Until recently, law-abiding Germans didn’t shop on Sunday–even in freewheeling Berlin. Other Europeans, most of them accustomed to more liberal store hours, shook their heads at the plodding Germans, seemingly left behind by a warp-speed global economy. West Germany’s paternalistic, heavily regulated brand of capitalism resulted in the country’s 1956 law prohibiting late-evening and Sunday shopping. Both the statute and the way of life prevailed across Germany after unification. The pace was set by Germany’s capital, the mossbacked Rhineland town of Bonn. But now the national authorities are under growing pressure to loosen up, particularly from the easterners. In a few weeks the capital will formally move from Bonn to Berlin, the center of old East Germany. “The cities of the east are leading a new revolution,” claims Peter Dussmann, whose Berlin book and music shop is one of a growing number of stores challenging the old closing laws. “I haven’t heard of any city of the west being involved.”
It’s all about earning money. Within the area of former East Germany, unemployment is more than 17 percent–nearly double the rate in the rest of the country. The Sunday rebellion was born this June in the eastern city of Leipzig after the mayor, Holger Tschense, vowed to create “a shopping paradise for all of Germany.” By July the trend had spread to several shops in Berlin’s newly built Potsdamer Platz mall, situated in the old no man’s land near the Berlin wall. More eastern cities joined the movement in August. And why not? After unification, many easterners chafed at submitting to a stricter shop-closing law than they had lived under in East Germany. Nils Busch-Petersen, head of the Berlin branch of the German Retailers’ Association, says easterners still can’t see how a law that limits their store hours is supposed to be a manifestation of greater freedom.
So far, most local authorities and shops have tried to bend the law, not break it. Taking advantage of Sunday-closing exemptions for shops catering to tourists, Leipzig simply declared its whole downtown a tourist zone. At its Sunday opening this month, Berlin’s Kaufhof store put BERLIN SOUVENIR stickers on everything it sold. Still, there is a growing push to abolish the law altogether–and westerners are joining it. Peter Fischer, the Economics minister of Lower Saxony, predicts: “The law will fall by the end of the year.”
The law’s defenders are striking back. Berlin authorities have threatened to impose hefty fines on Kaufhof or any other store that dares to continue doing business on Sunday. Trade unions are warning that without the ban, big stores could crush mom-and-pop enterprises merely by staying open for brutally long hours. And religious leaders are sermonizing against Sunday shopkeepers for defiling the Sabbath. “They’re dancing around the golden calf,” rages Bishop Manfred Kock, chairman of the Protestant Council of Churches in Germany. Some merchants say Sunday hours aren’t even smart business. “For the customer it’s good,” says Wolfgang Schlag, the manager of a small Berlin furniture store. “For the stores, it’s bad.” He insists staying open longer will raise operating costs but can’t expand the basic market for consumer goods.
Economists may debate that hypothesis if they like. Store managers who have tried opening on Sundays say the move has boosted their weekly sales between 10 and 50 percent. And locally at least it appears to create jobs. Since June, when the gleaming new mall surrounding Leipzig’s railway station began operating on Sundays, its 140 constituent shops have hired 130 new employees. “I don’t understand the unions,” says the mall’s manager Josef Schuller. “It’s good that we’re creating new jobs.” Besides, he adds: “You have to allow people to decide things for themselves. You can’t regulate everything in life.” After all, wasn’t that the idea that tore the wall down?
