It’s January 6. In Mannheim the stores are closed and the buses run a Sunday schedule. In Viernheim, which starts where Mannheim ends, everybody is at work.
Epiphany is a public holiday in Baden-Württemberg. It isn’t one in Hesse. The tram out of Mannheim crosses that line in a couple of minutes, and the rule changes with it. On November 1 the whole thing repeats, because All Saints’ Day works the same way.
Nobody moved the border. The holiday simply stops there.
That’s the thing to know before you plan a day around one. Nine days off are the same in all sixteen states. Everything past those nine is state law, and state law does not travel with you.
The Nine That Hold Everywhere
On each of these, the shops are shut across the whole country. Bakeries open for a few morning hours, and the stores inside train stations and airports keep trading. Everything else stays dark.
- New Year’s Day, January 1
- Good Friday (Karfreitag) and Easter Monday (Ostermontag)
- Labor Day (Tag der Arbeit), May 1
- Ascension Day (Christi Himmelfahrt), a Thursday, 39 days after Easter Sunday. It doubles as Father’s Day, which here involves handcarts full of beer and looks nothing like the American version. :-)
- Whit Monday (Pfingstmontag), 50 days after Easter
- German Unity Day (Tag der Deutschen Einheit), October 3. It marks the day reunification took legal effect in 1990. Not the fall of the Berlin Wall, which is a separate date and a separate story.
- December 25 and 26, both of them full holidays
Four of the nine move with Easter, which is why the spring calendar here looks scattered from the outside. Good Friday is also a quiet day by law. Clubs close, public dancing is banned, and the length of the ban depends on the state.
The Ones That Stop at a State Line
Nine more days are a holiday somewhere and an ordinary workday an hour away.
| Holiday | When | Where it’s a day off |
|---|---|---|
| Epiphany (Heilige Drei Könige) | January 6 | Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria, Saxony-Anhalt |
| Women’s Day (Internationaler Frauentag) | March 8 | Berlin, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania |
| Corpus Christi (Fronleichnam) | 60 days after Easter | Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria, Hesse, North Rhine-Westphalia, Rhineland-Palatinate, Saarland, plus Catholic villages in Saxony and Thuringia |
| Peace Festival (Hohes Friedensfest) | August 8 | the city of Augsburg, nowhere else |
| Assumption Day (Mariä Himmelfahrt) | August 15 | Saarland, and most Bavarian municipalities |
| Children’s Day (Weltkindertag) | September 20 | Thuringia |
| Reformation Day (Reformationstag) | October 31 | Brandenburg, Bremen, Hamburg, Lower Saxony, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, Schleswig-Holstein, Thuringia |
| All Saints’ Day (Allerheiligen) | November 1 | Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria, North Rhine-Westphalia, Rhineland-Palatinate, Saarland |
| Repentance Day (Buß- und Bettag) | Wednesday before November 23 | Saxony |
The pattern behind that table is old. The Catholic south and west kept Corpus Christi and All Saints’ Day. The Protestant north and east kept Reformation Day. That border was drawn in the sixteenth century and has barely shifted since.
The holiday that counts is the one where you are standing, not the one where you live. Commuters across a state line learn this fast. Mannheim and Viernheim do agree on Corpus Christi, which only makes the other two days stranger.
Bavaria ends up with more days off than any other state, and Augsburg beats Bavaria. The city holds a peace festival that no other municipality in the country has, which puts it one ahead of everywhere else.
The Days That Look Like Holidays and Aren’t
Carnival Monday is the big one. Rosenmontag is not a public holiday anywhere in Germany. In Cologne, Düsseldorf, and Mainz that makes no practical difference. Schools are out, offices empty, and plenty of shops never open the door.
Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve are ordinary working days in law. In practice the shops close around two in the afternoon, and by mid-afternoon on December 24 the streets belong to nobody.
Easter Sunday and Whit Sunday are legal holidays in Brandenburg and nowhere else. They’re Sundays everywhere anyway, so nobody outside a payroll office has ever noticed. ;-)
School Holidays and the Eleven-Week Summer
School holidays aren’t public holidays. They do decide what a trip costs, which is reason enough to look them up.
Since 1964 the states have staggered the summer break on a rotation, so the autobahns and the coast don’t fill up on one weekend. Fourteen states rotate through five groups. Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg have always gone last, and the other fourteen have been arguing about that for years.
The result is a high season roughly eleven weeks long. From late June to mid-September, school is out somewhere in Germany, and hotel prices know it.
The shorter breaks move the same way. Two weeks around Easter, one in autumn, and two to three over Christmas. Travel in early June or late September instead, and the Alps are emptier and the rooms cheaper.
Before you lock in a date, check which state you’ll be standing in that week. That one look saves more grief than any phrasebook.
Christmas runs for four weeks and plays by its own rules, and all of that sits on German Christmas. Why the map splits where it does is the subject of German religion. And the rest of the everyday basics are gathered on Germany info.