Germany

Germany was not a destination of the great waves of Basque emigration. The Basques who live there arrived late and in a different way: young students and professionals who left Euskal Herria for work or for study, often for a season, when the country had already stopped being a land of emigrants. Their four centres are among the youngest in the network; the first was founded in 1998 and the last in 2025.¹²

That change was described in November 2004 by the Advisory Council for Relations with Basque Communities. Euskal Herria, it noted, was no longer a country of emigrants, but young people were still leaving to study or to work, largely on a temporary basis, and they were not going to the old destinations, America, the Philippines or Australia, but to European countries such as Italy, Germany, Ireland or Denmark, and to new ones such as China. The Council also warned that the traditional model of the Basque centre did not meet the needs of those groups.²

To know how many there are, there is only a partial figure. Alexander Ugalde Zubiri records that in 2005, according to the National Statistics Institute, 1,594 citizens of the Basque Autonomous Community were living in Germany and registered on the electoral roll. These are the Basques with the right to vote who registered, not the whole community.²

The associations came with the turn of the century. The first, the Gernika Deutsch-Baskischer Kulturverein (Gernika German-Basque Cultural Association), was founded in Berlin in 1998 (see the Basque centre in Berlin).² In 2004 an agreement between the Basque Government and the Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität in Frankfurt gave rise to the Centro de Estudios Vascos de Alemania (Centre for Basque Studies in Germany), with a Basque library and courses in Basque language, history and culture. The centre launched the research project “Presencia vasca en Alemania en los siglos XX y XXI” (Basque presence in Germany in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries) to catalogue publications and cultural records in German libraries and museums.² Then came the other three centres: Munich in 2013, Bremen in 2024 and Koblenz in 2025 (see the Basque community today).¹