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Germany

 
Germany
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Germany
(Mapping Specialists, Ltd.)
(jûr'mə-nē) pronunciation

A country of north-central Europe. Occupied since c. 500 B.C. by Germanic tribes, the region became part of the Frankish empire by the sixth century A.D. Later it became a loose federation of principalities and the nucleus of the Holy Roman Empire until the imperial state was broken up by Napoleon in 1806. Germany became a confederation after 1815 and then an empire centered around Prussia (1871-1918). Following its defeat in World War I, it was reorganized as the Weimar Republic, which collapsed when Adolf Hitler rose to power and formed the Third Reich. Germany's defeat in 1945 at the end of World War II resulted in its division into four occupation zones, each controlled by an Allied power. Out of the U.S., French, and British zones West Germany was established in 1949, while the Soviet zone became East Germany. The two Germanies were reunified in 1990 after the fall of the East German Communist government. Berlin is the capital and largest city. Population: 82,400,000.

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Country, north-central Europe. Area: 137,879 sq mi (357,104 sq km). Population: (2010 est.) 81,644,000. Capital: Berlin. The majority of the people are German. Language: German (official). Religions: Christianity (Protestant, Roman Catholic, other Christians); also Islam. Currency: euro. The land is generally flat in the north and hilly in the northeast and central region, rising to the Bavarian Alps in the south. The Rhine River basin dominates the central and western part of the country; other important rivers include the Elbe, Danube, and Oder. Germany has a developed free-market economy largely based on services and manufacturing. It is one of the richest countries in the world. Exports include motor vehicles and iron and steel products. Germany is a federal multiparty republic with two legislative houses; the head of state is the president, and the head of government is the chancellor. Germanic tribes entered Germany c. 2nd century BCE, displacing the Celts. The Romans failed to conquer the region, which became a political entity only with the division of the Carolingian empire in the 9th century CE. The monarchy's control was weak, and power increasingly devolved upon the nobility, organized in feudal states. The monarchy was restored under Saxon rule in the 10th century, and the Holy Roman Empire, centring on Germany and northern Italy, was revived. Continuing conflict between the Holy Roman emperors and the Roman Catholic popes undermined the empire, and its dissolution was accelerated by Martin Luther's revolt (1517), which divided Germany, and ultimately Europe, into Protestant and Catholic camps, culminating in the Thirty Years' War (1618 – 48). Germany's population and borders were greatly reduced, and its numerous feudal princes gained virtually full sovereignty. In 1862 Otto von Bismarck came to power in Prussia and in 1871 united the Germans, founding the German Empire. It was dissolved in 1918 after its defeat in World War I, and the Weimar Republic was declared. Germany was stripped of much of its territory and all of its colonies. In 1933 Adolf Hitler became chancellor and established a totalitarian state, the Third Reich, dominated by the Nazi Party. Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, plunging the world into World War II, and he was responsible for the Holocaust, the systematic killing of some six million Jews and millions of others. Following its defeat in 1945, Germany was divided by the Allies into four zones of occupation. Disagreement with the Soviet Union over their reunification led to the creation in 1949 of the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). Berlin, the former capital, remained divided. West Germany became a prosperous parliamentary democracy, East Germany a one-party state under Soviet control. In 1952 Germany became a founding member of the European Coal and Steel Community, the forerunner of the European Union. The East German communist government was overthrown peacefully in 1989, and Germany was reunited in 1990. After the initial euphoria over unity, the political and economic integration of the former East Germany into the federal republic resulted in heavy financial burdens for the wealthier former West Germans. However, the country continued to move toward deeper political and economic integration with western Europe through its membership in the European Union.

For more information on Germany, visit Britannica.com.

The older literature tended to depict Germany—i.e. the territories eventually forming the German Empire in 1871—  as one of the cradles of early photography. Probably early in 1839, in fact, the Munich scientists Franz von Kobell (1803-82) and Carl August von Steinheil succeeded in making paper negatives of local sights, and Steinheil revealed the details of their process to the Bavarian Academy of Sciences on 13 April. However, they were not independent of events in France and England, and it was the techniques developed there that soon came to dominate photography's development in Germany.

Early history

As in other countries, it was the daguerreotype which attracted most attention in larger German towns and the press from August 1839. Already that year, daguerreotypes were exhibited for sale, in Hamburg by the optician and instrument maker Rudolf Koppel, and in Berlin by the art dealer Louis Sachse and the optician Theodor Dörffel. Other cities such as Munich, Cologne, Dresden, and Leipzig followed almost immediately. Brochures with descriptions of Daguerre's process were circulating in Germany by the late summer of 1839. Opticians, booksellers, picture dealers, and pharmacists saw photography as a both fascinating and marketable product that could be sold at high prices—sometimes equivalent to a workman's monthly pay. When portraiture became feasible in 1841, the medium's commercial exploitation really began. Daguerreotypists travelled from town to town offering their services: for example, the Swiss-born Johann Baptist Isenring in south Germany, or the Weninger brothers from Vienna in the north. At the same time, 1841-2, the first studios were started in Hamburg (Hermann Biow) and Berlin (J. C. Schall). Recognized both by contemporaries and later critics were, among others, the pioneers Carl Ferdinand Stelzner, Joseph Albert, Franz Hanfstaengl, and Hermann Krone. Specialist periodicals began appearing in the mid-1850s, such as the Prague-based Photographisches Journal (1854-65), then the Photographisches Archiv (1860-97) in Elberfeld and the Photographische Mitteilungen founded by Hermann Wilhelm Vogel in 1864.

The rapidly developing commercial sector was dominated by small businesses, mostly studios with one or two employees. The occupational statistics published under the empire showed 4, 574 people working in photography in 1875, 6, 364 in 1882, as many as 11, 851 in 1895, and 19, 406 in 1907. The percentage of women rose from 7.5 per cent in 1875 to 18.7 per cent in 1907. Although many did processing or finishing jobs in factory-like conditions, a growing number had important front-of-house jobs in studios or, as with the successful Elvira Studio in Munich, ran their own. The Berlin Lette-Verein's excellent women's photography school, founded in 1890, expanded rapidly. The state-subsidized Munich Photography School, founded in 1900, opened its doors to women in 1905.

Camera and equipment manufacture became an important industry. A sizeable infrastructure developed, from which firms like Zeiss, Voigtländer, and Agfa emerged. Eventually the German photographic industry, concentrated especially around Berlin and Dresden, became the largest in Europe. German firms also led the field in related branches like album manufacture and, from the turn of the century, postcard production.

From 1839 until the early 1850s, the daguerreotype was the dominant process, but was then rapidly supplanted by the wet-plate process, which remained dominant into the 1870s. It was then replaced by the gelatin dry-plate process. Although roll-film appeared with the arrival of Kodak cameras at the end of the 1880s, it was not used by professionals until the First World War.

If portraiture was the backbone of commercial photography, it should not be forgotten that the reproduction of works of art (painting, sculpture, and prints), as well as landscape, topographical, architectural, and documentary work was also done by many firms. It is problematical to treat these branches of photography purely in aesthetic terms, or divorced from trends in the fine arts or from practice in other countries. In Germany, as elsewhere, the question of whether photography was an art was discussed. But attempts to formulate the medium's autonomous aesthetic capability in radical terms were rare before the rise of pictorialist ‘art photography’ (Kunstfotografie) in the late 1880s and early 1890s. In visual terms, professional photographers tended to rely on current fine-art conventions, while using the latest technical innovations, such as retouching of negatives and prints, hand colouring, the use of electric light in studios, stereo photography, and new developing and copying techniques; also new formats as they appeared (cartes de visite from c.1860, cabinet prints from the 1870s).

1880-1918

In the last quarter of the 19th century, as photography became increasingly widespread even among the lower middle class, and as important changes occurred in the visual arts, commercial photography came in for increasing criticism. It came mainly from middle-class amateurs, who found much to find fault with, primarily with professional portraiture, but to a degree also with view photography. They not only rejected excessive retouching, unnatural poses, and the whole studio mise-en-scène, but also the ubiquitous albumen print with its hard, shiny surface. From the late 1880s, amateurs founded societies to promote their interests and propagate their ideas, partly by means of regular public exhibitions intended to influence photographic practice generally. One of the most important was the Society for the Encouragement of Amateur Photography (Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Amateurfotografie) founded (initially under a different name) in Hamburg in 1891, and supported by the director of the Kunsthalle, Alfred Lichtwark. The issues were debated above all in newly founded journals like the Photographische Rundschau, the Photographische Correspondenz, and the Atelier des Photographen.

In fact, pictorialist art photography's influence on professional photography was considerable. For portraitists such as Rudolph Dührkoop, Nicola Perscheid, or Hugo Erfurth, it was decisive. Their portraits seemed more atmospheric, more natural, and, to a degree, more private—at all events, their poses, lighting, and printing methods were much more varied and individual than in run-of-the-mill studio work. Some branches of landscape and architectural photography also retreated from the conventional nicely composed long shot and tourist-orientated view. Details and light effects became the centre of aesthetic interest, and—for example in the work of the Hofmeister brothers—the toning and surface texture of the final print. Numerous exhibitions in major German cities, many with international participation, emphasized the movement's importance. By the 1900s, however, the impact of art photography and the debates surrounding it was diminishing markedly, even though the pictorialist style remained dominant. There was a shift towards a more objective or ‘factual’ (sachlich) photography, linked with Erfurth but also with August Sander, who made preliminary pictures for the great project he was to undertake in the 1920s in the years before the First World War.

In the shadow of the debates surrounding art photography, the development of the medium in aesthetically more neutral fields such as science, technology, journalism, documentation, or the purely private sphere went on apace. At the end of the 19th century a new market for photography emerged in the illustrated press. Although photographs by Ottomar Anschütz had been reproduced by the autotype process in the Leipzig Illustrirte Zeitung as early as 1883, it was not until the late 1890s that photographs reproduced in this way appeared regularly in journals and newspapers. The largest-circulation illustrated papers were Ullstein's Berliner illustrirte Zeitung (1891) and Scherl's Woche (1899). Berlin became a centre for press photographers, and alongside existing picture agencies, specialized photo agencies such as Zander & Labisch (1895) appeared.

The First World War led to a remarkable spread of amateur photography. Many soldiers took cameras with them and, official prohibitions notwithstanding, documented their daily lives. Not until 1916, when it established the Picture and Film Bureau (Bild- und Filmamt; BUFA), did the government make systematic use of photographs as propaganda. However, the war's photographic legacy was much more strongly shaped by amateur pictures, mostly taken in rear areas far from the front line.

— Jens Jaeger

Bibliography

  • Peters, U., Stilgeschichte der Fotografie in Deutschland 1839-1900 (1979).
  • Baier, W., Quellendarstellungen zur Geschichte der Fotografie (1980).
  • Kaufhold, E., Bilder des Übergangs: Zur Mediengeschichte von Fotografie und Malerei in Deutschland um 1900 (1986).
  • Dewitz, B. v., and Matz, R., Silber und Salz: Zur Frühzeit der Photographie im deutschen Sprachraum 1839-1860 (1989).
  • Honnef, K., Sachsse, R., and Thomas, K. (eds.), German Photography, 1870-1970: Power of a Medium (1997).
  • Pohlmann, U., and Scheutle, R. (eds.), Lehrjahre, Lichtjahre: Die Münchner Fotoschule 1900-2000 (2000)

The period 1918-45 was one of headlong technical, aesthetic, and organizational change. However, although the process was both far reaching and conspicuous, it was partly rooted in the pre-war years, and still far from complete long after 1945. There were major changes above all in modes of seeing, and in ideas about what photography was and what its tasks should be. Particularly notable between 1918 and 1945 were links between theoretical debate (Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, László Moholy-Nagy, et al.), the proliferation of aesthetic viewpoints, and the growing importance of the medium in culture, politics, and economic life. On the other hand, the enormous range and experimental vitality of artistic and journalistic photography tends to obscure the fact that less spectacular developments like changes in photographic retailing and manufacture, and the vast expansion of amateur photography, were no less characteristic of the period. Older aesthetic traditions also persisted in practically every field. Photographers like Hugo Erfurth and Franz Grainer who were already well known before the war further consolidated their success.

1918-1933

In the photographic industry the growth trend of previous decades resumed soon after the end of the war. A new professional body, the Society of German Photographers (Gesellschaft Deutscher Lichtbildner; GDL), was founded in 1919. In 1925 the numbers officially employed in photography were 15, 673 (including 4, 118 women, or 26.3 per cent). In 1933 the figure was 22, 032, and at the last pre-war count, in 1939, 23, 435 (including 9, 980 women, or 42.6 per cent). The structure of the business remained practically unchanged. Most enterprises were small, with fewer than five employees. But conditions were different on the manufacturing and chemical side, where a strong trend towards concentration developed; and Agfa, Kodak (Germany), and Zeiss-Ikon (founded in 1926) were among the biggest firms. The amateur market became increasingly important, as photography became ever more widely accessible and more workers took it up. (In 1931 workers' photography clubs had c.2, 400 members.)

Technical development favoured the spread of the medium. The industry moved towards smaller, better-specified cameras, with Leitz's Leica, available since 1925, at the peak. Film gradually replaced glass plates, and the almost simultaneous introduction of colour film by Kodak and Agfa from 1936 was of major importance.

It is virtually impossible to list all the most significant trends and personalities in photography in this period. Both photojournalism and photographically illustrated publications had received an enormous boost from the war. Existing illustrated papers were joined by new ones, and circulations rose. The Berliner illustrirte Zeitung reached its peak in 1929 with 1.8 million copies. New creations in the 1920s included the ünchener illustrierte Presse, the Nazi Illustrierter Beobachter, and the Communist Arbeiter illustrierte Zeitung (AIZ), as well as newspaper supplements and a wide range of magazines. New photo agencies were founded, such as Dephot in Berlin (1928). Well-known press photographers of the 1920s and 1930s included the sports specialist Martin Munkácsi, Erich Salomon, Tim Gidal, Felix H. Man, Paul Wolff, and Umbo (Otto Umbehr). Though several had to emigrate after 1933, they continued to work for the press in France, England, or the USA. Only a small proportion of photojournalists had attended a photographic school: for example, the Halle-Burg Giebichstein Design School, the Folkwang School in Essen, the Stuttgart Design School, or older institutions such as the Bavarian State Photographic School. A separate photographic section—under Walter Peterhans— was not established at the Bauhaus until 1929. Nevertheless, there was considerable cross-fertilization between theory and practice. Thus the photomontage developed by John Heartfield with the Dada group became a much-used cover-page device for the AIZ.

Particularly significant for the aesthetics of photography were, on the one hand, the ‘objective’ image (Neue Sachlichkeit—New Objectivity) and, on the other, experimental photography (Neues Sehen—New Vision), including cameraless pictures. Objectivity was exemplified by the work of Albert Renger-Patzsch, whose industrial photographs and landscapes were highly influential. His book The World is Beautiful (Die Welt ist schön, 1929) was a major success. Karl Blossfeldt's macrophotographs of plants emphasized form and structure by isolating the subject. Helmar Lerski and Erna Lendvai-Dircksen adopted a comparable approach with their portraits, which concentrated on the face. August Sander's series of full-length portraits of people of all ages and classes in their surroundings caused a considerable stir when the first images appeared in 1929. Examples of experimental photography were the collages and photograms of Hanna Hoech, Moholy-Nagy, and Raoul Hausmann.In 1929 both the Film und Foto (FiFo) exhibition in Stuttgart, organized by Franz Roh, and Werner Gräff's book Here Comes the New Photographer! (Es kommt der neue Fotograf!) offered an overview of 1920s photography in all its formal variants. The development of both artistic and applied photography (also beyond 1933) can be followed more broadly in annuals like The German Photograph (Das deutsche Lichtbild; 1927-38 and 1955-79) and German Camera-Almanach (Deutscher Camera-Almanach; 1905-41).

1933-1945

In formal and stylistic terms, there was little immediate change after the Nazi seizure of power in January 1933. But theoretical debate soon ceased, and by 1938 many leading photographers and writers had been banned from working or forced to emigrate. Only the politically and racially ‘sound’ could belong to the regime's principal control mechanism, the Reich Chamber of Culture (Reichskulturkammer). In other ways, too, the totalitarian impulse worked its way through the system. Formally and technically, German photojournalism maintained the standards set during the Weimar Republic, and remained as ‘modern’ as its counterparts in democratic countries abroad. But photo-reportage became a tool of the Propaganda Ministry, which as early as March 1933 had established an ‘Illustrated-Press Department’. All press photography was subject to ministerial control, and photojournalists and picture editors lost any semblance of independence. Tactless or incorrect captions, even ‘inappropriate’ positioning of Hitler in relation to other Nazi leaders, could incur dire penalties. All photo agencies came under the control of the regime except for the American Associated Press, which maintained a degree of autonomy until 1941. The leading figure in German press photography between 1933 and 1945 was Heinrich Hoffmann, whose personal relationship with Hitler since the 1920s dominated Führer- and Party-related photography; and Hoffmann's own firm was Germany's largest picture agency. The photographic press was required to propagate Nazi aesthetic principles. Photography clubs and the League of Amateur Photographers (Amateurfotografenverband, f. 1908) were politically ‘coordinated’.

As in painting, a few niches of freedom survived. Herbert List, for example, was able to pursue his surreal ‘metaphysical’ photography without interference. But other individuals (Paul Wolff, Walter Hege (1893-1955), Hilmar Pabel (1910-2000)) came to terms with the regime, or were more or less forced to work for it. Some exponents of 1920s experimentalism, such as Höch, remained in Germany but were unable to exhibit or publish their work.

During the war, initially, photography was promoted in advertisements and propaganda as a bridge between servicemen and home. From 1943, however, scarcity of materials created increasing problems for private photographers. Official war reporting was under military control, with photographers assigned to propaganda companies (PKs). These were formed in 1938 and first deployed during the occupation of the Sudetenland the same year. PK photographers were well equipped (especially by comparison with their British counterparts), often used colour film, and achieved superb results; casualties were correspondingly high. In 1940 the illustrated weekly Signal was launched as a vehicle for propaganda abroad and many of its leading photographers continued their careers in the new generation of West German magazines that emerged after the war.

Bibliography

  • Jens Jaeger
  • Mellor, D. (ed.), Germany: The New Photography 1927-33 (1978).
  • Fiedler, J., Fotografie am Bauhaus (1990).
  • Lugon, O. (ed.), La Photographie en Allemagne: anthologie de textes 1919-39 (1997).
  • Sachsse, R., Die Erziehung zum Wegsehen. Fotografie im NS-Staat (2003)
Post-war German photography was initially dominated by ‘ruin photography’, which presented the devastation of German cities as a kind of blanket warning against war, while suppressing issues of responsibility. By contrast, the task of showing Nazi atrocities was fulfilled by Allied photographers (e.g. Margaret Bourke-White, Lee Miller, Sergei Morosov, George Rodger). The two most celebrated ‘ruin photography’ publications, on Cologne (Hermann Claassen, Gesang im Feuerofen—Song in the Furnace, 1947) and Dresden (Richard Peter Sr., Dresden: Eine Kamera klagt an—Dresden: A Camera's Testimony, 1949) already showed the beginnings of reconstruction. With the start of the Cold War, the ideological confrontation between the two German states was also reflected in photography, with the two ‘scenes’ developing in different directions. But, while the history of West German photography is well documented, material on the East is scarce.

West Germany to 1990

In the West, the photographic industry rapidly reorganized itself, dominated by Agfa, now based in Leverkusen. Both art photography and the amateur market expanded steadily. A major stimulus was the biennial Cologne Photokina show, inaugurated in 1950: the world's largest photographic trade fair but also, largely thanks to L. Fritz Gruber, a photography festival of increasing cultural importance. The German Photographic Society (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie; DGfP), founded in Cologne in 1951, was a photographers' organization attuned to Germany's changing economic conditions. The Society of German Photographers (Gesellschaft Deutscher Lichtbildner; GDL), in existence since 1919, had reorganized itself in the late 1940s, but did not come to terms with its past until the 1980s and 1990s, by which time it had become marginal. In 1987 it renamed itself the German Photographic Academy (DFA).

In the field of photojournalism and the press, Berlin had forfeited its leadership after the war. The Americans in particular were anxious to foster a full range of magazines in Germany. But after the 1949 currency reform, journals started by the Allies (for example Heute, launched in the summer of 1945) became hard to sell, and withered over the next few years. There was increasing competition from new German magazines like the Munich Revue, the Cologne Neue illustrierte, and the Hamburg Kristall, which had appeared in 1946. In 1948 came Stern, Constanze, and Quick. With these magazines, following the example of Life, photography was the core element, claiming to be a universal medium of communication. The annual Das deutsche Lichtbild reappeared—also in an English-language edition—in 1954 (until 1979), its editors Wolf Strache (b. 1910) and later Otto Steinert hoping to restore German art photography's international profile.

The art photography of the 1950s harked back to certain tendencies of the 1920s and developed in the ambit of non-representational, abstract work; solarization, photomontage, photograms, negative prints, and other experimental techniques were revived. Trend setting in West Germany was the fotoform group (f. 1949) with its programme, strongly influenced by Steinert, of ‘subjective photography’. But if most ‘high’ 1950s art photographs were in monochrome, colour was becoming increasingly important. At first it was confined to luxuriously got-up fashion and advertising imagery. But by the late 1950s many German photographers—for example, Peter Cornelius, Walter Boje (1905-92), Erwin Fieger (b. 1928)—were experimenting with colour's aesthetic possibilities. Above all, however, amateurs were taking to it. By the end of the 1960s, colour film usage had outstripped that of black-and-white. (Around this time amateurs were also strongly influenced by Karl Pawek's vision—in the wake of the Family of Man exhibition—of photography as a universal language, and especially by three celebrated ‘world exhibitions’ he organized in 1964, 1968, and 1973.)

In the emerging art of the 1960s, photography was increasingly discovered by ‘fine’ artists, although a certain distance persisted between the fine-art and photography scenes. Under the banner of ‘generative photography’, a group that included Gottfried Jäger, Manfred Kage, and Kilian Breier presented the photographic process as an analytical, step-by-step ‘generative’ system—an approach that tended to result in abstract compositions, often serially organized.

The 1970s saw the rise of so-called ‘authorial photography’ (Autorenphotographie), partly conditioned by a crisis in conventional magazine photojournalism. It was a movement of independent photographers who dedicated themselves to self-selected—and in some cases very long-term—projects that deliberately eschewed any kind of commercial use.

Since the 1970s, photography in Germany, as elsewhere, has embraced a multitude of ideas and tendencies. The proliferating technical options created by new cameras, lenses, and other equipment have encouraged this. In both the amateur and commercial sectors, colour has almost completely supplanted monochrome. Since the 1980s, electronic imaging has increasingly dominated product design, advertising, and photojournalism. This has transformed the relationship between reality, simulation, and fiction, with implications for society's collective visual memory, and for the formation of a supposedly objective public opinion. In the 1990s the truthfulness and authenticity so long naively ascribed to photography were increasingly overshadowed by individual visual worlds and subjective interpretations of reality. The process was accelerated by the spread of digital image capture and manipulation.

East Germany

Reunification in 1990 focused renewed attention on the East German photographic scene. The German Democratic Republic (GDR) had inherited both a mature photographic culture and a sizeable portion of what was left of pre-1945 Germany's world-class photographic industry. VEB-Pentacon, for example, a combine formed in 1964 from several Dresden camera manufacturers, exported robust products like the Praktica single-lens reflex. But ultimately state subsidies were no substitute for the design sophistication and non-stop innovation achieved abroad, especially in Japan. Work in the official media (and in science and industry, with more arcane specialisms in the Stasi and military) was safe but dull, supplying official newspapers like Neues Deutschland with endless images of victorious athletes and optimistic-looking workers, dark-suited communist functionaries and fraternal delegations. Pollution, vandalism, infrastructural decay, escape attempts, and the Wall were taboo. At the same time, although a network of amateur clubs and journals existed, openings for art photographers were limited. By the 1980s a kind of passive opposition was expressing itself in documentation of the grimmer aspects of GDR life. Sad nudes and desolate, poisoned-looking landscapes abounded. But it is premature, given the patchy information available, to write off the history of East German photography as an inevitable dead end. In particular, the role of private photography in the GDR's totalitarian society deserves to be investigated.

Since 1990 The German photographic world at the beginning of the 21st century is multifaceted, partly because of the historically and politically conditioned federal structure of German cultural institutions. German photography is exhibited worldwide, and successful in the market place. Members of the so-called ‘Düsseldorf School’ are particularly highly valued. Many talents have been shaped by the teaching of Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Düsseldorf Academy. Their best-known students include Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Axel Hütte, Thomas Ruff, Jörg Sasse, and Thomas Struth, who have developed in individually distinctive ways within the tradition represented by their teachers; and who, above all, use colour as an indispensable means of expression. In addition to Düsseldorf, many other colleges and academies are notable. The most important photographic collections are also widely distributed: in Hamburg, Munich, Essen, Cologne, Berlin, and Dresden.

Photographers' changing conditions of work were reflected as early as 1969 in the founding of the League of Independent Photo-Designers (Bund Freier Fotodesigner; BFF). In response to the rapid transformation of photojournalism at the end of the 20th century another body, Freelens, was formed in Hamburg in 1995. With c. 1, 400 members it is the largest German photographers' organization, and in particular endeavours to safeguard photographers' creative property rights: an increasingly important task.Ulrich Rüter/Robin Lenman

Featured article: Inner-German Border Photography 1952-1989.

As it did elsewhere in Europe, ballet in Germany began at court. One of the earliest examples is Darmstadt's Die Befreiung des Friedens (The Liberation of Peace) in 1600, which was in effect a ‘sung ballet’. In 1717 in Leipzig, Gottfried Taubert published his Der rechtschaffene Tantzmeister, the first important German dance treatise. Stuttgart was put on the ballet map when Noverre worked there from 1760 to 1767, developing his controversial reforms while acting as ballet master. Stuttgart also attracted Filippo Taglioni and his daughter Marie, who both worked in the city from 1824 to 1828. There they created Danina, oder Jocko der Brasilianische Affe (1826), one of the most popular ballets of the day. Thirty years later Berlin played host to Paul Taglioni, Marie's brother, when he took charge of the Berlin Court Opera Ballet (1856-83). Regular ballet performances started in Berlin after the First World War at the State Opera (Staatsoper), whose directors included Heinrich Kröller (1921-3) and Rudolf von Laban (1930-4). After the Second World War the company, renamed the German State Opera Ballet (also known as the Staatsoper Ballet), continued in what was now East Berlin. In 1955 the company moved back to its rebuilt house, Unter den Linden, where it is still based. Berlin's second opera house, the Charlottenburg, which opened in 1912 in what became West Berlin, is today the German Opera House, home to the Berlin Opera Ballet.

Modern dance took hold in Germany after visits by Isadora Duncan and Ruth St Denis in the early 1900s. While interest in classical dance was waning, there was great interest in the new expressive dance, or Ausdruckstanz. In 1911 Jaques-Dalcroze opened his institute for applied rhythm in the Dresden suburb of Hellerau. The leading figures in German modern dance after the First World War were Rudolf von Laban (who had set up his school in Munich in 1910) and Mary Wigman, both of whom ran influential schools. The most significant work to emerge from this period was Kurt Jooss's The Green Table, which was premiered by the Essen Folkwang Ballet in Paris in 1932. The Second World War, and the Nazi regime, put a stop to the development of ballet in the country. In the 1950s ballet in East Germany came under the influence of the Soviet school, with the two main companies in East Berlin taking a lead in the development of Socialist Realism. In West Germany, meanwhile, every opera house had its own ballet company, most of them classically based. From the 1960s onwards, dance in West Germany was strongly influenced by British and American ideas, thanks to the influx of foreign directors and choreographers like John Cranko in Stuttgart, Kenneth MacMillan in Berlin, William Forsythe in Frankfurt, and John Neumeier in Hamburg. In the field of modern dance, Germany's Pina Bausch became a leading international player. Among German ballet companies today, the Stuttgart Ballet and the Frankfurt Ballet are the most internationally recognized for their innovation and excellence. The Bavarian State Ballet is one of the leading regional companies, while the Leipzig Ballet (under Uwe Scholz's direction) symbolizes the rebirth of dance in the former East Germany following the collapse of Communism. In 1999 plans were announced to amalgamate the Berlin Opera Ballet, the German State Opera Ballet (the Staatsoper Ballet), and the Komische Ballet into a single Berlin company which from 2004 was known as Staatsballett Berlin.

Germany where fairy tales were first considered worthy of study, occupies a pre‐eminent position in the genre. When Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm decided to collect Germany's traditional tale forms, they laid the basis for the future of the genre in Germany, created a model for content and style, and set a standard for editing that was applied in nations around the world.

1. the genre and its history

Modern fairy tales emerged together with an urban workforce that increasingly consumed print products, and their plots, short and relatively simple, recount the magic fulfilment of their heroines' and heroes' wishes against a backdrop of personal deprivation and hostile opponents. Customary protagonists are poor girls or boys who, with magic assistance, achieve wealth and power and marry royalty. Tales about fairies, on the other hand, deal with the complicated intersections of royal lives with gnomes, elves, kobolds, giants, and fairies. Tales about fairies sometimes conclude tragically, sometimes happily. A third genre, literary fairy tales, share characteristics of both genres, fairy tales and tales about fairies. Their protagonists can be poor girls and boys or royal children; they often include excursions into fairyland; and their plots can be and often are amended by sequentially appended episodes that loop back to the primary plot.

