Transcription
Long before any nation called Germany existed, the lands between the Baltic, North Sea, and Alps were home to early humans. As the ice ages waned, Mesolithic hunter gatherers and later Neolithic farmers settled the fertile valleys of central Europe. Over the subsequent millennia, these peoples developed into various Bronze Age and later Iron Age cultures which by the final centuries BC had manifested into a cultural divide with Celtic tribes inhabiting the area to the south while Germanic tribes which had emerged from Scandinavia came to occupy the north.
The Kelts of southern Germany were gradually absorbed by those expanding Germanic groups who eventually came to inhabit the entire region encompassing the rivers Rin and Danube which formed a natural barrier between their lands and that of the expanding Roman Republic. In the 1st century BC, contact between Rome and these Germanic tribes began to increase, largely due to Roman generals such as Julius Caesar, who ordered legions across the Rine and into the lands they called Germana. These early military expeditions, however, achieved little.
So, by the time of Emperor Augustus' reign in the early 1st century AD, more concerted efforts were made to bring the region of Germania and its inhabitants under Roman rule. This had disastrous consequences in the year 9 AD when three entire Roman legions were ambushed and annihilated by a coalition of Germanic tribes in the battle of Tutubberg forest. This catastrophic defeat forced Rome to abandon any hopes of conquering Germania and a decision was made to fix the border of the empire along a line following parts of the Rine and Danube as well as a series of fortifications known as the Lemus Germanicus.
Several Germanic tribes nevertheless lived under Roman rule to the south and west of the border with many towns and cities such as Cologne, Mains and Regensburg being established by the Romans during this time. As a result of this proximity, a residual Roman influence began to seep into Germania. Many Germanic warriors served in Roman auxiliary units and the various tribes engaged in trade for Roman goods. Although elements of Roman material culture such as pottery, plows, and even written language began to penetrate Germanic society, they mostly retained their distinct way of life, revolving around settled farming communities without cities or coinage and were led by warrior elites who upheld a pagan religion, worshiping gods like Odin and Thor.
Life in Germany remained largely unchanged in the following decades up until the late 4th century when a new group of people emerged from the east and triggered a domino effect that would bring irreversible changes across both the Roman and Germanic worlds. The Hunik invasion of Eastern and Central Europe triggered the so-called migration period which saw hundreds of thousands of Germanic peoples move westwards into the territory of the Roman Empire. This movement coincided with a dramatic weakening of the empire itself over the course of the fifth century, resulting in many of the tribes capitalizing on the opportunity to carve out new homelands for themselves. The Vandals and Swaybe overran Roman Spain and advanced into North Africa. The Beagandians and Franks established kingdoms in Gaul. The Angles and Saxons invaded and settled across Britain. And the Visigoths even went on to sack Rome itself in 410 AD.
By the end of the fifth century, the Western Roman Empire had practically collapsed and in its place stood a patchwork of new barbarian kingdoms which began blending Germanic tribal leadership with lingering Roman institutions. The Goths, Lombards, and others adopted elements of Roman law, Christianity, and administration. But it was the Franks who applied this cultural fusion most effectively, carving out a large kingdom across much of what is now France and Western Germany under the leadership of King Clovis I.
In the eastern part of Germany, however, the chaos born out of the migration period brought about a different set of results. The Germanic peoples who had once inhabited the region between the rivers Elba and Oda were replaced by Slavic tribes from the east, giving rise to contrasting societies such as the Abitrites, Valleti, and Sorbs. It would nevertheless be the Frankish kings in the west who began to bring the other Germanic tribes of Western and Central Europe under their sway over the course of the 8th century. The greatest of these kings, Charlemagne, significantly expanded the borders of his kingdom by waging a brutal 30-year campaign against the pagan Saxons in the northeast. He also defeated the Bavarians and Lombards, extending his dominion southward into Italy. In recognition of his power and piety, Charlemagne was crowned emperor of the Romans by Pope Leo III on Christmas Day in the year 800. This moment symbolically resurrected the Western Roman Imperial title and laid the ideological foundations of what would later be called the Holy Roman Empire.
