Germany (The Federal Republic of Germany) is a federal state in Central Europe. It has 16 federal states and is conceived as a liberal-democratic and social-constitutional state. Founded in 1949, the Federal Republic of Germany is the most recent manifestation of the German nation-state, which was first established in 1871. The federal capital and seat of government is Berlin. Germany borders nine states, it has a share in the North Sea and Baltic Sea in the north as well as Lake Constance and the Alps in the south. It is located in the temperate climate zone and has 16 national and more than 100 natural parks.
Today’s Germany has a good 83 million inhabitants and, with an area of 357,588 square kilometers with an average of 232 inhabitants per square kilometer, is one of the densely populated territorial states. The most populous German city is Berlin; other metropolises with more than one million inhabitants are Hamburg, Munich and Cologne; the largest conurbation is the Ruhr area. Frankfurt am Main is of global importance as a European financial center. The birth rate is 1. 53 children per woman (2020).
On the territory of Germany, the presence of humans 500,000 years ago is proven by finds of Homo heidelbergensis as well as some prehistoric works of art from the later Paleolithic period. During the Neolithic period, around 5600 BC, the first farmers, including cattle and seeds, immigrated from the Middle East. Since ancient times, the Latin name Germania has been known for the settlement area of the Germanic tribes. The Roman-German Empire, which existed from the 10th century onwards and consisted of many dominions, was like the German Confederation founded in 1815 and the liberal democratic movement, the forerunner of the later German state, which was founded in 1871 as the German Empire.
The rapid development from an agrarian to an industrial state took place during the Wilhelminian period in the second half of the 19th century. After the First World War, the monarchy was abolished in 1918 and the democratic Weimar Republic was constituted. From 1933, the National Socialist dictatorship led to political and racist persecution and culminated in the murder of six million Jews and members of other minorities such as Sinti and Roma. The Second World War, begun by the Nazi state in 1939, ended in 1945 with the defeat of the Axis powers.
The country occupied by the victorious powers was divided in 1949 after its eastern territories had already been placed under Polish and partLy Soviet administrative sovereignty in 1945. The founding of the Federal Republic as a democratic West German state with ties to the West on 23 May 1949 was followed by the founding of the socialist GDR on 7 October 1949 as an East German constituent state under Soviet hegemony.
The inner-German border was sealed off after the Berlin Wall was built (on 13 August 1961). After the peaceful revolution in the GDR in 1989, the German question was resolved by the reunification of both parts of the country on 3 October 1990, which also recognized Germany’s external borders as definitive. Due to the accession of the five East German states and the reunification of East and West Berlin into today’s federal capital, the Federal Republic of Germany has had sixteen federal states since 1990.
Germany is a founding member of the European Union and its predecessors (Treaties of Rome 1957) and its most populous country. With 18 other EU member states, it forms a monetary union, the eurozone. It is a member of the UN, the OECD, the OSCE, NATO, the G7, the G20 and the Council of Europe. The United Nations has maintained its German headquarters in Bonn (“UN City”) since 1951. The Federal Republic of Germany is considered one of the most politically influential states in Europe and is a sought-after partner country on a global level.
In terms of gross domestic product, Germany, which is organized in a market economy, is the largest economy in Europe and the fourth largest in the world. In 2016, it was the third-largest export and import nation. It is an information and knowledge society. Automation, digitalization and disruption characterize the innovative German industrial development. Increasing the quality of the German education system and the sustainable development of the country are regarded as central tasks of location policy. According to the Human Development Index, Germany is one of the most highly developed countries.
The mother tongue of the majority of the population is the German language. There are also regional and minority languages and both Germans and migrants with other mother tongues, the most important of which are Turkish and Russian. The most important foreign language is English, which is taught in schools in all federal states. The culture of Germany is diverse and, in addition to numerous traditions, institutions and events, is recorded and appreciated, for example, in the designation as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Germany, in cultural monuments and as an intangible cultural heritage.
History of terms: German and Germany
The etymological preforms of German originally meant “belonging to the people”, whereby the adjective initially referred to the dialects of the continental-West Germanic dialect continuum. The term Germany has been used since the 15th century, but is attested earlier in individual documents; in the Frankfurt translation of the Golden Bull (around 1365) it is called Dutschelant. Before that, only word additions of the attribute German are occupied with land, for example in the indefinite singular form “a German country” or the certain plural form “the German states”, but not in the certain singular form “the German country”.
This meant countries with a ruling class that referred to the political claim to power of the (East) Franconian, from the 10th century of the Holy Roman Empire (962–1806). The term was thus used primarily for (pre-)state entities in the German-speaking or dominion area, which experienced great changes over centuries.
The Holy Roman Empire, originally referred to only as the “Empire” (Latin Empire), received several name additions: “Holy” since the middle of the 12th century, “Roman” since the middle of the 13th century and since the end of the 15th century “German Nation” (Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation) . It was not until the 16th century that the term “Teutschland” came up for the previously so-called “German lands”. Soon an equation of Reich and Teutschland became established in contemporary literature, which were eventually used as synonyms (for example by the Halle lawyer Johann Peter von Ludewig in 1735).
An awareness that not the respective territorial state, but Germany as a whole was to be regarded as a fatherland, only began to spread in the Napoleonic Wars. Previously, for example, Friedrich Schiller had made a strict distinction in Xenia in 1797 between a spiritual and a political Germany, which had no intersection: “Germany, but where is it? I don’t know how to find the country. Where the learned begins, the political ends. ” He rejected the possibility of the latter: “To form a nation, you hope so, Germans, in vain. ” He saw German greatness (the title of an unfinished poem from 1801) only in the spiritual. As late as 1813, Achim von Arnim spoke of Germany as a “hollow word ideal”, to which he contrasted “everything glorious of the individual German peoples” (in the plural).
A political understanding of the name Germany initially came only from a small group of intellectuals and politicians such as Ernst Moritz Arndt, Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, Johann Gottlieb Fichte or Heinrich Friedrich Karl vom und zum Stein, but already developed a considerable mobilization effect during the wars of liberation. The Empire of Austria and the Kingdom of Prussia now also referred positively to Germany: Archduke Karl of Austria-Teschen issued his appeal to the German nation in 1809 at the beginning of the Fifth Coalition War, in which he assured: “Our cause is the business of Germany”.
The Prussian King Frederick William III announced in the proclamation of Kalisch on 19 March 1813 “the return of freedom and independence to the princes and peoples of Germany”. This Germany was defined as the German-speaking area. It was no longer understood as an empire, but as a nation; In the following decades, the German national movement campaigned for all German territories to be brought together in one nation-state.
This initially failed, at the Congress of Vienna in 1814/15 the territorial states were instead restored and combined into a confederation of states, the German Confederation. This was also referred to as Germany, but included some mostly non-German-speaking territories such as Bohemia and Moravia, while others, mostly German-speaking areas such as East Prussia, did not belong to it. Nevertheless, the national movement initially remained an elite project. It only unfolded mass effectiveness in the Rhine crisis of 1840.
From the founding of the Reich in 1871, a change in meaning began, from Germany as a cultural nation to the designation of the state, with geographical restriction to today’s territory:
The Austrian Empire did not become part of the German Empire in 1871. However, the German-speaking inhabitants of Austria continued to see themselves as Germans. When the multi-ethnic state disintegrated at the end of the First World War, the German-Austrians wanted to join the German Reich. However, this was prohibited by the peace treaty. Thus, different national identities began to develop. The terms German and German were increasingly identified only with the German Reich.
This process was initially interrupted when Austria was annexed to the German Reich in 1938 under National Socialist rule. The distancing from National Socialism after the Second World War led to a distancing from the concept of Germany in Austria and to the consolidation of the Austrians’ own national identity. In the course of the political reorganization of the continuing state, the Parliamentary Council in West Germany rejected a continuation of the state name German Reich because of its “aggressive accent” and used Germany for the first time as a state designation in the then constituted “Federal Republic of Germany”.
In the deliberations in 1948, Theodor Heuss said: “With the word Germany we give the whole thing a certain pathos . . . sentimental and not power politics. “The German Democratic Republic (GDR) did not use Germany in the state name, but as a synonym for GDR in Article 1 of the Constitution of 1949. Later, the GDR used almost only the attribute German or the name suffix “. . . of the GDR” for state sovereign designations. With German reunification in 1990, Germany was able to become the official abbreviation of the state name.
Geography
Physical Geography
The major natural regions are from north to south: the North German Lowlands, the low mountain range zone and the foothills of the Alps with the Alps.
Geology
Geologically, Germany belongs to Western Europe, i. e. to that part of the continent that was only successively annexed to the Precambrian consolidated “primeval Europe” (Eastern Europe including a large part of Scandinavia, cf. Baltica) in the course of the Phanerozoic by continent-continent collisions (mountain formations). The corresponding crustal provinces (bedrock provinces) are classically simplistically called (eastern) Avalonia (cf. Caledonian mountain formation) and Armorica (cf. Variscan mountain formation). The most recent crustal province is the Alpine-Carpathian orogen (cf. Alpidian mountain formation), in which Germany has only a share with the extreme south of Bavaria and which, in contrast to the other two tectonic provinces, is an active orogen.
Today’s surface geology of Germany, i. e. the pattern of rock complexes of different ages and structures, as it is often depicted in geological maps, only emerged in the course of the last 30 to 20 million years in the younger Cenozoic and was decisively influenced by two events: the Alpidian mountain formation and the Quaternary Ice Age.
The Quaternary Ice Age formed the comparatively monotonous surface geology of northern Germany and the foothills of the Alps with their moraine deposits and other side effects of large-scale glaciations (cf. glacial series).
The surface geology of the center and the majority of southern Germany is the result of significant fracture tectonic uplifts and subsidences, which can be traced back to the long-distance effect of the Alpidian mountain formation. Here, partly old (predominantly Paleozoic), Variscan folded bedrock complexes (slate mountains and crystalline) were lifted out of the subsoil and exposed over a large area (including Rhenish Slate Mountains, Harz, Ore Mountains), partly the earth’s crust sank and formed sedimentation spaces that absorbed more or less powerful Cenozoic sediment sequences (Upper Rhine Trench, Lower Rhine Trench, Hessian Depression, Molasse Basin). A tectonic intermediate position is occupied by the tablelands with their unfolded Mesozoic strata sequences, dominated by the Triassic and Jurassic (Thuringian Basin, South German Stratified Land).
Relief
The geologically young folded mountains of the Alps are the only high mountains in which Germany has a share. The German Alps, which are entirely located in the state of Bavaria, have the only mountain peaks with more than 2000 m above sea level. The summit of the Zugspitze (2962 m above sea level), which Germany shares with Austria, is the highest point in the country.
The German low mountain ranges extend from the northern edge of the low mountain range threshold to the edge of the Alps and the Upper Rhine with Lake Constance. They tend to increase in height and extent from north to south. The highest low mountain peak is the Feldberg in the Black Forest (1493 m above sea level), followed by the Großer Arber in the Bavarian Forest (1456 m above sea level). Peaks over 1000 m above sea level also have the Ore Mountains, the Fichtelgebirge, the Swabian Alb and the Harz, which rises quite isolated as the northernmost among the highest German low mountain ranges with the Brocken at 1141 m above sea level.
North of the low mountain range, only a few mountains within the glacial terminal moraine trains reach more than 100 m above sea level, of which the Heidehöhe in Schraden (Southern Ridge in the Brandenburg-Saxon border area) is the highest at 201 m above sea level.
The deepest publicly accessible state office in Germany is located at 3. 54 m below sea level in a depression near Neuendorf-Sachsenbande in the Wilstermarsch (Schleswig-Holstein). Also in this state is the deepest cryptodepression: It lies with 39. 6 m below sea level at the bottom of Lake Hemmelsdorf northeast of Lübeck. The deepest artificially created terrain point lies at 267 m below NHN at the bottom of the Hambach opencast mine east of Jülich in North Rhine-Westphalia.
Climate
Germany belongs entirely to the temperate climate zone of Central Europe in the area of the west wind zone and is located in the transition area between the maritime climate in Western Europe and the continental climate in Eastern Europe. The climate in Germany is influenced, among other things, by the Gulf Stream, which makes the average temperature level unusually high for the latitude.
The average annual average temperature, based on the normal period 1961–1990, is 8. 2 °C in the nationwide area average, the average monthly average temperatures are between −0. 5 °C in January and 16. 9 °C in July. The average annual precipitation is 789 millimeters. The average monthly rainfall is between 49 millimeters in February and 85 millimeters in June.
The lowest officially recorded temperature in Germany was −37. 8 °C; it was recorded in Wolnzach in 1929. The highest temperature to date was 41. 2 °C and was measured on 25 July 2019 in Duisburg-Baerl and in Tönisvorst on the Lower Rhine.
Waters
Of the six streams with the largest catchment areas, the Rhine, Elbe, Weser and Ems drain via the North Sea and the Oder via the Baltic Sea into the Atlantic, while the Danube flows into the Black Sea and is therefore hydrographically attributable to the Mediterranean. The catchment areas of these two systems are separated by the main European watershed.
The Rhine, which rises in Switzerland, dominates the southwest and west. It flows for 865 kilometers through and on the border with Germany before flowing into the North Sea via the Netherlands. Its most important German tributaries are the Neckar, Main, Moselle and Ruhr. The Rhine is of great economic importance and is one of the busiest waterways in Europe. In the south, the Danube drains almost the entire German foothills of the Alps over 647 kilometers and flows further into Austria and South-Eastern Europe. Its most important German tributaries are the Iller, Lech, Isar and Inn.
The Elbe, which rises in the Czech Republic, flows through eastern Germany for 725 kilometers. Its most important German tributaries are saale and Havel. On 179 kilometers, the Oder, as in the further course, is its most important tributary, the Neisse, the border river to Poland. Only the catchment area of the 452-kilometer-long Weser lies entirely in Germany. It feeds on the rivers Werra and Fulda and drains the central north. The Ems flows for 371 kilometers through the extreme northwest of the country. Its catchment area also extends to parts of the Netherlands.
The natural lakes are predominantly of glacial origin. Therefore, most of the large lakes can be found in the foothills of the Alps, in Holstein Switzerland and in Mecklenburg. The largest lake, which belongs entirely to the German territory, is the Müritz, which is part of the Mecklenburg Lake District. The largest lake with a German share is Lake Constance, which is also bordered by Austria and Switzerland. In the west and east of Germany, there are many artificial lakes created by the recultivation of lignite opencast mines or industrial wastelands, such as the Leipzig New Lake District or the Dortmund Phoenix Lake.
Islands
In the Wadden Sea, the Dutch, German and Danish North Sea coasts immediately off, lie the Frisian Islands. While the North Frisian Islands are continental remnants that were separated from the coast by land subsidence and subsequent flooding, the East Frisian Islands are barrier islands formed by sediments washed up by coastal currents as well as wave and tidal dynamics. Located in the middle of the German Bight, Helgoland is the inhabited German island furthest from the mainland. It goes back to the rise of a salt dome in the subsoil of the North Sea.
