National Flag
Full country name: Federal Republic of Germany (Bundesrepublik Deutschland)
Area: 137,846 sq mi (357,021 sq km)
Population: 82,398,326
Capital: Berlin
People: German 91.5%, Turkish 2.4%, Italians 0.7%, Greeks 0.4%, Poles
0.4%, other 4.6%.
Languages: German.
Religion: Protestant 38%, Roman Catholic 34%, Muslim 1.7%, Unaffiliated
or other 26.3% .
Government: federal republic
President: Johannes Rau (1999)
GDP per head: US$2.174 trillion (2001 est.)
Annual growth: 0.6% (2001 est.)
Inflation: 2.4% (2001)
Major industries: among the world's largest and most technologically
advanced producers of iron, steel, coal, cement, chemicals, machinery, vehicles,
machine tools, electronics, food and beverages; shipbuilding; textiles
Major trading partners: EU, U.S., Japan
The Celts are believed to have been the first inhabitants of Germany. They were followed by German tribes at the end of the 2nd century B.C. German invasions destroyed the declining Roman Empire in the 4th and 5th centuries A.D. One of the tribes, the Franks, attained supremacy in western Europe under Charlemagne, who was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 800. By the Treaty of Verdun (843), Charlemagne's lands east of the Rhine were ceded to the German Prince Louis. Additional territory acquired by the Treaty of Mersen (870) gave Germany approximately the area it maintained throughout the Middle Ages. For several centuries after Otto the Great was crowned king in 936, German rulers were also usually heads of the Holy Roman Empire.
By the 14th century, the Holy Roman Empire was little more than a loose federation of the German princes who elected the Holy Roman emperor. In 1438, Albert of Hapsburg became emperor, and for the next several centuries the Hapsburg line ruled the Holy Roman Empire until its decline in 1806. Relations between state and church were changed by the Reformation, which began with Martin Luther's 95 theses, and came to a head in 1547, when Charles V scattered the forces of the Protestant League at Mühlberg. The Counter Reformation followed. A dispute over the succession to the Bohemian throne brought on the Thirty Years' War (1618–48), which devastated Germany and left the empire divided into hundreds of small principalities virtually independent of the emperor.
Meanwhile, Prussia was developing into a state of considerable strength. Frederick the Great (1740–86) reorganized the Prussian army and defeated Maria Theresa of Austria in a struggle over Silesia. After the defeat of Napoléon at Waterloo (1815), the struggle between Austria and Prussia for supremacy in Germany continued, reaching its climax in the defeat of Austria in the Seven Weeks' War (1866) and the formation of the Prussian-dominated North German Confederation (1867). The architect of this new German unity was Otto von Bismarck, a conservative, monarchist, and militaristic Prussian prime minister. He unified all of Germany in a series of three wars against Denmark (1864), Austria (1866), and France (1870–71). On Jan. 18, 1871, King Wilhelm I of Prussia was proclaimed German emperor in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. The North German Confederation, created in 1867, was abolished, and the Second German Reich, consisting of the North and South German states, was born. With a powerful army, an efficient bureaucracy, and a loyal bourgeoisie, Chancellor Bismarck consolidated a powerful centralized state.
Wilhelm II dismissed Bismarck in 1890 and embarked upon a “New Course,” stressing an intensified colonialism and a powerful navy. His chaotic foreign policy culminated in the diplomatic isolation of Germany and the disastrous defeat in World War I (1914–18). The Second German Empire collapsed following the defeat of the German armies in 1918, the naval mutiny at Kiel, and the flight of the kaiser to the Netherlands. The Social Democrats, led by Friedrich Ebert and Philipp Scheidemann, crushed the Communists and established a moderate state, known as the Weimar Republic, with Ebert as president. President Ebert died on Feb. 28, 1925, and on April 26, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg was elected president. The mass of Germans regarded the Weimar Republic as a child of defeat, imposed upon a Germany whose legitimate aspirations to world leadership had been thwarted by a world conspiracy. Added to this were a crippling currency debacle, a tremendous burden of reparations, and acute economic distress.
