The 1990 movie Home Alone is a family favorite and Christmas classic. If you're not familiar with the movie, it stars Macaulay Culkin as Kevin McCallister, the youngest of five kids in the McCallister family. That Christmas, Kevin's family — along with his aunt, uncle, and some cousins — are supposed to go to Paris to visit more of their extended family. But as the title of the movie gives away, Kevin, an eight-year-old, is accidentally left home alone. Hijinks ensue as Kevin schemes to ward off would-be home invaders while his family races back against holiday traffic to make sure that their left-behind adolescent is safe. The movie, while opening to mixed reviews, earned more than $450 million at the box office globally (second only to Ghost that year) and has become a cultural touchstone in the United States and beyond.
But there are a lot of people in Germany who wish it hadn't.
Home Alone, by most measures, was the most successful movie released in Germany in 1991. The second, Dances With Wolves, starred Kevin Costner. The popularity of those films, and particularly the first, inspired a lot of German parents to name their baby boys "Kevin" which, for avoidance of doubt, isn't otherwise a common name for a German lad. ("Kevin" is Irish in origin.) As the Economist reported, "By 1991, Kevin was the most popular name in [Germany, France, and the Netherlands], and stayed so for many years." But most of the parents who named their boys Kevin were of a lower socioeconomic standing, and, as the Economist continued, "being a Kevin came to be seen as a sign that one hails from the great cultural unwashed, at least in the eyes of sophisticated types who claimed to be more familiar with the names of characters in Victor Hugo or Hermann Hesse than those in American pop culture."
In Germany, the problem with being a Kevin was particularly bad. In 2009, Astrid Kaiser, a philosophy professor at the University of Oldenburg, led research into the Kevin question. According to The Local (Germany), Kaiser's study "reveal[ed] that traditional names such as Charlotte, Sophie, Marie, Hannah, Alexander, Maximilian, Simon, Lukas and Jakob are consistently linked to strong performance and good behavior. Non-traditional names such as Chantal, Mandy, Angelina, Kevin, Justin, and Maurice, on the other hand, are associated with weak performance and bad behavior." And per Der Spiegel, "elementary school teachers believe Kevin is the ultimate punishment for children. It tops the list of unpopular names and is considered behaviorally problematic and underachieving. One teacher interviewed commented: 'Kevin is not a name, but a diagnosis.'" Others ran with that comment, coining the term "Kevinismus" — the label given to those suffering from the disease of being a Kevin.
The anti-Kevin backlash got so bad that in 2015, a dictionary had to take action. Langenscheidt, a publisher of German reference books, ran an online poll for "Youth [German] Word of the Year," and the user-submitted term "Alpha-Kevin" — the Kevin of all Kevins, or "the dumbest of them all" per Frankfurter Allgemeine, was leading the vote. Langenscheidt removed the word from the poll, noting that it was really mean to people named Kevin.
And while that's unfair, parents have taken notice — and Kevin is no longer a popular name for a baby German boy. Far from it, in fact; as of 2023, according to Nameberry, "Kevin" is not one of the 100 most common names given to boys in Germany.