A large and increasingly influential group of scholars propose that fairy tales emerged during the Renaissance from pre‐existing medieval literary forms and motifs. Framed story collections like Boccaccio's Decameron or Chaucer's Canterbury Tales provided a model for the structure adopted by the first authors of fairy tales, the Venetian Giovan Francesco Straparola and the Neapolitan Giambattista Basile. Fairy‐tale motifs, however, derived from widely disparate sources. Oriental tales from the eastern Mediterranean supplied magic rings, magical transport, and magic transformations, while north‐western European Celtic tradition provided fairies. Plot elements sometimes survived from medieval legends, sagas, romances, and adventures to become traditional components of modern fairy tales, such as the giant who helped the king by retrieving a ring thrown into the sea in König Rother (King Rother, c.1150).

Heroic epics provided other elements, such as treasures, dragons, cloaks of invisibility, heroes who had to free heroines from demonic captors and who had to cut out and carry off a dragon's tongue or a giant's head in order to prove themselves the heroic agent. The early 13th‐century verse novella Asinarius detailed another familiar plot in its transformation story of a prince who was an ass during the day and a handsome prince at night, until his royal bride's father stole away his skin and burned it to release him from the evil spell. Another nursery story with ancient lineage is ‘Sleeping Beauty’, first documented in the French medieval romance Perceforest; it was read in France, and in northern Germany was performed as a pre‐Lenten Shrove Tuesday drama in the mid‐1400s.

The earliest printed books and their downmarket successors, chapbooks, were powerful agents in the dissemination of popular narratives in the late Middle Ages and early modern period, when motifs of magic first entered broad German popular awareness. It was then that relatively inexpensive printed booklets of 8, 16, 32, 64, or occasionally 128 pages created a common body of narrative knowledge for large numbers of marginally or semi‐literate people in every European country. Cheap print mediated a set of stories whose parts were as interchangeable as the printed type which delivered them. The stories included Arthurian tales with kings, queens, fairies, dragons, valorous knights and cowering princesses, Siegfried stories, oriental tales, Till Eulenspiegel tales, and stories of long‐suffering girls and women like Genoveva and Griselda. Sold at fairs, they not only provided the broad populace with a common set of story elements and motifs, but also supplied subsequent authors with material for their own creations, adaptations, or pirated reprints.

Translations also played a role in enriching Germany's narrative store, with scattered evidence that some of Straparola's tales were translated into German in the 1500s and again at the end of the 1600s. Two of Straparola's tales, 4.5 (which deals with Life and Death) and 5.2 (which is a true fairy tale of social rise with the help of magic) are documented in Caspar Lolivetta's Das teutsche Gespenst (1687), but no copy of a complete German edition of Straparola's tales survives.

Germany's first ‘Cinderella’‐type fairy tale, ‘Ein schoene geschichte von einer frawen mitt zweyen kindlin’ (‘A Pretty History of a Woman with Two Children’), appeared in the Wegkürtzer of Martin Montanus in 1560. It tells the story of a little girl abandoned in the woods to starve, who is sustained by an ‘Erdkuehlein’, a magic calf. Her wicked stepmother discovers and slaughters it, but the little girl eventually gains wealth and position through its buried bones. In Germany, however, the time was not yet ripe for the modern fairy tale in which a poor protagonist, whether boy or girl, rose socially by means of a marriage mediated by magic. Instead of Cinderella tale types, the most beloved German popular brief narratives in the 1500s were stomach‐filling ones that told of ponds filled with fish grilled and ready for the eating, of roast goose running free, and more importantly, free for the taking. The Land of Cokaigne dreams of most of Germany's common readers in the 1500s and 1600s rose only as high as their often empty bellies: tales about fairies (except for Merlin figures in chapbooks with Arthurian tales) did not exist in Germany in the 1500s or 1600s.

The first quasi‐fairy tale, that is, a series of episodes detailing a social rise with the help of magic, was ‘Bärenhäuter’ (‘Bearskin’). According to the respected German scholar Kurt Ranke, Johann Jakob Christoph von Grimmelshausen composed it from heterogeneous elements for his prose novel Simplicissimus (1669). The titular character, a cashiered soldier, makes a pact with the devil to gain riches by living in filth until a virtuous and well‐born girl accepts him in that condition; if he fails, the devil will win his soul. When the youngest of a merchant's three daughters does so, her two sisters mock her unmercifully; when Bearskin finally washes and shows himself to be not only rich but also handsome, the sisters hang themselves. The devil loses his wager with Bearskin, but departs satisfied, because he has gained two souls (the sisters') instead of one (Bearskin's).

Another early fairy tale emerged in the 1600s, Johannes Praetorius's ‘Die drei Spinnerinnen’ (‘The Three Spinners’), a now‐familiar folk tale which details the clever manner in which three old women, misshapen from the rigours of spinning, fool a husband into forbidding his young wife ever to spin again, to her immeasurable delight. It typifies the brief narratives available in Germany at the end of the 1600s, as do the contents of Andreas Strobl's Ovum Paschale Novum (New Easter Egg) of 1694, which listed 100 popular tales that priests might want to tell as part of their Easter sermons: 36 fables, 1 legend, and 63 comic tales, most of which dealt, like ‘The Three Spinners’, with the battle of the sexes.

Fairies, ghosts, knights, and magic arrived in Germany with steadily increasing amounts of leisure for middle‐ and upper middle‐class women in the Age of Enlightenment. For most of the 1700s, fairies and fairy tales in Germany were correspondingly restricted to the reading matter of Germany's middle, upper‐middle, and upper classes. They were an integral part of the new kinds of reading matter that emerged for a new, often female, reading public with moderate amounts of leisure time. The stories were fashionably French in origin, in a country whose nobility and upper classes spoke and read French. Easily read in part of a morning or afternoon, the stories, stylistically pre‐romantic, had some literary merit.

Fairies and fairy tales evoked a broad spectrum of response from their 18th‐century readers and critics. In German‐speaking Switzerland, Johann Jacob Bodmer justified the use of fairies and spirits of woods, air, and water as agents to awaken the imagination. In contrast, the highly regarded German literary theorist Johann Christoph Gottsched inveighed against all fables and stories except those that taught a moral lesson. Christian Wilhelm Diederichs recommended magic and fairies as a modern‐day manifestation of the kind of tales that animated the Old and New Testaments (1791). Johann Gottfried Herder attributed tales to folk belief and imagination, and theoretically divorced printed French tales from ‘orally transmitted German folk fairy tales’ when he developed a theory of ‘Volkspoesie’ (folk poetry). His conception of folk poetry was subsequently understood in terms of anonymous folk authorship of fairy tales, and later, when growing nationalism had reshaped thinking about the folk in the 19th‐century, this diffuse notion was transformed into the idea of national folk memory.

Despite 18th‐ and 19th‐century theorizing, documentary evidence demonstrates that fairies and fairy tales did not arise from German tradition, but moved laterally to Germany from France. From the mid‐1700s onward, one French fairy tale after another was translated into German, sometimes word‐for‐word, and sometimes reworked to suit conditions, tastes, and habits east of the Rhine. At roughly the same time (1755), the first German‐language literary fairy tale appeared in a collection of satires by Gottlieb Wilhelm Rabener, which began with a story about fairies. A decade later, Christoph Martin Wieland introduced fairies and fantasy in his satirical adventures of Don Sylvio of Rosalva (1764).

In the latter half of the 1700s, magic grew in importance. For a 20‐year period, Friedrich Maximilian Klinger produced one oriental motif‐laden fairy tale after another and composed the first German‐language fairy‐tale play, Der Derwisch (The Dervish, 1780). Similarly, Johann Heinrich Voss published a German‐language version of The Arabian Nights, several of whose tales and many of whose motifs recur in the Grimm collection.

According to Manfred Grätz, the most important contemporary historian of fairy tales in 18th‐century Germany, a translation of long‐lasting significance was Wilhelm Christhelf Siegmund Mylius's rendering of three fairy tales by Anthony Hamilton in 1777. Mylius's translation archaicized the genre by introducing an old‐fashioned vocabulary tinged with folk usage. Mylius simultaneously created a ‘folk’ version of fairy tales, a myth of their folk origins, and a corresponding myth of an oral tradition for fairy tales in Germany. In the same spirit, Johann Karl August Musäus called his own collection of distinctly literary fairy tales Volksmärchen der Deutschen (Folk Tales of the Germans, 1782–6), and Benedikte Naubert similarly invoked the ‘folk’ in the title of her collection of equally literary fairy tales, Neue Volksmärchen der Deutschen (New Folk Tales of the Germans, 1789–93), and so did Ludwig Tieck in his Volksmärchen (Folk Tales, 1797). By naming his reworked chapbook about King Arthur an ‘old wives' tale’ in 1786, Johann Ferdinand Roth did the same.

Christoph Wilhelm Guenther furthered the notion of orality and fairy tales' suitability for children in 1787. He had compiled his own tales from popular motifs, designated them ‘Denkmäler der Vorzeit’ (monuments to prehistory), and entitled the book Kindermärchen aus mündlichen Erzählungen gesammelt (Children's Tales Gathered from Oral Stories). And yet, the kinds of fairy‐tale stories that authors and editors increasingly labelled ‘ancient’ had not actually formed part of Germany's oral folk culture, as Rudolf Schenda has persuasively demonstrated in a lifetime of scholarly investigation.

A comprehensive history of German translations of French fairy tales is a relatively recent phenomenon (Grätz). That history shows that in 1761 the nine‐volume Cabinet der Feen, with 72 tales by Mme de Murat, Mlle Lhéritier, Mme d'Aulnoy, Mlle de La Force, and Louise d'Auneuil, among others, was published in Nuremberg, and that from 1790 to 1797 Friedrich Justin Bertuch published the Blaue Bibliothek aller Nationen (Blue Library of All Nations) in Gotha. Bertuch's little books, modelled on those of the French Bibliothèque bleue, republished the fairy tales of Charles Perrault and Mme d'Aulnoy, as well as those of now less known or even unknown authors like Catherine de Lintot, Hamilton, and Jean de Préchac, and continuations of The Thousand and One Nights by Chavis and Jacques Cazotte, and oriental tales from the Arabic and Persian‐language traditions. In disseminating them to a broad German readership that included artisans as well as bourgeois girls, Bertuch made the myth of fairy tales among the folk a reality. In addition, Bertuch contributed to the myth of orality by writing of the world‐wide ubiquity of an oral ‘Märchentradition’ (storytelling tradition; see below for discussion of the difficulties introduced by terminological confusion), and like so many others, he ascribed his print sources to oral origins. A flood of fairy‐tale reprints, piratings, and knock‐offs followed, of which Albert Ludwig Grimm's various editions offer an excellent example. The fairy‐tale tradition that we now know as ‘German’ was thoroughly international at the beginning of the 1800s.

In the decades on either side of 1800, German classical and romantic authors elevated the fairy‐tale genre into the nation's literary canon by composing new fairy tales and reworking old ones. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe tried his hand, and E. T. A. Hoffmann set the fantastic at the centre of his œuvre.

Against a background of exogenous tales circulating in Germany, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm formulated requirements for a ‘German’ collection. The opening sentences of the Foreword to the first edition of their Kinder‐ und Hausmärchen (Children's and Household Tales) refer in coded language to Napoleon's invasion and subjection of Germany between 1806 and 1813, but Wilhelm's choice of metaphor raised their enterprise to a transcendent and eternal level by using the language of nature to depict the German countryside: ‘It is heartwarming, when tempest or misfortune sent from above crushes an entire planting to earth, that humble wayside hedges and bushes provide a small secure place where a few seedlings remain upright. When the sun shines favourably, then they grow on alone and unnoticed; no scythe cuts them in season for the storeroom; but in late summer, when their swelling seeds ripen, humble, pious hands come searching and lay stalk upon stalk, carefully bound up, and regarding them more highly than entire sheaves, carry them home; and through the winter they are the nourishment, perhaps the only seeds for the future’ (vol. i (1812), p. v).

Despite the Grimms' intention to collect characteristically German tales, their first edition of the Children's and Household Tales included German translations of several Perrault tales, for example, ‘Bluebeard’, ‘Cinderella’, and ‘Puss‐in‐Boots’. In part this happened because the Grimms believed that Perrault had collected from popular tradition. For the second edition of 1819, Wilhelm summarily replaced them with German versions of similar tales, where they existed.

Public taste lagged behind the Grimms' conception of ‘German’ tales, however, as the sales history of their tales shows. Volume i, which contained a few French tales and bourgeois versions of several other tales, sold well; volume ii with folk versions sold poorly; and when a second edition in 1819 replaced bourgeois and French versions with German ‘folk’ ones, sales dropped to a trickle. On the other hand, their nationalistic concerns were shared by many German as well as European intellectuals, and enthusiasm for the Grimms' tales made them a model for tale collections in one country after another.

Because the Grimms' collection was so influential, it is important to describe its contents in the context of Germany's tale tradition. It includes a few literary fairy tales, extended narratives of magic and transformation with interlocking sub‐stories. It also includes many modern fairy tales, that is, stories of social reversal through a royal marriage mediated by magic. And it contains as well a broad range of traditional minor genres: cautionary tales like ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, animal tales like ‘The Bremen Town Musicians’, tales of origins like ‘The Moom’ or ‘The Duration of Life’, and religious tales like ‘Marienkind’. Much of their 19th‐century dissemination derived from school and home readers such as Heinrich Dittmar's Deutsches Lesebuch (German Reader), produced in many volumes from 1821 onward.

Within German‐speaking Central Europe the Grimm collection precipitated local collecting activity, so that in the following decades a tale collection (fairy and otherwise) for every geographic district became available. All claimed orality, but more often than not the tales themselves came from older published collections. (Literary fairy tales, with their elaborated vocabularies, and modern fairy tales, with their tightly structured plots, are particularly hard to pass on orally, and they derive nearly exclusively from published precursors.)

Literary fairy tales, as opposed to simplified and simple folk tales, continued to thrive in the 19th century, in part because childhood experience was redefined in the romantic period to include fantasy. Foremost among 19th‐century literary fairy tales was Ludwig Bechstein's Deutsches Märchenbuch (1845), which was repeatedly published in both cheap and expensive editions, small and large formats, illustrated and unillustrated, in northern and western German‐speaking areas. A second Bechstein collection, the Neues Deutsches Märchenbuch, was published principally in Vienna and Budapest and distributed throughout the southern and eastern areas of German‐speaking Central Europe. Like the Deutsches Märchenbuch, it also addressed a variety of market segments.

Bechstein's books dominated the 19th‐century German fairy‐tale market in terms of book sales, but both Bechstein's and the Grimms' tales were represented in the broadly popular poster format. It was principally the Grimms' tales, however, which made their way through school readers into the core syllabuses of German‐speaking Central Europe. Their spare style, with a minimum of distinguishing adjectives and with little in the way of individually nuanced characterizations of the stories' heroes and heroines, made the Grimms' tales ideal vehicles for didactic classroom discussions. Manuals provided teachers with word‐by‐word guidance about how to utilize individual tales. The following class‐plan segment draws on the Grimms' tale ‘Die Sterntaler’ (‘The Star‐Money’) and specifies both teacher questions, and pupil response (in bold type):

Goal (read or spoken aloud to the assembled class). We are going to discuss a story about a little girl who is richly rewarded.

Preparatory questions for teacher to ask the class . What's your name? Where do you live? Who lives at your house? Father, mother, brother. What do you receive from your father and mother? Food, clothing, shelter. (To be determined by additional questions!)

Presentation What would you like to know first about the little girl? Her name. I know your name. But I don't know the little girl's name … Now what would you like to know about the little girl? Where she lived …?

But soon the little girl was in distress. How did that come about? Her father died. She cried a lot. Then things got even worse. What happened? Her mother died too. Why was that so bad for the girl? Her parents gave her everything, a room, a little bed for sleeping, food …

What do you like about the little girl? I like the way she loved her parents. What would she have said to her mother, when she was given a new dress, a piece of cake, an apple, and so on? Thank you, dear mother. That's how the little girl showed herself grateful. What do you like about the little girl?—that she was grateful …

What did God like most about her? That she trusted in God.

That she was compassionate.
All children should be like that …
… But how can you show your parents that you love them? Help at home, do what you're told, don't make noise when father wants to rest, don't get your clothes dirty …
Germany's bookbuyers also continued to be receptive to foreign fairy tales in the 19th century. Hans Christian Andersen's tales appeared in German soon after their initial publication in Denmark, and continued to be republished with ever‐new illustrations throughout the 20th century.

Grimm, Bechstein, and A. L. Grimm represent the best‐known 19th‐century fairy‐tale collections. But the 19th century was awash with the genre. Literarily fashionable, structurally open, and with a pre‐available stock of motifs and plots that could be varied at will, fairy tales attracted literati as well as antiquarians. The fairy‐tale creations of E. T. A. Hoffmann, Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), Ludwig Tieck, Clemens Brentano, Wilhelm Hauff, Eduard Mörike, and Gottfried Keller have been well documented in secondary literature; others, like those of Friedrich Wilhelm Carové, Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, and Karl Wilhelm Salice Contessa (despite their names, all German‐born German writers) less so. Fairy tales also formed a customary part of mixed collections, such as Hauff's story almanacs (1826–8), which included folk tales, legends, horror, ghost, and crime stories.

Fairy tales attracted female attention increasingly in 19th‐century Germany. The best‐known group comprised the girls of the Kaffeterkreis, who with Gisela von Arnim as their leader formed a weekly Berlin salon in 1843, at which the members considered anonymously submitted writings. Usually fairy tales with female‐centred plots, they were eventually published in their Kaffeterzeitung. The Kaffeterkreis was symptomatic of broad interest among 19th‐century women in fairy tales, which both preceded and followed the Grimms' publications. Examples include Sophie Mereau‐Brentano, Wun derbilder und Träume in eilf [sic] Mährchen (Phantasms and Dreams in Eleven Stories, 1802); Sophie de la Motte Fouqué, Drei Mährchen von Serena (Serena's Three Tales, 1806); Agnes Franz, Kinderlust (Children's Joy, 1804); Karoline Stahl, Fabeln, Mährchen und Erzählungen für Kinder (Fables, Stories, and Tales for Children, 1818); Amalie Schoppe, Kleine Mährchen‐Bibliothek (Little Library of Stories, 1828); and Clara Fechner, Die schwarze Tante (The Black Aunt, 1848). According to Shawn Jarvis, women published over 200 fairy‐tale collections in German‐speaking countries in the 19th century.

At the turn of the 20th century, Grimms' Tales, allegorically representative of true Germanness, rose above its former rivals. Sacralized and nationalized, they became a verbal version of forested Germany in the rhetoric of publicists like Franz Heyden and then‐influential historians of children's literature, like Leopold Köster.

During the Weimar period, a new wave of fairy‐tale composition developed. Politically committed to revolutionary social change, socialist authors such as Edwin Hoernle, Hermynia Zur Mühlen, Bruno Schönlank, Béla Balázs, and Felix Fechenbach urged the institution of a new social and economic order. Because their stories so frequently end with the protagonist's failure, they can largely be accounted anti‐fairy tales.

With the conclusion of World War II, Britain, France, the United States, and the USSR (the Allies) each occupied a quadrant of Germany. Persuaded that the Grimms' Tales had socialized Germans to violence and anti‐Semitism, occupying authorities in the American sector scoured school and municipal library shelves and removed offending copies to the United States, where they were redistributed to university and public libraries.

Despite military efforts to banish the Grimms' Tales, they returned immediately. In 1945, a Stuttgart publisher issued a small edition of 29 tales, and for the next few years licences were required. New editions of the Grimms' Tales were published, at first cautiously and in expurgated form, and then in a torrent which reached a high water mark during the celebration of the bicentenary of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimms' births in 1984–6. The popularity of the Grimms' tales continues to the present day, sustained by popularized Jungian, Freudian, anthroposophic, and Christian interpretations.

Coincident with popular acceptance of the Grimms' Children's and Household Tales in the second half of the 20th century were numerous newly composed fairy‐tale collections that their authors intended as replacements for or as alternatives to the Grimms' tales. Some who were involved in this effort were Ernst Wiechert, Otto Flake, Hans Watzlik, Hanns Arens, and Paul Alverdes.

Following a season of university unrest in the spring of 1968, radical social movements spawned fairy‐tale revisions in western Germany. Initially anti‐capitalist, the revisions eventually also decried violence and encouraged gender equality.

The second half of the 20th century also witnessed a rising tide of criticism of the Grimms' tales from intellectuals. Parodies of the Grimms and of their tales had long existed, but these had usually been marked by affection; that was still the case with Hans Traxler's Die Wahrheit über Hänsel und Gretel (The Truth about Hansel and Gretel, 1963). The parodies that appeared after 1968 were often bitingly bitter and angrily denunciatory. Their authors understood the Grimms' Tales as the embodiment of everything that they perceived as morally flawed or politically and socially wrong in modern Germany. Foremost among revisionist fairy tale authors were Hans‐Joachim Gelberg (Geh und spiel mit dem Riesen (Go Play with the Giant, 1971) ) and Janosch (Janosch erzählt Grimm's Märchen (Janosch tells Grimm's Tales, 1972)). Among the broad spectrum of revisionist fairy tales produced in this period, Jack Zipes identified six distinct streams: socially satirical, utopian, pedagogical, feminist, parodic, and spiritual.

A slightly different set of developments characterized the USSR‐dominated eastern sector of Germany from 1949 to 1989. Just as the socialist ideals of the Weimar period had engendered revisions of fairy tales, so, too, did the related ideals implemented by the Kinderbuchverlag (Children's Literature Publishing House). Schoolchildren there were exposed to translations into German of fairy tales from other socialist countries, and in addition the Grimms' Tales were carefully edited to remove egregious violence. Hence, in eastern Germany Snow White's story no longer ended with her stepmother forced to dance to death in red‐hot iron slippers, and the Goose Girl's tormenter was simply chased from the land instead of being rolled downhill in a nail‐studded barrel.

Eastern intellectuals also rewrote fairy tales. Notable were Franz Fühmann, whose poems and stories questioned hallowed fairy‐tale virtues like obedience (1966), and Horst Matthies, whose ‘non‐fairy tales’, as he designated them, explored social problems in eastern Germany.

The extent to which German intellectuals have reformulated and reformed individual fairy tales as well as the genre itself indicates the privileged position accorded fairy tales in German popular and learned culture. The German Europäische Märchengesellschaft (European Fairy Tale Society), the largest of its kind anywhere in the world, holds large annual meetings at which storytellers and scholars alike gather, while the Enzyklopädie des Märchens (Encyclopedia of the Tale), an ongoing project of the German Academy of Sciences whose completion is envisaged for about 2010, is a monumental scholarly undertaking funded by the national government.

The publishing history of fairy tales in Germany from 1550 to the present is one of gradual importation of tales from beyond its borders, their translation and transformation into German tales, and their ultimate integration into German culture. First to appear were French tales augmented by oriental literary fairy tales in French. Next were French and oriental fairy tales translated into German, tales that were themselves adapted for the German Blue Library of all Nations. These popular books provided Germany's simple readers with a shared repertoire of tales, which in turn furnished subsequent collectors all over Germany with ‘folk’ sources. From a broad field of competing tale collections in the 19th‐century, the Grimms' Tales slowly gained ground in the popular mind until they came to dominate the genre at the end of the 19th and through the 20th centuries.

2. fairytale scholarship

It has long been believed that the fairy tale is an ancient genre that has existed since the beginnings of human communication, but many 20th‐century scholars, beginning with Albert Wesselski, no longer believe that to be true. They note the medieval documentary evidence from the lowest to the highest levels of society of a great variety of literary genres, among which were ballads, verse epics, Aesopic fables, folk tales, legends, animal tales, and jests, but not a single fairy tale. This is as true of a compendious source like the Karlsruhe Codex 408 as it is of hundreds of marginal manuscript notations.

A principal cause of confusion surrounding the history of the fairy tale in Germany is the German word Märchen, which has designated the fairy‐tale genre for nearly two centuries. Märchen means ‘brief tale’. Brief tales have existed for uncounted millenia, but because the word Märchen formed part of the title of the Grimms' Kinder‐ und Hausmärchen—which was often translated into English as Grimms' Fairy Tales—it came to stand for ‘fairy tales’ in English in the 19th and 20th centuries. As a result, everything that was written about Märchen was undifferentiatedly, and often erroneously, applied to ‘fairy tales’. That confusion has been further compounded by the fact that certain kinds of tales which are not themselves fairy tales, but which are routinely included in fairy‐tale collections, do have a demonstrably long history. One is the cautionary tale ‘Little Red Riding Hood’.

Many scholars have concluded that Ecbasis captivi (c.1043–6) by Egbert of Liège, with its little girl, tunica rubicunda, and worrying wolf, provides an ancient rendering of the well‐known modern story. Most contemporary scholars, however, distinguish between individual motifs and entire stories in the world of contemporary tales and storytelling, but since the early 19th century beginnings of fairy‐tale scholarship, there has existed a tendency to equate the documented existence of an individual motif with the contemporaneous presence of an entire fairy tale. The vocabulary and names in ‘Cinderella’ stories provide another relevant example. Its heroine in the Grimms' version is Aschenputtel, in the Bechstein version Aschenbrödel. Some commentators have pointed to the fact that similar names were used by Martin Luther (‘Aschenbroedel’), Geiler von Keysersberg (‘Eschengrudel’), and Georg Rollenhagen (‘Aschenpoessel’) in the 1500s to prove that the Aschenputtel/Cinderella story was widespread at that time. But no evidence exists to support that proposition. The greater likelihood is that when the ‘Cinderella’ story entered Germany, it appropriated an already‐existing name for its heroine.

Bibliography

  • Apel, Friedmar, Die Zaubergärten der Phantasie. Zur Theorie und Geschichte des Kunstmärchens (1978).
  • Grätz, Manfred, Das Märchen in der deutschen Aufklärung. Vom Feenmärchen zum Volksmärchen (1988).
  • Haase, Donald, The Reception of Grimms' Fairy Tales (1993).
  • Klotz, Volker, Das europäische Kunstmärchen (1985).
  • Schenda, Rudolf, Von Mund zu Ohr: Bausteine zu einer Kulturgeschichte volkstümlichen Erzählens in Europa (1993).
  • Tismar, Jens, Kunstmärchen (1977).

— Ruth B. Bottigheimer

Germany, for the Romans an undefined area east of the Rhine (Rhenus) and north of the Danube (Danubius or Ister). In the north it comprised what are now Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. The German tribes originated in south Scandinavia and Jutland, and from about 1000 BC they expanded southwards and westwards. According to Tacitus one of the tribes was called Germani, and this name was first used by the Gauls to designate the whole race. It was not until shortly after 120 BC that they entered Roman history, when the tribes of the Cimbri and the Teutones, invading south-east Gaul and, later, northern Italy, inspired great terror at Rome; they were finally destroyed by Roman armies under Marius. Early in the first century BC another German tribe, the Suebi, moved south-west to the area of the rivers Main (Moenus) and Rhine. Their inroads into Gaul in 58 BC led Julius Caesar to drive them back across the Rhine (as related in the first book of Caesar's Gallic War), which river became a frontier of the Roman empire. Later, under Augustus, Roman invasions of German territory were systematically undertaken, but the Roman ascendancy in this region was brought to an end in AD 9 when the Roman forces under P. Quinctilius Varus were destroyed by the German chief Arminius. After this disaster Augustus abandoned all attempts to establish a frontier beyond the Rhine, although in the east he established the river Danube as a frontier against tribes from the north. Around AD 90 Domitian formally established the two provinces of Germania Superior (Upper Germany) in the south and Germania Inferior (Lower Germany) in the north. During the reign of Marcus Aurelius (AD 161–80) there occurred a dangerous invasion across the Danube by the Marcomanni, a German tribe who advanced even into Italy and besieged Aquileia (near the coast at the head of the Adriatic Sea). The resulting war continued to the end of the emperor's life, and his successor Commodus had to make a compromise peace with the Germans. During the next three centuries the German tribes, especially the Alemanni and Franks, harassed Gaul by frequent invasions and finally crossed in great numbers over the Rhine, the Danube, and the Alps, conquering Gaul, Italy, and Spain and even penetrating into Africa. Other tribes such as the Angli and the Saxons had by that time crossed over into Britain. Nearly the whole of western Europe was thus over-run by German tribes. (See also FALL OF ROME.)

Germany (jûr'mənē), Ger. Deutschland, officially Federal Republic of Germany, republic (2005 est. pop. 82,431,000), 137,699 sq mi (356,733 sq km). Located in the center of Europe, it borders the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France on the west; Switzerland and Austria on the south; the Czech Republic and Poland on the east; Denmark on the north; and the Baltic Sea on the northeast. The official capital and largest city is Berlin, but many administrative functions are still carried on in Bonn, the former capital of West Germany.