The largest German islands in the Baltic Sea are (from west to east) Fehmarn, Poel, Hiddensee, Rügen and Usedom. Rügen is also the largest German island. The largest peninsula is Fischland-Darß-Zingst. With the exception of Fehmarn, these land areas are part of a Bodden coast, i. e. a ground moraine landscape flooded after the glacial period and subsequently modified by landing processes.
The largest and best-known islands in inland waters are Reichenau, Mainau and Lindau in Lake Constance as well as herreninsel in Chiemsee.
Flora
The natural area of Germany lies in the temperate climate zone; from west to east, its natural vegetation marks the transition from the west-side lake climate to the continental climate. Without human influence, the flora would be mainly characterized by deciduous and mixed forests, except for nutrient-poor or dry locations such as rocky peaks, heath lowlands and moorlands as well as the alpine and subalpine high altitudes, which are extremely low in vegetation and cold temperate in their climate.
Locally, the flora in Germany shows a high diversification due to location factors of the terrain and the mesoclimatic location. The total population of wild plant species in Germany is estimated at over 9,500 species, of which almost 3,000 species are seed plants, 74 fern plants, over 1,000 mosses and about 3,000 diatoms. In addition, there are around 14,000 fungal and 373 slime mold species. Especially on fallow and sturgeon areas, a number of introduced species such as Robinia and the glandular springwort can be found today.
Currently, the forest in Germany covers 32 percent of the land area. This makes Germany one of the most forested countries in the European Union. The current tree species composition corresponds only to a small extent to the natural conditions and is mainly determined by forestry. The most common tree species are the common spruce with 26. 0 percent of the area, followed by the forest pine with 22. 9 percent, the European beech with 15. 8 percent and the oaks with 10. 6 percent.
About half of the state’s land is used for agriculture; according to the Federal Statistical Office, it was 182,637 square kilometers on 31 December 2016. In addition to its use as permanent grassland, a large part of it has been cultivated, since the Stone Age or the Bronze Age mainly with crops that do not occur naturally in Central Europe (most of the cereals from the Middle East, potatoes and corn from America). In the river valleys, including the Main, Moselle, Ahr and Rhine, the landscape has often been redesigned for viticulture.
The preservation of nature is a public task in Germany and a state objective enshrined in Article 20a of the Basic Law. Nature conservation is served by 16 national parks (see National Parks in Germany), 19 biosphere reserves, 105 nature parks as well as thousands of nature reserves, landscape protection areas and natural monuments.
Fauna in Germany
In Germany, about 48,000 animal species are proven, including 104 mammal, 328 bird, 13 reptile, 22 lurch and 197 fish species as well as over 33,000 insect species, making the country “one of the less species-poor areas due to the geological development and geographical location”. These species are joined by over 1,000 crustaceans, almost 3,800 spiders, 635 mollusks and over 5,300 other invertebrates.
Wild mammals native to Germany include deer, wild boar, red and fallow deer as well as foxes, martens and lynxes. Beavers and otters are rare inhabitants of the floodplains, with populations rising again. The Bavarian Alps are home to alpine ibex, alpine marmot and chamois; the latter can also be found in various low mountain ranges. Other large mammals that lived in earlier times on the territory of today’s Germany were exterminated: wild horses, aurochs (15th century), bison (16th century), brown bears (19th century), wolf (19th century), moose (20th century).
While moose today occasionally migrate from neighboring countries, wolves from Poland have firmly established themselves again in Germany and gave birth to offspring for the first time at the turn of the millennium. In 2018, there were 73 proven wolf packs in Germany, most of which live in the states of Saxony, Brandenburg and Lower Saxony. In 2013, a herd of bison was released into the wild in the Rothaargebirge. Also, in October 2019, a brown bear, presumably immigrant from Italy, was photographed by a wildlife camera in the district of Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Moreover, in the following months, the animal could be detected again several times. Already in 2006, a bear had immigrated to Germany with the “problem bear” Bruno. In the meantime, lynxes originally native to Germany live again, but in low population density, because they are repeatedly victims of poaching and road traffic.
Of the white-tailed eagle, which is considered the model for the German heraldic animal, there are again about 500 pairs, especially in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Brandenburg. The golden eagle is only found in the Bavarian Alps, where the bearded vulture from Switzerland and Austria, which has been exterminated there, is also returning.
The most common birds of prey today are buzzards and kestrels, the population of peregrine falcons is significantly lower. More than half of the total population of red kites breeds in Germany, but is declining due to intensive agriculture. On the other hand, many birds benefit as cultural followers from the presence of humans, especially the city pigeons living in cities, blackbirds (former forest birds), sparrows and, whose survival is also ensured by winter feeding, as well as crows and gulls on garbage dumps. The Wadden Sea is a resting place for ten to twelve million migratory birds per year.
Salmon, which used to be common in rivers, was largely eradicated in the course of industrialization, but was resettled in the Rhine in the 1980s. In Germany, the last sturgeon was caught in 1969. In many ponds, the carp introduced by the Romans are kept. The species seal and grey seal, which were almost exterminated by professional fishermen in the middle of the 20th century as prey competitors and are now protected – the latter the largest predator native to Germany – are now again represented on the German coasts with several thousand specimens. In the North Sea and Baltic Sea there are eight whale species, including the porpoise, and with the common dolphin also a dolphin species.
Reptiles living in Germany include ringed snakes, vipers and European marsh turtles. Amphibians such as salamanders, frogs, toads, toads and newts are all listed on the Red List of Endangered Species in Germany.
The – partly invasive – Neozoa in Germany (introduced animal species) include raccoon, raccoon dog, muskrat, nutria, collared parakeet, Canada goose and Nile goose.
Human geography
Germany has a total of nine neighboring countries: Germany borders Denmark to the north, Poland to the northeast, the Czech Republic to the east, Austria to the southeast, Switzerland to the south, France to the southwest, Luxembourg and Belgium to the west, and the Netherlands to the northwest. The total limit length is 3876 kilometers. This makes Germany the European country with the most neighboring countries.
In Germany, a total of 51 percent of the country’s land area is used for agriculture (2016), forests cover a further 30 percent. 14 percent are used as settlement and traffic areas. Water surfaces come to two percent, the remaining three percent is distributed over other areas, mostly wasteland and also opencast mines.
Administrative unit
The federally structured Federal Republic consists of 16 member states, which are officially referred to as Länder (Länder). The city-states of Berlin and Hamburg each consist of unitary municipalities of the same name, while the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen, as the third city-state, comprises two separate municipalities with Bremen and Bremerhaven. In contrast to other federal states, there are no federal territories in Germany.
The municipalities are the smallest democratically constituted, legally independent local authorities and administrative units in Germany. They have a long tradition due to their cooperative character, which dates back to the Middle Ages. Today, the municipalities in Germany, with the exception of the city-states and most district-free cities, are grouped into districts and other associations of municipalities. There are 400 local authorities at district level, of which 294 are districts and 106 are independent cities.
They are subdivided into a total of 10,790 municipalities (as of January 2021), with a downward trend, as well as more than 200 largely uninhabited uninhabited uninhabited areas. Districts and municipalities are subject to the municipal constitutional law of the respective federal state and are therefore organized differently nationwide. The district is thus both a supra-local municipal authority and a lower state administrative authority, it has its own representative body, the Kreistag (Art. 28 sec. 1 sentence 2 GG), and performs various tasks of the “supra-local community” for the municipalities belonging to the district.
The municipalities are part of the Länder under constitutional law, which means that they are subject to their right of supervision and instruction and therefore do not have their own state sovereignty. The self-government guarantee of Art. 28 sec. 2 GG – on the one hand a so-called Institutional Legal Subject Garantie, from which it follows that there must be municipalities in the state structure at all, on the other hand a subjective-public right with constitutional status – distinguishes between cities and municipalities, to which this right is granted in full, and the associations of municipalities (districts), to which it is granted in only a graduated form.
Thus, there is a clear rule-exception relationship in favor of the municipalities (subsidiarity principle) for the delimitation of tasks between municipalities and districts. With regard to the “affairs of the local community”, i. e. the power guaranteed in Art. 28 sec. 2 sentences 1 GG to conduct business independently in this area of responsibility (so-called objective legal institutional guarantee), the Federal Constitutional Court has determined the primacy of the municipal level over the district level in accordance with the laws: According to this, cities and municipalities are “regarded as essentials and identity-determining characteristics of the municipal Self-administration” the principle of the “universality of the municipal sphere of activity”, in contrast to the special competence of the associations of municipalities by means of express legal allocation, which means that there are no fixed municipal association sovereignties.
| Land | Capital | Area in km² | Inhabitant | Population per km² |
| Baden-Württemberg | Stuttgart | 35. 748 | 11. 103. 043 | 311 |
| Bavaria | Munich | 70. 541 | 13. 140. 183 | 186 |
| Berlin | — | 892 | 3. 677. 472 | 4. 124 |
| Brandenburg | Potsdam | 29. 654 | 2. 537. 868 | 86 |
| Bremen | Bremen | 420 | 676. 463 | 1612 |
| Hamburg | — | 755 | 1. 852. 478 | 2. 453 |
| Hesse | Wiesbaden | 21. 116 | 6. 295. 017 | 298 |
| Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania | Schwerin | 23. 295 | 1. 611. 160 | 69 |
| Lower Saxony | Hanover | 47. 710 | 8. 027. 031 | 168 |
| North Rhine-Westphalia | Dusseldorf | 34. 112 | 17. 924. 591 | 525 |
| Rhineland-Palatinate | Mainz | 19. 858 | 4. 098. 391 | 206 |
| Saarland | Saarbrücken | 2571 | 982. 348 | 382 |
| Saxony | Dresden | 18. 450 | 4. 043. 002 | 219 |
| Saxony-Anhalt | Magdeburg | 20. 459 | 2. 169. 253 | 106 |
| Schleswig-Holstein | Keel | 15. 804 | 2. 922. 005 | 185 |
| Thuringia | Erfurt | 16. 202 | 2. 108. 863 | 130 |
| Germany | Berlin | 357. 376 | 83. 155. 031 | 233 |
Metropolitan areas
In Germany, conurbations and conurbations (agglomerations) are not statistically precisely defined. There are 81 large cities (with 100,000 inhabitants), 14 of them with more than 500,000 inhabitants, historically mainly in the west and southwest of Germany. These conurbations running along the Rhine form the central part of the central European population concentration (blue banana). Most agglomerations are monocentric, while the Ruhr area is a (polycentric) conurbation. With its numerous centers, Germany, unlike the neighboring countries of Austria with its capital Vienna and Denmark with Copenhagen, does not have a primate city. Despite the large number of large cities, as of December 31, 2020, slightly less than a third (26. 6 million) of Germany’s inhabitants lived in large cities.
On the territory of Germany, eleven European metropolitan regions have been defined by the Ministerial Conference on Regional Planning. These go far beyond the corresponding agglomerations. Cologne/Düsseldorf/Dortmund/Essen belong to the Rhine-Ruhr Metropolitan Region, Leipzig/Halle/Chemnitz to the Central Germany Metropolitan Region. Another is the Rhine-Neckar metropolitan region around Ludwigshafen/Mannheim/Heidelberg.
Most populous settlement areas in Germany
The following table shows all German cities with over 500,000 inhabitants including the agglomeration and metropolitan region to which they belong:
| No | Settlement area | City* | Agglomeration | Metropolitan area |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Berlin | 3. 664. 088 | 4. 630. 000 | 6. 120. 000 |
| 2 | Hamburg | 1. 852. 478 | 2. 820. 000 | 5. 360. 000 |
| 3 | Munich | 1. 488. 202 | 2. 210. 000 | 5. 990. 000 |
| 4 | Cologne | 1. 083. 498 | 4. 910. 000 | 10. 680. 000 |
| 5 | Frankfurt am Main | 764. 104 | 2. 710. 000 | 5. 720. 000 |
| 6 | Stuttgart | 630. 305 | 2. 360. 000 | 5. 300. 000 |
| 7 | Dusseldorf | 620. 523 | 4. 910. 000 | 10. 680. 000 |
| 8 | Leipzig | 597. 493 | 1. 200. 000 | 2. 400. 000 |
| 9 | Dortmund | 587. 696 | 5. 610. 000 | 10. 680. 000 |
| 10 | Eat | 582. 415 | 5. 610. 000 | 10. 680. 000 |
| 11 | Bremen | 566. 573 | 990. 000 | 2. 730. 000 |
| 12 | Dresden | 556. 227 | 830. 000 | 2. 400. 000 |
| 13 | Hanover | 534. 049 | 1. 130. 000 | 3. 830. 000 |
| 14 | Nuremberg | 515. 543 | 1. 350. 000 | 3. 560. 000 |
* As of December 31, 2020
German population
Demography
| Year | Population | Year | Population |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1950 | 69. 346. 000 | 1990 | 79. 753. 000 |
| 1955 | 71. 350. 000 | 1995 | 81. 817. 000 |
| 1960 | 73. 147. 000 | 2000 | 82. 260. 000 |
| 1965 | 76. 336. 000 | 2005 | 82. 438. 000 |
| 1970 | 78. 069. 000 | 2010 | 81. 752. 000 |
| 1975 | 78. 465. 000 | 2015 | 82. 176. 000 |
| 1980 | 78. 397. 000 | 2020 | 83. 191. 000 |
| 1985 | 77. 661. 000 |
According to the 2011 census, 83,190,556 inhabitants lived in Germany on an area of 357,381 square kilometers on 30 September 2020. With almost 233 people per square kilometer, the country is one of the most densely populated states. In 2020, 50.7 percent of the population were women and 49. 3 percent were men. In 2019, 18. 4 percent of the population was under the age of 20, 24. 6 percent between the ages of 20 and 40, and 28.4 percent were between the ages of 40 and 60. In the city, the population was 60 to 80 years of age 21. 7% and 6. 8% of the population were spread out with them. In 2019, the average age was 44.5 years. This makes Germany one of the oldest societies in the world.
In addition to the family as the most frequently sought-after form of living together, many life models are represented in German society. The number of children born alive in 2015 was 737,575, the highest birth rate in 15 years. This corresponds to a birth rate of 1. 50 children per woman or 9. 6 births per 1,000 inhabitants. During the same period, 925,200 deaths were recorded, about 11. 2 cases per 1,000 inhabitants. In 2017, the birth rate per woman increased to 1. 57 children.
Because the death rate has been above the birth rate every year since 1972, the political orientation towards a family-friendly, child- and young-year-promoting society with multi-child families is sought (pronatalism). Experts see the compatibility of family and career as a central prerequisite for this. With birth rates remaining low, especially among sections of the population with intermediate and higher educational qualifications, social, economic and geopolitical problems are predicted for Germany.
