LAND & PEOPLE

The 81 million people of the Federal Republic of Germany occupy a landmass of 137,847 square miles (357,022 square kilometers) at the very heart of Europe. Not the largest country in Europe but the powerhouse of the European Union, Germany is a beautiful, varied, and fascinating place to live, work, or visit. The impact of her scholars, scientists, artists, musicians, writers, philosophers, and politicians on European culture has been profound, and has influenced much of the way the modern world thinks and acts.

Although Germany had been settled for thousands of years, it became a single political entity only in 1871, when it was unified under Wilhelm I of Prussia by the statesman Otto von Bismarck. Who, then, are the German people, where did they come from, and what are they like today? A good way to start is by taking a look at the land that has shaped the people.

GEOGRAPHY

Germany occupies a pivotal position in Central Europe, bounded to the north by the North Sea, Denmark, and the Baltic Sea; to the east by Poland and the Czech Republic; to the south by Austria and Switzerland; and to the west by France, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands. So many neighboring territories have always created a security problem and, with historically shifting borders, German-speaking populations have periodically found themselves incorporated into other countries. This is particularly true of the Alsace region of France and the German-speaking part of Switzerland. Until unification in 1871 the word "Germany" had been a geographical term, referring to an area occupied by small states, ruled by priests and princes, and for much of its history under the dominance of Rome and the Holy Roman Empire that succeeded it.

Germany has a wide variety of landscapes. There are three main geographical regions: the lowland plain in the north, the uplands in the center, and a mountainous region in the south. The lowlands include several river valleys and a large area of heathland (the Lüneburger Heide, the oldest national park in Germany).

At sea level on the North Sea and Baltic coasts there are sand dunes, marshlands, and several islands including the North Friesian islands, the South Friesian islands, Rügen, and Heligoland in the North Sea. The eastern part of the lowland plain is Germany's breadbasket, rich in agricultural land. Between Hanover in the north and the Main River in the south are Germany's uplands with low mountains, valleys, and river basins. The mountains include the Taunus and Spessart ranges, and the Fichtelgebirge in the east.

The part of Germany best known to visitors is probably the southwestern mountain region containing the Black Forest (Schwarzwald), where the famous Schwarzwälderkirschtorte (a chocolate, cream, kirsch, and cherry cake) comes from. In the far south are the Bavarian Alps with Germany's highest peak, the Zugspitze, at 9,718 feet (2,962 meters).

The other major feature of the German landscape is its rivers. The most important of these is the Rhine, which rises in Switzerland and flows along the border with France before entering Germany proper and eventually flowing out through the Netherlands to the North Sea. The Rhine is both a major water transportation network and home to some of Germany's most beautiful scenery. Magnificent fortress-castles guard its banks. Vineyards cascade down the hill slopes to the river and its tributaries, the Mosel and the Neckar, yielding the grapes that produce the Hocks and Rieslings for which Germany is so well known. The Ruhr, traditional center of German industry, is also a tributary of the Rhine. The Elbe rises in the Czech Republic and flows northwest across the German plain to the North Sea, and the Danube (in German, Donau) rises on the eastern slopes of the Black Forest and flows eastward before entering Austria. The Oder and Neisse rivers form the international border with Poland in the east. Other major rivers are the Main, the Weser, and the Spree.

There are many large lakes on the northeastern plain, but those in the mountainous south are more dramatic. The most famous of these is Lake Constance (Bodensee).

Some 30 percent of the countryside is unspoilt woodland. About 80 percent of Germany is agricultural land, but the number of farms has diminished and agriculture makes up only 0.8 percent of the German economy (2012 figures) and employs only 1.5 of the German workforce.

Germany, historically and today, is a focal point of European interaction, both through its nine bordering states and through its waterways carrying goods from all over Europe to the North Sea and Baltic ports.

CLIMATE

Germany's climate is temperate and marine. The northern lowlands are slightly warmer than the mountainous south, which gets most of the rain and snow. The average rainfall is 23–27 inches (600–700 mm) a year. Temperatures range from 21°F (–6°C) in the mountains, and 35°F (1.5°C) in the lowlands, in winter, to 64°F (18°C), and even 68°F (20°C) in the valleys, in summer.

The Föhn

A peculiar feature of the Alpine climate in southern Germany is the Föhn. This is a warm, dry wind that blows down the leeward slope of a mountain. As moist air rises up the windward side, it cools and loses its moisture. When it descends it heats up because of the increase in pressure, and can cause a 10° rise in temperature in a short period. The Föhn brings clear, warm weather, and is often marked by beautiful twilight periods. Expect sudden atmospheric changes.

THE GERMAN PEOPLE: A BRIEF HISTORY

Every country has its own founding myth. In Britain it is the story of the Celts, King Arthur, and the mysterious land of Avalon. In the United States it is the story of the Founding Fathers.

