As of: March 9, 2024, 7:01 a.m
By: Bettina Menzel, Moritz Bletzinger
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Changeover to summer time: At the end of March it's one hour ahead.
© Christian Ohde/Imago
Two become three: the time change to summer time is just around the corner.
But which weekend is it really that time?
And where does the practice come from?
Munich – It's almost that time again: the time change is coming up.
In a few weeks the clock will be turned.
The night of March 30th to 31st is one hour shorter because daylight saving time is set at 2 a.m.
However, the practice is not really popular.
The time change in March is unpopular: 75 percent of Germans are in favor of abolition
A survey by the opinion research institute YouGov from last year showed that around 75 percent of Germans are in favor of abolishing the time change.
Only 18 percent of those surveyed supported keeping it.
The Germans are not alone in this: an EU-wide survey with 4.6 million participants in 2018 showed that 84 percent of those surveyed would abolish the time change.
The majority were in favor of maintaining daylight saving time permanently.
The European Union originally planned to abolish the constant time change.
However, the wheels of bureaucracy move slowly.
One of the reasons for this is that countries have not yet been able to agree on a permanent winter or summer time.
And for good reason: perpetual daylight saving time would result in longer hours of light in Poland, while people in northern Spain would sit in the dark until around ten in the morning.
According to the story, the invention of daylight saving time was a joke by Benjamin Franklin
There were already considerations about saving energy in the 18th century.
Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers of the United States, wrote an ironic letter to the editors of the
Journal of Paris
in 1784 .
In it he presented his idea of getting up earlier to save energy.
Although his suggestion was not entirely serious - he suggested, among other things, firing cannons to "effectively wake up the idlers" - the concept of changing the time remained not unlike Franklin's idea.
Luckily there were no cannon shots.
Germany introduced daylight saving time during World War I to make more efficient use of daylight in agriculture and the defense industry.
After a break of around 20 years, daylight saving time returned during the Second World War, was then abolished and only reintroduced in the 1970s during the oil crisis.
However, it is now clear that the time change does not contribute to energy savings, at least these days.
“In terms of energy consumption, summer time offers no advantages,” the federal government said in a response to a small query in 2005.
The editor wrote this article and then used an AI language model for optimization at his own discretion. All information has been carefully checked. Find out more about our AI principles here.