Land and People

Germany as a whole can be divided into three major geographic regions: the low-lying N German plain, the central German uplands, and, in the south, the ranges of the Central Alps and other uplands. The climate is temperate although there is considerable variation. Almost two thirds of the country's extensive forests are coniferous; among the broadleafs, beech predominates.

N Germany, drained by the Ems, Weser, Elbe, and Oder rivers, is heavily farmed, despite poor soil; crops include wheat, rye, barley, oats, potatoes, and sugar beets. Dairy cattle are widely raised, especially in Schleswig-Holstein; pork, beef, and chicken are other livestock products. The region also includes the major industrial and transportation centers of Kiel, Rostock Hamburg, Bremen, Hanover, and Magdeburg, as well as Berlin.

The central uplands include the Rhenish Slate and Harz mts., and the Thuringian Forest. The Rhine River runs through W Germany and, between Bingen and Bonn, flows through a steep gorge, famous for its scenery, vineyards, and castles. Along the northern rim of the Rhenish Slate Mts. lies Germany's chief mining and industrial region, which includes the Ruhr and Saar basins and takes in the cities of Düsseldorf, Duisburg, Krefeld, Essen, Wuppertal, Bochum, Gelsenkirchen, and Dortmund. In the east, industrial centers are located along and near the Elbe River and its tributaries. The major cities include Leipzig, Dresden, Chemnitz, Halle, and Erfurt. The southern section of the Rhineland, which contains the Eifel and Hunsrück mts., is largely agricultural and has famous vineyards, especially in the Moselle valley.

The southern part of Germany is drained by the Danube, Iller, Lech, Isar, Inn, Neckar, and Main rivers. Rising to the Zugspitze (9,721 ft/2,963 m) in the Bavarian Alps, the highest point in Germany, it consists of plateaus and forested mountains, e.g., the Black Forest, the highlands of Swabia, and the Bohemian Forest. Lake Constance, in the Alps, is a popular tourist area. Notable agricultural products of the region are fruit, wheat, barley, and dairy goods. Important industrial centers include Munich, Frankfurt, Augsburg, Nuremberg, Stuttgart, and Karlsruhe.

About one third of the population is Protestant, mostly in the north, and one third is Roman Catholic, primarily in the south and west. There is a small Jewish minority. About half the population in the area that was formerly East Germany has no religious affiliation. Catholic and Protestant churches and Jewish synagogues receive government support through a church surtax levied on members of these denominations. Virtually all citizens of the country speak German. Danes, Frisians, Gypsies, and Sorbs or Wends comprise the indigenous non-German-speaking minorities. Since the early 1970s, millions of "guest workers" from other countries (mostly former Yugoslavia, plus Turkey and Italy) have come to Germany for employment. These residents include about 2 million Muslims, mainly Turks and Kurds.

Economy

The former West Germany has for many years benefited from a highly skilled population that enjoys a high standard of living and an extensive social welfare program. Since unification, however, Germany has faced the economic challenge of transforming the former East Germany from a deteriorating command economy dependent on low-quality heavy industrial products to a technologically advanced market economy. Unemployment in the east has remained consistently higher than that in the west, and although several larger urban centers there have begun to revive economically, most E German industrial cities remain depressed. Since the postwar years, the German economy has emphasized management-labor consensus, which, while generally avoiding labor strife, has also created a relatively inflexible labor environment where employers are reluctant to hire more than the minimum required number of skilled workers, since it is difficult to fire them once they are hired.

Manufacturing and service industries are the dominant economic activities; agriculture accounts for about 1% of the gross domestic product (GDP) and occupies about 3% of the workforce. Industries include food and beverage processing, shipbuilding, and the manufacture of iron and steel, chemicals, machinery and machine tools, motor vehicles, electronics, and textiles. Hard coal and lignite are mined. Overall, the principal German agricultural products are potatoes, wheat, barley, rye, sugar beets, cabbage, fruit, and dairy products. Large numbers of cattle, hogs, and poultry are raised. Germany is one of the world's largest exporters; products include machinery, vehicles, chemicals, foodstuffs, and various manufactures. Germany also imports machinery, vehicles, chemicals, and foodstuffs. Its main trading partners are France, the United States, the Netherlands, Great Britain, and Italy.

Government

Germany is a parliamentary democracy governed under the constitution of 1949, which became the constitution of a united Germany in 1990. The federal president is the head of state but has little influence on government. The president is elected for a five-year term by a federal convention, which meets only for this purpose and consists of the Bundestag and an equal number of members elected by the state parliaments. The chancellor, elected by an absolute majority of the Bundestag for a four-year term, is the head of government. There is a bicameral Parliament. The Bundesrat, or Federal Council (the upper house), has 69 seats, with each state having three to six representatives depending on the state's population. The Bundestag, or Federal Assembly (the lower house), has 614 deputies who are elected for four years using a mixed system of proportional representation and direct voting.

Germany is divided into 16 states (Länder). Each state has its own constitution, legislature, and government, which can pass laws on all matters except those, such as defense, foreign affairs, and finance, that are the exclusive right of the federal government. The states are Schleswig-Holstein, Lower Saxony, Bremen, Hamburg, Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, North Rhine-Westphalia, Saxony-Anhalt, Brandenburg, Berlin Hesse, Thuringia, Saxony Rhineland-Palatinate, Saarland, Baden-Württemberg, and Bavaria.

History

Various aspects of the early, medieval, and early modern history of Germany are covered in the articles Germans; Germanic laws; Germanic religion; Holy Roman Empire; Austria; and in the articles on the major historic German states (Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony, Württemberg, Baden, Thuringia, Hesse, Mecklenburg (see under Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, Oldenburg, Brunswick, Anhalt, Lippe, Schaumburg-Lippe) and on the free cities of Hamburg, Bremen, and Lübeck. The survey that follows is a very general outline of the complex history of Germany.

History to the Early Middle Ages

At the end of the 2d cent. B.C., the German tribes began to expand at the expense of the Celts, but they were confined by Roman conquests (1st cent. B.C.-1st cent. A.D.) to the region E of the Rhine and N of the Danube. The Romans penetrated briefly (12 B.C.-A.D. 9) as far east as the Elbe River (see Teutoburg Forest), and from the late 1st cent. A.D. to the 3d cent. they held the Agri Decumates, protected against Germanic inroads by a fortified line from Cologne to Regensburg. In a series of great migrations (4th-5th cent.) the German tribes (who did not all come from present-day Germany) overran most of the Roman Empire, while Slavic tribes occupied Germany E of the Elbe.

By the 6th cent., the Anglo-Saxons had established themselves in Britain, and the Franks had taken over nearly all of present-day France, W and S Germany, and Thuringia. Clovis I, who first united the Franks late in the 5th cent., accepted Christianity, and St. Boniface in the 8th cent. spread the gospel in the areas acquired by Clovis's successors. In 751, Pepin the Short deposed the dynasty of the Merovingians and established his own, that of the Carolingians. His son Charlemagne conquered the Saxons and extended the Frankish domain in Germany to the Elbe. He was crowned emperor at Rome in 800.

In the first division (843) of Charlemagne's empire (see Verdun, Treaty of) the kingdom of the Eastern Franks, under Louis the German, emerged as the nucleus of the German state. The Treaty of Mersen (870) enlarged it by the addition of part of Lotharingia (Lorraine), but after the death (876) of Louis it was divided among his sons Carloman, Louis the Younger, and Charles III (Charles the Fat). Emperor Arnulf reunited the kingdom, but during his reign (887-99) and that of his son Louis the Child (900-911), last of the Carolingian kings of Germany, the Norsemen, Slavs, and Magyars began to make devastating inroads. These contributed to economic breakdown and localization, manifest in the manorial system.

Political localization was evident in the emergence of powerful duchies and in the growth of feudalism. The dukes of Franconia, Swabia, Bavaria, Saxony, and Upper and Lower Lorraine emerged as the most powerful magnates of Germany. On the death (911) of Louis the Child, they elected the Franconian duke Conrad I as king. Conrad's reign was spent in struggles against the Magyars and against the rebellious dukes, one of whom (Henry the Fowler of Saxony) succeeded him in 918 as Henry I, beginning a century of Saxon rule. Henry restored some of the royal authority, took territory from the Slavs, and secured the election in 936 of his son, Otto I, as his successor.

The Holy Roman Empire

The Holy Roman Empire came into existence with the imperial coronation (962) of Otto I. (A list of Otto's successors until 1806 accompanies the article on the Holy Roman Empire.) As a result of their difficult dual role as emperors and German kings, and especially because of their interests in Italy, Otto's successors could not prevent the German dukes and their vassals from increasing their power at the expense of the central authority. Imperial power was further undermined by the conflict between emperors and popes, manifest in the struggle over investiture.

Emperor Frederick I (reigned 1152-90; also known as Frederick Barbarossa) of the Hohenstaufen line was one of the most energetic medieval German rulers. He unsuccessfully challenged the power of the pope (see Guelphs and Ghibellines), being defeated by the Lombard League in 1176. However, Frederick did succeed in partitioning (1180) the domains of Henry the Lion of Saxony and Bavaria, thus destroying the last great independent German duchy. Until the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806, Germany remained a patchwork of numerous small temporal and ecclesiastical principalities and free cities.

The campaigns of the 12th and 13th cent. against the Slavs (see Wends) resulted in tremendous eastward expansion and the establishment of the margraviate of Brandenburg and the domain of the Teutonic Knights. The turbulent reign (1212-50) of Emperor Frederick II, who was active in Sicily, and who engaged in a major conflict with the papacy, left Germany in a state of anarchy. Several rival kings appeared, but none held wide authority, and lawlessness prevailed. The dark period of the Great Interregnum (1254-73) ended with the election of Rudolf I, count of Hapsburg (see Hapsburg), as German king, but neither he nor his successors could create a centralized monarchy. Germany thus diverged from the great kingdoms of Western Europe-France, England, and Spain-where the trend was toward increasing centralization.

To offset the tendency toward independence of the nobles, the emperors relied chiefly on the prosperous cities, many of which formed into leagues for their common defense and interests-e.g., the Hanseatic League and the Swabian League. German commerce and banking prospered in the late 15th and early 16th cent., the heyday of such merchant princes as those of the Fugger and Welser families of Augsburg. With the help of these capitalists, Emperor Charles V (reigned 1519-58) financed his many campaigns.

The weakness of the imperial position was evident when, in the Protestant Reformation (16th cent.), the Catholic emperor was unable to enforce his religious policies or to prevent the conversion to Protestantism of many powerful princes. Links between religious and economic unrest were reflected in the Peasants' War (1524-26) and in the unsuccessful attempt of the Imperial Knights under Franz von Sickingen to secularize ecclesiastical domains.

Continued unrest and Protestant gains helped stimulate the Counter Reformation, which hardened the religious and political divisions in Germany. A religious settlement was reached only after the devastating Thirty Years War (1618-48), which was a crushing setback to the cause of German unity. The chief theater of the war, Germany was reduced to misery and starvation, lost a large part of its population, and became, as a result of the Peace of Westphalia (1648; see Westphalia, Peace of), a loose confederation of petty principalities under the nominal suzerainty of the emperor. Depopulation brought increased competition for peasant labor and helped to perpetuate the institution of serfdom, which was declining in other parts of Western Europe.

The German Confederation and the Rise of Prussia

The most powerful German state to emerge from the wars of the 17th and 18th cent. was Prussia, which under Frederick II (reigned 1740-86) successfully challenged the military might of Austria and became a European power. The French Revolution and the wars of Napoleon I brought the demise (1806) of the moribund Holy Roman Empire and also forced the German states, notably Prussia, to accept long-needed social, political, and administrative reforms.

Germany's military humiliation by Napoleon stimulated nationalist fervor for a strong and unified state. By the Congress of Vienna (see Vienna, Congress of) the German map was redrawn in 1814-15, eliminating many petty states and expanding Prussia and Bavaria. The German states were loosely linked in the German Confederation, set up by the congress. Conservative Austria obtained control of the confederation, and Metternich, who also dominated the Holy Alliance, frustrated nationalist ambitions. In ensuing decades, nationalist sentiment was furthered by German romanticism, a noteworthy exponent of which was the poet Ernst Moritz Arndt, and by persons like Friedrich Jahn, the educator and gymnast.

German nationalism, linked with liberalism, emerged in the revolutions of 1848, which shook the German states. However, the revolutionists were soon defeated, and the Frankfurt Parliament, having failed to obtain the unification of Germany under Frederick William IV, disbanded. Prussia was humiliated by Austria in the Treaty of Olomouc (1850) but used the Zollverein, a customs union from which Austria was excluded, to consolidate Prussian hegemony in N Germany.

Otto von Bismarck, who in 1862 took charge of Prussian policy, resolved on the course of creating a "Little Germany" (a Germany without Austria) under Prussian leadership. In the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, Prussia triumphed over its rival, and Austria was excluded from the newly created North German Confederation. As a result of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 Bismarck attained his goal: William I of Prussia was proclaimed German emperor by the assembled German princes in the Palace of Versailles (1871). The peace treaty with France awarded Alsace and Lorraine to Germany and stamped it as the chief power of continental Europe.

The German Empire

The new German empire was consolidated under Bismarck's autocratic rule and a constitution that favored conservative interests. The Reichstag (the lower house of parliament) had some power over money bills but only slight influence in military matters or foreign policy; autocratic Prussia dominated the Bundesrat (the upper house of parliament). Bismarck's rule was complicated by far-reaching internal changes. The Industrial Revolution, which came late in Germany, transformed the country into Europe's foremost manufacturing nation and also accelerated the pace of urbanization.

Economic factors in turn affected politics. The National Liberal party and the Progressives, both representing the middle class, became important, as did German socialism and the Social Democrats, guided by August Bebel and Karl Kautsky. The strong Center party represented Roman Catholic interests.

Bismarck's only certain ally was the Conservative party, a Protestant faction particularly strong in agrarian and semifeudal Prussia. Bismarck ruled chiefly through force of will, prestige, and the steadfast support of the emperor. He attempted to vitiate German Catholicism in the Kulturkampf (1872-79). Both paternalism and an effort to lessen the appeal of the Socialists and the Liberals motivated his social security laws, which became models of welfare legislation throughout the world.

A master of foreign policy, Bismarck secured Germany against France by maintaining alliances in the east. Reconciliation with Austria led to an alliance (1879), joined in 1882 by Italy (see Triple Alliance and Triple Entente). Simultaneously, Bismarck kept alive the Three Emperors' League of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia. He weathered the Liberal opposition and retained his chancellorship during the brief reign (1888) of Frederick III, but he was dismissed in 1890 by William II. Bismarck was succeeded as chancellor by von Caprivi, Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst (1894), and Bernhard von Bülow (1900).

By the mid-1880s, Germans had acquired some African territories, but it was only under William II that German colonial expansion began to collide seriously with British and French interests. (For a list of former German colonies, see mandates.) Equally serious threats to peace were Germany's increasing commercial rivalry with England, heightened by the naval expansion under Tirpitz, German influence in Ottoman affairs (e.g., in the construction of the Baghdad Railway), and German support of Austria's Balkan policy, which clashed with Russian interests (see Eastern Question). Two crises (1905-6 and 1911) over Morocco helped to create and strengthen the Triple Entente of France, Russia, and England, which faced Germany and its allies (see Central Powers) in World War I (1914-18). In 1909, von Bethmann-Hollweg had replaced von Bülow as chancellor of Germany; Bethmann was overthrown (1917) by Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and Chief of Staff Erich Ludendorff, who together controlled Germany until late 1918.

Exhausted to the point of collapse but with no enemy troops on its soil, Germany was obliged to accept the Allied armistice terms (Nov., 1918) and, in 1919, the harsh peace terms of Versailles (see Versailles, Treaty of). William abdicated and fled (Nov., 1918) after national and international demands for his abdication (led by Chancellor Maximilian, prince of Baden) and after the outbreak of a left-wing revolution, started at Kiel, which swept the rulers of the German states from their thrones.

The Weimar Republic

A democratic and more centralized federal constitution was adopted at Weimar in 1919, and Germany became known as the Weimar Republic. Friedrich Ebert, a Social Democrat, became the first president. His middle-of-the-road government suppressed attempts by the radical left (see Spartacus party) and by the extreme right (see Kapp, Wolfgang) to seize power. However, the economic crisis of the postwar years, marked by mass unemployment and rampant currency inflation, strengthened the extremist parties and wiped out a large portion of the middle class. The assassinations of Matthias Erzberger (1921) and of Walther Rathenau (1922) were symptomatic of the terrorist tactics adopted by the extreme nationalists, many of whom later joined the National Socialist (Nazi) party of Adolf Hitler or the Nationalist (monarchist) party of Alfred Hugenberg.

The election (1925) of Hindenburg as president after the death of Ebert seemed a nationalist victory, but Hindenburg cooperated with the cabinets (1923-32) of Wilhelm Marx, Hans Luther, Hermann Müller, and Heinrich Brüning, in which coalitions drawn mainly from the Social Democrats, the Catholic Center party, and the conservative German People's party fulfilled moderate programs. Under Luther, Hjalmar Schacht helped stabilize the currency, and a remarkable return to economic prosperity began. Gustav Stresemann, as foreign minister from 1923 to 1929, secured an easing of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, particularly with regard to German reparations payments, and the admission (1926) of Germany into the League of Nations.

Germany had apparently recovered economically and politically by 1929, but soon afterward the world economic depression brought about mass unemployment and business failure, and political and social tensions mounted. As the Nazi and Communist parties gained strength in the Reichstag, Brüning and his successors, Franz von Papen and Kurt von Schleicher, failed in their efforts to mold parliamentary majorities without Hitler's support. Government came to a standstill. Rather than accept Schleicher's alternative of a military dictatorship, Hindenburg, by then old and exhausted, accepted von Papen's assurance that Hitler could be held in check. In Jan., 1933, Hindenburg made Hitler chancellor. In the elections of Mar., 1933, Hitler played upon the electorate's fear of the Communists (especially after the Reichstag building was largely destroyed by fire in Feb., 1933) to win a bare majority of seats in the Reichstag for the National Socialists and the Nationalists. On Mar. 23, the Enabling Act, opposed only by the Social Democrats and the disbarred Communist party, gave Hitler full dictatorial powers.

The Third Reich

Hitler had promised to build a Third Reich, successor to the Holy Roman and Hohenzollern empires, which would last a thousand years. As chancellor, he began the "coordination" (Gleichschaltung) of every aspect of German life. Young persons were organized in semimilitary groups (the Hitlerjugend) and were indoctrinated with the Nazi creed. The powers of the state governments were abolished, and the adherents of National Socialism from 1934 made up the sole legal party. Hitler's opponents within the party (including Ernst Roehm) were eliminated in the "Blood Purge" of June, 1934.

The Gestapo (see secret police) quashed open discontent among the German people. Many scientists, artists, educators, and scholars followed the Nazi doctrines without much protest, and some Germans welcomed what they considered the rebirth of German strength. After the death of Hindenburg (1934), the offices of president and chancellor were combined in the person of the Führer [leader] of the Nazi party. In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws deprived Jews of citizenship, forbade marriage between Jews and non-Jewish Germans, and barred Jews from the liberal professions. In order to coordinate cultural affairs, the radio, press, cinema, and theater came under the control of propaganda minister Goebbels, who raised Hitler to the status of a quasi-divinity. Jews and others (especially those holding liberal or leftist political beliefs) made outcasts by the Nazi regime were harassed, and some were placed in concentration camps.

Hitler attempted to make Germany economically self-sufficient, and industry, commerce, and foreign trade were strictly supervised by the government. Labor unions were dissolved, and workers were organized in a state-controlled labor front. In order to ease unemployment and to prepare for war, Hitler expanded the armaments industry, increased the size of the armed forces, and sponsored large-scale public works (e.g., the construction of a network of superhighways, the Autobahnen). Hermann Goering was a leading protagonist of German rearmament and preparations for war. Albert Speer was at first Hitler's official architect; during World War II he assumed important posts as minister for armaments and later as chief planner of the war economy.

In Oct., 1933, Hitler withdrew from the Geneva Disarmament Conference and from the League of Nations. In Mar., 1936, Germany remilitarized the Rhineland in violation of the Treaty of Versailles and the Locarno Pact. Hitler followed this by concluding an alliance with Fascist Italy (see Axis), by interfering in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) in support of the Insurgents led by Franco, and by annexing Austria (Mar., 1938). Outside Germany, fifth columns were used to undermine the governments of nations that Hitler sought to annex in order to increase the Lebensraum [living space] of the Germans. The Munich Pact (Sept., 1938) marked the culmination of British and French attempts to appease Germany in the hope that Hitler had limited aims.

In Mar., 1939, Germany marched into Czechoslovakia, thus violating the Munich agreements, and also annexed Memel, on the Baltic coast. On Aug. 23, 1939, in a surprise move, Germany and the USSR signed a nonaggression pact and other agreements. On Sept. 1, 1939, cutting short negotiations on the status of Danzig (Gdańsk) and the Polish Corridor, Hitler invaded Poland, thus precipitating World War II.

In the early years of the war Germany had great success; its conquests included Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, the Balkan states, and Greece. Great Britain, particularly London and other industrial areas, was subjected to massive German air attacks (the Battle of Britain), as a prelude to invasion, but the island successfully withstood the onslaught and was not invaded. In June, 1941, Hitler launched a vast offensive against the USSR, his former ally. In Dec., 1941, shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Germany declared war on the United States.

In 1942, the tide of the war began to turn against Germany; the Allies scored successes in North Africa, the USSR stopped the German army at Stalingrad (now Volgograd), and British and U.S. airplanes began the massive terror bombing of German cities. As its fortunes waned, Germany treated its remaining conquered territories more harshly. Millions of Jews and many other civilians were sent to concentration camps and exterminated, vast slave-labor systems were organized, and many thousands were deported to Germany for forced labor. By early 1945, Germany was being invaded from the west and the east, and most of its cities lay in ruins. On Apr. 30, 1945, with the total collapse of Germany imminent, Hitler committed suicide.

Postwar Germany

Hitler's successor, Admiral Karl Doenitz, signed (May 7-8, 1945) an unconditional surrender to the Allies, whose military commanders assumed the functions of government in Germany. The agreements of the Yalta Conference (Feb., 1945) were implemented at the Potsdam Conference (July-Aug., 1945). These agreements were to be tentative, pending a peace conference, but as no peace conference was held, they tended to shape the course of German history after 1945.

A line formed mostly by the Oder and Neisse rivers was made the eastern boundary of Germany, as East Prussia and Upper and Lower Silesia were placed under Polish administration (except N East Prussia, which was awarded to the USSR). In the west, the Saarland was occupied by French military forces. What remained of Germany was divided into four zones, occupied separately by the armies of Great Britain, France, the United States, and the USSR. Berlin, similarly divided although situated well within the Soviet zone, was made the seat of the four-power Allied Control Council, authorized to make economic and administrative decisions for Germany as a whole. However, the council failed to agree on how to implement the often imprecise Potsdam decisions, and separate governments were soon established in each of the four zones.

The National Socialist party and affiliated organizations were outlawed, and many leading Nazis were tried, convicted, and executed for war crimes; other leaders, including von Papen and Schacht, were acquitted. Some Germans (including the philosopher Karl Jaspers and the historian Friedrich Meinecke) called for moral regeneration, but as Germany became a battleground of the cold war, concern with the guilt for the past receded.

During 1945-47 there was a serious shortage of food, caused by the crippled state of the German economy and by poor harvests; this situation was intensified in W Germany by the arrival of about 10 million ethnic German refugees from the Soviet zone and the former German territories of E central Europe. In the Soviet zone, a military administration under Zhukov was established in June, 1945. In 1946, politics there were brought under the control of the Communist-dominated Socialist Unity party (SED), led by Wilhelm Pieck, Otto Grotewohl, and Walter Ulbricht. At the same time, a major program of nationalization and collectivization was carried out. As reparations, the Soviets took much of E Germany's industrial equipment for use in rebuilding their own industry.

The Western Allies rejected a plan by Henry Morgenthau, Jr. to center the German economy around agriculture. Industrial machinery was restored to use, restrictions against the German cartels went largely unenforced, and West Germany's remarkable recovery and reindustrialization soon began. The rebuilding process was facilitated by the Marshall Plan. By 1947, the Western occupation zones were increasingly coordinating their policies (especially in economics), whereas the Soviet zone followed an increasingly divergent policy. The split between the three Western Allies and the USSR became complete in 1948. After the Western powers had planned steps toward establishing a West German constitution and had instituted a currency reform, the Soviet authorities unsuccessfully blockaded (1948-49) West Berlin as part of the cold war (see Berlin airlift). In 1949, Germany was divided into the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). The precise legal status of West Berlin remained unclear; however, West Berlin was intimately tied to West Germany in many ways (see Berlin).

East Germany

East Germany, 41,610 sq mi (107,771 sq km), consisted of the area included in the present states of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, Saxony-Anhalt, Thüringia, Saxony, and Brandenburg. East Berlin was the capital of the country. Originally divided into five states, East Germany was reorganized into 15 districts (Bezirke) in 1952. A congress organized by the Socialist Unity party (SED) in May, 1949, adopted a constitution establishing the German Democratic Republic. The initial constitution, superseded by one adopted in 1968, provided for a president and a bicameral parliament. Wilhelm Pieck became the country's first president and Otto Grotewohl its first prime minister, with Walter Ulbricht as first deputy prime minister.

The government was controlled by the SED and was much more centralized than that of West Germany. In 1950, a treaty was signed with Poland recognizing the Oder-Neisse line as East Germany's permanent eastern boundary. A drive to collectivize the remaining privately held farmland was started in 1952. In the same year, a 3-mi-wide (4.8-km) zone, guarded by police, was established along the border with West Germany (but not with West Berlin) in order to reduce emigration to the West.

Agitated by the forced changes in the country and by food shortages and other economic hardships, workers in East Berlin began on June 17, 1953, a rising that soon spread to much of the country; the revolt was suppressed only after the intervention of Soviet forces. Following the rising, the USSR attempted to improve East German economic conditions, especially the availability of consumer goods, and in 1954 it ceased to collect reparations for German actions in World War II. Also in 1954, the USSR recognized the sovereignty of East Germany, which in 1955 became a charter member of the Warsaw Treaty Organization. East German armed forces were established in 1956; Soviet troops, however, remained stationed in the country.

During the 1950s, Ulbricht, who was first secretary of the SED from 1950, emerged as the leader of East Germany. Under Ulbricht, the country was closely aligned with the USSR, and the liberalizing policies introduced in some of the other East European Communist nations were avoided. After the death of Pieck in 1960, the office of president was replaced by a council of state, with Ulbricht as its chairman. In order to reduce the large flow of persons leaving East Germany (about 4 million during 1945-61), many of whom crossed from East to West Berlin, a wall was erected (Aug., 12-13, 1961) between the two parts of the city; it was later reinforced and enlarged. In the ensuing years dozens of those who tried to scale the wall were shot by East German border guards. The wall drastically cut the number of emigrants, and gradually this had the effect of solidifying East Germany as an independent country.

In 1963, a "New Economic System," calling for more efficient and decentralized economic planning, was adopted. Partly as a result of the new system, East Germany's economy expanded considerably in the 1960s. Also, large-scale building programs were undertaken in the cities. In 1964, a treaty of friendship and cooperation-in effect a peace treaty-was signed with the USSR; similar treaties with Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Bulgaria followed in 1967. Grotewohl died in 1964 and was succeeded as prime minister by Willi Stoph, who had served as de facto prime minister since the onset (1960) of Grotewohl's terminal illness.

In 1968, East German forces actively participated in the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Under a new constitution promulgated in 1968, the 500-member people's chamber became the sole legislative body. In the late 1960s, diplomatic contacts with West Germany were initiated; these culminated in 1973 with the signing of a treaty between the two states. At the same time, East Germany for the first time was accorded diplomatic recognition by a number of non-Communist countries, including the United States (1974).

In 1971, Ulbricht resigned as first secretary of the SED and was replaced by Erich Honecker. Under Honecker, most of the few remaining private enterprises were taken over by the state. Checks on intellectual and cultural activities were relaxed somewhat. After being granted permanent observer status in 1972, East Germany was made a full member of the United Nations in 1973. Later in 1973, Stoph was elected chairman of the council of state and was replaced as prime minister by Horst Sindermann; Stoph returned as prime minister from 1976 to 1989. In the 1970s, trade between the Germanys increased, spurred by large-scale West German credits. Travel restrictions were eased so that West Germans could visit the East, and later, in the 1980s, East Germans were allowed to travel to West Germany. In 1981, Chancellor Helmut Schmidt made an official visit to East Germany, and in 1987 Honecker was officially received in West Germany by Chancellor Helmut Kohl.

In the latter half of the 1980s, tensions developed with Moscow as the hardline SED reacted coolly to the reforms of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. For a description of the events leading up to East Germany's reunification with West Germany, see subheading Reunification of Germany.

West Germany

West Germany, 95,742 sq mi (247,973 sq km), consisted of the ten states that had been included in the U.S., British, and French occupation zones after the war. Bonn was the seat of government. The country adopted a constitution in May, 1949, to establish the Federal Republic of Germany.