Upon his death in 814, Charlemagne was buried in the German city of Arkan, which he had made his northern capital. But the empire he had spent his life expanding and consolidating would not long remain intact. Charlemagne's grandsons divided his empire between them in the year 843, splitting it into three roughly longitudinal realms. The eastern portion comprising much of modern-day Germany came to be known as East Frankia and was ruled by Louis the German and his descendants of the Carolindian dynasty. Then in 919, the German Duke selected the first non-Carolindian king Henry the Fowler, a Saxon, marking the beginning of the Otonian dynasty. However, it would be his son Otto the Great who would ultimately establish the earliest foundations of a united German state. After defeating the Magias of Hungary at the Battle of Lechfeld in 955, Otto conquered much of Italy and was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 962, reviving Charlemagne's imperial ideal.
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Throughout the high middle ages, the Holy Roman Empire played a central role in European affairs. But it was never a centralized nation state. Instead, it was a vast feudal conglomeration of semi-independent duchies, counties, bishop bricks, and free imperial cities. Though emperors like Frederick I Barbarosa and his grandson Frederick II were powerful and ambitious rulers, they could never fully unite the divergent factions and dynasties of the innumerable princes spread across Germany. Over time, more power shifted to these regional lords with a landmark turning point in this political evolution coming in 1356 when Emperor Charles IV issued the Golden Bull, which decreed that each new emperor of the Holy Roman Empire would henceforth be elected by seven of the German princes. Consequently, by the late Middle Ages, the German lands remained politically fragmented and bound only by a common emperor.
Yet despite this political disunityity, the Germans of this era shared linguistic ties and participated in a broadly common medieval culture. Gothic cathedrals rose in cities like Cologne and Strasborg. German knights and mercenaries marched together on crusades. Universities were founded such as H Highleberg in 1386. and German artisans and traders prospered in commercial organizations such as the Hanziatic League which operated in ports and cities along the Baltic and North Sea coasts. There were also a wider migratory movement of German peoples into Eastern Europe during this time which gave rise to many German settlements and a cultural diffusion of Germanization in parts of what is now Poland and the Czech Republic. Similarly, large swades of the Baltic region were conquered by the crusading efforts of the Tutonic Order, which for the most part was composed of German knights and soldiers.
With the dawn of the 16th century, Germany and the wider Holy Roman Empire as a whole underwent a brief period of political consolidation. Emperor Maxmleon I introduced a set of imperial reforms that saw a more unified state begin to emerge with standardized laws and policies. However, much of this progress was undone by a seismic event that unfurled across the German-speaking world in 1517, the Protestant Reformation. The German monk and theology professor Martin Luther circulated his 95 thesis in Bittenberg that year, denouncing the abuses of the Catholic Church. Luther's calls for reform were aided by the recent German invention of the printing press created by Johans's Gutenberg in the city of Mains in 1440 which allowed these protestations against the church to be publicized and spread on mass.
What began as a theological dispute soon cleaved the empire along religious and political lines. Northern and eastern German princes found Luther's Protestant ideas appealing. Some out of genuine conviction while others sought a means of asserting independence from the Catholic Habsburg emperors. Meanwhile, most southern and western regions remained loyal to the Roman Catholic Church. But this rift quickly led to decades of strife and religious civil war breaking out across Germany. Emperor Charles V, a staunch Catholic, won a temporary victory over the Protestant princes in 1547, but could not crush the new movement entirely. The religious stalemate was finally formalized in the peace of Augsburg in 1555 which allowed each prince in the empire to choose either Catholicism or Lutheran Protestantism as the official faith of his territory.
Despite the peace, religious tensions continued to fester and exploded once again in 1618 with the outbreak of the 30 years war. One of the most devastating conflicts in German and European history. What began in Bohemia as a rebellion by Protestant nobles against the Catholic Habsburgs quickly escalated into a Europewide conflict with some of the most destructive fighting taking place on German soil. Armies of all nations marauded across the countryside and the toll on the German populace was catastrophic. By the war's end in 1648, an estimated 4.5 to 8 million people had perished with some regions losing over half their population due to a combination of battle, famine, and disease. The conflict's conclusion was marked by the signing of the peace of Westfailia, which reinforced the decentralized structure of the Holy Roman Empire by the end of the 17th century.
