Germany

Germany (/ˈdʒɜːrməni/; German: Deutschland [ˈdɔʏtʃlant]), officially the Federal Republic of Germany
(German: Bundesrepublik Deutschland, is a federal parliamentary republic in West-Central Europe. It
includes 16 constituent states and covers an area of 357,021 square kilometres with a largely
temperate seasonal climate. Its capital and largest city is Berlin. With about 81.5 million inhabitants,
Germany is the most populous member state in the European Union. After the United States, it is the
second most popular migration destination in the world.
Various Germanic tribes have occupied the northern parts of current Germany since classical
antiquity. A region named Germania was documented before 100 AD. During the Migration Period
the Germanic tribes expanded southward. Beginning in the 10th century, German territories formed
a central part of the Holy Roman Empire.[8] During the 16th century, northern German regions
became the centre of the Protestant Reformation.
The rise of Pan-Germanism inside the German Confederation resulted in the unification of many of
the German states in 1871 into the Prussian-dominated German Empire. After World War I and the
German Revolution of 1918–1919, the Empire was replaced by the parliamentary Weimar Republic.
The establishment of the national socialist dictatorship in 1933 led to World War II and systematic
genocide. After 1945, Germany split into two states, East Germany and West Germany. In 1990, the
country was reunified.
In the 21st century, Germany is a great power and has the world's fourth-largest economy by
nominal GDP, as well as the fifth-largest by PPP. As a global leader in several industrial and
technological sectors, it is both the world's third-largest exporter and importer of goods. Germany is
a developed country with a very high standard of living sustained by a skilled and productive society.
It upholds a social security and universal health care system, environmental protection and a tuition-
free university education.
Germany was a founding member of the European Union in 1993. It is part of the Schengen Area,
and became a co-founder of the Eurozone in 1999. Germany is a member of the United Nations,
NATO, the G8, the G20, and the OECD. The national military expenditure is the 9th highest in the
world. Known for its rich cultural history, Germany has been continuously the home of influential
artists, philosophers, musicians, sportsmen, entrepreneurs, scientists and inventors.

The English word Germany derives from the Latin Germania, which
came into use after Julius Caesar adopted it for the peoples east of
the Rhine.[11] The German term Deutschland, originally diutisciu
land ("the German lands") is derived from deutsch (cf. dutch),
descended from Old High German diutisc "popular" (i.e. belonging to
the diot or diota "people"), originally used to distinguish the language
of the common people from Latin and its Romance descendants. This
in turn descends from Proto-Germanic *þiudiskaz "popular" (see also

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the Latinised form Theodiscus), derived from *þeudō, descended
from Proto-Indo-European *tewtéh₂- "people"

The discovery of the Mauer 1 mandible shows that ancient humans

were present in Germany at least 600,000 years ago. The oldest
complete hunting weapons found anywhere in the world were
discovered in a coal mine in Schöningen where three 380,000-year-
old wooden javelins 6–7.5 feet long were unearthed.[The Neander
Valley was the location where the first ever non-modern human fossil
was discovered, the new species of human was named Neanderthal
man. The Neanderthal 1 fossils are known to be 40,000 years old.
Evidence of modern humans, similarly dated, has been found in caves
in the Swabian Jura near Ulm. The finds include 42,000-year-old bird
bone and mammoth ivory flutes which are the oldest musical
instruments ever found, the 40,000-year-old Ice Age Lion Man which
is the oldest uncontested figurative art ever discovered,and the
35,000-year-old Venus of Hohle Fels which is the oldest uncontested
human figurative art ever discovered. Nebra sky disk is a bronze
artifact created during the European Bronze Age attributed to a site
near Nebra, Saxony-Anhalt. It is part of UNESCO's Memory of the
World Register.

The Germanic tribes are thought to date from the Nordic Bronze Age or the Pre-Roman Iron Age.
From southern Scandinavia and north Germany, they expanded south, east and west from the 1st
century BC, coming into contact with the Celtic tribes of Gaul as well as Iranian, Baltic, and Slavic
tribes in Central and Eastern Europe. Under Augustus, Rome began to invade Germania (an area
extending roughly from the Rhine to the Ural Mountains). In 9 AD, three Roman legions led by Varus
were defeated by the Cheruscan leader Arminius. By 100 AD, when Tacitus wrote Germania,
Germanic tribes had settled along the Rhine and the Danube (the Limes Germanicus), occupying
most of the area of modern Germany; Austria, Baden Württemberg, southern Bavaria, southern
Hessen and the western Rhineland, however, were Roman provinces.

