The German federal election system regulates the election of the members of the national parliament, called the Bundestag. According to the principles governing the elections laws, set down in Art. 38 of the German Basic Law, elections are to be universal, direct, free, equal, and secret. Furthermore, the German Basic Law stipulates that Bundestag elections are to take place every four years and that one can vote, and be elected, upon reaching the age of 18.  All other stipulations for the federal elections are regulated by the Federal Electoral Act. Elections always take place on a Sunday.  Mail votes are possible upon application.

Germans elect their members of parliament with two votes. The first vote is for a direct candidate, who is required to receive a plurality vote in their electoral district. The second vote is used to elect a party list in each state as established by its respective party caucus. The Bundestag comprises, then, the seats representing each electoral district on the first vote and the seats allocated to maintain proportionality based on the second vote. Common practice is that direct candidates are also placed on the electoral lists at higher rankings as a fall-back in case they do not win their districts.

Constitutional basis

Principles governing the law of elections
According to Article 38, §1 of the German constitution, "the delegates of the German Parliament () [...] are elected in a general, direct, free, equal and secret vote."
These five principles of suffrage are fundamental rights: Any violation of the law can be brought up to the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany in form of a constitutional complaint.

An election is general, if basically every citizen can take part in it: there are no restrictions such as in terms of income, sex, health or any other arbitrary distinctions. But according to the jurisdiction of the Federal Constitutional Court, the prescription of a minimum voting age is compatible with the commonalty of the election.

The exclusion from the active right to vote is also – within narrow limitations – consistent with the Basic Constitutional Law. The exclusion of the passive right to vote is governed by somewhat less strict regulations.

The right to vote is in principle reserved for German citizens and the so-called "status Germans" who are refugees and expelled persons of German descent that settled in Germany. The introduction of a right to vote for foreigners would require an alteration of §20 of the constitution.

An election is immediate if the voters will determines the result directly. The process of an election based on lists compiled by the political parties is, however, compatible with the principle of an immediate election.

An election is considered free if the government does not compel the people's voting decision in terms of content. According to the Federal Constitutional Court's dispensation of justice the principle of a free ballot would not be harmed if a compulsory vote was introduced by the Federal Electoral Law. Electoral advertising at government expense would, however, be incompatible with this principle of electoral law. However, the Federal Government (made up of different political parties) is allowed to conduct public relations if its neutrality is strictly preserved.

Elections are confidential if the voter's decision is not known to anybody else. The German Parliament's voting law even states that no elector is allowed to announce his decision in the polling station. Postal voting is problematic because the secrecy of the ballot is not guaranteed; it has therefore to be taken as an exceptional case. Since the election's more important basic principle of universal suffrage would otherwise be violated, postal votes are admissible.

In principle an election is considered equal if all electoral votes have the same weight. This is for example not the case if constituencies differ considerably in size or if the way these constituencies are politically controlled causes advantages or disadvantages for certain groups of people (gerrymandering).

For electoral lawmaking the most difficult part in terms of constitutional principles is the equality of the election. On the one hand, certain inequalities are unavoidable as the constituencies can not be of exactly equal size and the turnout, too, is not homogenous. On the other hand, the  (the 'overhang', or extra seats in Parliament a party gets due to gaining more constituency seats than it is entitled to according to Parliament's proportional seating principle) and a  (negative vote weight: an unwanted outcome changing an elector's vote to the opposite of their intended political will expressed with that vote) might influence the "one man, one vote" principle. On 3 July 2008, the Federal Constitutional Court declared the paradox of the  to be unconstitutional. The court allowed three years for these changes, so the 2009 federal election was not affected. The changes were due by 30 June 2011, but appropriate legislation was not completed by that deadline. A new electoral law was enacted in late 2011, but declared unconstitutional once again by the Federal Constitutional Court upon lawsuits from the opposition parties and a group of some 4,000 private citizens.

Finally, four of the five factions in the Bundestag agreed on an electoral reform whereby the number of seats in the Bundestag will be increased as much as necessary to ensure that any overhang seats are compensated through apportioned leveling seats, to ensure full proportionality according to the political party's share of party votes at the national level. The Bundestag approved and enacted the new electoral reform in February 2013.

The five percent rule and the basic mandate clause are further strong interventions because they completely reject the influence of entire political streams and their voters in the parliament.

The five percent rule and the overhang () are in principle approved by the Federal Constitutional Court and the German jurisprudence.

Suffrage

Right to vote
Suffrage is the civil right to vote. All German citizens over the age of 18 are allowed to vote (Art. 38, para. 2 of the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany), as long as they have lived in Germany after reaching the age of 14 for at least a three-month continuous period that was within 25 years of the election.

According to Art. 20, para. 2, p. 1 all power emanates from the people, that is the people of Germany. Therefore, Art. 12 para. 1 of German Federal Electoral Law determines in accordance with constitutional law, that only Germans in the sense of Art. 116, para. 1 are eligible to vote.

Excluded from suffrage are Germans,

 who have been deprived of active suffrage by a court in connection with a conviction because of delicts within the fields of treason, compromise of the democratic constitutional state, threat to the external national security, criminal offence against constitutional bodies, as well as criminal offence at elections and ballots, as well as indictable offences against the national defence. (§§ 13 Nr. 1 BWahlG, 92a, 101, 108c, 109i, 45 Abs. 5 StGB)
 for whom had been ordered a custodian with contained field of activity through interlocutory injunction (§ 13 Nr. 2 BWahlG)
 who find themselves in an asylum according to §§ 63, 20 StGB after having committed an illegal action being criminally incapable because of an order from the criminal court

Eligibility to stand for election
Every German who has reached the age of majority, in Germany 18 years, is eligible to stand for election according to the German Basic Law (article 38, paragraph 2 BL). It has to be remarked that the age of majority can be altered by a simple federal law.

Eligibility to stand for election presupposes the right to vote. However, some German citizens are not permanent residents of Germany and also do not have the right to vote as a German citizen living abroad. They can still be elected if they meet all the other requirements. Yet, people can be deprived of their eligibility to stand for election in certain circumstances. This can happen in the case of an imprisonment of more than a year as is laid down in § 45, subparagraph 1 in the , the German criminal law.

Election management bodies
The most important election management body is the Federal Returning Officer, appointed by the Federal Ministry of the Interior. Responsibilities include running electoral procedures and chairing the election committee. The leader of the Federal Statistical Office usually holds this office. The Federal Returning Officer is assisted by the electoral committee and the Returning Officers of each , the election supervisors and the electoral committee of each constituency as well as the election judges and the managing committee of each electoral ward. They are appointed by the federal government. The other members of the electoral committees are appointed by the Returning Officer.

Election management bodies (EMBs) are institutions of independent, societal self-organisation. In general they are considered to be a sort of federal agency. The Federal Ministry of the Interior, the Supreme Federal Authority, is responsible for the enactment of certain regulations necessary for federal election procedures. However, the Federal Ministry of the Interior does not have the authority to issue directives against the election management bodies.

Scrutiny of elections
Within two months after the federal election () any voter can request the scrutiny of elections. According to the established practice of the Federal Constitutional Court () the Committee for the Scrutiny of Elections of the , the parliament of Germany, has to reject a request if the distribution of mandates did not change even with the request being granted.
The Committee for the Scrutiny of Elections only makes sure that the Federal Voting Act is implemented properly; it does not deal with possible unconstitutionalities.

If the  rejects the veto, an appeal to scrutiny of elections can be lodged to the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany within another two months. This appeal has to be joined by 100 eligible voters.

If the veto is successful, the affected member will lose his or her seat in parliament. This member can in turn file a lawsuit against the adjudication.

No appeal to scrutiny of elections against decisions made by the German  has thus far been successful.

Party structure

Membership
Political parties are required to be membership-based, and the party determines its membership based upon its own bylaws, i.e., the party itself determines who can join, leave, and who is excluded from the party. Applications for membership may be rejected without justification, and party bylaws may impose requirements and restrictions on membership, but may not discriminate based on gender, age, religion or ethnicity. All parties have membership fees, which range from 0.5%–4.0% of members' salaries, with reduced fees for low-income members. There is no collective membership. (For example, some countries' labor unions have enrolled its members in parties automatically.)

As parties can reject applications without justification, it is possible to discriminate unofficially. The feminist party  even calls all its members women in its bylaws, but claims this term also applies to men.

Governance
Full membership assemblies are used at the local- or district-level, but most parties rely on delegate assemblies ( or party conventions) above district-level, although all established parties use non-binding full membership referendums for important decisions such as leadership selection.

Appointment of candidates

The parties' right to propose candidates
Only parties that have been represented in the Bundestag or a Landtag by at least five delegates since the last election are entitled to propose their own candidates. Other parties have to announce their candidature to the Federal Returning Officer in time, i.e. not later than 90 days before the election day of periodic elections of the Bundestag. They must have been accepted as a party by the Federal Electoral Committee beforehand.

Proposal of candidates for constituencies
The applicants from a party must be elected in a democratic and secret election by an assembly of the party members in a constituency or by a similar board appointed by the party. Every party member entitled to vote is allowed to propose candidates. A candidate does not have to be a member of the party. Since the 2009 German Bundestag elections no member of a different party may be nominated. A written record of the election must be presented to the District Returning Officer, who is responsible for checking the proposal. He points out possible deficiencies and allows remedies to be made.

A county election nomination is only accepted if the nominee belongs to a party that is represented in the Bundestag or the Landtag, or if the party represents a national minority. Otherwise the nominee must have at least 200 signatures from eligible voters in the constituency. It does not make a difference whether the suggestion is handed in by a party or not. Hence a candidate does not need to be supported by a party in a constituency if he has sufficient signatures. The county election nominee must also nominate a person of trust and a proxy who are allowed to release statements to the leader of the county election.

