The 9th of November: Germany's Schicksalstag

If you live in Germany long enough, you notice that one date keeps coming back. Flags out on public buildings in one place, wreaths in another, a school assembly, a candle outside a building you walk past every day. The date is der 9. November — and Germans have a name for it: der Schicksalstag, the day of fate. Four times in a single century, German history turned on it.

For anyone preparing for the Leben in Deutschland test, this is not trivia. Two of these four events sit squarely in the official question catalogue, and the date also explains something that puzzles a lot of newcomers: why Germany celebrates its unity on 3 October and not on the day the Berlin Wall opened.

1918 — the monarchy ends and a republic is proclaimed

Germany lost the First World War, and by early November 1918 the empire was collapsing from the inside. On 9 November, the Social Democrat Philipp Scheidemann proclaimed the German republic from a balcony of the Reichstag in Berlin. Roughly two hours later, and a couple of kilometres away at the Berliner Schloss, Karl Liebknecht proclaimed a free socialist republic — a competing vision of what the new state should be. Kaiser Wilhelm II went into exile the following day.

That double proclamation matters more than it looks. The republic was born already split between two ideas of itself, and the Weimar years never fully healed that split. die Republik — a republic, a state without a monarch — is a word worth owning: it is feminine, and it turns up constantly in German history writing (die Weimarer Republik, die Bundesrepublik).

1923 — a failed putsch in Munich

Five years later, on the morning of 9 November 1923, Hitler and General Erich Ludendorff marched with their supporters to the Feldherrnhalle in Munich, intending to seize power. The Bavarian police stopped the march. The NSDAP was banned and Hitler was sentenced to five years in prison — of which he served a small fraction.

The putsch failed, and for a while that looked like the end of the story. It was not. The Nazi movement later turned 9 November into one of its own commemorative dates, which is part of why the 1938 pogrom fell on the same night.

1938 — die Reichspogromnacht

On the night of 9 to 10 November 1938, the National Socialist regime and its supporters carried out an organised pogrom against Jews across Germany and Austria. Synagogues were set on fire. Jewish shops, homes and community buildings were destroyed. People were beaten, humiliated and killed because they were Jewish.

The Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung records around 7,500 Jewish businesses destroyed, more than 1,200 synagogues burned, 91 Jews killed during the pogrom itself, and roughly 1,300 deaths in total as a result of the violence, the conditions of imprisonment that followed, or suicide. The Deutsches Historisches Museum puts the number of synagogues severely damaged or destroyed across Germany and Austria at 1,400 or more. In the days afterwards, more than 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and taken to the concentration camps at Dachau, Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald. The Jewish communities were then forced to pay an enormous financial levy for the destruction inflicted on them.

This was not a riot that got out of hand. It was co-ordinated, and it marked the point at which the persecution of Jews in Germany moved openly from law and exclusion to organised violence.

1989 — der Mauerfall

On the evening of 9 November 1989, the East German official Günter Schabowski announced new travel rules at a press conference and, asked when they applied, said they took effect immediately. East Berliners went to the crossing points. At the checkpoint on Bornholmer Straße, shortly before midnight, the border guards gave way and opened the barrier. After twenty-eight years, the Wall was open.

This is der Mauerfall — literally the wall-fall, the fall of the Berlin Wall. It opened the road to die Wiedervereinigung, the reunification of the two German states, which was completed less than a year later.

The word behind the date: der Schicksalstag

So why is the national holiday on 3 October?

This is the question learners ask, and it has a serious answer. Germany's national holiday is der Tag der Deutschen Einheit — the Day of German Unity — on 3 October. It marks 3 October 1990, the day the German Democratic Republic’s accession to the Federal Republic took effect under the Einigungsvertrag (unification treaty), which had itself come into force on 29 September. Reunification was legally complete at midnight; the Basic Law now applied to the eastern states and all of Berlin.

The obvious alternative was 9 November, the day the Wall opened. It was discussed — and ruled out: the same date carries the pogrom of 1938, and a state cannot ask its citizens to celebrate on the anniversary of that night. The date that was actually settled on came from practical politics — the Volkskammer picked 3 October to complete unity as quickly as possible, straight after the CSCE meeting of 2 October. The result is the same either way: Germany celebrates the legal act, not the emotional moment.

The vocabulary of remembrance

German has a precise, everyday vocabulary for this that most textbooks skip. It is worth learning, because you will meet it in the news every November.

• gedenken (verb) — to commemorate, to remember formally. It takes the genitive: „Wir gedenken der Opfer.“ (We remember the victims.) Not accusative — this is one of the few genitive verbs still in common use.
• das Gedenken — the act of commemoration itself. „das Gedenken an die Opfer“ — the remembrance of the victims.
• der Gedenktag — a day of remembrance (as opposed to der Feiertag, a public holiday).
• die Erinnerungskultur — literally culture of remembrance: the whole German practice of publicly confronting the Nazi past through memorials, education and ceremony.
• der Nationalfeiertag — the national holiday. Germany has exactly one, and it is 3 October.
• die Wiedervereinigung — the reunification of East and West Germany in 1990.

What the Leben in Deutschland test actually asks

Both halves of this article appear in the official question catalogue, and it is worth being clear about what is being tested:

• The national holiday. You should know that Germany's Nationalfeiertag is 3 October, the Tag der Deutschen Einheit, and that it marks reunification in 1990.
• November 1938. The catalogue asks what happened in Germany on 9 November 1938. The expected answer is that Jewish shops and synagogues were destroyed by the National Socialists and their supporters. A related question asks in which year that happened: 1938.
• The fall of the Wall and reunification. The Wall opened on 9 November 1989; the two German states were reunited on 3 October 1990.

Learn the two dates as a pair rather than as isolated facts. 9 November 1989 is when it became possible; 3 October 1990 is when it was done. Once you hold that pair, the exam questions around it stop being memorisation and start being a story you already know.

The takeaway

Der 9. November is the clearest single lesson in how Germany deals with its own past. One date holds the birth of its first republic, an attempted coup, its worst night of open persecution, and the evening its division ended. The country did not tidy that up by picking the happy anniversary and celebrating it. It kept 9 November for remembrance and moved the celebration to 3 October.

If you are settling in Germany, understanding that choice will tell you more about the place than any list of dates. And if you are sitting the Leben in Deutschland test, you now know both of the answers it asks for — and why they are different days.