"Germany" was not a name chosen by peoples who inhabited the area. "Germania" was the name they were given by the Roman historian Tacitus, who rather admired them.

The original Germans were hunter-gatherers who seem to have migrated westward and southward from Asia and from northeastern Europe around 2300 BCE, and who settled in areas around the Danube. They seem to have arrived in two main waves. The first were Celtic peoples, who raised crops, bred livestock, and traded with their Mediterranean neighbors. Archeological finds suggest that these people were among the first to develop copper and tin mining, and to make implements and containers out of bronze. Later arrivals, probably originally from southern Russia, moved into north and central Germany, and these are the real ancestors of the German-speaking peoples. They introduced the use of iron, developed metal tools and weapons, and eventually absorbed the peoples of the existing Celtic Bronze Age culture.

The German tribes spread along the northeastern frontier of the Roman Empire and became Rome's most ferocious opponents. A founding myth of Germany is the famous victory over the Roman legions by Hermann (Latin, Arminius), a chieftain of the Cherusci tribe, in a battle in the Teutoburg forest in 9 CE. The Teutoburge Wald remains sacred to German memory to this day.

The movie Gladiator, you may remember, begins with a battle fought by the Roman army under the Emperor Marcus Aurelius (161–180 CE) against the invading German hordes. As Roman power declined, so the German tribes advanced, eventually sacking Rome itself in 410 CE.

The Carolingian Empire

German history proper begins with the conquests of the Frankish king Karl der Grosse, better known as Charlemagne, who succeeded in a short period in consolidating the Germanic tribes, converting pagans, and imposing order on the whole of continental Europe. His capital at Aachen in North Rhine-Westphalia became the center of a renaissance of learning. He also promoted the Frankish tongue.

During the first millennium of the Christian Era borders in Europe were fluid, first determined by the needs of the Roman Empire, and later influenced by dynastic marriages and the Church. With the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West, the Church in Rome became the sole heir and transmitter of imperial culture and legitimacy. Charlemagne, as the champion of Christendom, revived the title of "Roman emperor" and in 800 CE was crowned Holy Roman Emperor by Pope Leo III in Rome. The new line of "Roman" emperors he inaugurated lasted for more than a thousand years, although they seldom had any power outside the boundaries of Germany. After his death, the empire he had created began to fragment, partly owing to the peculiarly German laws of inheritance that apportioned land equally among sons. Nevertheless, a series of vigorous German kings tried to convert the Roman empire of the West into reality, which brought them into conflict with the Popes and the revived city-republics of Italy. This struggle became a major factor in the political history of the Middle Ages.

During the Middle Ages the German princes consolidated their landholdings, originally held as fiefs granted by the Holy Roman Emperor. Gradually these principalities became more independent, uniting only to elect one of their number as Holy Roman Emperor on the death of his predecessor. By the sixteenth century, the title had become hereditary, and had passed to a single German dynasty — the Austrian House of Habsburg. After the Thirty Years' War (1618–48) between Protestants and Catholics in Central Europe, the Holy Roman Emperor's authority in Germany was greatly reduced.

What we know today as Germany was thus a patchwork of small autonomous principalities, duchies, kingdoms, and a few free cities, owing a loose allegiance to the Holy Roman Emperor. This situation lasted until the Holy Roman Empire was dissolved by Napoleon in 1806.

Some German cities had acquired a special status. Foremost among these were the members of the Hanseatic League, a medieval confederation of north German cities with a monopoly on the North Sea and Baltic trade. The Hansa towns, which included Bremen, Hamburg, and Lübeck, traded overseas and had a leading commercial role in what was a largely agricultural economy.

The Reformation

In 1517, the Augustinian monk Martin Luther initiated the Protestant Reformation in Germany by protesting publicly against the Vatican's sale of indulgences (promises freeing the bearer from all his or her sins). His protests found an echo in many of the north German principalities and a number of them adopted the Protestant Lutheran religion. Political, economic, and religious interests soon became intertwined. In the following century the Electors of the Holy Roman Empire were deeply divided into Catholic and Protestant camps.

A revolt by the Bohemian (Czech) nobles against the proposed accession to the throne of Bohemia of the Habsburg Emperor's cousin, Ferdinand of Styria, soon triggered a wider conflict. Ferdinand became Holy Roman Emperor the following year, and the resultant Thirty Years' War engulfed Germany, Austria, Sweden, the Netherlands, and France. One legacy of the struggle between the Catholic and Protestant states is the split today between the mainly Protestant north of Germany and the mainly Catholic south.

