A Consise History of Germany
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IMPORTANT DATES
AD 9
Germanic warriors decisively defeated Roman forces at the Battle of Teutoburg Forest.
The Frankish king Clovis overran the Roman province of Gaul. Clovis introduced features of Roman life into western Germany.
The Treaty of Verdun divided Charlemagnes empire into three kingdoms. The German kingdom soon divided into five duchies.
Otto I was crowned Holy Roman emperor in Aachen.
1075
A dispute between Henry IV and Pope Gregory VII marked the beginning of a series of civil wars contesting church power.
1300s
The Hanseatic League was the supreme commercial and military power in northern Germany.
1517
Martin Luther started the Protestant Reformation.
1555
The Peace of Augsburg recognized the right of princes to choose Lutheranism or Catholicism for their lands.
1648
The Peace of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years War.
1740
Frederick the Great became king of Prussia and began building Prussia into a great power.
1806
The Holy Roman Empire came to an end with the establishment of the Confederation of the Rhine.
1815
The German Confederation was formed at the Congress of Vienna.
1848
Revolutions swept across Germany. The first German national assembly met at Frankfurt in the hopes of creating a more united country.
1871
Prussian prime minister Otto von Bismarck realized his dream of a united Germany as the German Empire was founded.
1918-1919
Germany was forced to accept harsh terms under the Treaty of Versailles that brought an end to World War I. The Weimar Republic was founded.
1933
Adolf Hitler and the Nazis assumed power.
1939
Germany invaded Poland, starting World War II.
1945
Allied armies occupied Germany and divided it into four zones of occupation. Nazi war criminals were tried at NДјrnberg.
1949
Germany was divided into East Germany and West Germany. Berlin, in East Germany, was also divided between the two countries.
1955
East Germany and West Germany became sovereign states. East Germany joined the Warsaw Pact, an Eastern European military alliance. West Germany became a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a Western military alliance.
1961
The East German government built the Berlin Wall.
1989
The Communist government in East Germany collapsed, and the Berlin Wall was dismantled. Thousands of East Germans emigrated to West Germany.
1990
Germany was formally reunified under the government of the former West Germany.
1994
In a close election, Chancellor Helmut Kohl was returned to power for a fourth consecutive term.
GENERAL INFORMATION
Official Name
Bundesrepublik Deutschland
(Federal Republic of Germany)
Capital
Berlin, with some government offices remaining in the former West German capital of Bonn
Flag
The flag of the former West Germany was retained when Germany was reunified in 1990. The colors were taken from the uniforms of German volunteers during the Napoleonic Wars, and have flown intermittently over Germany since 1848. The black represents gunpowder, the red represents blood, and the gold represents fire.
Anthem
Third verse of “Deutschlandlied”
(“Song of Germany”)
Origins of the Germans
Germany was inhabited from earliest times, but it took many millennia of migration, conquest, and intermingling to produce the Germans.
Stone Age Peoples
During the Old Stone Age, the German forests were thinly populated by wandering bands of hunters and gatherers. They belonged to the earliest forms of Homo sapiens, such as Heidelberg man, who lived about 400,000 years ago. Somewhat later more advanced forms of Homo sapiens appeared, as exemplified by skeletal finds near Steinheim, some 300,000 years old, and near Ehringsdorf, from about 100,000 years ago. Another human type was the Neandertal, found near DДјsseldorf, who lived about 100,000 years ago. The most recent type, which appeared by 40,000 BC, was the Cro-Magnon, a member of Homo sapiens sapiens, essentially of the same group as modern Europeans.
During the New Stone Age, the indigenous hunters encountered farming peoples from the more advanced southwest Asia, who were migrating up the Danube Valley into central Germany about 4500 BC. These populations mixed and settled in villages to raise crops and breed livestock. Villagers of this Danubian culture lived with their animals in large, gabled wooden houses, made pottery, and traded with Mediterranean peoples for fine stone and flint axes and shells. As their hand-hoed fields wore out, they moved on, often returning years later.
Bronze Age Peoples
The Bronze Age began in central Germany, Bohemia, and Austria in about 2500 BC with the working of copper and