Federal Republic of Germany

E

Religion

Religion in Germany plays a fairly small role in society. Church attendance in Germany is much lower than that in the United States. Under German law, all churches are supported by a modest church tax that is collected by the state.

Roman Catholicism was the dominant religion in medieval Germany until the major crises and reformation efforts of the 14th and 15th centuries. After that time, Protestant churches came to power in the majority of principalities of the north, east, and center of the Holy Roman Empire. The actual Reformation began with the publication of the Ninety-five Theses of protest by Martin Luther in 1517. After considerable religious and political conflict, the Peace of Augsburg of 1555 decreed that each ruler of the approximately 300 German principalities could determine the religion of the subjects. The Catholics eventually met the rapid spread of Protestantism with the Counter Reformation, which involved internal church reforms and a stricter interpretation of church doctrine. Religious strife finally culminated in the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), which devastated the country.

Roman Catholics, mainly concentrated in the south, make up about 35 percent of the German population. Protestants, the great majority of whom are Lutherans (see Lutheranism), make up about 37 percent of the people. Protestants live primarily in the north. Several German Protestant churches form a loosely organized federation called the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD). About 4 percent of the German population is Muslim (see Islam).

Only a very small percentage of Germans are Jewish (See also Judaism). Until the 19th century, the Jewish community was segregated and barred from many activities in most German states. In 19th-century Prussia and with the unification of Germany in 1871, German Jews were granted equal status under the law. At that point, German Jews became integrated into cultural and economic life. More than 500,000 Jews lived in Germany in the early 1930s. By the end of World War II in 1945, most of them had been killed by the Nazis in the Holocaust or had fled the country. By 1970 only about 33,000 Jews lived in Germany. With the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and the fall of the Berlin Wall, tens of thousands of East European and Russian Jews began to settle in the larger cities of Germany, particularly Berlin. Today, due to in part to an immigration policy that generally grants visas to Jews from formerly Communist states, Germany is home to one of the fastest growing Jewish populations in Europe, now numbering more than 100,000.

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F

Education

Full-time school attendance in Germany is free and mandatory from age 6 to age 14, after which most children either continue in secondary schools or participate in vocational education until the age of 18. Kindergarten is not part of the public school system, although before unification East Germany had a nearly universal system of childcare facilities. Under the treaty of unification, the East German public education system was required to conform to the model in use in West Germany.

Education in Germany is under the jurisdiction of the individual state governments, which results in a great deal of variety. Most states in the former West Germany have a three-track system that begins with four years of Grundschule (primary school), attended by all children between the ages of 6 and 9. After this period, a child’s further educational program is determined during two “orientation grades” (ages 10 and 11). Those who are university-bound then enter a track of rigorous preparatory secondary education by attending a highly competitive, academic Gymnasium (junior and senior high school). Many Gymnasium students leave school at age 16 to pursue business careers. Others graduate at age 19 after passing a week-long examination called the Abitur. If they pass, they receive a certificate, which is a prerequisite for entering a university. The Gymnasium has three alternative focuses: Greek and Latin, modern languages, and mathematics and science. Only about one-tenth of German students graduate from the Gymnasium.

The overwhelming majority of German students attend either a six-year Realschule (postprimary school), which offers a mixture of business and academic training, or a five-year Hauptschule (general school) followed by further skills training and on-the-job experience in a three-year vocational program, or Berufsschule. From age 14 nearly all Realschule and Hauptschule students, both male and female, enroll in trade apprenticeship programs, which combine training in workshops, factories, or businesses with vocational schooling. Apprentices are supervised by a trade master and must demonstrate their mastery of the trade in examinations.

Since the German three-track system has often been accused of conforming to class distinctions, some states have opted instead for a comprehensive high school system that combines all the tracks within the same institution. The result is somewhat similar to an American high school, but far more competitive. Before unification, East Germany’s polytechnic high schools also provided a comprehensive program. Since 1990, East German education has moved in the direction of West German models.

The Abitur is required for university entrance but there are alternative routes to it. Some students are permitted to change from one kind of school to another during the course of their education. Such midcourse changes are easiest at comprehensive high schools. Those who opt for three years of vocational training after tenth grade can also go on to specialized trade colleges, or Fachhochschulen. Schools of continuing education for adults, such as the many Volkshochschulen (German for “people’s colleges”), offer a variety of adult education courses and have some programs leading to diplomas.