Around 72. 650 million people in Germany had German citizenship as of 30 September 2020. This corresponds to 87. 33 percent of the resident population. In 2017, around 18. 9 million people had a migration background (23%). In the 2011 census, all foreigners and all Germans who immigrated to the territory of today’s Federal Republic of Germany after 1955 or who have at least one parent who immigrated after 1955 were counted as persons with a migration background. Among them, the Aussiedler and Spätaussiedler form the largest group, followed by citizens of Turkey, other states of the European Union and the former Yugoslavia. Between 1950 and 2002, a total of 4. 3 million people, either born in the country or living there for a long time, were naturalized at their own request.
The Institute of the German Economy (IW) predicted in 2017 that Germany’s population would continue to grow through immigration and would comprise around 83. 1 million people in 2035. In 2018, the German population grew by 227,000 inhabitants, exceeding the mark of 83 million inhabitants in Germany. In 2019, it grew by 147,000 people (+0. 2%) to 83. 2 million. At the end of September 2020, the population was 83,190,556.
Germany has de facto been regarded as a country of immigration for years. In 2020, about 220,000 more people moved in than away.
| Rank | Nationality | Population | Proportion of foreigners |
| 1. | Turkey | 1. 461. 910 | 12,8% |
| 2. | Poland | 866. 690 | 7,6% |
| 3. | Syria | 818. 460 | 7,2% |
| 4. | Romania | 799. 180 | 7,0% |
| 5. | Italy | 648. 360 | 5,7% |
| 6. | Croatia | 426. 845 | 3,7% |
| 7. | Bulgaria | 388. 700 | 3,4% |
| 8. | Greece | 364. 285 | 3,2% |
| 9. | Afghanistan | 271. 805 | 2,4% |
| 10. | Russia | 263. 300 | 2,3% |
Languages
The main language spoken in Germany is German (High German). It is used as a standard language in the national media and as a written language; as a language of everyday life, it is spoken almost exclusively in many regions (often slightly colored regionally). The transition to the German dialects is fluid. Among the official languages within Germany, German is the most important administrative language. In principle, the competence lies in the cultural sovereignty of the Länder, the state as a whole determines such languages only for the fulfillment of its own tasks. Where European law is applicable, applications and documents may be filed in court in any official or judicial language of any Member State of the European Union. Ancestral national minorities are Danes, Frisians, Sorbs and Sinti and Roma.
Some regional and minority languages may be used as official, legal or judicial languages. The basis is the European Charter of Regional or Minority Languages, according to which Germany recognizes Low German as a regional language and the following minority languages: Danish (about 50,000 speakers, both Imperial Danish, predominantly in the variant Sydslesvigdansk, and Sønderjysk), Frisian (about 10,000, North Frisian in Schleswig-Holstein, Sater Frisian in Lower Saxony), Sorbian (about 30,000, Upper Sorbian in Saxony, Lower Sorbian in Brandenburg), Romani of the Roma (about 200. 000 throughout Germany).
Other new minority languages, such as Yiddish or the Yenish language, which are hardly spoken in Germany, were not included in the Charter. The languages of immigrants are explicitly not covered by the Charter. The German Sign Language (DGS) used by the deaf was recognized as an independent language in Germany with the introduction of the Disability Equality Act (BGG) in 2002. Other, formerly widespread languages such as Moselle Romance (extinct in the 11th century) and Polabian (extinct in the 18th century) are no longer spoken today.
Whether the Low German language is independent or a variety of German is controversial in linguistics. Low German had about 2. 6 million active speakers in 2007, passive knowledge had about three-quarters of the population of the language area. In 2016, passive comprehension was good to very good for almost half of the inhabitants of the language area, in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania 70 percent, in Schleswig-Holstein almost 60 percent, in Lower Saxony almost 50 percent. In Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, almost 21 percent actively mastered the Low German language, in Schleswig-Holstein just under 25 percent, in North Rhine-Westphalia and Saxony-Anhalt just under 12 percent each and in Brandenburg just under 3 percent.
Northern Germans tend to use the Low German language or regional dialects less pronouncedly, while in Central and Upper Germany the use of the Franconian, Bavarian and Alemannic dialects is more widespread even in the academic milieu.
Again and again, immigrants brought their languages with them, for example, the Ruhr Poles in the 19th century. While the descendants of the older waves of immigration have now largely adapted linguistically, immigrants of the past decades (such as guest workers) often use their mother tongue, especially Turkish (about two million), in addition to German. In addition, the Russian language is also widespread, among contingent refugees and among Russian-Germans, which include not only German or Plautdietsche, but also Russian native speakers (three to four million). The number of people with Polish as an everyday language is also assumed to be relatively high.
The primary foreign language taught in public schools is English. The second foreign language is often French, Latin or Spanish, less often Russian or Italian (decision-making authority of the countries).
Religions in Germany
Traditions
Like most of Western and Central Europe, today’s Germany dates back to late antiquity and is Christian-occidental and has been influenced by enlightenment and science since the 18th century. This is based on influences from ancient Greek and Roman culture as well as Jewish and Christian traditions, which had mixed with Germanic traditions since the beginning of the Christianization of northwestern Europe, from about the 4th century. The territory of Germany has been Christianized since the early Middle Ages. In the Frankish period, missionary work was completed in Charlemagne’s empire, partly by coercion. With Martin Luther’s theses in 1517, the Christian Reformation began and subsequently the formation of Protestant denominations, which shape the religious landscape in Germany in addition to the Catholic denomination.
Relationship between state and religion
Freedom of religion in Germany is guaranteed by Article 4 of the Basic Law, individually as a fundamental right and institutionally in the relationship between religion and state. Thus, the ideological neutrality of the state and the right of self-determination of the religious communities are established. On this basis, the relationship between religious communities and the state is based on partnership; there is, therefore, no strict separation of church and state, but in many social and school-cultural areas there are interdependencies, for example through a church, but state-co-financed sponsorship of kindergartens, schools, hospitals or nursing homes.
Likewise, some German parties refer to the Christian tradition of the country. The Christian churches have the status of official churches and are corporations under public law, but sui generis due to the applicable state church law. As public religious societies, the churches are to be given certain options for shaping the future without being subject to state supervision; instead, both the church’s public mandate is partially recognized in church contracts with the states or the corresponding regulations in the state constitutions, as well as the special, original Church Poweris legally affirmed.
Certain Christian churches as well as the Jewish communities levy a church tax, which the state collects against an expense allowance and forwards to the respective churches or to the Central Council of Jews in Germany. Furthermore, according to the Basic Law, religious instruction is an optional, but nevertheless regular subject in public schools (with the exception of Bremen, Berlin and Brandenburg). This subject is often taught by a representative of one of the two major churches.
Population shares
About 59 percent of the population belong to a Christian denomination: the Roman Catholic Church 28. 9 percent (mainly in Western and Southern Germany), the Evangelical Church (Lutherans, Reformed and Uniates) 27. 1 percent (tends to be mainly in northern Germany); other Christian churches such as Orthodox and Ancient Near Eastern churches, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the New Apostolic Church and the Free Churches a total of about 3 percent. The number of worshippers is much lower than the number of church members.
On the so-called counting Sundays (the second Sunday of Lent and the second Sunday in November) of 2016, 2.4 million people (2. 9% of the total population) attended Catholic services and 0.8 million (1%) those of the Protestant Church. On high church holidays, especially on Christmas Eve, significantly more people attend church services. About 37 percent of the population is non-denominational. In the new Länder, their share is between 68 (Thuringia) and 81 percent (Saxony-Anhalt). The GDR had propagated and conveyed an atheistic worldview (see Youth Consecration) and promoted leaving the church. Due to long-term processes of secularization and changes in values, the proportion of non-denominational people in the total population also increased in the old Federal Republic (1970: 3. 9%; 1987: 11. 4%). This development continued in a united Germany.
At the end of 2015, there were about 4. 5 million Muslims living in Germany. Their share of the total population is about 5. 5 percent. More than half have a Turkish migration background, a good 17 percent come from the wider Middle East. Between 2011 and 2015, 1. 2 million new Muslims came to Germany. As an umbrella organization of the many Islamic organizations and contact persons for outsiders, the Coordination Council of Muslims in Germany was founded.
The German Buddhist Union estimates that there are about 270,000 Buddhists in Germany. Half of them are immigrant Asians. This corresponds to 0. 3 percent of the population.
About 200,000 Jews live in Germany, which corresponds to 0. 25 percent of the population. About half of them are organized in Jewish communities. Since the 1990s, these have recorded a strong increase in immigrants from the former Eastern Bloc countries, especially from Ukraine and Russia.
Syrian Christianity is a steadily growing Christian denomination in Germany due to the continuous influx of Assyrians from Mesopotamia with about 130,000 members. Of these, around 100,000 Assyrians belong to the Syrian Orthodox Church of Antioch.
History
Prehistory, Celts, Teutons and Romans
The oldest evidence for the presence of the genus Homo on German territory is about 700,000 years old, a permanent presence at least in the south is assumed since 500,000 BC. Homo heidelbergensis was named after the site near the city of Heidelberg. The Schöninger spears, which are at least 300,000 years old, are the oldest fully preserved hunting weapons of mankind and have revolutionized the image of the cultural and social development of early man.
The Neanderthals, named after a site in the Neanderthal Valley, east of Düsseldorf, were followed about 40,000 years ago by Homo sapiens, the anatomically modern man, who immigrated from Africa. The Neanderthals disappeared, but it was recently proven that both had common descendants. Upper Paleolithic cabaret is the oldest known art of mankind.
Neolithic farmers from the Middle East, who migrated with their cattle and cultivated plants via Anatolia and the Balkans (linear band ceramicists), displaced the hunter-gatherers of the Middle Stone Age from the southern half of Germany from about 5700/5600 BC. It was not until around 4000 BC that the appropriated cultures of hunter-gatherers and fishermen were also replaced in northern Germany by peasant, now consistently sedentary cultures; the last culture of hunters in northern Germany is the Ertebølle culture.
With a delay of more than 1000 years, the Bronze Age began on German territory around 2200 BC. One of her most important finds is the Nebra Sky Disc. With the beginning of the Hallstatt period (1200–1000 BC), southern and central Germany were inhabited by Celts, and iron began to assert itself as the most important metal. Around 600 BC, the Jastorf culture, which is regarded as a Germanic culture, developed in northern Germany. The term “Germanic” (Latin Germani) was first mentioned in the 1st century BC by ancient authors. This is an ethnographic, less precise collective term which, for methodological reasons, must not be misunderstood as a term for a single people.
From 58 BC to about 455 AD, the areas to the left of the Rhine and south of the Danube belonged to the Roman Empire, from about 80 to 260 AD also a part of Hesse and most of today’s Baden-Württemberg south of the Limes. These Roman territories were divided into the provinces of Gallia Belgica, Germania Superior, Germania Inferior, Raetia and Noricum. There the Romans founded legionary camps, a number of cities such as Trier, Cologne, Augsburg and Mainz – the oldest cities in Germany. Allied Germanic tribes secured these provinces, and settlers from other parts of the empire settled here.
The part of the settlement area of the Germanic tribes outside the Roman provinces of Germania Inferior and Germania Superior was called Germania magna by the Romans in the early and high imperial period and in late antiquity.
Attempts to extend the sphere of influence further into this Germanic area failed with the Battle of Varus in 9 AD. The efforts of the Romans to establish provinces up to the Elbe finally ended. Tacitus’ writing Germania, written in 98 at the earliest, is the oldest description of the Germanic tribes.
Migration and the Early Middle Ages (375–962)
After the invasion of the Huns around 375, the migration of peoples began, at the same time several large tribes emerged in the transition from late antiquity to the early Middle Ages, namely those of the Franks, Alamanni, Saxons, Bavarians and Thuringians.
Important in recent research in this context is the complex process of ethnogenesis of the different gentes (strains). The emergence of ethnic identities (ethnicity) in late antiquity. dem or the beginning of the early Middle Ages in connection with the so-called migration of peoples is no longer understood as a biological category. Rather, identities arise in a changeable social process in which several factors play a role.
The main goal of the groups that had invaded the Empire was to participate in the prosperity of the Empire, whose structures and culture they did not want to destroy. But the ensuing military conflicts and intra-Roman power struggles led to a political erosion process of the Western Empire. In the course of the fall of West Rome (the last emperor in Italy was deposed in 476), Germanic-Romanesque successor empires were formed on the soil of the Western Empire. The Eastern Roman Empire (“Byzantium”), on the other hand, continued until 1453 and continued to maintain contacts with the West.
Slavic tribes immigrated to the largely depopulated areas of today’s East Germany in the 7th century. Only in the course of the high medieval eastern settlement they were assimilated. Western and Central Europe was dominated by the Frankish Empire, which emerged at the end of the 5th century, and today’s northern Germany by the Saxons and Slavs. All areas of the Frankish Empire that belonged to Germany today were located in the eastern part of Austrasia. Among the Merovingians, however, there were repeated dynastic conflicts.
In the middle of the 8th century, pippin the younger from the Carolingian dynasty took over the royal succession of the previously ruling Merovingians in the Frankish Empire. After the subjugation and forced proselytizing of the Saxons and conquests in Italy, northern Spain and the eastern border area under Charlemagne, the multi-ethnic empire was reorganized. Church organization and cultural promotion partly linked to Roman traditions (Carolingian Renaissance).
At Christmas 800, Charles was crowned emperor by the Pope in Rome and thus laid claim to the succession of the Roman Empire (Translatio imperii), which led to competition with the Byzantine emperors (two emperor problem). After Charles’ death in 814, there were battles among his descendants, which led in 843 in the Treaty of Verdun to the tripartite division of the empire into eastern France under “Louis the German”, western France and Lotharingia.
In the East Franconian Empire, five large duchies were formed around 900, namely the tribal duchies of Saxony, Bavaria, Swabia, Franconia and Lorraine. In the 10th century, the Carolingian dynasty died out in both Western and Eastern Franconia, and both parts of the empire remained politically separated from then on. The Battle of Lechfeld ended decades of Hungarian invasions in 955, led to a gain in prestige for King Otto, who was crowned emperor in Rome in 962, and to the assignment of the archangel Michael as the patron saint of the Germans.
From Eastern France to the Holy Roman Empire (962–1806)
The Ottonian dynasty was essential for the formation of eastern France, but it is no longer regarded as the beginning of the actual “German” imperial history. Rather, the associated process dragged on at least into the 11th century. The term regnum Teutonicorum (“Kingdom of the Germans”) is first found in the sources at the beginning of the 11th century, but it was never the title of the empire (empire), but served the popes to relativize the claim to power of the Roman-German kings.
The Lombard royal dignity adopted by Otto I in 951 combined the Regnum Teutonicum with imperial Italy. In 962, Otto was crowned emperor and thus combined the Roman-German royal dignity with the claim to the western “Roman” empire (imperial idea). This Roman-German Empire assumed a hegemonic position in Western Europe under the Ottonians. In 1024, the Salians took over the royal succession, which until the end of the Middle Ages was always linked to an election by various greats of the empire.
The dovetailing of secular and spiritual power by the imperial church system led to the investiture dispute with the Reformed papacy, to the passage to Canossa in 1077 and to the interim solution of the Worms Concordat in 1122. The conflict between emperor and pope reached a climax in Hohenstaufen times, especially under Frederick II, who gave up many regalia in the German part of the empire. With his death in 1250, the Hohenstaufen royal rule collapsed; the following interregnum increased the power of the princes. The Empire continued to exist as a factor of political order, but increasingly lost its influence at the European level.
