A Report on Some Traditions and Recent Developments of the Census.

Just 13 years passed away since a complete census was hold in Germany. The struggling discussions in the German public about the last census in 1987 had a long lasting effect on politics that there was no desire to renew this debate. In 1997 EUROSTAT advised the members of the European Union to hold a census about the year 2001 under equal conditions. German politics and the official statistics were such forced to deal with the problems concerned. In the following text some traditional aspects of the census will be carried out and the stations of the recent developments on the way to a new kind of census in Germany about the year 2001 + x years are reported in detail.