Three Names Bad

The German government's power to regulate the names of its citizens has been a topic on this blog so many times, I'm thinking of giving it its own category.

Germany's Federal Constitutional Court will soon decide whether Germans are allowed to have three hyphenated last names. The case involves a lawyer and a dentist. The male lawyer already has a double name, which the woman wants to take on. However, she also wants to keep her own name in the mix, since she runs her dental practice under her own name.

The problem for the couple is that according to a 1994 law, Germans are generally allowed to have a maximum of two hyphenated last names. The couple's lawyer claims that the ban on having more than two last names violates the German Basic Law's protection of marriage and family, among other provisions. Germany's SPD Justice Minister, Birgitte Zypries, defends the ban (g) arguing that without it, people could string together 'unlimited' chains of last names. Names are about more than "self-realization," she says -- they're also necessary for identification and record-keeping.

The last (priceless) paragraph points us to yet another cultural difference between Northern and Latin Europe:

Zuck [the couple's lawyer] pointed to the practice in other European countries -- especially in Portugal, the country with the longest chains of names. There, the long names cause no problems. The plantiff, an attorney from Munich, was married to an Italian woman who -- despite already having four last names -- took on his double-name as well. The six-part name chain was accepted by the Italian authorities.

I have to say, I'm on the side of the couple here. My response to Zypries' point about unlimited last names is...so what? I would presume that anyone who would do this would have a pretty good reason to do it, as the couple in the lawsuit seem to have. It's probably a pain in the neck to have a lot of last names, so I have a hard time imagining anyone doing it just for fun.

Am I missing something here?  

Comments

[Koch]

Isn't the solution to put a line on the page and let the respective parents simply write the name in? If the name doesn't fit within the line, that's probably a pretty good sign that they've named their child after pi and that this isn't a good idea. Same for the other forms, or just put two rows of boxes. That's used on Überweisungsformulare, and a good argument could be raised that the reason for the transfer (Verwendungszweck) needs to be as specific as a name.

Full disclosure - I have an abbreviated middle name because my first name is long, and there was not enough space on my birth certificate's form to include the - also very long - middle name my parents had picked. Nowadays in the country I was born in you can name your child whatever you want. No big deal. Administrations worked around it.

I spent the day checking German identity cards for a charity blood donation event. Of the two hundred cards I checked, even the longest names fit in. Same with addresses - there are some remarkably long ones in Germany. We manage that somehow. Using a law to decree the length of names isn't the right solution and it reeks of banana curvature legislation.

[strcmp]

@Koch: by some natural law even 200 characters will not be enough. But having space for 200 characters in every official form is a waste of paper, think about carrying an id card with mostly white space.

[Koch]

@ strcmp:

The cut-off number becomes wholly arbitrary, unless you choose something with 200 characters (i.e. long enough to cover every eventuality).

Germany does not have a vast number of Sri Lankans, many of whom have absurdly long names. Otherwise they would have run into this issue a long time ago.

[CN Heidelberg]

Considering a lot of the names people use nowadays I admit the idea of naming laws is sort of attractive, but I'm not actually in favor of them. If this woman wants to live with all the pain in the ass of having 56 names, fine.

But I agree very, very, very strongly with this statement:

"Names are about more than 'self-realization,' she says -- they're also necessary for identification and record-keeping."

(In a less nice way, on many name issues people probably need to get over themselves and think about it practically.)

[Maria Barros]

Veronique,
That is extremely rare. In Portugal, everyone must have an ID card when they finish primary school (or earlier if they leave the country) and the birth certificate is required for that. The ID card is the main identification document therefore nobody has any doubts of what their birth name is. I would guess that Portuguese immigrant left the country long ago without any official identification document.

I am Portuguese, married to a German. Our children's names follow the Portuguese rule. My kids have 2 given names and 3 family names, 2 from me and one from the father. There has never been any issue with German authorities on their names.

If there was to be a European rule, I’d like it to be the Portuguese one because it is very flexible and it gives us lots of choices. When we marry and if we chose to add the family name of the husband to our own, or vice-versa, we don't use hyphens and we never lose our own names like it happens in Germany where the wife's family name vanishes. Hyphens exist but for single unit names, not as a result of a composition between two family names. It is not common for people to do that though. Most women and men keep their original names when they get married.

Things work fine, we don’t have any problems. We are only required to write down our full names in official documents. For anything else we use one of our given names, together with one of the family names we like best. For example, the prime minister is called José Sócrates Carvalho Pinto de Sousa but everyone calls him José Sócrates. People are very much free to be known by the name combination they like the best, which I think is great. I use my mom's last name, not my father's and this is actually very common.