In the form of the territorial states, numerous feudal lordships became independent at the expense of the royal imperial power, which, however, was never strongly developed and was therefore dependent on consensual rule with the greats of the empire. Emperor Henry VI had failed at the end of the 12th century with the attempt to introduce the hereditary monarchy through the inheritance plan. While western France developed into the French central state, the East Franconian or Roman-German Empire remained characterized by sovereigns and the right to elect kings.
In the middle of the 13th century, in the Holy Roman Empire – the name Sacrum Imperium (Holy Empire) was already used in 1157, Sacrum Imperium Romanum (Holy Roman Empire) is first documented in 1184 (older research was based on 1254) – the view prevailed that a college of electors was entitled to the election of the king, which was bindingly laid down by the Golden Bull in 1356. Until the end of the empire in 1806, the empire thus formally remained an electoral monarchy. Although the emperors repeatedly tried to strengthen their position, the empire remained a supranational association of many territories of different sizes as well as imperial cities.
The late medieval 14th and 15th centuries were marked by electoral royalty: three large families – the Habsburgs, the Luxembourgers and the Wittelsbachs – had the greatest influence in the empire and the greatest domestic power. The most important king is Charles IV, who is a skillful domestic power enterprise. Despite crises such as the plague (Black Death), the agrarian crisis and the Western schism, cities and trade flourished; the transition to the Renaissance began. In the empire, the Habsburgs inherited the Luxembourgers, who died out in 1437 in the male line, and almost continuously provided the Roman-German rulers until the end of the empire. Through skillful policies, the Habsburgs secured additional territories in the empire and even the Spanish royal crown: Habsburg thus rose to become a major European power.
At the turn of the 16th century, Emperor Maximilian I pursued a comprehensive imperial reform that strengthened the Reichstag, the jurisdiction (creation of the Reichskammergericht and Reichshofrat) and the internal order through the Eternal Land Peace and the division into imperial circles. Due to the failure of the Common Pfennig and the Reich Regiment, however, the reform remained incomplete. From 1519, Emperor Charles V, at the same time King of Spain with an overseas colonial empire, pursued the concept of a universal monarchy. His supremacy in Europe established the centuries-long Habsburg-French opposition.
In 1517, Martin Luther initiated the Reformation through demands for inner-church and theological reforms and an anti-papal attitude, which led to the formation of “Protestant” denominations. Catholicism reacted with the Counter-Reformation, but the Protestant Church asserted itself in large parts of the empire. The Peace of Augsburg in 1555 managed a provisional settlement; Sovereigns determined the denomination of their subjects (Cuius regio, eius religio). Confessional and power-political antagonisms triggered the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) with many deaths and devastated landscapes, ended by the Peace of Westphalia, which strengthened and codified the influence of the territories over the emperor (see Recent Imperial Farewell).
The imperial princes were now allowed to set up their own troops and were able to conclude treaties with foreign powers. As a result, the empire became de facto a confederation of states, de jure it remained a monarchically led and estates-shaped power structure. From 1663, the Reichstag was transformed into a permanent congress of envoys (Perpetual Reichstag), which met in Regensburg.
As part of his reunion policy, Louis XIV led the War of the Palatine Succession. France acted as a model of absolutism, which in the empire did not turn the royal central power, but individual principalities into bureaucratically organized states. Some rulers, especially Frederick II of Prussia, opened up to the philosophical zeitgeist and carried out reforms (Enlightened Absolutism). The political rise of Prussia in the 18th century led to dualism with the House of Habsburg. After the French Revolution, their troops occupied the left bank of the Rhine. After Napoleon Bonaparte’s victory in the Second Coalition War, the Reichsdeputationshauptschluss was held in 1803. In 1806, the last emperor Franz II laid down the crown, thus extinguishing the empire.
Confederation of the Rhine, German Confederation, North German Confederation (1806–1871)
Under Napoleon’s influence, between 1801 and 1806, the number of states in the territory of the “Old Kingdom” had been reduced from about 300 to about 60. France annexed the German West and Northwest and created German vassal states whose thrones Napoleon occupied with family members (Grand Duchy of Berg, Kingdom of Westphalia, Grand Duchy of Frankfurt). Napoleon built up some German states as allies, especially the Kingdom of Bavaria, Württemberg and Baden, newly created in 1805 in the Treaty of Pressburg, by expanding them to include the territories of the secularized and mediatized small states and uniting them in the Confederation of the Rhine allied with France.
With the opponents Prussia and Austria defeated by Napoleon, he succeeded the Holy Roman Empire, which was thus divided into three parts and eliminated as a power factor. The “French period” brought the Rhine Confederation states considerable impetus for modernization, including civil liberties, through the introduction of the civil code of civil law. In Prussia, too, far-reaching reforms were undertaken from 1806 onwards in order to make subjects citizens (cf. Citoyen) and the state capable of acting and defending themselves again.
From 1809 there was resistance to French occupation and rule; Various uprisings, for example by Andreas Hofer in Tyrol and Ferdinand von Schill in Prussia, were initially suppressed. After Napoleon’s defeat in the Russian campaign of 1812, Prussia and Austria, in alliance with the Russian Empire, began the wars of liberation (1813–1815), which strengthened the German national feeling, initially among Protestant academics, for example in the Lützow Freikorps, which is also considered the origin of the colors black, red and gold. Most of the States of the Confederation of the Rhine joined the allies who, after winning the Battle of Leipzig in 1813, finally defeated Napoleon until 1815.
Subsequently, the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815) largely restored monarchical rule. In the German Confederation, a confederation dominated by Austria and Prussia, 38 states (→ Third Germany) organized themselves with the Frankfurt Bundestag as a decision-making body. Also, in 1833/1834, the German Customs Union was created under Prussian supremacy. In Vormärz, the old ruling elite suppressed the economically strengthening bourgeoisie (demagogue persecution), which demanded further political participation and the formation of a nation-state, as in 1817 at the student Wartburg Festival and in 1832 at the Hambach Festival with the hoisting of black, red and gold, the later national colors.
With the bourgeois March Revolution of 1848, many conservative politicians had to resign, among them the epoch-defining Austrian Chancellor Prince Metternich. Under the revolutionary pressure in Berlin, the Prussian King Frederick William IV accepted the establishment of the Frankfurt National Assembly. However, he rejected its Paulskirche constitution, which would have created a German nation-state as a “German Reich” with a constitutional monarchy, as well as the imperial crown offered to him, which he described as a bourgeois “rag crown”. After the suppression of the May Uprising, the revolution ended on 23 July 1849 with the capture of Rastatt Fortress by Prussian troops. The failure of the democratic movement led to the flight and emigration of the Forty-Eighters and to an era of reaction in the German states.
Soon after, the conflict between Prussia and Austria for supremacy in the German Confederation broke out (German dualism), which ended in Prussia’s victory in the German War in 1866. The German Confederation was dissolved, Prussia annexed several areas of North and Central German war opponents. In 1866, under Prussian domination, the North German Confederation was initially founded as a military alliance. His constitution of 1867 made it a sovereign federal state and initiated the Little German Solution – that is, the formation of a German state without Austria.
German Empire (1871–1918)
The German Empire as the first German nation-state was founded in the German-French War on January 18, 1871, when the Prussian King Wilhelm I was proclaimed the first German Emperor in Versailles. In particular, the southern German states were incorporated.
Otto von Bismarck, as Prussian Prime Minister, founded the Reich and became the first Reich Chancellor. Bismarck’s Imperial Constitution based the power of the constitutional monarchy, but was also designed for modernization and ambivalent; Laws on school and civil marriage were partly liberal. The Reichstag had universal suffrage (for men). Bismarck led the Kulturkampf against the Catholic Church, against social democracy he enacted the socialist laws from 1878 and tried to bind the workers to the state through social legislation. High industrialization in Germany ensured economic and population growth, rural exodus and a broad increase in living standards; Germany rose to become the largest economy in Europe.
Otto von Bismarck’s alliance policy was aimed at isolating France with Germany as a semi-hegemonic power in the middle of Europe. After German merchants and associations had pursued private colonial policy, the Reich took part in the race for Africa as a result of the Berlin Congo Conference in 1884, despite Bismarck’s skepticism. German colonies were described by Bismarck as “protected areas”. In the “Year of the Three Emperors” of 1888, Wilhelm II came to power, demanded the recognition of the previous great powers (“Platz an der Sonne”) for the economically and militarily ascended German Reich and strove for colony acquisition and fleet building in imperialism. Challenged England then excluded Germany in a new alliance system (Triple Entente) instead of France. These tensions triggered the First World War in 1914, a loss-making multi-front war; more than two million German soldiers died, and around 800,000 civilians starved to death.
Weimar Republic (1919–1933)
With the November Revolution and the proclamation of the Republic on 9 November 1918, the German Empire ended, which with its capitulation conceded defeat in the First World War. After the election of the constituent National Assembly – in which women were actively and passively entitled to vote for the first time – the Weimar Constitution came into force on 14 August 1919. In the Peace Treaty of Versailles, considerable territorial cession, the Allied occupation of the Rhineland and reparations were determined on the basis of a fixed German sole responsibility for the war.
This initial situation weighed on the political climate; Right-wing extremists spread the stabbing legend against the “November criminals”, which led to political murders and coup attempts (Kapp Putsch in 1920 and Hitler putsch in 1923). Communist uprisings such as the Ruhr Uprising in 1920, the March Struggles in Central Germany in 1921 and the Hamburg Uprising in 1923 also caused instability. Belgium and France took inadequate reparations as an occasion for the occupation of the Ruhr from 1923 to 1925.
In the short “golden twenties” culture flourished and from 1924 also the economy. With over four million inhabitants, Berlin was the third largest and one of the most dynamic cities in the world. Prosperity ended in 1929 with the Great Depression, at the height of which in 1932 there were more than six million unemployed in Germany, most of whom lived in misery. Radical parties gained strong support, making it increasingly difficult for the moderate parties to form stable governments.
After the landslide victory of the National Socialists in the Reichstag election of 1930, the Reich Chancellors, who changed in rapid succession, no longer had a parliamentary majority; their presidential cabinets were dependent on Reich President Paul von Hindenburg and his emergency decrees. The deflationary policy of Reich Chancellor Heinrich Brüning exacerbated the economic crisis. His successor Franz von Papen (June–November 1932) subordinated the democratic government of Prussia to a Reich Commissar (Preußenschlag) and had new elections held, in which the National Socialists became even stronger.
Reich Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher tried to prevent Adolf Hitler from coming to power through a “cross-front” of trade unions and parts of the National Socialists, but von Papen persuaded the reluctant Hindenburg to appoint Hitler as Reich Chancellor on 30 January 1933. On February 27, there was the Reichstag fire – which has not yet been clarified – which Hitler used to form the “Reichstag Fire Ordinance”, which suspended fundamental rights indefinitely.
The ensuing mass arrests of political opponents, especially communists and social democrats, shaped the 1933 Reichstag election, in which the NSDAP narrowly missed the absolute majority and continued to govern with the reactionary DNVP. The final seizure of power took place five days later, when the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act with the votes of the bourgeois parties, alone against the votes of the SPD, and thus also left the legislation to Hitler’s government.
National Socialist Dictatorship (1933–1945)
Within a very short time, the NSDAP established a totalitarian one-party state in the German Reich under the leadership of Adolf Hitler and the alignment of the institutions. Unpopular persons and political opponents, especially communists, social democrats and trade unionists, were removed from all authorities, the first concentration camps were set up, books were burned and unpopular art was defamed as “degenerate”. Nazi propaganda also permeated private life; pressure was already being exerted on children to join the party organizations.
In October 1933, Hitler announced Germany’s withdrawal from the League of Nations. He secured his rule internally by also having inner-party opponents and former companions murdered, especially during the Röhm murders on June 30, 1934, when the SA was disempowered in favor of the SS, which was unconditionally devoted to him. The generality of the Reichswehr took the oath of leadership on him personally. The Gestapo was used as a political police force to combat political and ideological opponents.
From the beginning, Hitler had two goals, a war of aggression and annihilation to create “living space in the East” and the persecution of the Jews, which began with discrimination, humiliation and exclusion and ended as the “final solution of the Jewish question” in the Holocaust. In 1934, the rearmament of the Wehrmacht began. An uninhibitedly expansive monetary policy and debt economy were geared towards early warfare. The Reinhardt program reduced unemployment; this was welcomed by the population as a fulfillment of economic promises.
The German Jews were placed in a worse and worse position; the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 severely punished relations between “Aryans” and Jews as “racial disgrace. ” Jews lost all public offices, were arbitrarily persecuted, robbed and blackmailed, and finally banned from their profession entirely, Jewish assets were Aryanized. More and more often, Jews were also sent to concentration camps. Many decided to emigrate, but most remained in Germany.
The racist Nazi ideology for the creation of a “healthy” “national community” (cf. Herrenrasse) was directed against two other groups, Roma and Slavs as “subhumans”. Not as “foreign race”, but as threatening the “health” of the “people’s body”, they also harassed and murdered homosexuals, the disabled and “asocials”. At the same time, the regime celebrated propaganda successes; In 1936, the Olympic Games improved the reputation abroad, the demilitarized Rhineland was occupied.
The expansion began with the forced annexation of Austria in March 1938, after which Germany was referred to as the Greater German Reich. The Munich Agreement in October 1938 sealed the annexation of the Sudetenland. With the destruction of the Czechoslovak Republic in March 1939, Hitler broke his promise that the Sudetenland was his last territorial demand. This made it clear that the appeasement policy of the Western powers towards Germany had been a mistake.
After the German Reich began the invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, India, New Zealand, South Africa and France declared war on Germany. The Second World War claimed about 55 to 60 million lives in six years. Germany initially achieved some military successes known as a “blitzkrieg”. Poland was divided between Hitler and Stalin in the non-aggression pact, the Wehrmacht then threw its armies to the west, invaded Denmark and Norway in the “Weser exercise” and the neutral states of Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands in the “Western Campaign” and occupied large parts of France within six weeks in 1940. Hitler’s popularity reached its peak.
In the course of the war, the Third Reich intensified the persecution of the Jews. Their departure was forbidden and many died due to inadequate supplies and epidemics in forced labor. From 1941 they had to wear the “Jewish star” and their systematic murder began throughout the German sphere of influence. The SS, which was primarily tasked with the execution, set up extermination camps on former Polish or Soviet territory, in which most of the victims, brought in cattle cars, were immediately gassed (see Aktion Reinhardt). In the gas chambers and crematoria of the Auschwitz concentration camps alone, more than a million people were murdered. In total, the number of murdered Jews amounts to 6. 3 million.
