The history of Germany

For most of its history Germany was not a single state but a patchwork of kingdoms, duchies, bishoprics and free cities, held together loosely within the Holy Roman Empire for nearly a thousand years. German lands were the birthplace of the Protestant Reformation and the battlefield of the Thirty Years' War, and from the eighteenth century the rise of Prussia set the stage for unification under Bismarck in 1871. The new empire became an industrial and military giant, but defeat in the First World War, the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the Nazi dictatorship led to the Second World War and the Holocaust, the murder of six million Jews. Divided after 1945 between a democratic West and a communist East, Germany was reunified in 1990 and is today the most populous country and largest economy in the European Union.

Some of the most important finds in human evolution come from German soil. A jawbone found at Mauer near Heidelberg belonged to an early human who lived around 600,000 years ago, and wooden spears from Schöningen in Lower Saxony, some 200,000 years old by recent dating, are among the oldest complete hunting weapons ever found. The Neanderthals take their name from the Neander valley near Düsseldorf, where their bones were first identified in 1856. Modern humans arrived over 40,000 years ago, and in caves of the Swabian Jura they carved some of the oldest figurative art in the world, including the Lion Man, a figure with a human body and a lion's head, and the Venus of Hohle Fels, along with the earliest known musical instruments, flutes made of bird bone and mammoth ivory.

Farming arrived around 5500 BCE with the Linear Pottery culture, whose people built long timber houses across central Europe. The Nebra sky disc, a bronze plate inlaid with gold symbols of the sun, moon and stars, made around 1600 BCE, is one of the most remarkable objects of the European Bronze Age. In the first millennium BCE the south was home to Celtic peoples of the Hallstatt and La Tène cultures, who built fortified hill towns such as the Heuneburg on the Danube, while Germanic-speaking peoples spread from the north and gradually displaced or absorbed them.

Roman writers grouped the peoples east of the Rhine under the name Germani. Julius Caesar fought them in the 50s BCE and twice bridged the Rhine. Under Augustus, Roman armies pushed towards the Elbe, but in 9 CE a coalition led by Arminius, a chieftain of the Cherusci who had served in the Roman army, ambushed and destroyed three legions under Publius Quinctilius Varus in the Teutoburg Forest. Rome abandoned plans for a province reaching to the Elbe.

The Rhine and the Danube became the frontier of the Roman Empire, completed in the southwest by a fortified line, the limes. Roman cities grew along the rivers: Cologne, Mainz, Augsburg, Regensburg and Trier, which in the fourth century served as an imperial residence. Across the frontier, Rome traded and fought with Germanic peoples who formed larger confederations over time, among them the Alemanni, Franks, Saxons, Thuringians and later the Bavarians. In the fifth century, as the western empire fell, the Franks expanded across the Rhine into Gaul.

The Frankish king Clovis defeated the Alemanni around 496, and his Merovingian successors brought Thuringia and Bavaria under Frankish rule. Christianity spread from the Rhineland and through Irish and Anglo-Saxon missionaries, above all Boniface, who organised the church in central Germany and was killed in Frisia in 754. Charlemagne conquered the pagan Saxons in a series of wars from 772 to 804, marked by mass executions and forced conversions, and made Aachen the centre of the Carolingian Empire. He was crowned emperor in Rome in 800.

When Charlemagne's grandsons divided the empire by the Treaty of Verdun in 843, Louis the German received East Francia, the lands east of the Rhine. Its people spoke Germanic dialects, while those of West Francia increasingly spoke early French, and the two kingdoms drifted apart. After the last East Frankish Carolingian died in 911, the dukes chose their own kings, Conrad I and then, in 919, Henry the Fowler, Duke of Saxony.

Henry's son Otto I defeated the Magyars at the Lechfeld near Augsburg in 955, ending their raids, and was crowned emperor in Rome in 962. The empire he founded, later called the Holy Roman Empire, linked the German crown with Italy and Burgundy and with a claim to universal Christian leadership. Its emperors were elected by the great princes rather than inheriting the throne automatically, and they constantly travelled between royal palaces rather than ruling from a single capital.

