In Germany, Politics Pours Into Christmas – By Cathrin Schaer (US News) / Dec 19 2019
The rise of far-right political parties is placing more attention on the country’s so-called culture wars.
BERLIN – After a local supermarket chain started advertising traditional Christmas floral decorations – poinsettias – as “winter stars” – instead of calling them the traditional “Christmas stars” – a minor controversy ensued, intensifying public arguments that have been growing in recent years in this country.
In a debate that’s similar to other Western countries, particularly the United States, German conservatives are complaining that removing the word Christmas in subjects ranging from flowers to markets to chocolate Santas is carrying political correctness too far.
But unlike in the U.S., the debate here over using the word Christmas in public spaces is less about religion and more about politics. In recent years, far-right political parties – particularly popular in the former East Germany, where, after decades of state-sponsored atheism, most people are not religious – have seized on the removal of mentioning Christmas as an attack on traditional German culture.
Such rhetoric also plays well to conservative Germans, which as the Zeit newspaper reports, have worried about how Germany may change after absorbing more refugees than any other European country.
“Christmas is such an emotional thing here,” says Beate Kuepper, a social psychologist at the University of Applied Sciences in Niederrhein and who researches right-wing populism and attitudes. “It’s still one of the biggest holidays in Germany and everybody celebrates it – even though most don’t celebrate it as a religious holiday. It’s more like Thanksgiving. It’s about family and home and coziness. And the line they (the far right) are taking is that somebody is trying to destroy that.”
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