They don’t have cashier’s checks or banker’s drafts in Germany?

Germany is a very cash-oriented society. Many independent businesses don't take credit cards and most consumers prefer to pay in cash. Germans are very privacy-conscious, and there's a latent suspicion of debt and intangible money because of Weimar-era hyperinflation.

https://www.german-way.com/germanys-cash-culture-geld-stinkt...

Which is slightly odd, considering that in hyperinflation, paper cash was losing value just as fast as intangible money.

However, the privacy aspect makes cash usage understandable. But it is somewhat inconvenient sometimes - for example, you generally have to be prepared to pay taxis by cash, not bank/credit card as in Nordics.

And there is a culture of hiding assets from the state. I remember a while back the German police where regularly catching pensioners driving to Luxembourg to smuggle large amounts of euros which they did not want to pay tax on.

A cashier's check is effectively a cash equivalent - it's a check guaranteed by the bank, wherein they basically freeze the funds in your account at the time you write the check. The only real purpose of it is to save people from carrying around huge amounts of cash. So that doesn't really answer his question.

Very very very rarely. I've never seen or heard of anyone using either personally and I'm not even sure where I would get a check book or cash in a check.

Germany is very cash. You pay taxi in cash, you pay the restaurant in cash and you pay the train in cash. Credit Cards exist but largely the EC system is prefered since it's not credit based and pulls from your bank account instead. And I only really fall back to EC when I run out of cash and I know I'm going to be at a place that has a card reader.