Sixteen states make Europe's most populous EU member
The Federal Republic of Germany stretches from Baltic and North Sea shores to the Alps, packing over 83 million people across sixteen states—the European Union's largest population. Romans called the lands Germania; Prussia's 1871 empire began the modern nation-state path through Weimar, Nazi catastrophe, division, and reunification.
The name Germany goes back to Latin Germania, which Julius Caesar applied to the peoples east of the Rhine; Deutschland comes from Old High German diutisc, of the people, first used for the vernacular tongue. Humans were here at least 600,000 years ago, and the first Neanderthal fossil was found in the Neander Valley. Caves in the Swabian Jura yielded 42,000-year-old flutes, the oldest musical instruments known, along with the Lion-man and the Venus of Hohle Fels.
Celtic peoples of the La Tène culture held the south until Germanic tribes from Scandinavia and the north absorbed them. Augustus pushed Rome toward the Elbe, but in 9 AD Arminius destroyed three legions in the Teutoburg Forest, ending hopes of conquest. After Charlemagne's empire was split in 843, East Francia, reaching from the Rhine to the Elbe, grew into the Kingdom of Germany. Hanseatic towns prospered, Germans settled eastward, and the Great Famine of 1315 and the Black Death of 1348–50 cut the population.
Gutenberg's movable type and Luther's 1517 Reformation reshaped Europe, and the 1555 Peace of Augsburg let each ruler choose his realm's faith. The Habsburgs held the imperial crown from 1438 to 1740, after which rivalry with Prussia dominated. Following Napoleon, the Congress of Vienna created a loose confederation of 39 states. Bismarck, appointed in 1862, won wars against Denmark, Austria and France, and the princes proclaimed the empire in 1871.
About two million German soldiers died in the First World War; Wilhelm II abdicated in November 1918, Philipp Scheidemann proclaimed a republic, and the Versailles treaty stripped away some 13 percent of the country's European territory. Friedrich Ebert signed the Weimar Constitution in August 1919, but the Ruhr occupation and hyperinflation soon followed. Today the country also holds the world's third-highest tally of UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
Source: Germany