With Operation Barbarossa, the Russian campaign 1941–1945 began on 22 June 1941. The German army marched on Moscow and was stopped in the Battle of Moscow in December 1941. After the war ally Japan invaded the American Navy in the same month in the attack on Pearl Harbor, Germany also declared war on the United States. Lack of resources and the superiority of the enemy soon led to the turn of the war, which manifested itself in the lost Battle of Stalingrad with the complete exhaustion of the German 6th Army. The more inevitable the defeat became, the harder politics became internally.
In his Sports Palace speech of 18 February 1943, Joseph Goebbels proclaimed “total war”, while the German armies retreated on almost all fronts and numerous German cities were destroyed by the bombing war. When Soviet armies had already taken the capital in the Battle of Berlin, Hitler took his own life on April 30, 1945, in the Führerbunker. The unconditional surrender of the Wehrmacht followed on 8 May, the last Reich government was arrested in the special area of Mürwik near Flensburg on 23 May 1945. Surviving political, military and economic leaders were charged with their individual responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Nuremberg Trials.
Allied Occupation (1945–1949)
Germany was divided within the borders of 31 December 1937; On 5 June 1945, the four victorious powers – the USA, THE USSR, Great Britain and finally Also France – established occupation zones and then exercised sovereignty west of the Oder-Neisse line in their respective zones and jointly by means of an Allied Commandant’s Office over Greater Berlin. The German eastern territories, a quarter of the area of the Reich, inhabited by one-fifth of the Reich population, had already been subordinated to the administration of the People’s Republic of Poland before the end of the war after their conquest by the Red Army and to the Soviet Union in northern East Prussia (Kaliningrad Oblast).
At Stalin’s instigation, the Western powers approved this in the Potsdam Agreement as well as the expulsion of the Germans from Central and Eastern Europe. The Republic of Austria was restored to the borders of 1938 and also divided into four occupation zones. In 1946/1947, the Saarland was spun off from the occupied territory and placed under direct French administration.
The Four Powers initially sought a common occupation policy. There was agreement on demilitarisation, denazification and dismantling of the cartels; Already on the question of what was meant by democracy, differences between the Soviet Union and the Western powers became apparent, which intensified in the beginning of the Cold War. In the three western zones, the Western Allies placed the coal and steel industry, which was important for the reconstruction, under the Ruhr Statute.
With the currency reform in June 1948 and the simultaneous abolition of price fixing and management, the economic director of the western zones, Ludwig Erhard, set a particularly psychologically significant economic caesura; With the currency reform that followed a few days later in the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany and the Berlin blockade by the USSR, the separation between East and West deepened.
Federal Republic of Germany and GDR (1949–1990)
The Federal Republic of Germany was founded on 23 May 1949 in the three western occupation zones and the Basic Law was put into force as a provisional constitution, the preamble of which contained a reunification requirement for a transitional period; Bonn became the seat of government. Four and a half months later, the German Democratic Republic was founded in the Soviet occupation zone. Both states saw themselves in the continuity of an all-German state and did not recognize the other. Both remained under the control of the occupying powers.
With the integration into the opposing military alliances of NATO and the Warsaw Treaty, they received their formal independence in 1955 (see Paris Treaties, Declaration of Sovereignty of the USSR for the GDR). The prerequisite for this was that in July 1951 the three Western powers decided to formally end the state of war with Germany; the Soviet Union did not declare this until January 1955, followed by other states in Eastern Europe. The Allies were left with responsibility for Germany as a whole and their rights in Berlin.
While a state-controlled planned economy was being built up in the GDR, the Federal Republic opted for the so-called social market economy with little state influence. The Soviet occupying power provided difficult starting conditions on the territory of the GDR with high demands for reparations (especially dismantling), while in the Federal Republic with foreign help (Marshall Plan) an “economic miracle” began, which led to persistently high growth rates, full employment and prosperity.
In the West, the new and reconstruction of cities was based on the Charter of Athens (CIAM) of 1933, while in the East, the 16 principles of urban development developed according to the Soviet model became binding. As a result, the reconstruction in both German states nevertheless followed the model of the car-friendly city. Residential and commercial were thus often separated from each other. From then on, numerous suburban satellite cities (“sleeping cities”) were also planned. This type of urban development was recognized as misguided at an early stage.
The Iron Curtain through Central Europe also divided Germany; the continued emigration of especially young and highly qualified people caused the GDR to increasingly seal off the inner-German border until it was completely closed in 1961 under the long-standing SED General Secretary Walter Ulbricht by the construction of the Berlin Wall, which made even family contacts between West and East Germany very difficult. Anyone who tried to flee the republic anyway was forcibly stopped (see Shooting Order, Border and Wall Deaths).
In terms of foreign policy, the long-standing Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer pushed through Western integration and participation in the economic unification of Western Europe, which began with the Coal and Steel Union in 1952, for the partially sovereign Federal Republic. The Élysée Treaty of 1963 established the German-French friendship as the engine of European integration. In September 1950, the GDR became a full member of the Eastern Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA).
Inside the GDR, socialism was bindingly enshrined by the state party SED and by mass organizations such as the FDJ; There were no more free elections, and the uprising of 17 June 1953 was crushed. Dissenting opinions were prosecuted by censorship and the extensive surveillance of the Secret Police State Security; against this, protest formed in a dissident and civil rights movement, which was radicalized by the expatriation of Wolf Biermann in 1976.
In the Federal Republic of Germany, which was liberalizing through Westernization, demands for social change and for coming to terms with the past intensified, as the Nazi elites had remained largely unmolested – especially by the West German student movement of the 1960s. An extra-parliamentary opposition arose against the grand coalition formed in 1966 with its emergency laws. The social-liberal coalition under Willy Brandt expanded the welfare state and social freedoms from 1969 onwards; The “New Ostpolitik” aimed at easing tensions with Eastern Europe earned Brandt the Nobel Peace Prize in 1971 and criticism from the conservative side.
In 1973, the Federal Republic and the GDR became members of the UN. In addition to increasing supply problems (shortage economy), the planned economy of the GDR had to struggle with the demographic development that Erich Honecker, who ruled from 1971 to 1989, countered with massive family support. The women’s and family policy of the GDR, as well as the social equality and security achieved, are considered to be partially successful.
The 1970s in the Federal Republic were marked by rising debt and unemployment after the oil crisis and the terror of the radical left-wing Red Army Faction. Chancellor Helmut Schmidt (SPD) lost the support of his party because of his support for the NATO double decision – attacked by the peace movement, part of the emerging New Social Movements – and was replaced in 1982 by Helmut Kohl (CDU), who seized the opportunity for the reunification of Germany in 1989.
The dissatisfaction of the GDR population had grown in the constant comparison of systems supported by Western television. At the end of the 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev’s reform policy in the Soviet Union also formed a protest movement in the GDR, which put the political leadership under pressure in the ailing GDR in the autumn of 1989 through an exit movement over the holey Iron Process and mass demonstrations (“We are the people”) and led to Honecker’s resignation. On 9 November 1989, the granting of freedom of travel by the GDR leadership led to a mass onslaught and the opening of the border crossing points of the Berlin Wall.
Kohl steered the development from his ten-point program at the end of November towards national unity (“We are one people”) while maintaining the military and political ties to the West. In the first free Volkskammer election on 18 March 1990, the party alliance “Alliance for Germany” led by the Eastern CDU won, which relied on a rapid reunification. This was negotiated in the coming months in the Unification Treaty and with the representatives of the Allies within the framework of the “two-plus-four talks”.
Reunified Germany (since 1990)
German reunification took place on 3 October 1990 with the accession of the GDR to the Federal Republic of Germany; this Day of German Unity became a national holiday. The Two-plus-Four Treaty, which came into force in 1991, finally settled the German question: the Four Powers gave up their sovereign powers, by the end of 1994 their troops left the country, the reunified Germany received its full state sovereignty. It committed itself to disarmament to a maximum of 370,000 soldiers.
With the German-Polish Border Treaty signed in Warsaw on 14 November 1990, Germany recognized the Oder-Neisse border; the territory to the east of it thus finally became Polish under international law. This was complemented by a policy of reconciliation with the eastern neighbors, first with Poland in 1991, then with the Czech Republic in 1997. In terms of foreign policy, the government under Chancellor Kohl advocated deeper integration with the formation of the European Union, the subsequent eastward enlargement of the EU and the introduction of the euro.
The Bundestag made Berlin the capital in 1991, to which the government and parliament moved in 1999 (see Reichstag building and government district). After a short reunification boom, the 1990s were marked by economic stagnation, mass unemployment and a “reform backlog”. In particular, the new Länder did not develop as quickly as hoped after the introduction of the market economy (“flourishing landscapes”). From 1991 to 1993 there was a wave of riots against asylum seekers. It was not until the 2000s that the new Länder stabilized socially and economically.
In the 1998 Bundestag election, Kohl’s black-yellow coalition lost its Bundestag majority, the previous opposition parties SPD and Bündnis 90/Die Grünen formed the first red-green coalition under Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, which pushed through far-reaching changes in social, pension and health policy. Ecology was given greater weight, for example with the beginning of the nuclear phase-out. Socio-political liberalizations included the Civil Partnership Act and a new citizenship law. The first combat mission of German soldiers since the Second World War – in 1999 in the Kosovo War – marked a turning point in foreign policy. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Schroeder assured the United States of “full solidarity”; Germany took part in the war in Afghanistan, but not in the Iraq war, which popularized the “peace chancellor” Schroeder.
Schröder’s second term in office from 2002 was marked by Agenda 2010 and the associated labor market reforms of the Hartz concept. Social benefits for the unemployed were reduced and linked to individual support measures, which was perceived as unfair by those affected. This led to Germany-wide protests and indirectly to an early Bundestag election in 2005, after which Angela Merkel (CDU) became Chancellor. Their grand coalition faced the collapse of banks during the global financial crisis and the ensuing Great Recession. After overcoming them, Germany experienced a sustained economic boom and a sustained decline in unemployment.
Since then, the euro crisis (from 2010) and the refugee crisis in Europe from 2015 have been the most important challenges facing policymakers, which the economic boom has made much easier to overcome. However, both events also led to considerable social divisions and a strengthening of Eurosceptic and Islamophobic movements (Pegida, Alternative for Germany). With the legalization of same-sex marriages, the civil introduction of a third gender and the cessation of conscription for military service in the Bundeswehr, Germany strove for further liberalization of its society.
Angela Merkel ended the last of her four terms during the COVID-19 pandemic, to which Germany responded with temporary restrictions on economic, cultural and public life and began its fight with national vaccination programs, including the novel mRNA vaccine tozinameran developed in Germany. The vast majority of Germans supported the measures to combat the pandemic. However, on the one hand, the pandemic revealed social and economic upheavals within German society, the German health care system and Germany’s technological backwardness compared to other Western countries.
On the other hand, protest movements mobilized against the measures to combat the pandemic, specifically addressing fears among the population regarding vaccinations. After the 2021 Bundestag election, Merkel was replaced by Olaf Scholz (SPD) and the CDU, which had previously ruled in coalitions, by a red-green-yellow coalition. It continues Germany’s digital transformation and the transport and energy transition towards sustainable energy sources, which has begun due to climate change.
Politics
Founding of the state
The Federal Republic of Germany, as a state and subject of international law, is identical to the German Reich and its predecessor, the North German Confederation, according to the prevailing doctrine and settled case law of the Federal Constitutional Court, and has thus been in a state continuity since 1867. The historically different constitutions provide information about the self-image of the respective state. After Germany had been occupied in 1945 by the Four Powers, the victorious powers of the Second World War, the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany, which had emerged in West Germany, was promulgated on 23 May 1949 and put into force the following day.
It was limited in its scope by the division of Germany and until 1955 by the occupation statute. In the eastern part of Germany, the GDR was founded as a separate state on 7 October 1949 and received a constitution, which was replaced in 1968 and revised in 1974. The Basic Law lost its provisional character with reunification, when the GDR joined its scope on 3 October 1990. With the end of the four-power responsibility, the united Germany gained full sovereignty.
Territory
The national territory of the Federal Republic (Federal Territory) results from the totality of the national territories of its Länder. The territory was extended twice by accession according to Article 23 sentence 2 of the Basic Law old version: in 1957 by the Saarland, in 1990 by the accession area of the GDR and Berlin (eastern part of Berlin and west Staaken).
The exclusive economic zone in the North Sea and Baltic Sea does not belong to the national territory. The course of the state border is now fixed up to parts of Lake Constance.
The only condominium existing in Germany is the Joint german-Luxembourg territory, which is formed by the rivers Moselle, Sauer and Our on the border between the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg and the Federal Republic of Germany (with the countries of Rhineland-Palatinate and Saarland). It goes back to the Vienna Congress Act of 9 June 1815, the regulations of which were confirmed in a border treaty in 1984. The area is the only unincorporated area of the states of Rhineland-Palatinate and Saarland.
The German-Dutch border issue in the area of the Ems-Dollart area is still controversial, because both neighboring states maintain their incompatible legal positions on the border. Within Germany, the course of the state borders between Schleswig-Holstein, Lower Saxony and possibly Hamburg in the area of the Lower Elbe has not been conclusively clarified.
In this area, the Länder have regulated administrative and judicial competencies by means of administrative agreements and international treaties, but territorial sovereignty has not been clarified. Exclavian parts of the national territory are Büsingen on the High Rhine in Baden-Württemberg, which is enclosed by Switzerland and belongs to the Swiss customs territory, as well as some small North Rhine-Westphalian areas, which are separated from the main territory of Germany by the Belgian Vennbahn route, which is a few meters wide.
Political system
The Basic Law (GG) is the constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany. The head of state is the Federal President with primarily representative tasks. He is elected by the Federal Assembly. He is followed by the President of the German Bundestag, the Federal Chancellor, the incumbent President of the Bundesrat, who represents the Federal President, and the President of the Federal Constitutional Court. The seat of the constitutional body of the Federal Government is the federal capital Berlin (§ 3 abs. 3 Berlin-Bonn-Gesetz).
Article 20 GG stipulates – secured by the eternity clause – that Germany must be organized as a democratic, social state governed by the rule of law and federally. The system of government is a parliamentary democracy. Federalism is divided into two levels in the political system: the federal level, which represents the entire state of Germany externally, and the state level, which exists in each of the 16 federal states. Each level has its own state organs of the executive (executive power), legislative (legislative power) and judiciary (judiciary).
The Länder, in turn, determine the order of their cities and municipalities; for example, five Länder are divided into a total of 22 administrative districts. The countries have given themselves their own constitutions; In principle, they are state-quality, but they are limited subjects of international law who may only enter into their own treaties with other states with the consent of the Federal Government (Art. 32 sec. 3, Art. 24 sec. 1 GG). The Federal Republic of Germany can be regarded as the constitutional connection of its federal states and only then acquires state character, i. e. it is a federal state in the true sense.