A county election nomination can be recalled either by a joint statement from the two persons of trust or by a statement from the majority of the signataries of the nominee. Through a declaration from the two persons of trust the name of the suggested person can be changed in case the originally suggested person loses his eligibility or dies. Once the nomination is authorised it can neither be recalled nor changed.

If a candidate with a direct mandate dies before election day, the election is cancelled in this constituency. Within the next six weeks, the election is held again, allowing the deceased candidate's party to appoint a substitute candidate. This by-election follows the same rules as the main election. This means that Germans who have come of age in the time between the main and the by-election are not allowed to vote.

Regional lists of parliamentary candidates for election to Federal Parliament
According to the Federal Election Law the nominations for the regional lists basically result from the same system as the constituency nominations. In addition, the order of the regional list is determined by secret election.

The regional list of a party which is neither represented in the Federal Parliament nor in a State Parliament and which does not represent a national minority, requires for its admission the signing of at least one-thousandth of the state's eligible voters, not exceeding 2,000 signatures. For the nomination of confidants and the modification of the regional list, the regulations concerning the constituency nominations are applied correspondingly.

For the calculation of the electoral threshold, the candidate lists on state level of one party are generally treated as connected, unless the confidants issue a differing declaration to the Federal Returning Officer.

Voting system

The voter has two votes. The federal election system distinguishes between 'first' and 'second' votes. However, these terms refer neither to a hierarchical order of importance of the votes, nor to a logical (chronological) sequence in a valid election process. According to public polls, about 70% (2002) to 63% (2005) of the voters mistakenly thought the first vote to be more important than the second. In some state election systems that have two voting systems modelled after the federal election setup, the votes are called 'vote for person' and 'vote for list'. It is important that both votes have distinct functions.

First vote
The first vote allows the elector to vote for a direct candidate of their constituency, who applies for a direct mandate in the Bundestag (see illustration above, no. 2). Relative majority voting is used, which means that the candidate who receives most of the votes gets the mandate. If the vote results in a tie, the lot drawn by the leader of the regional election is decisive. In this case, the votes for the other candidates are invalid. The primary function of the first vote is to personalize the election. As there are 299 constituencies at the moment, the same number of mandates in the Bundestag are distributed to the elected candidates in each district. However, the first vote does not determine the power of the parties in the Bundestag. For each direct mandate in a Bundesland the party always receives one mandate fewer from the second vote.

The size and the geographical shape of the electoral constituencies are revised by an electoral committee appointed by Germany's Head of State. The final decision is made by the German Bundestag and can be found in an attachment to the federal electoral law.

Second vote
For the distribution of seats in the German Bundestag, the second vote is more important than the first vote. This second vote allows the elector to vote for a party whose candidates are put together on the regional electoral list. Based on the proportion of second votes, the 598 mandates are distributed to the parties who have achieved at least 5 percent of valid second votes (i.e. reached the electoral threshold). Since the 1987 German Bundestag elections, the distribution of seats was made according to the Hare-Niemeyer method. Due to a change in the law passed in January 2008, the distribution of seats is now made according to the Sainte-Laguë/Schepers method.

The proportion of seats a party gets in the Bundestag approximately equates to the percentage of votes the party gets in the election. Discrepancies result from overhang and the electoral threshold. According to §6, para. 1, clause 2 of the Federal Election Law the electors' second votes are not accounted for if those electors give their first votes to a successful and autonomous direct candidate (a candidate who is not nominated by a party). This rule is designed to prevent a double influence on the composition of the Bundestag.

A similar problem occurred at the federal election in 2002. The PDS got two direct mandates in Berlin, but with only 4.0% of second votes they failed to pass the electoral threshold. The second votes from the electors who voted for those direct candidates counted nevertheless, since in this case both candidates belonged to a party which had handed in a regional list in the respective Bundesland. In its decision of November 23, 1988 (Federal Constitutional Law 79, 161), the Federal Constitutional Court pointed out the relevant loophole in the Federal Election Law to the legislative body. Abolishing the system with first and second votes with the possibility of splitting votes – meaning the elector's option to vote for a direct candidate and for a party independently – would solve the problem automatically.

Abstention and spoilt votes
German parliamentary election law does not have explicit abstention; a ballot paper without markings on it is considered a spoilt vote (separated into first and second vote).

Furthermore, votes are spoilt if the voter's intention cannot be recognised without doubt, if the ballot paper contains additions or conditions or if it is not an official document. Since the general elections in 2009, only the first vote is spoilt on ballot papers designed for a different constituency as long as they contain the correct regional list for the second vote.

The law of the German federal election does not consider ballot papers which are marked in a way that endangers the confidentiality of the ballot (as, for example, votes marked with an upright cross) as spoilt.

There are further reasons for invalidity concerning the postal vote: Both votes are invalidated if the envelope for the postal vote is empty, if it contains several differently marked ballot papers or if it actually should have been rejected (including also those ballot paper envelopes which differ from the rest in a way that endangers the election secrecy.) In contrast, the votes of voters who die or lose their right to vote before the ballot vote takes place explicitly remain valid.

Invalid votes, equally to non posted votes, have no effect on the result of the poll. Nevertheless, their number is officially counted and published.

According to § 4 of the election statistics act, the cause of invalidity is also a census criterion to be mentioned in the official election statistics. The numbers for a total of twelve categories of (partly) invalid ballot papers have been published at last (for the Federal Parliament elections in 2005).

However, it only concerns combinations of the three basic categories "empty or crossed out", "multiple crosses" and "other causes", divided into first and second votes. Thus one can hardly deduce the reason for the invalidity; whether it was a matter of purpose, mistake or just ignorance of the voting right. For combinations of invalid and valid votes on a ballot paper, the belonging elected (major) parties have been deciphered as well.

Invalid votes count as non votes in the financing of the parties. The parties do not receive any money for them. As the party's financing is capped and the total sum is regularly being utilised, the discrepancy of valid votes for parties who take part in financing is practically low. A small number of invalid votes is generally beneficial for parties with above average fund raising (membership fees included) seeing that more money remains in the bonus fund.

Electoral threshold
Seats in the German Bundestag distributed by regional lists are only given to parties passing a five percent electoral threshold of the federally valid second votes. Alternatively, if a party wins at least three constituencies, a party still gains seats by proportional representation according to the number of second votes they received. Those second votes for parties that meet neither requirement will not be taken into account for the distribution of seats among the rest of the parties. Parties who qualify for proportional representation in this manner are recognized as party groups, as a party must win at least five percent of the vote to qualify as a full parliamentary party, or Fraktion.

The three-constituency rule favours those smaller parties with a regional stronghold. For example, the German Party (DP) only won 3.3% of the second vote, but was able to win 15 seats by electing ten members from constituency seats, mostly in the party's heartland of Lower Saxony. In 1957, the DP won 3.4% of the second vote, but elected six members from constituency seats, enabling them to send 17 members to the Bundestag. The three-constituency rule was not used again until 1994, when the PDS won four direct mandates in Berlin, enabling them to send 30 delegates to the Bundestag, despite the fact that they had only 4.4 percent of the second vote. After another gap it was used in the 2021 election, where PDS's successor Die Linke received 4.9 percent of the second vote, but were saved from exclusion by winning exactly three constituencies (Berlin-Treptow-Köpenick, Berlin-Lichtenberg and Leipzig II) and received 39 seats.

The clause is meant to minimise the risk of party fragmentation, which partially caused the incapacitation of the Reichstag in the Weimar Republic. The clause is not explicitly mentioned in the constitution as this could cause a conflict with the fundamental principle of equal votes, which states that each vote must have equal weight. However, the general consensus is that the clause is important for the stability of the party system, the capacity of the parliament and the government and overall for the political stability of the state. Thus, a balance must be achieved between the two existing constitutional objectives. The Federal Constitutional Court approves of the threshold clause, arguing that it is allowed to violate a constitutional principle within certain limits, if this is essential to achieve a more important constitutional objective such as the adherence to a principle of electoral law. Because of this, the Federal Constitutional Court allows the threshold clause to be maximally five percent. Thus the legislator has no possibility of increasing it.

National minority parties, such as the SSW, which won a seat in the 2021 parliamentary election, are now freed from the electoral threshold due to the fact that under Constitutional Law it is imperative that minorities are protected. This special regulation however does not necessarily apply to a Turkish party, as the Turkish do not yet enjoy the status of a national minority in Germany, unlike the Danish party in Schleswig-Holstein, the SSW, or the Sorbs in Saxony.

Distribution of seats
At first, the number of successful independent direct candidates and the successful direct candidates whose party did not make it into the German Bundestag is taken from the total number of 598 mandates. In the parliamentary election of 2002, both direct candidates were members of the PDS party. Only in the parliamentary election of 1949 were there successful independent direct candidates.

The remaining proportional mandates (596 seats in the election of 2002 and all of the 598 seats in 2005) are distributed among the parties which have obtained at least five per cent, or three direct mandates according to the results of all second votes, in the Sainte-Laguë/Schepers procedure (before the federal election in 2009 it was the Hare-Niemeyer procedure). Afterwards, the obtained proportional mandates of each party are distributed among the candidates' lists of the Bundesländer, according to the number of their second votes in the respective Bundesländer, by following the same procedure.

The outcome of this procedure shows how many proportional mandates each party has gained in each Bundesland. The candidates who have achieved a seat in the Bundestag can then be identified.

At first, the victorious direct candidates of a party obtain their mandates in a Bundesland. Within the  Bundesländer, in which the number of achieved direct mandates of one party is smaller than the number of achieved proportional mandates, the difference is settled by list mandates i.e. candidates of the Bundesländer list in order of appearance, whereas candidates who have already gained a direct mandate in their district (not matter which Bundesland) are simply left out.