The new republic was similar in structure to the Weimar Republic, except that the individual states had somewhat more power, and the president's powers were much reduced. In the first elections (Aug., 1949), the Christian Democratic party (CDU), along with its close ally, the Bavarian-centered Christian Social Union (CSU), gained a small plurality of seats in the Bundestag (Federal Diet). The CDU leader Konrad Adenauer formed a coalition government and became the first chancellor of West Germany; he remained in office until 1963. The Social Democratic party (SPD), led successively by Kurt Schumacher, Erich Ollenauer, and Willy Brandt, was the main opposition party until 1969, when it came to power. The middle-class-oriented Free Democratic party (FDP) was influential, although small, and it participated in coalition governments with both the CDU (1949-53; 1961-66, 1982-98) and the SPD (1969-82). The first president of West Germany was Theodor Heuss; he was succeeded by Heinrich Lübke (1959), Gustav Heinemann (1969), Walter Scheel (1974), Karl Carstens (1979), and Richard von Weizsäcker (1984).

The occupying powers allowed West Germany considerable autonomy from the start, except in foreign affairs. The three resident High Commissioners could review actions taken by the Bonn government, but in practice they rarely intervened. In 1951, West Germany was given the right to conduct its own foreign relations. In 1952, West Germany, the United States, France, and Great Britain signed the Bonn Convention, in effect a peace treaty, which granted West Germany most of the attributes of national sovereignty. The Paris agreements of 1954, which came into force in 1955, gave West Germany full independence, except that the former occupying powers reserved the right to negotiate with the USSR on matters relating to Berlin and to Germany as a whole. Also, the powers continued to maintain troops in the country. In 1955, West Germany was recognized as an independent country by numerous nations, including the USSR, and it became a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, thus solidifying its ties with the West. In the same year, legislation was passed providing for the creation of West German armed forces.

In postwar West Germany, there were occasional, mostly minor, recurrences of anti-Semitism and extreme nationalism (e.g., the temporary growth of the nationalistic National Democratic Party in the mid-1960s); more important, however, the country tried to make up in part for the Nazi atrocities by granting considerable aid to Israel and by paying reparations to individuals who suffered loss or injury at the hands of the Nazi regime. During the 1950s, the West German economy grew dramatically; in 1958, the country became a charter member of the European Economic Community, or Common Market (now the European Union). It also gave much economic and technical assistance to the developing nations of Asia and Africa. In 1957, the Saarland was assigned to West Germany by France, after a plebiscite.

National politics in the 1950s and early 1960s were stable and were dominated by Adenauer. The CDU-CSU held firmly to the position that Germany should be reunited on the basis of democratic elections; it followed the "Hallstein doctrine" (named for Walter Hallstein, an official in the ministry of foreign affairs), under which West Germany refused to have diplomatic relations with any nation (except the USSR) that recognized East Germany. Until the 1970s, East and West Germany had virtually no contact on an official level, but there was considerable trade between them.

Later in 1963, Adenauer retired and was replaced as chancellor by Ludwig Erhard, also a Christian Democrat and an expert on economics. Erhard's government was shaken by a downturn in the economic boom and by controversy over foreign policy. In 1966, Erhard resigned and was replaced by Kurt Georg Kiesinger, a Christian Democrat, who headed a "grand coalition" of the CDU-CSU and the SPD; SPD leader Willy Brandt assumed the posts of vice chancellor and foreign minister. Under Kiesinger, economic conditions improved, ties with France were strengthened, and talks with the nations of Eastern Europe (with whom West Germany did not have diplomatic relations) were initiated.

The general election of 1969 resulted in a small plurality for the CDU-CSU, but Brandt was able to become chancellor at the head of an SPD-FDP coalition government. In the 1972 general election the coalition was returned to power with a substantial majority. Brandt launched a major program, called the Ostpolitik [eastern policy], to improve relations with Eastern Europe. Important milestones in the Ostpolitik were the signing (1970) of treaties of nonaggression and cooperation with the Soviet Union and Poland (ratified in 1972); the signing (1972) of an agreement among the four former occupying powers improving access to West Berlin and permitting West Berliners to visit East Berlin and East Germany more often; and a treaty (1973) between East and West Germany that called for increased cooperation between the two states and prepared the groundwork for the establishment of full diplomatic relations. West Germany was admitted to the United Nations in 1973, after having held permanent observer status since 1953.

Brandt resigned in May, 1974, after it was revealed that an East German spy had been on his personal staff. He was succeeded by Helmut Schmidt, the finance minister. A deteriorating economic situation caused a decline in the popularity of the government and increasing tension between the coalition partners. The emergence in 1980 of the new ecology party, the Greens, significantly changed West Germany's politics. Schmidt's support of NATO policies of European rearmament brought him into conflict with the left wing of his own party. In local elections in 1981 and 1982, the SPD-FDP coalition suffered severe setbacks. Disputes over nuclear power, defense policy, and economic measures continued to divide the parties, and in 1982, the FDP withdrew from the coalition.

On Oct. 1, 1982, Schmidt was replaced as chancellor by the CDU leader Helmut Kohl, and the FDP agreed to form a coalition with the CDU-CSU. The Kohl government brought about a rightward swing in support of the policies of the NATO alliance and toward more conservative economic principles. Kohl supported the continued presence of NATO forces and nuclear weapons on German soil. He also, however, consistently tried to broaden political relations between the West and the Soviet bloc. In 1983 and 1984 the government experienced a series of domestic crises, including labor strikes and massive demonstrations by the country's antinuclear movement. The governing coalition retained power by a slim majority in the 1987 general elections.

Reunification of Germany

Although German reunification was seen as a principal goal in West Germany's relations with East Germany, it seemed a remote likelihood until the dramatic political upheavals that took place in East Germany in late 1989 and 1990. In the latter half of 1989, thousands of East German citizens emigrated illegally to West Germany via Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary. Popular dissent in East Germany gave rise to an independent citizen's action group, New Forum. Following the suppression of demonstrations in East Berlin by the police, civil unrest spread across the country; the demonstrators attracted an increasing number of people, and intervention by the police eventually ceased. In Oct., 1989, Erich Honecker resigned his posts and was replaced by Egon Krenz, who legalized and initiated dialogue with the New Forum. Media constraints were partially lifted, and an amnesty was announced for all persons who had attempted to leave the country illegally, as well as for arrested demonstrators.

Large-scale demonstrations continued, including a November rally in East Berlin of 500,000 people. On Nov. 7 the entire membership of the council of ministers resigned, and Hans Modrow was elected chairman of the council (prime minister). The SED politburo also resigned and was reorganized. The new government promised to introduce political and economic reforms, to hold free elections in 1990, and to abolish restrictions on foreign travel. All border crossings to West Germany were opened, and the East German government began to dismantle sections of the Berlin Wall.

In Dec., 1989, the East German legislature voted to delete from the constitution the provisions guaranteeing the SED's leading role in society. A special commission was established to investigate cases of corruption by members of the former leadership. Honecker and Willi Stoph, former chairman of the council of ministers, along with other senior leaders, were expelled from the SED and placed under house arrest. Honecker, who was ill, escaped to Moscow. The hated state security police (Stasi) was also disbanded. Mass demonstrations continued as instances of governmental corruption became public. As the atmosphere in the country grew increasingly volatile, the politburo and the central committee of the SED, including Krenz, resigned.

Gregor Gysi, a prominent lawyer, was elected chairman of the SED (renamed the Party of Democratic Socialism, PDS). The first free elections in East Germany were held on Mar. 19, 1990, with the participation of more than 90% of the electorate. The East German CDU unexpectedly received about 40% of the votes, while the East German SPD received 21.8%, and the PDS only 16.4%. A "grand coalition" government, chaired by Lothar de Maiziére, the leader of the CDU, was formed in early April.

With the abolition of travel restrictions between the two Germanies, the possibility of reunification was openly discussed. In Nov., 1989, Kohl presented a ten-point unification plan to the Bundestag, where it was overwhelmingly approved. In December he made his first official visit to East Germany, where he agreed to establish joint economic, cultural, and environmental commissions. Four rounds of "two-plus-four" talks were held in mid-1990 involving the two Germanies and the four powers that occupied Germany after World War II. In May the legislative bodies of East and West Germany ratified a treaty establishing a monetary, economic, and social union, which took effect July 1.

In July, 1990, Kohl and Gorbachev agreed that the USSR would withdraw its forces from East German soil within four years (between then and Aug., 1994, when the withdrawal was completed, more than a half million troops were pulled out); it was also agreed that the united Germany would reduce its armed force strength to 370,000 within the same period. Also in July, East Germany reestablished five states in place of its 15 districts. In August, East and West Berlin were joined to form the state of Berlin. On Oct. 3, 1990, the two German states were formally unified, and it was officially declared that the united Germany would be a full member of NATO. In November, Germany signed a treaty with Poland recognizing Poland's western boundary and renouncing German claims to territory lost because of World War II.

The first all-German elections since 1933 were held on Dec. 2, 1990. The CDU coalition, led by Kohl, won strong support, and he was elected chancellor of all Germany. The Kohl government faced serious problems, including escalating unemployment in E Germany, rising public debt, and a resurgence, especially in E Germany, of extreme right-wing and neo-Nazi groups that made brutal attacks on foreign workers and immigrants. In 1991 the Bundestag voted in favor of Berlin as the seat of government; by 1999 most of the government had moved there, although some administrative functions remained in Bonn.

In new elections held in 1994, the governing coaliton suffered losses but held onto a small majority. Roman Herzog became president the same year. The country was required to adopt cost-cutting measures to reduce its budget deficit in order to qualify for the European Union's single currency, which was inaugurated in 1999. Many of Germany's generous social benefits were cut, as unemployment rose to its highest postwar levels and workers reacted with strikes and protests. In 1998, Gerhard Schröder led the SPD to victory and was elected chancellor as head of a center-left coalition government that included the Greens. Johannes Rau was elected president in 1999, and that same year Germany adopted a new immigration law making it easier for its many foreign residents to become citizens. In late 1999 and early 2000 the CDU was rocked by disclosures that former chancellor and party leader Kohl and the party had accepted millions of dollars in illegal donations in the 1980s and 90s.

The new century opened with Germany continuing to retain its dominant economic position in the European Union, where it used its financial policies to fight inflation and high interest rates. In 2001, Schröder's support for the United States in Afghanistan strained relations with the Greens. The governing coalition narrowly retained power after the 2002 Bundestag elections, which left the Social Democrats more dependent on Green support. Although Schröder was hurt by the poor economic situation in Germany, his insistence that his government would not participate in an American operation against Iraq struck a responsive chord with many Germans.

The weakness in the German economy resulted in 2002 in government deficits that exceeded EU standards, leading to censure from the EU. In 2003, Germany's economic problems and deficits continued, and late in the year the chancellor secured the passage of a package of tax cuts and labor and social law changes intended to help the economy revive. Voter unhappiness with the economy and Schröder's policies led to several SPD setbacks in state elections in 2003 and 2004. Horst Köhler, the former managing director of the International Monetary Fund and the CDU candidate, was elected to succeed Rau as president in 2004; he was reelected in 2009. Sluggish economic growth during 2004 led to increases in German unemployment.

Following SPD losses (2005) in North Rhine-Westphalia, a party stronghold, Schröder called for early national elections, and engineered a no-confidence vote. In the Sept., 2005, elections, the CDU-CSU won, as had been expected, but it secured only a slight plurality of the seats when Schröder led the SPD to a strong finish. Negotiations led to an agreement to form a CDU-CSU-SPD coalition with Christian Democrat Angela Merkel as chancellor. Merkel became the first woman-as well as the first East German after reunification-to hold the post. The awkwardness of her broad coalition, however, was highlighted by a 2006 compromise agreement on health care reform that proved difficult to negotiate and was regarded by many as inadequate.

Late in 2008 the global financial and economic crisis began having significant effects in Germany, forcing the government to rescue one of Germany's largest banks from collapse, and sending the economy into recession. In Feb., 2009, the German parliament passed a sizable economic stimulus package. The parliamentary elections of Sept., 2009, resulted in a significant victory for Merkel and the CDU-CSU, who increased their plurality in the Bundestag. The CDU-CSU formed a center-right coalition with the Free Democrats, who finished third; Merkel remained chancellor.

In 2010, Merkel's government strongly opposed a European-only rescue of Greece if the budgetary crisis there required one, insisting on International Monetary Fund involvement as well. The disagreement between Germany and France on the issue was the first significant monetary-policy conflict between the two since the establishment of the euro, and resulted at times in an unclear European response that also magnified the crisis. Subsequently, Germany adopted a more assertive position with respect to a eurozone rescue fund, seeking changes on fiscal, social, business, and labor policies in eurozone member nations as the price for its support, but new German support for eurozone financial stability measures was necessary in 2011 and that continued to create divisions in the coalition and cost it public support.

President Köhler resigned in May, 2010, after he made controversial remarks that suggested that the deployment of German forces in Afghanistan was necessary to protect German economic interests. Christian Wulff, a deputy leader of the CDU, was elected president in June, 2010, but the fact that it took three ballots for him to win was seen as a sign of displeasure within the governing coalition over government policies. In 2011, parties in the governing coalition in general suffered losses in a series of state elections.

Bibliography

The chief source collection for medieval German history is the Monumenta Germaniae historica. Of the writings of the great German historians of the 19th cent., the monumental works of Ranke, Sybel, and Treitschke remain important. Among more recent works, see those of G. Barraclough, V. Valentin, E. Eyck, A. J. P. Taylor, G. P. Gooch, H. Kohn, F. Fischer, K. Epstein, E. Kehr, and G. D. Feldman.

See also H. Holborn, History of Modern Germany, 1840-1945 (3 vol., 1959-69); P. Gay, Weimar Culture (1968); G. Ritter, The Sword and the Scepter (tr., 4 vol., 1969-73); F. R. Stern, The Failure of Illiberalism (1972); A. J. Ryder, Twentieth-Century Germany (1973); V. R. Berghahn, Modern Germany (1982); L. J. Edinger, West German Politics (1986); M. Dennis, German Democratic Republic (1987); D. L. Bark and D. R. Gress, A History of West Germany, 1945-1988 (1989); B. Gwertzman and M. T. Kaufman, ed., The Collapse of Communism (1990); D. Marsh, The New Germany (1990); V. R. Berghahn, Imperial Germany, 1871-1914 (1994); S. Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews (2 vol., 1997-2007); H. D. Genscher, Rebuilding a House Divided (1998); M. Burleigh, The Third Reich (2000); M. Stürmer, The German Empire: 1870-1918 (2001); N. Frei, Adenauer's Germany and the Nazi Past (2003); R. J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (2004), The Third Reich in Power (2005), and The Third Reich at War (2009); M. Mazower, Hitler's Empire (2008); M. E. Sarotte, 1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe (2009); P. Watson, The German Genius (2010). The Allied occupation is discussed in the study by F. Taylor (2011), the U.S. occupation in that by E. Davidson (1959), the British in that by R. Ebsworth (1961), the French in that by F. R. Willis (1962), and the Russian in that by N. M. Naimark (1995). Bibliographies will also be found under other related headings.


The first contacts between psychoanalysis and Germany occurred during the discussions and correspondence between Freud and Wilhelm Fliess at the end of the 1890s and continued through Freud's student Felix Gattel. Between 1907 and 1910 psychiatrists who formed part of the entourage of Otto Binswanger, professor of psychiatry at Jena, became familiar with the "cathartic method." They included Wolfgang Warda, Wilhelm Strohmayer, Arnold Georg Stegmann, Georg Wanke, Iwan Bloch, Arthur Muthmann, Otto Juliusburger, and Jaroslav Marcinowski.

The first systematic application of psychoanalysis in Berlin was carried out by Karl Abraham, a student of Carl Gustav Jung and Eugen Bleuler. Abraham was in close contact with Freud since 1908 and was responsible for the first meeting of the Berliner Psychoanalytische Vereinigung (Berlin Psychoanalytic Association) on August 27, 1908, which involved a group of local doctors, including Magnus Hirschfeld (a sex researcher), Iwan Bloch (dermatology, human sexuality), Otto Juliusburger (psychiatry, abstinence), and Heinrich Koerber (circle of Monists). Later its members included Max Eitingon and Mosche Wulff. In 1910 the International Psychoanalytical Association was founded on the occasion of the second international congress of psychoanalysis in Nuremberg, with the Berlin Psychoanalytic Association the leading regional group. By the end of 1911 the Berlin association had eleven members, including three women, Tatiana Rosenthal, Karen Horney, and Margarete Stegmann, the first women analysts. In June 1912 two other nonphysician women were admitted as members at large.

Since German psychiatrists resisted psychoanalysis, recognition took place through various cultural movements (sexual liberation, the emancipation of women, judicial reform, monism). At the time two psychoanalytic congresses were held in Germany: the Weimar congress on September 21, 1911 and the Munich congress on September 7, 1913. The Berlin Psychoanalytic Association underwent qualitative consolidation in an effort to set itself apart from the sexual sciences (after the exclusion of Magnus Hirschfeld in 1911) and in reaction to the defection of Carl Jung, who gave up the presidency of the International Psychoanalytical Association in 1913 and was supported by the Munich group.

Aside from its institutionalization, psychoanalysis received a welcome reception in literature (from authors Lou Andreas-Salomé, Hermann Hesse, Rainer Maria Rilke, Alfred Döblin). Indeed, the city of Frankfurt awarded Sigmund Freud the Goethe Prize in 1930. It was also well received in art (though the mediation of Otto Gros, who was part of the action group that included F. Pfemfert, F. Jung, E. Mühsam). Georg Wilhelm Pabst's film Geheimnisse einer Seele (The mysteries of a soul; 1926) was made in collaboration with Karl Abraham and Hanns Sachs.

Georg Groddeck, the "wild analyst" and the "father of psychosomatics," opened a fifteen-bed clinic in Baden-Baden. During World War I, an opportunity arose to prove the effectiveness of psychoanalysis in treating war neuroses. This had the effect of identifying the majority of analysts with the objectives of the war (with the exception of Helene Stöcker and Siegfried Bernfeld) and enabled them to maintain international scientific dialogue (for example, through the publication of the Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse). Official recognition of psychoanalysis grew, as demonstrated by the presence of government representatives from Austria, Germany, and Hungary at the 1918 Budapest congress, whose theme was the use of psychoanalysis in treating war neuroses. It was here that Sigmund Freud spoke in favor of the use of mass psychoanalysis. In 1919 the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag (International Psychoanalytic Press) was founded in Leipzig (later in March 1936 the Nazis confiscated the firm's inventory).

The executive board of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Association appointed Max Eitingon, Ernst Simmel, and Karl Abraham on September 26, 1919, to head the Poliklinik für psychoanalytische Behandlung nervöser Krankheiten (Polyclinic for the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Mental Illnesses), which opened on February 16, 1920. Though the Berlin Psychoanalytic Association managed the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute and the polyclinic, Max Eitingon owned the physical assets and library. He financed the association with an annual fund of 16,000 Reichsmarks. Annual elections were held for the various positions (polyclinic, teaching, candidate, cash management, and subventions). The association grew through an influx of Hungarian analysts fleeing the revolution and counterrevolution, as well as the arrival of analysts from other countries, who were attracted by the freedom and liberality of the Weimar Republic and the then favorable economic situation in Germany. From 1923 the training of analysts was systematized according to guidelines established by Max Eitingon, Carl Müller-Braunschweig, and Sándor Radó and included theoretical courses, a required analysis, and supervised analyses. In 1925 analytic treatment was recognized by a new Prussian order on honoraria (PREUGO) and the German doctor's agreement (ADGO). Following the death of Karl Abraham (on December 25, 1925), Ernst Simmel became director of the association (Sándor Radó was secretary, and Karen Horney was treasurer). On April 24, 1926, the association, in compliance with the international guidelines introduced by Ernest Jones, president of the International Psychoanalytical Association, became the Deutsche psychoanalytische Gesellschaft (DPG; German Psychoanalytic Society).

Germany was host to international psychoanalytic congresses in 1922 (Berlin), 1925 (Bad Homburg), and 1932 (Wiesbaden), as well as a couple of national conferences in 1924 (Würzburg) and 1930 (Dresden). Psychoanalytic work groups were formed in Leipzig in 1919 around Karl H. Voitel (from which a second group formed in September 1922 with Therese Benedek at its head), in Frankfurt in 1926 (with members Karl Landauer and Heinrich Meng), in Stuttgart in 1930 (with members Gustav Hans Graber and Hermann Gundert), and in Hamburg in 1930 (with members Clara Happel and August Watermann).

In 1929 the Südwestdeutsche psychoanalytische Arbeitsgemeinschaft (Southwest German Psychoanalytic Work Group, with members Karl Landauer, Heinrich Meng, and Frieda Fromm-Reichmann) was formed in Frankfurt in close collaboration with the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research) (with members Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno). This work group sought to diffuse psychoanalysis by providing training analysis and classes on theory held at the university for candidates without any therapeutic training. A few psychoanalytic clinics were established, though they soon closed for lack of financing. There were the Therapeutikum (from 1924 to 1928, with room for fifteen patients), founded by Erich Fromm and Frieda Fromm-Reichmann in Heidelberg to create a bridge between orthodox Judaism and psychoanalysis, and the Schloss Tegel sanitorium in Berlin (from April 1927 to August 1931) for the treatment of serious neuroses, addictions, and character disturbances.

In 1928 Max Eitingon became president of Internationaler psychoanalytischer Verlag. On January 13, 1931, he was elected president of the DPG, and was assisted by Felix Boehm, Hanns Sachs, and Ernst Simmel.

On April 7, 1933, a law restoring the "office of professions" was issued by the National Socialist government, followed, on April 9, 1933, by an "Aryanization" order directed at medical organizations. On April 22, 1933, medical health insurers started excluding "non-Aryan" doctors, and psychoanalysis was attacked as a "Jewish" science. Yet many eminent non-Jewish representatives of the profession, such as Felix Boehm and Carl Müller-Braunschweig, believed, as did National Socialism itself, that psychoanalysis was an effective therapeutic practice. Many eminent leftist psychoanalysts, including Wilhelm Reich, Otto Fenichel, and Ernst Simmel, considered psychoanalysis to have a worldview opposed to National Socialism.

At the annual DPG meeting of May 6, 1933, when Boehm and Müller-Braunschweig proposed Aryanizing the presidency, most members voted against the change (eight out of fifteen, with five abstentions). On May 10, 1933, the works of Sigmund Freud, along with those of other psychoanalysts, were burned. On November 18, 1933, Boehm and Müller-Braunschweig assumed control of the society, and on December 31, 1933, Max Eitingon left Berlin.

At the annual DPG meeting held on December 1, 1935, the society, with the assistance of Ernst Jones, president of the International Psychoanalytical Association, refused to dissolve and decided to remain within the association. However, it required its Jewish members to leave the society. By 1936, 74 analysts had left Germany. Salomea Kempner, August Watermann, and Karl Landauer did not survive their incarceration by the National Socialists.

Some members of the DPG resisted the regime: Edith Jacobsohn fought with the socialist resistance group Neu Beginnen (New Beginnings). She was arrested on October 24, 1935, but managed to escape and fled to the United States. The DPG then passed a resolution that required members to abstain from politics. In February 1937 Käthe Dräger became head of the Berlin committee of the KPD-Opposition (the opposition group formed to fight the German communist party, or KPD). She wrote and distributed antifascist writings and tracts, and helped the families of comrades who had been jailed. In 1937 John Rittmeister was forced to flee Switzerland for "communist activity," and in 1941 he joined the resistance group that had formed around H. Schultze-Boysen (the Rote Kapelle, or Red Orchestra). He was arrested on September 26, 1942, and executed on May 13, 1943. Fourteen psychoanalysts remained in Germany.

Discussions between Felix Boehm (president of the DPG), Sigmund and Anna Freud, and other leading analysts gave Boehm the impression of a certain neutrality toward or even support for his and the DPG's adaptation to the National Socialist regime. But those involved did not want to further complicate matters, though they did not agree with his political views or the ideological conformism of Müller-Braunschweig. The Ministry of the Interior told Boehm that to obtain authorization to teach, he, as president of the DPG, had to fold the other psychotherapeutic organizations into the Deutsches Institut für psychologische Forschung und Psychotherapie (German Institute for Psychological Research and Psychotherapy), which was to be under National Socialist control and run by Professor Matthias Heinrich Göring.

The new institute was founded in May 1936, and Max Eitingon's assets "inventoried." This was the beginning of the development of a "German psychotherapy," an eclectic mix of different psychotherapeutic theories. The DPG was dissolved on November 19, 1938, after an aborted attempt by MüllerBraunschweig to transfer the Wiener Psychoanalytische Vereinigung (WPV; Vienna Psychoanalytic Society) and the publishing house to the German Institute for Psychological Research and Psychotherapy, within which it would become working group A.

Although Boehm and Müller-Braunschweig were officially banned from teaching and publishing, they were both important collaborators of the institute. They ran the polyclinic, and Boehm coordinated the working group on homosexuality, while MüllerBraunschweig coordinated the teaching program. The ban on the use of psychoanalytic terminology did not affect Harald Schultz-Hencke, however, who in 1933 developed a form of "neopsychoanalysis," an amalgam of current psychoanalytic teachings, by abandoning metapsychology and other essential elements of analysis.

Of the 300 members of the medical staff of the German Institute (including 17 members of the DPG/WPV), 41 were members of the Nazi party (the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei), and of the 145 members who were not doctors (25 of whom were members of the DPG/WPV), 22 were party members. Although most of the DPG members remaining in Germany had managed to adapt to the Nazi regime, only Doctor Gerhard Scheunert was a member of the Nazi party. The German Institute, by then solidly established, was recognized by the union of German workers, financed by the Luftwaffe and private insurers, and, during the war, was "assigned to the war effort." Eventually it was raised to the level of a government institute within the Reich's research council (Reichsinstitut im Reichsforschungsrat), with an annual budget of 880,000 Reichsmarks.

After the war, though participants claimed to have sought to "save psychoanalysis" by their underground presence, they faced considerable skepticism and criticism from colleagues living abroad. On October 16, 1945, the DPG was reestablished with MüllerBraunschweig as its first president, Boehm as representative, and Werner Kemper as the third member of the office staff. It had 35 ordinary members and 2 members at large, 12 of whom had been trained between 1936 and 1945. On April 29, 1946, it resumed activities (as the Berliner Psychoanalytische Gesellschaft until December 3, 1950), but the British military authorities forced the DPG to strike any mention of being a "member of the International Psychoanalytical Association." On May 9, 1947, the Institut für Psychotherapie was founded in Berlin, with teachers from a variety of psychotherapeutic backgrounds, to provide training in psychotherapy; in 1948 the institute also began training "education counselors," or Psychagogen (child and adolescent therapists).

During the first postwar International Congress of Psychoanalysis, which took place in Zurich in 1949, the confrontation between Harald Schultz-Hencke's neopsychoanalysis and the conventional Freudian position of Müller-Braunschweig reached its culmination. The DPG was provisionally admitted to the International Psychoanalytical Association, subject to the requirement that its members state their position openly.

On May 13, 1950, Müller-Braunschweig, unsuccessful in his attempts to obtain recognition from Schultz-Hencke, secretly founded the Deutsche psychoanalytische Vereinigung (DPV; German Psychoanalytic Association). The DPV was admitted to the International Psychoanalytical Association at the 1951 Amsterdam congress, but not the DPG. The DPG only succeeded in regaining membership as the IPA Executive Council Provisional Society at the IPA Congress in Nice in 2001. In 2004 the DPV was the second largest group within the International Psychoanalytical Association in terms of number of members. At the suggestion of Werner Schwidder (member of the DPG and student of Schultz-Hencke), the DPG, in 1962, joined with other neopsychoanalytic groups to form the Internationale Föderation psychoanalytischer Gesellschaften (International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies), comprising twenty individual societies in Europe, North America, and South America.

In spite of struggles for influence between the DPG and the DPV, which were just beginning to ease, in 1949 Wilhelm Bitter founded the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Psychoanalyse, Psychotherapie, Psychosomatik und Tiefenpsychologie (German Society for Psychoanalysis, Psychotherapy, Psychosomatics, and Depth Psychology), a professional organization incorporating the major trends in depth psychology (neopsychoanalysis, conventional Freudianism, Jungian analysis, Adlerian analysis). The member societies took turns supplying presidents. As of 2004, it had approximately 3,150 members in 45 institutes, which are recognized by the kassenärztliche Bundesvereinigung (German association of registered physicians) and German medical associations as establishments providing further education to become child and youth analytical psychotherapists. Outside Berlin, working groups and psychotherapeutic establishments were created in Munich (the successor of the German Institute for Psychological Research and Psychotherapy and the mobile psychosomatic service of Johann Cremerius), Stuttgart (the working group in 1946, and in 1948 the Institut für Psychotherapie und Tiefenpsychologie [Institute for Psychotherapy and Depth Psychology], representing the various forms of depth psychology and founded by Wilhelm Bitter, Hermann Gundert, and Felix Schottlaender), Heidelberg (the department of psychosomatics run by Alexander Mitscherlich), Bremen (the working group founded by Hildegard Buder in 1949, and an institute founded by R. W. Schulte and Franz Rudolf Haarstrick in 1951), and Göttingen (the Tiefenbrunn regional hospital, founded by G. Kühnel and W. Schwidder). Later, institutes were created in all the major cities of the Federal Republic of Germany. The Berlin institute gradually lost its importance and was overshadowed by the institute founded in Frankfurt in 1961 under the direction of Alexander Mitscherlich and associated with the university. This was the Institut und Ausbildungszentrum für Psychoanalyse und psychosomatische Medizin (Institute and Learning Center for Psychoanalysis and Psychosomatic Medicine), which was renamed the Sigmund Freud Institute in 1964.

