Academic literature on the topic 'German Prayers'

Abstract In medieval Switzerland, war prayers were an important ritual that was performed both before battle and after a victory. Swiss troops prayed the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary five times each, kneeling down and stretching out their arms in a prescribed posture. This posture, together with the quintuple repetition of the prayers, evokes the Passion of Christ and his five wounds. The Swiss troops thought of the correct performance of this prayer ritual as crucial for their military success. The Swiss battle prayer also partly constituted a tactical means that was employed to scare or delude enemies unfamiliar with the ritual. From the early 16th century onwards, German humanist scholars criticized this prayer ritual as an act of superstition and uttered their disconcertment concerning the underlying belief of the Swiss that they were God’s chosen people.

Summary The paper deals with the Bohemian Reformation literature. Culture of the Bohemian Reformation belongs to a little-known phenomenon in Czech historiography. Art and culture historians have focused mostly on the Hussite period and less on the 16th and 17th centuries. An important issue is the reception of German Lutheran religious educational literature in Protestant Circles of the Czech lands. The author focuses primarily on books in which the genre of mediation dominates, and explores the prompt Czech reaction to several German authors (Martin Moller, Johann Gerhard etc.) active between approximately 1580–1620 who found intensive response in the Bohemian Lands. The second important field is the Czech hymnography in the 17th–18th centuries. The author finds German inspiration for Czech hymnbooks. He deals with Luther’s songs in the hymnbook Cithara sanctorum by Jiří Třanovský and especially with late baroque Protestant exile hymnbooks influenced by the Pietistic Circle in Halle and Herrnhut (Harfa nová [‘A New Harp’] by Jan Liberda, Lipský kancionál [‘Hymnbook of Leipzig’] by Georg Sarganek). Owing to the German stimuli, the spectrum of genres, ideological processes and stylistic registers in Czech literature from the 16th to 18th centuries is comparatively rich and diversified.

This article presents the analysis of the language situation, done as part of sociolinguistic study among representatives of the German etnic minority in the Molchanovo district of Tomsk region which has been a place of concentrated residence of German immigrants since the second half of the 20th century. Using recorded monologic and dialogic speech as well as questionnaire data, the authors identify subject-specific areas that have communicative significance in the speech behavior of Russian Germans in the area. The purpose of this article is to examine the functioning of the German dialect in the speech of representatives of the German ethnic minority from the Molchanovo district of Tomsk region as an exogloss component of the language situation. The study uses data from a sociolinguistic analysis of the language situation conducted on the territory of the Molchanovo district of Tomsk region in 2017. The main research methods are observation, comparison and interpretation, oral interviews and questionnaires. The analysis of the language situation in the indicated region has revealed a significant dominance of the Russian language over German in all areas of everyday communication. Thus, 99% of the Russian German surveyed use the Russian language, which has become their native language (54%) and serves as the main means of communication among the informants. Since, due to its long-term residence in a Russian-speaking environment, the Molchanovo German ethnic minority has been isolated from the German-speaking parent community in Germany, this has brought about a widespread use of Russian in oral (72%) and written (63%) speech as well as communication in the workplace (72%). Of no small importance is the belief of these Russian Germans in the importance of the Russian language for the development of Tomsk region (63%) as well as the use of Russian in religious practice when reading texts and prayers (45%), caused by more than fifty years of living in the area dominated by a different religious tradition (Russian Orthodox). Thus the language situation among Russian Germans in the Molchanovo district of Tomsk region is characterized by a significant dominance of the Russian language as its endoglossic exponent.

