What is the deal with the “never ever ending” cafe names in Berlin?

Berliners love cafes with overly long cutesy names and here’s my documentation. They drive me nuts, triggering a visceral loathing like few things other than the Microsoft paper clip do. They’re cloying, gimmicky, and precious (“affectedly dainty or overrefined”, to quote the dictionary). Somehow they aim for cute yet land on pompous, which is quite a feat.

It’s like they’re hitting you with a baseball bat to make sure you know how mirthful and clever they are. When you know German culture you can detect a hint of the characteristic smugness  in which it’s not enough to just be something, you have to congratulate yourself for it and make sure other people are congratulating you for it too. Then there’s the all-lower-case. More triggering. I think what’s going on here is they see grammar as a tool of the patriarchy and so lower case is a way to “decolonize language”.

Many are in English, to add to the affectation.. A few aren’t so long but have the same effect; a couple are stores. I translated the German ones and left the lack of capitalization intact.

• A Never Ever Ending Love Story
• what do you fancy love
• be coffee my friend
• Let’s Stay Friends
• friends forever
• this could really be a good life
• neither yesterday nor tomorrow
• on a beautiful sunday in may… [with the ellipsis; out of business, so no photo here]
• no need for fancy names
• Under the Mango Tree
• Walking the Cat
• A Kind of Guise
• Faith Love Hope (name of a play)
• Sweet was yesterday

• In Search of Lost Happiness

Oh jeez where do I start. If you want to know the real Berlin, this speaks volumes. The name comes from the world of those vegan New Age yoga mommy anti-vaxxers who marched in anti-mask protests side-by-side with Nazis during the depths of Covid. That’s the real Berlin in a nutshell. The name is the title of a 1975 book on “attachment parenting” that says mothers should be in physical contact with their children as much as possible from birth until walking, including carrying all day long and sleeping together. The author (who never had children) based it entirely on a few months living with indigenous people in Venezuela with no prior background in the language, culture, anthropology or anything else. She’d gone there to go diamond hunting without any intention of getting involved with indigenous people. She came away with the notion that these people live in blissful harmony with each other and nature, which serious observers have pointed out is patronizing, simplistic, unintentionally colonialist and not respectful as it claims to be. But German New Age-rs still love this stuff.

• your Liver loves you

A grammar train wreck where they’re not even clear on whether they’re following the rules or not. They capitalized “liver” because nouns always begin with a capital in normal German writing and yet they made the rest lower case in order to be cute like the other cafes. But if you’re going to be cute then you would just make everything lower case. Just pick one!

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