Children working in the school garden in 1920. 50 years earlier they would still have had to work as harvest hands Photo: Ullstein picture
By Oliver Ohmann
The school year ends on Wednesday and the summer holidays begin for 400,000 Berlin children and young people. Six weeks without classes. The kids can be really happy about that, because it wasn’t always like that!
200 years ago there were days off, but no holidays in midsummer. A week was free at Christmas, over Pentecost and a period in autumn. No more than six weeks a year in total. The autumn holidays weren’t easy either, because many children had to help with the harvest.
This mainly affected schoolchildren in the countryside, but Berlin children were also sent to the fields in the surrounding area. There was talk of the “potato holidays”.
Holidays in midsummer have only existed for around 130 years, and even then many children still had to work in the fields, for example to harvest hay. They could only dream of vacation trips.
It was only in the 1950s that people went on holiday or even flew during the holidays that became common practice.
In 1964, the “Hamburg Agreement” stipulated that students have the right to six weeks of summer vacation, which must be between July 1st and September 10th. Since then, there have been a total of 75 vacation days per year. The kids should be happy about that too.
Because once they are adults, there are only 30 vacation days per year on average. So the little Berliners should enjoy the holidays while they are still long.