If a party in a Bundesland receives more direct mandates than proportional mandates, all the successful candidates in constituencies gain additional seats in the Bundestag. These seats are called overhang seats. Consequently, the Bundestag becomes larger by the number of additionally gained seats. Starting with the 2013 election, other parties receive leveling seats. In recent years, the number of overhang seats was 13 in 1998, 5 in 2002, 16 in 2005, 24 in 2009 and 33 in 2013. In 2017, after the formula was adjusted somewhat, there were 111 overhang and levelling seats. In theory, there is no limit to the possible number of overhang seats; this is because one or more parties could win constituency seats while having arbitrarily few list votes.

If a delegate of the Bundestag who was elected in a constituency in which his or her political party gained a number of excess mandates resigns, his or her seat remains free and cannot be used by the following candidate on the party's list. At the beginning of the 2002 legislative period the Bundestag consisted of 603 delegates. When SPD delegate Anke Hartnagel died and the head of SPD in Thuringia, Christoph Matschie, resigned, this regulation was enacted. As a consequence, the 15th Bundestag consisted of 601 members.

Debate over the awarding of overhang and leveling seats was renewed after the 2021 German federal election produced a Bundestag with 736 members, which made it the largest freely elected parliament in the world. The Scholz cabinet introduced a 2023 reform law to fix the size of the Bundestag at 630 members, which would be achieved by eliminating all overhang and leveling seats, as well as the Grundmandatsklausel which awards full proportional representation to parties winning at least three constituency seats, even if the five-percent threshold is not met. Instead, a party's total number of seats would be determined strictly by its share of Zweitstimmen (party votes), and the five-percent threshold is absolute. If a party wins overhang seats, the seat winners with the fewest votes would not enter the Bundestag. Parties representing minority groups are still exempt from the five-percent threshold. The law is subject to constitutional challenges by the CSU and The Left, both of whom benefit from the previous system, though President Frank-Walter Steinmeier signed the law after personally determining he believed it was constitutional.

Classification and assessment of the system

The Bundestag, Germany's parliament, is elected according to the principle of  proportional representation. In some cases, this system is also referred to as mixed member proportional representation. This, however, is incorrect considering the fact that the mandates gained directly in each federal state are compared to the number of second vote mandates and any differences are compensated with candidates from the party's list at the state level, if, according to the principle of proportional representation, a party gains more second vote mandates than direct mandates. Therefore, it is more accurate to call it additional member system. However, the so-called mixing election system can be described as parallel voting whereas a certain number of representatives is elected through one of the systems and the other independent representatives are elected through the other system without any mandates being taken over by both of the systems.

Voting for the Bundestag is complicated. In particular, the importance of the second vote is sometimes underestimated.
However, the voting system combines many of the advantages of both the plurality and the proportional voting system. Time has proven that this voting system mainly allows for a proportional distribution of seats, stable governments, change of governments, the possibility of new parties joining the parliament, and in comparison to the Reichstag, the precursor parliament of the Bundestag in the Weimar Republic, it allows for a parliament capable of acting. Presently, the big parties are not considering introducing a majority voting system like they did at the beginning of the first grand coalition in 1966.

However, there has been major criticism of the federal election system, as it existed prior to 2013. The overhang seats are problematic in the sense that they distort the proportional representation (resulting from the second votes). The Federal Constitutional Court of Germany has found that this distinctive feature is compatible with the legislator's will of ensuring a regionally balanced composition of the Bundestag. Nevertheless, one consequence of the overhang seats is the paradoxical possibility that a party may receive more seats in the Bundestag by receiving fewer second votes in certain states, or fewer seats if they receive more votes. On July 3, 2008, the Federal Constitutional Court declared the possibility of this so-called "negative vote weight" () to be unconstitutional, and reforms were implemented in May 2013 that sharply reduced this possibility.

Discussions about the implementation of a majority voting system
By the end of 1955 the CDU/CSU (political union of the parties of the Christian Democratic Union and the Christian Social Union) together with the German party () brought forward a first draft outlining a possible majority voting system. According to this draft 60 percent of the mandates were supposed to be determined by majority votes and only 40 percent according to proportional representation. Adenauer's attempt to end the CDU/CSU's dependence on the FDP (the Liberal Democratic Party) as well as to limit the SPD's (the Social Democratic Party) prospects of getting elected was unsuccessful.

When the first Grand Coalition (1966–1969) took office, there were strong tendencies within both major parties, CDU and SPD, to abandon proportional representation which had existed/had been applied since the foundation of the German Federal Republic in 1949. Instead, they suggested implementing the majority vote system. These plans were even part of the coalition agreement. The smaller FDP which has no chance of winning the majority in an election district, protested because the implementation of this voting system would have threatened its further existence. Ultimately, however, the introduction of the majority vote system failed because large parts of the SPD were convinced that it would not have meant better prospects of power. Paul Lücke (CDU), Federal Minister of the Interior, resigned from office on April 2, 1968. Since then there have been no more attempts to introduce the majority vote system in Germany.

Forecast
The paradoxes which occur with the largest remainder method are avoided by the recent introduction of the Sainte-Laguë method. The difficulty of "negative vote weight" (where a voter's choosing to vote for a party makes it less likely that that party will gain seats in parliament) still remain possible. But German lawmakers adopted reforms in May 2013 that sharply reduce this possibility, following a July 2008 decision of the Federal Constitutional Court declaring negative vote weight unconstitutional.

History
Election of the 1st German Bundestag (14 August 1949) – The election system which was valid for the election of the Bundestag in 1949 has been changed significantly in the following decades. Because the Parliamentary Council couldn't agree on a written formulation of the voting system in the Grundgesetz, the Federal Election Law was ratified by the heads of government of the German states. The right to vote was granted from the age of 21, the right to be elected from the age of 25.

The constitutional number of representatives counted 400, plus possible overhang seats and 19 Berlin representatives. The federal territory was divided into 242 electoral districts, each one having one direct candidate being elected according to the relative majority voting, which is still valid. As a result of two CDU overhang seats, the Bundestag of 1949 consisted of 402 representatives.

Each German state formed its own electoral district. Consequently, the number of representatives of a state was determined in advance (excluding overhang seats). Accordingly, the five-percent hurdle and the Grundmandat-clause (one direct mandate was sufficient to join the Bundestag) were valid merely in the federal states.

A single-vote system was used. Using this single vote, the voter elected both a state party list and a direct candidate of the same party from his electoral district. Therefore, the voter did not have the possibility to give separate, independent votes for the person or the direct candidate and the party or the list. The voter of an independent direct candidate had in comparison with the two-vote system of today not the possibility to vote a party, with the risk that his vote in a case of unsuccessfulness of the candidate was lost.

In case a direct candidate resigned from the Bundestag, the corresponding electoral district had to hold a reelection. This happened fourteen times the first being the 1950 Kulmbach by-election.

The proportional mandates (Proporzmandate) were allocated using the D'Hondt method which disadvantages small parties. These parties were further disadvantaged because the seats were allocated on a per state basis.

Election of the 2nd German Bundestag (6 September 1953) – In 1953 for the first time, a law (Bundeswahlgesetz) designed by the German Bundestag was the basis for the federal elections. This law contained some major alterations compared to the former election law:

The dual-vote system with the respective possibility of vote splitting was introduced. In order to pass the electoral threshold, the party needed to receive a minimum of 5% of all second votes. Although the threshold was overruled for parties of national minorities, the Südschleswigsche Landesverband (SSW) was not able to re-enter into Parliament. The number of proportional seats increased from 400 to 484, while the 242 electoral districts were maintained. Consequently, the Bundestag is equally represented by seats voted directly as well as via second vote, disregarding additional second vote mandates that have resulted from overhang seats. The number of Berlin's parliament members increased from 19 to 22. In the case of a direct candidate withdrawing from the Bundestag, a new election in his voting district was no longer necessary. Instead, the candidate being next in the state's list of candidates ("Landesliste") would substitute the candidate.

Election of the 3rd German Bundestag (5 September 1957) – Today's electoral law is basically the same as it used to be in 1957. The two-stage distribution of seats connected with states' candidates lists was introduced, which brought along the problem of negative vote weight. At the same time, the disadvantage of smaller parties was clearly reduced with the D'Hondt method. The Grundmandatsklausel, which says that a party needs at least 5% of the second votes to get any seat in the Bundestag, was modified: from now on at least three direct mandates were needed to overcome this clause. Since the Saarland joined the Federal Republic of Germany on January 1, 1950, five electoral districts were added to the 242 already existing districts and the number of the mandates distributed by proportion was raised from 484 to 494. The absentee ballot was introduced as well.

Election of the 5th German Bundestag (19 September 1965) – The electoral districts were rearranged, the number was increased from 247 to 248. Accordingly, the number of mandates distributed by proportion was raised from 494 to 496.

Election of the 7th German Bundestag (19 November 1972) – By changing article 38 (2) of the Basic Law in 1970 the voting age was lowered from 21 to 18 and the legal age to be eligible for election was adapted to the voting age, which was 21 at that time. Before that, one had to be 25 to stand for election.

Election of the 8th German Bundestag (3 October 1976) – When the change of sec. 2 BGB (German Civil Code) came into effect on January 1, 1975, the age of consent was lowered from 21 to 18 years. This means that since the election of 1976 citizens have the right to vote and to run for office at the age of 18.

Election of the 11th German Bundestag (25 January 1987) – Since the German federal election in 1987, the largest remainder method, which is neutral towards the size of the parties, has been applied instead of the D'Hondt method. The discrimination of/against small parties when distributing mandates (Proporzmandate) could hereby be completely abolished.
Because of paradoxes that occur in the largest remainder method, the danger of negative vote weight expanded to all federal states, even to those without overhang seats. The voting right for Germans living abroad was introduced during this election.

Election of the 12th German Bundestag (2 December 1990) – Briefly before the Bundestagswahl of 1990, the Federal Constitutional Court decided that the situation of the recently reunited Germany showed a special case. An electoral threshold for the entire election district was unconstitutional. For this reason, a party had to receive at least 5% of the second votes either in the old federal territory including West-Berlin or in the new federal territory in order to win seat in the German Bundestag (Lower House of German Parliament). This special regulation was only valid for the elections in 1990.