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In the 3rd century a number of large West Germanic tribes emerged: Alemanni, Franks, Chatti,
Saxons, Frisii, Sicambri, and Thuringii. Around 260, the Germanic peoples broke into Roman-
controlled lands.After the invasion of the Huns in 375, and with the decline of Rome from 395,
Germanic tribes moved further south-west. Simultaneously several large tribes formed in what is
now Germany and displaced the smaller Germanic tribes. Large areas (known since the Merovingian
period as Austrasia) were occupied by the Franks, and Northern Germany was ruled by the Saxons
and Slavs.

For 900 years, the history of Germany was intertwined with the history of the Holy Roman Empire. In
800, the Frankish king Charlemagne was crowned emperor and founded the Carolingian Empire,
which was divided in 843 among his heirs. The Holy Roman Empire included the eastern portion of
Charlemagne's original kingdom and emerged as the strongest. Its territory stretched from the Eider
River in the north to the Mediterranean coast in the south.
The Ottonian emperors (919–1024) consolidated several major duchies and the German king Otto I
was crowned Holy Roman Emperor of these regions in 962. In 996 Gregory V became the first
German Pope, appointed by his cousin Otto III, whom he shortly after crowned Holy Roman Emperor.
The Holy Roman Empire absorbed northern Italy and Burgundy under the reign of the Salian
emperors (1024–1125), although the emperors lost power through the Investiture Controversy.
In the 12th century, under the Hohenstaufen emperors (1138–1254), German princes increased their
influence further south and east into territories inhabited by Slavs; they encouraged German
settlement in these areas, called the eastern settlement movement (Ostsiedlung). Members of the
Hanseatic League, which included mostly north German cities and towns, prospered in the expansion
of trade. In the south, the Greater Ravensburg Trade Corporation (Große Ravensburger
Handelsgesellschaft) served a similar function. The edict of the Golden Bull issued in 1356 by
Emperor Charles IV provided the basic constitutional structure of the Empire and codified the
election of the emperor by seven prince-electors who ruled some of the most powerful principalities
and archbishoprics.
Population declined in the first half of the 14th century, starting with the Great Famine in 1315,
followed by the Black Death of 1348–50.Despite the decline, however, German artists, engineers,
and scientists developed a wide array of techniques similar to those used by the Italian artists and
designers of the time who flourished in such merchant city-states as Venice, Florence and Genoa.
Artistic and cultural centers throughout the German states produced such artists as the Augsburg
painters Hans Holbein and his son, and Albrecht Dürer. Johannes Gutenberg introduced moveable-
type printing to Europe, a development that played a key role in the Renaissance, Reformation, the
Age of Enlightenment, and the Scientific revolution, and laid the material basis for the modern
knowledge-based economy and the spread of learning to the masses.
The Holy Roman Empire in 1648, after the Peace of Westphalia which ended the Thirty Years' War
In 1517, the Wittenberg monk Martin Luther publicised The Ninety-Five Theses, challenging the
Roman Catholic Church and initiating the Protestant Reformation. In 1555, the Peace of Augsburg
established Lutheranism as an acceptable alternative to Catholicism, but also decreed that the faith
of the prince was to be the faith of his subjects, a principle called Cuius regio, eius religio. The
agreement at Augsburg failed to address other religious creed: for example, the Reformed faith was

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still considered a heresy and the principle did not address the possible conversion of an ecclesiastic
ruler, such as happened in Electorate of Cologne in 1583. From the Cologne War until the end of the
Thirty Years' Wars (1618–1648), religious conflict devastated German lands.The latter reduced the
overall population of the German states by about 30 percent, and in some places, up to 80
percent.The Peace of Westphalia ended religious warfare among the German states.German rulers
were able to choose either Roman Catholicism, Lutheranism or the Reformed faith as their official
religion after 1648
In the 18th century, the Holy Roman Empire consisted of approximately 1,800 territories.The
elaborate legal system initiated by a series of Imperial Reforms (approximately 1450–1555) created
the Imperial Estates and provided for considerable local autonomy among ecclesiastical, secular, and
hereditary states, reflected in Imperial Diet. The House of Habsburg held the imperial crown from
1438 until the death of Charles VI in 1740. Having no male heirs, he had convinced the Electors to
retain Habsburg hegemony in the office of the emperor by agreeing to the Pragmatic Sanction. This
was finally settled through the War of Austrian Succession; in the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, Maria
Theresa's husband became Holy Roman Emperor, and she ruled the Empire as Empress Consort.
From 1740, dualism between the Austrian Habsburg Monarchy and the Kingdom of Prussia
dominated the German states in the 18th century. As a consequence of the French Revolutionary
Wars, and the subsequent final meeting of the Imperial Diet, most of the secular Free Imperial Cities
were annexed by dynastic territories; the ecclesiastical territories were secularized and annexed. In
1806 the Imperium was dissolved; German states, particularly the Rhineland states, fell under the
influence of France. Until 1815, France, Russia, Prussia and the Habsburgs competed for hegemony in
the German states during the Napoleonic Wars.

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