And quite averse/backwater (choose your version) on using debit/credit cards. Which is mindblowing from my Easter European perspective. I didn't use cash in a decade.
Unfortunately that's much less the case since COVID. Not looking forward to have more and more placed that only take panopticon-payments.
That has pretty much changed now. I rarely use cash in Berlin. About 2-3 years already...
Berlin is very different from the rest of Germany.
But not how you think, in this instance. I think Berlin has more places of questionable legality which require cash for presumably tax avoidance reasons.
That reminds me when I was in Schleswig (lovely town) on my way to Denmark. And I wanted to pay for 1 day stay, lady that had (a really nice) apartment said that unfortunately her terminal doesn't accept international debit/credit cards (wild! and probably not true) and I had to hunt for an ATM machine to get some cash. It was 13 years ago, I remember I was so surprised that the west is so far back behind us.
germany had bank transfers as the norm when the US still fiddled around with paper cheques.