Legislature
Legislative bodies of the Confederation are the German Bundestag, the Bundesrat and, in case of defense, the Joint Committee under further conditions. Federal laws are passed by the Bundestag by a simple majority. They take effect if the Federal Council has not lodged an objection or given its consent (Art. 77 GG). An amendment to the Basic Law is only possible with a two-thirds majority of the members of the Bundestag and the Bundesrat (Art. 79 sec. 2 GG). In the federal states, the state parliaments decide on the laws of their country. Although the deputies are not bound by instructions according to the Basic Law (Art. 38 GG), in the practice of legislation preliminary decisions dominate in the parties that participate in the political decision-making (Art. 21 GG).
The competence to legislate lies with the federal states, unless there is a legislative power of the federal government (Art. 70 to 72 GG) – namely an exclusive or in certain cases of concurrent legislation.
Executive
The executive is formed at the federal level by the Federal Government, which consists of the Federal Chancellor as head of government and the Federal Ministers. All federal ministries have one official seat in Berlin and one in the federal city of Bonn; some have their first official seat in Bonn. At the state level, the prime ministers, in the city-states of Hamburg and Bremen the presidents of the Senate, in Berlin the governing mayor heads the executive. The Länder are also parliamentary democracies and their heads of government elected by the state parliaments, citizens’ parliaments and the Berlin House of Representatives. The administrations of the Federation and the Länder are each headed by the ministers.
On the proposal of the Federal President, the Federal Chancellor is elected by the Bundestag with a majority of its members (Art. 63 GG), his term of office ends with the parliamentary term of the Bundestag (Art. 69 sec. 2 GG). Before their expiry, the Federal Chancellor can only leave office against his will if the Bundestag elects a successor with a majority of its members (Art. 67 GG, so-called constructive vote of no confidence).
The Federal Ministers are appointed on the proposal of the Federal Chancellor (Art. 64Paras. 1 GG), they and the Federal Chancellor form the Federal Government (Art. 62 GG), whose authority to issue directives is held by the Federal Chancellor (Art. 65 sentence 1 GG). The leading task in the German “chancellor democracy” falls to the Federal Chancellor. The Chancellor also nominates the German candidate for the post of EU Commissioner.
The exercise of state powers and the implementation of federal laws is in principle the responsibility of the federal states, unless the Basic Law makes or permits a deviating provision (Art. 30, Art. 83GG).
Budget
In 2020, the state budget had revenues from taxes, parafiscal charges and fees of about 1600 billion euros, as well as expenditures of 1700 billion euros. Of the revenues, 740 billion euros were tax revenues from the federal government, the federal states, municipalities and the EU. Due to the increase to about 33 million employees subject to social security contributions and rising wages, important tax revenues such as income tax and sales tax remain at a high percentage level for the state.
According to the report of the Deutsche Bundesbank, Germany’s public debt in 2021 amounted to about 2500 billion euros. With a gross domestic product of about 3600 billion euros for 2021, the government debt ratio thus corresponded to about 70 percent of the gross domestic product. In 2005, the national debt of the Federal Republic of Germany amounted to 1541 billion euros.
The Federal Republic of Germany, whose government bonds are called Bunds, receives the best possible credit rating from the three major rating agencies Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s and Fitch. The demand for the securities considered safe investments has significantly lowered interest rates in recent years and in some cases even led to negative interest rates, which is one of the main reasons for Germany’s budget surplus.
In addition to various traffic taxes (e. g. sales tax), the state earns a large part of its income from taxes on income and income: These include income, corporation and trade tax. Insofar as products or services are subject to VAT, the tax rate in Germany is 19 (general rate) or 7 percent (reduced rate, for example, food). Colloquially and in EU law, VAT is also called VAT.
According to an OECD study from 2014, Germans have the world’s highest tax burden due to high taxes and other levies such as social security contributions, ahead of the Scandinavian welfare states. According to a study published by the UN, Germany is one of the countries with the highest willingness to finance public goods through taxes. The federal government can sometimes borrow loans over long terms (up to ten years) at negative interest rates.
Party Landscape
According to Art. 21 GG, parties participate in the political decision-making of the people. The party spectrum is shaped by the parties represented in the Bundestag, which has included the People’s Parties, the SPD and the Union Parties (in the CDU and CSU parliamentary group) since its inception. Of the other parties, the Left Party and the Greens, the SSW as well as the AfD and the FDP are also represented there after the 2021 Bundestag election; the SSW is represented in the Bundestag for the first time since the 1949 Bundestag election.
All these parties are represented in the political groups of the European Parliament. Almost all influential parties support youth organizations, while other political front organizations include student representatives, student associations, women’s and senior citizens’ organizations, business associations, municipal organizations and international associations. Party-affiliated foundations co-determine the political discourse – legally independent of the parties.
European policy
Germany is a founding member of the Council of Europe and the European Communities, which grew together in the 1990s to form the political European Union (EU) through initially predominantly economic integration. The Federal Republic of Germany joined the European Monetary Union in 1990 and is part of the European Single Market. Since 2002, the euro has been introduced as a means of payment and has replaced the German mark in the Federal Republic.
Germany is also part of the Schengen area and judicial and police cooperation through Europol and Eurojust. The EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy plays a role in determining Germany’s foreign policy. The legal framework of German European policy in the EU is set by Article 23 of the Basic Law.
Germany is home to the European Patent Office (Munich) and several EU institutions: the European Central Bank in Frankfurt am Main, the EU Insurance Supervisory Authority also in Frankfurt and the European Aviation Safety Agency in Cologne.
Political indices about Germany
| Name of the index | Index | Worldwide rank | Interpretation aid | Year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fragile States Index | 23. 2 out of 120 | 166 of 178 | Stability of the country: sustainable 0 = very sustainable / 120 = very alarming | 2020 |
| Democracy Index | 8. 67 out of 10 | 14 of 167 | Full democracy 0 = authoritarian regime / 10 = complete democracy | 2020 |
| Freedom in the World Index | 94 of 100 | — | Freedom status: free 0 = non-free / 100 = free | 2020 |
| Ranking of press freedom | 17. 96 out of 100 | 16 of 180 | Satisfactory situation for freedom of the press 0 = good situation / 100 = very serious situation | 2022 |
| Corruption Perception Index (CPI) | 80 of 100 | 9 of 180 | 0 = very corrupt / 100 = very clean or incorruptible | 2020 |
| Positive Peace Index (PPI) | 1,397 out of 5 | 9 of 163 | 1 = most harmonious / 5 = least peaceful | 2020 |
Foreign and security policy
The guiding principles of German foreign policy are ties with the West and European integration. Membership of the transatlantic defense alliance NATO has been central to security policy since 1955.
During the Cold War, the scope of West German foreign policy was limited. One of the most important goals was reunification. Military operations abroad were out of the question. According to the Basic Law, the Bundeswehr may not participate in wars of aggression, its task is only in national and alliance defense. The “New Ostpolitik” initiated by the social-liberal coalition from 1969 under the motto Change through rapprochement, which important allies initially viewed sceptically, was able to set independent accents and was continued by the liberal-conservative government of Helmut Kohl from 1982.
Since reunification, Germany has borne greater international responsibility; Since 1991, under the supervision of the Bundestag and together with allied armies, the Bundeswehr has participated in peacekeeping and enforcement missions outside Germany and the territory of NATO allies (out-of-area missions). Gerhard Schröder’s German government rejected the Iraq war in 2003 and thus opposed the important ally the USA.
Traditionally, Germany, together with France, has played a leading role in the European Union. Germany is pushing ahead with efforts to create a unified, effective European foreign and security policy beyond the Economic and Monetary Union. Other foreign policy goals include the implementation of the Kyoto Protocol on climate protection and the worldwide recognition of the International Criminal Court. Germany is particularly interested in a peaceful solution to the Middle East conflict, which it supports above all through informal contact between the parties involved. Together with its allies Great Britain and France, the Federal Republic of Germany is trying to persuade Iran in dialogue to refrain from continuing its nuclear energy program.
On 13 July 2016, the Federal Government adopted the new White Paper on security policy and the future of the Bundeswehr as Germany’s supreme basic security policy document.
Military
After its foundation in 1949, the Federal Republic of Germany was initially not allowed to set up its own armed forces due to the occupation statute. Under the impression of the Korean War and the Sovietization of Eastern Europe, however, the Federal Republic of Germany was allowed to set up the paramilitary Federal Border Guard as a border police in 1951 and full-fledged armed forces from 1955 onwards in order to join NATO.
The establishment of this Bundeswehr as a prerequisite for accession was thus an important contribution to the ties with the West and thus to the international recognition of the Federal Republic, but highly controversial domestically under the impression of the Second World War. After reunification in 1990, parts of the National People’s Army (NVA) of the GDR were integrated into these forces. From 1956 to 2011, according to Article 12a of the Basic Law, general conscription was applied in the Federal Republic of Germany for all men over the age of 18. It was suspended in 2011 and replaced by voluntary military service. Since 2001, women have also had full access to service in the armed forces. Their share is 12. 4 percent of the soldiers (as of 2020). Around 3,100 German soldiers were deployed abroad in mid-2019.
The Bundeswehr is divided into the sub-forces Army, Air Force and Navy as well as the supporting organizational areas Armed Forces Base, Central Medical Service and Cyber and Information Space. After the end of the Cold War, the total strength of the Bundeswehr was gradually reduced from around 500,000 to less than 180,000 soldiers by 2015, after a maximum peacekeeping strength of 370,000 German soldiers had been binding under international law in the Two-plus-Four Treaty. The suspension of conscription in 2011 was also associated with a comprehensive reform of the Bundeswehr, which primarily meant the determination of a maximum personnel strength of 185,000 soldiers and 55,000 civilian employees.
In addition, the quantities of heavy equipment (main battle tanks, artillery) have been significantly reduced. The background to these structural changes was the Bundeswehr’s focus on participating in international UN and NATO missions since the mid-1990s, which required fewer military personnel and, above all, lighter and faster deployable material. With the Crimean crisis and the armed conflict in eastern Ukraine in 2014, the Bundeswehr’s focus of tasks changed back to national and alliance defense within the framework of NATO and the EU.
As the first army of a German nation-state, the Bundeswehr is a parliamentary army whose operations are decided exclusively by the Bundestag on the proposal of the Federal Government. In peacetime, the commander-in-chief (“holder of command and command authority”) is the respective Federal Minister of Defence; in the event of defense, this function is transferred to the Federal Chancellor. The Bundeswehr’s understanding of tradition distances itself from both the Wehrmacht of the Nazi era and the NVA. It refers to the Prussian army reform around 1810, the wars of liberation against Napoleon, the military resistance against National Socialism and their own history (see Traditional Decree). For the soldiers, the mission statement of the “citizen in uniform” applies. The most important military ceremonial is the Great Cone Strike; The swearing-ins and vows of the soldiers, which are often carried out outside military installations, are effective for the public.
The Federal Republic of Germany spent 45. 2 billion euros on the Bundeswehr in 2020. This makes Germany one of the ten countries in the world with the highest defense budgets; With a share of about 1. 3 percent of gross domestic product, German spending is below the average of NATO member states (1. 6 %).
Fire brigade
In 2019, around 1,348,000 active members were organized in the fire brigade in Germany, including over 1,003,000 volunteer firefighters, around 35,000 professional firefighters, 35,000 plant firefighters and around 275,000 young people and children. They are active in over 22,100 volunteer fire brigades, 110 professional fire brigades, 760 plant fire brigades and 22,900 youth fire brigades. In the same year, the German fire brigades were alerted to over 4,519,000 operations.
Almost 225,000 fires had to be extinguished, technical assistance had to be provided almost 650,000 times, and around 2,664,000 emergency rescue services and 981,000 other operations had to be carried out. In addition, several million supporting members belong to the local fire brigade associations. The fire brigades are united via district fire brigade associations, possibly district fire brigade associations and state fire brigade associations to form the German Fire Brigade Association, which represents them in the World Fire Brigade Association CTIF.
Police and intelligence services
Due to federalism in Germany, the federal states and thus in particular the state police and state criminal police offices are responsible for the internal security of the Federal Republic. Within the police, a distinction is often made between protective police, riot police, criminal police, special units (such as the Special Operations Command (SEK) or the Mobile Task Force (MEK)) as well as the regulatory authorities. In order to maintain public order, these are additionally supported in some municipalities by public order offices.
Nevertheless, there are also several organizations at the federal level to protect public safety. These include, in particular, the Federal Police (formerly the Federal Border Guard), which takes on tasks such as border protection, railway police and counter-terrorism and also maintains the special unit GSG 9, as well as the Federal Criminal Police Office, which, among other things, prosecutes particularly serious crimes. Both are directly subordinate to the Federal Ministry of the Interior and Home Affairs.
In addition, there are the enforcement authorities of the Federal Customs Administration (such as the Customs Investigation Service, the Customs Criminal Police Office and the Central Support Group Customs), which are responsible for the enforcement of fiscal, commercial and labor law rules and are subordinate to the Federal Ministry of Finance.
In Germany, there are also three federal intelligence services: The civilian Federal Intelligence Service (BND) as a foreign intelligence service collects civilian and military information about foreign countries and evaluates it. Responsible for tasks of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution and Counterintelligence are the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), the Military Counterintelligence Service (MAD) for the portfolio of the Federal Ministry of Defense (BMVg) and in each of the federal states a state authority for the protection of the constitution. The intelligence services in Germany do not have police enforcement powers due to the separation requirement.
Police violence
Germany has been criticized by international organizations such as Amnesty International for its inappropriate use of police force. The UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment has already noticed the police violence in Germany negatively through numerous indications.
Only a few criminal complaints against police officers in Germany ultimately lead to an indictment. The UN Human Rights Council advises Germany to set up independent complaints offices against police violence, which, unlike in other European countries, do not yet exist in Germany.
Delinquency
Germany is one of the safest countries in the world. As in all wealthy countries in the Western world, there was an increase in crime from the early 1960s to the early 1990s and a decline since then, especially in violent crime and theft.
For comparisons of the propensity to violence over long periods of time and large spatial distances, the rate of homicides per year is used as an index. In 2018, Germany had 0. 9 cases per 100,000 inhabitants, which corresponds to the average in Western Europe. The average in Europe as a whole was 2. 8 cases per 100,000 inhabitants, the global average was 5. 8. East Asian countries average 0. 5, Singapore only 0. 2 cases per 100,000 inhabitants.
Detailed, comprehensive data have been recorded in the police crime statistics since 1953 (until 1990 only for the old federal states). There was a peak in crime in 1993. By 2021, the rate has fallen by 27 percent. The rate of thefts fell by 65 percent from 1993 to 2021. However, the peak in reported violent crimes was not reached in the 1990s, but in 2007. The decline here was 25 percent until 2021. It is assumed that there will be an increasing willingness to report or a decreasing number of unreported cases, especially in the case of violence against women.
Rights in Germany
Origin
German law belongs to the continental legal system and has developed over most of its existence without the order of a German nation-state. It is therefore based on the historically transmitted German law, which goes back to Germanic tribal laws and medieval legal collections such as the Sachsenspiegel, and the reception of Roman law from the 12th century, which was considered superior because of its accuracy and universality.