The focus of my study is a mid-seventeenth-century Latin manuscript prayer book. Its most basic characteristics should attract the attention of scholars of the period since it was compiled by a Lutheran married couple from Prešov for their individual religious practice. In examining the prayer book, I was able to identify the basic source of the manuscript, which was previously unknown to researchers: the compendium of the German Lutheran author Philipp Kegel. The manuscript follows the structure of Kegel’s volume and also extracts a number of texts from the German author’s work, which mainly collects the writings of medieval church fathers. In addition to Kegel, I have also been able to identify a few other sources; mainly the writings of Lutheran authors from Germany (Johann Arndt, Johann Gerhardt, Johann Rist, and Johann Michael Dilherr). I give a description of the physical characteristics of the manuscript, its illustrations, the hymns that accompany the prayers, and the copying hands. I will also attempt to identify the latter more precisely. The first compilers of the manuscript were Andreas Glosius and his wife Catharina Musoniana from Prešov. I also organize the biographical data we have about their life and will correct the certainly erroneous provenance of Andreas Glosius, whose name appears in the context of several important contemporary manuscripts, including the gradual of Prešov. In the last part of my paper, I will also show how well known and popular Philipp Kegel’s work was in the early modern Kingdom of Hungary. This is necessary because, although the data show that there was a very lively reception of Philipp Kegel’s work in Hungary, previous scholars have only tangentially dealt with the Hungarian presence of his work.

The paper interprets the data from the open online archive of German dialects (https:// www.tomdeutsche.ru/dialects/). This work was started ten years ago in Tomsk by Prof. Z. M. Bogoslovskaya and her students. The archive provides the records of the native dialects and folklore of Russian Germans whose speech originates from different mother tongues and has different degrees of preservation. Archival materials were collected on the territory of Tomsk and Novosibirsk regions during linguistic expeditions of recent years. Many dialects of the upper German and middle German types appear to be mixed, containing (primarily in phonological terms) the features of different dialect systems, mixed as early as last century. These are secondary language formations that are exclusively spoken by older people. It is not the case in the German-Mennonite dialect (Plautdietsch), which is based on the Low German language substrate. This dialect has a higher degree of preservation and is spoken not only by older people but also by young people and children. The genre component of the collected samples of folklore and religious practices does not show much diversity. The archive contains only a few samples of songs, ditties, and jokes that old speakers can still perform in their native dialect. A special role is played by literary German – it is the language of liturgical practices, of prayers and spiritual singing. The paper presents a number of dialect material transcriptions.

This paper presents an article by Rabbi Dr. S. Levi published in 1921 in Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums about French Jewish army rabbis and Jewish praying books from World War One distributed among Jewish soldiers in French Army. Levi served himself as an Army Rabbi in German army. He used his own experience to highlight the most interesting and significant features of French approach toward Jewish military service in time of war. This article of Rabbi Levi serves as an example of continuation of the pre-war GermanJewish self-identification as both culturally German and religiously Jewish. However, it also presented an interesting depiction of the technical details about French Army praying book. In contrast to German Jewry, their French counterparts published praying book under the auspices of the Chief Rabbi of France and distributed in with the help of his office. Levi pointed out that these praying books reflect in their content the original war time religiosity, which was still important to reconstruct and to reflect about in the after war epoch. The Great Rabbi of France gave his sanctions for the publishing the Prayer for the War Time and Prayer for France, both prayers bore his name and originated in the years 1914-1915. Dr. Levi justly saw in the figure of the Great Rabbi a central authority for the Jews in the French uniform. The French praying book was designated not only for the French Jews of European origin who mostly had had Alsace and Lorraine roots, but also for the Sephardic Jews from the French colonies in North Africa (Morocco and Algiers). Because of this fact, this praying book was different in its content from both German Jewish praying books. It provided two versions of the Hebrew texts in accordance to Ashkenazi and Sephardic rites. Both versions, the Ashkenazi (and the German one as Dr. Levi called it) and the Sephardic were printed together. Dr. Levi thought that it was necessary to highlight the differences between these two Jewish rites. He found that there elements in general were of great importance whereas his Ashkenazi German readers would find it confusing to differentiate between ritual nuances with their Sephardic co-religionists, namely in the conducting the death-, burial- and mourning praying ceremonies. In accordance to the articles published in the Monatsschrift Jewish experiences during the First World War were positively evaluated by their German co-religionists.