Enrollments at German universities have quadrupled since the 1960s, which has caused the expansion of many old universities and the building of a number of new ones. Germany has quite a few venerable old universities, such as those of Heidelberg, Freiburg, Munich, Tübingen, and Marburg.

G

Way of Life

High living standards, plentiful leisure time (including three weeks or more of mandatory paid vacation for most workers), and comprehensive social welfare benefits distinguish German society. Germany has a highly urbanized society, with lifestyles that emphasize recreational, leisure, and physical fitness activities. Many Germans enjoy hiking, camping, skiing, and other outdoor pursuits. Germans are known for their love of traveling, and millions travel abroad each year. Soccer is the most popular sport in the nation, and many Germans belong to local soccer clubs. Germans are also known for their love of food, especially rich pastries, veal and pork dishes, and many types of sausages and cheeses. German-made wine and beer are famous all over the world. Also popular are lively social gatherings at outdoor beer or wine gardens or cellar restaurants where wine or beer is stored.

German society has undergone vast changes in recent decades. Since the early 1960s, for example, television has homogenized popular culture and brought urban ways of thinking to rural areas. In fact, the rapid spread of automobile ownership in the 1950s and 1960s made rural isolation a thing of the past. The old village communities, whose cultural life was dominated by the parish and the elementary school, have almost disappeared. The one-room schools in which eight grades used to be instructed simultaneously no longer exist. Young women find that most of the traditional barriers to a career of their own choosing, in particular barriers to diversified vocational and higher education, have broken down. Women have also been freed from the constraints of the traditional family roles of motherhood and child rearing by birth control and a greatly lowered birth rate. Today, Germany’s birthrate is among the lowest in the world.

Some people in the former East Germany look back fondly on the days before unification when their way of life was modest but also highly egalitarian. Unification brought greater personal freedom to East Germans, but the capitalistic market economy also brought the heightened competition and a hectic pace of life common in the West. The former East Germany still has considerably lower wage levels and living standards than the more prosperous West Germany. Many large state-owned manufactures and cooperative agricultural enterprises in East Germany did not survive the transformation to a market economy, a process that resulted in unusually high unemployment. The German government continues to invest tens of billions of dollars every year to modernize the infrastructure of roads, transport, communications, and housing in the former East Germany.

H

Social Problems

Germany does not have large pockets of poverty or great economic disparity. Crime levels are substantially lower than those in the United States, and the possession of guns is controlled. However, there are significant numbers of homeless people and problems of violence, alcoholism, and drug abuse. Nonviolent crimes, such as theft and burglary in urban areas, have increased since the 1970s.

Since the 1960s youth violence and crime have increased steadily. Disruptive behavior and gang membership characterize some urban secondary schools. Neighborhood youth gangs sometimes engage in vandalism, car theft, and other crimes. Some teens belong to punk and skinhead groups, which may espouse drug use, violence, or racism. In addition, gangs of “soccer rowdies” frequently disrupt games or cause riots afterward.

In the early 1990s the great influx of foreigners, especially illegal aliens and asylum-seekers, coincided with the collapse of the East German Communist regime. Unification brought numerous economic and social problems to Germany, including increased taxes, budget deficits, housing shortages, strikes and demonstrations, high unemployment, and rising crime rates. Enormous social changes and economic fears brought xenophobia (fear of foreigners) to the surface. While an angry public focused on the unwelcome strangers and competitors for scarce housing and other benefits, neighborhood youth gangs attacked visible aliens and set fire to their government-assigned housing shelters. At its peak in 1992 this antiforeign violence became the object of extraordinary media concern in Germany and abroad, where it was sometimes interpreted as a sign of German racism and the revival of Nazi activities. Massive counter-demonstrations drew millions of Germans opposed to racism and antiforeign violence. Nevertheless, episodes of racist violence continued into the new millennium, claiming an estimated 100 lives between 1990 and 2000.

IV

Culture

The German people have made many noteworthy cultural contributions. However, the antecedents of contemporary German art, music, and literature are so thoroughly embedded in the broader European intellectual traditions as to defy most attempts to separate any specifically German cultural roots. A visitor, for example, can see abundant evidence of early medieval art and architecture in the many splendid cathedrals, monasteries, and castles of Germany, but these follow the same styles and style periods that are be found in other European countries—Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, baroque, and so on. German literature and music were similarly part of the larger European culture.

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