Before there was a Germany there were the Germanic peoples: a set of tribes —Cherusci, Chatti, Marcomanni, Suebi, Saxons, Franks and many more— who around the turn of the era inhabited the forests and marshes between the Rhine and the Elbe. They formed no nation and had no shared self-awareness; it was Rome that lumped them together under the name Germania, and it was a Roman, Tacitus, who in his work Germania (98 AD) left the oldest and most formative portrait of these peoples, praising their freedom and their roughness against the decadence he saw in his own city.
The decisive clash came in September of the year 9, in a wooded spot in the north-west, probably near present-day Kalkriese. There Arminius —a Cheruscan noble who had served as an auxiliary officer in the Roman army and held citizenship— ambushed the governor Publius Quinctilius Varus and annihilated three entire legions, the XVII, the XVIII and the XIX, along with their auxiliaries: between fifteen and twenty thousand men. The Battle of the Teutoburg Forest (Varusschlacht) was one of the most humiliating defeats in Roman history. The emperor Augustus, according to Suetonius, would beat his head against the doors shouting: «Varus, give me back my legions!». Those three legions were never reconstituted, and Rome gave up for good on conquering Germania east of the Rhine.
From then on the Empire pulled back and fixed its border along a fortified line, the Upper Germanic-Raetian limes, which ran from the Rhine to the Danube studded with forts, watchtowers, walls and palisades; today it is a World Heritage Site. On one side lay Romanised Germania, with cities such as Cologne, Trier and Mainz, vineyards, baths and paved roads; on the other, free Germania. That border marked a cultural divide for centuries. Much later, in the nineteenth century, German nationalism would turn Arminius into «Hermann», founding hero of the nation, and raise the colossal Hermannsdenkmal monument to him: proof of how a battle from antiquity can be reinvented as political myth.
After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, among the Germanic peoples who divided up its remains there was one destined for greatness: the Franks. Under the Merovingian and then the Carolingian dynasty, the Franks built the most powerful kingdom of early medieval Europe, straddling present-day France and Germany. Its towering figure was Charlemagne (Karl der Große), who between 768 and 814 subdued the pagan Saxons by force of arms —Christianising them with fire and blood, in episodes such as the massacre of Verden— and absorbed Bavaria and much of Germania.
On Christmas Day of the year 800, Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne emperor in Rome, reviving the idea of a Christian empire of the West that claimed to be Rome's heir. Charlemagne set his favourite court at Aachen, where he built the palatine chapel that still stands and that would be, for six hundred years, the coronation place of the German kings. His reign also drove the so-called «Carolingian renaissance», a flowering of culture, schooling and manuscript copying.
Charlemagne's empire did not outlive him intact. In the Treaty of Verdun of 843, his three grandsons split it up: Louis the German received East Francia (Ostfrankenreich), the German-speaking lands east of the Rhine. Out of that eastern kingdom, where the name meaning «land of the people», deutsch, gradually took root, medieval Germany would in time emerge. When in 919 the Saxon Henry I and later his son Otto were raised to the throne, the German kingdom already had a profile of its own, distinct from the western kingdom that would become France.
In the year 962 the German king Otto I was crowned emperor in Rome, refounding the imperial crown of the West. So was born what posterity would call the Holy Roman Empire (Heiliges Römisches Reich), an extraordinary political construction that would last, through enormous transformations, until 1806. In theory it was the supreme temporal authority of Christendom, heir to Rome and protector of the Church. In practice it was always something else: a loose assembly of hundreds of territories —duchies, principalities, counties, bishoprics, free cities— that acknowledged an elected emperor but kept almost total autonomy.
The philosopher Voltaire summed up that paradox in a devastating line that remains the best definition of the Empire: «This body which was called and which still calls itself the Holy Roman Empire was in no way holy, nor Roman, nor an empire». It was not holy, because papal and imperial power spent centuries at war in the Investiture Controversy, with humiliating episodes such as Canossa (1077); it was not Roman, because its heart was Germanic; and it was not a true empire, because the emperor had no effective central power over his princes.
From the thirteenth century the emperor was not inherited but elected: the Golden Bull of 1356, issued by Charles IV, fixed at seven the number of prince-electors —three archbishops (Mainz, Cologne, Trier) and four laymen— who chose the King of the Romans. From the fifteenth century the imperial dignity was in practice in the hands of the House of Habsburg, with its capital in Vienna. The result was a perpetually decentralised Germany, a chessboard of local powers where universities, art and cities flourished but where no strong national state ever took shape as in France or England. That fragmentation would mark all later German history.
If the Empire was weak, the German cities were strong. During the Middle Ages, dozens of them obtained the status of free imperial city (Reichsstadt), which made them answerable only to the emperor and practically autonomous, governed by their guilds and their patrician families. Nuremberg, Frankfurt, Augsburg, Lübeck, Cologne and many others became prosperous urban republics, centres of trade, craft and banking. In Augsburg, the Fugger family came to bankroll emperors and popes.
The most impressive phenomenon was the Hanseatic League (die Hanse), a commercial confederation of northern cities that dominated Baltic and North Sea trade between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries. Led by Lübeck —its de facto capital— and taking in Hamburg, Bremen, Rostock, Gdansk and dozens of other towns, the Hansa wove a network of routes, privileges and trading posts (the Kontore) reaching from London to Novgorod, from Bruges to Bergen. It traded in herring, salt, grain, timber, furs, wax and cloth, and came to have its own fleet, army and foreign policy, capable of making war on kings.
The Hansa left a lasting mark on northern Germany: the brick Gothic of its churches and town halls, the merchant wealth of its ports, a spirit of bourgeois independence. To this day Hamburg and Bremen keep the title of «free Hanseatic city» in their official names, and their vehicle number plates begin with an H for Hansestadt. That world of rich, self-governing cities was, for centuries, the urban and commercial counterweight to a rural, fragmented Empire.
On 31 October 1517, an Augustinian monk and professor of theology named Martin Luther made public in Wittenberg his 95 theses against indulgences —the sale of forgiveness for sins with which the Church was funding St Peter's Basilica. Tradition says he nailed them to the door of the castle church; whether nailed up or simply sent out and circulated, those theses set off an earthquake that split Western Christendom in two and changed the history of Germany and of Europe for good.
