4 - 1999

Shopping on Sunday

Stores Open for The Bored

Conflict over business hours betrays a crisis of meaning

by Christoph Quarch

The controversy about work on Sunday is not only on economic issues. Rather, a crisis that is of the society, becomes visible centered on consumption and continuous entertainment and in which there is scarcely room for rest.

"God’s boredom on the seventh day of creation" would be a topic for great poetry, Friedrich Nietzsche thought. People’s boredom on the seventh day, on the contrary, needs no poet in order to take shape. It is currently announcing itself in an impressive way. In the Eastern German cities of Berlin, Leipzig or Halle on Sunday noon, when the stores open their doors, customers thronged into the temples of consumption. There they enjoyed their new leisure-time pleasure and delighted in having shown it to "them up there".

Indeed, in August we had a "competition" for the "cleverest" interpretation of the law on store closing times, as the Minister of Social Affairs of Sachsen-Anhalt, Gerlinde Kuppe (SPD), deplored. Inventive department store managers outdid themselves in thinking up tricks to get around the legal ban on Sunday opening. The ostensibly greatest coup was pulled off by the Berlin "Kaufhof" branch on Alexanderplatz, which declared its entire stock to be "Souvenirs of Berlin" to fit the legal exception for selling tourist articles on Sunday.

Of course, one should not make only the cunning merchants responsible for the destruction of the law on store closing times. They were given cover for their actions by local and state politicians who - like the Berlin Senator Beate Huebner (CDU) - handed out permission for exceptions to Sunday work under the pretext of questionable official functions. And Saxony’s Economic Minister, Kajo Schommer (CDU), did not try to disguise the fact that he wanted to get rid of the store closing law completely.

However, on the federal level these local matadors had little backing. Across party lines it was said that a change in the store closing law was imaginable, but Sunday should remain under protection. How should it be otherwise when Sunday is protected by the Basic Law as "the day of rest from work and for uplifting the spirit" (Article 139)? Consequently, in spite of all the noise from the east, one cannot count upon Sunday openings becoming the rule in the future, especially when the arguments of their advocates turn out to be quite meager. The actual motive, to maximize profits, is only with difficulty disguised with honorable words like "freedom of consumption". The business section of the newspaper "Frankfurter Allgemeine" blustered about the "individual perspectives on happiness of Sunday shoppers". That betrays a crisis of argumentation. Churches’ unusual verve

Even the fairy tale about a "vote with their feet" doesn’t quite have the desired effect when the results of polls clearly prove that about two-thirds of those asked reject Sunday opening. In the face of this, the unusual verve with which the churches, especially the Protestant one, took to the battlefield against the threatening erosion of the protection of Sunday, may seem astonishing at first glance. The head of the Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD), Manfred Kock, explained that the church would have to carry on the conflict on store closing "in a sharper form than so far". "Clearly", he says, "whoever does not respect the protection of Sunday commits a sin against the biblical commandment ’Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy’.

Whoever speaks so clearly knows himself to have good arguments. Kock summarized them in a statement: "Sunday is a valuable cultural treasure of the Judeo-Christian tradition. The regular rhythm of work and rest is good for people and for the society. The interruption of work on Sunday is healthy. The day of worship deserves special protection." "Good", will say those for whom the Judeo-Christian tradition and Sunday rest have some value. But those who in the East dance "around the golden calf" (Kock) will pay little attention to these arguments. They document precisely by their behavior that they wish to escape from the traditional Sunday rest. What is to be done?

First one must try to understand the phenomenon of the Sunday shopping frenzy. The place where it takes place presents a starting point for this. It is not by chance in eastern Germany, where forty years of SED rule have left behind in many places a value-desert. It is not only that religious analphabetism is ripe.

Generally it appears that the need to transcend one’s own existence seems to have been lost. In a situation where daily life is ruled by a pressure to consume there seems to be no other way to experience oneself and life as meaningful. This lifting up of life - in sports clubs, at a family party or in the church - needs the Sunday escape from the daily routine. Why do people no longer deem it to be necessary?

Where the need for experience of meaning and of self disappears, boredom spreads, that "experience of the nothingness of being" as Pascal once described it. However, to someone who is bored, as Pascal also saw, there is nothing more terrible than rest. "Then he will feel his nothingness, his desolation, his inadequacy, his dependence, his impotence, his emptiness."

Kierkegaard interpreted this nihilistic boredom later as the secret motor of modern life. Our whole busyness feeds itself accordingly from the "hungry satiation" of a humanity that has distanced itself from its religious sources of meaning. The logical consequence is the compensation through consumption. Where nothing has its own worth and meaning, the nihilistic person hurls himself upon the worth of goods. He buys in order to cradle himself in the illusion of having raised the value of his own existence through the value of the goods bought.

This mechanism cannot stand any rest, let alone any Sunday, which could call awake the memory that "we are more than consumers" (President Johannes Rau). If nihilism spreads further, the erosion of Sunday as a day of rest will not be held back, all well-meant appeals notwithstanding. The only counter is the resurrection of the - often forgotten - original inheritance of the church: the capacity to grant people the experience of meaning, the experience of a higher reality. The person in whom meaning and taste for the eternal has been awoken will no longer want to shop on Sunday.

Commentary in the monthly magazine "Evangelische Kommentare", September 1999. Translated for Publication in this issue.