This had resulted in hundreds of principalities, dukedoms, electorates, and free cities being scattered across the German lands. However, two of these had begun to emerge as rivals for primacy, Austria and Prussia. The Habsburg dynasty of Austria based in Vienna had long been pre-minent providing successive Holy Roman emperors over the centuries and ruling over a sprawling multithnic realm that included the arch duche of Austria itself as well as Bohemia, Hungary and other parts of central and eastern Europe. In the north, the rising electorate and later kingdom of Brandenburgg, Prussia based in Berlin had aggressively expanded its strength in recent years. Under the astute leadership of the Hornoland dynasty, especially Elector Frederick William in the 17th century and later King Frederick the Great in the 18th century, Prussia had transformed from a middling border state into a military powerhouse. Frederick the Great in particular modernized the Prussian bureaucracy and army which he deployed in a series of audacious wars that upended the balance of power across Europe in the mid- 18th century. During the Sissian wars and the 7 years war, Prussia against all odds held its own against Austria, France, Russia and other foes. So much so that by the time the latter conflict concluded in 1763, Prussia had nearly doubled its territory and had emerged as a recognized great power. From this point on, German affairs would be dominated by the rivalry between Habsburg, Austria, and Honolulan, Prussia.
The 18th century also coincided with Germany's progress in the age of the enlightenment. Literary giants like Gerta and Schiller wrote in Vimar while philosophers like Kant and Libnit also made their mark. Musical prodigies such as Bach and Mosart emerged during this time often sponsored by the German upper classes to perform in theaters and private homes. Yet despite this cultural progress which went some way to promoting ideals of German nationalism, politically Germany remained divided and would soon be shaken by the next epochdefining force at the end of the century.
The French Revolution which began in 1789 and the subsequent rise of Napoleon Bonapart convulsed Europe and Germany was no exception. The ideas spread by the revolution initially led some in Germany to hope for the triumph of reason and rationalism inspired by enlightenment thinking. On the other hand, the royal courts of Vienna and Berlin denounced the overthrow of the French king as well as the emergent notions of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Military conflict soon followed when Prussian and Austrian forces joined a coalition of other European states to launch an invasion of France in 1792 and put an end to these revolutionary ideas once and for all. This plan, however, quickly backfired. The French successfully repelled the invasion and went on the offensive, unleashing a wave of successive military conflicts that would embroil not only Germany but the entire European continent for the next two decades.
By 1806, the French Emperor Napoleon had defeated Austria and Prussia and reorganized the map of Germany. In July of that year, he coerced 16 German princes into forming the Confederation of the Rine, effectively a French puppet state covering Western and Southern Germany. Days later, on the 6th of August, the last Holy Roman Emperor, Francis II, abdicated and formally dissolved the Holy Roman Empire under French pressure, thereby ending an institution that had lasted for over a thousand years since the days of Charlemagne. Napoleon's domination nevertheless brought profound change and promoted a sense of nationalism within Germany that had not been seen before.
After Napoleon's disastrous invasion of Russia and subsequent defeat at the Battle of Leipig in 1813, German forces joined the final allied push into France itself. By the time the Napoleonic Wars ended in 1815, the victorious powers convened the Congress of Vienna to restore order. One of the settlements agreed upon was the formation of a new German Confederation, a loose association of 39 sovereign states, down from the 300 plus of the old empire, which was essentially a diplomatic league intended to provide mutual defense and preserve the status quo. The 19th century thus opened with Germany still fragmented, but a growing sentiment of nationalism, defined by the idea that all German people should be united under one nation state, was beginning to take root.
Following this, in 1848, a wave of liberal revolutions swept Europe and Germany was a central stage. Revolutions broke out, sparked by demands for constitutional government, national unity, and liberal rights. In Frankfurt, an all German national assembly convened and even drafted a constitution for a united Germany, offering the imperial crown to the king of Prussia. But the movement failed. King Frederick William IV of Prussia refused and conservative forces backed by Prussian and Austrian arms suppressed the uprisings the following year. Many disappointed liberals immigrated. While for those who remained in Germany, the cause of unity and freedom entered an uneasy dormcy.
Nonetheless, the mid 19th century saw progress in many other areas. Industrialization had begun to transform the German economies, especially in the Rhineland and Saxony as railways, coal and steel industries burgeoned. By the 1850s and 1860s, Prussia had leveraged this economic growth and in combination with its military strength had positioned itself as leader of German unification by force under the leadership of the renowned statesman Otto von Bismar. Appointed as the Prussian minister president in 1862, Bismar set out to unify Germany under Prussian dominance, deliberately excluding Austria. In a masterful series of short wars, he first defeated Denmark in 1864, seizing the duchies of Schlesvvic and Holstein before turning on Austria in 1866, defeating its forces at the Battle of Colingratz. The result was decisive. Austria was sidelined from German affairs and a new north German confederation was formed in 1867 with the Prussian king Wilhelm I as its president. The southern German states of Bavaria, Vhenberg, Bardon and Hessha Damstat remained outside this confederation but were tied to Prussia by defense packs. Bismar anticipated that only an external threat or war would persuade these southern kingdoms to rally behind and join Prussia in a political union.