The conflict between emperor and papacy known as the Investiture Controversy weakened imperial power. In 1077 Henry IV stood as a penitent in the snow at Canossa to win the forgiveness of Pope Gregory VII, and the Concordat of Worms of 1122 brought a compromise. The Hohenstaufen emperors, notably Frederick Barbarossa, who drowned in Anatolia on the Third Crusade in 1190, and his grandson Frederick II, spent much of their energy in Italy, while the German princes grew more independent.

In the High Middle Ages German-speaking settlers moved east into lands inhabited by Slavic and Baltic peoples, founding towns and villages from Brandenburg to Silesia. The crusading Teutonic Order conquered the pagan Prussians from the 1230s and founded its own state on the Baltic. Trading towns led by Lübeck and Hamburg formed the Hanseatic League, which dominated commerce in the North Sea and the Baltic and fought a successful war against Denmark in 1367 to 1370. Jewish communities, established in the Rhineland since Roman times, suffered massacres during the First Crusade in 1096 and again during the Black Death of 1347 to 1351, when Jews were falsely blamed for the plague. The Golden Bull issued by Charles IV in 1356 fixed the election of the king by seven prince-electors, and from 1438 the crown passed almost continuously to the Austrian house of Habsburg.

Around 1450 Johannes Gutenberg developed printing with movable metal type in Mainz, and printed books and pamphlets spread rapidly. In 1517 Martin Luther, a monk and professor at Wittenberg, published his Ninety-five Theses against the sale of indulgences. The Protestant Reformation that followed won the support of many princes and cities, and Luther's translation of the Bible shaped the modern German language. The emperor Charles V declared Luther an outlaw at the Diet of Worms in 1521 but could not suppress the movement. The Peasants' War of 1524 and 1525, the largest popular rising in Europe before the French Revolution, was crushed with perhaps 100,000 dead. The Peace of Augsburg in 1555 allowed each prince to choose whether his territory would be Lutheran or Catholic.

The settlement broke down in the Thirty Years' War, which began with a Protestant revolt in Bohemia in 1618 and drew in Denmark, Sweden under Gustavus Adolphus, and France. Armies lived off the land, spreading plunder, famine and disease, and in some regions more than half the population was lost. The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 recognised Calvinism alongside Lutheranism and Catholicism and confirmed the near-sovereignty of around 300 territories, leaving the emperor with limited authority outside his own Habsburg lands.

Among the many German states, Brandenburg, ruled by the Hohenzollern dynasty from Berlin, rose to prominence. Its rulers also held the Duchy of Prussia, the former lands of the Teutonic Order, and in 1701 the elector crowned himself king in Prussia. The Kingdom of Prussia built an efficient bureaucracy and a large army relative to its population. Frederick the Great, king from 1740 to 1786, seized Silesia from Maria Theresa of Austria in 1740 and held it through the Seven Years' War, making Prussia a great power and the rival of the Habsburg Monarchy for leadership in Germany. With Russia and Austria, Prussia partitioned Poland in 1772, 1793 and 1795.

Political division did not prevent a flowering of culture and thought. The music of Johann Sebastian Bach, who worked in Leipzig, the philosophy of Leibniz and later Immanuel Kant in Königsberg, and the writing of Goethe and Schiller in Weimar made German-speaking lands a centre of European culture, followed by Beethoven, born in Bonn in 1770.

The wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon swept away the old order. France annexed the left bank of the Rhine, and in 1803 most of the church states and free cities were absorbed by larger neighbours. In 1806 Napoleon formed the Confederation of the Rhine from the southern and western states, and Francis II dissolved the Holy Roman Empire. Prussia was crushed at Jena and Auerstedt the same year and then carried out sweeping reforms, freeing the serfs and modernising its army. The coalition armies defeated Napoleon at the Battle of Leipzig in 1813, during the Napoleonic Wars.