The History of Revisions of Prayers in Johann Arndt’s ROJAUS DARǮELIS (1807 – 1817) S u m m a r y Johann Arndt (1555–1621), the German theologian and next-generation religious reformer is the author of the uniquely successful prayer book titled Paradiesgärtlein (Magdeburg,1612). The first known Lithuanian translation of Arndt’s Paradiesgärtlein appeared in early 19th century in Prussian Lithuanian. It was published in 1807 by the widow of Gottlieb Lebrecht Hartung, a printer from Königsberg. This article aims to reveal the history of revisions of six prayers from Johann Arndt’s Rojaus Darelis (The Garden of Paradise) that were first published in Königsberg in 1807. The goal is to show the revision trends and content transformations Arndt’s texts underwent in the second, 1816 Königsberg edition of Rojaus Darǯelis, the 1816 Tilsit edition, and the unofficial 1817 conventiclers’ (Lith. surinkimininkai) hymnal Wiſſokies Naujes Gieſmes arba Ewangelißki Pſalmai (Tilsit). The analysis of the prayers has shown that the language of the hymnal Rojaus Darelis (Königsberg, 1807) is rather grounded on the standard of the official ecclesiastical and philological papers of Prussian Lithuania: the prevalent southern subdialect of the Western Aukštaitians of Prussian Lithuania. It is dominated by rather stable normative elements of morphology and diacritic orthography, as evidenced in the philological written works of the period: the grammars of the Lithuanian language by Gottfried Ostermeyer (1791) and Christian Gottlieb Mielcke (1800). The only identifiable non-grammatical orthography trait is the ending -ęs that sometimes appears in the acc. sg. endings of feminine adjectives, pronouns, and numerals. A comparison of the prayers from Rojaus Darǯelis that were published in Königsberg in 1807 and in 1816 has revealed that the texts had remained stable and free from major or significant revisions content-wise. This edition is even more consistent in its placement of the stress-marks than the one before. Efforts are made to keep up with the standard trend of spelling and language that prevailed in the official printed texts (grammars) of Prussian Lithuanian. It has been established that the making of the new edition of Rojaus Darelis published by the printing house of Johann Heinrich Post in Tilsit in 1816 relied on the Königsberg edition that had been released earlier that year. This is evidence in the morphological and lexical revisions that had been carried over. Structurally, the prayers in the 1816 Tilsit edition had remained intact. There were a little bit more orthography and syntactic differences compared to the 1816 Königsberg edition. It is probable that the Tilsit edition had had an effect on the preparation of Arndt’s prayers that were later featured in Wiſſokies Naujes Gieſmes arba Ewangelißki Pſalmai, a hymnal by Kristijonas Endrikis Mertikaitis (Tilsit, 1817). Nonetheless, it is the 1816 Königsberg edition (or the prior 1807 edition) that is to be considered the original source of the prayers published in Mertikaitis’s hymnal. It was in Wiſſokies Naujes Gieſmes arba Ewangelißki Pſalmai by Kristijonas Endrikis Mertikaitis (Tilsit, 1817) that Arndt’s prayers underwent the greatest extent of transformation. Contrary to the Königsberg or Tilsit editions mentioned in this article, this edition is teeming with differences on all sorts of levels: orthography, phonetics, morphology, lexis, word formation, and syntax. Analysis of the relationship between the sources shows that Mertikaitis’s hymnal did not try to follow the widely recognised grammatical usage. This unconventional approach most probably was the product of Mertikaitis’s savvy of the period language and lack of literacy. It is worth mentioning that Mertikaitis was not a man of academic or spiritual elite, but rather a vibrant preacher of the home-prayer service and schoolteacher who tended to pastoral care, matters of saving his own soul and those of the others as well as eternal life, someone who did not see making language more grammatically correct and standard-compliant as an important part of his earthly concern.

