The new Hamburg State Opera by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) will establish a contemporary home for the State Opera and Hamburg Ballet. The project is set to be located on the Baakenhöft peninsula in HafenCity - a sprawling waterfront development - and will replace the company's mid-century house on Dammtorstraße. It will extend the German city's long tradition of pairing cultural architecture with the harbor's open horizon.
Earlier this week, some reports out of England suggested that Bayern Munich might very well look to offload Nicolas Jackson as early as this January, when he would be participating in the African Cup of Nations with Senegal. His loan spell from Chelsea with the German Rekordmeister is set to run through the remainder of this season and, despite the rumors of a potential January departure, he looks set to stay at Bayern and see through the entirety of his loan spell.
A German court ruled that OpenAI's ChatGPT violated the nation's copyright laws by training its language models on licensed musical work without permission, multiple news outlets, including The Guardian reported. The decision came from a lawsuit that GEMA, the society that handles music rights in Germany, filed last November against OpenAI. The company was ordered to pay an undisclosed amount of damages to GEMA, but said it disagreed with the ruling and is "considering next steps."
If you want to understand the state of Germany in these last weeks of 2025, grasping the meaning of two entries in the German dictionary are essential: stadtbild and haftbefehl. The first term technically means cityscape. But since chancellor Friedrich Merz gave a speech in the state of Brandenburg on 14 October, it has taken on a new political meaning. We have come far with migration, he said, but of course we still have this problem in our stadtbild.
Since at least June 2025, Martin S has called for attacks on named politicians, public officials and public figures in Germany on the darknet, the federal prosecutor's office said in a statement. To this end, he anonymously operates a platform on which he publishes, among other things, lists of names, death sentences pronounced by himself and instructions for building explosive devices. He also solicits donations in cryptocurrency, which are then offered as bounties' for the killing of the targeted individuals.
The Saudi-born doctor accused of carrying out a deadly car attack on the Christmas market in the eastern city of Magdeburg has said he was "as cold as ice" on the day. He has said he wishes to testify "for hours, perhaps days" from Tuesday as his trial continues. Six people were killed and more than 300 injured in the December 20, 2024, attack.
Bundestag President Julia Klockner, of the center-right Christian Democrats (CDU), recently implied that Germany had become the "brothel of Europe" reigniting the national debate about sex work. In a speech read out at an award ceremony on Tuesday, Klockner criticized Germany's current legislation, saying sex workers are not adequately protected. "I am firmly convinced that we must finally ban prostitution and the purchase of sex in this country," the conservative Klockner said.
It can seem like a strange coincidence to see children parade through the streets of Germany with lanterns to mark St. Martin's Day on November 11 while, at the same time, colorfully dressed carnival revelers shout "Alaaf" or "Helau." Do these things really go together? In fact, Carnival and St. Martin's Day are two customs that share a common origin dating back several centuries.
A total of 1,906 initial asylum applications from Syrians were rejected in October, compared to 163 during the period from January to September, statistics from the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) showed on Saturday. The figures come as BAMF resumed processing "young, able-bodied" male Syrians' asylum requests at the end of September after suspending almost all such decisions last December following the change in government in Syria. "In justified individual cases, the Federal Office has also issued full rejections against Syrian nationals," the BAMF said, referring to cases involving criminals and people considered to pose a potential danger.
If you've set foot in a supermarket in Germany in the past couple of weeks, you'll have seen shelves stacked with Christmas sweets and seasonal treats like chocolate Santa Clauses and packets of gingerbread cookies (Lebkuchen) in various shapes and sizes. In Germany, these seasonal foods tend to hit shelves well ahead of the advent, often even before Halloween, to give shoppers plenty of time to stock up ahead of the holiday festivities.
Hamburg's interior minister, Andy Grote of the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD), welcomed the ban and said that authorities had "eliminated a dangerous and very active Islamist group". Police on Wednesday also searched buildings in Berlin and the western state of Hesse as part of investigations into two other groups, "Generation Islam" and "Realitaet Islam". Germany has previously banned a number of Muslim organisations, such as the NGO Ansaar, which was accused in 2021 of financing Islamist terrorism under the guise of charitable work.
But with a new tech update coming, many doctors offices are facing the loss of digital services such as e-prescriptions and electronic sick notes, it has emerged. It's nearly two years since e-prescriptions (known as an ' e-Rezept ') became mandatory in Germany. Instead of a paper slip, prescriptions in Germany are added directly to the patient's health card by a doctor. The patients can then take the card to a pharmacy - or use the E-Rezept app - to pick up their medicine.
The Eisbach wave in the Englischer Garten park has become a landmark in the Bavarian city since rogue surfers in the 1980s turned it from an occasional natural phenomenon to a permanent surfable presence. The city administration is working with the Water Management Office and surfers to find a quick solution so that the famous surf wave will soon be available again as usual, Mayor Dieter Reiter said in a statement Tuesday.
Women remain markedly underrepresented in executive positions across Germany, with only 29.1% of leadership roles held by women in 2024, according to figures published by the Federal Statistical Office. About 1.32 million men and 540,000 women occupied management positions in 2024, leaving Germany well below the EU average of 35.2% leadership roles filled by women. Sweden led the bloc with 44.4% female representation, followed by Latvia (43.4%) and Poland (41.8%).
German authorities said Sunday they arrested a 22-year-old Syrian man in Berlin suspected of preparing a "jihadist" attack, without giving details of the alleged plot. The suspect, arrested on Saturday in the capital's southern Neukoelln district, was being kept in a detention centre and was to be brought before an investigating judge later Sunday. He was alleged to have plotted "a jihadist-motivated attack", a spokesman for the prosecutor's office in Berlin told AFP.
Almost 1.3 million Ukrainian refugees have come to Germany since Russia launched its war of aggression against their country in February 2022. At the start of October 2025, the central register of foreign nationals recorded 1,293,672 individuals who had been granted temporary protection since the war began. Until recently, the majority were Ukrainian women with children, or pensioners. Now, though, large numbers of men under the age of 22 have begun to arrive.
Before the Second World War, Dresden was commonly regarded as Germany's most beautiful city, marked by Baroque silhouettes and filled with cherished collections of the fine and applied arts. Then came the Allied air raids of February 1945, and Dresden underwent what could be described as a horrific rebrand-becoming Germany's most decimated metropolis. Decades of rebuilding later, however, it is once again what Germans call a Kunststadt -a city of art.