Adolf Hitler, an Austrian war veteran and a fanatical nationalist, fanned discontent by promising a Greater Germany, abrogation of the Treaty of Versailles, restoration of Germany's lost colonies, and the destruction of the Jews, whom he scapegoated as the reason for Germany's downfall and depressed economy. When the Social Democrats and the Communists refused to combine against the Nazi threat, President von Hindenburg made Hitler the chancellor on Jan. 30, 1933. With the death of von Hindenburg on Aug. 2, 1934, Hitler repudiated the Treaty of Versailles and began full-scale rearmament. In 1935, he withdrew Germany from the League of Nations, and the next year he reoccupied the Rhineland and signed the Anti-Comintern pact with Japan, at the same time strengthening relations with Italy. Austria was annexed in March 1938. By the Munich agreement in Sept. 1938, he gained the Czech Sudetenland, and in violation of this agreement he completed the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in March 1939. His invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, precipitated World War II.
Hitler established death camps to carry out “the final solution to the Jewish question.” By the end of the war, Hitler's Holocaust had killed 6 million Jews, as well as Gypsies, homosexuals, Communists, the handicapped, and others not fitting the Aryan ideal. After some dazzling initial successes in 1939–42, Germany surrendered unconditionally to Allied and Soviet military commanders on May 8, 1945. On June 5 the four-nation Allied Control Council became the de facto government of Germany.
(For details of World War II and of the Holocaust, see Headline History, World War II.)
At the Berlin (or Potsdam) Conference (July 17–Aug. 2, 1945) President Truman, Premier Stalin, and Prime Minister Clement Attlee of Britain set forth the guiding principles of the Allied Control Council: Germany's complete disarmament and demilitarization, destruction of its war potential, rigid control of industry, and decentralization of the political and economic structure. Pending final determination of territorial questions at a peace conference, the three victors agreed to the ultimate transfer of the city of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad) and its adjacent area to the USSR and to the administration by Poland of former German territories lying generally east of the Oder-Neisse Line. For purposes of control, Germany was divided into four national occupation zones.
The Western powers were unable to agree with the USSR on any fundamental issues. Work of the Allied Control Council was hamstrung by repeated Soviet vetoes; and finally, on March 20, 1948, Russia walked out of the Council. Meanwhile, the U.S. and Britain had taken steps to merge their zones economically (Bizone); on May 31, 1948, the U.S., Britain, France, and the Benelux countries agreed to set up a German state comprising the three Western zones. The USSR reacted by clamping a blockade on all ground communications between the Western zones and West Berlin, an enclave in the Soviet zone. The Western Allies countered by organizing a gigantic airlift to fly supplies into the beleaguered city. The USSR was finally forced to lift the blockade on May 12, 1949.
The Federal Republic of Germany was proclaimed on May 23, 1949, with its capital at Bonn. In free elections, West German voters gave a majority in the Constituent Assembly to the Christian Democrats, with the Social Democrats largely making up the opposition. Konrad Adenauer became chancellor, and Theodor Heuss of the Free Democrats was elected first president.
The East German states adopted a more centralized constitution for the Democratic Republic of Germany, put into effect on Oct. 7, 1949. The USSR thereupon dissolved its occupation zone but Soviet troops remained. The Western Allies declared that the East German Republic was a Soviet creation undertaken without self-determination and refused to recognize it. Soviet forces created a state controlled by the secret police with a single party, the Socialist Unity (Communist) Party.
Agreements in Paris in 1954 giving the Federal Republic full independence and complete sovereignty came into force on May 5, 1955. Under the agreement, West Germany and Italy became members of the Brussels treaty organization created in 1948 and renamed the Western European Union. West Germany also became a member of NATO. In 1955, the USSR recognized the Federal Republic. The Saar territory, under an agreement between France and West Germany, held a plebiscite and despite economic links to France, elected to rejoin West Germany on Jan. 1, 1957.