T he second edition of J ohann B ehrendt ’ s hymn book ISZ naujo pérweizd ėtos ir pagérintos Giesm û-Knygos AND PRAYER BOOK Maldû-Knygélos (1735): an unknown copy in Prague The article presents a 1735 Lithuanian publication from Königsberg (Lith. Karaliaučius) which was believed to not have survived—the hymn book for Prussian Lithuania’s Evangelical Lutherans Iß naujo pérweizdėtos ir pagérintos Giesmû-Knygos (Reviewed and Improved Hymn-book) and the prayer book Maldû-Knygélos (Prayer-book). The only known copy of the second edition of the hymn book and the prayer book was discovered in the National Library of the Czech Republic (Czech Národní knihovna České republiky; NK ČR: 33 K 139) in Prague. It has not been registered in Lithuanian bibliographies. Just as the first 1732 edition, the second edition appeared thanks to the initiative of the theology professor of the University of Königsberg and the chief court preacher, Johann Jacob Quandt (Lith. Jonas Jokūbas Kvantas, 1686–1772), while the archpresbyter of Insterburg (Lith. Įsrutis), Johann Behrendt (Lith. Jonas Berentas, 1667–1737), led the editing team. Aiming to reveal the differences of the second edition from the first, and to highlight the editing tendencies of the hymn and prayer books, this article not only discusses the main features of the copy, but also analyzes the structure of the 1735 edition including the repertoire of new hymns and linguistic particularities of the texts of hymns and prayers written in Lithuanian. Provenance research revealed that the copy belonged to the Lithuanian Dovydas Blindinaitis or Bl(i)undinaitis before reaching this library, and this is supported by handwritten inscriptions on the front and back flyleaves. He acquired the book in 1736 for 33 groschen and must have been its first owner. The imprint “REGIÆ BIBLIOTH: ACAD: PRAGEN:” (“Royal Library of the Academy of Prague”) which is seen on the title page of the hymn book could only appear after 1777 when the Public Imperial-Royal University Library (Czech Veřejná císařsko-královská univerzitní knihovna) in Prague had been established. From the perspective of structure, the 1735 Lithuanian publication is a convolute which consists of two alligates: (1) hymn book and (2) prayer book. The hymn book comprises: (a) two introductions—one written by Quandt in German and one written by Behrendt in Lithuanian, (b) the main section of the hymn book and its appendix “Kittos naujos Gieſmes ßwėey pridėtos” (“Other new recently added hymns”), (c) two indexes—the index for the Lithuanian hymns “Prirodijimas Wiſſû Gieſmû, ant kurro Laißko jos ßoſa Knygoſa randamos yra” (“A listing of all hymns which page they are found on in this book”) and the index of German original hymns called a “Regiſter” (“Register”). The prayer book comprises prayers, collects, the story of Christ’s suffering, and a list of thematic groups of these texts marked “Prirodijimas Wiſſû Maldû” (“A listing of all prayers”). The second (1735) edition of the hymn book differs remarkably from the first (1732) in its structure and scope: (1) All of the hymns that had been previously included in the 1732 edition’s “Appendix arba Kittos naujos Gieſmes ßwėey pridėtos” (“Appendix or other new recently added hymns”) (a total of 34) were integrated into the main section of the hymn book of the 1735 edition comprising 334 hymns; their thematic groupings and subgroupings remained the same; (2) The 1735 edition does not include one of the hymns published in 1732: Peter Gottlieb Mielcke’s (Lith. Petras Gotlybas Milkus, 1695–1753) translation “MIeli Krikßćionis dʒaukimės” (“Dear Christians let us rejoice”) (← Martin Luther, “Nun freut euch lieben Chriſten”); (3) The 1735 edition was supplemented with 26 hymns, that is to say, the second edition comprises 360 hymns. The new hymns are published in the appendix “Kittos naujos Gieſmes ßwėey pridėtos” (“Other new recently added hymns”). Cryptonyms attached to these hymns attest to the fact that their translators were two priests of Prussian Lithuania. For the first time, 18 hymns of the priest of Didlacken (Lith. Didlaukiai), Fabian Ulrich Glaser (Lith. Fabijonas Ulrichas Glazeris, 1688–1747), were included in this hymn book. The priest of Popelken (Lith. Papelkiai), Adam Friedrich Schimmelpfennig (Lith. Adomas Frydrichas Šimelpenigis, 1699–1763), translated 8 new hymns (while 15 of his hymns that had been already published in the 1732 edition were presented in the main section of the hymn book of the 1735 edition). The new repertoire of the Lithuanian hymn book was compiled from the translations of the following German hymn creators of the 16th–18th centuries: Johann Georg Albinus (1624–1679), Martin Behm (1557–1622), Kaspar Bienemann (Melissander, 1540–1591), Simon Dach (1605–1659), Johann Burchard Freystein (1671–1718), Paul Gerhardt (1607–1676), Johannes Gigas (Heune, 1514–1581), Ludwig Andreas Gotter (1661–1735), Johann Heermann (1585–1647), Heinrich Held (1620–1659), Martin Moller (1547–1606), Johann Rist (1607–1667), Samuel Rodigast (1649–1708), Johann Röling (1634–1679), Gottfried Wilhelm Sacer (1635–1699), Arnold Heinrich Sahme (1676–1734), Benjamin Schmolck (1672–1737). In contrast to the hymn book, the structure of the 1735 prayer book published concurrently were not changed; the thematic groups of prayers remained essentially the same as they were in the first edition of 1732. Texts of both the hymn book and the prayer book were edited. The editing tendencies in both are similar and encompass all linguistic levels (phonetics, morphology, lexicon, syntax), as well as orthography and punctuation, but the intensity of editing was different. The orthographic corrections prevail and the most consistent of them are: [i·] <ij> → <y> (characteristic only of the hymn book), [č’] <ć> → <cʒ> (together with refusing the marker indicating consonant palatalization <i>), [·] <e> → <ė>, [ž] ir [ž’] <Ʒ> → <>, marking accent placement with an acute accent < ’ >. The second edition reflects an important stage in the quantitative and qualitative development of Behrendt’s hymn book. In the second edition that appeared just three years later, we see the further consistent efforts of the editors to expand the repertoire of hymns and improve the texts in terms of language (i.e. they first of all sought to standardize the orthography of texts written in different centuries by many different translators). In contrast to the hymn book, the prayer book was improved along only one vector: the language of the texts was edited according to the same principles, while the number of prayers was not increased. The fact that the editors of the second edition devoted more attention to the hymn book than the prayer book probably stems from the important place that hymns hold in the Evangelical Lutheran liturgy.

