german weekday

morning 🙂
by executing the function <?php the_date(‘d.m.Y’,'<h2>’,'</h2>’); ?> I’m not able to show also the weekday. I searched for the php-tag, but did not find it anyway, so that it would be ok 🙁
I don’t wont to usw <?php the_weekday(); ?>, because this would destroy my layout (and I wonna have the output of weekday and date in one string).
thanks for your help