I'm hoping someone who is knowledgeable about Frankfurt can help me out. I am travelling with my in-laws in the first week of April 2007 to Germany, and we will be in Frankfurt on Easter sunday. Everything I've read indicates that virtually no shops (including the Zeil) are open on sundays. My in-laws insist that they spoke with some tourist official in Germany who said that the laws have been changed and everything will be open. Can someone here give me the straight goods? On a related note, if most things are closed, does anyone have a recommendation for things to do in Frankfurt on Easter Sunday (I know, I know...I should go to church ;-} )

Thanks in Advance!

Shopping laws of the previous mandatory Sunday and evening closings was repealed and stores can open if they want. A normal Sunday yes...Easter could be an exception?

Frankfurt has world-class museums that should be open and a fine park with lots of huge hothouses with plants.

Beer halls are always open it seems.

Proszt! (sp?)

Is this just for Frankfurt, or for other German cities too (the Sunday shopping law)?

I believe the previous law was national - at least in 30 years of German travel i saw not one regular store open on Sundays anywhere except just before Christmas.

But as Germany has a federal system perhaps it's now left up to the Lander. Friends of mine just returned were in Frankfurt on Sunday and it was hopping with shopping (but was pre-Christmas) - someone will surely know more definitive answer.

The laws about the opening hours of shops are the Federal States' business. So far, only a few States, like Berlin and Nordrhein-Westfalen, have allowed shops to open round the clock on weekdays (which hardly any shop will actuially do) and for some hours on a number of Sundays (not all Sundays) per year. Hessen hasn't joined yet. Anyway, a big Christian holiday like Easter is be a different matter than normal Sundays. So prepare for shops to be closed except at the train station and some souvenir shops.

Museums, the zoo, Palmengarten etc. will be open on Easter Sunday, so there will be enough to do.

The change kmcqueen's in laws was told about simply removed a Federal requirement for Sunday and early evening shop closure and transferred legislative competence to the Lander. Incidentally, there was never a law against anything else opening on Sundays: it simply isn't true that "most things are closed" in Germany on Sunday. Just most shops.

The legal change certainly didn't mean "everything will be open", and any tourist official who thought so didn't understand how his country worked or how his fellow-countrymen think. It just meant the powerful pressure groups against Sunday opening - who'd been very successful mobilising public opinion nationally - started lobbying at local level instead. And even if laws change, not every retailer will decide it's in their interest to add extra trading hours - which can increase costs faster than income.

The simple fact many foreigners seem unable to get their heads around is that most Germans don't want to shop on Sundays and don't want the special feeling of a Sunday to be changed. And they can think of lots of things to do on a Sunday that don't involve shopping or going to church.

Hesse (the Land that includes Frankfurt) changed its opening hours in late November, allowing virtually unregulated shopping Monday to Saturday, and some shopping on four Sundays a year. Its explicitly bans shop opening, except in petrol stations etc, on Easter Sunday.

This is all fully documented on the Web: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladenschluss

Flanneruk - thanks for the detailed reply. Yesterday I was able to find the legislation online (I had lots of fun trying to translate with my very rusty German!). It confirmed all that you have said, and indeed I will be very thankful that shops will be closed. As much as I love my in-laws, their holidays tend to be one big shopping trip, and now I will have a good excuse to point them in other directions for that day.

<And even if laws change, not every retailer will decide it's in their interest to add extra trading hours - which can increase costs faster than income>

no but the largest ones will as it's not only not going to increase costs faster than income but will spur shopping in a country with a savings rate amongst the highest in Europe. And this is exactly why the law was relaxed and left to states (flanner - you used the word "Lander" when in your previous criticism of folks using foreign versions of words in English - Brugge over Bruges is one of your frequent laments along with Koln for Cologne, so i think you should have used the word States instead of Lander!)

And this is exactly why the law was relaxed, to spur commercial activity. And Sunday shopping is very very popular - whenever stores are open the city centre shopping drags, normally deserted and lifeless at night and on Sundays, the shops are thronged. Germans too want to shop in leisure and not have to scurry around mobbed stores due to previous restricted shopping hours (when they had to close at 6 or 7pm previously workers had little time to shop as their workday lasted nearly until then - and Saturdays, the only day they could shop meant super mobbed stores - all inhibiting shoppers from shopping to the max). Thus large retailers will boom at the expense of small shops and i predict nearly all of Germany will soon be open at night and on Sundays and well and polls have shown that most Germans are in favor of it.

>nearly all of Germany will soon be open at night and on Sundays and well and polls have shown that most Germans are in favor of it.
Not really ;-)
"Lander and Koln" isn't German either, it's always "Laender and Koeln".

The English (ie, what the Times and the Economist use) for the secondary level of German government is land. There is no generic word in English for secondary levels of government: the words we use include department, prefecture, regency, voivodship, province, state and county - as well as land (I got the case of the initial letter wrong).

The plural of land is lander, by analogy with cherubim, papadam and criteria. Not laender, which isn't English, not lander with an umlaut because most of us can't do umlauts, and not lands because it sounds silly.

No poll that I'm aware of shows most Germans in favour of unrestricted Sunday shopping, though it might have changed since my time. But most Germans have certainly supported longer Monday-Saturday opening.

Nearly all Germany won't be open on Sundays - or even most Sundays - because it's taken at least 20 extremely painful years to get to where we are today, and the real controversy has always been about Sundays, not about extended weekday hours (I spent several years intimately involved in all this, and the scars still show). I'd put the chances of all the lander and cities to whom the decision has now been delegated accepting unregulated Sunday trading before 2050 as roughly the same as the Irish Republic joining Schengen if Northern Ireland doesn't (ie zero)

Even when Sunday trading is permitted, all large stores don't necessarily open. English city centre stores took nearly 10 years from liberalisation to open nearly universally, and I traded a number of large stores in Scotland (where it's centuries since Sunday trading was banned, if it ever was) that didn't open every Sunday, because the economics didn't make sense.

In fact in England Sunday liberalisation seriously undermined the relative competitiveness of many town-centre stores, big and small, which in turn led to a mushrooming of medium-sized town-edge chains.

The environment is different in Germany. But if there's one clear lesson from Wal-Mart's inability, outside the US, to manage a booze-up in a brewery it's that retail lessons rarely travel well from one country to another. It might even be in Germany, for example, that smaller stores (less likely to have unions being difficult, and not subject to beastly Supervisory Boards) will open faster than savings-obsessed, union-driven biggies like Karstadt. The one thing we can say for certain is that Germany will go its own way in all this.

Especially when Germany's trade unions, Greens and churches agree they'll campaign against any politician who votes for full Sunday opening.