ABSTRACT A unique fifteenth-century Middle English visionary account survives about a nun of Hampole Priory who saves the soul of her deceased brother. Scholars have long considered it an authentic narrative from Hampole Priory. Yet, near-identical texts in Dutch and German manuscripts suggest that it is a translation of a Continental source instead. My analysis shows that while the Continental versions were designed for female religious readers, the English version was adapted for a lay audience. I argue that Hampole Priory used the reworked narrative to promote its intercessory prayers among and attract donations from lay benefactors.

AbstractThis article presents a manuscript that was transferred from the Hamburg Franciscan monastery to the Hamburg Beguin convent around the year 1500. The manuscript connects treatises, meditations and prayers of the late medieval Ars moriendi by using cross references, rubrics and intentionally arranged textgroups. The article contextualizes the Middle Low German treatises within the tradition of the ›Speculum artis bene moriendi‹, the ›Bilder Ars‹ and Jean Gersons ›Opus tripartitum‹. It reconstructs how the interplay of didactic and performative texts creates a sense of danger in the face of death while simultaneously providing strategies for securing salvation.

The diploma thesis deals with so-called St Emmeram's Prayer preserved in Old High German and Old Church Slavonic manuscript versions. It summarises the up-to-date state of research. In the analytical part, on the ground of the structure of an Old High German confession formula a text analysis is carried out for both versions of the prayer, as well as for another Latin confession formula recorded in the b 9 manuscript. Old High German / Old Church Slavonic index is attached to the thesis.

Summaries in German and English.
Die vorliegende MTh-Dissertation ist eine missionsgeschichtliche Untersuchung. Sie beschäftigt sich mit der Entstehung der Erweckung in Wales (1904/05), indem sie diese zunächst in den Kontext weltweiter Erweckungen in jenem Jahrzehnt setzt, die gesellschaftlichen und kirchlichen Entwicklungen in Wales vor der Erweckung darstellt und anhand von Primär- und Sekundärliteratur die Entstehung der Erweckung untersucht. Es werden biografische Meilensteine im Leben von Evan Roberts, der herausragenden Persönlichkeit jener Erweckung, bis zum Höhepunkt seines Wirkens nach seiner ersten Missionsreise kritisch beleuchtet. Menschen aus der Schweiz sind nach Wales gereist, um die Erweckung zu erkunden. Parallel zu den Ereignissen sind zahlreiche Artikel und Schriften entstanden, um eine Erweckung in der Schweiz anzufachen. Die Arbeit untersucht die Auswirkungen der Erweckung von Wales auf die deutschsprachige Schweiz und deren Rezeption im historischen Kontext. Aus den Quelltexten wird in missiologischer Perspektive eine wegweisende Richtung für heute eröffnet.
Christian Spirituality, Church History and Missiology
M. Th. (Missiology)

