Anja sold my green sofa online. It was an emotional process, since over the years I had written two novels and survived several heartbreaks on that couch. A few expressions of interest dropped in straight away. Somebody called Erich wrote to Anja saying he was very interested in buying it. He made a polite and humble attempt at bargaining by email, and Anja told him he could come and pick it up at my Berlin address on a recent Sunday.
When Erich arrived, it became clear that he was as much of an Erich as I was an Anja. The moment we shook hands at my door, my real name slipped out of my mouth and I looked at him, pretty embarrassed. He said: “Mohamed, pleasure.” We nodded the realisation of both our fake identities away and concluded our sofa deal within minutes. I looked at the empty space in my living room and felt lost.
Whether I’m calling a cab or buying vintage fashion online from a private seller, I never share my address in combination with my real name if I don’t know people personally. I’m fully aware of the contradiction, that corporations such as Amazon and Uber own all my data and can do whatever they please with it. But that’s different. When individuals know how to track me down, I feel unsafe. Unsafe as a woman, unsafe as an easy-to-Google antifascist in Germany’s current political climate. The choices I make regarding the fake names are spontaneous and intuitive. Yet I can observe an unconscious pattern here: Julia, Lena, Jana, Lisa. Yes, they have two syllables, just like me. And when I close my eyes, the faces of these made-up women all look the same.
Having grown up as a Fatma in Germany, I seem to find comfort in the most generic German names. My own name is pretty generic as well, one could argue, in many parts of the world at least. (Whenever I dated a Muslim, an odd dynamic arose from the fact that their mums always had the same name as me, or derivations of it such as Fatima, Fatme, Fadime.) But in Germany, Fatma is not exactly random. The name provokes assumptions that don’t necessarily play out in my favour. Fatma is not very likely to get a reservation for an outside table at a fancy restaurant. Fatma’s email regarding the apartment rental will not even get an answer if she doesn’t happen to be rich. Fatma is the only name a teacher will remember to mention, even though they’ve seen a whole bunch of students doing something forbidden. Fatma’s used couch might look just as awesome and well-kept as Anja’s – but it will probably be worth half the price.
So I was not surprised to find out about a study showing Germans find people with very common German names more trustworthy than others. Of course, it’s ridiculous to think of Lisa as a white girl with a blond ponytail. But in the simple world of the German imagination, she really is. When last New Year’s Eve celebrations on the streets of Berlin escalated, and police claimed that groups of young men had attacked officers and firefighters, the Christian Democratic (CDU) party requested a list with the first names of all detained suspects. Yes, their first name, not their nationality.
The days when German citizenship was tied to bloodline are over, which still breaks many conservatives’ hearts and makes it harder for them to produce cheap racist propaganda with nationality-based crime statistics. But are they really desperate enough to make first names the modern proof of “Aryan-ness”? This would be way too easy to hack for all the Lisas of colour. And it would expatriate the many east German Mandys, Justins, Chantals, Enricos, Jeremys and Cindys.
Among the working class of east Germany in particular, there was a boom in English names for children born after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It became a massive stereotype in popular culture in the 2000s. Poor and uneducated east German characters on TV were given those names, although Kevin was popular in the west as well, following the success of the Home Alone movies in the early 1990s. Yet the Ossi stigma turned out to be just as stubborn as the naughty kid played by Macaulay Culkin, adding a class dimension to name-based opportunities.
A man called Dirk is 28 percentage points likelier to get a bank loan than a Kevin, even if they have identical economic circumstances. Teachers tend to grade a Kevin lower than a Maximilian, even if they write exactly the same answers in a test, a study conducted by the University of Oldenburg found. While traditional names such as Charlotte, Friedrich, Eva or, yes, Maximilian are associated with the upper-middle class, a pedagogue quoted by the same study said: “Kevin is not a name, it’s a diagnosis.”
As a side note, my living room is still empty, due to a supply bottleneck affecting the delivery of the new couch. So, I sit on my carpet, realising that sharing a name with Eva Braun has more favourable associations in this country than being an immigrant and being poor. I wonder too if Mohamed is enjoying my green sofa as much as I have in the past 10 years. Getting rid of old things makes space for new habits, I comfort myself. The most common name among newborns in Berlin in 2022, by the way, was Mohamed. The thought of Erich and Anja calling themselves Mohamed and Fatma in 20 years’ time, just to get hold of some nice and well-kept items of vintage furniture, makes me giggle to myself on the floor.
Fatma Aydemir is a Berlin-based author, novelist, playwright and a Guardian columnist
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