The Congress of Vienna in 1815 created the German Confederation, a loose league of 39 states under Austrian presidency, in which Metternich suppressed liberal and national movements. Students and liberals demanded a united, constitutional Germany. The Zollverein, a customs union led by Prussia, took effect in 1834, and the first German railway opened between Nuremberg and Fürth in 1835. In the revolutions of 1848 an elected national assembly met in Frankfurt and drafted a constitution, but King Frederick William IV of Prussia refused the imperial crown it offered him in 1849, and the revolution was suppressed. In the same years Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published the Communist Manifesto.

Otto von Bismarck, Prussian minister-president from 1862, achieved unification by war. Prussia defeated Denmark in 1864 and Austria in 1866, excluding Austria from Germany, and then France in 1870 and 1871. On 18 January 1871 the German Empire was proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, with the king of Prussia as Emperor Wilhelm I. The unification of Germany created a federal empire dominated by Prussia, with a parliament, the Reichstag, elected by universal male suffrage but with real power held by the emperor and his chancellor.

Germany industrialised rapidly, becoming a leader in steel, chemicals and electrical engineering, and its cities, especially Berlin, grew enormously. Bismarck fought the Catholic Church in the Kulturkampf and banned socialist organisations, but also introduced the world's first national systems of health, accident and old-age insurance in the 1880s. Germany joined the Scramble for Africa, hosting the Berlin Conference of 1884 and 1885 and acquiring colonies in Namibia, Cameroon, Togo, Tanzania and the Pacific. In South West Africa, German forces responded to a Herero uprising with a campaign of extermination: between 1904 and 1908 an estimated 40,000 to 80,000 Herero and about 10,000 Nama were killed or died in the desert and in concentration camps, the first genocide of the twentieth century. Germany acknowledged it as genocide in 2015, and in 2021 agreed to pay 1.1 billion euros in development aid to Namibia. In German East Africa the suppression of the Maji Maji rising from 1905 also caused enormous loss of life.

Wilhelm II, emperor from 1888, dismissed Bismarck in 1890 and pursued a more aggressive world policy, including a naval build-up that alarmed Britain. In 1914 Germany backed Austria-Hungary after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and declared war on Russia and France, invading neutral Belgium. In the First World War about two million German soldiers died, and the Allied blockade caused severe hunger at home. As defeat approached in November 1918, sailors mutinied, revolution spread, the emperor abdicated on 9 November and a republic was proclaimed.

The new republic adopted a democratic constitution at Weimar in 1919, giving women the vote. It had to accept the Treaty of Versailles, which took Alsace-Lorraine, large areas in the east and all the colonies, limited the army and imposed reparations. Many Germans, especially nationalists, blamed the republic for the defeat, spreading the myth that the army had been betrayed at home. The early years brought uprisings from left and right, the murder of the communist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in 1919 and of several democratic politicians. In 1923 France and Belgium occupied the Ruhr, and the currency collapsed in hyperinflation, while in Munich Adolf Hitler attempted a coup.

A new currency and the Dawes Plan of 1924 stabilised the economy, and the mid-1920s saw a cultural boom in cinema, theatre, science and the Bauhaus school of design. The Great Depression ended this period: by 1932 about six million Germans were unemployed, and voters turned to the Nazis and Communists. Governments ruled by emergency decree, and on 30 January 1933 President Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor.

Within months Nazi Germany became a one-party dictatorship. Opponents were sent to concentration camps, trade unions and other parties were banned, and the press and culture were brought under control. Jews were driven out of public life, deprived of citizenship by the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 and attacked in the pogrom of 9 and 10 November 1938, known as Kristallnacht. Rearmament reduced unemployment. Germany annexed Austria in March 1938 and the Sudetenland in September 1938, and occupied the rest of the Czech lands in March 1939.

The invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 began the Second World War in Europe. Germany conquered much of the continent and in June 1941 invaded the Soviet Union in a war of annihilation in which millions of Soviet prisoners of war and civilians died. In the Holocaust, the Nazi regime and its collaborators murdered about six million Jews, in mass shootings and in extermination camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka in occupied Poland. Roma and Sinti, disabled people, Poles and other groups were also murdered in large numbers. The tide turned at Stalingrad in the winter of 1942 and 1943, an attempt by army officers to kill Hitler on 20 July 1944 failed, and Allied bombing destroyed much of the German cities. Hitler killed himself in Berlin on 30 April 1945, and Germany surrendered unconditionally on 8 May 1945.

