Germany History

Germany is a relatively recent country, since for most of its history it was made up of a number of city-states and independent principalities.

First occupied by the Roman Empire, then by the Holy Roman Empire, it was the Austrian Habsburgers that finally took over. It might be because of this particular history that a lot of Germans still have got a strong regional sense of identity.
Martin Luther brought the Protestant Reformation in 1517, which was also a cause for the start of the Thirty Years’ War.

Germany was something like the battlefield of Europe during this time. It was not before the end of the Napoleonic War and the rise of the Kingdom of Prussia that the country regained stability. It was the Prussian ‘Iron Chancellor’ Otto v. Bismarck that united Germany’s independent states so that, for the first time, the country was one.
Tensions with Russia, England and France were responsible for World War One (WW1).

The Weimar Republic was created after the defeat of Germany, but the impossible reparation payments weakened the new government, causing economic depression and hyperinflation, giving way to radical groups like Adolf Hitler’s National Socialists (Nazis).
By 1933 Hitler had become chancellor. He provoked war with Britain and France by attacking Poland in 1939. During WW2 an estimated 6 million Jews and another million other people were killed.

After WW2, Germany was divided into four occupation zones with three of them forming the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) in the west of the country. In the other zone (occupied by the Soviets) the communist German Democratic Republic (GDR) was founded.
The GDR built a wall around West Berlin in 1961 (Berliner Mauer), considering of 40 years of capitalist and socialist co-existence full of tensions.

The Peaceful Revolution caused the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the reunification of Germany followed in 1990. This was cause for great celebration at the time amongst the masses in both east and west Germany, but has since led to tensions and political strife due to the huge cost of unification which has been borne largely by west German tax-payers.

In 2005 Angela Merkel became Germany’s 1st female Chancellor.

Back to All European Country Guides