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How Germans are fed up with Bavaria getting all the breaks

DPA/The Local
DPA/The Local - [email protected]
How Germans are fed up with Bavaria getting all the breaks
In Bavaria they remember the dead on November 1st. Photo: DPA

If you live in Bavaria you get 13 public holidays a year, but in Berlin you only get nine. Is that fair? No, say a majority of Germans.

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A poll conducted by YouGov and released by DPA on Wednesday shows that Germans think they need a break.

An overwhelming 72 percent think that October 31st, Reformation Day, should be a nationwide holiday every year, as will be the case in 2017.

In celebration of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, all of Germany will have a day of on October 31st 2017, whereas normally the day is only a national holiday in the former east German states.

Seventeen percent of Germans were against the idea that Reformation Day should be an annual nationwide holiday.

Almost two thirds (61 percent) were also for all sixteen of the German states receiving the same amount of public holidays every year. The same proportion of people thought everyone should get the same amount as the state with the most public holidays - Bavaria.

Currently Bavaria, a mainly Catholic state, gets 13 holidays per year, including days such as Assumption of Mary Day on August 15th and All Saints Day on November 1st.

Meanwhile northerners, in the lands of the protestant work ethic, have to make do with a miserly nine. Berlin, Hamburg, Schleswig-Holstein and Lower Saxony all have this amount of holiday.

Only 13 percent of respondents were against the idea of all Germans getting the same amount of holiday (although this number rose to 22 percent in Bavaria.)

On the question of which days could be made national public holidays, 49 percent wanted the protestant Reformation Day, and 48 percent wanted the catholic All Saints Day.

When it was suggested that a non-Christian religion could have a public holiday, 68 percent rejected this idea. Ten percent said that a Muslim holiday would make sense, nine percent wanted a Jewish holiday.

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