But the real point isn’t that Germans love cash. It’s that—for the same historical reasons—they loathe debt. (Armchair anthropologists have also long noted that German word for debt—Schulden—comes from the word for guilt, Schuld.)
Levels of consumer debt in Germany are remarkably low. German aversion to mortgage debt is part of the reason why the country has some of the lowest homeownership rates in the developed world. Just 33% of Germans said they had a credit card back in 2011. And most of those hardly ever get used. In 2013, only 18% of payments in Germany were made via cards, compared to 50% in France and 59% in the UK.
As the article states that the national preference for cash, then, seems to be the flip side of aversion to debt, which, in turn, can be interpreted as a sign of deep-seated doubt about the future. (German business people are also notorious for their pessimism about the future.) And fear of the future, of course, is rooted in the past.
In other words, the German tendency to settle up in cash undeniably reflects the fact that for much of the last century, Germany has been either on the brink of, in the midst of, or struggling to recover from, disaster. And traumas like that are bound to leave, if you’ll excuse the pun, a mark.
This article first appeared in Quartz, Feature image courtesy wsj