Such an opportunity presented itself in 1870 with the outbreak of the FrancoRussian War. France had grown increasingly wary of Prussia's rising power and so in July of that year, Emperor Napoleon III declared war, expecting a quick victory. Instead, Prussia and its southern German allies mobilized with stunning efficiency and within weeks had encircled the French armies and captured Napoleon III himself at the Battle of Sedan. After later capturing Paris, Bismar and the German princes agreed to proclaim a unified German Empire. And on 18th of January 1871, inside the glittering hall of mirrors at the Palace of Versailles, King Wilhelm I of Prussia was proclaimed as Kaiser.
The German Empire rapidly became a formidable presence in Europe. Rich in coal and iron and with a well educated populace, the newly unified Germany industrialized at breakneck speed. By 1900, it was one of the world's leading industrial powers, rivaling Britain and the United States. German cities like Berlin, Hamburg and Essen swelled with factories and workers, and railways crisscrossed the empire. Alongside its industrial might, Germany fostered intellectual and cultural brilliance during this era, producing scientists like Einstein and Plank, composers like Brahms and Vagnner, and philosophers such as nature.
Politically, the empire was ruled as a federal monarchy with Bismar serving as chancellor. He initiated pioneering social welfare legislation, old age pensions and health insurance to undercut the appeal of the socialist movement. And he engaged in the cult culture struggle to assert state control over the Catholic Church. In foreign policy, Bismar's strategy was to preserve peace and stability now that Germany had achieved unification. He crafted a complex system of alliances with Austria, Hungary and Italy in 1882 to diplomatically isolate France and maintain the balance of power in Europe. Bismar famously declared Germany as a satiated power in 1871 with no further territorial ambitions in Europe. However, this restraint would ultimately not last.
In 1888, Kaiser Wilhelm I died, but his son Frederick III, who succeeded him, reigned only briefly before succumbing to illness. The throne then passed of Wilhelm II, who was young, restless, and eager to assert his own personal rule. He dismissed the aging Bismar in 1890 and took a more hands-on approach to governance, seeking to elevate Germany to a global imperial power on par with Britain. Under Wilhelm's direction, Germany built a large modern navy and established colonies in Africa and the Pacific. This new course was both aggressive and nationalistic, straining Germany's relations with other great powers, which by the early 20th century had resulted in rival power blocks forming across the continent. Germany's ties with AustriaHungary solidified, while France, Russia, and Britain formed an alliance system of their own. Europe with Germany at its center was once again a powder keg of tensions teetering on the precipice of total war and it would take only a spark to ignite it all.
The assassination of Austria's Archduke France Ferdinand in July 1914 set off a chain reaction among the alliance systems resulting in the outbreak of the First World War. Germany and its allies including AustriaHungary, the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria faced off against the Allied powers of France, Britain, Russia, and later Italy and the United States. The German army initially achieved great successes, nearly reaching Paris in 1914 before being halted on the Mann. In the east, they won crushing victories against Russia. However, the war soon bogged down into trench warfare, especially on the western front. Years of stalemate, mass slaughter, and a British naval blockade gradually sapped Germany's strength.
By November 1918, Germany was exhausted. Over 2 million of its soldiers were dead, and with defeat looming, the Imperial government collapsed with Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicating on the 9th of November and fleeing into exile. An armistice came into effect 2 days later on the 11th of November and the guns fell silent. With Germany in little position to negotiate, the Allied leaders met to dictate the peace terms. The resulting Treaty of Versailles was harsh on Germany, which was forced to accept blame for the war, surrendering neighboring territories to France and Poland, as well as all its overseas colonies and pay enormous war reparations to the victors. The treaty's punitive clauses caused shock and humiliation among Germans across the political spectrum, greatly damaging the newly democratic Germany's legitimacy.
The resulting VHimar Republic was born in 1919, but faced tremendous difficulties from the outset. Racked by political violence from both the right and the left, as well as huge war debts and economic inflation, Germany was on the brink of societal collapse. Despite some stability in the mid1 1920s, bringing political and cultural relief beneath the surface, resentment over Versailles and economic vulnerabilities persisted. In 1929, the Great Depression struck another hammer blow to the nation's recovery. And as coalition governments in the Reichag founded over how to respond, a sense grew that democratic politicians were incapable of decisive action.
