🇩🇪 The History of Germany

Germany has existed as a state for less time than the United States. Until 1871 it was a geographical expression, not a country: a heap of three hundred princedoms, bishoprics and free cities held together by a language and by almost nothing else.

This is the story of how that heap became the most populous and the richest country in Europe, how it broke into pieces twice and put itself back together each time.

The forest where Rome stopped

In the year 9 the Germanic chieftain Arminius lured three Roman legions into the Teutoburg Forest and almost nobody came out. Arminius had served with the Romans, held Roman citizenship and equestrian rank — a detail that, from the Roman point of view, made the whole thing considerably worse.

The emperor Augustus is said to have walked about the palace afterwards, banging his head against the doorframes. Rome never came back across the Rhine for good, and the border it left there divided Europe into a Roman and a non-Roman half for the next two thousand years. You can still see it on a map of vineyards.

An empire that was not even holy

At Christmas in the year 800 the pope crowned Charlemagne emperor and thereby restored, on paper, the Western Roman Empire. The Holy Roman Empire as we know it begins rather in 962 with Otto I.

It lasted until 1806, more than eight hundred years, and for all that time it was exactly what Voltaire later said of it: it was not holy, it was not Roman, and it was not an empire. The emperor was elected, the electors took payment for their votes, and individual princes ran their own foreign policy, sometimes against him.

The cities that governed themselves

While the princes squabbled over titles, the German cities built a world of their own. The Hansa, a league of trading towns led by Lübeck, controlled commerce on the Baltic and the North Sea from the thirteenth century. It had its own law, its own fleet and fought its own wars — when the king of Denmark got in its way it beat him and made him confirm its privileges in writing.

The free imperial cities answered to the emperor alone, which in practice meant to almost nobody. In Augsburg the Fugger family lent money to monarchs and largely paid for the election of Emperor Charles V out of its own pocket; it was the most expensive election campaign of the Middle Ages and the Fuggers bought influence for decades to come.

Germany, then, had no capital, but it had dozens of cities each of which considered itself the centre of the world. Something of that has remained: Munich, Hamburg, Cologne and Frankfurt still compete with one another, and not one of them roots for Berlin.

The monk who broke Europe

In 1517 a Wittenberg professor, Martin Luther, wrote ninety-five theses against the sale of indulgences. Whether he really nailed them to a church door is unknown — historians take it for a later legend. What came next is certain.

Gutenberg's printing press had been working not far away for seventy years, and Luther's texts flew across Germany faster than the church could respond. Within two years an academic quarrel about theology had become a revolution that split Europe in half. In Germany it split the individual princedoms too, because the rule took hold that the ruler decided the faith of his subjects. Anyone who disagreed with his prince's faith was expected to move.

Thirty years, after which there was nobody left to tax

In 1618 two governors were thrown out of a window in Prague and out of it grew a war that lasted thirty years and was fought largely on German soil. Swedes, French, Spaniards, Danes and Czechs all fought in it. Germans mostly died in it.

Estimates of the losses vary, but in some regions two thirds of the population disappeared — more from hunger and plague than in battle. The Peace of Westphalia of 1648 settled it by confirming the fragmentation: more than three hundred entities, each practically sovereign. Germany was reliably weak for another two hundred years, which suited most of its neighbours very well.

Prussia steps out of line

Out of that muddle an unexpected candidate emerged in the eighteenth century. Prussia was a poor state built on sand that staked everything on its army — it used to be said of it that it was not a country with an army but an army with a country.

In 1740 Frederick II seized Austrian Silesia, held on to it through three wars and raised Prussia to the rank of a great power. Then in 1806 Napoleon abolished the Holy Roman Empire with a single decree and crushed Prussia at Jena. The humiliation had an unexpected consequence: Prussia reformed itself, abolished serfdom, rebuilt its army and returned to the battlefield seven years later as a victor.

The year freedom did not come off

In 1848 Germany attempted a revolution. An elected parliament sat in the Church of St Paul in Frankfurt, wrote a constitution with basic rights and offered the imperial crown to the king of Prussia.

He refused it. He would not take a crown from deputies, he said; he wanted it from monarchs or not at all. The revolution failed and many of those who had taken part left for America. Unification therefore came twenty years later, was carried out by somebody else entirely, and was carried out in an entirely different way.