Except for a few legal provisions such as the Constitutio Criminalis Carolina in 1532, the Holy Roman Empire was characterized by particular rights. It was not until the course of the 19th century that legal unification began and a General German Commercial Code was introduced in the German Confederation in 1861 and, among other things, the Imperial Court of Justice in 1877 and the Imperial Justice Laws in 1879 in the Empire. In 1900, the Civil Code came into force.
Dictatorship and post-war period
National Socialism perverted the law as a means of tyranny, for which the terror judgments of the People’s Court, the Nuremberg Laws and numerous other legal acts stand, which were only repealed by Allied occupation law, a non-German source of law. Even though the right of occupation was repealed in five federal laws and its provisions were largely incorporated into German law, the German administration of justice is still trying to restore the law destroyed by the National Socialist unjust state to this day. For example, the criminal definition of murder, which dates back to the time of National Socialism, is controversial among German judicial officers.
The tightening of § 175 in the Third Reich also led to an extensive persecution of homosexuality in the Federal Republic; it was only reformed in 1969 and deleted from the Penal Code in 1994.
In the GDR, the law was governed by the one-party rule of the SED; the separation of powers and independence of the courts, which were prescribed by the Constitution, were circumvented in constitutional reality. In the administration of justice and legislation, the GDR strove over the period of its existence to distance itself from the civil legal tradition, which was founded in the Empire and continued in the Federal Republic, and to create independent sources of law in terms of legal history.
Unlike the Federal Republic, the GDR legally rejected both the identity with the German Reich and the legal succession of the German Reich. In the Civil Code of the GDR, which came into force in 1976, the “supply relationships” of the citizens were in the foreground. Questions of property were regulated under clear signs of the socialist planned economy, a definition of property no longer existed with the introduction of the Civil Code.
With the accession of the GDR, both the development and the continued existence of the GDR law ended. Except in the case of old cases in the administration of justice, it no longer exerts any influence on contemporary German law.
The death penalty was abolished in Germany with Article 102 of the Basic Law when it was promulgated. In the GDR, it was not abolished until 1987, a few years before its end.
Present
The Federal Republic of Germany sees itself as a constitutional state (Art. 20, Art. 28(1) sentence 1 GG), which means that state activity can only be justified by law and is limited by law. The content of German laws is therefore usually first the limit of their sphere of activity before law is established. For example, § 1 of the Criminal Code exempts all acts that were not punishable by law at the time of the act. Anyone who is violated in their rights by public authority has the right to seek legal protection from the court (Art. 19f. 4 GG). The judges are not subject to any instructions in the case law and are independent of other powers of a state or political nature.
The case law is mainly exercised by courts of the federal states: in civil and criminal cases by the district courts, the regional courts and the higher regional courts (ordinary jurisdiction); at specialized courts, there are labor, administrative, social and financial courts. The Federal Patent Court exists for the protection of intellectual property. The courts of appeal are the highest federal courts (Art. 95 GG): the Federal Court of Justice as the highest civil and criminal court, the Federal Labour Court, the Federal Administrative Court, the Federal Social Court and the Federal Finance Court. Constitutional disputes are ruled by the constitutional courts of the Länder and the Federal Constitutional Court (Art. 93 GG), whose decisions can have the force of law and thus bind other courts (cf. § 31 Of the Federal Constitutional Court Act).
Constitutional jurisprudence by EU courts
European law and the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union are becoming increasingly important. As a result of Germany’s long-standing treaties with the European Union and the legal activities based on them, German law is significantly influenced by EU law. In December 2021, the European Court of Justice declared in a landmark ruling across the EU that the law it upheld could also override the case law of the constitutional courts of the Member States.
According to observers, the European Court of Justice thus also claims to be the final instance of the case law of the Member States; they could no longer rely on their constitution in contrast to EU law. The judgment was preceded by various conflicts between the European Union and its member states over the final, constituent jurisprudence – including (discontinued) infringement proceedings against Germany due to a judgment of its Federal Constitutional Court on financial supervision that contradicts the ECJ.
Economy
Basics
With a nominal gross domestic product of about 3. 8 trillion US dollars in 2020, Germany is the largest economy in Europe and the fourth largest in the world. In terms of nominal GDP per capita, Germany ranks 18th internationally and 8th in the European Union (as of 2019). In terms of the value of goods, the country was the third-largest importer and exporter in the world in 2016. The United Nations Development Programme counts Germany among the countries with very high levels of human development. It ranked 3rd in the Global Competitiveness Index in 2018. Germany’s competitiveness is mainly driven by the high number of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which are among the world market leaders, especially in specialized areas of industry.
2.1 percent of the total economic output is provided in the primary economic sector (agriculture), 24.4 percent in the secondary (industry) and 73.5 percent in the tertiary (service). In 2014, Germany recorded a peak with an average of around 42.6 million employees subject to social security contributions. The average number of unemployed in 2014 was 2.898 million. According to Eurostat, Germany had the second lowest unemployment rate in the European Union in June 2019 at 3.1 percent. An important factor in the creation of new jobs is entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship, about which, among other things, the annual KfW Start-up Monitor provides information.
Germany has a wide variety of raw material deposits and has a long mining tradition (including coal, precious salts, industrial minerals and building materials as well as silver, iron and tin). The industry is dependent on global raw material imports.
The human potential with good education and a culture of innovation are regarded as prerequisites for the success of the German economy and knowledge society. The most competitive sectors of German industry worldwide are the automotive, commercial vehicle, electrotechnical, mechanical engineering and chemical industries. Aerospace technology, the financial sector with the Financial Centre Frankfurt am Main and the insurance industry, in particular reinsurance, are also of global importance. The importance of cultural and creative industries is increasing.
As a member of the European Union, Germany is part of the world’s largest single market with a combined population of around 500 million and a nominal GDP of 17. 6 trillion US dollars in 2011. Germany is also part of the Eurozone, a monetary union with 19 member countries and about 337 million inhabitants. Their means of payment is the euro, whose monetary policy is controlled by the European Central Bank (ECB) and is the second most important reserve currency in the world and the world’s largest currency in circulation in terms of cash value.
Income inequality in Germany in 2005 was just below the OECD average. In 2008, the median disposable income was 1,252 on a Gini index of 0. 29. With a Gini index of 0. 78, the distribution of wealth in Germany is much more concentrated than the distribution of income. According to Credit Suisse, the total amount of private assets in 2016 amounted to $12. 4 trillion.
On average, every adult person in Germany had assets of $185,175 in 2016 (median assets: $42,833). This ranks 27th in the world and less than in most of Germany’s neighboring countries – one cause or consequence (depending on the interpretation) is a low proportion of real estate ownership. In 2016, there were 1,637,000 millionaires in Germany and in 2017 a total of 114 billionaires (in US dollars), the third highest number in the world.
Foreign trade and economic development
For decades, the German economy recorded more exports than any other country (“export world champion”). In the 2010s, Germany was consistently the country with the third highest value of exports worldwide. Exports reached a total value of 1,205 billion euros in 2020, the value of imports was 1,025 billion euros – a surplus of the foreign trade balance of 180 billion euros. The current account surplus was the highest in the world in 2016 and was over 7 percent of economic output, which is partly met with criticism from home and abroad.
The most important trading partners (imports and exports) in 2020 were the People’s Republic of China (213 billion euros in trade volume), the Netherlands (173 billion euros), the United States (172 billion euros), France (147 billion euros), Poland (123 billion euros) and Italy (114 billion euros). The largest export markets were the USA, the PRC, France and the Netherlands. More than half of Germany’s foreign trade was with the states of the European Union. The value of all exports of goods and services accounted for 47 percent of economic output in 2019, which is a high value among the larger economies. The country is therefore potentially vulnerable to fluctuations in global trade, even if the upswing of recent years has been mainly consumption-driven.
Germany was hit by the international financial crisis at the end of 2008 and 2009, which led to a 5.6 percent decline in gross domestic product in 2009. Subsequently, the German economy grew again significantly by 4.1 and 3.7 percent (2010 and 2011) and more moderately in 2012 and 2013 with 0. 5 percent each. Economic growth accelerated again to 1.9 percent in 2014 and further to 1.7 and 1.9 percent in 2015 and 2016, respectively. For 2017, growth was 2.2 percent.
Between 2000 and 2011, the average annual inflation rate was a minimum of 0.3 percent (2009) and a maximum of 2.6 percent (2008). At the beginning of 2015, Germany recorded slight deflation (−0.3%) for the first time since 2009 due to the low oil price.
Automobile industry
Germany is known worldwide for the development and production of innovative and high-quality passenger cars. The automobile was invented in 1886 by Carl Benz in Germany, which laid the foundation for the development of what is currently the third-largest automotive industry in the world. Today, corporations such as Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz and BMW are an important part of the German economy. In 2017, the German automotive industry generated more than 400 billion euros in sales with over 800,000 employees in Germany, accounting for about seven percent of GDP.
Information technology and telecommunications
Information and communication technology (ICT) is regarded as an essential location factor. The digitization of the German economy is being driven forward under the project name Industry 4. 0. Deutsche Telekom is the telecommunications company with the highest turnover in Germany. SAP, Software AG and DATEV are among the most important software manufacturers in the world with headquarters in Germany. In the hardware sector, development is particularly important, for example at Infineon and AGVs. Additionally to traditional companies in the ICT industry, innovative start-ups and e-ventures are gaining in importance in Germany.
In 2017, 88 percent of the population had internet access; about 87 percent were able to rely on a broadband connection.
Energy
| Energy carrier | 1990 (%) | 2019 (%) |
|---|---|---|
| Mineral oil | 35,1 | 35,3 |
| Gas | 15,5 | 25,0 |
| Renewable energies | 1,3 | 14,7 |
| Lignite | 21,5 | 9,1 |
| Coal | 15,5 | 8,8 |
| Nuclear energy | 11,2 | 6,4 |
| Other | 0,7 |
In 2010, Germany was the fourth largest producer of primary energy in Europe and ranked 24th among the world’s energy producers. Also, in 2012, primary energy consumption in Germany was 13,757 PJ (2005: 14,238 PJ). In terms of this, the country is the second-largest national energy consumer in Europe and the seventh-largest in the world. The power supply was guaranteed in 2012 by 1059 companies headquartered in Germany.
In 2016, renewable energies supplied 29.2 percent of gross electricity production, 13.4 percent of final energy demand in the heating sector and 5.1 percent of fuels. As part of the energy transition, it is planned to increase the share of renewable energies in electricity consumption to 80 percent by 2050, to reduce primary energy consumption by 50 percent compared to 2008 and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80–95 percent compared to 1990 in line with the EU targets. In total, at least 60 percent of energy consumption is to be covered by renewable energies by 2050.
Tourism
In 2016, Germany was one of the seven most visited countries in the world with over 35 million foreign overnight guests per year.
About 4,000 of the 11,116 municipalities in Germany are organized in tourism associations, 310 of which are recognized as spas, seaside resorts and health resorts. There are 6,135 museums, 366 theatres, 34 leisure and adventure parks, 45,000 tennis courts, 648 golf courses, 190,000 km of hiking trails, 40,000 kilometers of long-distance cycle paths and holiday and themed roads.
Of outstanding importance is business and congress tourism; Germany is the world’s most important trade fair location with several world-leading trade fairs. The International Tourism Exchange Berlin is the world’s leading tourism trade fair. In addition, there is the highest density of festivals in Germany.
Traffic
The Logistics Performance Index 2018 compiled by the World Bank identifies Germany as the country with the best infrastructure in the world.
Due to the dense population and central location in Europe, there is a very high volume of traffic in Germany. It is an important transit country, especially for freight transport. The concept of the Trans-European Networks promotes Germany as a transfer area between the first European core economic area, the so-called Blue Banana, and the core economic area in East Central Europe. Important projects in these networks are the Lyon/Genoa–Rotterdam/Antwerp railway axes, POS (Paris–East France–South-West Germany), PBKA (Paris–Brussels–Cologne–Amsterdam), Berlin–Palermo and the Magistrale for Europe. Furthermore, Germany is the western starting point of some pan-European transport corridors.
In 2005, a motorway toll for lorries was introduced. Carbon dioxide emissions from road freight transport in Germany rose by 20 percent from 1995 to 2017.
Road traffic
Already the Romans laid out paved roads in Germany, which fell into disrepair again. The first roads were built in the 18th century. The invention of the automobile gave new impetus to road construction. The world’s first motorway, the AVUS, was opened in Berlin in 1921. In the second half of the 20th century, road transport replaced the railway as the most important mode of transport. Germany has one of the densest road networks in the world.
In 2012, the federal highway network comprised 12,845 kilometers of motorways and 40,711 kilometers of federal highways. Furthermore, the supra-local road network included 86,597 kilometers of state roads, 91,520 kilometers of district roads and municipal roads.
On 1 January 2020, 47.7 million passenger cars were registered in Germany. The vehicle fleet of all motor vehicles and trailers amounted to 65. 8 million. From 1995 to 2017, absolute carbon dioxide emissions from road freight transport in Germany increased by 20 percent.
In order to reduce the dangers and burdens of road traffic, pedestrian zones, traffic-calmed zones and 30 km/h zones have been set up in many German cities. Since then, the number of people killed in road traffic has steadily decreased; In 2015 there were 3,459 people, in 2019 still 3,046. Cycling is playing an increasing role, and its expansion is politically supported, for example, by the cycling plan.
Rail transport
Germany’s railway network is about 38,500 kilometers long and is served daily by up to about 50,000 passenger and freight trains. As part of the railway reform, the state railways Deutsche Bundesbahn (West) and Deutsche Reichsbahn (East) were transferred to the private-sector company Deutsche Bahn AG on 1 January 1994. It organizes the majority of rail transport in Germany. Around 350 other railway companies operate on the German railway network. While the state has withdrawn from operations, it finances the majority of network maintenance and expansion as well as (via regionalization funds) largely regional transport.
Regional (Interregio-Express (IRE), Regionalbahn (RB), Regional-Express (RE) and S-Bahn (S)) and long-distance services (Intercity (IC), Eurocity (EC) and Intercity-Express (ICE)) run largely according to the timetable. For long-distance trains, high-speed lines with a total length of about 2000 kilometers are available.
Local traffic
In 1881, Werner von Siemens opened the world’s first electric tram in Lichterfelde near Berlin. In the first half of the 20th century, this means of transport dominated the public transport of the larger cities in Germany. After the Second World War, especially in West Germany, many were shut down, others were converted into light rail vehicles with inner-city tunnel lines. They have been replaced by bus transport, which is also available throughout the countryside and provides access to almost every place.
However, the bus networks have been thinned out by the population decline in rural areas and often replaced by dial-a-ride bus systems. In the 20th century, underground trains were built in the largest cities and combined with S-Bahn trains to form a high-speed rail network for the city and the surrounding area. The administrative processing is carried out by public transport authorities.
Since the 1980s, cycle path networks have been created and expanded in the cities and in the countryside, so that today the bicycle again plays an increasing role in local transport. In an international comparison, public transport in the larger cities of Germany is characterized by high effectiveness and coverage.
Air traffic
With around 700 airports, Germany has one of the largest runway densities in the world.
