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RELIGION

The constitution guarantees religious freedom, the main religions being Catholicism and Protestantism, each with about 26 million adherents (around a third of the country’s total population each). Religion has a stronger footing in western Germany, especially Catholic Bavaria.

Unlike the Jewish community, which has grown since the early 1990s due to immigration from the former Soviet Union, the Catholic and Protestant churches are losing worshippers. This is attributed partly to the obligatory church tax (8% or 9% of total income tax paid) paid by those belonging to a recognised denomination. Most German Protestants are Lutheran, headed by the Evangelische Kirche (Protestant Church), an official grouping of a couple of dozen Lutheran churches with headquarters in Hanover. In 2005, for the first time in almost five centuries, a German, Joseph Ratzinger (b 1927) became pope, taking the name Pope Benedict XVI.

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A WAY WITH ‘UNWORDS’

Each year the Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache (Society for German Language; www.gfds.de, in German) publishes an Unwort des Jahres (Unword of the Year) and several runners up – usually unloved words that dominated the media that year.

In the early 1990s unwords like ausländerfrei (free of foreigners), ethnische Säuberung (ethnic cleansing) and Überfremdung (too many foreigners) reflected a mood of hostility towards foreigners and the break-up of Yugoslavia. By the late 1990s, a Rentnerschwemme suggested a flood of pensioners was laying waste to the land, Wohlstandsmüll (rubbish of affluence) rather harshly described the large number of incapacitated workers, and sozialverträgliches Frühableben (socially compatible early death) offered a glimpse into the German angst that pensioners might be a drain on society by not shuffling off this mortal coil early enough. German Leitkultur (lead culture) emerged around 2000, although a proponent of creating a strong German host culture to lead the minority soon became known as a Leithammel (bellwether) – a castrated ram that wears a bell and leads the flock. Ich AG (Me Inc) was coined to describe a newly introduced legal form of corporation, the single-employee business, and an Abweichler became someone who dissents in an act seemingly akin to ‘political heresy’. If you received a Herdprämie (stove premium), you were probably a woman being given incentives to stay at home like a good housewife and mother. Recently, notleidende Banken (banks in a crisis) topped the list of qualifiers, ahead of Rentnerdemokratie (pensioner democracy, a new angle on the socially compatible early death, describing how one generation of pensioners dominates and plunders the younger generation). Both came in ahead of Karlsruhe-Touristen – defenders of constitutional rights who frequently bring cases to the constitutional court, situated in the northern Baden-Württemberg town of Karlsruhe.

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The head of the Jewish community’s Berlin-based umbrella organisation, the Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland (Central Council of Jews in Germany), is Charlotte Knobloch (b 1932). The largest Jewish communities are in Berlin, Frankfurt am Main and Munich. Countrywide, 80 or more congregations are represented by the council, known for its conservatism (Click here).

Up to 4.3 million Muslims live in Germany. In the past, no single national body had existed to represent the fragmented Muslim community, but in 2007 a Coordinating Council of Muslims in Germany (Koordinationsrat der Muslime in Deutschland) was established by the four largest organisations. This grew out of the so-called Islam Conference, initiated by the Ministry of the Interior to create a dialogue between the state and Germans of the Muslim faith.

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The German Protestant Church is online at www.ekd.de; the Catholics are at www.catholic-hierarchy.org/country/de.html; and the Central Council of Jews at www.zentralratdjuden.de (in German).

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ARTS

Literature

EARLY LITERATURE

Oral literature during the