Abstract A Comparison of English conditions with those on the Continent could be extremely important in further illuminating conditions on either side of the Channel, but it is beyond the scope of this book to do more than indicate below some of the major areas of comparison. The nobility of England at the end of the Anglo-Saxon period seems to be similar in a number of ways to that of Germany at the end of the Millennium. It has been pointed out, for example, that whilst from the eleventh century it is possible to trace the descent of well-defined families of German nobles, before that time the nobility ‘had been composed of large groups, linked by descent ... but very loosely organized’. The difficulty of tracing family trees for even the wealthiest of the pre-Conquest landholders suggests that the English nobility may have formed a similar, somewhat ill-defined group as existed in Germany at a slightly earlier period. One of the methods used to build up family trees in Germany has been by studying the names of people remembered in the prayers of monks which were recorded in liber memoriales. The repetition of sequences of particular names, or of elements within these names, is taken to indicate that the groups represent particular kindreds. This suggests the possibility that in England too, personal nomenclature may provide a means of tracing family relationships.

Abstract At some time after his 1595 Italian travels, Dowland returned to the court of Moritz, Landgrave of Hesse, traveling via Nuremburg. In 1596, he received a letter from an old patron, Sir Henry Noel, who encouraged his return to England, intimating that the time had come for him to take his place in the Elizabethan court (Folger Shakespeare Library, V.a.321). Unfortunately, Noel died soon after and, although Dowland returned to England, the aforementioned prospects never materialized. Dowland composed a collection of seven four-part settings of penitential psalms and prayers in commemoration of his friend, creating music that honored Noel in a way appropriate for a Protestant patron within the Church of England, but that also showed a certain Italian influence, perhaps inspired by the music of Giovanni Croce. This chapter examines primary-source documents related to Dowland’s final 1596 months in the German lands, briefly explores the history of musical psalm prints in England, and considers Dowland’s previous and future forays into setting metrical psalms, including those included in musically harmonized editions of The Whole Booke of Psalmes produced by Thomas East (1592) and Thomas Ravenscroft (1621), contrasting them with the funeral psalms for Noel.

Abstract The crisis of Berlin Jewry was by no means over when the Jews of Prussia were granted citizenship by the decree of March 1812. Although the era of unconventional family patterns and out-of-wedlock births was coming to an end, the wave of baptisms continued unabated. The new status of Berlin Jews as citizens of the city and of Prussia found them faced both with the continuing problem of defections from Judaism and the new issues of how to deal with their new political status. One result of the Emancipation law was that it brought back to the fore ideological issues that had been languishing almost unnoticed since the collapse of the Jewish Enlightenment in the last years of the eighteenth century. Those who began to advocate a reform of the Jewish religion after 1812 generally connected their call to action with the new civic stat”as of the Jews. Now that the Jews were citizens, they claimed, they should pray in the language of their country (German) and change those prayers calling for a return to Palestine, rescue from persecution, or a restoration of the Jerusalem Temple. Despite the fact that the overt explanation of the need for reform was related to emancipation, the ongoing problem of conversions must have been a factor as well. Proponents of reform wanted to make sure that coming generations would continue the Jewish religion. In their minds, this would only be possible if the religion underwent a thoroughgoing reform.

Abstract In light of the American liberal understanding of God and the world elucidated in the previous chapter, one might expect liberal Protestants, like the German idealists before them, to have abandoned traditional petitionary prayer altogether. In reality, however, the liberal expurgation of the super­ natural element in prayer occurred quite gradually. Before 1920, a significant segment of liberal Protestantism sought to retain the traditional confidence in petitionary prayer even while asserting a devotional ethic in harmony with modern nonsupernaturalistic thought. Not until the 1920s did a full-fledged ethic of prayer largely stripped of petition begin to become prominent within American liberalism.