Street names can get very long but it isn’t a requirement that the full name must be given to a street. I live in a street with a huge name but we just shorten it. The zip code helps identifying the street correctly.

I agree with Lígia. Family history is a nice thing and I don't see why one should give more meaning to one of the parents side by having only one family name.

[hgerstung]

"The male lawyer already has a double name, which the woman wants to take on. However, she also wants to keep her own name in the mix, since she runs her dental practice under her own name."

Well, she wants A but she also wants B ... I for one do not really like hyphenated names as well and three- or more-word names scare me to death. Did anyone ever attended some event where five or six people had to be honored in a speech and four of them have two-word names? Do not try this at home...

Frankly, people with more than one name always give me the impression that they are unable to make a decision.

If that woman wants to run her dental practice under her own name, she should simply keep that name. If the desire to take on the name of her husband is stronger than that, she should take on his name and be happy. If she would be allowed to have a three-word-name, she would not be able to run her business under the same name - instead of Ph.D. A-B she would have to rename it to "Ph.D. A-B-C". That renders the whole lawsuit useless IMHO.

Maybe I am missing something, but a dentist in Germany should have no problems with renaming his business. You can still keep an entry in the phone book under the old name ("The dentist formerly known as Prince" for example) and on your website, all that changes is your letterhead and the front door sign. Since dentists here have a large base of "Stammkunden" and almost always no problems to find new customers (did anyone try to get an appointment at his/her dentist lately? "Sure, we have a free slot in 6 months, Sir."), I do not get her point.

I have a middle name (and I am German), and I can confirm that you get strange looks when you actually use it. My kids got a middle name as well because I consider this being a tradition in our family. But I agree that in the US you are considered to be a strange crazy weird guy when you do not have something to fill it into the corresponding MI field on a form.

[ian in hamburg]

The reason they want to put a limit on it is simply because they would have to re-program every database and entry field in the country to accommodate the longer names.

[Ligia]

@ strcmp

In case of a street name there should exist a rule, indeed. Parents can give their children very long names. But don´t make people get confused about streets called "Engenheiro Luis Carlos Berrini". It´s obvious that the street is konwn as "Berrini". God only knows if Mr. Berrini was called "Cacá" by his family members/closest friends.

[Anderl]

Until quite recently, Mongolians only had one name, a "first" name but no surnames. With the country's integration into a globalised society, this became to complicated - for the other countries whose bureaucracies couldn't keep track with that "system" (Mongolians themselves never had a problem). So some time in the mid-90's (I think...) they were asked to choose a last name - any last name they could think of. It didn't even have to be the same for parents and children.

Needless to say, half the male population chose "Genghis Khan".

[strcmp]

It is better to put limits on the things that actually matter, in this case that would be 'total number of characters including whitespace'. That makes it much easier to design forms, documents and database fields. -- I once lived in a street with a name that didn't fit in most forms and I have experiences with product databases where there is always one name longer than the field declaration.

[Véronique]

"There, the long names cause no problems."
Except that in Portugal, parents can give different name combinations to each of their children and forget about it. A Portuguese acquaintance living in France since his childhood found out when his son was born that the family name he had lived with was not the one on his original birth registration, which led to a huge quantity of paper work and the mention of "formerly known as" in more occasions than he would like, and for the rest of his life. I'm for keeping it simple, and don't mind some rules.

More urgent though would be a European rule, many binational children having different family names on their different passports (like the name of their German father on their French passport, France accepting only this one, and name of the French mother on their German passport, Germany giving the choice...)

[Ligia Manis Guedes Pereira]

I wonder these germans may not have something more serious to worry about... Is that a real issue how many names you may have? I don´t like that much having a long name, according to the portuguese traditon. But long names have history. What if my name were just " Ligia Pereira"?? There´s not much story to tell about such a ordinary name.

PS: When I say germans I kept my maiden name after marriage they seem to get more shocked about the "modernity" of my decision than the brazilians. That´s so strange for such a cosmopolitan society that germany stands for (at least for me)

[Junger Gott]

I never got the reason behind middle names Americans seem to consider indispensible to personhood. It raised eyebrows when I had to leave the middle initial field blank on form that provided it.
One child, one name, what's so hard about that?

[Koch]

Not to mention that four-word last names or full "last names" including up to five words already exist in Germany:

http://www.csu-landtag.de/www/abgeordnete_abg_2030.asp

What's the difference between this gentleman's name and Annette Schmidt-Kessler-Grabenhorst?

Plus, lots of Germans have no middle names (poor things). Shouldn't they be allowed lots of last names to compensate?

[Stefan]

I don't like any hyphenated names (they sound so vain).

If someone wants to express his vanity with his name, he is free to do so.