In the federal states that were formerly part of Eastern Germany, including Berlin, 80 constituencies were added. Because of this, the number of constituencies increased to 328, the number of proportional mandates to 656. Another consequence of German reunification was the abolition of a special regulation for West Berlin. This regulation prescribed that the Berlin City Parliament elected 22 representatives into the Bundestag on the day of the federal election.

Election of the 15th German Bundestag (22 September 2002) – For the election of the Bundestag in 2002, the number of constituencies was reduced from 328 to 299, as was the number of proportional mandates (from 656 to 598).

Election of the 17th German Bundestag (27 September 2009) – For the 2009 election of the Bundestag, the Hare-Niemeyer method was replaced by the Sainte-Laguë/Schepers method. For the first time, parties could no longer nominate candidates who were members of other parties. The circle of Germans living abroad who are entitled to vote was extended.

Election reform 2023 for German Bundestag (17 March 2023)
The German lower house electoral system has been reformed 2023 to replace flexible number of seats with a fixed size of 630 seats, as well removing the 3 district seat exception to the 5% electoral threshold. The overhang seats and leveling seats have been replaced with Zweitstimmendeckung.

See also
Elections in Germany

References

 Erhard H. M. Lange: Wahlrecht und Innenpolitik. Entstehungsgeschichte und Analyse der Wahlgesetzgebung und Wahlrechtsdiskussion im westlichen Nachkriegsdeutschland 1945–1956. Hain, Meisenheim am Glan 1975,
 Helmut Nicolaus: Grundmandatsklausel, Überhangmandate & Föderalismus, fünf Studien. Manutius-Verlag, Heidelberg 1996,
 Dieter Nohlen: Wahlrecht und Parteiensystem. 4. Aufl., Leske und Budrich, Opladen 2004,
 Wolfgang Schreiber: Handbuch des Wahlrechts zum Deutschen Bundestag. Kommentar zum Bundeswahlgesetz, unter Einbeziehung des Wahlprüfungsgesetzes, des Wahlstatistikgesetzes, der Bundeswahlordnung, der Bundeswahlgeräteverordnung und sonstiger wahlrechtlicher Nebenvorschriften. Heymann, Köln 2002 (7. Aufl.),
 Karl-Heinz Seifert: Bundeswahlrecht. Wahlrechtsartikel des Grundgesetzes, Bundeswahlgesetz, Bundeswahlordnung und wahlrechtliche Nebengesetze. Vahlen, München 1976 (3. Aufl.),

Germany
Elections in Germany

Electoral system of Germany


Orange is the colour between yellow and red on the spectrum of visible light. Human eyes perceive orange when observing light with a dominant wavelength between roughly 585 and 620 nanometres. In traditional colour theory, it is a secondary colour of pigments, produced by mixing yellow and red. In the RGB colour model, it is a tertiary colour. It is named after the fruit of the same name.

The orange colour of many fruits and vegetables, such as carrots, pumpkins, sweet potatoes, and oranges, comes from carotenes, a type of photosynthetic pigment. These pigments convert the light energy that the plants absorb from the Sun into chemical energy for the plants' growth. Similarly, the hues of autumn leaves are from the same pigment after chlorophyll is removed.

In Europe and America, surveys show that orange is the colour most associated with amusement, the unconventional, extroversion, warmth, fire, energy, activity, danger, taste and aroma, the autumn and Allhallowtide seasons, as well as having long been the national colour of the Netherlands and the House of Orange. It also serves as the political colour of the Christian democracy political ideology and most Christian democratic political parties. In Asia, it is an important symbolic colour in Buddhism and Hinduism.

In nature and culture

Etymology
In English, the colour orange is named after the appearance of the ripe orange fruit. The word comes from the , from the old term for the fruit, . The French word, in turn, comes from the Italian , based on Arabic  (), borrowed from Persian , derived from Sanskrit  (), which in turn derives from a Dravidian root word (compare / / which refers to bitter orange in Tamil and Malayalam). The earliest known recorded use of orange as a colour name in English was in 1502, in a description of clothing purchased for Margaret Tudor. Another early recorded use was in 1512, in a will now filed with the Public Record Office. By the 17th century, the fruit and its colour were familiar enough that 'orange-coloured' shifted in use to 'orange' as an adjective. The place name "Orange" has a separate etymology and is not related to that of the colour.

Before this word was introduced to the English-speaking world, saffron already existed in the English language. Crog also referred to the saffron colour, so that orange was also referred to as  (yellow-red) for reddish orange, or  (yellow-saffron) for yellowish orange. Alternatively, orange things were sometimes described as red (which then had a broader meaning) such as red deer, red hair, the Red Planet and robin redbreast. When orange was infrequently used in heraldry, it was referred to as tawny or brusk.

History and art
In ancient Egypt, and ancient India, artists used an orange colour on some of their items. In Egypt, a mineral pigment called realgar was used for tomb paintings, as well as for other purposes. Orange carnelians were significantly used during the Indus Valley civilization which was, in turn, obtained by the people from Kutch, Gujarat. The colour was also used later by Medieval artists for the colouring of manuscripts. Pigments were also made in ancient times from a mineral known as orpiment. Orpiment was an important item of trade in the Roman Empire and was used as a medicine in China although it contains arsenic and is highly toxic. It was also used as a fly poison and to poison arrows. Because of its yellow-orange colour, it was also a favourite with alchemists who were searching for a way to make gold, both in China and in the West.

Before the late 15th century, the colour orange existed in Europe, but without the name; it was simply called yellow-red. Portuguese merchants brought the first orange trees to Europe from Asia in the late 15th and early 16th century, along with the Sanskrit word , which gradually became part of several European languages:  in Spanish,  in Portuguese, and orange in English. In mid-16th century England, the colour referred to as 'orange' was a reddish-brown, matching the deteriorated appearance of the fruit after a long journey from where it was grown in Portugal or Spain. Improvements in transportation and the introduction of an orange grove in Surrey allowed the fresh fruit to become more familiar in England, and the colour referred to as orange shifted in the 1600s toward its modern understanding.

House of Orange
The House of Orange-Nassau was one of the most influential royal houses in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. It originated in 1163 the tiny Principality of Orange, a feudal state of  north of Avignon in southern France. The Principality of Orange took its name not from the fruit, but from a Roman-Celtic settlement on the site which was founded in 36 or 35 BC and was named after the Celtic water god Arausio; however, the name may have been slightly altered, and the town associated with the colour, because it was on the route by which quantities of oranges were brought from southern ports such as Marseille to northern France.

The family of the Prince of Orange eventually adopted the name and the colour orange in the 1570s. The colour came to be associated with Protestantism, due to participation by the House of Orange on the Protestant side in the French Wars of Religion. One member of the house, William I of Orange, organised the Dutch resistance against Spain, a war that lasted eighty years, until the Netherlands won its independence. The House's arguably most prominent member, William III of Orange, became King of England in 1689, after the downfall of the Catholic James II in the Glorious Revolution.

Due to William III, orange became an important political colour in Britain and Europe. William was a Protestant, and as such, he defended the Protestant minority of Ireland against the majority Roman Catholic population. As a result, the Protestants of Ireland were known as Orangemen. Orange eventually became one of the colours of the Irish flag, symbolising the Protestant heritage. His rebel flag became the forerunner of The Netherlands' modern flag.

When the Dutch settlers living in the Cape Colony (now part of South Africa) migrated into the Southern African heartlands in the 19th century, they founded what they called the Orange Free State. In the United States, the flag of the City of New York has an orange stripe, to remember the Dutch colonists who founded the city. William of Orange is also remembered as the founder of the College of William & Mary, and Nassau County in New York is named after the House of Orange-Nassau.

18th and 19th century
In the 18th century, orange was sometimes used to depict the robes of Pomona, the goddess of fruitful abundance; her name came from the , the Latin word for fruit. Oranges themselves became more common in northern Europe, thanks to the 17th-century invention of the heated greenhouse, a building type which became known as an orangerie. The French artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard depicted an allegorical figure of "inspiration" dressed in orange.

In 1797 a French scientist Louis Vauquelin discovered the mineral crocoite, or lead chromate, which led in 1809 to the invention of the synthetic pigment chrome orange. Other synthetic pigments, cobalt red, cobalt yellow, and cobalt orange, the last made from cadmium sulfide plus cadmium selenide, soon followed. These new pigments, plus the invention of the metal paint tube in 1841, made it possible for artists to paint outdoors and to capture the colours of natural light.

In Britain orange became highly popular with the Pre-Raphaelites and with history painters. The flowing red-orange hair of Elizabeth Siddal, a prolific model and the wife of painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, became a symbol of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Lord Leighton, the president of the Royal Academy, produced Flaming June, a painting of a sleeping young woman in a bright orange dress, which won wide acclaim. Albert Joseph Moore painted festive scenes of Romans wearing orange cloaks brighter than any the Romans ever likely wore. In the United States, Winslow Homer brightened his palette with vivid oranges.

In France, painters took orange in an entirely different direction. In 1872 Claude Monet painted Impression, Sunrise, a tiny orange sun and some orange light reflected on the clouds and water in the centre of a hazy blue landscape. This painting gave its name to the impressionist movement.

Orange became an important colour for all the impressionist painters. They all had studied the recent books on colour theory, and they know that orange placed next to azure blue made both colours much brighter. Auguste Renoir painted boats with stripes of chrome orange paint straight from the tube. Paul Cézanne did not use orange pigment, but produced his own oranges with touches of yellow, red and ochre against a blue background. Toulouse-Lautrec often used oranges in the skirts of dancers and gowns of Parisiennes in the cafes and clubs he portrayed. For him, it was the colour of festivity and amusement.