The division between West Germany and East Germany was intensified when the Communists erected the Berlin Wall in 1961. In 1968, the East German Communist leader, Walter Ulbricht, imposed restrictions on West German movements into West Berlin. The Soviet-bloc invasion of Czechoslovakia in Aug. 1968 added to the tension. West Germany signed a treaty with Poland in 1970, renouncing force and setting Poland's western border as the Oder-Neisse Line. It subsequently resumed formal relations with Czechoslovakia in a pact that “voided” the Munich treaty that gave Nazi Germany the Sudetenland. By 1973, normal relations were established between East and West Germany and the two states entered the United Nations.
West German chancellor Willy Brandt, winner of a Nobel Peace Prize for his foreign policies, was forced to resign in 1974 when an East German spy was discovered to be one of his top staff members. Succeeding him was a moderate Social Democrat, Helmut Schmidt. Schmidt staunchly backed U.S. military strategy in Europe, staking his political fate on placing U.S. nuclear missiles in Germany unless the Soviet Union reduced its arsenal of intermediate missiles. He also strongly opposed nuclear freeze proposals.
Helmut Kohl of the Christian Democrat Party became chancellor in 1982. An economic upswing in 1986 led to Kohl's reelection. The fall of the Communist government in East Germany left only Soviet objections to German reunification to be dealt with. On the night of Nov. 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall was opened, making reunification all but inevitable. In July 1990, Kohl asked Soviet leader Gorbachev to drop his objections in exchange for financial aid from (West) Germany. Gorbachev agreed, and on Oct. 3, 1990, the German Democratic Republic acceded to the Federal Republic and Germany became a united and sovereign state for the first time since 1945.
A reunited Berlin serves as the official capital of unified Germany, although the government would continue to have administrative functions in Bonn during the 12-year transition period. The issue of the cost of reunification and the modernization of the former East Germany were serious considerations facing the reunified nation.
In its most important election in decades, on Sept. 27, 1998, Germans chose Social Democrat Gerhard Schröder as chancellor over Christian Democrat incumbent Helmut Kohl, ending a 16-year-long rule that oversaw the reunification of Germany and symbolized the end of the cold war in Europe. A centrist, Schröder campaigned for “the new middle” and promised to rectify Germany's high unemployment rate of 10.6%.
Tension between the old-style left-wing and the more probusiness pragmatists within Schröder's government came to a head with the abrupt resignation of Finance Minister Oskar Lafontaine in March 1999, who was also chairman of the ruling Social Democratic Party. Lafontaine's plans to raise taxes on industry and raise German wages—already nearly the highest in the world—went against the more centrist policies of Schröder. Hans Eichel was chosen to become the next finance minister.
Germany joined the other NATO allies in the military conflict in Kosovo in 1999. Before the Kosovo crisis, Germans had not participated in an armed conflict since World War II. Germany agreed to take 40,000 Kosovar refugees, the most of any NATO country.
In Dec. 1999, former chancellor Helmut Kohl and other high officials in the Christian Democrat Party admitted accepting tens of millions of dollars in illegal donations during the 1980s and 1990s. The enormity of the scandal led to the virtual dismemberment of the CDU in early 2000, a party that had long been a stable conservative force in German politics.
In July 2000, Schröder managed to pass significant tax reforms that would lower the top income-tax rate from 51% to 42% by 2005. He also eliminated the capital gains tax on companies selling shares in other companies, a measure that was expected to spur mergers. In May 2001, the German Parliament authorized the payment of $4.4 billion in compensation to 1.2 million surviving Nazi-era slave laborers.
Schröder was narrowly reelected in Sept. 2002, defeating conservative businessman Edmund Stoiber. Schröder's Social Democrats and coalition partner, the Greens, won a razor-thin majority in parliament. Stoiber held an early lead in the polls, but Schröder's deft handling of Germany's catastrophic floods in Aug. and his tough stance against U.S. plans for a preemptive attack on Iraq buoyed him in the weeks leading up to the election. Germany's continued reluctance to support the U.S.'s call for military action against Iraq severely strained its relations with Washington.