Mitscherlich and his wife, Margarete Mitscherlich-Nielsen, not only renewed relations with the Institute of Social Research (where Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno were central figures) but also initiated a dialog with the international psychoanalytic community concerning the controversies associated with Germany's National Socialist past. Sparked by criticisms from the student movement, interest in social policies, group therapy, and family therapy grew (relevant authors include Horst-Eberhard Richter, Franz Heigl, Anneliese Heigl-Evers). The "Bernfeld Circle" (Johannes Cremerius) began to question the training and qualifications of analysts, the issue of feminism, and the various polemics surrounding psychoanalysis (Christa Rhode-Dachser).

In the German Democratic Republic, ideology interfered with the resumption of a psychoanalytic tradition, although there was relative tolerance for neopsychoanalysis. In an initial phase running from 1945 to 1949, the analysts Werner Kemper (West Berlin), Alexander Mette (Weimar), and Franz Baumeyer (Arnsdorf) were among the dozen psychiatrists responsible for training and accrediting "mental health caretakers and psychotherapists." In Leipzig, the neurologist A. Beerholdt, although he never completed his analytic coursework, was able to introduce psychoanalysis to several psychiatrists (Wendt, Starke, Behrendt, Böttcher). The only trained psychoanalyst remaining in the German Democratic Republic, Alexander Mette, left psychoanalysis to start a career in politics (he pursued an initial interest in health policies, then a university career, and eventually became a member of the chamber of deputies of the German Democratic Republic and a member of the central committee of the Socialist Unity Party). The contents of psychoanalytic discussions were determined by Harald Schultz-Hencke and his followers, Werner Schwidder, U. Derbolowsky, and G. Kühnel. Schultz-Hencke's appointment as professor at Humboldt University on September 29, 1949, led the DPG to issue a resolution forbidding members from taking posts in both East and West Germany, and Schultz-Hencke gave up his professorship. Following the creation of the German Democratic Republic on October 7, 1949, psychotherapeutic establishments were created in Jena and Leipzig.

From 1950 to 1962, while psychoanalysis was expanding in the United States and an antipsychoanalytic movement was taking place in the Soviet Union (where Freud's work represented a facet of National Socialist ideology), the trend in the German Democratic Republic turned to Pavlovianism. Associated with the therapeutic tradition of Otto Binswanger, Johannes H. Schultz, Ernst Speer, and O. Vogt, in 1951 a department of psychotherapy was opened at the medical polyclinic. There they developed a medical-materialist "rational psychotherapy" intended to replace neopsychoanalysis.

The period from 1963 to 1976, when H. Kleinsorge was president of the DPG, was characterized by greater openness in discussions of psychotherapies and in international relations. In the society a number of sections were set up, organized according to method rather than their theoretical leanings: psychodynamic therapy, group therapy, autogenic training and hypnosis, infant therapy, music therapy. Between 1976 and 1984 recognition was granted to "medical specialists in psychotherapy" and "medical psychologists" (August 1978), and individual therapy was reintroduced. Fifteen regional societies of psychotherapy were created to cover psychotherapeutic needs and the basic training of doctors, and interdisciplinary working groups were formed to further integrate psychoanalysis with the medical field. After 1985 efforts were made to institutionalize psychotherapy in the universities by creating autonomous chairs of psychotherapy and medical psychology, and psychoanalytically oriented research on the body helped to conceptualize group therapy. Access to the psychoanalytic literature was still limited, however: Freud was first published in the German Democratic Republic as late as 1983.

In September 1947, the Studiengesellschaft für praktische Psychologie (Research Society for Practical Psychology) was formed in West Germany for representatives of all the academic professions concerned with the individual. Ever since 1945, in the university exams given to psychologists, psychoanalysis appeared under "depth psychology and education counseling." After the educational reforms of 1973, it appeared in the larger field of "clinical psychology," comprising the study of testing, prevention, rehabilitation, counseling, and other areas outside the field of depth psychology.

Gradually, psychoanalysis disappeared from higher education to be taught in training institutes and the psychosomatic departments of medical schools. Nonetheless, in experimental psychology, psychoanalysis remained the most systematic and most studied psychological theory in 1977. At the beginning of the 1980s, the emphasis on the interpretation of psychoanalytic texts brought about through the influence of Jacques Lacan made its appearance in German scholarship. After 1970 medical psychology and sociology, as well as psychotherapy and psychosomatics, became required material for students of medicine and resulted in the creation of the corresponding chairs and, in some cases, university departments. In 1979 the DPG created a psychoanalysis section alongside psychotherapy, and psychoanalysis became a part of the continuing training of doctors. At the start of the 1990s, specialist medical training included fields such as "psychotherapeutic medicine," "psychiatry and psychotherapy," "psychiatry and psychotherapy of children and adolescents."

With respect to the relations between psychoanalysis and insurers, the Einheitskrankenkasse and the Rentenversicherung, in Berlin, had financed the Zentralinstitut für psychogene Erkrankungen der Versicherungsanstalt Berlin (Central Insurance Institute of Berlin for Mental Illness), founded by Werner Kemper and Harald Schultz-Hencke. By 1955 insurance reforms in Berlin had gradually done away with many of these organizations, but the Central Insurance Institute remains. Empirical follow-up work on outpatients by Franz Baumeyer and Annemarie Dührssen made legal recognition of psychotherapy possible. In 1960 the "Munich model" was instituted; this system involved the sharing of medical expenses among the government (for employees), insurers, and patients, each paying a third. In 1967 psychological and psychoanalytic therapies became covered general medical expenses for which insurers were responsible, following verification of the illness. In 1968 insurers (and in 1971 mutual insurance companies as well) started covering psychotherapy under certain conditions, and they also covered child therapies. On July 1, 1976, the medical committee and insurers modified the guidelines for analytic therapies to recognize neurosis as an illness. Psychosomatic treatment became covered from October 1, 1987. In therapy, if the symptoms are recognized, reimbursement covers 160 fifty-minute hours of treatment, with 80 to 140 additional hours possible. Psychologists who have received analytic training can provide psychoanalytic treatments. With the passing of a law regulating psychotherapists (June 16, 1998), "psychological psychotherapists" and child and youth therapists now require a license to practice medicine.

Among journals, one of the most important is Psyche, which began by focusing on depth psychology but later broadened its coverage to include cultural trends. Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse published contributions to the theory, practice, and history of psychoanalysis. Forum der Psychoanalyse and Zeitschrift für psychoanalytische Theorie und Praxis are clinical in orientation. Other journals include Praxis der Psychotherapie und Psychosomatik and Zeitschrift für psychosomatische Medizin und Psychoanalyse.

Until the end of the 1960s, the DPG and the DPV were separated by their divergent theoretical positions concerning Harald Schultz-Hencke's neopsychoanalysis. Since then, the DPG's orientation has shifted to a more international position focused on the ego and the self and on the theory of object relations. Moreover, it has generally supported the classical Freudian position. However, there has been growing interest within both the DPV and the DPG for the Kleinian position, and contacts have developed with the "Middle Group" of the British Psycho-Analytical Society. Though there are a few theoretical differences (Rudolf, 1987), there are more differences in practice. For example, in training analysis the DPV recommends four sessions, and the DPG three.

After accounts were settled over Alexander Mitscherlich's involvement with National Socialism, a reckoning that took place over a twenty-five-year period following the war, the first postwar congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association in Germany was held in Hamburg in 1985. At the congress there was a growing interest in the history of psychoanalysis, its development (Karen Brecht, Volker Friedrich, Ludger Hermanns, Dierk Juelich, Isidor Kaminer, and Regine Lockot), and its interpretation (Hermann Beland, Ermann). In 1995 and 1996 conferences between groups of German and Israeli psychoanalysts took place (H. Beland). In 1996 the first joint DPG-DPV conference was held on "the division of the psychoanalytic community in Germany and its consequences." In 1996 the two societies, the DPG and DPV, had nearly the same number of members (approximately five hundred each).

Bibliography

Haarstrick, Franz Rudolf. (1994). Die Entwicklung des Gutachterverfahrens in der Psychotherapie. Arbeitskreis Deutschen Gesellschaft für Psychoanalyse, Psychotherapie, Psychosomatik und Tiefenpsychologie/Vereinigung Analytischer Kinder—und Jugendlichen—Psychoterhapeuten, 4.

Hermanns, Ludger M. (1994). Karl Abraham und die Anfänge der Berliner psychoanalytischen Vereinigung. Luzifer-Amor, 13, 30-40.

Höck, Kurt. (1988). Entwicklung der Balint-Gruppenarbeit in der D.D.R. Klinik und Praxis. Berlin: Springer.

Lockot, Regine. (1985). Erinnern und Durcharbeiten: zur Geschichte der Psychoanalyse und Psychotherapie im Nationalsozialismus. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer.

Rudolf, Gerd. (1987). Vergleich der Akzeptanz psychoanalytischer Konzepte von I.P.A.- und D.P.G.-Mitgliedern.

—REGINE LOCKOT

Republic in north-central Europe, divided into East Germany and West Germany in 1949 and reunited in 1990. Officially called the Federal Republic of Germany.

  • Germany was a collection of competing states until it was unified during the second half of the nineteenth century under the leadership of Otto von Bismarck.
  • Germany's industrial, colonial, and naval expansion was considered a threat by the British and French and was one of the main causes of World War I, in which Germany was badly defeated.
  • After the defeat of the Nazis in World War II, Germany was divided into four zones occupied by British, French, Soviet, and American forces.
  • Since reunification Germany has become Europe's leading economic power. (See East Germany and West Germany under “World History since 1550.”)

Dialing Code:

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The international dialing code for Germany is:   49


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Local Time:

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It is 5:28 PM, February 8, in Germany.

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Introduction
Background:As Europe's largest economy and second most populous nation (after Russia), Germany is a key member of the continent's economic, political, and defense organizations. European power struggles immersed Germany in two devastating World Wars in the first half of the 20th century and left the country occupied by the victorious Allied powers of the US, UK, France, and the Soviet Union in 1945. With the advent of the Cold War, two German states were formed in 1949: the western Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the eastern German Democratic Republic (GDR). The democratic FRG embedded itself in key Western economic and security organizations, the EC, which became the EU, and NATO, while the Communist GDR was on the front line of the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact. The decline of the USSR and the end of the Cold War allowed for German unification in 1990. Since then, Germany has expended considerable funds to bring Eastern productivity and wages up to Western standards. In January 1999, Germany and 10 other EU countries introduced a common European exchange currency, the euro.
Geography
Map of Germany
Location:Central Europe, bordering the Baltic Sea and the North Sea, between the Netherlands and Poland, south of Denmark
Geographic coordinates:51 00 N, 9 00 E
Map references:Europe
Area:total: 357,021 sq km
land: 349,223 sq km
water: 7,798 sq km
Area - comparative:slightly smaller than Montana
Land boundaries:total: 3,621 km
border countries: Austria 784 km, Belgium 167 km, Czech Republic 646 km, Denmark 68 km, France 451 km, Luxembourg 138 km, Netherlands 577 km, Poland 456 km, Switzerland 334 km
Coastline:2,389 km
Maritime claims:territorial sea: 12 nm
exclusive economic zone: 200 nm
continental shelf: 200 m depth or to the depth of exploitation
Climate:temperate and marine; cool, cloudy, wet winters and summers; occasional warm mountain (foehn) wind
Terrain:lowlands in north, uplands in center, Bavarian Alps in south
Elevation extremes:lowest point: Neuendorf bei Wilster -3.54 m
highest point: Zugspitze 2,963 m
Natural resources:coal, lignite, natural gas, iron ore, copper, nickel, uranium, potash, salt, construction materials, timber, arable land
Land use:arable land: 33.13%
permanent crops: 0.6%
other: 66.27% (2005)
Irrigated land:4,850 sq km (2003)
Total renewable water resources:188 cu km (2005)
Freshwater withdrawal (domestic/industrial/agricultural):total: 38.01 cu km/yr (12%/68%/20%)
per capita: 460 cu m/yr (2001)
Natural hazards:flooding
Environment - current issues:emissions from coal-burning utilities and industries contribute to air pollution; acid rain, resulting from sulfur dioxide emissions, is damaging forests; pollution in the Baltic Sea from raw sewage and industrial effluents from rivers in eastern Germany; hazardous waste disposal; government established a mechanism for ending the use of nuclear power over the next 15 years; government working to meet EU commitment to identify nature preservation areas in line with the EU's Flora, Fauna, and Habitat directive
Environment - international agreements:party to: Air Pollution, Air Pollution-Nitrogen Oxides, Air Pollution-Persistent Organic Pollutants, Air Pollution-Sulfur 85, Air Pollution-Sulfur 94, Air Pollution-Volatile Organic Compounds, Antarctic-Environmental Protocol, Antarctic-Marine Living Resources, Antarctic Seals, Antarctic Treaty, Biodiversity, Climate Change, Climate Change-Kyoto Protocol, Desertification, Endangered Species, Environmental Modification, Hazardous Wastes, Law of the Sea, Marine Dumping, Ozone Layer Protection, Ship Pollution, Tropical Timber 83, Tropical Timber 94, Wetlands, Whaling
signed, but not ratified: none of the selected agreements
Geography - note:strategic location on North European Plain and along the entrance to the Baltic Sea
People
Population:82,329,758 (July 2009 est.)
Age structure:0-14 years: 13.7% (male 5,768,366/female 5,470,516)
15-64 years: 66.1% (male 27,707,761/female 26,676,759)
65 years and over: 20.3% (male 7,004,805/female 9,701,551) (2009 est.)
Median age:total: 43.8 years
male: 42.6 years
female: 45.2 years (2009 est.)
Population growth rate:-0.053% (2009 est.)
Birth rate:8.18 births/1,000 population (2009 est.)
Death rate:10.8 deaths/1,000 population (2008 est.)
Net migration rate:2.19 migrant(s)/1,000 population (2009 est.)
Urbanization:urban population: 74% of total population (2008)
rate of urbanization: 0.1% annual rate of change (2005-10 est.)
Sex ratio:at birth: 1.06 male(s)/female
under 15 years: 1.05 male(s)/female
15-64 years: 1.04 male(s)/female
65 years and over: 0.72 male(s)/female
total population: 0.97 male(s)/female (2009 est.)
Infant mortality rate:total: 3.99 deaths/1,000 live births
male: 4.41 deaths/1,000 live births
female: 3.55 deaths/1,000 live births (2009 est.)
Life expectancy at birth:total population: 79.26 years
male: 76.26 years
female: 82.42 years (2009 est.)
Total fertility rate:1.41 children born/woman (2009 est.)
HIV/AIDS - adult prevalence rate:0.1% (2007 est.)
HIV/AIDS - people living with HIV/AIDS:53,000 (2007 est.)
HIV/AIDS - deaths:fewer than 500 (2007 est.)
Nationality:noun: German(s)
adjective: German
Ethnic groups:German 91.5%, Turkish 2.4%, other 6.1% (made up largely of Greek, Italian, Polish, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish)
Religions:Protestant 34%, Roman Catholic 34%, Muslim 3.7%, unaffiliated or other 28.3%
Languages:German
Literacy:definition: age 15 and over can read and write
total population: 99%
male: 99%
female: 99% (2003 est.)
School life expectancy (primary to tertiary education):total: 16 years
male: 16 years
female: 16 years (2006)
Education expenditures:4.6% of GDP (2004)
People - note:second most populous country in Europe after Russia
Government
Country name:conventional long form: Federal Republic of Germany
conventional short form: Germany
local long form: Bundesrepublik Deutschland
local short form: Deutschland
former: German Empire, German Republic, German Reich
Government type:federal republic
Capital:name: Berlin
geographic coordinates: 52 31 N, 13 24 E
time difference: UTC+1 (6 hours ahead of Washington, DC during Standard Time)
daylight saving time: +1hr, begins last Sunday in March; ends last Sunday in October
Administrative divisions:16 states (Laender, singular - Land); Baden-Wuerttemberg, Bayern (Bavaria), Berlin, Brandenburg, Bremen, Hamburg, Hessen, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania), Niedersachsen (Lower Saxony), Nordrhein-Westfalen (North Rhine-Westphalia), Rheinland-Pfalz (Rhineland-Palatinate), Saarland, Sachsen (Saxony), Sachsen-Anhalt (Saxony-Anhalt), Schleswig-Holstein, Thueringen (Thuringia); note - Bayern, Sachsen, and Thueringen refer to themselves as free states (Freistaaten, singular - Freistaat)
Independence:18 January 1871 (German Empire unification); divided into four zones of occupation (UK, US, USSR, and later, France) in 1945 following World War II; Federal Republic of Germany (FRG or West Germany) proclaimed 23 May 1949 and included the former UK, US, and French zones; German Democratic Republic (GDR or East Germany) proclaimed 7 October 1949 and included the former USSR zone; West Germany and East Germany unified 3 October 1990; all four powers formally relinquished rights 15 March 1991
National holiday:Unity Day, 3 October (1990)
Constitution:23 May 1949, known as Basic Law; became constitution of the united Germany 3 October 1990
Legal system:civil law system with indigenous concepts; judicial review of legislative acts in the Federal Constitutional Court; has not accepted compulsory ICJ jurisdiction
Suffrage:18 years of age; universal
Executive branch:chief of state: President Horst KOEHLER (since 1 July 2004)
head of government: Chancellor Angela MERKEL (since 22 November 2005)
cabinet: Cabinet or Bundesminister (Federal Ministers) appointed by the president on the recommendation of the chancellor
elections: president elected for a five-year term (eligible for a second term) by a Federal Convention, including all members of the Federal Assembly and an equal number of delegates elected by the state parliaments; election last held 23 May 2004 (next scheduled for 23 May 2009); chancellor elected by an absolute majority of the Federal Assembly for a four-year term; Bundestag vote for Chancellor last held 22 November 2005 (next will follow the national elections to be held by 27 September 2009)
election results: Horst KOEHLER elected president; received 604 votes of the Federal Convention against 589 for Gesine SCHWAN; Angela MERKEL elected chancellor; vote by Federal Assembly 397 to 202 with 12 abstentions
Legislative branch:bicameral legislature consists of the Federal Council or Bundesrat (69 votes; state governments sit in the Council; each has three to six votes in proportion to population and are required to vote as a block)and the Federal Assembly or Bundestag (614 seats; members elected by popular vote for a four-year term under a system of personalized proportional representation; a party must win 5% of the national vote or three direct mandates to gain proportional representation and caucus recognition)
elections: Bundestag - last held on 18 September 2005 (next to be held no later than autumn 2009); note - there are no elections for the Bundesrat; composition is determined by the composition of the state-level governments; the composition of the Bundesrat has the potential to change any time one of the 16 states holds an election
election results: Bundestag - percent of vote by party - CDU/CSU 35.2%, SPD 34.3%, FDP 9.8%, Left 8.7%, Greens 8.1%, other 3.9%; seats by party - CDU/CSU 225, SPD 222, FDP 61, Left 53, Greens 51, independents 2
Judicial branch:Federal Constitutional Court or Bundesverfassungsgericht (half the judges are elected by the Bundestag and half by the Bundesrat)
Political parties and leaders:Alliance '90/Greens [Claudia ROTH and Cem OEZDEMIR]; Christian Democratic Union or CDU [Angela MERKEL]; Christian Social Union or CSU [Horst SEEHOFER]; Free Democratic Party or FDP [Guido WESTERWELLE]; Left Party or Die Linke [Lothar BISKY and Oskar LAFONTAINE]; Social Democratic Party or SPD [Franz MUENTEFERING]
Political pressure groups and leaders:other: business associations and employers' organizations; religious, trade unions, immigrant, expellee, and veterans groups
International organization participation:ADB (nonregional member), AfDB (nonregional member), Arctic Council (observer), Australia Group, BIS, BSEC (observer), CBSS, CDB, CE, CERN, EAPC, EBRD, EIB, EMU, ESA, EU, FAO, G-20, G-5, G-7, G-8, G-10, IADB, IAEA, IBRD, ICAO, ICC, ICCt, ICRM, IDA, IEA, IFAD, IFC, IFRCS, IHO, ILO, IMF, IMO, IMSO, Interpol, IOC, IOM, IPU, ISO, ITSO, ITU, ITUC, MIGA, NAM (guest), NATO, NEA, NSG, OAS (observer), OECD, OPCW, OSCE, Paris Club, PCA, Schengen Convention, SECI (observer), UN, UNCTAD, UNESCO, UNHCR, UNIDO, UNIFIL, UNMIL, UNMIS, UNOMIG, UNRWA, UNWTO, UPU, WADB (nonregional), WCO, WEU, WFTU, WHO, WIPO, WMO, WTO, ZC
Diplomatic representation in the US:chief of mission: Ambassador Klaus SCHARIOTH
chancery: 4645 Reservoir Road NW, Washington, DC 20007
telephone: [1] (202) 298-4000
FAX: [1] (202) 298-4249
consulate(s) general: Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, San Francisco
Diplomatic representation from the US:chief of mission: Ambassador (vacant); Charge d'Affaires John KOENIG
embassy: Pariser Platz 2, 10117 Berlin; note - new embassy opened 4 July 2008
mailing address: PSC 120, Box 1000, APO AE 09265, Clayallee 170, 14195 Berlin
telephone: [49] (030) 2385174
FAX: [49] (030) 8305-1215
consulate(s) general: Duesseldorf, Frankfurt am Main, Hamburg, Leipzig, Munich
Flag description:three equal horizontal bands of black (top), red, and gold
Economy
Economy - overview:The German economy - the fifth largest economy in the world in PPP terms and Europe's largest - began to contract in the second quarter of 2008 as the strong euro, high oil prices, tighter credit markets, and slowing growth abroad took their toll on Germany's export-dependent economy. At 1.7% in 2008, GDP growth is expected to be negative in 2009. Recent stimulus and lender relief efforts will make demands on Germany's federal budget and undercut plans to balance its budget by 2011. Strong growth in 2007 led unemployment in 2008 to fall below 8%, a new post-reunification low. This suggested the reforms launched by the former government of Chancellor Gerhard SCHOEDER, deemed necessary due to chronically high unemployment and low average growth, had had the desired effect. The current government of Chancellor Angela MERKEL has initiated other reform measures, such as a gradual increase in the mandatory retirement age from 65 to 67 and measures to increase female participation in the labor market. Germany's aging population, combined with high chronic unemployment, has pushed social security outlays to a level exceeding contributions, but higher government revenues from the cyclical upturn in 2006-07 and a 3% rise in the value-added tax cut Germany's budget deficit to within the EU's 3% debt limit. The modernization and integration of the eastern German economy - where unemployment exceeds 30% in some municipalities - continues to be a costly long-term process, however, with annual transfers from west to east amounting to roughly $80 billion. While corporate restructuring and growing capital markets have set strong foundations to help Germany meet the longer-term challenges of European economic integration and globalization, Germany's export-oriented economy has proved a disadvantage in the context of weak global demand.
GDP (purchasing power parity):$2.863 trillion (2008 est.)
$2.816 trillion (2007)
$2.806 trillion (2006)
note: data are in 2008 US dollars
GDP (official exchange rate):$3.818 trillion (2008 est.)
GDP - real growth rate:1.3% (2008 est.)
2.5% (2007 est.)
3% (2006 est.)
GDP - per capita (PPP):$34,800 (2008 est.)
$34,900 (2007 est.)
$34,000 (2006 est.)
note: data are in 2008 US dollars
GDP - composition by sector:agriculture: 0.9%
industry: 30.1%
services: 69% (2008 est.)
Labor force:43.62 million (2008 est.)
Labor force - by occupation:agriculture: 2.4%
industry: 29.7%
services: 67.8% (2005)
Unemployment rate:7.9%
note: this is the International Labor Organization's estimated rate for international comparisons; Germany's Federal Employment Office estimated a seasonally adjusted rate of 10.8% (2008 est.)
Population below poverty line:11% (2001 est.)
Household income or consumption by percentage share:lowest 10%: 3.2%
highest 10%: 22.1% (2000)
Distribution of family income - Gini index:27 (2006)
Investment (gross fixed):18.9% of GDP (2008 est.)
Budget:revenues: $1.614 trillion
expenditures: $1.579 trillion (2008 est.)
Fiscal year:calendar year
Public debt:62.6% of GDP (2008 est.)
Inflation rate (consumer prices):2.8% (2008 est.)
Central bank discount rate:NA
Commercial bank prime lending rate:5.96% (31 December 2007)
Stock of money:NA
note: see entry for the European Union for money supply in the euro area; the European Central Bank (ECB) controls monetary policy for the 16 members of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU); individual members of the EMU do not control the quantity of money and quasi money circulating within their own borders
Stock of quasi money:NA
Stock of domestic credit:$5.081 trillion (31 December 2007)
Market value of publicly traded shares:$2.106 trillion (31 December 2007)
Agriculture - products:potatoes, wheat, barley, sugar beets, fruit, cabbages; cattle, pigs, poultry
Industries:among the world's largest and most technologically advanced producers of iron, steel, coal, cement, chemicals, machinery, vehicles, machine tools, electronics, food and beverages, shipbuilding, textiles
Industrial production growth rate:2.2% (2008 est.)
Electricity - production:594.7 billion kWh (2007 est.)
Electricity - consumption:549.1 billion kWh (2006 est.)
Electricity - exports:62.31 billion kWh (2007 est.)
Electricity - imports:42.87 billion kWh (2007 est.)
Electricity - production by source:fossil fuel: 61.8%
hydro: 4.2%
nuclear: 29.9%
other: 4.1% (2001)
Oil - production:148,100 bbl/day (2007 est.)
Oil - consumption:2.456 million bbl/day (2007 est.)
Oil - exports:563,400 bbl/day (2005)
Oil - imports:3.026 million bbl/day (2005)
Oil - proved reserves:367 million bbl (1 January 2008 est.)
Natural gas - production:17.96 billion cu m (2007 est.)
Natural gas - consumption:97.44 billion cu m (2007 est.)
Natural gas - exports:12.22 billion cu m (2007 est.)
Natural gas - imports:88.35 billion cu m (2007 est.)
Natural gas - proved reserves:254.8 billion cu m (1 January 2008 est.)
Current account balance:$267.1 billion (2008 est.)
Exports:$1.53 trillion f.o.b. (2008 est.)
Exports - commodities:machinery, vehicles, chemicals, metals and manufactures, foodstuffs, textiles
Exports - partners:France 9.7%, US 7.5%, UK 7.3%, Italy 6.7%, Netherlands 6.4%, Austria 5.4%, Belgium 5.3%, Spain 5% (2007)
Imports:$1.202 trillion f.o.b. (2008 est.)
Imports - commodities:machinery, vehicles, chemicals, foodstuffs, textiles, metals
Imports - partners:Netherlands 12%, France 8.6%, Belgium 7.8%, China 6.2%, Italy 5.8%, UK 5.6%, US 4.5%, Austria 4.4% (2007)
Reserves of foreign exchange and gold:$136.2 billion (31 December 2007 est.)
Debt - external:$4.489 trillion (30 June 2007)
Stock of direct foreign investment - at home:$924.7 billion (2008 est.)
Stock of direct foreign investment - abroad:$1.36 trillion (2008 est.)
Currency (code):euro (EUR)
Currency code:EUR
Exchange rates:euros (EUR) per US dollar - 0.6827 (2008 est.), 0.7345 (2007), 0.7964 (2006), 0.8041 (2005), 0.8054 (2004)
Communications
Telephones - main lines in use:53.75 million (2007)
Telephones - mobile cellular:97.151 million (2007)
Telephone system:general assessment: Germany has one of the world's most technologically advanced telecommunications systems; as a result of intensive capital expenditures since reunification, the formerly backward system of the eastern part of the country, dating back to World War II, has been modernized and integrated with that of the western part
domestic: Germany is served by an extensive system of automatic telephone exchanges connected by modern networks of fiber-optic cable, coaxial cable, microwave radio relay, and a domestic satellite system; cellular telephone service is widely available, expanding rapidly, and includes roaming service to many foreign countries
international: country code - 49; Germany's international service is excellent worldwide, consisting of extensive land and undersea cable facilities as well as earth stations in the Inmarsat, Intelsat, Eutelsat, and Intersputnik satellite systems (2001)
Radio broadcast stations:AM 51, FM 787, shortwave 4 (1998)
Radios:77.8 million (1997)
Television broadcast stations:373 (plus 8,042 repeaters) (1995)
Televisions:51.4 million (1998)
Internet country code:.de
Internet hosts:22.606 million (2008)
Internet Service Providers (ISPs):200 (2001)
Internet users:42.5 million (2007)
Transportation
Airports:549 (2008)
Airports - with paved runways:total: 331
over 3,047 m: 13
2,438 to 3,047 m: 52
1,524 to 2,437 m: 59
914 to 1,523 m: 73
under 914 m: 134 (2008)
Airports - with unpaved runways:total: 218
1,524 to 2,437 m: 3
914 to 1,523 m: 34
under 914 m: 181 (2008)
Heliports:28 (2007)
Pipelines:gas 24,364 km; oil 3,379 km; refined products 3,843 km (2008)
Railways:total: 48,215 km
standard gauge: 47,962 km 1.435-m gauge (20,278 km electrified)
narrow gauge: 229 km 1.000-m gauge (16 km electrified); 24 km 0.750-m gauge (2006)
Roadways:total: 644,480 km
paved: 644,480 km (includes 12,400 km of expressways)
note: includes local roads (2006)
Waterways:7,467 km
note: Rhine River carries most goods; Main-Danube Canal links North Sea and Black Sea (2008)
Merchant marine:total: 393
by type: bulk carrier 2, cargo 43, chemical tanker 13, container 284, liquefied gas 5, passenger 5, passenger/cargo 27, petroleum tanker 11, roll on/roll off 3
foreign-owned: 11 (China 2, Cyprus 2, Denmark 1, Finland 4, Netherlands 1, Sweden 1)
registered in other countries: 2,998 (Antigua and Barbuda 941, Australia 2, Bahamas 44, Bermuda 22, Brazil 6, Bulgaria 63, Burma 1, Canada 3, Cayman Islands 15, Cyprus 189, Denmark 9, Denmark 1, Estonia 1, Finland 1, France 1, Georgia 2, Gibraltar 129, Hong Kong 6, India 2, Indonesia 1, Isle of Man 56, Jamaica 4, Liberia 849, Luxembourg 5, Malaysia 1, Malta 91, Marshall Islands 235, Mongolia 4, Morocco 2, Netherlands 75, Netherlands Antilles 43, Norway 1, NZ 1, Panama 44, Portugal 20, Russia 1, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines 3, Singapore 24, Slovakia 3, Spain 5, Sri Lanka 5, Sweden 5, Turkey 1, UK 76, US 5) (2008)
Ports and terminals:Bremen, Bremerhaven, Duisburg, Hamburg, Karlsruhe, Lubeck, Rostock, Wilhemshaven
Military
Military branches:Federal Armed Forces (Bundeswehr): Army (Heer), Navy (Deutsche Marine, includes naval air arm), Air Force (Luftwaffe), Joint Support Services (Streitkraeftbasis), Central Medical Service (Zentraler Sanitaetsdienst) (2009)
Military service age and obligation:18 years of age (conscripts serve a 9-month tour of compulsory military service) (2004)
Manpower available for military service:males age 16-49: 19,594,118
females age 16-49: 18,543,955 (2008 est.)
Manpower fit for military service:males age 16-49: 15,747,493
females age 16-49: 14,899,416 (2009 est.)
Manpower reaching militarily significant age annually:male: 431,508
female: 409,111 (2009 est.)
Military expenditures:1.5% of GDP (2005 est.)
Transnational Issues
Disputes - international:none
Illicit drugs:source of precursor chemicals for South American cocaine processors; transshipment point for and consumer of Southwest Asian heroin, Latin American cocaine, and European-produced synthetic drugs; major financial center


Gale World Cuisines:

Germany

Top

Recipes

Weisse Bohnensuppe (White Bean Soup)
Bratwurst (Sausage)
Kartoffelknödeln (Potato Dumplings)
Rye Bread
Spargelgemuse (Fresh Asparagus)
Apfelpfannkuchen (Apple Pancakes)
Lebkuchen (Cookies)
Apfelschörle (Sparkling Apple Drink)
Glühwein (Non-alcoholic Drink)
Soft Pretzels
Red Coleslaw

Geographic Setting and Environment

Germany is located in Western Europe. The topography of the country is varied, and includes regions of deep forest and high mountains, as well as a wide valley surrounding the Rhine, Germany's largest river. The highest mountain peak, the Zugspitze, lies on the border with Austria. Less than 3 percent of Germans are farmers, and the country must import much of its food. Apples, pears, cherries, and peaches, as well as grapes for wine production, are important crops in Germany.