Luther went much further than he first intended. He denied the pope's authority, held that salvation came by faith and grace alone (not by works or money), and declared that the only source of truth was the Bible, which he translated into German in a version that set the country's literary language. Excommunicated by the pope and outlawed by Emperor Charles V at the Diet of Worms (1521) —where, tradition has it, he refused to recant— he was protected by German princes and sheltered in Wartburg Castle. Gutenberg's printing press, invented decades earlier in Mainz, spread his writings by the thousand and was the decisive weapon of the Reformation.
The consequences were immense and not all of them peaceful. In 1524-1525 the Peasants' War broke out, a great social revolt that invoked the Gospel and that Luther —fearful of disorder— condemned harshly; it was crushed with tens of thousands dead. Germany was left divided between Catholic and Protestant princes, a tension the Peace of Augsburg of 1555 tried to settle with the principle cuius regio, eius religio: each prince imposed his religion on his subjects. It was a fragile truce. That religious fracture, added to the weakness of the Empire, would set the stage for the greatest catastrophe of pre-modern Germany.
In 1618, a revolt by Protestant nobles in Prague —who threw some imperial governors out of a window, the famous «defenestration of Prague»— lit the fuse of the most devastating war Europe knew before the twentieth century. The Thirty Years' War began as a religious conflict between Catholics and Protestants inside the Empire, but it soon turned into a struggle for power drawing in half of Europe: the Habsburgs of Austria and Spain, Denmark, Sweden under Gustavus Adolphus, and finally the Catholic France of Cardinal Richelieu, which —out of pure reason of state— backed the Protestants against the Habsburgs.
German territory was the great battlefield and the great victim. Armies of unpaid mercenaries lived off plunder, ravaging harvests, burning villages and spreading hunger and plague. The most appalling episode was the sack of Magdeburg in 1631, when imperial troops massacred some twenty thousand inhabitants and reduced the city to ashes. Entire regions were left depopulated. Historians reckon that the population of the Empire's German lands fell catastrophically: around a third of the total, and up to 40 % or more depending on the estimate, with some districts losing half their people or more. It was a demographic wound that took Germany a century to recover from.
The war ended in 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia, signed in Münster and Osnabrück, a landmark of diplomatic history usually regarded as the birth certificate of the modern system of sovereign states. It recognised Calvinism alongside Lutheranism and Catholicism, enshrined the de facto independence of the German princes and bled away what was left of the emperor's authority. The Empire came out of Westphalia as an almost ghostly entity, an archipelago of more than three hundred states. The real consequence was clear: for another century and a half, Germany would still not be a nation.
Out of the fragmented Germany of the eighteenth century there emerged, almost from nothing, a great power: Prussia. Ruled by the Hohenzollern dynasty from its capital, Berlin, and from the duchy of Brandenburg, Prussia was a state poor in resources and scattered across the map, but it built its strength on two pillars: an efficient and honest administration, and above all a disproportionately large and disciplined army. The «soldier king» Frederick William I forged that army and that austere, militarised state, of which it would be said that it «was not a country with an army, but an army with a country».
His son Frederick II, «Frederick the Great» (1740-1786), turned it into a European power. An enlightened man and a musician, a correspondent of Voltaire, an amateur philosopher who wrote in French and played the flute at his palace of Sanssouci in Potsdam, he was also a ruthless military strategist. No sooner had he taken the throne than he invaded Silesia, seizing it from Austria, and he held out against half of Europe in the Seven Years' War (1756-1763), from which Prussia emerged battered but victorious and confirmed as the fifth great power. He modernised the administration and the courts, promoted religious tolerance and agriculture, and embodied the model of the «enlightened despot».
The rise of Prussia installed a decisive «dualism» in the German world: the rivalry between rising Protestant Prussia in the north and Catholic Habsburg Austria in the south for hegemony over Germany. That competition, running through the whole of the following century, would decide which of the two powers would unify the German nation —and in what form. The answer would come a century later, and it would be Prussian.
The French Revolution and Napoleon demolished the old German order. Between 1803 and 1806, French victories completely redrew the map: the small ecclesiastical states and the free cities disappeared, absorbed by larger kingdoms such as Bavaria, Württemberg and Saxony, which Napoleon raised in rank and grouped into the Confederation of the Rhine under his protection. The final blow came on 6 August 1806: pressed by Napoleon, Emperor Francis II abdicated the imperial crown and dissolved the Holy Roman Empire. After more than eight hundred years, the old Reich ceased to exist.
The humiliation of French occupation —the crushing of Prussia at Jena and Auerstedt in 1806, the occupation of Berlin— had an unexpected effect: it kindled a German national feeling for the first time. Philosophers such as Fichte, with his Addresses to the German Nation, and a generation of reformers and Romantics began to dream of a united Germany. After Napoleon's defeat, the Congress of Vienna (1815) did not restore the old Empire but created the German Confederation, a loose association of 39 states presided over by Austria, which disappointed the supporters of unity.
Union would come through the economy before politics. In 1834, under Prussian leadership, the Zollverein was created, the German customs union that abolished internal tariff barriers and created a common market, weaving economic ties between the German states —with the significant exclusion of Austria. The Zollverein was the scaffolding on which industrialisation, and with it Prussian power, would grow. When a liberal and nationalist revolutionary wave broke out in 1848, the Frankfurt Parliament, meeting in the Paulskirche, tried to give Germany a constitution and a crown; the failure of that revolution left unification in the hands not of the democrats but of Prussian force.
The man who unified Germany was neither a revolutionary nor a democrat, but a conservative Prussian aristocrat: Otto von Bismarck, appointed minister-president of Prussia in 1862. Convinced that the great questions of the day would not be settled «by speeches and majority resolutions —that was the great mistake of 1848— but by iron and blood», Bismarck orchestrated unification through three carefully provoked wars: against Denmark (1864), against Austria (1866) —which pushed Vienna out of the German world and confirmed Prussian hegemony— and against France (1870-1871).
The Franco-Prussian War sealed the work. National enthusiasm swept the southern states into line with Prussia, and after the crushing victory and the capture of Napoleon III at Sedan, the German Empire was proclaimed. The scene was symbolic and deliberately provocative: on 18 January 1871, in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles —on occupied French soil— King William I of Prussia was acclaimed emperor (Kaiser) of a unified Reich. Bismarck became his chancellor. For the first time since Charlemagne, most Germans lived in a single state, though under a semi-authoritarian regime dominated by Prussia, with a parliament (the Reichstag) of limited powers.
The new Empire, «Wilhelmine Germany», lived through dizzying decades. It industrialised at prodigious speed —Ruhr steel, chemicals, electricity, railways— until it became the leading industrial and scientific power of continental Europe, and Bismarck, to defuse the growing socialist labour movement, created the world's first welfare state, with sickness, accident and old-age insurance. In foreign policy, by contrast, the «iron chancellor» was cautious, weaving a system of alliances to isolate France and keep the peace. But in 1890 the young and ambitious Emperor William II dismissed Bismarck, and caution went with him.
Arriving late to the colonial carve-up, the Germany of William II demanded its «place in the sun» and took colonies in Africa —German East Africa (Tanzania), Cameroon, Togo and German South West Africa (present-day Namibia)— and in the Pacific. Its rule was especially brutal in South West Africa. In 1904 the Herero people and, shortly afterwards, the Nama rose up against the seizure of their land and cattle. The German response, led by General Lothar von Trotha, was a campaign of deliberate extermination: after the battle of Waterberg, the Herero were driven into the Omaheke desert, where they were left to die of thirst and hunger with the water holes sealed off; the survivors were locked up in concentration camps.
Between 1904 and 1908 around 80 % of the Herero people died —some 40,000 to 65,000 people or more— and close to half of the Nama, around 10,000. Historians consider it the first genocide of the twentieth century, with practices (concentration camps, experiments on prisoners, racial theories) that chillingly foreshadow what would come decades later. For more than a century Germany avoided acknowledging it; only on 28 May 2021 did the German government officially call it a genocide and announce 1.1 billion euros in development aid over thirty years. The agreement was criticised by Herero and Nama leaders for being negotiated without them, for avoiding the word «reparations» and for rejecting legal responsibility.
The militarism and ambitions of the Wilhelmine Reich led to the catastrophe of the First World War. After the Sarajevo assassination in 1914, Germany backed Austria-Hungary and put the Schlieffen Plan into action, invading neutral Belgium and dragging Britain into the war. The dream of a quick victory sank into four years of trench warfare on the western front —Verdun, the Somme. Blockaded, exhausted and starving, its army broken in 1918, Germany collapsed: revolution broke out, the Kaiser abdicated and fled to Holland, and on 11 November 1918 the armistice was signed. Bismarck's Empire, born at Versailles in 1871, would die —humiliated— at that same Versailles with the peace treaty of 1919.
Out of defeat came Germany's first democracy. Proclaimed in 1919 and given an advanced constitution drafted in the city of Weimar, the Republic lived through fourteen tormented years. It carried the weight of the Treaty of Versailles —territorial losses, disarmament and above all crushing reparations— and of the «stab-in-the-back legend» (Dolchstoßlegende), the lie spread by the nationalist right that the army had not been beaten at the front but betrayed at home by socialists and Jews. That slander poisoned political life. In 1923 the crisis hit bottom with an insane hyperinflation: the mark collapsed to the point where one dollar came to be worth trillions of marks and people carried bundles of banknotes in wheelbarrows to buy bread.
And yet the Weimar of the 1920s was also an explosion of creativity without equal. Berlin became one of the cultural capitals of the world: the Bauhaus school of art and design revolutionised architecture; German expressionist cinema produced masterpieces such as Metropolis and The Cabinet of Dr Caligari; Brecht's theatre, Einstein's science, music, cabaret and an utterly free nightlife and sexual culture all flourished. It was a dazzling, fragile modernity, suspended over a political volcano.
The Great Depression of 1929 blew that volcano open. Mass unemployment and despair pushed millions of voters towards the extremes. Adolf Hitler's National Socialist (Nazi) Party —he was an Austrian agitator who had attempted a failed coup in Munich in 1923 and had written his book of hatred, Mein Kampf, in prison— went from a fringe group to the largest party in the Reichstag, exploiting resentment over Versailles, fear of communism and a virulent antisemitism. On 30 January 1933, amid the intrigues of conservative elites who believed they could «tame him», President Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor of the Reich. Weimar democracy had just signed its own death warrant.
Within weeks Hitler turned power into dictatorship. The Reichstag fire of February 1933 served as the pretext for suspending civil liberties; the Enabling Act of March handed him full powers; within months parties and trade unions were banned, the first concentration camp opened at Dachau, near Munich, and the persecution of opponents, communists and social democrats began. With Hindenburg's death in 1934, Hitler concentrated every power in himself as Führer. The Nazi regime —totalitarian, racist and expansionist— set out to build a racially «pure» «people's community» and an empire that would dominate Europe.
Antisemitism was at the centre of everything. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 stripped German Jews of citizenship and rights; the Night of Broken Glass (Kristallnacht), in November 1938, unleashed a nationwide pogrom with synagogues burned, shops destroyed and tens of thousands arrested. After the outbreak of war and the occupation of eastern Europe, persecution escalated into extermination. At the Wannsee Conference (January 1942) the «final solution», the plan to murder every Jew in Europe, was coordinated bureaucratically.
The result was the Holocaust —the Shoah—: the systematic, industrial, state-planned murder of some six million European Jews. They were shot en masse by the Einsatzgruppen over mass graves, crammed into ghettos and, above all, deported and gassed in extermination camps built to kill —Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek— where the bodies were burned in crematorium ovens. The Nazi regime also persecuted and murdered other groups: hundreds of thousands of Roma and Sinti, Soviet prisoners of war, Poles, people with disabilities (exterminated in the T4 «euthanasia» programme), homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, political dissidents. The Holocaust was not an excess of war or an accident: it was a deliberate crime, unprecedented in history for its scale and its administrative coldness, and it is the central, indelible fact against which all later German memory is measured.
The Second World War was unleashed by Germany. On 1 September 1939 the invasion of Poland began a conflict that Hitler expanded through a series of lightning conquests —Poland, France, almost all of Europe— until the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 opened the front that would destroy him. After the defeat at Stalingrad (1943), the Reich fell back on every front under the crossfire of the Western Allies and the Red Army. German cities were flattened by bombing; among them Dresden, in February 1945, whose death toll —inflated for decades by Nazi propaganda and later by deniers into the hundreds of thousands— was finally established by a commission of historians in 2010 at around 25,000 dead. In April 1945, with the Red Army in Berlin, Hitler killed himself in his bunker; on 8 May Germany surrendered unconditionally. The country was left in ruins, with millions dead and expelled, and with the awareness of having committed the greatest crime in European history.
Defeated, Germany was occupied and divided by the victors. In 1949 the western zones gave birth to the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), democratic, capitalist and aligned with the West, which under Konrad Adenauer and Ludwig Erhard led the «economic miracle» (Wirtschaftswunder); the Soviet zone gave birth to the German Democratic Republic (GDR), a socialist one-party state under Moscow's tutelage. At the heart of that division lay Berlin, itself split into four sectors. To stop the mass flight of its citizens to the West, the GDR threw up the Berlin Wall overnight on 13 August 1961; for twenty-eight years it cut the city in two and became the worldwide symbol of the Cold War and the Iron Curtain. At least 140 people died trying to cross it.
In the 1970s the social democratic chancellor Willy Brandt drove Ostpolitik, a policy of détente and recognition towards the East and the GDR that earned him the Nobel Peace Prize; his gesture of kneeling before the Warsaw Ghetto memorial in 1970 endured as the image of German contrition. The end came in 1989: the wave of reforms in the USSR, the flight of thousands of East Germans and the huge peaceful Monday demonstrations in Leipzig and other cities undermined the GDR regime. On the night of 9 November 1989, pushed by the street, the government opened the borders and the Wall fell amid scenes of euphoria. Less than a year later, on 3 October 1990, the two Germanys were reunified into a single democratic state.
Reunified Germany is today the largest economy in Europe, a pillar of the European Union and a stable democracy with its capital once again in Berlin. But its most singular trait is how it deals with its past. Germans coined an untranslatable word, Vergangenheitsbewältigung —something like «the work of facing up to and working through the past»— to name the collective effort, sustained over generations, of confronting responsibility for Nazism and the Holocaust without alibis or forgetting. It translates into concrete things: compulsory teaching of the Holocaust in schools, Holocaust denial as a criminal offence, memorials in the very centre of cities —such as the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe next to the Brandenburg Gate—, the Stolpersteine (the brass «stumbling stones» bearing victims' names set in front of their former homes) and a public culture that treats memory as a civic duty. That willingness to look the worst of its own history in the face, and to build a democracy on that clear-sightedness, is perhaps the most valuable contribution of contemporary Germany.
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Berlin began as a modest twin merchant town (Berlin and Cölln) on the banks of the river Spree in the thirteenth century, in the March of Brandenburg. Its fate changed when the Hohenzollern dynasty chose it as their residence. Under the «Great Elector» Frederick William, in the seventeenth century, Berlin was repopulated after the Thirty Years' War and took in thousands of French Protestant Huguenots expelled from France, who brought industry, crafts and refinement. In 1701 it became the capital of the new kingdom of Prussia.
Under Frederick the Great and his successors, Berlin grew as a military, administrative and cultural capital, home to a distinguished university (today's Humboldt) and to a brilliant intellectual life. When Bismarck unified Germany in 1871, Berlin went from being the capital of Prussia to the capital of the German Empire, and within a few decades it turned into an industrial metropolis of millions, with its Unter den Linden avenue, its Reichstag and its Brandenburg Gate as symbols.
In the twentieth century, Berlin was the central stage of German tragedy and rebirth: capital of vibrant Weimar, capital of the Third Reich, a city flattened in 1945, a city split by the Wall during the Cold War and, since 1990, the reunified capital of democratic Germany. Few cities in the world pack so much twentieth-century history into their streets.
At the gates of Berlin, Potsdam was the Versailles of Prussia, the leisure and government residence of the Hohenzollern kings. Its jewel is Sanssouci («without a care», in French), the rococo palace and its park of stepped terraces that Frederick the Great had built in the mid-eighteenth century as a personal retreat, where he played the flute, talked philosophy with Voltaire and asked to be buried beside his dogs. The ensemble of palaces and gardens in Potsdam is today a World Heritage Site.
Potsdam was also a seat of Prussian militarism —with its garrison and its Garrison Church— and the stage for politically loaded gestures, such as the «Day of Potsdam» in 1933, when the Nazis staged their alliance with old conservative Prussia. And it was there, at Cecilienhof Palace, that the Potsdam Conference was held in the summer of 1945: Stalin, Truman and Churchill (later Attlee) decided the fate of defeated Germany, its occupation, its denazification and the postwar borders.
During the Cold War, Potsdam lay on the eastern side, and agents were exchanged between East and West on its famous Glienicke Bridge —the «bridge of spies». Today the city combines its royal palaces, its gardens and its Dutch Quarter with the memory of having been, more than once, the place where Germany's future was decided.
Dresden, capital of Saxony on the banks of the Elbe, was one of the most beautiful cities in Europe, nicknamed the «Florence on the Elbe» for its baroque splendour. That splendour is owed above all to Augustus II the Strong, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland at the start of the eighteenth century, a great patron who filled the city with palaces and art collections: the Zwinger, the royal palace, the Church of Our Lady (Frauenkirche) with its great stone dome, and painting and porcelain collections among the finest on the continent. Nearby, Augustus founded the Meissen manufactory, Europe's first porcelain.
On the night of 13-14 February 1945, in the last weeks of the war, British and American aircraft subjected Dresden to an incendiary bombing that unleashed a firestorm and destroyed the historic centre almost completely. The death toll was long a target of manipulation: Nazi propaganda first, and later deniers, inflated it into the hundreds of thousands. A commission of historians appointed by the city concluded in 2010, after years of research in archives, registers and cemeteries, that around 25,000 people died: a terrible figure, but far from the propaganda exaggerations.
Under the GDR, the ruins of the Frauenkirche were left standing as an anti-war monument. After reunification the church was rebuilt stone by stone —using many blackened original blocks— and reopened in 2005 as a symbol of reconciliation, with a cross donated by Britain. Today a restored Dresden shows off its baroque again, though its recent history remains a reminder of the destruction of war and of the political manipulation of memory.
Leipzig, the other great city of Saxony, was for centuries a capital of trade and culture. Its position at a crossroads of trade routes made it the seat of one of the oldest and most famous trade fairs in Europe, and its university, founded in 1409, is one of the oldest in Germany. It was also a capital of music: Johann Sebastian Bach worked here as cantor of St Thomas Church for 27 years, until his death in 1750, and composed much of his sacred work here; later Mendelssohn, Schumann and Wagner —born in Leipzig— lived and worked in the city.
In 1813, the colossal Battle of the Nations (Völkerschlacht) was fought on its outskirts, in which a European coalition defeated Napoleon in the largest engagement of the Napoleonic Wars; the monumental Völkerschlachtdenkmal commemorates it. But Leipzig's most decisive role in history would come almost two centuries later.
In the autumn of 1989, St Nicholas Church in Leipzig became the epicentre of the peaceful revolution that brought down the GDR. Every Monday, after the prayers for peace, thousands and then hundreds of thousands of citizens took to the streets with candles chanting «Wir sind das Volk!» («We are the people!»), in the so-called «Monday demonstrations» (Montagsdemonstrationen). The demonstration of 9 October 1989, with 70,000 people whom the regime did not dare repress, marked the point of no return. A month later the Berlin Wall fell. Leipzig thus earned the name «city of heroes» of the German peaceful revolution.
After the war, Berlin lay in the geographic centre of the Soviet occupation zone, yet was itself divided into four sectors. When the two Germanys came into being in 1949, East Berlin became the capital of the communist GDR, while West Berlin remained a capitalist, democratic enclave surrounded by GDR territory and tied to the West. Back in 1948-1949 the Soviets had already tried to choke it with a blockade, which the Allies outwitted with the heroic «airlift» that supplied the city for almost a year.
The constant exodus of citizens fleeing the GDR for the West through Berlin threatened to bleed the socialist state dry. To stop it, in the small hours of 13 August 1961 the GDR closed the border and began building the Berlin Wall, a system of walls, barbed wire, watchtowers and a «death strip» that completely encircled West Berlin for 28 years. The Wall separated families, streets and neighbourhoods overnight. At least 140 people died trying to cross it, many shot by border guards.
The Wall became the worldwide symbol of the Cold War and of the lack of freedom in the Soviet bloc. Standing before it, President Kennedy proclaimed «Ich bin ein Berliner» in 1963, and Reagan demanded in 1987 «tear down this wall». Internal pressure in 1989 did the rest: on the night of 9 November 1989, after a confused announcement of an opening of the borders, crowds of East Berliners packed the crossings, the guards gave way and people began to cross and to chip at the Wall with their bare hands. Today some stretches survive —such as the East Side Gallery, painted by artists— and a line in the pavement recalls where that concrete wound once ran.
On the banks of the river Neckar, hemmed in by wooded hills, Heidelberg is home to the oldest university in what is now German territory, founded in 1386 by the Elector Palatine Rupert I. For centuries it was a great centre of learning, first as a focus of humanism and later of Reformed theology —the «Heidelberg Catechism» of 1563 was a foundational text of Calvinism. Heidelberg's Bibliotheca Palatina became one of the largest manuscript collections in Europe.
The city's history was tied to that of the Electors Palatine, who made it their capital. That status brought splendour but also destruction: in the War of the Palatine Succession, the troops of the French king Louis XIV sacked and burned Heidelberg in 1689 and 1693, wrecking its castle. The Bibliotheca Palatina, for its part, had been carried off to Rome as spoils during the Thirty Years' War.
In the nineteenth century, Heidelberg was reborn as one of the great university and scientific centres of Germany and as a symbol of Romanticism. Poets and philosophers —Hegel taught here— lived alongside the idealised image of the old student town, its taverns, its duels and its songs. Miraculously intact after the Second World War —it was not bombed— Heidelberg still keeps its old town, its famous bridge over the Neckar and a living university, and is one of the most visited and most romantic destinations in Germany.
Above the city, on the slope of the Königstuhl, stands Heidelberg Castle (Heidelberger Schloss), one of the most famous and evocative ruins in Germany. Residence of the Electors Palatine, the castle grew over the centuries into a complex of Renaissance and Gothic palaces, with gardens and a monumental cellar holding the «Great Vat» (Großes Fass), a gigantic wine barrel with a capacity of more than 200,000 litres. Burned by the French in the seventeenth century and struck by lightning in the eighteenth, the castle was never fully rebuilt and was left in a state of majestic ruin.
It was precisely that ruin that turned it into an icon. For the Romantics of the nineteenth century, the half-collapsed castle of Heidelberg, wrapped in ivy and mist above the Neckar valley, was the perfect image of longing for a glorious, lost past. Painters, poets and travellers from all over Europe visited and immortalised it, and helped fix the Romantic image of Germany in the continent's imagination.
Heidelberg was the capital of the Electoral Palatinate (Kurpfalz), one of the most important states of the Holy Roman Empire, whose prince was one of the seven electors. The Palatinate, straddling the Rhine, was an early Protestant territory and a recurring battleground between France and the Empire; its history of cultural splendour and wartime devastation left a deep mark on this west-central German region, which is also a land of excellent wines.
Perched above the valley of the river Tauber, Rothenburg ob der Tauber is the best preserved medieval town in Germany: an intact centre of half-timbered houses, cobbled streets, towers, fountains and a complete wall with a covered walkway you can still walk all the way round. To stroll through Rothenburg is to step into the very image of the German Middle Ages, so perfect that it has served as a set for countless films and postcards.
That exceptional preservation has a paradoxical explanation: impoverishment. Rothenburg was a prosperous and populous free imperial city in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but the Thirty Years' War and epidemics ruined and emptied it. Too poor to grow, to pull down its walls or to rebuild in the fashion of each new era, the town was left «frozen» in its medieval and Renaissance form for centuries. When nineteenth-century Romanticism arrived, Rothenburg was «rediscovered» by artists and travellers who saw in it the ideal German town.
Rothenburg came close to being lost in 1945: bombed in the last days of the war, part of the town was destroyed, but a senior American commander who knew its value ordered that it not be shelled and negotiated its surrender, saving it. Carefully rebuilt, it is today one of the great attractions of the Romantic Road (Romantische Straße), the tourist route through the historic towns of southern Germany, and a worldwide symbol of storybook medieval Germany.
Rothenburg was one of the many free imperial cities (Freie Reichsstädte) scattered across central and southern Germany. These towns enjoyed a privileged legal status: they answered to no prince, duke or bishop, but directly to the emperor, which in practice gave them wide autonomy, almost like small urban republics. They governed themselves through their own councils, sometimes minted coin, administered justice, kept a militia and traded across Europe.
In their heyday, between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, cities such as Nuremberg, Augsburg, Rothenburg, Ulm, Regensburg and Frankfurt were among the richest and most advanced in the Empire, centres of craft, trade, banking, printing and art. Their independence from feudal power made them hubs of innovation and early defenders of their «liberties» —the rights and privileges of their citizens— sometimes symbolised by the statue of a knight, the Roland, in their main square.
Most of these free cities lost their independence with the Napoleonic reorganisation of Germany at the start of the nineteenth century, when they were absorbed by neighbouring kingdoms and principalities. Only a few —Hamburg, Bremen, Lübeck and Frankfurt— kept their status for longer. But the legacy of those urban republics —their architectural heritage, their bourgeois culture, their spirit of autonomy— remains one of the most distinctive features of German history.
