By law, "the Sundays and the public holidays remain protected as days of rest from work and of spiritual elevation". Thus all Sundays are, in a manner, public holidays – but usually not understood by the term "holiday". Public holidays apart from the Sundays can be declared by law by either the Federation or the Länder for their respective jurisdictions. By federal law, only the German Unity Day is made a holiday at present ; the others, even the ones celebrated all over Germany, are made holidays by state legislation.
List by state
Notes: In addition, the state of Brandenburg has formally declared Easter Sunday and Pentecost Sunday as public holidays. As these are Sundays anyway, they have been left away by the other states, nor counted in the table above.
Quiet days
A couple of days are designated stille Tage by state legislation, which regularly means that public dancing events, music at inns etc. are prohibited. Some public holidays are quiet days:
In a limited number of cases – apart from All Saints which, however, has long been associated in popular understanding with remembrance of the dead. The status of quiet days is also given to festivities joyous in nature: in Hesse, the highest Christian holidays are half-quiet days and in Rhineland-Palatinate, Easter Sunday and Christmas Day are two-thirds-quiet days. For details see the German article on :de:Tanzverbot|the dancing ban.
Flag days
A yet third category that may, sometimes, be called "holidays" in a sense are the "flag days". Only the very highest institutions, and the military, use the national flags at every day, so the directives when flags are to be displayed mark the days in question as special. Flags are to be shown by Federal Decree on
and by state decrees on other days, such as election days for state parliaments, state constitution days, anniversary of the election of the Federal President and so forth. Frequently flags are ordered ad hoc to be shown at half-mast in cases of national mourning.
Unofficial holidays
Either Carnival Monday or Mardi Gras is a de facto holiday in some towns and cities in Catholic western and southern Germany which have a strong Carnival tradition. Also, Christmas-Eve is developing into a sort of semi-holiday: from the middle of the afternoon, it is practically treated as a holiday, and while in the morning shops are still open, working for other businesses is becoming more and more unusual; schools are closed in any case.
