Frankfurt
Hesse, Germany
A centre of Sikh life in Germany, whose community is unusual in the diaspora for how much of it arrived not from Punjab but as refugees from Afghanistan.
Germany’s Sikh population is generally put somewhere between 13,000 and 20,000, served by more than forty gurdwaras. The width of that range is itself informative: the German census does not record Sikh affiliation separately, so every figure is an estimate.1
Germany was for a period the second-largest Sikh community in Europe, before large-scale migration to Italy moved it into third place behind Britain and Italy. Frankfurt, Cologne, Munich and Stuttgart hold the main congregations.1
What distinguishes the German community from most of the diaspora is where a substantial part of it came from. Alongside migration directly from Punjab, Germany received Afghan Sikhs fleeing the collapse of their community in Kabul and Jalalabad — people whose families had lived outside Punjab for generations before arriving in Europe as refugees. A German gurdwara congregation may therefore contain Punjabi Sikhs, Afghan Sikhs who speak Dari or Pashto as readily as Punjabi, and their German-born children, with a set of shared reference points that is not simply Punjab.3
Germany has no historic gurdwara comparable to Abbotsford or Stockton. Its Sikh presence is recent — essentially a phenomenon of the last fifty years — which makes it a useful corrective to the assumption that diaspora communities are always old.1,2
Last updated: