Germany

The territory of modern Germany was inhabited from antiquity by Celtic and, from roughly the first millennium BCE, by Germanic peoples. Roman expansion brought the lands west of the Rhine and south of the Danube into the empire as the provinces of Germania and Raetia, while the tribes beyond remained outside Roman control after the destruction of three legions at the Teutoburg Forest in 9 CE. As Roman authority receded in the fifth century, Germanic confederations including the Franks, Saxons, Alemanni, and Bavarians established successor polities, and by the late eighth century most had been absorbed into the Frankish realm of Charlemagne, who was crowned emperor in 800.

The partition of the Carolingian inheritance at Verdun in 843 left an East Frankish kingdom that historians treat as the institutional ancestor of Germany. Under the Ottonian dynasty, Otto I was crowned emperor in 962, founding what later became known as the Holy Roman Empire, a loose elective polity of duchies, ecclesiastical principalities, and free cities that endured for more than eight centuries. The medieval period saw eastward settlement, the rise of the Hanseatic trading network, and persistent contests between emperor and papacy. The Protestant Reformation, sparked by Martin Luther in 1517, fractured religious unity and culminated in the Thirty Years' War (1618 to 1648), whose Peace of Westphalia entrenched the sovereignty of the empire's constituent states.

The empire was dissolved in 1806 under pressure from Napoleonic France. After the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the German Confederation grouped the surviving states until Prussia, having defeated Austria in 1866 and France in 1870 to 1871, unified the northern and southern states into the German Empire proclaimed at Versailles in January 1871 under Kaiser Wilhelm I and Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. The new state pursued rapid industrialisation and acquired overseas colonies before its defeat in the First World War led to the abdication of Wilhelm II in November 1918 and the proclamation of the Weimar Republic.

The Weimar Republic, weakened by economic crises and political polarisation, gave way in 1933 to the National Socialist dictatorship under Adolf Hitler. The Nazi regime initiated the Second World War in 1939, perpetrated the Holocaust against Europe's Jews and other targeted groups, and was destroyed by Allied forces in 1945. Germany was placed under four-power occupation and in 1949 was divided into the Federal Republic of Germany in the west, founded on a Basic Law adopted that May, and the German Democratic Republic in the east, a socialist state aligned with the Soviet Union. Berlin was likewise partitioned, and the Berlin Wall, erected in 1961, became the definitive symbol of the Cold War division.

Peaceful protests in the east and the wider collapse of the Soviet bloc led to the fall of the Wall in November 1989 and to reunification on 3 October 1990, when the eastern Länder acceded to the Federal Republic. The reunified state retained its Basic Law, anchored its foreign policy in the European Union (a founding member of its predecessor communities) and in NATO (joined by the west in 1955), and moved its capital from Bonn back to Berlin in 1999. Germany today is a federal parliamentary republic of sixteen Länder, with executive authority vested in a chancellor responsible to the Bundestag and a largely ceremonial federal president as head of state.