Frankfurt Main Airport is the largest in Germany in terms of passengers (2016: 60. 77 million), the fourth largest in Europe and the largest airport in Europe in terms of freight volume (2015: 2. 1 million tonnes). The largest German airline Lufthansa operates intercontinental hubs in Frankfurt and at the second-largest German airport in Munich. The federal government and the states of Berlin and Brandenburg are the sole shareholders of Flughafen Berlin Brandenburg GmbH, which operates Berlin Brandenburg Airport “Willy Brandt”.
Germany does not have its own spaceport (or spaceport) for traffic beyond the Kármán Line (100 km) into space. The space flight of the German Aerospace Center therefore usually uses the CSG spaceport in French Guiana or the Russian-operated Baikonur Cosmodrome.
Shipping traffic
Due to the high share of foreign trade, Germany is particularly dependent on maritime trade. It has a number of modern seaports, but also handles large parts of its overseas trade through the ports of neighboring countries, especially in the Netherlands. The three busiest seaports in Germany are Hamburg, Wilhelmshaven and the ports of Bremen. The JadeWeserPort in Wilhelmshaven is the only deep-water port in Germany. The most important Baltic Sea ports are Rostock, Lübeck and Kiel. Rostock-Warnemünde is the busiest cruise port in Germany.
The most important maritime shipping routes are the Lower Elbe and Lower Weser. The Kiel Canal is the busiest artificial shipping lane in the world, off the German Baltic Sea coast lies the Kadetrinne, the busiest shipping route in the Baltic Sea.
There is a well-developed network of waterways for inland navigation. The most important navigable rivers are the Rhine, Main, Moselle, Weser and Elbe. Important inland canals are the Mittelland Canal, the Dortmund-Ems Canal, the Rhine-Herne Canal and the Elbe Side Canal. The Main-Danube Canal crosses Europe’s main watershed and thus enables a direct shipping route from the North Sea and Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. The complex of Duisburg-Ruhrort ports is the busiest inland port in Germany and is considered the largest inland port in Europe. The New Silk Road, an infrastructure project of the People’s Republic of China that wants to build on old trade routes, also begins or ends there.
The master plan for inland navigation was adopted in 2019.
German culture
Since the Middle Ages, German art and cultural history, whose roots go back to the time of the Celts, Germans and Romans, has produced personality that shaped styles and epochs. In a wide variety of disciplines, German-speaking cultural workers became pioneers of new intellectual currents and developments. Some of the most influential German artists are among the protagonists of Western civilization. State subsidies for culture (theatres, museums, art academies, etc. ) by the federal government, state governments and municipalities in Germany amounted to more than eleven billion euros in 2017.
Since Germany did not exist as a nation-state for a long time, German culture has been defined for centuries above all by the common language; even after the founding of the Reich in 1871, Germany was often understood as a cultural nation. Due to the spread of mass media in the 20th century, popular culture has gained a high priority in German society. The spread of the Internet in the 21st century has led to a differentiation of the cultural landscape and changed the diverse niche cultures in their forms.
The Goethe-Instituts serve to spread the German language and culture in the world. With a total of 158 locations, including liaison offices, the institute is represented in 93 countries in 2013. According to a survey of 22 countries for the BBC in 2013, Germany enjoyed the highest international reputation among 16 countries surveyed for the sixth time in a row since 2008. On average, 59 percent of respondents rated Germany’s influence and political work as positive, 15 percent had a negative picture.
For specific areas of German culture, see:
- German-language literature
- German Philosophy
- Music in Germany
- German Film
- Television in Germany
- Architecture in Germany
- World Heritage in Germany
- Museums in Germany
- Public holidays in Germany
- German cuisine
- Fashion design in Germany
- German costumes
Media
In Germany, 352 newspapers, 27 weekly newspapers, 7 Sunday newspapers, 2450 public and 3753 specialist journals are regularly published. Some of these media are published by the large corporation’s Axel Springer SE, Bauer Media Group, Bertelsmann, Hubert Burda Media and Funke Mediengruppe. There are 18 news agencies, of which the German Press Agency (dpa) and the Redaktion Netzwerk Deutschland (RND) are the most important.
The national daily newspapers with the highest circulation (as of 2020) are Bild (ed. 1.27 million), Süddeutsche Zeitung (edition 0.3 million), Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (ed. 0.2 million) and Handelsblatt (ed. 0.14 million). By far the weekly newspaper with the highest circulation is Die Zeit (ed. 0. 55 million). In addition, there are political magazines such as Der Spiegel and magazines focused on popular topics such as Stern and Focus.
On television, there are public broadcasters such as Das Erste and ZDF and privately financed full programs, especially RTL, Sat. 1, Pro7, RTL Zwei, Kabel eins and VOX. In recent years, many regional channels and special interest programs have been added.
Radio in Germany is organized in a dual way and, above all, has a regional character. It is divided into public radio, which is financed by the broadcasting fee, and private radio providers, which derive their revenues mainly from advertising. At the end of 2016, well over 300 broadcasters were registered, of which around 290 were commercial and more than 60 public service programs of the ARD, mainly broadcast via FM, but increasingly also via DAB. Of great importance for the development are two judgments of the Federal Constitutional Court of 1981 and 1986, which defined the organization and the framework conditions.
Spiegel Online (weekly reach: 15%), t-online (weekly reach: 14%) and ard’s news portals (weekly reach: 13%) are the most frequently used as online media. Active and passive media use is around 9 hours a day (as of 2018).
Society
According to the World Values Survey, secular-rational values and personal self-development are valued in Germany, which is based on the pluralistic tradition of the Enlightenment. In the areas of education, work-life balance, employment, the environment, social relations, housing, security and subjective well-being, the population cites satisfaction values above the average of the developed industrial nations and is only below this in terms of health. Overall, Germany’s OECD Better Life Index in 2015 was 7 out of 10 points above the OECD average (6. 5; Greece 5. 5, Switzerland 7. 6).
In the UN’s World Happiness Report 2018, Germany ranked 15th out of 156 countries.
Social affairs
Germany has a long tradition of legally promoted social compensation. According to the Gini Index, the country is considered a society with low-income inequality by international standards. The German state offers its residents extensive legal rights to family support and social security. The history of social security began in the Empire. Later governments have gradually expanded it and supplemented it with additional social transfers, which means that today a large part of the state budget is spent on social welfare.
Employees are required to be members of social security, which consists of five pillars: health, accident, pension, long-term care and unemployment insurance. Basic social security is primarily financed by contributions from the insured, deficits are compensated by taxpayers’ money.
In 2010, 830,000 euro millionaires (1% of the population) in Germany had a total wealth of 2,191 billion euros, while around 12. 4 million people (15. 3% of the population) lived in relative poverty or were considered at risk of poverty. In 2016, 19. 7% of the population was at risk of poverty or social exclusion (EU: 23. 5%).
The national transfer payments include the Länder fiscal equalization, which obliges federal states with high tax revenues to hand over part of their income to less well-off countries so that living conditions in Germany do not diverge too far. The solidarity surcharge levied on income tax is intended to alleviate sharing-related burdens in the new Länder.
The General Equal Treatment Act is intended to prevent discrimination based on gender, race, ethnic origin, religion or belief, disability, age or sexual identity (such as homosexuality).
Bless you
The German healthcare system is highly developed, as evidenced by the very low infant mortality rate of about 3. 5 boys and 3. 0 girls per 1000 births and a high life expectancy, which in 2016 was 78. 2 years for men and 83. 1 for women. In 2015, poor men had a life expectancy of 70.1 years, wealthy men of 80. 9 years (women: 76. 9 and 85. 3 years). In 2015, an OECD study showed that patients in Germany had short waiting times, low financial expenses of their own and a lot of choices.
Prevention, on the other hand, needs to be improved, as evidenced by a high number of diseases such as cardiovascular diseases and diabetes. However, the quality is shown, among other things, by the fact that a stroke is often survived. The number of hospitalizations and operations is in the top group internationally, but so is the cost of medicines; In 2013, health expenditure accounted for 11 percent of GDP (OECD average: just under 9 percent).
The health system includes service providers such as doctors, pharmacists, nursing staff, the state (federal, state and local authorities), health, accident, nursing care and pension insurance, associations of statutory health insurance physicians, employers’ and employees’ associations, other interest groups and patients, some of whom are represented by associations and self-help organizations.
Hospitals are often run by non-profit organizations, but are increasingly privatized. Other care services are largely provided privately by freelancers (doctors and pharmacists in private practice and companies, for example in the pharmaceutical and medical technology industries). As a service provider, the state participates only subordinately with health authorities, municipal hospitals and university clinics.
The majority of the population belongs to statutory health insurance (GKV), whose contributions are mainly based on the level of income. Family members without their own income are often insured free of contributions. The entitlement to benefits is independent of the amount of the contribution. About 10. 8 percent of insured persons had private health insurance in 2017.
Education
Today’s German education system has its roots, among other things, in the once exemplary Humboldtian educational ideal and the Prussian educational reforms. Its design is the responsibility of the federal states (“cultural sovereignty”), but is coordinated by nationwide conferences of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs, which also set common educational standards.
Depending on the federal state, there are preschool periods and there is a nine- to thirteen-year compulsory schooling. Attendance at general education schools lasts at least nine years. After that, secondary schools or vocational schools can be attended. Most German federal states have a structured school system with Hauptschule, Realschule and Gymnasium, but there are tendencies towards more comprehensive schools and all-day schools. Depending on the federal state, the university entrance qualification is acquired after twelve or thirteen years of schooling.
Virtually all young adults attend a secondary education institution after school. Apprentices in companies usually attend vocational school one or two days a week, which is known worldwide as a successful model of dual training. The academic equivalent is the dual study program. Students can choose between university and application-oriented universities (universities of applied sciences). The proportion of academics has risen steadily since the 1970s.
Continuing vocational training also plays a major role. For the unemployed, the Federal Employment Agency provides training vouchers. Before their vocational training, young people can also complete so-called voluntary services, such as a voluntary social year or a voluntary ecological year. Other popular transitional activities include voluntary military service and stays abroad, for example in the form of work & travel or youth exchanges.
In school performance surveys, Germany often performs only mediocre or even below average in a global comparison. In the last PISA studies, Germany was able to improve: In the PISA ranking of 2015, German students reached 16th place out of 72 in mathematics, 15th place in science and 10th place in reading comprehension. The performance of German students was thus above the OECD average in all three categories.
In the PISA studies, however, the OECD criticizes German education policy, as the school successes of children with socially or educationally disadvantaged parents and with a migration background, in particular, are below average. Contrary to the reform efforts of recent decades, it is still statistically significantly less likely that working-class children will achieve the Abitur (general university entrance qualification) or a university degree than children from the middle or upper classes. In addition, there would be a lack of individual differentiation and support for both high-performing and low-performing students.
Expenditure on education (4.6% of gross domestic product) is below average by OECD standards. School support at primary school age is considered to be in need of improvement, especially with regard to childcare facilities and targeted support for weaker pupils.
Of the working-age population, about 2. 3 million (4%) were considered complete and 7.5 million functionally illiterate in 2011.
Science
Germany is an internationally important technology and science location. Since the Industrial Revolution, German-speaking researchers have been significantly involved in the founding of empirical sciences. In particular, the economic performance of various industries and the transfer of knowledge into practice were driven forward by the creative work of engineers. Around 8 percent of all patents filed worldwide under PCT in 2016 came from Germany; This placed Germany in 4th place behind the USA, Japan and China.
In Germany, universities, technical universities and universities of applied sciences are institutions of research and scientific teaching. The (technical) universities are entitled to doctoral and habilitation procedures. Both methods are intended to prove education and contain scientific findings. With the introduction of international degree titles in the course of the Bologna Process, the previous separation of degrees between universities of applied sciences and universities in the field of academic education is being softened.
Individual higher education institutions do not provide training at all in the tertiary education sector, but are set up for postgraduate education or exclusively for doctoral studies and habilitations. Most German universities are publicly funded, but their research is funded by third-party funds (German Research Foundation, foundations, companies and others).
In addition to the universities, there are a larger number of research organizations that are active throughout Germany and beyond. In Germany, on the one hand, a system of division of labor between the universities and on the other hand between the universities and the non-university research institutions was created. The Max Planck Society is committed to basic research. It manages 79 institutes in Germany and has an annual budget of 1. 8 billion euros. The Helmholtz Association is the largest scientific society in Germany and operates 15 so-called large-scale research centers that work on interdisciplinary scientific complexes.
The Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft is the largest organization of applied research. In its 56 institutes, it takes up the results of basic research and tries to develop them economically. It provides industry with the service of contract research. In addition, it gained worldwide fame through the development of the MP3 audio format. It is one of the most important patent applicants and owners in Germany. The Leibniz Association is a network of independent research institutions that work in both basic and applied research.
The expenditure of state universities and colleges in Germany (also referred to as tertiary education in Germany) amounted to more than 64 billion euros in 2020 (in 2005: 30. 9 billion euros), which is mainly financed by tax revenues of the federal and state governments. About 2. 9 million students studied at universities and colleges in Germany in 2020. Of these, about 14% were foreign students.
A further 15. 6 billion euros were awarded to non-university institutes such as the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, Helmholtz Association, Leibniz Association, Max Planck Society and Academies of Sciences. Total spending on education, research and science in 2020 amounted to around 334 billion euros in Germany.
Numerous researchers from all areas of modern science come from Germany. More than 100 Nobel laureates are assigned to the country. With their theories, Albert Einstein and Max Planck founded important pillars of theoretical physics, on which Werner Heisenberg and Max Born, for example, could continue to build. Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, the first Nobel laureate in physics, discovered and investigated the X-ray radiation named after him, which still plays an important role today in medical diagnostics and materials testing, among other things.
Heinrich Hertz wrote important works on electromagnetic radiation, which are decisive for today’s telecommunications technology. The developments of Karl von Drais, Nikolaus Otto, Rudolf Diesel, Gottlieb Daimler and Carl Benz have revolutionized the transport industry, the Bunsen burners and zeppelins named after their inventors are known worldwide. The German aerospace industry carried out decisive pioneering work in the field of space travel and space research and today has an efficient space agency in the form of the German Aerospace Center (DLR), and Germany is also the member state that contributes most to the European Space Agency (ESA).
Chemical research was influenced by Carl Wilhelm Scheele, Otto Hahn and Justus von Liebig, among others. With their successful inventions, names such as Johannes Gutenberg, Werner von Siemens, Wernher von Braun, Konrad Zuse and Philipp Reis are components of general technological education. Many important mathematicians were also born in Germany, such as Adam Ries, Friedrich Bessel, Richard Dedekind, Carl Friedrich Gauss, David Hilbert, Emmy Noether, Bernhard Riemann, Karl Weierstrass and Johannes Müller (Regiomontanus).
Other important German researchers and scientists are the astronomer Johannes Kepler, the archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, the biologist Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, the polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, the religious researcher Max Müller, the historian Theodor Mommsen, the sociologist Max Weber and the medical researcher Robert Koch.
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