Germany's affluent and technologically powerful economy turned in a relatively weak performance throughout much of the 1990s. The modernization and integration of the eastern German economy continues to be a costly long-term problem, with annual transfers from west to east amounting to roughly $70 billion. Germany's ageing population, combined with high unemployment, has pushed social security outlays to a level exceeding contributions from workers. Structural rigidities in the labor market - including strict regulations on laying off workers and the setting of wages on a national basis - have made unemployment a chronic problem. Business and income tax cuts introduced in 2001 did not spare Germany from the impact of the downturn in international trade, and domestic demand faltered as unemployment began to rise. The government expects growth to gain pace in the second half of 2002, but to fall short of 1% for the year again. Corporate restructuring and growing capital markets are setting the foundations that could allow Germany to meet the long-term challenges of European economic integration and globalization, particularly if labor market rigidities are addressed.
The German people have made many noteworthy contributions to culture. However, the antecedents of contemporary German art, music, and literature are so thoroughly embedded in the broader European intellectual traditions as to defy most attempts to separate any specifically German cultural roots. A visitor, for example, can see abundant evidence of early medieval art and architecture in the many splendid cathedrals, monasteries, and castles of Germany, but these follow the same styles and style periods that are be found in other European countries—Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, baroque, and so on. German literature and music were similarly part of the larger European culture.
Brecht, Bertolt (1898-1956), the most influential German dramatist and theoretician of the theater in the 20th century. Also a poet of formidable gifts and considerable output, Brecht first attracted attention in the Berlin of the 1920s as the author of provocative plays that challenged the tenets of traditional theater. In the 1950s he became an internationally acclaimed playwright and director through productions of his plays by the Berliner Ensemble, a company based in East Berlin and headed by his wife, actor Helene Weigel.
Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht was born in Augsburg, Bavaria
. Raised in a comfortable middle-class home, he attended secondary school in
Augsburg and studied briefly at the University of Munich. In 1924 he gained
a foothold in the cultural metropolis of Berlin as an assistant dramaturge (drama
specialist) at the Deutsches Theater. He achieved enormous popular success following
the 1928 premiere of his collaborative effort with German composer Kurt Weill,
Die Dreigroschenoper (published 1928; translated as The Threepenny Opera, 1964).
Forced to flee Germany in 1933 because of his leftist political beliefs (he
had become a convert to the socioeconomic theories of Karl Marx) and opposition
to the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler, Brecht and his family spent 14 years in
exile in Scandinavia and the United States. Although he tried hard to become
established in the United States, Brecht failed to make a breakthrough either
as a scriptwriter in Hollywood, California, or as a playwright on Broadway.
He returned to Europe in 1947. Two years later he moved to East Berlin and remained
there until his death.
Brecht's first major play, Baal (1922; translated 1964), features a materialistic and promiscuous poet, the opposite of the view then in vogue of the artist as a visionary. Baal and his next play, Trommeln in der Nacht (1922; Drums in the Night, 1966), reject idealism in favor of crass individualism. Brecht’s turn to Marxism resulted in plays that indicted capitalism. In Die heilige Johanna der Schlachthöfe (1932; St. Joan of the Stockyards, 1956), a modern-day Joan of Arc advocates the use of force in the fight against exploitation of workers. The austere and controversial Lehrstück (learning play) titled Die Maßnahme (1930-1931; The Measures Taken, 1960) appeals to the spectators' reasoning faculties rather than to their emotions. The play takes the form of a stylized trial to demonstrate the errors in political thought and behavior for which a young Communist Party member has been liquidated.
Brecht's narrative style, which he called epic theater, was directed against the illusion created by traditional theater of witnessing a slice of life. Instead, Brecht encouraged spectators to watch events on stage dispassionately and to reach their own conclusions. To prevent spectators from becoming emotionally involved with a play and identifying with its characters, Brecht used a variety of techniques. Notable among them was the Verfremdungseffekt (alienation or estrangement effect), which was achieved through such devices as choosing (for German audiences) unfamiliar settings, interrupting the action with songs, and announcing the contents of each scene through posters. Brecht temporarily returned to a more traditional dramatic mode in Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reiches (1941; The Private Life of the Master Race, 1944), an attack on the fascist government of Germany under Hitler.
