Even long-distance travel won’t be cheap in 2023, so between 30 and 50 percent of Germans have holidayed in their own country in recent years. City trips to regions where people are friendly and polite and welcome strangers with open arms would be enjoyable. At least in big cities, this is not always the case, like one Survey by language learning platform Preply now show.
According to this, Essen is the rudest of the 20 largest German cities. However, this is not said by holidaymakers, but by the residents themselves: The market research company Censuswide asked 1,525 people in major German cities how often they observed rude behavior at their place of residence. A total of twelve aspects were questioned, ranging from ‘cars don’t slow down when they see pedestrians’ to ‘people use loudspeakers to make phone calls in public’.
Essen, Dresden and Frankfurt are the rudest
Respondents were asked to rate on a scale of 1 to 10 how often they observed these behaviors in their city. The higher the score, the more common. From the responses, Censuswide calculated the average value for each city. The food got the most points. On average, residents gave here 6.47 points. The Ruhrpott city scored the worst in ten of twelve categories, including ‘Being Loud in Public’, ‘Closed Body Language’ and ‘Disrespecting Personal Space’.
Ranked second among the rudest German cities Dresden with a score of 6.12. Here, most of the people in public are constantly looking at their smartphones and are very rude to the service personnel, such as waiters or salesmen. The other places in the general classification follow Frankfurt on the Main (6.00 points), Colony (5.99) and Dortmund (5.93).
So while two Ruhrpott cities are among the five rudest cities in the country, Germany’s most polite city is also in the metropolitan region. Bochum achieves the best score with an average of 5.17 points, beating Bremen (5.35), Hanover (5.49) and Nuremberg (5.53).
Bochum is the most educated city in Germany
Bochum has the best rating in six categories. Among other things, the city has low values of 4.08 for “rudeness towards service personnel” and 4.23 for “telephoning with loudspeakers in public”. Bremen wins two categories. On the one hand, very few people in public on the Weser seem to be constantly looking at their smartphone and, far more importantly, very few watch videos in public without headphones. Hannover and Münster share the last three category victories. In the student city of North Rhine-Westphalia, for example, very few people make their way through the ranks.
But Preply wanted to know more, including whether residents think it’s locals or newcomers that are misbehaving. The response brings a clear draw across the country. 57 percent of those interviewed are unable or unwilling to commit themselves, of the remaining 43 percent only a narrow majority blame the newcomers. This is more pronounced in Leipzig and Dusseldorfwhile in Münster and Dresden it is mainly the locals who are considered rude.
However, the poll should generally be viewed with humor. First, the data is not representative. The only criterion for participation was that a respondent had to have lived in the respective city for at least one year. Secondly, even the rudest city in Germany is really not rude. On a scale of 1 to 10, the average is 5.5. So Essen doesn’t even beat him by a full point. Also, the national average is 5.84, which is pretty much in the middle of the scale. And thirdly, the difference between the rudest city in Essen and the most polite in Bochum is only 1.3 points. Nothing stands in the way of a pleasant summer city trip in a large German city, at least not the kindness of the residents.
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