The post-impressionists went even further with orange. Paul Gauguin used oranges as backgrounds, for clothing and skin colour, to fill his pictures with light and exoticism. But no other painter used orange so often and dramatically as Vincent van Gogh. who had shared a house with Gauguin in Arles for a time. For Van Gogh orange and yellow were the pure sunlight of Provence. He produced his own oranges with mixtures of yellow, ochre and red, and placed them next to slashes of sienna red and bottle green, and below a sky of turbulent blue and violet. He put an orange moon and stars in a cobalt blue sky. He wrote to his brother Theo of "searching for oppositions of blue with orange, of red with green, of yellow with violet, searching for broken colours and neutral colours to harmonize the brutality of extremes, trying to make the colours intense, and not a harmony of greys."

20th and 21st centuries
In the 20th and 21st centuries, the colour orange had highly varied associations, both positive and negative.

The high visibility of orange made it a popular colour for certain kinds of clothing and equipment. During the Second World War, US Navy pilots in the Pacific began to wear orange inflatable life jackets, which could be spotted by search and rescue planes. After the war, these jackets became common on both civilian and naval vessels of all sizes, and on aircraft flown over water. Orange is also widely worn (to avoid being hit) by workers on highways and by cyclists.

A herbicide called Agent Orange was widely sprayed from aircraft by the Royal Air Force during the Malayan Emergency and the US Air Force during the Vietnam War to remove the forest and jungle cover beneath which enemy combatants were believed to be hiding, and to expose their supply routes. The chemical was not actually orange, but took its name from the colour of the steel drums in which it was stored. Agent Orange was toxic, and was later linked to birth defects and other health problems.

Orange also had and continues to have a political dimension. Orange serves as the colour of Christian democratic political ideology, which is based on Catholic social teaching and Neo-Calvinist theology; Christian democratic political parties came to prominence in Europe and the Americas after World War II.

In Ukraine in November–December 2004, it became the colour of the Orange Revolution, a popular movement which carried activist and reformer Viktor Yushchenko into the presidency. In parts of the world, especially Northern Ireland, the colour is associated with the Orange Order, a Protestant fraternal organisation and relatedly, Orangemen, marches and other social and political activities, with the colour orange being associated with Protestantism similar to the Netherlands.

Science

Optics

In optics, orange is the colour seen by the eye when looking at light with a wavelength between approximately 585–620nm. It has a hue of 30° in HSV colour space. Isaac Newton's Opticks distinguished between pure orange light and mixtures of red and yellow light by noting that mixtures could be separated using a prism.

In the traditional colour wheel used by painters, orange is the range of colours between red and yellow, and painters can obtain orange simply by mixing red and yellow in various proportions; however these colours are never as vivid as a pure orange pigment. In the RGB colour model (the system used to display colours on a television or computer screen), orange is generated by combining high intensity red light with a lower intensity green light, with the blue light turned off entirely. Orange is a tertiary colour which is numerically halfway between gamma-compressed red and yellow, as can be seen in the RGB colour wheel.

Regarding painting, blue is the complementary colour to orange. As many painters of the 19th century discovered, blue and orange reinforce each other. The painter Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo that in his paintings, he was trying to reveal "the oppositions of blue with orange, of red with green, of yellow with violet... trying to make the colours intense and not a harmony of grey". In another letter he wrote simply, "there is no orange without blue." Van Gogh, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and many other impressionist and post-impressionist painters frequently placed orange against azure or cobalt blue, to make both colours appear brighter.

The actual complement of orange is azure – a colour that is one quarter of the way between blue and green on the colour spectrum. The actual complementary colour of true blue is yellow. Orange pigments are largely in the ochre or cadmium families, and absorb mostly greenish-blue light.

(See also shades of orange).

Pigments and dyes

Other orange pigments include:
Minium and massicot are bright yellow and orange pigments made since ancient times by heating lead oxide and its variants. Minium was used in the Byzantine Empire for making the red-orange colour on illuminated manuscripts, while massicot was used by ancient Egyptian scribes and in the Middle Ages. Both substances are toxic, and were replaced in the beginning of the 20th century by chrome orange and cadmium orange.
Cadmium orange is a synthetic pigment made from cadmium sulfide. It is a by-product of mining for zinc, but also occurs rarely in nature in the mineral greenockite. It is usually made by replacing some of the sulphur with selenium, which results in an expensive but deep and lasting colour. Selenium was discovered in 1817, but the pigment was not made commercially until 1910.
Quinacridone orange is a synthetic organic pigment first identified in 1896 and manufactured in 1935. It makes a vivid and solid orange.
Diketopyrrolopyrrole orange or DPP orange is a synthetic organic pigment first commercialised in 1986. It is sold under various commercial names, such as translucent orange. It makes an extremely bright and lasting orange, and is widely used to colour plastics and fibres, as well as in paints.

Orange natural objects
The orange colour of carrots, pumpkins, sweet potatoes, oranges, and many other fruits and vegetables comes from carotenes, a type of photosynthetic pigment. These pigments convert the light energy that the plants absorb from the sun into chemical energy for the plants' growth. The carotenes themselves take their name from the carrot. Autumn leaves also get their orange colour from carotenes. When the weather turns cold and production of green chlorophyll stops, the orange colour remains.

Before the 18th century, carrots from Asia were usually purple, while those in Europe were either white or red. Dutch farmers bred a variety that was orange; according to some sources, as a tribute to the stadtholder of Holland and Zeeland, William of Orange. The long orange Dutch carrot, first described in 1721, is the ancestor of the orange horn carrot, one of the most common types found in supermarkets today. It takes its name from the town of Hoorn, in the Netherlands.

Flowers
Orange is traditionally associated with the autumn season, with the harvest and autumn leaves. The flowers, like orange fruits and vegetables and autumn leaves, get their colour from the photosynthetic pigments called carotenes.

Animals

Foods
Orange is a very common colour of fruits, vegetables, spices, and other foods in many different cultures. As a result, orange is the colour most often associated in western culture with taste and aroma. Orange foods include peaches, apricots, mangoes, carrots, shrimp, salmon roe, and many other foods. Orange colour is provided by spices such as paprika, saffron and curry powder. In the United States, with Halloween on 31 October, and in North America with Thanksgiving in October (Canada) and November (US) orange is associated with the harvest colour, and also is the colour of the carved pumpkins, or jack-o-lanterns, used to celebrate the holiday.

Food colourings

People associate certain colours with certain flavours, and the colour of food can influence the perceived flavour in anything from candy to wine. Since orange is popularly associated with good flavour, many companies add orange food colouring to improve the appearance of their packaged foods. Orange pigments and dyes, synthetic or natural, are added to many orange sodas and juices, cheeses (particularly cheddar cheese, Gloucester cheese, and American cheese); snack foods, butter and margarine; breakfast cereals, ice cream, yoghurt, jam and candy. It is also often added to children's medicine, and to chicken feed to make the egg yolks more orange.

The United States Government and the European Union certify a small number of synthetic chemical colourings to be used in food. These are usually aromatic hydrocarbons, or azo dyes, made from petroleum. The most common ones are:
Allura red AC, also known as Red 40 and E129.
Sunset Yellow FCF, also known as Yellow 6 and E110.
Tartrazine, also known as Yellow 5 and E102. A dye used in soft drinks such as Mountain Dew, Kool-Aid, chewing gum, popcorn, breakfast cereals, cosmetics, shampoos, eyeshadow, blush, and lipstick.
Orange B is approved by the US Food and Drug Administration, but only for hot dog and sausage casings.
Citrus Red 2 is certified only to colour orange peels.
Because many consumers are worried about possible health consequences of synthetic dyes, some companies are beginning to use natural food colours. Since these food colours are natural, they do not require any certification from the Food and Drug Administration. The most popular natural food colours are:
Annatto, made from the seeds of the achiote tree. Annatto contains carotenoids, the same ingredient that gives carrots and other vegetables their orange colour. Annatto has been used to dye certain cheeses in Britain, particularly Gloucester cheese, since the 16th century. It is now commonly used to colour American cheese, snack foods, breakfast cereal, butter, and margarine. It is used as a body paint by native populations in Central and South America. In India, women often put it, under the name sindoor, on their hairline to indicate that they are married.
Turmeric is a common spice in South Asia, Persia and the Mideast. It contains the pigments called curcuminoids, widely used as a dye for the robes of Buddhist monks. It is also often used in curry powders and to give flavour to mustard. It is now being used more frequently in Europe and the US to give an orange colour to canned beverages, ice cream, yogurt, popcorn and breakfast cereal. The food colour is usually listed as E100.
Paprika oleoresin contains natural carotenoids, and is made from chili peppers. It is used to colour cheese, orange juice, spice mixtures and packaged sauces. It is also fed to chickens to make their egg yolks more orange.

Culture, associations and symbolism

Confucianism
In Confucianism, the religion and philosophy of ancient China, orange was the colour of transformation. In China and India, the colour took its name not from the orange fruit, but from saffron, the finest and most expensive dye in Asia. According to Confucianism, existence was governed by the interaction of the male active principle, the yang, and the female passive principle, the yin. Yellow was the colour of perfection and nobility; red was the colour of happiness and power. Yellow and red were compared to light and fire, spirituality and sensuality, seemingly opposite but really complementary. Out of the interaction between the two came orange, the colour of transformation.

Hinduism and Buddhism
A wide variety of colours, ranging from a slightly orange yellow to a deep orange red, all simply called saffron, are closely associated with Hinduism and Buddhism, and are commonly worn by monks and holy men across Asia.

In Hinduism, the divinity Krishna is commonly portrayed dressed in yellow or yellow orange. Yellow and saffron are also the colours worn by sadhu, or wandering holy men in India.