Around 1940 Brecht began writing the dramas for which he is primarily known today; some of these were produced or published first in English, then in German. Leben des Galilei (1955; Galileo, 1947) deals with the responsibility of the intellectual to defend his or her beliefs in the face of opposition from established authorities, in Galileo’s case the Roman Catholic Church. The antiwar play Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (written 1937; first produced 1941; Mother Courage and Her Children, 1941) shows an indomitable mother figure who misguidedly seeks to profit from war but loses her children instead. In Der gute Mensch von Sezuan (written 1938-1940; first produced 1948; 1943;The Good Woman of Setzuan, 1948), which Brecht called a parable play, a kindhearted prostitute is forced to disguise herself as her ruthless male cousin and exploit others in order to survive. In Der kaukasische Kreidekreis (written 1944-1945; first produced 1943; The Caucasian Chalk Circle, 1948) a singer-narrator directs and comments on the poetic exploration of maternal sacrifice and justice.
Brecht's greatest achievement is, without doubt, his contribution to the repertory of the international theater. Apart from his greatest theatrical hit, The Threepenny Opera, which had a seven-year run in New York City in the 1950s, he provided the stage with a rich array of texts. They range from early dramas, infused with his rebellious spirit, to his mature plays that seek to promote the prospect of a better world. Brecht, who formulated his theory of epic theater in Kleines Organon für das Theater (1948; A Short Organum for the Theatre, 1964), also achieved renown as a theoretician. Perceived as a liberating influence in South America and East Asia, Brechtian theater has often been declared outmoded by critics in Europe and North America. But no serious director can ignore Brecht, and his plays continue to be produced all over the world.
Hesse, Hermann (1877-1962), German-born Swiss novelist and poet, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1946. After World War II ended in 1945, his work became popular with younger readers, who identified with the central theme of many of his novels: the conflicts of youth—and especially of creative artists—in search of self.
Hesse was born on July 2, 1877, in Calw, Germany
. The son of a former missionary, he was enrolled in a seminary but soon left
school; his rebellion against formal education was expressed in the novel Beneath
the Wheel (1906; trans. 1958). Thereafter, he educated himself through reading.
As a young man he worked for a bookseller and did freelance journalism, which
inspired his first novel, Peter Camenzind (1904; trans. 1961), the story of
a dissolute writer.
During World War I (1914-1918), Hesse, who was a pacifist, moved to Montagnola, Switzerland; he became a Swiss citizen in 1923. His despair and disillusion occasioned by the war and by a series of domestic tragedies, and his attempts to find solutions, became the subject of his later fiction. His writings became focused on the spiritual search for new goals and values to replace the no longer valid, traditional ones. Demian (1919; trans. 1923), for example, was strongly influenced by the ideas of the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, which Hesse discovered in the course of his own (brief) psychoanalysis. The book's treatment of the symbolic duality between the dream character Demian and his real-life counterpart, Sinclair, aroused great interest among German intellectuals of the 1920s. Hesse's novels subsequently became increasingly symbolic and psychoanalytical in approach. For example, Journey to the East (1932; trans. 1956) examines in Jungian terms the mythic qualities of human experience. Siddhartha (1922; trans. 1951), on the other hand, reflects Hesse's interest in Eastern mysticism—the result of a trip to India; it is a short lyric story of a father-son relationship, based on the early life of Buddha.
Steppenwolf (1927; trans. 1929) is perhaps Hesse's most innovative novel. The artist-hero's double nature—human and wolfish—forces him into a labyrinth of nightmarish experiences; the work thus symbolizes the split between rebellious individuality and bourgeois convention, as does a later work, Death and the Lover (1930; trans. 1932; trans. 1968 as Narcissus and Goldmund). Hesse's last novel, Das Glasperlenspiel (1943; trans. 1949 as Magister Ludi; trans. 1969 as The Glass Bead Game), set in a utopian future, is in effect a resolution of the author's concerns. Several volumes of his nostalgic, mournful poetry have also been published (1952; trans. 1970).