A Public Holiday in Some German States but Not Others

Reformation Day's status as an official public holiday in Germany varies by state rather than applying uniformly across the country, reflecting Germany's federal structure and the different religious histories of its constituent states: predominantly Protestant states in the north and east, including Saxony, Brandenburg and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, observe it as a full public holiday, while predominantly Catholic states in the south and west generally do not, so that the same 31 October is a day off work in one part of Germany and an ordinary working day only a short drive away in another.

For the 2017 quincentenary of Luther's theses, the German federal government made an exception and declared Reformation Day a one-off nationwide public holiday in every state regardless of its usual status, a temporary and symbolic national unification of the holiday for the anniversary year alone, after which the ordinary state-by-state pattern resumed the following year, illustrating both the significance Germany attached to the five-hundredth anniversary and the limits of that significance, since the country did not choose to make the wider nationwide holiday status permanent once the anniversary year had passed.