Why do Germans prefer cash?

asks Winterspeak and quotes QZ:

But, of course, their attitudes toward currency must owe something to Germany’s tumultuous monetary history. During the Weimar-era hyperinflation that peaked in 1923, prices rose roughly a trillion-fold, as Germany attempted to pay its onerous war reparations with devalued marks.

before he discounts that reasoning as hardly making any sense at all, because if you fear inflation you would stay away from cash and go into debt-financed investments.

There is another point that precludes this in that hardly anybody is around who remembers those Weimar times of hyper inflation. For present-day folks it is beyond any scope of imagination what a trillion-fold rate of inflation would look like.

The reason why Germans love their cash so much is their trust in an authority, their government. It is not cash per se that they love, it is their German currency. The government gave them the Deutsche Mark, die harte Mark (the hard Mark), via the Jobwunder, which never existed. This trust has been transferred on to the Euro, though still with lots of regrets and laments.

Read the comments section on articles dealing with some US or British economic topic and you will witness ridiculing of those respective currencies. The US $ is just paper money, they are broke, they can never repay all those trillions. The British Pound? How much did it lose its value since the 1960s? No, it's not cash that the Germans love, it was their Deutsche Mark and now is their Euro.

There is more to this almost crazy love. At present quite some Germans distrust the banks (capital controls in Cypress put them on alert) and that's why they pull their Euro cash from their bank account and, get seated, put it in a safe-deposit box at their very bank!

Another reason is their deep disdain of stocks. Not that they did not try but it did not work for them as they had expected. And expected they had an increase in their stock price. What else would you have done as someone who had been seduced over months by an actor from the former GDR to invest into that Fort Knox-like company Telekom, the state company that enabled you to make phone calls (with ugly phones you could drop from the first floor window and they still would be in working order) since decades, the tower of trust. When the stock price tanked German investors even turned against the unlucky actor and don't even mention the 'Neuer Markt'. Germans are done with that shit.

Stocks are American to a German. Iffy, not trustworthy, just paper, promises and they are just not anything close to a Sparbuch where even the German knows he is losing money, but it is a German Sparbuch.

Germans loathe credit card payments because they want to see how much money they have presently? Sorry, does not make sense because people can certainly see how much they have in their wallet at the moment but would they know precisely how much in total they have with them plus at home on that very day?

No, the reason Germans do not trust credit cards is that they are American. In addition they fear being hacked when paying on a computer. Germans do pay with a card. They pay with their EC card from their - German! - bank without any hesitation. Yep, Germans trust a transaction based on a 4-digit PIN number, no worries, but paying with a credit card on a computer where you have just logged on with an 18-character password...? No, the German does not feel comfy here. Amazon would have gone bust in Germany had they insisted on credit card payment only. Same goes for eBay.de.

At the root of that love of cash is the complete ignorance of 95% of Germans of the concept of fiat money, the inability to distinguish between a private household and a public household. Germans, their press and their economists see as the most cherished goal of their government a consolidated household and the black zero. And that leads in a world economy to a periodically returning black eye.