rund um Kaffee. Von der richtigen Einstellung Deiner Maschine, über die Zubereitung des Espresso-Shots bis hin zur perfekten Milchtexturierung — Du wirst einige Aha-Momente erleben! Und das Beste kommt zum Schluss: Deine Teilnahme ist kostenlos!

I must admit that I’m somewhat taken aback at being addressed with “Du”. Am I just hopelessly old-fashioned and stuck-up? Or over-sensibilized to the issue?

Anyway, back to Ms Mokosch, who went on quizzing friends and interrogating taxi drivers about their stance on this clearly troublesome dilemma of formal versus informal. She found: Taxi drivers address their female passengers with “Sie” and women typically use the “Sie” towards their taxi or Uber drivers as well. The interaction with male passengers is more informal. Also, home cleaners are often addressed with “du”, but they respond with “Sie” – and find that “normal”. An interesting phenomenon though is the rising tendency of professionals who can afford to have a cleaner to insist on the mutual “du”. This, the journalist reckons, is an attempt to gloss over the class differences, pretending that everyone’s at eye level. The newly coined term for this is “deflecting privilege”, an attempt by the socially privileged to downplay their origins and obscure their standing, by claiming everyone is the same (and has the same opportunities, if only they try hard enough…).

Ms Mokosch ends her article with a visit to her garage where she meets a young man in a hoodie and cannot quite bring herself to use the formal “Sie”. Instead she asks him outright if he will allow her to call him “du”. His response, “Yes, sure, I myself would only use ‘Sie’ with the German Chancellor”. “So all your clients use ‘du’, and you use ‘du’ back?”, “In general, yes”. “And how does that feel?”, “Normal”. “Okay, danke. Wie heißt du?”. “Herr Oberländer.” Aha!