In Buddhism orange (or more precisely saffron) was the colour of illumination, the highest state of perfection. The saffron colours of robes to be worn by monks were defined by the Buddhist texts. The robe and its colour is a sign of renunciation of the outside world and commitment to the order. The candidate monk, with his master, first appears before the monks of the monastery in his own clothes, with his new robe under his arm and asks to enter the order. He then takes his vows, puts on the robes, and with his begging bowl, goes out to the world. Thereafter, he spends his mornings begging and his afternoons in contemplation and study, either in a forest, garden, or in the monastery.

According to Buddhist scriptures and commentaries, the robe dye is allowed to be obtained from six kinds of substances: roots and tubers, plants, bark, leaves, flowers and fruits. The robes should also be boiled in water a long time to get the correctly sober colour. Saffron and ochre, usually made with dye from the curcuma longa plant or the heartwood of the jackfruit tree, are the most common colours. The so-called forest monks usually wear ochre robes and city monks saffron, though this is not an official rule.

The colour of robes also varies somewhat among the different "vehicles", or schools of Buddhism, and by country, depending on their doctrines and the dyes available. The monks of the strict Vajrayana, or Tantric Buddhism, practised in Tibet, wear the most colourful robes of saffron and red. The monks of Mahayana Buddhism, practised mainly in Japan, China and Korea, wear lighter yellow or saffron, often with white or black. Monks of Theravada Buddhism, practised in Southeast Asia, usually wear ochre or saffron colour. Monks of the forest tradition in Thailand and other parts of Southeast Asia wear robes of a brownish ochre, dyed from the wood of the jackfruit tree.

Colour of amusement
In Europe and America orange and yellow are the colours most associated with amusement, frivolity and entertainment. In this regard, orange is the exact opposite of its complementary colour, blue, the colour of calm and reflection. Mythological paintings traditionally showed Bacchus (known in Greek mythology as Dionysus), the god of wine, ritual madness and ecstasy, dressed in orange. Clowns have long worn orange wigs. Toulouse-Lautrec used a palette of yellow, black and orange in his posters of Paris cafes and theatres, and Henri Matisse used an orange, yellow and red palette in his painting, the Joy of Living.

Colour of visibility and warning
Orange is the colour most easily seen in dim light or against the water, making it, particularly the shade known as safety orange, the colour of choice for life rafts, life jackets or buoys. Highway temporary signs about construction or detours in the United States are orange, because of its visibility and its association with danger.

It is worn by people wanting to be seen, including highway workers and lifeguards. Prisoners are also sometimes dressed in orange clothing to make them easier to see during an escape. Lifeguards on the beaches of Los Angeles County, both real and in television series, wear orange swimsuits to make them stand out. Orange astronaut suits have the highest visibility in space, or against blue sea. An aircraft's two types of "black box", or flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder, are actually bright orange, so they can be found more easily. In some cars, connectors related to safety systems, such as the airbag, may be coloured orange.

The Golden Gate Bridge at the entrance of San Francisco Bay is painted international orange to make it more visible in the fog. Next to red, it is the colour most popular for extroverts, and as a symbol of activity.

Orange is sometimes used, like red and yellow, as a colour warning of possible danger or calling for caution. A skull against an orange background means a toxic substance or poison.

In the colour system devised by the US Department of Homeland Security to measure the threat of terrorist attack, an orange level is second only to a red level. The US Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices specifies orange for use in temporary and construction signage.

Academia
 In the United States and Canada, orange regalia is associated with the field of engineering.
 The Syracuse University, California Institute of Technology, Princeton University, Occidental College, and University of Tennessee use orange as a main colour.

Selected flags

Geography
 Orange is the national colour of the Netherlands. The royal family, the House of Orange-Nassau, derives its name in part from its former holding, the principality of Orange. (The title Prince of Orange is still used for the Dutch heir apparent.)
The Republic of the Orange Free State () was an independent Boer republic in southern Africa during the second half of the 19th century, and later a British colony and a province of the Union of South Africa. It is the historical precursor to the present-day Free State province. Extending between the Orange and Vaal river, its borders were determined by the United Kingdom in 1848 when the region was proclaimed as the Orange River Sovereignty, with a seat of a British Resident in Bloemfontein.
Oranjemund (German for 'Mouth of Oranje') is a town situated in the extreme southwest of Namibia, on the northern bank of the Orange River mouth.

Contemporary political and social movements

Because of its symbolic meaning as the orange colour of activity, orange is often used as the colour of political and social movements.
 Christian democratic political ideology and political parties, which are based on Catholic social teaching and Neo-Calvinist theology.
 The Orange Institution a.k.a. the Orange Order is a pro-British Protestant association based in Northern Ireland.
 Orange was the rallying colour of the 2004–2005 Orange Revolution in Ukraine.
 Orange was the colour used by the historical Liberal Party of the United Kingdom
 On 14 September 2017 North America's United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism began to use orange as part of a regarding effort.
 Orange was used as a rallying colour by Israelis (such as Jewish settlers) who opposed Israel's unilateral disengagement plan in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank in 2005.
 Orange ribbons are used to promote awareness and prevention of self-injury.
 Orange is also used in the ribbon of the Order of St. George in Russia.
 Orange is the party colour of several Christian democratic political parties, as well as others:

 Alliance for the Future of Austria (BZÖ)
 American Solidarity Party (ASP), United States
 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), India
 Christian Democrats, Denmark
 Christian Democratic and Flemish (CD&V), Belgium
 Humanist Democratic Centre (CDH), Belgium
 Christian Social Party (CSP), Belgium
 Christian Democratic People's Party, Switzerland
 Christian Democratic Union, Germany
 Christian Social People's Party, Luxembourg
 Citizens-Party of the Citizenry, Spain
 Czech Social Democratic Party
 Democratic Liberal Party, Romania
 Democratic Movement, France
 Free Patriotic Movement, Lebanon
 Party Workers' Liberation Front 30th of May (Frente Obrero), Curaçao
 Fidesz – Hungarian Civic Union
 Independence Party of Minnesota
 Justice and Truth Alliance, Romania
 Move Forward Party, Thailand
 Nacionalista Party, Philippines
 National Union, Israel
 New Democratic Party, Canada
The NDP's unexpected sweep of seats in Quebec and its consequent rise to official opposition in the 2011 federal election became known as the "Orange Wave" () or "Orange Crush".
 Orange Democratic Movement, Kenya
 Orange Movement, Italy
 Our Ukraine–People's Self-Defense Bloc
 Palikot's Movement, Poland
 People's National Party, Jamaica
 People First Party, Republic of China (Taiwan)
 PORA, Ukraine
 Pwersa ng Masang Pilipino, Philippines
 Québec solidaire, Canada
 Reformed Political Party, Netherlands
 Republican Left of Catalonia, Spain
 Shiv Sena, India
 Social Democratic Party, Portugal
 United Nationalist Alliance, Philippines
 Valencian Nationalist Bloc-Coalició Compromís, Spain
 Zares, Slovenia

Religion

 Orange, or more specifically deep saffron, is the most sacred colour of Hinduism.
 Hindu and Sikh flags atop mandirs and gurdwaras, respectively, are typically a saffron-coloured pennant.
 Saffron robes are often worn by Hindu swamis and also by Buddhist monks in the Theravada tradition.
In Paganism, orange represents energy, attraction, vitality, and stimulation. It can help with adapting, encouragement, and power.

Metaphysics and occultism
 The "New Age Prophetess", Alice Bailey, in her system called the Seven Rays which classifies humans into seven different metaphysical psychological types, the "fifth ray" of "Concrete Science" is represented by the colour orange. People who have this metaphysical psychological type are said to be "on the Orange Ray".
 Orange is used to symbolically represent the second (Swadhisthana) chakra.
In alchemy, orpiment – a contraction of the Latin word for gold (aurum) and colour (pigmentum) – was believed to be a key ingredient in the creation of the Philosopher's Stone.

In the military
In the United States Army, orange has traditionally been associated with the dragoons, the mounted infantry units which eventually became the US Cavalry. The 1st Cavalry Regiment was founded in 1833 as the United States Dragoons. The modern coat of arms of the 1st Cavalry features the colour orange and orange-yellow shade called dragoon yellow, the colours of the early US dragoon regiments.
The US Signal Corps, founded at the beginning of the American Civil War, adopted orange and white as its official colours in 1872. Orange was adopted because it was the colour of a signal fire, historically used at night while smoke was used during the day, to communicate with distant army units.

In the Royal Netherlands Air Force, aircraft may have a roundel with an orange dot in the middle, surrounded by three circular sectors in red, white, and blue.

In the Indonesian Air Force, the Air force infantry and special forces corps known as Paskhas uses Orange as their beret colour.

Corporate brands
Several corporate brands use orange, such as Blogger, Fanta, FedEx, GlaxoSmithKline, Gulf, Hankook, Harley-Davidson, ING, Jägermeister, Nickelodeon, Orange, the Women's National Basketball Association, The Home Depot, PornHub and TNT.

Sports

See also
 Amber
 List of colours
 Shades of orange
 Skin-contact wine

Notes

References

External links

 Orange Spectrum Color Chart Listing (archived 4 July 2007)

Optical spectrum
Rainbow colors
Secondary colors
Tertiary colors

Orange (colour)


Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier  (; 17 October 1796 – disappeared 26 April 1848) was an Irish officer of the Royal Navy and polar explorer who participated in six expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctic. In May 1845, he was second-in-command to Sir John Franklin and captain of  during the Franklin expedition to discover the Northwest Passage, which ended with the loss of all 129 crewmen in mysterious circumstances.

Early life
Francis Crozier was born in Banbridge, County Down, in Ulster, the northern province in Ireland. He was the eleventh of thirteen children, and the fifth son of solicitor George Crozier, who named him after his friend Francis Rawdon-Hastings, 2nd Earl of Moira. Crozier attended school locally in Banbridge, with his brothers William and Thomas, and lived with his family in Avonmore House which his father had built in 1792, in the centre of Banbridge.