Central Germany —with its medieval towns, its ruined castles, its rivers and its forests— was the setting and the inspiration of German Romanticism, one of the great cultural movements in European history. At the start of the nineteenth century, in a country humiliated by Napoleon and still without unity, poets, philosophers and composers looked to the medieval past, to nature and to the soul of the «people» (Volk) for the roots of a German national identity.
Out of that impulse came works that would travel the world. The Brothers Grimm, philologists, collected and published Children's and Household Tales (1812) —Snow White, Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood— rescuing popular oral tradition and fixing for good the European fairy-tale imagination, peopled with dark forests, witches and castles. Poets such as Novalis, Eichendorff and Heine, and composers such as Schubert, Schumann and Weber, gave voice to that Romantic yearning for nature, mystery and nostalgia.
A central element of that culture was the German forest (der deutsche Wald), turned into an almost mystical symbol of the nation: the place of Arminius and the Germanic tribes, the setting of the tales, the image of the German soul. That myth of the forest, born of Romanticism, had a long afterlife —including its nationalist instrumentalisation— and still weighs today on Germans' relationship with nature, with their woods and their trees, and on their early and strong ecological awareness.
For centuries northern Germany was a world apart: flat, Protestant, seafaring and turned towards the North Sea and the Baltic. Its history is inseparable from the Hanseatic League, the powerful confederation of trading cities that dominated northern European commerce between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries. Lübeck was its capital and its «queen»; Hamburg and Bremen, two of its pillars. Together they traded in grain, herring, salt, timber, beer, cloth and furs along a network running from London and Bruges to Bergen, Riga and Novgorod.
The Hansa gave northern Germany a bourgeois, mercantile and independent identity, very different from the Germany of princes and peasants in the south. Its cities governed themselves through councils of merchants, raised imposing town halls and brick churches (the distinctive Baltic Gothic) and jealously defended their autonomy against kings and nobles.
Although the League dissolved at the end of the early modern period, overtaken by national states and by the new Atlantic trades, its spirit lived on. Hamburg and Bremen kept their status as free cities across the centuries and are still today, within federal Germany, two city-states that proudly keep the title of «free Hanseatic city» (Freie und Hansestadt) in their official names.
Hamburg, Germany's second city, takes pride in being «the gateway to the world» (das Tor zur Welt). Set on the river Elbe, about a hundred kilometres from the North Sea, it is Germany's largest port and one of the largest in Europe. A free city since the Middle Ages and a member of the Hansa, it prospered on trade, and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries became a shipping and merchant power, with its great district of red-brick warehouses, the Speicherstadt —today a World Heritage Site— built to store coffee, spices, tea and carpets.
Hamburg's history has dark chapters too. In July 1943, during the Second World War, the city suffered «Operation Gomorrah», a series of Allied bombing raids that set off a gigantic firestorm and killed tens of thousands of people —some 34,000 by most estimates— one of the deadliest bombings of the war in Germany. Much of the city was destroyed and had to be rebuilt after the conflict.
Today Hamburg is one of the richest and greenest cities in Germany, with a strong seafaring and commercial identity. Its port is still its economic heart; its St. Pauli district and the Reeperbahn are legendary for nightlife (the Beatles played there in their early days); and the spectacular Elbphilharmonie concert hall, opened in 2017 on top of an old dockside warehouse, has become the city's new emblem.
Bremen, the smallest of the Hanseatic cities, is one of the oldest and most characterful in the north. It was an important church centre —seat of a missionary archbishopric from the ninth century— and a prosperous Hansa trading city. Its market square, with the imposing Renaissance town hall (a World Heritage Site) and the statue of Roland —a stone knight over five metres tall erected in 1404 as a symbol of the city's liberties and rights— is one of the most beautiful in Germany.
Bremen took its place in the world's imagination thanks to the Brothers Grimm and their tale «The Town Musicians of Bremen» (Die Bremer Stadtmusikanten): the story of a donkey, a dog, a cat and a rooster, old and cast off by their masters, who set out for Bremen to make a living as musicians. The small bronze sculpture of the four animals, one on top of the other, next to the town hall, is today one of the most photographed spots in the city, even though in the tale the animals never actually reach it.
On the coast, Bremen developed its outer port, Bremerhaven, founded in the nineteenth century to take the big ships. Bremen and Bremerhaven today form the smallest city-state in Germany, which keeps its old merchant and seafaring tradition alive. And it was precisely from its docks that millions of European emigrants set off for the Americas.
For more than a century, the ports of northern Germany were Europe's main departure gate to the New World. Between the mid-nineteenth and the early twentieth century, when rural poverty, crises and persecution were pushing millions of Europeans to look for a new life, Bremen/Bremerhaven and Hamburg became the great embarkation points of transatlantic emigration. Not only Germans passed through them, but also eastern and central Europeans who crossed Germany to board ship.
More than seven million people are reckoned to have emigrated from Bremerhaven, and another five million from Hamburg; the two cities competed for the lucrative passenger business. The great shipping lines —Norddeutscher Lloyd of Bremen and HAPAG of Hamburg, then the largest shipping company in the world— built fleets of ocean liners and accommodation complexes for emigrants waiting for their ship, such as Hamburg's Auswandererhallen (emigrant halls).
That human epic left its mark on both sides of the ocean. Many of the millions of Americans, Brazilians, Argentines and people from other countries of the Americas with German surnames descend from those emigrants. Today museums such as the Deutsches Auswandererhaus in Bremerhaven and the BallinStadt in Hamburg reconstruct that experience of the voyage, the farewell and the hope, and let descendants trace their ancestors.
Northern Germany embraced the Lutheran Reformation early, in the sixteenth century, and Protestantism became a deep feature of its identity, distinct from the Catholic south. The Hanseatic cities, governed by their merchant bourgeoisie, adopted the new faith and with it an ethic of work, thrift and sobriety that sat well with their commercial character. That contrast between the Protestant, Hanseatic north and the Catholic, courtly south runs through the whole of German cultural history.
The northern mentality was forged by the sea and by trade: pragmatic, understated, cosmopolitan, proud of its civic liberties in the face of princes and emperors. The city-states of Hamburg and Bremen kept a strong attachment to their autonomy and their republican tradition over the centuries, even within the German Empire and within present-day federal Germany.
That openness to the world had its literary and human flip side too: the north of the merchant bourgeoisie, with its family grandeurs and declines, was portrayed for ever in Buddenbrooks, the great novel by Thomas Mann —born in Lübeck— which won him the Nobel Prize and which tells of the rise and fall of a family of Hanseatic traders. To this day, the seafaring, Protestant, bourgeois north remains one of the Germanys within Germany.