The victorious Allies divided Germany and Berlin into four occupation zones. At Potsdam they agreed to move Poland's border west to the Oder and Neisse rivers, and between 12 and 14 million Germans fled or were expelled from the eastern territories and from countries such as Czechoslovakia, with many deaths. Cities such as Breslau, today Wrocław, and Danzig, today Gdańsk, became Polish, and Königsberg became Soviet Kaliningrad. Leading Nazis were tried at Nuremberg in 1945 and 1946.

As the Cold War began, the western zones received a new currency in 1948, and the Soviet Union blockaded West Berlin, which was supplied by an Allied airlift for nearly a year. In 1949 the western zones became the Federal Republic of Germany, with its capital at Bonn and the Basic Law as its constitution, and the Soviet zone became the German Democratic Republic, a one-party communist state allied with the Soviet Union. Under Konrad Adenauer, West Germany experienced an economic miracle, joined NATO in 1955 and was a founding member of the European Economic Community in 1957, its recovery helped by reconciliation with France and by millions of guest workers from southern Europe and Turkey. East Germany crushed a workers' uprising on 17 June 1953 with Soviet tanks. About 3.5 million East Germans had left for the West by 1961, when the regime sealed the border and began building the Berlin Wall on 13 August. Between 136 and more than 200 people were killed at the Wall in the following decades.

In the West, the student movement of 1968 forced a reckoning with the Nazi past, and the far-left Red Army Faction carried out a campaign of terror in the 1970s. Chancellor Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik sought better relations with the East, symbolised by his kneeling at the memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto in 1970, and the two German states recognised each other in the Basic Treaty of 1972. In the East, the secret police, the Stasi, built one of the most extensive surveillance systems in history.

The reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union and the opening of Hungary's border in 1989 set off an exodus of East Germans and mass demonstrations, above all in Leipzig. On 9 November 1989 the East German authorities announced that citizens could travel to the West, and crowds opened the Berlin Wall, one of the defining moments of the revolutions of 1989. Free elections in March 1990 were followed by monetary union in July and the Two Plus Four Treaty with the four wartime Allies, and on 3 October 1990 the five re-established eastern states joined the Federal Republic under Chancellor Helmut Kohl.

Reunification was expensive and painful for many easterners, whose state-run industries were privatised or closed, and unemployment in the east stayed high for years. In 1991 parliament voted to move the capital back to Berlin, where the Bundestag began sitting in the rebuilt Reichstag in 1999. Germany helped found the European Union through the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 and adopted the euro in 1999. Its soldiers took part in combat for the first time since 1945 in the Kosovo war of 1999 and later served in Afghanistan.

Angela Merkel, the first woman to hold the office, was chancellor from 2005 to 2021, steering Germany through the financial crisis of 2008 and the eurozone debt crisis. In 2015 Germany took in over a million refugees and migrants, many fleeing the war in Syria, a decision that divided the country and contributed to the rise of the right-wing Alternative for Germany, which entered the Bundestag in 2017.

Olaf Scholz of the Social Democrats became chancellor in 2021. After Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, his government announced a sharp increase in military spending, including a special fund of 100 billion euros and Germany's last nuclear power plants were shut down in 2023. Scholz's coalition collapsed in November 2024 when he dismissed the Free Democrat finance minister, Christian Lindner. In the early federal election of 23 February 2025 the Christian Democrats and their Bavarian sister party won 28.5 percent of the vote and the Alternative for Germany came second with 20.8 percent. On 6 May 2025 Friedrich Merz was elected chancellor, at the head of a coalition with the Social Democrats, after failing to win a majority in a first round of voting that morning. With a population of over 83 million, Germany remains the most populous member of the European Union and its largest economy.