Popular festivals continue to abound in the west, southwest, and south, the regions that have clung most to the practices of a traditional, preindustrial age. For example, the donning of elaborate wooden masks during the pre-Lenten celebrations in the southwest remains unchanged despite being televised; hundreds of smaller towns and larger villages in the south still commemorate an anniversary from the Thirty Years’ War with a parade in 17th-century costume or, in Roman Catholic areas, march in full procession on Corpus Christi Day. What is remarkable is not merely that these traditions survive but that the homelier and less celebrated of them remain truly genuine in the observance.
Traditional German cuisine, though varying considerably from region to region, makes generous use of meat—pork is especially popular, both cured and fresh. Beef, poultry, game such as rabbit and venison, and both freshwater and ocean fish are also widely consumed. German dairies produce a variety of excellent cheeses, and fresh soft cheeses find their way into many dishes. Starches are supplied by bread (wheat and rye) and by potatoes, noodles, and dumplings. The necessity of preserving foods for the northern winter has led to a highly developed array of cured, smoked, and pickled meats, fish, and vegetables such as sauerkraut (fermented cabbage). German hams and sausages (Wurst) are world famous and widely imitated, produced in an impressive variety. Mustard, caraway, dill, juniper berries, and marjoram are favoured spices and herbs. Tortes, kuchen, cookies, and other pastries produced in the Konditorei (pastry shop) or home kitchen are served as a conclusion to a meal or an accompaniment to coffee. Holidays bring an array of seasonal sweets such as stollen, gingerbread, and anise cookies. Few meals of the traditional sort, whether presented in the home or in a Gasthaus (inn) or restaurant, are unaccompanied by locally produced wine, beer, brandy, or schnapps. By the early 21st century, German cuisine had become more cosmopolitan with the influence of immigrant cultures, and a meal out was as likely to involve Italian, Chinese, Vietnamese, or Turkish foods as traditional German dishes such as sauerbraten, schnitzel, or spaetzle.
As in many other Western countries, family life has undergone many changes. In contrast to past generations, when families had numerous children, an estimated 30 percent of married German couples never become parents, and most of the remainder have only one or two children. Thus, German birth rates are low and below replacement levels. More people are living together before or instead of marrying, the number of marriages is declining, and the number of divorces has increased. More than one-third of all births now occur outside of marriage. Changing marriage patterns have also influenced gender roles. Traditionally, German families had highly differentiated gender roles within marriage—men worked outside the home and women undertook most homemaking activities and child care. During the last decades of the 20th century, however, this pattern shifted, with more than 70 percent of working-age women employed outside the home—though they still are underrepresented within the elite professions. The arts Government and audience support
For several centuries Germany has enjoyed a tradition of governmental support of the arts. Before the founding of the German Empire in 1871, the many small kingdoms, principalities, duchies, bishoprics, and free cities that preceded it—as well as Austria and German-speaking Switzerland—supported the arts; they established theatres, museums, and libraries, and their leaders acted as patrons for poets, writers, painters, and performers. The institutions thus founded and the convention of generous public support have continued uninterrupted to the present.
The quantitative dimensions of Germany’s cultural life astound non-Germans. Several hundred theatres are subsidized by the federal government, the states, and the cities, and there also are many privately financed theatres. Unlike the United States, Britain, and France, in which theatre is more often than not centred in one city, no single German city predominates. Also, productions in Vienna, Austria, and in Zürich, Switzerland, are significant to Germany’s artistic life, and artists and resources move easily and freely among the theatrical and operatic companies within the German-speaking regions. Only in Vienna, the capital in which the arts arouse far more intense passions than do politics, does theatre have a broader audience base than in Germany. Audiences in Germany are not limited to a small intellectual or social elite but are drawn from all ranks of society. Season tickets, group arrangements, bloc tickets bought by business firms, and theatre clubs constitute the major patronage of such production companies as the People’s Independent Theatre (Theater der Freien Volksbühne), dating from 1890 in Berlin. Going to the theatre or opera in Germany is nearly as affordable and as unremarkable as attending the cinema is elsewhere. The same is also true of concert music. Every major city has at least one symphony orchestra offering many concerts and recitals each week, and many smaller cities and towns also have concerts.
In few countries are the arts so lavishly cultivated as in Germany in terms of the proliferation of cultural amenities, the funds allotted to them, and the attendance upon them. Although this abundance and generous support has not called forth a new era of brilliance to rival that of the Weimar Republic—when Germany (especially Berlin) experienced a resurgence in the arts and a proliferation of creative talents unparalleled since German Classicism and Romanticism—there are a number of noteworthy individual talents and movements dotting the contemporary landscape. Literature and theatre
Arguably, German literature holds less than its deserved status in world literature in part because the lyrical qualities of its poetry and the nuances of its prose defy translation. Even the most sublime figures in German literary history—Goethe (the author of Faust), whose genius not only created poetry, novels, and drama but extended to scientific study as well, and his friend Friedrich Schiller, poet, dramatist, and literary theorist—are doomed to remain known to the world outside the German-speaking regions largely by reputation. The same is true for a host of remarkable writers through all periods of German literary history, including Friedrich Hölderlin, whose lyric poetry, heavily influenced by the Greek and Latin classics, invigorated early modern German writing; Hermann Broch, whose Der Tod des Vergil (1945; The Death of Virgil) is a profound meditation on the collapse of the spirit in the scientific age; Ernst Jünger, whose futuristic novel Auf den Marmorklippen (1939; On the Marble Cliffs) is an allegorical critique of Nazism; and even Karl May, perhaps the most popular of all German writers, who in the late 19th century wrote a succession of best-selling westerns after serving a prison sentence for fraud.
Schiller, FriedrichFriedrich Schiller, chalk drawing by F.G. Weitsch, 1804; in the Staatliche Museen, Berlin, Germany.Staatliche Museen zu Berlin—Preussischer Kulturbesitz
Four German poets and writers from the early 20th century won permanent niches in world literature: Franz Kafka, whose fantastical works explored the dark side of modernism; Thomas Mann, who explored the psychology of the modern condition in his novels; Rainer Maria Rilke, who developed a new style of lyric poetry influenced by the work of the French Symbolists; and Bertolt Brecht, known for his brilliant Marxist dramas. Four other German novelists became Nobel laureates while winning a popular following abroad in translation: Hermann Hesse, who celebrated Eastern mysticism; Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass, who explored the effects of World War II on German lives and psyches; and Herta Müller, who reflected on the oppressive atmopshere of her native Romania during the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu. Among other writers who gained widespread recognition in the late 20th and early 21st centuries were Siegfried Lenz, Peter Weiss, Uwe Johnson, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Patrick Süskind, Peter Handke, Gabriele Wohmann, and W.G. Sebald. During partition many writers fled East Germany, some after serving prison terms; the poet and songwriter Wolf Biermann was exiled in 1976 while on tour in West Germany. Among those of international significance who remained in East Germany were Stefan Heym, Anna Seghers, and Christa Wolf.