History and Food

Food has always been a major part of German culture. Even the well-known German fairy tale, Hansel and Gretel, makes reference to food. Hansel and Gretel, brother and sister, discover a house in the forest made of gingerbread and candies. King Frederick II (King Frederick the Great, 1712–1786) introduced the potato, a staple in the German diet. He gave away seed potatoes and taught the people how to grow them. But wars caused food shortages and hardship twice during the twentieth century. After the Germans lost World War I (1914–18), food was scarce and soldiers trying to get home were starving. After World War II (1939–1945), the country had even less food available, but this time nations that had defeated Germany, including the United States, helped to feed the Germans and rebuild the country. In 1949 after World War II, Germany was divided into East Germany and West Germany. This division caused the country's two halves to develop different styles of cooking. East Germany, closely associated with its neighbor, Russia, took on a more Russian style of cooking. West Germans continued the traditional German cuisine.

There are also differences in cooking style between the northern and southern Germany, similar to the northern and southern styles of cooking in the United States. In the north, restaurants in Hamburg and Berlin might feature aalsuppe (eel soup) or eintopf (seafood stew). Soups of dried beans, such as weisse bohnensuppe (white bean soup) are also popular. In the center of the country, menus include breads and cereals made with buckwheat and rye flour. A favorite dish is birnen, bohnen und speck (pears, green beans, and bacon). In the middle of the country, a region near the Netherlands known as Wesphalia is famous for spargel (asparagus), especially white asparagus, and rich, heavy pumpernickel bread. Westphalian ham, served with pungent mustard, is popular with Germans worldwide.

Frankfurt, located in the south, is the home of a sausage known as Wüstchen. This sausage is similar to the U.S. hot dog, sometimes called a "frankfurter" after the German city. In the south, a dish mysteriously called Himmel und erde (Heaven and Earth) combines potatoes and apples with onions and bacon. The southern region of Bavaria features rugged mountains and the famous Black Forest. Black Forest cherry cake and tortes, as well asKirschwasser, a clear cherry brandy, are two contributions from this area. Spätzle (tiny dumplings) are the southern version of knödel (potato dumplings) of the north. Lebkuchen is a spicy cookie prepared especially during the Christmas season. East and West Germany were reunited in the early 1990s, but Germans continue to cook according to their region.

Foods of the Germans

Germans tend to eat heavy and hearty meals that include ample portions of meat and bread. Potatoes are the staple food, and each region has its own favorite ways of preparing them. Some Germans eat potatoes with pears, bacon, and beans. Others prepare a special stew called the Pichelsteiner, made with three kinds of meat and potatoes. Germans from the capital city of Berlin eat potatoes with bacon and spicy sausage. Sauerbraten is a large roast made of pork, beef, or veal that is popular throughout Germany, and is flavored in different ways depending on the region. In the Rhine River area, it is flavored with raisins, but is usually cooked with a variety of savory spices and vinegar. Fruit (instead of vegetables) is often combined with meat dishes to add a sweet and sour taste to the meal. Throughout Germany desserts made with apples are very popular.

Knödel, or dumplings, accompany many meals, especially in the north. In the south, a tiny version called spätzle is more common. Knödel may be made either of mashed potatoes or bread (or a mixture of both), and are either boiled or fried. Germans enjoy bread with every meal, with rye, pumpernickel, and sourdough breads more common than white bread. Soft pretzels can be found almost anywhere. Spargel (asparagus) served with a sauce or in soup is popular in the spring.

See Weisse Bohnensuppe (White Bean Soup) recipe.

See Bratwurst (Sausage) recipe.

See Kartoffelknödeln (Potato Dumplings) recipe.

See Rye Bread recipe.

See Spargelgemuse (Fresh Asparagus) recipe.

See Apfelpfannkuchen (Apple Pancakes) recipe.

Food for Religious and Holiday Celebrations

Oktoberfest is the German festival of October. It is held, not in October but during the last week of September in Munich. In late summer or early fall in the United States, many cities stage Oktoberfests to celebrate German culture, especially German beer. At German Oktoberfests, beer is traditionally drunk from a large, decorated stone mug called a Bier Stein (beer stein). Germany has more than 1,200 breweries, making over 5,000 different kinds of beer.

For Christmas, cut-out honey cakes called Lebkuchen are baked in squares, hearts, semicircles, or little bear shapes, iced, and decorated with tiny cutouts of cherubs (angels) and bells. One large or five to seven small cakes are then tied together with a bright ribbon and presented by a young lady to a young man of her choice on Christmas Day. Springerle (cookies), marzipan candies, and Stollen (a type of coffeecake with candied and dried fruit) are also popular Christmas desserts. To accompany the cookies, Germans drink Glühwein, a type of mulled wine. A favorite drink with teenagers is Apfelschörle, a sparkling fruit juice. A traditional Christmas dinner is roast goose with vegetables and Kartoffelknödeln (potato dumplings).

See Lebkuchen recipe.

See Apfelschörle recipe.

See Glühwein (Non-alcoholic Drink) recipe.

Mealtime Customs

When eating out in Germany, it is polite to have both hands above the table at all times, but elbows should not rest on the table. It is also considered impolite to leave food on a plate. Waiters expect a 5 to 10 percent tip. An imbiss is a food stand that may serve bratwurst or other fast foods. Another type of restaurant is the bierhall, which commonly serves bratwursts, accompanied by beer.

Breakfast, or früstück, consists of rolls with jam, cheese, eggs, and meat. Coffee or tea may also be served. The zweites früstück (literally second breakfast) is a mid-morning snack eaten at work or school. Students may have belegtes brot (literally covered bread), a small sandwich of meat or cheese, and a piece of fruit. Germans eat their big meal of the day, mittagessen, around noon or later, sometimes lasting two hours. The meal almost always begins with suppe (soup), and several more courses follow (see sample menu). In the afternoon, kaffee (snack with coffee) is often served, consisting of pastries and cakes. Abendbrot (supper, literally "bread of the evening") is a lighter meal than lunch, usually offering an open-faced sandwich of bread with cold cuts and cheese, eaten with a knife and fork, and perhaps some coleslaw or fruit. Pretzels and sweets may be enjoyed, especially by children, any time during the day.

See Soft Pretzels recipe.

See Red Coleslaw recipe.

Politics, Economics, and Nutrition

Many Germans have begun to modify their eating habits to lower their calorie and cholesterol intake. Since the unification of East and West Germany in the 1990s, the government has faced the challenge of bringing the living conditions in the former East Germany up to the standard found in the former West Germany. Upgrading housing, schools, and utilities will continue after 2001. Despite unequal living conditions, Germans in all parts of the country are well nourished. In fact, most German children have enough to eat.

Further Study

Books

Einhorn, Barbara. West German Food and Drink. New York: Bookwright Press, 1989.

Hazelton, Nika Standen. The Cooking of Germany. New York: Time-Life Books, 1969.

Hirst, Mike. Germany. Austin, TX: Raintree Steck-Vaughn, 2000.

Loewen, Nancy. Food In Germany. Vero Beach: Rourke Publications, 1991.

Parnell, Helga. Cooking the German Way. Minneapolis: Lerner Publications Company, 1988.

Scharfenberg, Horst. The Cuisines of Germany:Regional Specialties and Traditional Home Cooking. New York: Poseidon Press, 1989.

Web Sites

German Tourism. [Online] Available http://www.deutschland-tourismus.de (accessed January 31, 2001).

Films

Hansel and Gretel, prod. by Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, and dir. by Len Talan, 84 min., Cannon Films, Inc., 1988, videocassette.



Germany's approach to wine is somewhat different from that of other European countries like France and Italy because Germans aren't as focused on wine-the simple fact is that Germans prefer beer. In fact, German per capita wine consumption is about one third of that of either France or Italy. Yet Germany is considered a negative producer because it consumes more wine than it makes, whereas Italy and France produce more wine than they drink. The cool climate in Germany makes it overwhelmingly a white-wine producer (and all their best wines are white) because red grapes don't ripen well under such conditions. The main grape varieties for white wines are riesling müller-thurgau, and sylvaner. Other white varieties include bacchus, ehrenfelser, elbing, faber, gewürztraminer, Gutedel (chasselas), huxelrebe, kerner, morio-muskat, optima, ortega, Rülander (pinot gris), scheurebe and Weissburgunder (pinot blanc). The main red varieties are portugieser, Spätburgunder (pinot noir), and Trollinger (schiava). Riesling is by far the star of the German wines. Germany's approach to promoting wine quality is different from other appellation systems, such as France's appellation d'origine contrôlée and Italy's denominazione di origine controllata. Appellations in other countries are geographic in nature and have specific regulations controlling each area. Germany, however, chose to base its wine quality on levels of ripeness and sweetness of the grapes. The focus on sugar content embodies the theory that grapes with higher sugar levels are riper and therefore yield richer wines with deep colors, intense flavors, and opulent bouquets. The German wine laws adapted in 1971 set up three categories for defining the quality of German wines. deutscher tafelwein (dtw) is the lowest-quality level followed by qualitätswein bestimmter anbaugebiet (QbA)-"quality wine from a specified region"-and the top level, qualitätswein mit prädikat (QmP)-"quality wine with distinction." Within the premier QmP category, there are six subcategories that ranked from lowest to highest: kabinett, spätlese, auslese, beerenauslese, eiswein and trockenbeerenauslese. Chaptalization (the addition of sugar) is allowed for DTW and QbA wines but not for QmP wines. It's one of the major differences between the quality levels-most grapes with enough natural sugar are reserved for QmP wines. The addition of sugar, which is converted into alcohol during fermentation, allows producers to reach the required minimum alcohol levels for a DTW or QbA wine. If a quality wine (QbA or QmP) passes all its requirements, an amtliche prüfungsnummer (official test number) is assigned. Abbreviated as A.P.Nr., this number is printed on the label, along with name of the anbaugebiet. Additional information may be printed on a quality-wine label if other requirements are met. For instance, the name of the grape variety can be included if 85 percent of the grapes used in the wine are of one variety. Compared to French and Italian wines, those from Germany are generally lower in alcohol (ranging from about 81⁄2 to 11 percent) and usually contain at least some residual sugar. The higher-quality wines-such as Auslese, Beerenauslese, Eiswein, and Trockenbeerenauslese-are quite sweet. Recently, there's been a trend toward making more of the DTW, QbA, and Kabinett wines in a less sweet style-either trocken (dry) or halbtrocken (half-dry). With the 2000 vintage, Germany introduced two new terms associated with dry varietal wines-"Classic" and "Selection." This effort is meant to simplify information to consumers and encourage the making of higher-quality dry wines. Classic wines are above average in quality and dry and are made from a traditional grape variety, such as Riesling, Silvaner, Müller-Thurgau, or Spätburgunder. Classic wines contain a Classic logo and contain the name of the producer and winegrowing region but no vineyard names. Selection wines have to meet additional standards like using grapes from vineyards with lower yields, that are hand harvested (instead of mechanically), and that originate from an einzellage (individual vineyard site), which is used on the label. Selection wines theoretically are of higher quality and less available because of these added criteria. Though Germany's appellation system isn't based on it, geography does come into play. The top two categories, QbA and QmP, must come from specific growing areas. Germany has developed a structure for defining the growing areas-from large general regions to specific vineyard sites. A large general growing region for quality wines is called an anbaugebiet. There are now thirteen of these regions, and their regional name is required on labels of quality wines (QbA and QmP). German law established eleven of these Anbaugebiete in 1971 in an effort to meet European Common Market rules. The original eleven Anbaugebiete are ahr, baden, franken, hessische bergstrasse, mittelrhein, mosel-saar-ruwer, nahe, rheingau, rheinhessen, pfalz and württemberg. Two more Anbaugebiete have been added from the former East Germany-saale-unstrut and sachsen. Except for Saale-Unstrut and Sachsen, all of Germany's primary growing regions are located along the Rhine River or one of its tributaries. Each Anbaugebiet may be further divided into bereiche (districts), grosslagen (general sites), and einzellagen (individual sites or vineyards). An Einzellage could be compared to a specific grand cru or premier cru vineyard site in France's burgundy region that's recognized for a history of producing high-quality wines. There are about 2,600 Einzellagen throughout Germany. The names of specific towns and villages with decade-old reputations for wine-producing prowess are also important in the world of German wines. On German wine labels, the name of the town or village (often appended with an er, which converts it to an adjective) precedes the name of the grosslage or einzellage. For example, the Einzellage named Mäuerchen associated with the village named Geisenheim appears on the label as "Geisenheimer Mäuerchen," while the Grosslage named Auflangen associated with the town of Nierstein appears as "Niersteiner Auflangen." If an Einzellage is classified as an orsteil it doesn't need the nearest village's name.

Magic & Witchcraft

For an account of the magical beliefs of the early Teutonic peoples, see the entry on Teutons. Magic as formulated and believed in by the Germans in the Middle Ages bears, along with traces of its unmistakable derivation from the ancient Teutonic religion, the impress of the influence brought by the natural characteristics of the country upon the mind of its inhabitants.

Deep forests, mountains, limitless morasses, caverned rocks, and springs all helped to shape the imagination which may be traced in Teutonic mythology, and later in aspects of magic and in Christian fears of witchcraft, which first arose in Germany and obtained ready credence there.

As the clash and strife of Teuton and Roman, of Christian and others left records in folklore and history, they have also characterized the magical belief of the Middle Ages. Earlier monkish legends are replete with accounts of magic and sorcery, indicating how ancient deities became evil following the introduction of the newer religion. Miracles were recounted in which these villians were robbed of all power in the name of Christ, or before some blessed relic, then chained and prisoned beneath mountain, river, and sea in eternal darkness. At the same time, tales were told of how misfortune and death were the consequence to those who still might follow the outcast gods.

Again, the sites and periods of the great religious festivals of the Teutons were perpetuated in those localities said to be the place and time of the witches' sabbat and other mysterious meetings and conclaves. Mountains especially retained this character. The Venusberg, the Horselberg, and Blocksberg now became the devil's realm and an abode of the damned. Chapels and cathedrals were full of relics to exorcise the spirits of evil, along with the bells that had to be blessed, as ordained by the Council of Cologne, in order that "demons might be affrighted by their sound, calling Christians to prayers; and when they fled, the persons of the faithful would be secure; that the destruction of lightnings and whirlwinds would be averted, and the spirits of the storm defeated."

Storms were considered to be the work of the devil, or the conjuration of his followers. The trampling heard was thought to be his fury, his fiery train above the tossing forests or holy spires. In that way, Odin and his associated deities transformed.

The Valkyries, the Choosers of the Slain, riding to places of battle, became the medieval witches riding astride broomsticks on their missions of evil in much the same manner. Castles of flames, where the devil held wild revels; conclaves of corpses revivified by evil knowledge; unearthly growths, vitalized by hanged humans' souls, springing to life beneath gallows and gibbets; little people of the hills, malicious spirits, with their caps of mist and cloaks of invisibility. It was possible to trace the origins of the belief in dire consequences from these stories. For those who believed in magic were doomed as the pagan and Christian stories of the Middle Ages merged to form one myth.

Witchcraft was first derided as a delusion by church leaders. Belief in it was forbidden by some of the earlier councils. It was in the fourteenth century in the form of sorcery (malevolent magic), and then in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as witchcraft that it attained prominence. This was especially true when the practice of witchcraft was declared a crime in the eyes of the church (heresy and apostasy) in 1484—a crime punishable by confiscation and death. In their deliberation on witchcraft the inquisitors first systematized and formulated an understanding of black magic. Under such authority, belief in black magic flourished, filling people with either an outright fear or unholy curiosity.

Once placed on the books, the motives for charging a person with sorcery or witchcraft were numerous. In addition to the care for their souls, individuals otherwise involved in personal feuds, political enmities, and religious conflict, not to mention rulers facing empty treasuries, found the charges of black magic an unfailing and sure means of achieving their ends. For several centuries, the charges were hurled at high and low. Death was the consequence.

The Council of Constance (1414) began with its proscription of the doctrines of Wyclif and the burning of John Huss and Jerome of Prague. Less known, at this time, too, a multivolume work was published by one of the inquisitors, called the Formicarium, a comprehensive list of the sins against religion. The fifth volume contained an account of sorcery. The list of crimes accomplished by witches was also detailed: second sight, the ability to read secrets and foretell events; the power to cause diseases and death by lightning and destructive storms; the ability to transform themselves into beasts and birds; and powers to bring about illicit love or barrenness of living beings and crops. Finally, it detailed their enmity against children and practice of devouring them (a crime often brought against socially proscribed groups).

Witchcraft Persecutions

Papal bulls appeared for the appointment of inquisitors, free of any interference by the civil authorities. The emperor and reigning princes took them under their protection. The persecutions rose to level unparalleled in other countries until the following century. Hundreds of alleged witches were burned in a few years. Immediately after the redefinition of witchcraft in 1484, two inquisitors, Jakob Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer, compiled the Malleus Maleficarum (first published in 1486), a complete system of witchcraft, along with a detailed method of how to prove any accused capable and guilty of any and every crime.

Persecutions in Germany were intermittent throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Germany was more concerned with the split brought about by the activity of reformers Martin Luther and John Calvin. Still persecution broke out with renewed vigor in the seventeenth century stimulated by the increasing strife between Catholics and Protestants. The country had also been devastated by wars, plague, and famine. Two cities in particular, Bamberg and Würzburg, attained notoriety for trials and the number of victims.

In Bamberg, Prince-Bishop George II, and his suffragan Frederic Forner, prosecuted the holy inquisition so intensely that between the years 1625 and 1630 over 900 trials took place, and approximately 600 people were burned. Confessions were extracted from the victims under extreme torture. Rich and poor were gathered into the jails—often to such a degree that names were never taken nor recorded. The prisoners were only noted anonymously as numbers.

In other parts of Germany, Lutheranism was gaining ground. Here the charge of sorcery was brought against its followers. Protestants had no disagreement with Roman Catholics on the issue of witchcraft. At Würzburg, the bishop, Philip Adolph, in 1623, did not prosecute them openly, but nevertheless acted against the accused. In Eberhard David Hauber's Bibliotheca, Actaet Scripta Magica (1738-45) is a list of 29 burnings from the 1620s. Each burning consisted of several victims, the numbers ranging from two up to ten or more, which included old men and women; little girls and boys and infants; noble ladies; washerwomen; vicars; canons; singers and minstrels. Also among the accused were Bannach, a senator; a wealthy man; a keeper of the pot-house; the bishop's own nephew and page; a huckster; and a blind girl.

At Würzburg, in 1749, the last trial for witchcraft took place. Maria Renata of the Convent of Unterzell was condemned and burned in June that year for consorting with the devil and for being the focus of bewitchments and other infernal practices.

Toward the end of the seventeenth century, disbelief in the truth of witchcraft and criticism of the wholesale burnings began to be heard, although earlier than this some had dared to speak against the injustice and ignorance. Before 1593, Cornelius Saos, a priest in Mainz, had stated his doubt of the whole proceedings, but suffered for his recklessness. Johann Weyer, physician to the Duke of Cleves, Thomas Erast, another physician, Adam Tanner, a Bavarian Jesuit, and Frederick Spree, also a Jesuit, all attempted to put forward rational views about witchcraft persecution.

Alchemy and Occultism

Alchemy, one medieval form of Gnosticism, was seen as operating from the realm of magic. Many believed it was satanic in origin. Though few were charged unless caught in fraud for trying to make gold, alchemists were liable to the charge of sorcery and the death penalty if found guilty. Yet alchemy attracted emperors and princes who took up the study themselves, or, more frequently who hired well-known practitioners of the art. For example, Joachim I had Johannes Trithemius as teacher of astrology and "defender of magic," and the Emperor Rudolph employed Michael Maier as his physician.

Germany has supplied numerous names famous for their discoveries in magic—men who were open to suspicion because of their philosophical pursuits. Among those were Paracelsus —who in his search for the elixir of life discovered laudanum, a form of opium distilled from poppies; Cornelius Agrippa; Basil Valentine, prior and chemist; Henry Khunrath, physician and philosopher; and a host of students, all searching for the mysteries of life, the innermost secrets of nature.

Some people believed the activities of these men to be nothing more than pacts with the devil. The knowledge that the al-chemists gained could be acquired only by evil means. Religious people reasoned that the soul of the magician was the price promised and demanded by the Evil One. These myths and imaginings centered around one magician especially, and in the Faust legend we may find the general attitude and belief of the Middle Ages regarding the interaction of learning and supernatural beliefs.

Mystical Societies

While the alchemist conducted rudimentary scientific research, they were Gnostic mystics, as their writings testify. Their work fits into the larger Gnostic world whose exponents were Rosicrucians and theosophists. Among the more notable mystics was the shoemaker, Jakob Boehme, the son of peasants.

During the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648), many preachers, seers, and fanatics appeared, exhorting and prophesying. It is believed the condition of the country contributed towards producing the hallucination and hysteria. Reportedly there are accounts of ecstatics absorbed in supernatural visions, such as Anna Fleischer of Freiburg, and Christiana Poniatowitzsch, who traveled throughout Bohemia and Germany relating her visions and prophesing.

At the end of the seventeenth century the old tenets of magic were undergoing a gradual change, except alchemy. The Gnostic magical beliefs found new expression in secret societies, many of which were founded on those of the Middle Ages. Freemasonry —whose beginnings are attributed by some to a certain guild of masons banded together for the building of Strasburg Cathedral, but by other authorities to Rosicrucianism—formed the basis and pattern for many other secret societies.

In the eighteenth century, occultism flourished. There were stories of Frederick William who worked with Steinert in a house specially built for evocations; Schroepfer, proprietor of a café with his magic punch and circles for raising the spirits of the dead; the physiognomist J. K. Lavater, said to have two spirits at his command; the Mopses, a society whose rites of initiation were said to resemble those of the Templars and witches' sabbat in a mild and civilized form; and Carl Sand, the mystical fanatic who killed the dramatist August Kotzebue.

The Illuminati, whose teachings spread to France and underlay the French Revolution, was banded together as a society by Adam Weishaupt and fostered by Baron von Knigge, a student of occultism. This society reportedly originated as an attempt to circumvent the authority of the Jesuits. In its development it absorbed mysticism and supernaturalism, finally becoming political and revolutionary as it applied its philosophies to civil and religious life. Although the Illuminati was disbanded and dispersed in 1784, its ideas continued through other occult groups and reappeared in the democratic wave that swept Europe in the next century.

Mysticism and Animal Magnetism

In the transition from occultism to a more scientific view of the paranormal largely accomplished in the nineteenth century, many occult elements reemerged in the development of animal magnetism and Spiritualism. Some of the significant names of the period included: Johann Heinrich Jung (1740-1817), better known as Jüng Stilling, a seer, prophet, and healer; Franz Anton Mesmer (c. 1733-1815), the discoverer and apostle of animal magnetism; the Marquis de Puységur, magnetist and spiritualist; Madame von Krudener, preacher of peace and clemency to monarchs and princes; Heinrich Zschokke, the Gothic novelist; and Dr. Justinus Kerner (1786-1862), believer in magnetism and historian of two cases of possession and mediumship, the "Maid of Orlach" and Frederica Hauffe, the "Seeress of Prevorst." Also during this period, the poet, playwright, philosopher and novelist, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe whose own story of Faust made his name synonomous with the struggle between good and evil, showed serious interest in the occult, particularly dreams. His grandfather's dreams seemed to be prophetic, and Goethe served as a witness to the truth of them. Goethe himself was considered psychic.

The cures said to be affected by Prince Hohenlohe, a dignitary of the church occured early in the nineteenth century. He was led to believe in the power of healing through the influence of a peasant named Martin Michel. Most of these cures took place at Würzburg, the scenes of former witch-burnings, and it was reported that more than 400 people, deaf, mute, blind, and paralytic, were cured by the power of prayer.

About this time the case of stigmata with Catherine Emerich, the nun of Dülmen also rose to prominence. Supposedly there was an appearance of a bloody cross encircling the head; marks of wounds on her hands, feet, and side; and crosses on her breast that frequently bled. Again in Germany, around 1918, a twenty-year old Bavarian woman named Therese Neumann underwent a series of ailments following a fall while helping to fight a fire. Within two years she was totally blind and paralyzed. Three years later in 1923, Neumann believed she had a vision of St. Therese of Lisieux, known as the "Little Flower" and her blindness disappeared. Supposedly, she took no food or drink from that time until her death in 1962. It was in 1926 that her stigmata began to appear during a weekly series of visions and trances from Thursday at midnight to early Friday morning. She became a worldwide celebrity. Every Catholic school child throughout the time until her death knew her name as well as those of the saints. In 1932 the Catholic church had attempted to conduct its own investigation of her claims, but could not agree on the terms with Neumann's father. Neither did psychical researchers ever investigate.

In nineteenth-century occultism we find, as in the earlier periods, stories of hauntings and spirits existing side by side with learned disquisitions, such as that on the "fourth dimension in space" by Johann C. F. Zöllner in his Transcendental Physics (1880) and another on the luminous emanations from material objects in Baron Karl von Reichenbach 's treatise on od or odylic force, similar to some aspects of the magic of the Middle Ages.

