Public holidays in Germany

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You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in German. (September 2012) Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the German article. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 1,943 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing German Wikipedia article at [[:de:Feiertage in Deutschland]]; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template {{Translated|de|Feiertage in Deutschland}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

By law, "the Sundays and the public holidays remain protected as days of rest from work and of spiritual elevation" (Art. 139 WRV, part of the German constitution via Art. 140 GG). Thus all Sundays are, in a manner, public holidays – but usually not understood by the term "holiday" (except for, normally, Easter Sunday and Pentecost Sunday).

Public holidays apart from the Sundays (there must be some of them constitutionally) can be declared by law either by the Federation or by the Länder for their respective jurisdictions. At present the only federal holiday is German Unity Day (Unity Treaty, Art. 2 sect. 2); all the other holidays, even those celebrated all over Germany, are prescribed by state legislation.