By iron and blood

Otto von Bismarck became prime minister of Prussia in 1862 and promptly informed the deputies that the great questions of the day would be decided not by speeches and majority votes but by iron and blood. He kept his word. With three short wars — against Denmark, Austria and France — he united Germany under Prussian leadership and manoeuvred Austria out of it.

The empire was proclaimed on 18 January 1871 in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. That is, in a foreign country, in the palace of a defeated enemy. The French did not forget, and forty-eight years later they chose precisely the same hall for the signing of a peace treaty.

The emperor for whom Germany was too small

Bismarck stayed in power until 1890, when the young Wilhelm II dismissed him. The new emperor wanted a place in the sun for Germany: a fleet, colonies and respect. What he chiefly managed was to make enemies on every side.

The First World War cost Germany two million dead, its emperor and its monarchy. The Treaty of Versailles then loaded it with reparations and explicit guilt for the war — and to that was added the legend of the stab in the back, according to which the army had not lost at the front but had been betrayed at home. It was not true and millions of people believed it.

Weimar: a democracy nobody wanted

The Weimar Republic was on paper one of the most modern democracies in the world. But it had too many enemies and too few friends.

In 1923 the mark collapsed so completely that by the autumn a loaf of bread cost hundreds of billions. People burned banknotes for heat because it came cheaper than coal, and wages were paid twice a day so that they could be spent in time. The currency was saved; confidence was not. When the world economic crisis arrived in 1929, the republic had six million unemployed and almost nobody willing to defend it.

Twelve years

On 30 January 1933 President Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler chancellor, convinced that the conservatives in the cabinet would keep him in check. Within six months the other parties, the trade unions and the free press had been abolished.

What followed is the darkest chapter in European history. The Second World War cost around seventy million lives, and German policy included the industrially organised murder of roughly six million Jews and hundreds of thousands of Roma, disabled people, Soviet prisoners of war and political opponents. Germany began the war and lost it so thoroughly that in May 1945 it ceased for a time to exist even as a state.

Zero hour

In German, 1945 is called the zero hour. Cities in ruins, twelve million expelled and displaced Germans on the roads, no government and no currency anybody believed in.

Within four years there were two states: the Federal Republic in the west and the GDR in the east. The West got the Marshall Plan, a currency reform and an economics minister, Ludwig Erhard, who abolished rationing before the occupation authorities could stop him — and then explained to them that he had been permitted to change prices, not orders. The economic miracle followed: by 1960 the West had virtually full employment and was inviting workers in from abroad.

The East meanwhile discovered that its people were leaving. By 1961 almost three million had gone to the West, and because they were mostly young and educated, the GDR built a wall.

The wall falls over a badly read piece of paper

On 9 November 1989 the East German official Günter Schabowski was to announce new travel rules at a press conference. He had been handed the paper just beforehand, had not managed to read it, and when a journalist asked from when the rules applied he answered that as far as he knew, immediately and without delay. And so, thanks to Gorbachev, to the demonstrations, to public pressure and to the general collapse of the GDR, that mistake set off the fall of the Iron Curtain.

Television broadcast it, people came to the crossing points, and the border guards, who had received no such order, opened the barriers after a few hours. The wall did not fall by decision or by assault. It fell by misunderstanding.

On 3 October 1990 Germany was one again.

What unification cost

It looked like a happy ending and it was the most expensive removal in European history. The eastern mark was exchanged for the western one at a rate that was politically generous and economically lethal: East German factories became uncompetitive overnight and most of them closed. A solidarity surcharge was introduced and was paid for more than thirty years.

Two million people left the east for work, mostly young and mostly women, and some towns lost a third of their inhabitants. On the other hand, within twenty years almost everything visible had been repaired, and Leipzig and Dresden are today among the handsomest cities in the country.

The rest is history that has not finished. Germany is the largest economy in Europe; in 2015 it took in more than a million refugees; after 2022 it had to stop buying Russian gas within a single winter — and has been working out ever since whether a country built on cheap energy and the export of machines can stand on anything else.

Today more than eighty-three million people live in Germany. Its constitution opens with a sentence saying that human dignity is inviolable — a sentence the country wrote for itself in 1949 with a very particular experience fresh in mind.