GERMANY
History

Germany was originally settled by numerous tribes and later occupied by the Roman legions as far as the line of the Rhine and the Danube.

The country’s history, however, really begins in 800AD, when various Germanic peoples--Franks, Frisians, Saxons, Thuringians, Franconians, Swabians and Bavarians--came together under the rule of Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne, who was crowned in Rome by the Pope, thus legally assuming jurisdiction in the former areas of Gaul and Germania.

Feudalism produced the empire’s disintegration into regional duchies and kingdoms, and German history throughout the centuries was to be marked by the gradual decline of the concept of the Holy Roman Empire.

In the early Middle Ages, merchants of more than 200 German towns, most notably Hamburg, Bremen, and Lubeck, formed the Hanseatic League to promote mercantile interests. Their influence on commerce was widespread and is still visible in the old quarters of these cities. The founding of Heidelberg University, the oldest in Germany, and the invention of movable type by Gutenberg heralded the advent of Humanism.

In 1517 Martin Luther nailed his “theses,” denouncing the traffic in indulgences, to the church door in Wittenberg: this caused a considerable scandal throughout Germany and gave rise to the Protestant Reformation.

Growing contrasts between Catholics and Protestants resulted in the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), which ended as a European conflict with large-scale military operations, more connected with balance of power than with religion. The campaigns were fought for the most part in Germany; the countryside was laid waste, major towns were besieged and sacked and the economy was ruined.

The war ended with the Peace of Westphalia, which favored the development of Prussia, gave Alsace to France, and granted independence to the Netherlands and Switzerland.

By the time Frederick II the Great ascended the throne in 1740, Prussia was already a flourishing state. Under his direction, the building of theaters, palaces, and monuments transformed Berlin into a cultural center that attracted the world’s aristocracy. Within a few years Prussia became, after Austria, the second most powerful state in the Empire.

In the early 19th century Prussia and the other German states, as well as most of Europe, became part of Napoleon Bonaparte’s French Empire. The Congress of Vienna, which convened in 1814 after Napoleon’s defeat, instituted a German Confederation of thirty-five autonomous states and free towns. In 1871 Otto von Bismarck, the “Iron Chancellor,” molded these small states into a great empire which crashed with Germany’s defeat in World War I.

Resentment over the severe terms of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, as well as concerns over the economic recession led to the rise of the Nazi Party. In 1933 Adolf Hitler took complete control of the government and pursued an aggressive imperialistic policy that resulted in the Second World War.
 

After its defeat in 1945, Germany was divided into four zones of occupation: American, English, French, and Russian. The dissension that arose among these powers led to the division of the countries into German Federal Republic, with Bonn as capital, and German Democratic Republic, under Soviet influence.

During the 1950s and 60s West Germany undertook an astounding economic recovery, thanks also to U.S. aid. Meanwhile, the contrast with East Germany became increasingly apparent, as a consequence of the latter’s highly centralized and oppressive Communist government. In 1961 the Berlin Wall was erected marking the end of free movement between East and West Germany.

In the late 1980s reforms in neighboring Poland and the former Soviet Union’s glasnost policy paved the way for the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989), and for the merging of the two parts of the country into the Federal Republic of Germany, with Berlin as its capital.

Nowadays Germany has risen to the status of leading economic power and is playing a fundamental role in the development of the European Union.