The Rise of Prussia

Crucial to understanding the development of modern Germany is the rise of Prussia. Officially abolished in 1947, in the postwar division of Germany, the Prussian state embodied much that seems quintessentially German — discipline, efficiency, militarism, and the dominance of the Junker aristocratic class. Interestingly, Prussia emerged relatively late in German history. Situated in the northeast of Germany, from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries it was an undeveloped wasteland, a little like the American West at the beginning of the nineteenth century, inhabited by pagan Prussian and Lithuanian tribes. It was formed and governed by the Teutonic Knights, a chivalric order of military monks, an offshoot of the Knights Templar, whose mission was to convert the Baltic peoples to Christianity. At their height they controlled an area the size of Great Britain from their capital at Marienburg, present-day Malbork in Poland.

The Teutonic Knights were heavily defeated by a Polish–Lithuanian army at the Battle of Tannenberg in 1410. In 1525 under the influence of Martin Luther, their Grand Master, Prince Albrecht of Hohenzollern, converted to Protestantism and the Order itself was secularized. The brethren began to marry and hold land, and soon became a new military aristocracy. In the same year Albrecht transformed Prussia into a hereditary duchy, owing suzerainty to Poland. In 1618 Prussia passed by inheritance to the Hohenzollern Electors of Brandenburg, who consolidated and expanded its power. Polish sovereignty was thrown off by Friedrich Wilhelm, the "Great Elector," and so was born a vigorous new power, whose noble or "Junker" class was steeped in a long martial tradition.

Prussia became a kingdom in 1701, and rose to international prominence in the eighteenth century under Friedrich II, known as "the Great," who built an army of such efficiency and might that its soldiers were crucial in maintaining the European balance of power. For example, at the Battle of Waterloo against Napoleon, in 1815, it was General Blücher's Prussian troops who turned the tide of battle in the Allies' favor. Nationalist reaction to the creation of the Napoleonic Empire was a spur to internal social and administrative reform and Prussian regeneration.

Following the defeat of Napoleon, the victorious Allies created a new German Confederation to fill the void left by the destruction of the Holy Roman Empire. This association of states was dominated by Austria until after 1848. By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, Prussia had emerged as the most powerful German state and a deadly rival of Austria. Prussia's aim, the plan of its Chancellor, Prince Otto von Bismarck, was to unite the German nation under its leadership. Austria's policy was to control a divided Germany. The determining factor was the strength and organization of the Prussian army, and the decisive battle took place in 1866.

Prussia's other main rival in Europe was France, and in 1870 Bismarck succeeded in maneuvering the French Emperor Napoleon III into declaring war. After inflicting a humiliating defeat on the French in 1870, in 1871 Bismarck declared Prussia's Wilhelm I Kaiser (Emperor) of a united Germany, with its capital at Berlin, in an historic ceremony in the hall of mirrors of the palace at Versailles.

The new German Empire thus came into being with little experience of democracy, but great experience of military organization and campaigning. The huge organizing power and energy of Germany was soon evident in the speed of its industrialization — by 1900 German industrial output matched the achievements of first Britain and then America in the century and a half before. Bismarck, the architect of German unification, became the first Chancellor of the Empire, but was later dropped by the Kaiser's successor, Wilhelm II. It was Wilhelm II who precipitated the First World War (1914–18), which not only engulfed Europe but saw American troops fighting in Europe for the first time.

The Weimar Republic

Anger with Germany for causing the First World War led the victorious Allies to impose crippling reparation payments, while cutting Germany back to its pre-1914 borders. In 1919 a National Constituent Assembly met at Weimar, on the Elbe River, to draw up a new, democratic constitution. One could argue that the young Weimar Republic never stood much of a chance, sandwiched as it was between the demands of an aggressive Communist Party (fired by the recent success of the Russian Revolution of 1917) on the left, and the rise of National Socialism (fueled by resentment of the unfair burden of reparations, the loss of German territory, and the social dislocation brought about the by the Great Depression of the early 1930s) on the right.

The National Socialist, or Nazi, party won the elections of 1932 with 37.3 percent of the vote, and by 1933 its leader Adolf Hitler was both Chancellor and Head of State of the Third German Reich.

The Third Reich

Hitler aggressively pursued his aim of making Germany great again by building up the German army, navy, and airforce, and seeking to reverse the territorial losses of the First World War. Annexation of the Rhineland was followed by the invasion of Austria, the Sudetenland, and then the rest of Czechoslovakia. Ruthlessly crushing all internal opposition, he created a totalitarian dictatorship that indoctrinated the public with Nazi ideology, and set out to realize its dream of creating a racially pure Aryan nation by forcibly acting against "undesirable" groups — not only dissidents, but also Romanies, Russians, prostitutes, homosexuals, and, above all, Jews. In 1939, flush with his earlier successes, he plunged Germany once more into war by invading Poland.