4 - 1999

Shopping on Sunday

Weekend Beings Hungry for Experience

Expectations loaded onto free weekends

by Dr. Bernd Guggenberger

Social science professor Dr. Bernd Guggenberger describes the expectations loaded onto free weekends.

A uniform culture on weekends no longer exists. Whoever leaves his apartment on Sunday morning, say at eleven o’clock, will meet completely different contemporaries at leisure, every one of whom is going somewhere different. Only a few (clearly below ten percent) still follow the call of the church bells - and even they are no longer clearly to be identified by their solemn dark church clothes as was the generation of their parents 20 or 30 years ago. This is especially true of the younger generation of 14- to 29-year-olds. With disarming openness their "Word for Sunday" is: "The day when I can sleep late."

While 38 percent of the young people answered in this way when asked what they associated with "Sunday", they are perhaps not so far away from the original Christian purpose of Sunday as first appears. We know the Creator "rested" after six strenuous days of creation, looked upon his work and saw "that it was good".

The Jewish Sabbath, the Christian Sunday, the Moslem Friday are all human attempts to synchronize our social time plan with the cosmic and geophysical order of time. In this century the free Saturday that was fought for by the workers’ movement joined Sunday as the day of rest lifted up out of daily work, which is constitutionally protected in Germany by Art. 140. Saturday and Sunday as a weekend free from paid work have grown together into a "cultural unity".

"Since Saturday is a free day the form of Sunday has changed", the theologian Friedhelm Hengsbach writes. "The profile of a weekend culture has developed. Thus Saturday is characterized by work on the house, in the garden, on the car, by joint shopping in the town center in the morning, experiencing a city center transformed by flea markets, street theater, stands with political brochures, by conversation at home in the afternoon, by external entertainments for the younger generation in the evening. Sunday on the contrary has taken on the characteristics of a slower life-sleeping long, napping, communication centered on the primary group, sport, worship, meals together, visits, travel."

Little Leisureliness

In spite of all the criticism, the achievement of the modern free weekend is a very meaningful social- and cultural-historical "defensive signal against the totalitarian claim of the economy. The latter is currently trying to control the last recesses of social and private time through flexible working hours, longer store opening times and the spread of private media. Saturdays and Sundays - free from paid work - are days with their own identity which cannot be bent by money."

Quoted from: "Die Mitbestimmung" - issue on "Bessere Zeiten - Schlechtere Zeiten", a magazine of the Hans Boeckler Foundation, March 3 / 1999. Translated for publication in this issue.