Naval service
At the age of 13, Crozier volunteered for the Royal Navy and joined HMS Hamadryad in June 1810. In 1812, he served on  and visited Pitcairn Island in 1814, where he met the last surviving mutineers from . In 1817, he received his certificate as mate; in 1818, he served on  during a trip to the Cape of Good Hope.

Crozier joined Captain William Parry's second Arctic expedition to traverse the Northwest Passage in 1821. He served as midshipman on Parry's , which was accompanied by Captain Lyon's . He returned to the North with Parry a second time in 1824, this time on Hecla. The journey resulted in the sinking of Fury off Somerset Island. Crozier was promoted to lieutenant in 1826, and a year later, he once more joined Parry in his attempt to reach the North Pole; ultimately a futile endeavour.

During his voyages, Crozier became a close friend and confidant of the explorer James Clark Ross. He was elected to become a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1827, after conducting valuable astronomical and magnetic studies on his three expeditions with Parry.

He was appointed to the frigate  in 1831, and served off the coast of Portugal during the Liberal Wars, the country's civil war. Crozier joined Clark Ross as second-in-command of HMS Cove in 1835, to assist in the search for 12 lost British whaling ships in the Arctic. Crozier was appointed to the rank of commander in 1837.

Ross expedition

In 1839, Crozier again joined James Clark Ross on the Ross expedition, as second-in-command of a four-year voyage to explore the Antarctic continent in the ships  and . Crozier commanded Terror, and was appointed to the rank of captain in 1841. Erebus and Terror returned in 1843, having made the most significant penetration of the Antarctic pack ice and discovered large parts of the continent—including the Ross Sea and Ross Island, Mount Erebus and the Ross Ice Shelf.

Crozier was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1843, in recognition of his outstanding work on magnetism.

Franklin expedition

In 1845, Crozier joined Captain Sir John Franklin as captain of the  on the Franklin expedition to traverse the last unnavigated section of the Northwest Passage. Crozier was considered to lead this expedition, but his Irish ancestry and humble birth counted against him. The privilege of selecting subordinating officers, almost always given to the second-in-command, was given to James Fitzjames. After Franklin's death in June 1847, he took command of the expedition, and his fate and those of the other expedition members remained a mystery until 1859, when a note written by Crozier and James Fitzjames, captain of the Erebus, was discovered on King William Island during an expedition led by Francis McClintock. Dated 25 April 1848, the note indicated that the ships—stuck in thick pack ice—had been abandoned. Nine officers, including Sir John Franklin, and 15 crewmen had died. Also stated was their intention, on 26 April, to set out on foot for Back's Great Fish River on the Canadian mainland.

Unverified Inuit reports collected between 1852 and 1858 indicate that Crozier and one other expedition member might have been seen in the Baker Lake area, about  to the south, where, in 1948, Farley Mowat found "a very ancient cairn, not of normal Eskimo construction," inside which were fragments of a hardwood box with dovetail joints. McClintock and later searchers found relics, graves, and human remains of the Franklin crew on Beechey Island, King William Island, and the northern coast of the Canadian mainland.

Ships' location
In 2014, the Victoria Strait Expedition found two items on Hat Island, in the Queen Maud Gulf, near King William Island; part of a boat-launching davit bearing the stamps of two Royal Navy broad arrows, and a wooden object, possibly a plug for a deck hawse, the iron pipe through which the ship's chain cable would descend into the chain locker below. The expedition located one of Franklin's ships, preserved in reasonably good condition. The wreck lies at the bottom of the eastern portion of Queen Maud Gulf, west of O'Reilly Island and has been confirmed to be that of Erebus. In 2016, a well-preserved ship matching Terrors description was located in Terror Bay, off the southern coast of King William Island. The exploration of the wrecks continues.

Legacy

In January 2008, Crozier's home town of Banbridge hosted a memorial event, which included a service of remembrance and thanksgiving at the Church of the Holy Trinity, which was attended by more than a hundred descendants of Crozier and other officers of Franklin's lost expedition and those who searched for it, along with the chairman of Banbridge Council, and several Arctic historians, including Michael Smith and Russell Potter.

A memorial to Sir John Franklin and his men was erected by order of Parliament in 1858, in the Painted Hall of London's Greenwich Hospital. It was moved to Greenwich Royal Naval College's chapel in 1937, and was re-erected in the entrance of the former college in late 2009. At the service of thanksgiving on 29 October 2009, polar travellers and descendants of the expedition's crew celebrated their contributions.

Namesake
Geographical features named after Crozier include:
 Cape Crozier on the eastern side of Ross Island, Antarctica
 Cape Crozier on the western flank of King William Island, in the Canadian Arctic
 Cape Crozier at the western entrance of the Bay of Mercy on Banks Island, in the Canadian Arctic
 Crozier Strait which lies between Cornwallis and Bathurst Islands, in the Canadian Arctic
 Crozier River, near Fury and Hecla Strait in the Canadian Arctic
 Crozier Point on Spitsbergen, in the Arctic north of Norway
 Crozier Channel, to the north of Banks Island in the Canadian Arctic
 Crozier Island in the Kennedy Channel, between Greenland and Ellesmere Island
 The lunar crater Crozier, located at 13.5° S, 50.8° E on the Moon's near side
 Crozier Hill, Victor Harbor, South Australia
 Crozier Place, a street in Stanley, Falkland Islands
 The hydrographic survey vessel HMS Crozier was named after him in 1919.
 Francis Street in the suburb of Keilor Park in Melbourne, Australia

In literature

Francis Crozier appears as a character and the primary narrator of the 2007 best-selling novel, The Terror by Dan Simmons, a fictionalized account of Franklin's lost expedition, as well as the 2018 television adaptation, where Crozier is portrayed by Jared Harris. Both the novel and the television adaptation depict Crozier as the sole survivor of the expedition and joining an Inuit tribe instead of seeking to return to his homeland.

References

External links

19th-century explorers
19th-century Royal Navy personnel
1796 births
1840s deaths
1840s missing person cases
Date of death unknown
Fellows of the Royal Society
Irish Antarctic explorers
Irish Arctic explorers
Irish people of Norman descent
Lost explorers
People from Banbridge
Recipients of the Polar Medal
Royal Navy officers
Franklin's lost expedition
Military personnel from County Down
Irish officers in the Royal Navy
19th-century Irish explorers

Francis Crozier


Gatow (), a district of south-western Berlin is located west of the Havelsee lake and has forested areas within its boundaries. It is within the borough of Spandau. On 31 December 2002, it had 5,532 inhabitants.

History
Gatow's existence was first recorded in 1258 under the name of Gatho. In 1558, the village of Gatow became part of Spandau. Following the division of Berlin into four sectors at the end of the Second World War, Gatow became part of the British sector of West Berlin in early July 1945.

Infrastructures

Today's General-Steinhoff-Kaserne was between 1934 and 1994 home to an airfield, first used by the Luftwaffe as a staff and technical college, Luftkriegsschule II, and then by the Royal Air Force and Army Air Corps as RAF Gatow. RAF Gatow has the unlikely distinction of having been home during the Berlin Airlift to the only known operational use of flying boats within central Europe, when the RAF used Short Sunderlands to transport salt from Hamburg to Berlin, landing on the Havelsee lake.

The airfield was handed back to the Luftwaffe on 7 September 1994 and was kept in use as an airfield for a very short time, being closed to air traffic in 1995. It is now called General-Steinhoff-Kaserne and is home to some non-flying Luftwaffe units, and the Luftwaffen Museum der Bundeswehr. This is the museum of the Luftwaffe which has many displays (including historic aircraft) and much information on German military aviation and the history of the airfield. Admission to the museum is free, and full details of the museum and how to get there are on the museum's website . The history of RAF Gatow and of western forces in Berlin from 1945 to 1994 is told in the Alliierten Museum (Allied Museum) .

Also on the site of the former RAF station, but not part of General-Steinhoff-Kaserne, is a school, the Hans-Carossa-Gymnasium, and houses for government employees of the Federal Republic of Germany. This has been from 2003 part of the district of Berlin-Kladow.

References

External links

 Gatow page on www.berlin.de
 Gatow Volunteer Fire Brigade (in German)
 German site about a tower in Gatow
 Website of the Gatow branch of the Christian Democratic Union (in German)
 Luftwaffen Museum der Bundeswehr (official website)
 West Alliierte in Berlin e.V.
 Planeboys Spotters' page on Gatow
 The Hans-Carossa-Gymnasium (in German)
 The history of Gatow Airfield in German - a project of the Hans-Carossa-Gymnasium
 Alliierten Museum (The Allied Museum) - museum of the history of western forces in Berlin and Germany from 1945 to 1994

Localities of Berlin

Gatow


K17JI-D, virtual channel 12 (UHF digital channel 17), is a low-power, Class A 3ABN-affiliated television station licensed to Fresno, California, United States. Founded November 6, 1995, the station is owned by HC2 Holdings.

History
The station began with an original construction permit granted to Rollin Wong on November 6, 1995 to build a low-power station on VHF channel 12 (as K12OZ) to serve Fresno and surrounding area. 3ABN acquired the station in June 1998 and was granted a license on October 21, 1998. The license was upgraded to Class A on March 23, 2001. On February 6, 2013, the station's license to broadcast in digital was granted, with the station moving to channel 17 and changing its call sign to K17JI-D. 3ABN sold K17JI-D and 13 other stations to HC2 Holdings for $9.6 million in 2017.

Digital channels
The station's signal is multiplexed:

References

External links

Innovate Corp.
17JI-D
Low-power television stations in the United States
Television channels and stations established in 1998

K17JI-D


Oliver Spencer (6 October 1736 – 22 January 1811) was a New Jersey officer during the American Revolutionary War and received a special commission to enlist and lead one of 16 Additional Continental Regiments. He was born in Connecticut and later moved to New Jersey, where he married Anna Ogden and became a tanner. He joined the revolutionary cause and engaged a British force in December 1776 as a major of New Jersey militia. On 15 January 1777 during the Forage War, his militiamen captured 70 German mercenaries. That month George Washington authorized him to recruit Spencer's Additional Continental Regiment. As colonel, he led this unit at Brandywine and Germantown in 1777 and Monmouth in 1778. His regiment participated in the Sullivan Expedition in 1779 and was disbanded at the beginning of 1781. The conflict having ruined his home and his tanning business, he moved to Ohio, where he served as a probate judge and militia commander. He was the nephew of General Joseph Spencer.

