Divorce icon © Patrick Pleul
The number of divorces in Germany has risen slightly for the first time since 2012. As the Federal Statistical Office announced in Wiesbaden on Wednesday, in 2019, by court order, about 149.000 marriages divorced.
That's just under 1.000 cases, or 0.6 percent more than in 2018. The number of divorces is now back to about where it was in the early 1990s. In 1993 there were 156.000 divorces in Germany, after which the curve rose to a peak of 214,000 in 2003 and then dropped to 179,000.000 and then dropped to 179.000 in 2012 and from there to 148.000 two years ago. In 2019, there was now a slight increase again for the first time, to 149.000 divorces.
Divorces of same-sex couples were recorded for the first time: About 100 same-sex marriages divorced in 2019.
Marriages longer on average than 25 years ago
About 26.000 (17.3 percent) of all divorced couples were already at least 25 years old. year married. On average, couples looked back on 14 years and 10 months of marriage. 25 years ago, marriages were divorced after an average of 12 years and 5 months. Partly responsible for this was the lower proportion of divorced long-term marriages: in 1994, with 17.000 only 10.4 percent of divorced couples divorced in the year of their silver wedding anniversary or thereafter.
About half of the couples who divorced in 2019 had minor children. In total, about 122 couples were divorced in 2019.000 minors affected by the divorce of their parents.
Most of the marriages divorced in 2019 – 82.2 percent – were divorced after a previous separation period of one year. Divorces after three years of separation accounted for 16.8 percent of the total. In only 1 percent were the regulations for divorce before one year of separation or other regulations decisive.
Possible impact of coronavirus not foreseeable until later
In slightly more than half of all cases, the divorce petition was filed by the wife, the Federal Office reported in response to a request for information. In just 7.4 percent of cases, the petition had been filed by both spouses together. In 4.4 percent, the husband or wife had not consented to the petition filed by the other spouse, while in 88.2 percent of divorces the petition had been filed with consent in each case.
The Federal Office did not want to comment further on an online survey by the opinion research institute Civey, according to which the number of divorces in Germany could probably increase fivefold as a result of the Corona restrictions. However, the responsible department pointed out that in a divorce, it usually takes several years from the decision of the spouses to the court decision, because in between there is the usual separation year and the meetings with the lawyer. "So until we have the divorce figures for the Corona period 2020, it should be about two more years," the statistics office said. So it might not be until 2022 that there could be nationwide figures on the extent to which the Corona period has broken up spouses.