Bavaria is the largest and one of the oldest regions in Germany, with an identity so strong and distinctive —Catholic, rural and mountainous, with its Alps, its beer, its traditional dress and its dialect— that it often feels almost like a separate country. Its history as a state goes back to the Middle Ages, and for more than seven hundred years, from 1180 to 1918, it was ruled by a single dynasty: the Wittelsbachs, one of the longest-reigning houses in Europe.
Under the Wittelsbachs, Bavaria was a duchy, then an electorate and finally a kingdom. It was a firm bastion of Catholicism during the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, which left a deep mark on its baroque art, its lavishly decorated churches and its monasteries. In 1806, taking advantage of the Napoleonic reorganisation of Germany, the Bavarian elector was raised to king, and the Kingdom of Bavaria established itself as the second largest German state after Prussia.
Bavaria joined the German Empire in 1871, but kept certain privileges and a marked personality of its own, always jealous of its autonomy in the face of Protestant Prussia to the north. That tension between the Bavarian and the German, between the Catholic south and the Protestant north, has run through the country's history. Munich (München), its capital, became one of Germany's great cultural cities and is today one of its most prosperous, home of the Oktoberfest and a worldwide symbol of the traditional —and somewhat stereotyped— image of Germany.
The most famous and most tragic of the Wittelsbachs was King Ludwig II of Bavaria, who reigned from 1864 to 1886. Introverted, dreamy and obsessed with beauty, Ludwig II was a king more interested in art, music and architecture than in governing. He was the great patron of the composer Richard Wagner, whom he rescued from his debts and whose operas —with their worlds of Germanic mythology and medieval knights— fed his imagination.
Drawing on his personal fortune, Ludwig II had a series of fantastical castles built that are today the most visited in Germany. The most famous is Neuschwanstein, perched on an Alpine crag near Füssen: a fairy-tale castle with white towers and turrets, inspired by medieval legends and by Wagner's operas, begun in 1869. Paradoxically, it is not a medieval castle but a nineteenth-century Romantic fantasy, fitted with modern technology. Its silhouette inspired the castle in the Disney parks. Ludwig also raised the palaces of Linderhof and Herrenchiemsee, the latter an imitation of Versailles.
The end of the «mad king» was murky. His extravagant spending on building and his lack of interest in governing led his ministers to declare him mentally unfit and depose him in 1886. A few days later, Ludwig II was found drowned, along with his doctor, in Lake Starnberg, in circumstances never clarified that still feed all kinds of theories. Neuschwanstein, which he wanted as a private retreat and barely got to live in, opened to the public after his death and now receives more than a million visitors a year, turned into the tourist emblem of Bavaria.
Munich carries a dark chapter of German history: it was the birthplace of Nazism. In the climate of resentment and agitation that followed the First World War, the city became a breeding ground for the far right, and there, in the beer halls, Adolf Hitler took his first political steps and seized control of the small National Socialist Party in the early 1920s. On 8 and 9 November 1923, Hitler staged the failed «beer hall putsch» (Bürgerbräu-Putsch) in Munich, an attempted coup that cost him prison —where he wrote Mein Kampf— but gave him national fame. The Nazis would later call Munich the «capital of the movement», and a few kilometres away, in 1933, they opened their first concentration camp, Dachau.
But Munich was also the stage for one of the noblest acts of resistance to the regime. In 1942-1943, a group of students at its university, led by the siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl and by Professor Kurt Huber, formed the White Rose (Weiße Rose), an underground movement that wrote and distributed leaflets calling on Germans to rise against Hitler and put an end to the war and to the crimes of Nazism. Caught scattering leaflets in the university courtyard in February 1943, the main members were arrested by the Gestapo, tried summarily and executed by guillotine a few days later. Sophie Scholl was 21.
Today Munich honours that double memory: the monuments and the memorial at the Dachau camp recall the victims of Nazism, and the square in front of the university bears the Scholl siblings' name, with the White Rose leaflets reproduced in bronze on the pavement. The city that saw the Nazi movement born also keeps, in this way, the memory of those who had the courage to face it down.
Nuremberg (Nürnberg) was one of the largest and most brilliant free cities of the Holy Roman Empire. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it lived its golden age as a centre of trade, craft and German humanism: the great painter and engraver Albrecht Dürer worked here, and his house still stands; the first pocket watches and terrestrial globes were made here; and the city was an early focus of the Reformation. Its status as the traditional seat of the imperial Diet also gave it a special symbolic weight within the Empire.
It was precisely for that symbolic charge as an old capital of the «First Reich» that the Nazis chose Nuremberg as the setting for their great annual gatherings, the Party rallies (Reichsparteitage), choreographed as mass spectacles on a colossal site designed by Albert Speer. It was there that the infamous Nuremberg Laws were proclaimed in 1935, stripping German Jews of citizenship and laying the legal groundwork for their persecution. The city was thus tied for ever to Nazi propaganda and ideology.
That is why it carried powerful symbolic value that Nuremberg was the city chosen, after the war, to try the regime's criminals. Between 1945 and 1946 the International Military Tribunal held the Nuremberg Trials there, in which the victorious powers prosecuted the surviving senior Nazi leaders for war crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes against peace. It was a milestone in the history of international law: for the first time, high officials of a state were tried and convicted for their crimes before a court. Several defendants were sentenced to death and executed. Courtroom 600, where the trials were held, is preserved today as a memorial.
In the far south-west of Germany, in the state of Baden-Württemberg, lies the Black Forest (Schwarzwald), a mountainous region of dense conifer woods —so dark that the Romans gave them that name— with valleys, waterfalls, lakes and villages of houses under vast wooden roofs. A natural border with France along the Rhine, the Black Forest is one of the country's most emblematic and most visited natural regions.
The Black Forest is the cradle of traditions that have become symbols of Germany worldwide. The cuckoo clock industry was born and perfected here from the eighteenth century, handmade by farming families through the long winters; even today the region lives in part off that clockmaking craft. It is also the home of the famous Black Forest cake (Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte), of chocolate, cream and kirsch-soaked cherries, and of the traditional red-pompom hats (Bollenhut) worn with its regional dress.