Abstract So that will be my first thesis: the inextricability of renewed trini tarian conceptuality and the renewal of prayer practice, and I shall be arguing that Christian prayer practice is inherently trinitarian. In a way this is a belated riposte to the charge of the great German ‘liberal’ theologian, Friedrich Schleiermacher, that the Trinity can never be experienced, can never be, as he put it, ‘direct to consciousness’. This I want to challenge.

Germany is a parliamentary democracy (The Federal Government, 2021) with two politically independent levels of 1) Federal (Bund) and 2) State (Länder or Bundesländer), and has a highly differentiated decentralized system of Government and administration (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit, 2021). The 16 states in Germany have their own government and legislations which means the federal authority has the responsibility of formulating policy, and the states are responsible for implementation (Franzke, 2020). The Federal Government supports the states in dealing with extraordinary danger and the Federal Ministry of the Interior (BMI) supports the states' operations with technology, expertise and other services (Federal Ministry of Interior, Building and Community, 2020). Due to the decentralized system of government, the Federal Government does not have the power to impose pandemic emergency measures. In the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, in order to slowdown the spread of coronavirus, on 16 March 2020 the federal and state governments attempted to harmonize joint guidelines, however one month later State governments started to act more independently (Franzke & Kuhlmann, 2021). In Germany, health insurance is compulsory and more than 11% of Germany’s GDP goes into healthcare spending (Federal Statistical Office, 2021). Health related policy at the federal level is the primary responsibility of the Federal Ministry of Health. This ministry supervises institutions dealing with higher level of public health including the Federal Institute for Drugs and Medical Devices (BfArM), the Paul-Ehrlich-Institute (PEI), the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) and the Federal Centre for Health Education (Federal Ministry of Health, 2020). The first German National Pandemic Plan (NPP), published in 2005, comprises two parts. Part one, updated in 2017, provides a framework for the pandemic plans of the states and the implementation plans of the municipalities, and part two, updated in 2016, is the scientific part of the National Pandemic Plan (Robert Koch Institut, 2017). The joint Federal-State working group on pandemic planning was established in 2005. A pandemic plan for German citizens abroad was published by the German Foreign Office on its website in 2005 (Robert Koch Institut, 2017). In 2007, the federal and state Governments, under the joint leadership of the Federal Ministry of the Interior and the Federal Ministry of Health, simulated influenza pandemic exercise called LÜKEX 07, and trained cross-states and cross-department crisis management (Bundesanstalt Technisches Hilfswerk, 2007b). In 2017, within the context of the G20, Germany ran a health emergency simulation exercise with representatives from WHO and the World Bank to prepare for future pandemic events (Federal Ministry of Health et al., 2017). By the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, on 27 February 2020, a joint crisis team of the Federal Ministry of the Interior (BMI) and the Federal Ministry of Health (BMG) was established (Die Bundesregierung, 2020a). On 4 March 2020 RKI published a Supplement to the National Pandemic Plan for COVID-19 (Robert Koch Institut, 2020d), and on 28 March 2020, a law for the protection of the population in an epidemic situation of national scope (Infektionsschutzgesetz) came into force (Bundesgesundheitsministerium, 2020b). In the first early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Germany managed to slow down the speed of the outbreak but was less successful in dealing with the second phase. Coronavirus-related information and measures were communicated through various platforms including TV, radio, press conferences, federal and state government official homepages, social media and applications. In mid-March 2020, the federal and state governments implemented extensive measures nationwide for pandemic containment. Step by step, social distancing and shutdowns were enforced by all Federal States, involving closing schools, day-cares and kindergartens, pubs, restaurants, shops, prayer services, borders, and imposing a curfew. To support those affected financially by the pandemic, the German Government provided large economic packages (Bundesministerium der Finanzen, 2020). These measures have adopted to the COVID-19 situation and changed over the pandemic. On 22 April 2020, the clinical trial of the corona vaccine was approved by Paul Ehrlich Institute, and in late December 2020, the distribution of vaccination in Germany and all other EU countries