It was in this climate of crisis that the radical right-wing of German politics made its breakthrough. The National Socialist German Workers Party led by Adolf Hitler promised to rip up the Versail treaty, fight communism, restore German pride, and end the economic misery. The Nazis exploited modern propaganda techniques and mass rallies to great effect, leading to a surge in electoral support and the appointment of Hitler as chancellor in 1933. Once in power, he moved with ruthless speed to establish a totalitarian dictatorship under Nazi ideology. Hitler's regime was characterized by extreme nationalism, militarism, and racial ideology. The Nazis propagated a hateful anti-semitism that led to Jews who had lived in German lands for centuries becoming demonized and stripped of their citizenship. Many Jews fled the country while they still could, but those who remained would soon face far worse.
Having consolidated power domestically, Hitler turned to an aggressive foreign policy aimed at overturning the post-first world order. In flagrant violation of the Versail Treaty, Germany rearmed itself, but the Western democracies of Britain and France were mired in appeasement and were unwilling to risk starting another war. Hitler formed alliances with fascist Italy and Imperial Japan before launching a series of territorial annexations to unite German-speaking peoples in Austria and Czechoslovakia. Then on the 1st of September 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland. 2 days later, Britain and France declared war on Germany, marking the start of the Second World War.
Within 2 years, by mid 1941, German forces had overrun most of continental Europe from France to the Western Soviet Union and from Scandinavia to North Africa. Hitler's conquests brought millions of Jews, Poles, Slavs, and others under Nazi occupation, and the regime's racial policy escalated from persecution to systematic genocide. By the following year, 1942, however, Germany's progress in the war had begun to reverse. The Allies, now comprising Britain, France, Russia, and the United States, went on the offensive, and over the next 3 years, gradually closed in on Germany from both east and west. By the spring of 1945, much of Germany lay in ruins and was on the brink of imminent defeat. On the 8th of May, Germany surrendered unconditionally, thereby ending the war in Europe.
In the aftermath of the Second World War, Germany ceased to exist as a unified state once again. The Allied powers carved out and occupied different zones across Germany and similarly divided Berlin into four respective sectors. The intention was to administer Germany jointly and eventually determine its future. However, as the Cold War set in, cooperation frayed with the Western Allies merging their zones economically to pursue reconstruction along free market lines, while the Soviets stripped their zone of industrial assets and installed a communist administration. By 1949, it was clear that Germany was split by more than just occupying armies. It was divided by the ideological Iron Curtain that had descended across Europe. The three western zones formally united to create the Federal Republic of Germany, commonly known as West Germany, while the Soviet zone became the German Democratic Republic or East Germany, with a communist government backed by the Soviet Union.
The remaining decades of the 20th century saw the Cold War play out with the two rival German states forming the front line between ideological East and West. The contrast between the two was stark. West Germany became a liberal, democratic and capitalist society, whilst East Germany became a Soviet satellite state with a centrally planned economy governed by a repressive one party dictatorship. This division was iconically encapsulated by the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, which sealed off West Berlin to stop the growing number of people from the east escaping and seeking their freedom.
For nearly four decades, Germany remained divided. But by the 1980s, the GDR's economy was stagnating and dissatisfaction simmered beneath the surface of the seemingly stable communist regime. The crucial year came in 1989 when peaceful mass protests erupted across East Germany, demanding freedom and reform. Overwhelmed, the East German leadership finally relented and on the night of the 9th of November, the government unexpectedly announced that East Germans would be allowed to travel freely. Jubilent crowds swarmed the checkpoints and Berliners from east and west climbed at top the wall and began chipping away at it. The fall of the Berlin wall symbolized the end of the Cold War division in Germany and within less than a year, German reunification was achieved when the five reestablished eastern states joined the Federal Republic to form one sovereign nation.
In the years since then, steady progress has been made in knitting the country back together. Berlin once again became the national capital and the reunified Germany promptly assumed a powerful and leading role on the international stage. Today the country stands as one of the most populous nations on the European continent and is by far its largest economy known for its engineering and automative industries. Germany's long historic journey with all its triumphs and tragedies stands as one of the central threads of Europe's story. a once fragmented land that eventually found unity and a nation that was able to reinvent itself as a peaceful leader in the modern world.
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