Its thermal waters brought international fame to some of its towns. Baden-Baden, on the edge of the Black Forest, became in the nineteenth century the most elegant spa in Europe, a summer resort for the continent's aristocracy, writers and gamblers, with its Roman baths, its casino and its cosmopolitan atmosphere. And in the university city of Freiburg, at the gates of the Black Forest, with its Gothic cathedral and its reputation as a green and sunny city, the region shows its liveliest, most contemporary face. Between folklore, spa waters and nature, the Black Forest still embodies the wooded, Romantic Germany of the fairy tales.
The Rhine valley was both the frontier and the heart of Roman Germania, and no city embodies that better than Cologne. Founded as a settlement in the time of Augustus, it was raised to the rank of Roman colony in the year 50 AD at the urging of Agrippina the Younger —wife of the emperor Claudius and mother of Nero— who had been born there; from its full name, Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium, come both «Cologne» and its German name, Köln. It became the capital of the province of Germania Inferior and one of the largest cities in the north of the Empire, with walls, a forum, temples, an aqueduct and a river port.
From that Roman past Cologne keeps a rich archaeological legacy —remains of walls, mosaics, the famous Dionysus Mosaic— and two thousand years of urban continuity. Other Rhineland cities share that origin: Trier, the «Rome of the north», was an imperial residence and holds the largest Roman ruins north of the Alps, such as the Porta Nigra; Mainz and Bonn also began as Roman garrisons.
After the fall of Rome, Cologne remained a key city. Its continuity as an urban, commercial and religious centre right through the Middle Ages made it one of the largest and richest cities of the Holy Roman Empire, and its archbishop one of the seven prince-electors who chose the emperor.
In the Middle Ages, Cologne was an ecclesiastical and commercial power of the first order. Its archbishop was at once lord of the city and an elector of the Empire, and the city, a member of the Hansa, was the largest in Germany, with dozens of Romanesque churches —many of which still stand— and an intense religious and mercantile life. The acquisition in 1164 of the supposed relics of the Three Kings, brought from Milan, turned it into a great pilgrimage centre.
To house those relics, construction of Cologne Cathedral (Kölner Dom) began in 1248, conceived as the largest Gothic church in northern Europe. The undertaking was so ambitious that it stalled for centuries —the cathedral stood unfinished, with a medieval crane atop one of its towers as a symbol of the city— and was not completed until 1880, at the height of German nationalist fervour, following the original plans. With its two towers over 157 metres tall, it was for a time the tallest building in the world and is today a World Heritage Site and the most visited monument in Germany.
The cathedral survived, blackened but standing, the Second World War bombing raids that levelled the rest of central Cologne. Its silhouette rising out of the rubble became an iconic postwar image. Today, with the city restored, the Dom still dominates the bank of the Rhine and presides over the life of a Cologne also famous for its carnival, one of the biggest and best known in Europe.
Between the towns of Bingen and Koblenz, the Rhine narrows into a spectacular gorge flanked by vine-covered slopes, wine villages and a dense succession of medieval castles perched on the heights. This stretch, the Upper Middle Rhine Valley (Oberes Mittelrheintal), is a World Heritage Site and one of the most famous river landscapes in the world. The castles —Marksburg, Rheinstein, Pfalzgrafenstein on an island in mid-river— were built for the most part by feudal lords and archbishops to charge tolls on the boats going up and down the Rhine, one of Europe's great trade routes.
This landscape is the setting of the legend of the Lorelei, the rock more than a hundred metres high where, according to Romantic tradition, a beautiful maiden combed her golden hair and lured boatmen with her song towards the dangerous rapids, causing shipwrecks. The poet Heinrich Heine immortalised her in 1824 in a poem that became a famous popular song. The legend, though a modern creation, captures the fascination the Rhine exerted on Romanticism.
For in the nineteenth century the Rhine was the river of German Romanticism par excellence. Its ruined castles, its mists, its vineyards and its legends embodied the Romantic ideal of a mythical medieval past, and became a subject for poets, painters and composers, and a symbol of German national identity —«the Rhine, German river». That «Romantic Rhine» was also one of the first destinations of modern tourism, travelled by steamboat by visitors from all over Europe, as it still is today.
Frankfurt am Main played a first-rank institutional role in the Holy Roman Empire for centuries. A free imperial city and the seat of important trade fairs, it was the place where, from the Middle Ages on, the Kings of the Romans were elected; and from the Golden Bull of 1356 it was officially fixed as the city of the imperial election. Later it also became the place of the coronations, held in its cathedral of St Bartholomew (the Kaiserdom). In the Römer, its medieval town hall, the new emperors held the coronation banquet.
That political vocation resurfaced at a key moment: in 1848-1849, St Paul's Church (Paulskirche) in Frankfurt hosted the first elected German parliament, the National Assembly that tried to give Germany a liberal constitution and unify it through democracy. That experiment failed, but the Paulskirche remained the symbolic cradle of German constitutionalism and democracy.
Frankfurt has also long been a city of bankers and merchants —the Rothschild financial dynasty was born there, in its old Jewish quarter— and that tradition has made it the financial capital of contemporary Germany: home to the German stock exchange, the Bundesbank and the European Central Bank, with a skyline of high-rises unique in the country that has earned it the nickname «Mainhattan». Its airport is one of the largest in Europe. Rebuilt after the wartime bombing, Frankfurt today combines the few traces of its medieval core with a skyline of glass and steel.
North of the Rhine, around rivers such as the Ruhr and the Emscher, stretches the largest industrial region in Germany and one of the largest in Europe: the Ruhrgebiet, a cluster of cities —Essen, Dortmund, Duisburg, Bochum, Gelsenkirchen— that grew until they merged into one another. From the nineteenth century, the abundance of coal beneath the soil set off a dizzying industrialisation: mines were opened, blast furnaces and steelworks were raised, and the region became the heart of German coal and steel, the material basis of the country's economic and military power.
The Ruhr was the engine of the «workshop of Germany». Companies and families such as the Krupps of Essen forged their empires here, and their guns and steel armed the Reich's armies through several wars. That status as an industrial arsenal made the Ruhr a priority target in both world wars: it was occupied by France in 1923 over unpaid reparations, and pounded by Allied bombing in 1943-1945, including the attacks on its dams (the dam busters' «Operation Chastise»).
In the second half of the twentieth century, the progressive closure of the coal mines and the crisis in the steel industry forced the Ruhr into a deep reconversion. Today the region has turned much of its old industrial heritage into museums, parks and cultural spaces: the Zollverein coal mine complex in Essen, with its industrial architecture, is a World Heritage Site and a symbol of that metamorphosis of a land of coal and steel into a region of culture, universities and services.