Early career
Oliver Spencer was born at East Haddam, Connecticut on 6 October 1736. His parents were Samuel Spencer (b. 1708) and Jerusha Brainerd. His father, who was the oldest of the 12 children of Isaac Spencer (b. 1678) and Mary Selden, was a captain in the wars against the French in Canada. One of his uncles, Joseph Spencer became a Major General in the Continental Army. A second uncle was a prominent Presbyterian clergyman by the name of Elihu Spencer (b. 1721).

After his father died of smallpox when Spencer was about 14 years old, he went to live with the family of Robert Ogden in Elizabethtown, New Jersey. When he reached the age of 21, he wed Robert's daughter Anna Ogden. The newly married couple moved back to East Haddam where they lived for five years. Returning to Elizabethtown, Spencer became partner in his father-in-law's successful tanning business. Under his management, the commercial enterprise continued to prosper until the outbreak of the American Revolution.

New Jersey campaign

Spencer was appointed major of the 2nd Essex County Militia Regiment. When this organization's Colonel Elias Dayton took command of the 3rd New Jersey Regiment, it left Lieutenant Colonel Thomas in charge. When George Washington's army retreated though Elizabethtown in late 1776, the militiamen briefly joined it. From New Brunswick Washington sent the three militia regiments from Essex, Morris, and Sussex Counties to operate against the British flank from the mountains of northern New Jersey. When the militiamen reached Morristown, New Jersey, the commander of the three units resigned, as did Thomas.

The British army commander Sir William Howe decided to halt his successful campaign at the Delaware River and hold New Jersey for the winter with 14 garrisons. Howe left Major General James Grant in charge of the garrisons and returned to New York City. Desiring to pacify the countryside, Grant ordered Brigadier General Alexander Leslie to march to Princeton via Springfield and Bound Brook on 17 December 1776. As Leslie's brigade neared Springfield, it was detected by Spencer's militia which held the town. Sending a courier to Chatham to warn the militia brigade of the British approach, Spencer withdrew his men from Springfield. At Briant's Tavern, Spencer joined the main body of militia and the men advanced to contact the British. With Captain Seeley on the right, Captain Brookfield on the left, Colonel Lindsley on the left center, and Spencer on the right center, the New Jersey militia skirmished with Leslie's brigade near Woodruff's Tavern. The engagement lasted about one hour before darkness fell, upon which the militia withdrew about one mile. During the action Spencer's horse was killed under him. When the militiamen discovered the British were gone in the morning, they were greatly encouraged at their apparent success.

After a Hessian brigade was crushed at the Battle of Trenton on 26 December 1776 and a British brigade was mauled at the Battle of Princeton on 3 January 1777, Howe and Lord Charles Cornwallis hastily withdrew their forces from nearly all of New Jersey. This strategic retreat was immediately followed by the Forage War in which bodies of New Jersey militia and Continental Army troops severely harassed British and German forage parties. On 16 January at Connecticut Farms, 300 New Jersey militia led by Spencer ambushed 100 German foragers. In the Connecticut Farms action the mercenaries were nearly wiped out with losses of one killed and 70 captured. Another source noted an operation in which Spencer's men killed or captured almost 100 "mounted Waldecks". but did not give a date. He was also credited for boldly attacking an enemy picket near Elizabethtown.

Spencer's Additional Regiment

On 27 December 1776, the Continental Congress authorized Washington to form 16 new battalions of infantry. These became known as the "Sixteen Additional Regiments". Immediately, the commanding general began appointing officers to recruit these new units. Washington offered two of the regiments to New Jersey militia officers, Spencer and Samuel Griffin. Spencer accepted but Griffin declined and David Forman was appointed instead. On 11 January 1777, Spencer's Additional Continental Regiment came into existence as part of Washington's main army. During the spring, the unit assembled at Monmouth County, New Jersey. Seven of its companies hailed from New Jersey, while one company was recruited from Pennsylvania. Spencer became colonel and Eleazer Lindsley became the regiment's lieutenant colonel. Their commissions dated from 15 January 1777. No major was listed.

On 22 May 1777, Spencer's Regiment transferred into the 3rd Pennsylvania Brigade which was commanded by French-Irish volunteer Thomas Conway. The brigade fought in Lord Stirling's division at the Battle of Brandywine on 11 September 1777. Conway's brigade, which also included the 3rd, 6th, 9th, and 12th Pennsylvania Regiments, was driven off the field. At the Battle of Germantown on 4 October 1777, Conway's Brigade led John Sullivan's right column. When contact was made with the 2nd Light Infantry Battalion, Conway's men pressed straight on over Mount Airy while Sullivan's Maryland division formed on its right and Anthony Wayne's Pennsylvania division moved to its left. After meeting resistance from the 40th Foot at the Chew House, Sullivan ordered Conway's brigade to shift to a position on the right flank of the Maryland division. At this point Sullivan's men passed west of the Chew House and into the fog and battle smoke. Eventually, Sullivan's men were attacked at a time when they had run low on ammunition. After losing a few senior officers, the troops began a hasty retreat.

Francis B. Heitman listed Spencer as the commanding officer of his regiment at Valley Forge. Together with Malcolm's Additional Continental Regiment and the four Pennsylvania regiments, Spencer's formed part of Conway's brigade. At the Battle of Monmouth on 28 June 1778, the 3rd Pennsylvania Brigade included 39 officers, 56 sergeants, and 343 rank and file in the six units listed above. Before a substantial number of men were detached to units of the advance guard, the brigade numbered 42 officers, 112 non-coms, 20 staff, and 445 rank and file. Late in the day, Wayne pushed forward against the British left flank with the 3rd Pennsylvania, Spencer's, and Malcolm's Regiments. At first, the 1st Grenadier Battalion was isolated but soon the 33rd Foot came to its help and drove back Wayne's thrust.

Spencer's Regiment was assigned to the Highlands Department in July 1778 and transferred to the Middle Department in November of that year. In April 1779 the regiment absorbed Forman's Additional Continental Regiment and part of Malcolm's regiment to form nine companies. Lindsley retired in May and his replacement as lieutenant colonel was William S. Smith. John Burrowes joined the regiment in July 1779. In late June, the unit became part of the New Jersey Brigade. Spencer's Regiment marched with the Sullivan Expedition in the summer of 1779. With the 1st and 2nd New Jersey Regiments, the unit formed part of William Maxwell's 1st Brigade. At the Battle of Newtown on 29 August, Sullivan routed a force of Indians and Tories. That was the only serious fighting as the expedition visited large scale destruction on Iroquois villages. Spencer's Regiment was assigned to the Highlands Department in September 1780 and disbanded on 1 January 1781.

Post-Revolution
Following the War, Spencer joined other New Jersey officers in becoming a founding member of the Society of the Cincinnati in the State of New Jersey.

Spencer's home and tannery in Elizabethtown were thoroughly despoiled by the enemy. He suffered additional losses because of the depreciation of the currency. Determined to find a living, he moved with his family to the Miami Valley in Ohio where he bought three sections of land. When he arrived in Columbia, Ohio, the governor of the territory Arthur St. Clair made him the colonel of the local militia and probate judge for Hamilton County. One source gives a glowing account of Spencer's "spotless" character and generosity. He died at Columbia on 22 January 1811.

Notes

References

1736 births
1811 deaths
Continental Army officers from New Jersey
People of colonial New Jersey
People of colonial Connecticut
People of New Jersey in the American Revolution
Burials at Spring Grove Cemetery
Probate court judges in the United States

Oliver Spencer


Charles "Charlie" Kunz (August 18, 1896 – March 16, 1958) was a British musician, who became well-known and liked during the British dance band era. He played in nightclubs where people would come to ballroom dance. He had a rhythmic, relaxed style and played popular music with his own way of expressing feeling and moods.

Early life and career
Kunz was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania in 1896.  His father was a master baker who also played the French horn. Young Charlie began to play in front of an audience as an amateur when he was only six years old. When he was seven, he had become good enough to play as a professional pianist.

He came to England in 1922 with a small dance band that was led by the drummer, Ed Krick. Kunz liked London so well that he did not want to leave, so that band returned without him to Pennsylvania. In England, he soon became such a popular pianist that he gave up his own orchestra to just work at his piano playing. He played at ballroom and nightclub venues and also on the BBC radio. Two of Britain's most famous female vocalists were with his band in the 1930s; Vera Lynn  and Welsh songstress Dorothy Squires. His best known singer was George Barclay, who was known as a crooner, a popular singing style at that time.

His first time playing as a soloist came in 1934 at the Holborn Empire. In that same year, he began to record the first of many solo records of "Charlie Kunz Medleys".  His most famous song was Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie. Each time he performed, his closing theme was Pink Elephants.

Personal life and death
He was married three times. He had one child with his first wife, Amanda Dysher. She later died. In 1923, he married again Eva Dorothy "Nin" Lloyd, who was a fashion model. They had two sons. They were married until 1939. His third wife was Pat Sparkes, whom he married in 1942. They were still married when he died.
He kept living in England until his death from a heart attack in 1958. He is buried in Streatham Vale Cemetery.

References

Other websites

Charlie Kunz
Charlie Kunz Discography
Charlie Kunz Biography - AllMusic

1896 births
1958 deaths
American pianists
Musicians from Pennsylvania
People from Allentown, Pennsylvania
Bandleaders
Jazz pianists
Deaths from myocardial infarction

Charlie Kunz