My Germany Info Answers the Questions Guidebooks Skip

It’s August 8 in Augsburg, and the stores are closed.

Not in Munich. Not in the villages just past the city limits. Only inside Augsburg, because the city has a public holiday that exists nowhere else in Germany. The Hohes Friedensfest (High Peace Festival) has been marked since 1650, when the city’s Protestants got their churches back after the Thirty Years’ War. It became an official day off in 1950, and it gives Augsburg fourteen holidays a year, more than any other city in the country.

Things like that are what this section is for.

This isn’t the part about where to go or where to sleep. That’s the vacation section. This is the other pile: the flag, the money, and the eight o’clock news.

Some of the answers hold in all sixteen states. Plenty of them stop at the state line, and that catches visitors out far more often than the language does. The pages below are grouped by the kind of question. Start wherever yours sits.

The Symbols Every German Grows Up With

Start with the flag, because it’s the only German state symbol written into the constitution. Article 22 of the Grundgesetz (Basic Law) says the federal flag is black, red, and gold. That’s the entire sentence.

The colors are older than the country flying them. They turned up at the Hambach festival in 1832, and the Frankfurt assembly declared them German colors in 1848. Bismarck’s empire swapped them for black, white, and red. The Weimar Republic brought them back in 1919, the Nazis removed them again, and the Parliamentary Council settled on them once more in 1949.

East Germany used the same three colors and added its own emblem to the middle in 1959. In the fall of 1989, demonstrators started cutting that emblem out of their flags. What stayed in their hands was the West German one.

The anthem has the stranger backstory. Joseph Haydn wrote the melody in 1797 for an Austrian emperor. The words followed in 1841, written on Helgoland, which belonged to Britain at the time. Only the third verse of the Deutschlandlied (Song of the Germans) is the national anthem. The first two are not part of it.

The money is the recent chapter. Euro cash arrived in 2002, and the mark left the tills that winter. Leaving the drawers took longer. More than twelve billion marks have never come back, and the Bundesbank still exchanges them at the rate fixed in 1998. No deadline, no fee. :-)

How Germany Runs Its Calendar and Its Clock

Exactly one public holiday here comes from federal law. That’s Tag der Deutschen Einheit (German Unity Day) on October 3, and it got there through the reunification treaty. Every other day off on the calendar is written by the states.

Nine of them are identical everywhere, because all sixteen states put the same nine into their own holiday laws. Past those nine, the calendar splits. The dividing line is largely the one the Reformation drew. That’s why Fronleichnam (Corpus Christi) is a day off in the Catholic south and an ordinary Thursday in the north.

The total runs from ten days in most of the north to thirteen in Bavaria. Which is how Augsburg ends up with fourteen.

The weather is less dramatic than the calendar. Four seasons show up more or less on schedule, and none of them goes to extremes. Rain is possible in any month, including the one you booked for sunshine. Pack a layer you can take off again, and you’ve solved most of it.

Germany runs on Central European Time, an hour ahead of London and six ahead of New York for most of the year. The clocks still move forward in March and back in October.

The time itself comes out of a longwave transmitter at Mainflingen, southeast of Frankfurt. Atomic clocks at the national metrology institute feed it. That signal sets station clocks, traffic lights, and the radio clock on somebody’s kitchen wall. It has been doing the job since 1959.

If you want the current German time on a screen, there’s a live clock in the footer of every page here.

Where We Germans Get Our News

ARD is not a company. It’s a federation of regional broadcasters, each one rooted in its own corner of the country, sharing a single national channel between them. ZDF sits next to it as one nationwide broadcaster. A monthly fee per household pays for both, due whether or not there’s a television in the apartment.

The eight o’clock news is the fixed point of the day. Tagesschau runs fifteen minutes, and a fair number of households still won’t pick up the phone while it’s on. ;-)

Newspapers work the other way around. The national titles get quoted abroad, and the regional ones get read at the kitchen table. Almost every mid-size town still has a daily with its own name on the masthead.

Radio never lost its slot here. It runs in the car, in the bakery, and in the kitchen before work. The same regional broadcasters operate the public stations, with a thick layer of private ones alongside.

Site Updates

One more page belongs in this section, though it’s about the site rather than about Germany. Every time a page goes live or gets rewritten, it shows up there, newest at the top. If you’ve been here before and want to know what changed since, that’s the page to open.

Cash in the wallet, a layer in the bag, and a look at which state you’ll be in on which day. That covers most of what trips visitors up.

The wider view of the country sits on Germany. How we actually live with each other is German culture. And if a trip is what you’re working on, start with Germany vacation.