A German who wants a divorce must normally wait. Under § 1566 of the Civil Code, a marriage is presumed to have failed wenn die Ehegatten seit einem Jahr getrennt leben, when the spouses have lived apart for one year and both want the divorce or one agrees. If one spouse does not agree, the period is three years. Germans call this the Trennungsjahr, the year of separation. A legal advice site explains its purpose: Das Einhalten des Trennungsjahres soll übereilte Scheidungen verhindern. The year is meant to prevent hasty divorces. Couples can also separate inside one apartment. They must then keep separate households, with no shared bed, meals, shopping or laundry. A divorce before the year is over is possible only in cases of severe hardship, such as violence, and the courts set a high bar for it.
Many Steps and Many Stations
On 15 July 1963 Egon Bahr spoke at the Protestant Academy in Tutzing about the divided Germany. He said that reunification was ein Prozeß mit vielen Schritten und vielen Stationen, a process with many steps and many stations. His first conclusion was daß die Politik des Alles oder Nichts ausscheidet, that a policy of all or nothing was ruled out. He summed up his proposal in a formula: Wandel durch Annäherung, change through rapprochement.
Since Russia attacked Ukraine in 2022, this long, step-by-step policy toward the East has been disputed in Germany. A 2023 paper of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung notes: Seit dem Angriff Russlands auf die Ukraine wird in Deutschland über die jüngere sozialdemokratische Geschichte gestritten.
Words Against Hurrying
In der Ruhe liegt die Kraft. — Strength lies in calm. Duden explains: with calm and composure, much can be achieved.
Immer mit der Ruhe! — Always with calm. Duden glosses it as nichts überstürzen, don’t rush anything.
Blinder Eifer schadet nur. — Blind zeal only does harm. Duden lists it among its idioms and proverbs. It already appears in the old Deutsches Sprichwörter-Lexikon.
Etwas übers Knie brechen. — To break something over the knee. Duden: to deal with or decide something too hastily.
Die Entschleunigung. — Deceleration. Duden defines it as the deliberate slowing of a development that had been speeding up.
Without Haste, Without Rest
Goethe’s Zahme Xenien, his tame epigrams, include a verse of five short lines:
Wie das Gestirn,
Ohne Hast,
Aber ohne Rast,
Drehe sich jeder
Um die eigne Last.
Like the star, without haste but without rest, let each one turn around his own load. In German, Hast, haste, rhymes with Rast, rest, and with Last, load.
Eleven Months for a Vaccine
In 2020 BioNTech, the company of two doctors from Mainz, ran Projekt Lightspeed. Within only 11 months its COVID-19 vaccine went from the laboratory to a conditional approval. The speed had to be explained. On 21 November 2020 the newspaper taz interviewed Klaus Cichutek, president of the Paul-Ehrlich-Institut, which shares responsibility for approving vaccines. The interviewer began: normalerweise dauert es Jahre, bis ein Impfstoff entwickelt ist. Jetzt sind es Monate. Normally it takes years to develop a vaccine. Now it is months. Cichutek answered: Ich kann Sie beruhigen. Wir handeln nicht nach Bauchgefühl, sondern mit dem Kopf. I can reassure you. We act with our heads, not our gut. He added that the clinical trials had more test persons than usual. On 9 December 2020 he told an online symposium of the medical journal Deutsches Ärzteblatt: Wir haben beim Zulassungsprozess für die Impfstoffe nichts unterlassen, was nötig und üblich ist. We left out nothing in the approval process that is necessary and customary.
Here speed won acceptance once it was shown that no step had been skipped.
The Discovery of Slowness
In 1983 Sten Nadolny published the novel Die Entdeckung der Langsamkeit, the discovery of slowness. It tells the life of the polar explorer John Franklin as the story of a slow man. In the novel his slowness proves to be a strength. A slow man can afford to wait, because he must wait anyway. An excerpt had already won Nadolny the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 1980. The book drew wide interest in Germany.
Kept After Relegation
In the 2014/15 season, SC Freiburg finished 17th and was relegated from the Bundesliga. The club kept its coach, Christian Streich. One season later, Freiburg came back up as second-division champions. The Bundesliga’s own website later wrote: Dieses Vertrauen machte sich rückblickend mehr als bezahlbar. In hindsight, this trust more than paid off. Streich stayed head coach for twelve years. When he announced his departure in 2024, he spoke of 29 years at the club.
Cologne Cathedral
Archbishop Konrad von Hochstaden laid the foundation stone of the Kölner Dom on 15 August 1248. A new foundation stone for the continued building was laid on 4 September 1842. The official completion was celebrated on 15 October 1880. Since then the Dombauhütte, the cathedral workshop, has had the task of maintaining the building. Today it has about 85 employees from different trades. In 2020 UNESCO added the cathedral workshop tradition, nominated jointly by 18 workshops in five European countries, to its Register of Good Safeguarding Practices.
Sustainability, and where it came from
Sustainability is also a German word, and much older than the environmental movement. Hans Carl von Carlowitz set it out in Sylvicultura oeconomica in 1713, writing about forestry: cut no more timber than the forest can regrow.
The idea is prevention stretched across generations. Do not solve this year’s problem in a way that creates one for people not yet born.
Saving before borrowing
Der Bausparvertrag. A German savings contract taken out years before a house is bought: you save to a fixed target, and only then does the loan become available. The instrument requires the saving phase before the borrowing phase. The contingency is built into the sequence.