Just like the population at large, the German Bundeswehr has undergone a remarkable trajectory of religious pluralisation in recent years. As of 2012, over 48,000 Catholics and over 63,000 Protestants served in the armed forces. This would mean that just over half of Germany’s 180,000 soldiers identified as Christian; a figure that maps quite closely onto…
German policy-makers are debating the introduction of a so-called ‘mosque tax’, to be paid by German Muslims and collected by the German state in order to fund the provision of Islamic religious services. The ostensible model for such a levy is the ‘church tax’ (Kirchensteuer) already in existence: depending on their Land of residence, members…
2017 marked the first year that the German Interior Ministry officially registers Islamophobic (islamfeindliche) hate crimes. The authorities have now released preliminary figures on anti-Muslim criminal activity for the past year.1 950 Islamophobic criminal incidents in 2017 According to these statistics, Muslim individuals or institutions were targeted in 950 separate instances in 2017. This includes…
On June 30, the German Parliament voted to legalise gay marriage – or, as it has become known in Germany, the “marriage for all” (Ehe für alle). The path to this decision had been a tumultuous one; and the vote in the Bundestag came only after a surprise move in which Chancellor Angela Merkel, a…
(Frankfurter Rundschau) http://www.fr-online.de/wissenschaft/studie-ueber-muslime–respekt-schuetzt-vor-radikalisierung-,1472788,32938542.html