Spiritualism

It was some years after the original Rochester Rappings in America before the Spiritualism movement surfaced in German-speaking lands. Several intellectual leaders made note of the movement, including the philosopher J. G. Fichte, a proponet of Spiritualism; Edward von Hartmann, author of Philosophy of the Unconscious (1869), who gave the phenomena a place in his philosophy; and Carl du Prel, who, in his Philosophy of Mysticism (1889), held up Spiritualistic manifestations as evidence of a subconscious region in the human mind. Du Prel also founded a monthly magazine, The Sphinx, devoted to the interest of Spiritualism, and Alexander Aksakof, the Russian Spiritualist, published the results of his research in Germany and in the German language because he was not permitted to publish them in Russian. Baron Lazar De Baczolay Hellen-bach, integrated Spiritualist teachings in his hypothesis that no change of world or "sphere" occurs at birth or death, but merely a change in the mode of perception.

Psychical Research and Parapsychology

German psychical research owes much to the work of Baron Albert Schrenck-Notzing, who conducted investigations of such mediums as Eva C., Stanislawa Tomczyk, Franek Kluski, Linda Gazzera, Willi and Rudi Schneider, and Eusapia Palladino. His book Phenomena of Materialisation (London, 1920) reports on the claimed phenomenon of materialization.

The engineer Fritz Grünewald (d. 1925) was a pioneer of scientific testing of mediums, and maintained a laboratory in Charlottenburg, Berlin with various recording instruments. With the British investigator Harry Price, he tested such psychics as Jan Guzyk and Eleonore Zügun.

Other German researchers include Karl Grüber (1881-1927), who investigated the Schneider brothers, Traugott Konstantin Oesterreich (1880-1949), who published a comprehensive study of possession ; Rudolph Tischner (1879-1961); General Josef Peter (1852-1939); Dr. Albert Moll (1862-1939), a psychiatrist who contributed a study on hypnotism ; Max Dessoir, who first used the term "parapsychologie" in 1889; and Hans Driesch (1867-1941). Graf Carl von Klinckowstroem, even though skeptical regarding some psychical phenomena, wrote on water-divining and published a history of the divining rod. In 1874, Alexander Aksakof founded the journal Psychische Studien in Leipzig, published until 1934. It was superseded by the Zeitschrift für Parapsychologie. Another prominent German professor of philosophy, Trangott Konstantin Osterreich was especially well-known for investigating mediums. When the Nazis rose to power, he was stripped of his position and did not regain it until after the war. He died in 1949.

Parapsychology was largely destroyed during the Nazi era, but quickly rose again. Hans Bender, a post-war German researcher, was instrumental in founding the Institut für Grenzgebiete der Psychologie und Psychohygiene (IGPP-the Institute for Border Areas of Psychology and Mental Health) in Freiburg in 1950, and held the chair for Border Areas of Psychology established at Freiburg University. The institute, located at Wilhelmstrasse 3a, D-79098, Frieburg i. Br. Germany, or through their website at http://www.igpp.de. IGPP was scheduled to be host for the worldwide Parapsychological Association Convention during August of 2000.

One of Bender's more famous investigations involved the Nickelheim Poltergeist that first became apparent in the Bavarian village in 1969. On the windows and doors of the house of a couple who lived with their teenaged daughter, strange knocking sounds began sounding. Further strange occurences, such as stones thrown against the house, dolls and toilet articles flying across rooms, water poured in shoes and eggs broken in visitors' hats, escalated. Soon after, while a priest was blessing the house, teleportation, (the penetration of matter through matter) phenomena began occuring—a stone fell from the ceiling with all of the windows and doors shut. No further reports of later investigation were available.

In 1966, a Department for the Border Areas was established at the university's Psychological Institute and in 1968, the 11th Convention of the Parapsychological Association was held. The institute has conducted investigations into psychokinesis, poltergeist, electronic voice phenomenon, and qualitative and quantitative extra sensory perception research. As of 1991 Eberhard Bauer, was a German historian of parapsychology and managing editor of Zeitschrift fur Parapsychologie und Grenzgebiete der Psychologie, the only journal of parapsychology in Germany. He has had the distinction of being the leading European authority on the history of parapsychology and the contemporary scene.

Sources:

Berger, Arthur S., and Joyce Berger. The Encyclopedia of Parapsychology and Psychical Research. New York: Paragon House, 1991.

Driesch, Hans. Psychical Research: The Science of the Supernormal. London, 1933. Reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1975.

Du Prel, Carl. Die Magie als Naturwissenschaft. Leipzig: M. Altmann, 1912.

Grüber, Karl. Parapsychologische Erkenntnisse. Munich: Drei Masken Verlag, 1925.

Gulat-Wellenburg, W. von et al. Der Physikalische Mediumismus. Berlin: Ullstein, 1925.

Hansen, Joseph. Zauberwahn, Inquisition und Hexenprozess in Mittalalter und die Entstehung der grossen Hexenverfolgung. Munich/Leipzig: R. Oldenbourg, 1900. Reprint, Aalen: Scientiia, 1983.

Lea, Henry Charles. Materials Toward a History of Witchcraft. 3 vols. Philadelphia, 1939. Reprint, New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1957.

Moll, Albert. Hypnotism. London: W. Scott, 1901.

Oesterreich, T. K. Possession, Demoniacal & Other, Among Primitive Races, In Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and Modern Times. London, 1930. Reprint, New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1966.

Reichenbach, Karl von. Researches on Magnetism, Electricity, Heat Light, Crystallization, and Chemical Attraction, in Their Relations to the Vital Force. London, 1851. Reprint, New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1966.

Tischner, Rudolf. Geschichte der Parapsychologie. Titmoning (Pustet), 1960.

National Anthem:

National Anthem of: Germany

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Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit,
fuer das deutsche Vaterland!
Danach lasst uns alle streben,
bruederlich mit Herz und Hand!
Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit,
sind des Glueckes Unterpfand.
Blueh im Glanze dieses Gluekkes,
bluehe deutsches Vaterland!

Written by:August Heinrich von Fallersleben, 1841


Country in central Europe. During World War I (which lasted from 1914 to 1918), Germany fought alongside Austria-Hungary and Italy against Great Britain, France, the United States, and Russia. After Germany was vanquished by the Allies and the war ended, the democratic Weimar Republic was established (under which the country's Jews enjoyed complete legal equality). However, the Weimar period was fraught with unemployment and economic disaster. The Allies made Germany pay them huge sums of money to make up for their material losses in the war, and the situation got even worse in 1929 when the Great Depression hit. The economic desperation in Germany led to great turbulence: extremist political parties gained in strength, including the Nazi Party on one end of the political spectrum and the Communist Party on the other. Both gathered many new followers in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and both proposed radical solutions to the country's economic and social woes.

In January 1933 Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party rose to national power in Germany. Hitler soon became the country's dictator, and declared the establishment of the Third Reich---his name for the new German Empire. During their first years in power, the Nazis tried to redraw the face of Germany. One of their main goals was to erase the line between the government and the party institutions. For example, after 1936 both the police (a government institution) and the SS (a party institution) were directed by the same man, Heinrich Himmler. In addition, many police officers were awarded SS ranks. The Nazis also sought to restrict and supervise German art and culture, as evidenced by the 1933 public burning of books that were not approved of by the Nazi Party.

During the first years of the Nazi regime, all those who opposed the Nazis in any way were imprisoned in the newly established Concentration Camps, and were forced to stay there until their opposition had been broken down. Many Germans truly accepted Nazism, while others did not but conformed in public in order to avoid confrontation. Very few Germans actively resisted the Nazis, and on the face of it, at least, Germany became a Nazi society.

Hitler's foreign policy successes amassed before World War II even started gained him immense public support. Several regions were either reunited with Germany or annexed to it without war, such as the Saar region in 1935, Austria and the Sudeten region of Czechoslovakia in 1938, and Bohemia and Moravia in 1939. Then, on September 1, 1939 German troops invaded Poland, launching a world war. In the spring of 1940 the fighting extended to Western Europe, to the Balkans in the spring of 1941, and to the Soviet Union in late June of that year. The Germans gained victory after victory; the Nazis were fighting to ensure their place of dominance in Europe and by extension the world, and to gain living space, or Lebensraum, for the German people. They also meant to reshape the world in their own racial image, which included solving the so-called Jewish problem. However, their fortunes changed after their defeat by the Soviets at Stalingrad in early 1943. The Allied invasions of Italy in 1943 and France in 1944 sealed Nazi Germany's fate, and its final defeat came in May 1945.

Back in 1933 when Hitler came to power, some 566,000 Jews by a racial definition were living in Germany, making up less than one percent of the entire population. One-third of those Jews lived in the capital, Berlin, and another third resided in other big cities. Immediately after the Nazis took control of the government, they began to exclude Jews from German society and strip them of their legal and civil rights. Jews were fired from their jobs, not allowed to study at universities, and were kept out of German cultural life. In September 1935 the Germans passed the racial Nuremberg Laws which led to the definition of who was to be considered a Jew, and further isolated Jews from the rest of the society, stripping them of their citizenship. In addition, antisemitic measures continued to be implemented, peaking in the destructive Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938, during which hundreds of synagogues were burned down, Jewish homes and businesses were attacked and pillaged, and thousands of Jews were abused and sent to concentration camps.

In response to the constantly multiplying anti-Jewish measures, the Jews of Germany set up a comprehensive network of self-help associations. Their most important goal was to facilitate emigration, but they also set up organizations for relief within Germany, itself. These included adult education centers (see also Mittelstelle Fuer Juedische Erwachsenenbildung), cultural associations (see also Cultural Union of German Jews), social welfare bodies, and the umbrella organization called the Reich Representation of German Jews.

Between 1933 and 1941 about 346,000 Jews emigrated from Germany, most before the outbreak of the war. Between Kristallnacht and the outbreak of the war, flight reached panic level proportions.

In September 1941 all Jews in Germany over the age of six were ordered to don the Jewish badge (see also Badge, Jewish). The Deportation of German Jews had begun back in 1940, when Jews from Stettin were sent to Poland and Jews from Baden and the Saar region were sent to France. Most were later transported to their deaths at Extermination Camps. Deportations from the rest of Germany began in October 1941; at first, Jews were sent to the Ghettos of Eastern Europe, but later deportation transports were sent directly to Auschwitz and other extermination camps. All told some 200,000 German Jews died during the Holocaust. About 137,000 were deported from Germany, of whom 128,000 were murdered. The rest of the murdered German Jews had fled to countries that later fell under Nazi influence. In Germany itself about 20,000 Jews survived, including three-quarters of the Mischlinge.

Random House Word Menu:

categories related to 'Germany'

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Random House Word Menu by Stephen Glazier
For a list of words related to Germany, see:
  • Nations of the World - Germany: formerly East Germany and West Germany; Federal Republic of; in central Europe; capital Berlin; area 137,616 sq. mi., pop. 77,555,000; German; Protestant and Catholic; mark


Federal Republic of Germany
Bundesrepublik Deutschland
Flag Coat of arms
Anthem: 
National anthem of Germany - U.S. Army 1st Armored Division Band.ogg

The third stanza of Das Lied der Deutschen  
The Song of the Germans

Location of  Germany  (dark green)– in Europe  (green & dark grey)– in the European Union  (green)  —  [Legend]
Location of  Germany  (dark green)

– in Europe  (green & dark grey)
– in the European Union  (green)  —  [Legend]

Capital
(and largest city)
Berlin
52°31′N 13°23′E / 52.517°N 13.383°E / 52.517; 13.383
Official language(s) German[1]
Demonym German
Government Federal parliamentary constitutional republic
 -  President Christian Wulff (CDU membership dormant)
 -  Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU)
 -  President of the Bundestag Norbert Lammert (CDU)
 -  President of the Bundesrat Horst Seehofer (CSU)
Formation
 -  Holy Roman Empire 2 February 962 
 -  Unification 18 January 1871 
 -  Federal Republic 23 May 1949 
 -  Reunification 3 October 1990 
Area
 -  Total 357,021 km2 (63rd)
137,847 sq mi 
 -  Water (%) 2.416
Population
 -  2010 estimate 81,799,600[1] (15th)
 -  Density 229/km2 (55th)
593/sq mi
GDP (PPP) 2011 estimate
 -  Total $3.089 trillion[2] (5th)
 -  Per capita $37,935[2] (18th)
GDP (nominal) 2011 estimate
 -  Total $3.628 trillion[2] (4th)
 -  Per capita $44,555[2] (19th)
Gini (2006) 27 (low
HDI (2011) increase 0.905[3] (very high) (9th)
Currency Euro ()[2](2002 – present) (EUR)
Time zone CET (UTC+1)
 -  Summer (DST) CEST (UTC+2)
Drives on the right
ISO 3166 code DE
Internet TLD .de [3]
Calling code 49
1 ^ Danish, Low German, Sorbian, Romany and Frisian are officially recognised by the ECRML.
2 ^ Before 2002: Deutsche Mark (DEM).
3 ^ Also .eu, shared with European Union member states.

Germany (Listeni/ˈɜrməni/), officially the Federal Republic of Germany (German: Bundesrepublik Deutschland, pronounced [ˈbʊndəsʁepuˌbliːk ˈdɔʏtʃlant] ( listen)),[4] is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate. With 81.8 million inhabitants, it is the most populous member state and the largest economy in the European Union. It is one of the major political powers of the European continent and a technological leader in many fields.

A region named Germania, inhabited by several Germanic peoples, was documented before AD 100. During the Migration Age, the Germanic tribes expanded southward, and established successor kingdoms throughout much of Europe. Beginning in the 10th century, German territories formed a central part of the Holy Roman Empire.[5] During the 16th century, northern German regions became the centre of the Protestant Reformation while southern and western parts remained dominated by Roman Catholic denominations, with the two factions clashing in the Thirty Years' War, marking the beginning of the Catholic–Protestant divide that has characterized German society ever since.[6] Occupied during the Napoleonic Wars, the rise of Pan-Germanism inside the German Confederation resulted in the unification of most of the German states into the German Empire in 1871 which was Prussian dominated. After the German Revolution of 1918–1919 and the subsequent military surrender in World War I, the Empire was replaced by the Weimar Republic in 1918, and partitioned in the Versailles Treaty. Amidst the Great Depression, the Third Reich was proclaimed in 1933. The latter period was marked by Fascism and the Second World War. After 1945, Germany was divided by allied occupation, and evolved into two states, East Germany and West Germany. In 1990 Germany was reunified.

Germany was a founding member of the European Community in 1957, which became the EU in 1993. It is part of the Schengen Area and since 1999 a member of the eurozone. Germany is a member of the United Nations, NATO, the G8, the G20, the OECD and the Council of Europe, and took a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council for the 2011–2012 term.

It has the world's fourth largest economy by nominal GDP and the fifth largest by purchasing power parity. It is the second largest exporter and third largest importer of goods. The country has developed a very high standard of living and a comprehensive system of social security. Germany has been the home of many influential scientists and inventors, and is known for its cultural and political history.

Contents

Etymology

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.[7] In other languages it has various names.

The German term Deutschland (originally diutisciu land, "the German lands") is derived from deutsch, 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 the Latinised form Theodiscus), derived from *þeudō, descended from Proto-Indo-European *tewtéh₂- "people".[8]

History

Germanic tribes and Frankish Empire

Map of the Germania and the Roman Empire

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 Eastern Europe.[9] Under Augustus, the Roman General Publius Quinctilius Varus began to invade Germania (an area extending roughly from the Rhine to the Ural Mountains). In AD 9, three Roman legions led by Varus were defeated by the Cheruscan leader Arminius. By AD 100, 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, southern Bavaria and the western Rhineland, however, were Roman provinces.[10]

In the 3rd century a number of large West Germanic tribes emerged: Alamanni, Franks, Chatti, Saxons, Frisii, Sicambri, and Thuringii. Around 260, the Germanic peoples broke into Roman-controlled lands.[11] 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.[10]

Holy Roman Empire

On 25 December 800, Charlemagne founded the Carolingian Empire, which was divided in 843.[12] The Holy Roman Empire resulted from the eastern portion of this division. Its territory stretched from the Eider River in the north to the Mediterranean coast in the south.[12] Under the reign of the Ottonian emperors (919–1024), several major duchies were consolidated, and the German king was crowned Holy Roman Emperor of these regions in 962. 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.

Under the Hohenstaufen emperors (1138–1254), the German princes increased their influence further south and east into territories inhabited by Slavs, preceding German settlement in these areas and further east (Ostsiedlung). Northern German towns grew prosperous as members of the Hanseatic League.[13] Starting with the Great Famine in 1315, then the Black Death of 1348–50, the population of Germany plummeted.[14] The edict of the Golden Bull in 1356 provided the basic constitution of the empire and codified the election of the emperor by seven prince-electors who ruled some of the most powerful principalities and archbishoprics.[15]

Martin Luther publicised his 95 Theses in 1517, challenging the Roman Catholic Church and initiating the Protestant Reformation. A separate Lutheran church became the official religion in many German states after 1530. Religious conflict led to the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648), which devastated German lands.[16] The population of the German states was reduced by about 30%.[17] The Peace of Westphalia (1648) ended religious warfare among the German states, but the empire was de facto divided into numerous independent principalities. From 1740 onwards, dualism between the Austrian Habsburg Monarchy and the Kingdom of Prussia dominated German history. In 1806, the Imperium was overrun and dissolved as a result of the Napoleonic Wars.[18]

German Confederation and Empire

Following the fall of Napoleon I of France, the Congress of Vienna convened in 1814 and founded the German Confederation (Deutscher Bund), a loose league of 39 sovereign states. Disagreement with restoration politics partly led to the rise of liberal movements, followed by new measures of repression by Austrian statesman Metternich. The Zollverein, a tariff union, furthered economic unity in the German states.[19] National and liberal ideals of the French Revolution gained increasing support among many, especially young, Germans. In the light of a series of revolutionary movements in Europe, which established a republic in France, intellectuals and commoners started the Revolutions of 1848 in the German states. King Frederick William IV of Prussia was offered the title of Emperor, but with a loss of power; he rejected the crown and the proposed constitution, leading to a temporary setback for the movement.[20]

Foundation of the German Empire in Versailles, 1871. Bismarck is at the centre in a white uniform.

Conflict between King William I of Prussia and the increasingly liberal parliament erupted over military reforms in 1862, and the king appointed Otto von Bismarck the new Prime Minister of Prussia. Bismarck successfully waged war on Denmark in 1864. Prussian victory in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 enabled him to create the North German Federation (Norddeutscher Bund) and to exclude Austria, formerly the leading German state, from the federation's affairs. After the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, the German Empire was proclaimed 1871 in Versailles, uniting all scattered parts of Germany except Austria (Kleindeutschland, or "Lesser Germany"). With almost two thirds of its territory and population, Prussia was the dominating constituent of the new state; the Hohenzollern King of Prussia ruled as its concurrent Emperor, and Berlin became its capital.[20] In the Gründerzeit period following the unification of Germany, Bismarck's foreign policy as Chancellor of Germany under Emperor William I secured Germany's position as a great nation by forging alliances, isolating France by diplomatic means, and avoiding war. Under Wilhelm II, however, Germany, like other European powers, took an imperialistic course leading to friction with neighbouring countries. As a result of the Berlin Conference in 1884 Germany claimed several colonies including German East Africa, German South-West Africa, Togo, and Cameroon.[21] Most alliances in which Germany had previously been involved were not renewed, and new alliances excluded the country.[22]

The assassination of Austria's crown prince on 28 June 1914 triggered World War I. Germany, as part of the Central Powers, suffered defeat against the Allies in one of the bloodiest conflicts of all time. An estimated two million German soldiers died in World War I.[23] The German Revolution broke out in November 1918, and Emperor Wilhelm II and all German ruling princes abdicated. An armistice ended the war on 11 November, and Germany was forced to sign the Treaty of Versailles in June 1919. The treaty was perceived in Germany as a humiliating continuation of the war, and is often cited as an influence in the rise of Nazism.[24]

Weimar Republic and Third Reich

Adolf Hitler, chancellor and president1 1933–1945
1: office formally vacant from August 1934; Hitler styled himself "Führer und Reichskanzler"[25]

At the beginning of the German Revolution in November 1918, Germany was declared a republic. However, the struggle for power continued, with radical-left communists seizing power in Bavaria. The revolution came to an end on 11 August 1919, when the Weimar Constitution was signed by President Friedrich Ebert.[26] Suffering from the Great Depression, the harsh peace conditions dictated by the Treaty of Versailles, and a long succession of unstable governments, Germans increasingly lacked identification with the government. This was exacerbated by a widespread right-wing Dolchstoßlegende, or stab-in-the-back myth, which argued that Germany had lost World War I because of those who wanted to overthrow the government. The Weimar government was accused of betraying Germany by signing the Versailles Treaty. By 1932, the German Communist Party and the Nazi Party controlled the majority of parliament, fuelled by discontent with the Weimar government. After a series of unsuccessful cabinets, President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933.[27] On 27 February 1933 the Reichstag building went up in flames, and a consequent emergency decree abrogated basic citizens' rights. An Enabling Act passed in parliament gave Hitler unrestricted legislative power. Only the Social Democratic Party voted against it, while Communist MPs had already been imprisoned.[28][29] Using his powers to crush any actual or potential resistance, Hitler established a centralised totalitarian state within months. Industry was revitalised with a focus on military rearmament.[30]

In 1935, Germany reacquired control of the Saar and in 1936 military control of the Rhineland, both of which had been lost in the Treaty of Versailles.[31] In 1938 and 1939, Austria and Czechoslovakia were brought under German control and the invasion of Poland was prepared through the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact and Operation Himmler. On 1 September 1939 the German Wehrmacht launched a blitzkrieg on Poland, which was swiftly occupied by Germany and by the Soviet Red Army. The UK and France declared war on Germany, marking the beginning of World War II.[32] As the war progressed, Germany and its allies quickly gained control of most of continental Europe and North Africa, though plans to force the United Kingdom to an armistice or surrender failed. On 22 June 1941, Germany broke the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact and invaded the Soviet Union. Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor led Germany to declare war on the United States. The Battle of Stalingrad forced the German army to retreat on the Eastern front.[32] In September 1943, Germany's ally Italy surrendered, and German troops were forced to defend an additional front in Italy. D-Day opened a Western front, as Allied forces advanced towards German territory. On 8 May 1945, the German armed forces surrendered after the Red Army occupied Berlin.[33]

Berlin in ruins after World War II

In what later became known as The Holocaust, the Third Reich regime had enacted policies directly subjugating many dissidents and minorities. Millions of people were murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust, including a sizeable number of Jews, Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, Poles and other Slavs, including Soviet POWs, people with mental and/or physical disabilities, homosexuals, and members of the political opposition.[34] World War II was responsible for more than 40 million dead in Europe.[35] The Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals were held after World War II.[36] The war casualties for Germany are estimated at 5.3 million German soldiers[37] millions of German civilians;[38][39][40][41][42] and losing the war resulted in large territorial losses; the expulsion of about 15 million Germans from the eastern areas of Germany and other countries; mass rape of German women;[43] and the destruction of multiple major cities.

East and West Germany

Occupation zones in Germany, 1947. The territories east of the Oder-Neisse line, under Polish and Soviet de jure administration and de facto annexation, are shown as white as is the detached Saar protectorate.

After the surrender of Germany, the remaining German territory and Berlin were partitioned by the Allies into four military occupation zones. The western sectors, controlled by France, the United Kingdom, and the United States, were merged on 23 May 1949 to form the Federal Republic of Germany (Bundesrepublik Deutschland); on 7 October 1949, the Soviet Zone became the German Democratic Republic (Deutsche Demokratische Republik, or DDR). They were informally known as "West Germany" and "East Germany". East Germany selected East Berlin as its capital, while West Germany chose Bonn as a provisional capital, to emphasise its stance that the two-state solution was an artificial and temporary status quo.[44]

West Germany, established as a federal parliamentary republic with a "social market economy", was allied with the United States, the UK and France. The country enjoyed prolonged economic growth beginning in the early 1950s (Wirtschaftswunder). West Germany joined NATO in 1955 and was a founding member of the European Economic Community in 1957. East Germany was an Eastern bloc state under political and military control by the USSR via the latter's occupation forces and the Warsaw Pact. Though East Germany claimed to be a democracy, political power was exercised solely by leading members (Politbüro) of the communist-controlled Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED), supported by the Stasi, an immense secret service,[45] and a variety of sub-organisations controlling every aspect of society. A Soviet-style command economy was set up; the GDR later became a Comecon state.[46] While East German propaganda was based on the benefits of the GDR's social programmes and the alleged constant threat of a West German invasion, many of her citizens looked to the West for freedom and prosperity.[47] The Berlin Wall, built in 1961 to stop East Germans from escaping to West Germany, became a symbol of the Cold War.[20]

The Berlin Wall in front of the Brandenburg Gate shortly before its fall in 1989

Tensions between East and West Germany were reduced in the early 1970s by Chancellor Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik. In summer 1989, Hungary decided to dismantle the Iron Curtain and open the borders, causing the emigration of thousands of East Germans to West Germany via Hungary. This had devastating effects on the GDR, where regular mass demonstrations received increasing support. The East German authorities unexpectedly eased the border restrictions, allowing East German citizens to travel to the West; originally intended to help retain East Germany as a state, the opening of the border actually led to an acceleration of the Wende reform process. This culminated in the Two Plus Four Treaty a year later on 12 September 1990, under which the four occupying powers renounced their rights under the Instrument of Surrender, and Germany regained full sovereignty. This permitted German reunification on 3 October 1990, with the accession of the five re-established states of the former GDR (new states or "neue Länder").[20]

Berlin Republic and the EU

Based on the Berlin/Bonn Act, adopted on 10 March 1994, Berlin once again became the capital of the reunified Germany, while Bonn obtained the unique status of a Bundesstadt (federal city) retaining some federal ministries.[48] The relocation of the government was completed in 1999.[49] Since reunification, Germany has taken a more active role in the European Union and NATO. Germany sent a peacekeeping force to secure stability in the Balkans and sent a force of German troops to Afghanistan as part of a NATO effort to provide security in that country after the ousting of the Taliban.[50] These deployments were controversial since, after the war, Germany was bound by domestic law only to deploy troops for defence roles.[51] In 2005, Angela Merkel became the first female Chancellor of Germany as the leader of a grand coalition.[20]

Geography

Topographic map

Germany is in Western and Central Europe, bordering Denmark in the north, Poland and the Czech Republic in the east, Austria and Switzerland in the south, France and Luxembourg in the south-west, and Belgium and the Netherlands in the north-west. It lies mostly between latitudes 47° and 55° N (the tip of Sylt is just north of 55°), and longitudes and 16° E. The territory covers 357,021 km2 (137,847 sq mi), consisting of 349,223 km2 (134,836 sq mi) of land and 7,798 km2 (3,011 sq mi) of water. It is the seventh largest country by area in Europe and the 62nd largest in the world.[52]

Elevation ranges from the mountains of the Alps (highest point: the Zugspitze at 2,962 metres / 9,718 feet) in the south to the shores of the North Sea (Nordsee) in the north-west and the Baltic Sea (Ostsee) in the north-east. The forested uplands of central Germany and the lowlands of northern Germany (lowest point: Wilstermarsch at 3.54 metres / 11.6 feet below sea level) are traversed by such major rivers as the Rhine, Danube and Elbe. Glaciers are found in the Alpine region, but are experiencing deglaciation. Significant natural resources are iron ore, coal, potash, timber, lignite, uranium, copper, natural gas, salt, nickel, arable land and water.[52]

Climate

Most of Germany has a temperate seasonal climate in which humid westerly winds predominate. The climate is moderated by the North Atlantic Drift, the northern extension of the Gulf Stream. This warmer water affects the areas bordering the North Sea; consequently in the north-west and the north the climate is oceanic. Rainfall occurs year-round, especially in the summer. Winters are mild and summers tend to be cool, though temperatures can exceed 30 °C (86 °F).[53]

The east has a more continental climate; winters can be very cold and summers very warm, and long dry periods are frequent. Central and southern Germany are transition regions which vary from moderately oceanic to continental. In addition to the maritime and continental climates that predominate over most of the country, the Alpine regions in the extreme south and, to a lesser degree, some areas of the Central German Uplands have a mountain climate, characterised by lower temperatures and greater precipitation.[53]

Biodiversity

The eagle is a protected bird of prey and the national heraldic animal.

The territory of Germany can be subdivided into two ecoregions: European-Mediterranean montane mixed forests and Northeast-Atlantic shelf marine.[54] As of 2008 the majority of Germany is covered by either arable land (34%) or forest and woodland (30.1%); only 13.4% of the area consists of permanent pastures, 11.8% is covered by settlements and streets.[55]

Plants and animals are those generally common to middle Europe. Beeches, oaks, and other deciduous trees constitute one third of the forests; conifers are increasing as a result of reforestation. Spruce and fir trees predominate in the upper mountains, while pine and larch are found in sandy soil. There are many species of ferns, flowers, fungi, and mosses. Wild animals include deer, wild boar, mouflon, fox, badger, hare, and small numbers of beavers.[56]

The national parks in Germany include the Wadden Sea National Parks, the Jasmund National Park, the Vorpommern Lagoon Area National Park, the Müritz National Park, the Lower Oder Valley National Park, the Harz National Park, the Saxon Switzerland National Park and the Bavarian Forest National Park. More than 400 registered zoos and animal parks operate in Germany, which is believed to be the largest number in any country.[57] The Zoologische Garten Berlin is the oldest zoo in Germany and presents the most comprehensive collection of species in the world.[58]

Politics

The Reichstag in Berlin is the site of the German parliament (Bundestag).

