Germany news: Germany marks fateful date of November 9

These updates are closed. This was a roundup of the stories from and about Germany hitting the headlines on Monday, November 9, 2026:

President Frank-Walter Steinmeier on Monday spoke of the "darkness and light" that Germany experienced on November 9 in remarks made at the sixth annual meeting of the Weimar Forum for Remembrance.

Steinmeier noted that the date had seen the proclamation of the Weimar Republic in 1918 and Germany's first attempt at democracy as well as the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, but that it also marks one of the darkest chapters in German history with the anti-Jewish pogroms of 1938.

Steinmeier used these events to declare Germany's "obligation to observe historical truths, and to remain true to them" calling for the expansion of history lessons that can speak across generations rather than cutting them from school curriculums.

Speaking of the memory of the victims of Nazism, he said Germany should maintain its tradition of installing "Stolpersteine" (stumbling stones) in city sidewalks to mark the sites where Jews had once lived before they were sent to death camps .

The comment comes after a recent decision by the far-right AfD and the conservative CDU to ban the stones in the eastern city of Heidenau.

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