Germany is a federal, parliamentary, representative democratic republic. The German political system operates under a framework laid out in the 1949 constitutional document known as the Grundgesetz (Basic Law). Amendments generally require a two-thirds majority of both chambers of parliament; the fundamental principles of the constitution, as expressed in the articles guaranteeing human dignity, the separation of powers, the federal structure, and the rule of law are valid in perpetuity.[59]

The president, currently Christian Wulff, is the head of state and invested primarily with representative responsibilities and powers. He is elected by the Bundesversammlung (federal convention), an institution consisting of the members of the Bundestag and an equal number of state delegates. The second-highest official in the German order of precedence is the Bundestagspräsident (President of the Bundestag), who is elected by the Bundestag and responsible for overseeing the daily sessions of the body. The third-highest official and the head of government is the Chancellor, who is appointed by the Bundespräsident after being elected by the Bundestag.[20]

Christian Wulff (right) is the 10th President of Germany.

The chancellor, currently Angela Merkel, is the head of government and exercises executive power, similar to the role of a Prime Minister in other parliamentary democracies. Federal legislative power is vested in the parliament consisting of the Bundestag (Federal Diet) and Bundesrat (Federal Council), which together form the legislative body. The Bundestag is elected through direct elections, by proportional representation (mixed-member).[52] The members of the Bundesrat represent the governments of the sixteen federated states and are members of the state cabinets.[20]

Since 1949, the party system has been dominated by the Christian Democratic Union and the Social Democratic Party of Germany with all chancellors hitherto being member of either party. However, the smaller liberal Free Democratic Party (which has had members in the Bundestag since 1949) and the Alliance '90/The Greens (which has controlled seats in parliament since 1983) have also played important roles.[60]

Germany has a civil law system based on Roman law with some references to Germanic law. The Bundesverfassungsgericht (Federal Constitutional Court) is the German Supreme Court responsible for constitutional matters, with power of judicial review.[20][61] Germany's supreme court system, called Oberste Gerichtshöfe des Bundes, is specialised: for civil and criminal cases, the highest court of appeal is the inquisitorial Federal Court of Justice, and for other affairs the courts are the Federal Labour Court, the Federal Social Court, the Federal Finance Court and the Federal Administrative Court. The Völkerstrafgesetzbuch regulates the consequences of crimes against humanity, genocide and war crimes, and gives German courts universal jurisdiction in some circumstances.[62] Criminal and private laws are codified on the national level in the Strafgesetzbuch and the Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch respectively. The German penal system is aimed towards rehabilitation of the criminal and the protection of the general public.[63] Except for petty crimes, which are tried before a single professional judge, and serious political crimes, all charges are tried before mixed tribunals on which lay judges (Schöffen) sit side by side with professional judges.[64][65]

Constituent states

Germany comprises sixteen states that are collectively referred to as Länder.[66] Each state has its own state constitution[67] and is largely autonomous in regard to its internal organisation. Due to differences in size and population the subdivision of these states varies, especially between city states (Stadtstaaten) and states with larger territories (Flächenländer). For regional administrative purposes five states, namely Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria, Hesse, North Rhine-Westphalia and Saxony, consist of a total of 22 Government Districts (Regierungsbezirke). As of 2009 Germany is divided into 403 districts (Kreise) on municipal level, these consist of 301 rural districts and 102 urban districts.[68]

State Capital Area (km²) Population
Baden-Württemberg Stuttgart 35,752 10,717,000
Bavaria Munich 70,549 12,444,000
Berlin Berlin 892 3,400,000
Brandenburg Potsdam 29,477 2,568,000
Bremen Bremen 404 663,000
Hamburg Hamburg 755 1,735,000
Hesse Wiesbaden 21,115 6,098,000
Mecklenburg-Vorpommern Schwerin 23,174 1,720,000
Lower Saxony Hanover 47,618 8,001,000
North Rhine-Westphalia Düsseldorf 34,043 18,075,000
Rhineland-Palatinate Mainz 19,847 4,061,000
Saarland Saarbrücken 2,569 1,056,000
Saxony Dresden 18,416 4,296,000
Saxony-Anhalt Magdeburg 20,445 2,494,000
Schleswig-Holstein Kiel 15,763 2,829,000
Thuringia Erfurt 16,172 2,355,000

Foreign relations

Chancellor Angela Merkel hosting the G8 summit in Heiligendamm

Germany has a network of 229 diplomatic missions abroad and maintains relations with more than 190 countries.[69] As of 2011 it is the largest contributor to the budget of the European Union (providing 20%)[70] and the third largest contributor to the UN (providing 8%).[71] Germany is a member of NATO, the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the G8, the G20, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). It has played a leading role in the European Union since its inception and has maintained a strong alliance with France since the end of World War II. Germany seeks to advance the creation of a more unified European political, defence, and security apparatus.[72][73]

The development policy of the Federal Republic of Germany is an independent area of German foreign policy. It is formulated by the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and carried out by the implementing organisations. The German government sees development policy as a joint responsibility of the international community.[74] It is the world's third biggest aid donor after the United States and France.[75][76]

During the Cold War, Germany's partition by the Iron Curtain made it a symbol of East-West tensions and a political battleground in Europe. However, Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik was a key factor in the détente of the 1970s.[77] In 1999, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's government defined a new basis for German foreign policy by taking part in the NATO decisions surrounding the Kosovo War and by sending German troops into combat for the first time since World War II.[78] The governments of Germany and the United States are close political allies.[20] The 1948 Marshall Plan and strong cultural ties have crafted a strong bond between the two countries, although Schröder's vocal opposition to the Iraq War suggested the end of Atlanticism and a relative cooling of German-American relations.[79] The two countries are also economically interdependent: 8.8% of German exports are U.S.-bound and 6.6% of German imports originate from the U.S.[80]

Military

Eurofighter 9803.ogg
The Eurofighter Typhoon is part of the Luftwaffe.

Germany's military, the Bundeswehr, is organized in Heer (Army), Marine (Navy), Luftwaffe (Air Force), Zentraler Sanitätsdienst (Central Medical Services) and Streitkräftebasis (Joint Support Service) branches. As of 2005, military spending was an estimated 1.5% of the country's GDP, that is position 99 in a ranking of all countries;[52] absolutely, German military expenditure is the eighth-highest in the world.[81] In peacetime, the Bundeswehr is commanded by the Minister of Defence. If Germany went to war, which according to the constitution is allowed only for defensive purposes, the Chancellor would become commander in chief of the Bundeswehr.[82]

As of May 2011 the Bundeswehr employs 188,000 professional soldiers, 31,000 18–25 year-old conscripts who serve for at least six months.[83] The German government plans to reduce the number of soldiers to 170,000 professionals and up to 15,000 short-time volunteers (voluntary military service).[84] Reservists are available to the Armed Forces and participate in defence exercises and deployments abroad, a new reserve concept of their future strength and functions was announced 2011.[84] As of April 2011, the German military had about 6,900 troops stationed in foreign countries as part of international peacekeeping forces, including about 4,900 Bundeswehr troops in the NATO-led ISAF force in Afghanistan and Uzbekistan, 1,150 German soldiers in Kosovo, and 300 troops with UNIFIL in Lebanon.[85]

Until 2011, military service was compulsory for men at age 18, and conscripts served six-month tours of duty; conscientious objectors could instead opt for an equal length of Zivildienst (civilian service), or a six-year commitment to (voluntary) emergency services like a fire department or the Red Cross. On 1 July 2011 conscription was officially suspended and replaced with a voluntary service.[86][87] Since 2001 women may serve in all functions of service without restriction, but they are not subject to conscription. There are presently some 17,500 women on active duty and a number of female reservists.[88]

Economy

A Mercedes-Benz car. Germany was the world's leading exporter of goods from 2003 to 2008.[89]

Germany has a social market economy with a highly qualified labour force, a large capital stock, a low level of corruption,[90] and a high level of innovation.[91] It has the largest national economy in Europe, the fourth largest by nominal GDP in the world,[92] and the fifth largest by PPP[92] in 2009. The service sector contributes approximately 71% of the total GDP, industry 28%, and agriculture 0.9%.[52] The average national unemployment rate in 2010 was about 7.5%.[52] First estimates indicate a 3.6% increase in the price-adjusted GDP for 2010, following a 4.7% drop in 2009.[93]

Germany is a founding member of the EU, the G8 and the G20, and was the world's largest exporter from 2003 to 2008. In 2009 it remained the second largest exporter and third largest importer of goods. Most of the country's exports are in engineering, especially machinery, automobiles, chemical goods and metals.[52] Germany is a leading producer of wind turbines and solar-power technology.[94] Annual trade fairs and congresses are held in cities throughout Germany.[95]

Germany is an advocate of closer European economic and political integration. Its commercial policies are increasingly determined by agreements among European Union (EU) members and by EU legislation. Germany introduced the common European currency, the euro, on 1 January 2002.[96][97] Its monetary policy is set by the European Central Bank. Two decades after German reunification, standards of living and per capita incomes remain significantly higher in the states of the former West Germany than in the former East.[98] The modernisation and integration of the eastern German economy is a long-term process scheduled to last until the year 2019, with annual transfers from west to east amounting to roughly $80 billion.[99] In January 2009 the German government approved a €50 billion economic stimulus plan to protect several sectors from a downturn and a subsequent rise in unemployment rates.[100]

Of the world's 500 largest stock-market-listed companies measured by revenue in 2010, the Fortune Global 500, 37 are headquartered in Germany. 30 Germany-based companies are included in the DAX, the German stock market index. Well-known global brands are Mercedes-Benz, BMW, SAP, Siemens, Volkswagen, Adidas, Audi, Allianz, Porsche, and Nivea.[101] Germany is recognised for its specialised small and medium enterprises. Around 1,000 of these companies are global market leaders in their segment and are labelled hidden champions.[102]

The list includes the largest companies by turnover in 2009. Unranked are the largest bank and the largest insurance company in 2007:

Rank[103] Name Headquarters Revenue
(Mil. €)
Profit
(Mil. €)
Employees
(World)
1 Volkswagen AG Wolfsburg 108,897 4,120 329,305
2 Daimler AG Stuttgart 99,399 3,985 272,382
3 Siemens AG Munich/Berlin 72,488 3,806 398,200
4 E.ON AG Düsseldorf 68,731 7,204 87,815
5 Metro AG Düsseldorf 64,337 825 242,378
6 Deutsche Post AG Bonn 63,512 1,389 475,100
7 Deutsche Telekom AG Bonn 62,516 569 241,426
8 BASF SE Ludwigshafen 57,951 4,065 95,175
9 BMW AG Munich 56,018 3,126 107,539
10 ThyssenKrupp AG Essen/Duisburg 51,723 2,102 191,350

Infrastructure

The ICE 3 train

With its central position in Europe, Germany is a transport hub. This is reflected in its dense and modern transport networks. The motorway (Autobahn) network ranks as the third largest worldwide in length.[104] Germany has established a polycentric network of high-speed trains. The InterCityExpress or ICE network of the Deutsche Bahn serves major German cities as well as destinations in neighbouring countries.[105] The largest German airports are Frankfurt Airport and Munich Airport, both hubs of Lufthansa, while Air Berlin has hubs at Berlin Tegel and Düsseldorf. Other major airports include Berlin Schönefeld, Hamburg, Cologne/Bonn and Leipzig/Halle. Both airports in Berlin will be consolidated at a site adjacent to Berlin Schönefeld, which will become Berlin Brandenburg Airport in 2012.[106]

As of 2008, Germany was the world's sixth largest consumer of energy,[107] and 60% of its primary energy was imported.[108] Government policy promotes energy conservation and renewable energy. Energy efficiency has been improving since the early 1970s; the government aims to meet the country's electricity demands using only renewable sources by 2050.[109] In 2010, energy sources were: oil (33.7%); coal, including lignite (22.9%); natural gas (21.8%); nuclear (10.8%); hydro-electric and wind power (1.5%); and other renewable sources (7.9%).[110] In 2000, the government and the nuclear power industry agreed to phase out all nuclear power plants by 2021.[111] Germany is committed to the Kyoto protocol and several other treaties promoting biodiversity, low emission standards, recycling, and the use of renewable energy, and supports sustainable development at a global level.[112] The German government has initiated wide-ranging emission reduction activities and the country's overall emissions are falling.[113] Nevertheless the country's greenhouse gas emissions were the highest in the EU as of 2007.[114]

Science and technology

Germany's achievements in sciences have been significant, and research and development efforts form an integral part of the economy.[115] The Nobel Prize has been awarded to 103 German laureates.[116] For most of the 20th century, German laureates had more awards than those of any other nation, especially in the sciences (physics, chemistry, and physiology or medicine).[117][118]

The work of Albert Einstein and Max Planck was crucial to the foundation of modern physics, which Werner Heisenberg and Max Born developed further.[119] Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen discovered X-rays and was the first winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901.[120] Numerous mathematicians were born in Germany, including Carl Friedrich Gauss, David Hilbert, Bernhard Riemann, Gottfried Leibniz, Karl Weierstrass, Hermann Weyl and Felix Klein. Research institutions in Germany include the Max Planck Society, the Helmholtz Association and the Fraunhofer Society. The Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize is granted to ten scientists and academics every year. With a maximum of €2.5 million per award it is one of highest endowed research prizes in the world.[121]

Germany has been the home of many famous inventors and engineers, such as Johannes Gutenberg, credited with the invention of movable type printing in Europe; Hans Geiger, the creator of the Geiger counter; and Konrad Zuse, who built the first fully automatic digital computer.[122] German inventors, engineers and industrialists such as Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, Otto Lilienthal, Gottlieb Daimler, Rudolf Diesel, Hugo Junkers and Karl Benz helped shape modern automotive and air transportation technology.[123] Aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun developed the first space rocket and later on was a prominent member of NASA and developed the Saturn V Moon rocket, which paved the way for the success of the US Apollo program. Heinrich Rudolf Hertz's work in the domain of electromagnetic radiation was pivotal to the development of modern telecommunication.[124]

Germany is also one of the leading countries in developing and using green technologies. Companies specializing in green technology have an estimated turnover of 200€ billion. Especially the expertise in engineering, science and research of Germany is eminently respectable. The lead markets of Germany's green technology industry are power generation, sustainable mobility, material efficiency, energy efficiency, waste management and recycling, sustainable water management.[125]

Demographics

With its estimated population of 81.8 million in January 2010,[1] Germany is the most populous country in the European Union and ranks as the 15th most populous country in the world.[126] Its population density stands at 229.4 inhabitants per square kilometre. The overall life expectancy in Germany at birth is 79.9 years. The fertility rate of 1.4 children per mother, or 7.9 births per 1000 inhabitants in 2009, is one of the lowest in the world.[127] Since the 1990s, Germany's death rate has continuously exceeded its birth rate.[128] The Federal Statistical Office of Germany forecast that the population will shrink to between 65 and 70 million by 2060 (depending on the level of net migration).[129]

Germany's population pyramid in 2005

German nationals make up 91% of the population of Germany. As of 2009, about seven million foreign citizens were registered in Germany, and 19% of the country's residents were of foreign or partially foreign descent (including persons descending or partially descending from ethnic German repatriates), 96% of whom lived in Western Germany or Berlin.[130] The United Nations Population Fund lists Germany as host to the third-highest number of international migrants worldwide, about 5% or 10 million of all 191 million migrants.[131] As a consequence of restrictions to Germany's formerly rather unrestricted laws on asylum and immigration, the number of immigrants seeking asylum or claiming German ethnicity (mostly from the former Soviet Union) has been declining steadily since 2000.[132] In 2009, 20% of the population had immigrant roots, the highest since 1945.[133] As of 2008, the largest national group was from Turkey (2.5 million), followed by Italy (776,000) and Poland (687,000).[134] About 3 million "Aussiedler"—ethnic Germans, mainly from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union—have resettled in Germany since 1987.[135]

Germany has a number of large cities. The largest conurbation is the Rhine-Ruhr region (11.5 million as of 2006), including Düsseldorf (the capital of North Rhine-Westphalia), Cologne, Dortmund, Essen, Duisburg, and Bochum.[136]

Religion

Christianity is the largest religion in Germany, with around 51.5 million adherents (62.8%) in 2008,[137] of which 30.0% are Catholics and 29.9% are Protestants, belonging to the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD); the remainder consists of small denominations (each less than 0.5% of the German population).[138] Protestantism is concentrated in the north and east and Roman Catholicism is concentrated in the south and west;[6] 1.6% of the country's overall population declare themselves Orthodox Christians.[137]

The second largest religion is Islam with an estimated 3.8 to 4.3 million adherents (4.6% to 5.2%),[139] followed by Buddhism with 250,000 and Judaism with around 200,000 adherents (0.3%); Hinduism has some 90,000 adherents (0.1%). All other religious communities in Germany have fewer than 50,000 adherents.[140] Of the roughly 4 million Muslims, most are Sunnis and Alevites from Turkey, but there are a small number of Shi'ites and other denominations.[139] German Muslims, a large portion of whom are of Turkish origin, lack full official state recognition of their religious community.[6] Germany has Europe's third largest Jewish population (after France and the United Kingdom).[141] Approximately 50% of the Buddhists in Germany are Asian immigrants.[142]

Germans with no stated religious adherence make up 34.1% of the population, especially in the former East Germany and major metropolitan areas.[138] German reunification in 1990 greatly increased the country’s non-religious population, a legacy of the state atheism of the previously Soviet-controlled East. Christian church membership has decreased in recent decades, particularly among Protestants.[6]

Languages

German is the official and predominant spoken language in Germany.[143] It is one of 23 official languages in the European Union, and one of the three working languages of the European Commission. Recognised native minority languages in Germany are Danish, Low German, Sorbian, Romany, and Frisian; they are officially protected by the ECRML. The most used immigrant languages are Turkish, Kurdish, Polish, the Balkan languages, and Russian; 67% of German citizens claim to be able to communicate in at least one foreign language and 27% in at least two languages other than their own.[143]

Standard German is a West Germanic language and is closely related to and classified alongside English, Low German, Dutch, and the Frisian languages. To a lesser extent, it is also related to the East (extinct) and North Germanic languages. Most German vocabulary is derived from the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family.[144] Significant minorities of words are derived from Latin and Greek, with a smaller amount from French and most recently English (known as Denglisch). German is written using the Latin alphabet. German dialects, traditional local varieties traced back to the Germanic tribes, are distinguished from varieties of standard German by their lexicon, phonology, and syntax.[145]

Education

The University of Heidelberg was established in 1386.

Over 99% of Germans age 15 and above are estimated to be able to read and write.[52] However, a growing number of inhabitants are functionally illiterate.[146] Responsibility for educational oversight in Germany lies primarily with the individual federated states. Since the 1960s, a reform movement attempted to unify secondary education in a Gesamtschule (comprehensive school); several West German states later simplified their school system to two or three tiers. A system of apprenticeship called Duale Ausbildung ("dual education") allows pupils in vocational training to learn in a company as well as in a state-run vocational school.[147]

Optional kindergarten education is provided for all children between three and six years old, after which school attendance is compulsory for at least nine years. Primary education usually lasts for four years and public schools are not stratified at this stage.[147] In contrast, secondary education includes three traditional types of schools focused on different levels of academic ability: the Gymnasium enrols the most gifted children and prepares students for university studies; the Realschule for intermediate students lasts six years; the Hauptschule prepares pupils for vocational education.[148]

The general entrance requirement for university is Abitur, a qualification normally based on continuous assessment during the last few years at school and final examinations; however there are a number of exceptions, and precise requirements vary, depending on the state, the university and the subject. Germany's universities are recognised internationally; in the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) for 2008, six of the top 100 universities in the world are in Germany, and 18 of the top 200.[149] Nearly all German universities are public institutions, charging tuition fees of €50–500 per semester for each student.[150]

Health

Germany has the world's oldest universal health care system, dating back to Otto von Bismarck's Social legislation in 1883.[151] Currently the population is covered by a basic health insurance plan provided by statute. According to the World Health Organization, Germany's health care system was 77% government-funded and 23% privately funded as of 2005.[152] In 2005, Germany spent 11% of its GDP on health care. Germany ranked 20th in the world in life expectancy with 77 years for men and 82 years for women, and it had a very low infant mortality rate (4 per 1,000 live births).[152]

As of 2009, the principal cause of death was cardiovascular disease, at 42%, followed by malignant tumours, at 25%.[153] As of 2008, about 82,000 Germans had been infected with HIV/AIDS and 26,000 had died from the disease (cumulatively, since 1982).[154] According to a 2005 survey, 27% of German adults are smokers.[154] A 2007 study shows Germany has the highest number of overweight people in Europe.[155][156]

Culture

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827), composer

From its roots, culture in Germany has been shaped by major intellectual and popular currents in Europe, both religious and secular. Historically Germany has been called Das Land der Dichter und Denker (the land of poets and thinkers).[157] The federated states are in charge of the cultural institutions. There are 240 subsidised theatres, hundreds of symphonic orchestras, thousands of museums and over 25,000 libraries spread in Germany. These cultural opportunities are enjoyed by many: there are over 91 million German museum visits every year; annually, 20 million go to theatres and operas; 3.6 million per year listen to the symphonic orchestras.[158] The UNESCO inscribed 33 properties in Germany on the World Heritage List.[159]

Germany has established a high level of gender equality,[160] promotes disability rights, and is legally and socially tolerant towards homosexuals. Gays and lesbians can legally adopt their partner's biological children, and civil unions have been permitted since 2001.[161] Germany has also changed its attitude towards immigrants; since the mid-1990s, the government and the majority of Germans have begun to acknowledge that controlled immigration should be allowed based on qualification standards.[162] Germany has been named the world's second most valued nation among 50 countries in 2010.[163] A global opinion poll for the BBC revealed that Germany is recognised for having the most positive influence in the world in 2011.[164]

Arts

J.S.Bach
Toccata und Fuge
L.v. Beethoven
Symphonie 5 c-moll
R. Wagner
Die Walküre
Toccata et Fugue BWV565.ogg
Ludwig van Beethoven - Symphonie 5 c-moll - 1. Allegro con brio.ogg
Wagner - die walkure fantasie.ogg

Numerous German painters have enjoyed international prestige through their work in diverse artistic styles. Hans Holbein the Younger, Matthias Grünewald, and Albrecht Dürer were important artists of the Renaissance, Caspar David Friedrich of Romanticism, and Max Ernst of Surrealism. Architectural contributions from Germany include the Carolingian and Ottonian styles, which were precursors of Romanesque. The region later became the site of Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque art. Germany was particularly important in the early modern movement, especially through the Bauhaus movement founded by Walter Gropius. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe became one of the world's most renowned architects in the second half of the 20th century. He conceived of the glass façade skyscraper.[165]

German music includes works by some of the world's most well-known classical music composers, including Ludwig van Beethoven, Johann Sebastian Bach, Johannes Brahms, and Richard Wagner. As of 2008, Germany is the fourth largest music market in the world[166] and has influenced popular music through artists such as Kraftwerk, Alphaville, Boney M., Nena, Nico, Nina Hagen, Scorpions, Die Toten Hosen, Tokio Hotel, Rammstein, and Paul van Dyk.[citation needed]

Literature and philosophy

German literature can be traced back to the Middle Ages and the works of writers such as Walther von der Vogelweide and Wolfram von Eschenbach. Well-known German authors include Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. The collections of folk tales published by the Brothers Grimm popularised German folklore on an international level. Influential authors of the 20th century include Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Hermann Hesse, Heinrich Böll, and Günter Grass.[167] German-speaking book publishers produce some 700 million books every year, with about 80,000 titles, nearly 60,000 of them new. Germany comes third in quantity of books published, after the English-speaking book market and the People's Republic of China.[168] The Frankfurt Book Fair is the most important in the world for international deals and trading, with a tradition spanning over 500 years.[169]

German philosophy is historically significant. Gottfried Leibniz's contributions to rationalism; the establishment of classical German idealism by Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling; Arthur Schopenhauer's composition of metaphysical pessimism; the formulation of communist theory by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels; Friedrich Nietzsche's development of perspectivism; Gottlob Frege's contributions to the dawn of analytic philosophy; Martin Heidegger's works on Being; and the development of the Frankfurt school by Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse and Jürgen Habermas have been particularly influential. In the 21st century Germany has contributed to the development of contemporary analytic philosophy in continental Europe, along with France, Austria, Switzerland and the Scandinavian countries.[170]

Media

German cinema dates back to the earliest years of the medium with the work of Max Skladanowsky, which was particularly influential with German expressionists such as Robert Wiene and Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau. Director Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) is referred to as the first modern science-fiction film. In 1930 the Austrian-American Josef von Sternberg directed The Blue Angel, the first major German sound film.[171] During the 1970s and 1980s, New German Cinema directors such as Volker Schlöndorff, Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder put West German cinema on the international stage.[172] The annual European Film Awards ceremony is held every other year in Berlin, home of the European Film Academy (EFA); the Berlin Film Festival, held annually since 1951, is one of the world's foremost film festivals.[173]

More recently, films such as Good Bye Lenin! (2003), Gegen die Wand (Head-on) (2004), Der Untergang (Downfall) (2004), and Der Baader Meinhof Komplex (2008) have had international success. The Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film went to the German production Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum) in 1979, to Nowhere in Africa in 2002, and to Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others) in 2007.[174] Germany's television market is the largest in Europe, with some 34 million TV households. Around 90% of German households have cable or satellite TV, with a variety of free-to-view public and commercial channels.[175]

Cuisine

A Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte (literally, "Black Forest cherry torte".)

German cuisine varies from region to region. The southern regions of Bavaria and Swabia, for instance, share a culinary culture with Switzerland and Austria. In all regions, meat is often eaten in sausage form.[176] Organic food has gained a market share of ca. 2%, and is expected to increase further.[177] Although wine is becoming more popular in many parts of Germany, the national alcoholic drink is beer. German beer consumption per person is declining, but at 116 litres annually it is still among the highest in the world.[178] The Michelin guide has awarded nine restaurants in Germany three stars, the highest designation, while 15 more received two stars.[179] German restaurants have become the world's second-most decorated after France.[180]

Sports

Signal Iduna Park is the biggest stadium in Germany

Twenty-seven million Germans are members of a sports club and an additional twelve million pursue sports individually.[181] Association football is the most popular sport. With more than 6.3 million official members, the German Football Association (Deutscher Fußball-Bund) is the largest sports organisation of its kind worldwide.[181] The Bundesliga attracts the second highest average attendance of any professional sports league in the world.

The German national football team won the FIFA World Cup in 1954, 1974 and 1990 and the UEFA European Football Championship in 1972, 1980 and 1996. Germany hosted the FIFA World Cup in 1974 and 2006 and the UEFA European Football Championship in 1988. Among the most well-known footballers are Franz Beckenbauer, Gerd Müller, Jürgen Klinsmann, Lothar Matthäus, and Oliver Kahn. Other popular spectator sports include handball, volleyball, basketball (especially popularized through Dirk Nowitzki[182]), ice hockey, and tennis.[181]

Germany is one of the leading motor sports countries in the world. Constructors like BMW and Mercedes are prominent manufacturers in motor sport. Additionally, Porsche has won the 24 Hours of Le Mans, an annual endurance race held in France, 16 times, and Audi has won it 9 times. Formula One driver Michael Schumacher has set many motor sport records during his career, having won more Formula One World Drivers' Championships and more Formula One races than any other driver; he is one of the highest paid sportsmen in history.[183]

Historically, German sportsmen have been successful contenders in the Olympic Games, ranking third in an all-time Olympic Games medal count, combining East and West German medals. In the 2008 Summer Olympics, Germany finished fifth in the medal count,[184] while in the 2006 Winter Olympics they finished first.[185] Germany has hosted the Summer Olympic Games twice, in Berlin in 1936 and in Munich in 1972. The Winter Olympic Games took place in Germany once in 1936 in the twin towns of Garmisch and Partenkirchen.

See also

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Work cited

Fulbrook, Mary (1991). A Concise History of Germany. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521368360. 

External links

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Wikimedia Atlas of Germany


Translations:

Germany

Top

Dansk (Danish)
n. - Tyskland

Français (French)
n. - Allemagne

Deutsch (German)
n. - Deutschland

Português (Portuguese)
n. - Alemanha

Español (Spanish)
n. - Alemania

中文(简体)(Chinese (Simplified))
德国

中文(繁體)(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 德國

한국어 (Korean)
독일 (1990년 10월 3일 0시를 기해, 45년간의 동서 분단 끝에 재통일을 이룩함)

idioms:

  • East germany    동독 (1990년 독일 통일로 붕괴됨)
  • Federal Republic of germany    독일 연방 공화국 (구 West Germany 와 통일 후의 독일 공식명; 수도 Berlin; (약) FRG., F.R.G.)

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮גרמניה‬


 
 

 

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