Origins

Germany has a complex history and a problematic identity. Located in the geographically shifting and politically contested centre of Europe, the country lacks clear natural frontiers. Throughout most of its 1,100-year-old history, its boundaries extended beyond what they are today. The German lands have traditionally been characterized by political decentralization and by regionally distinct and entrenched cultural, religious, and linguistic diversity. Linguistic variations are particularly marked. Regional dialects such as Bavarian, Swabian, Palatine, and Saxon are spoken with pronunciations and a vocabularies deviating from today’s literary standard known as High German (Hochdeutsch). For instance, the Low German language (Plattdeutsch) spoken along the North sea coast is virtually incomprehensible to a Württemberger or Bavarian from the south.

German cultural and linguistic diversity has been reinforced over the centuries by political decentralization. For most of its history, Germany did not exist as a single state but rather as a loose confederation of lands governed by secular or ecclesiastical rulers nominally subject to an elected emperor. These lands were known collectively as the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. By the second half of the seventeenth century, when the first German settlers began to arrive in what is today Canada, the Holy Roman Empire consisted of 310 nearly sovereign territories, 50 imperial free cities, and 1,500 imperial knighthoods. Aside from what is today the state of Germany, the Holy Roman Empire included territories within present-day France (Alsace, Lorraine), Belgium, Luxembourg, Austria, Slovenia, Italy (South Tyrol, Trentino), the Czech Republic (Bohemia, Moravia), and Poland (Pomerania, Silesia). Excluded from the “German Empire” were Prussia’s territories east of Pomerania (East Prussia) and the Habsburg-ruled lands of Hungary, although since the fifteenth century the Austrian Habsburgs were themselves the hereditary emperors of the Holy Roman Empire.

Because of the highly decentralized nature of the Holy Roman Empire, Germany was often referred to as a mere geographical expression. This was in stark contrast to the growing centralized nation-states of Britain and France. During the Napoleonic era, most of the German states of the Holy Roman Empire came under the rule of France except for Austria and Brandenburg-Prussia, each of which had risen to a position of great power in Europe. In 1806 Napoleon abolished the Holy Roman Empire and reorganized the German territories under his control into 16 states forming the Confederation of the Rhine. But in 1815 the Congress of Vienna replaced that with another loose confederation of German states within the borders of the former Holy Roman Empire.

This so-called German Confederation (Deutscher Bund) consisted of 39 states and lasted until 1866 when Prussia, under the dynamic leadership of its prime minister Otto von Bismarck, challenged the dominance of Austria in the Bund. At the time, German nationalism was becoming an influential movement whose goal was to absorb Prussia, the smaller German states, and – in the plans of most nationalists – Austria into a liberal democratic German nation-state. To harness this nationalist movement for the benefit of Prussia, Bismarck engineered victorious wars against Austria and France and in 1871 created the “Second” German Empire. This Prussian-dominated, pseudo-democratic federal state included almost all the lands of the Deutscher Bund except for Habsburg Austria.

The German Empire created by Bismarck left beyond its borders numerous German communities that have traditionally felt themselves to be part of a larger German world defined primarily by the German language and culture they have preserved. Thus, there have always been two concepts of German identity and nationality: one defined by residence in a German state (Staatsnation), another by adherence to German language and culture regardless of place of residence (Kulturnation). This dichotomy became an issue after World War I, when several borderland territories were annexed by neighbours: Alsace and Lorraine to France; North Schleswig to Denmark; West Prussia, Posnania, and Upper Silesia to Poland; and Klaipeda/Memel to Lithuania. The breakup of the Habsburg Empire also left large German-speaking communities outside Germany and Austria. During the 1920s nationalists demanded that the Reichsdeutsche, that is, those living within the borders of Germany, defend the interests of the Auslandsdeutsche, meaning Germans beyond Germany. Nazi ideologists were particularly interested in the fate of the ethnic Germans living in eastern and southeastern Europe who became known as the Volksdeutsche.

When World War I began in 1914, Germany joined Austria-Hungary as part of the alliance known as the Central Powers. As a result of its military defeat and revolution, the Second German Empire collapsed in November 1918. It was succeeded by a democratic republic launched by a national assembly that met in the town of Weimar. In this so-called Weimar Republic, anti-democratic sentiment grew rapidly in the face of the peace terms imposed by the Allies, grave economic problems, social unrest, and internal political instability fuelled by Communists, monarchists, and Nazis. In 1933 the Nazi Party was able to take advantage of widespread unemployment caused by the Depression, have its leader, Adolf Hitler, appointed chancellor, and proclaim the advent of the Third German Empire or Third Reich.

In his quest to transform German society, Hitler established a totalitarian dictatorship that eliminated all political opposition and “racially undesirable” elements of the population (especially Jews and Sinti-Roma/Gypsies). Claiming to regain territories lost in war or denied self-determination by the 1919 peace settlement, Hitler set out to restore Germany to the status of a great power. In 1938 Germany annexed Austria and parts of Czechoslovakia (the Sudetenland). The British and French realization in March 1939 that Hitler’s real aim was not simply the union of German-speaking communities in central Europe but Nazi domination over non-German-speaking countries led to the outbreak of World War II in September 1939. For nearly five years, the Third Reich controlled and exploited most of the European continent either directly or through client states.

Nazi Germany’s defeat and unconditional surrender in May 1945 left the country’s cities and industries largely destroyed and over 31 million people (half of whom were German) uprooted. What remained of Germany was radically reduced in size and divided into four zones of military occupation (American, British, French, and Soviet). In 1949 the three western zones united to become the Federal Republic of Germany (BRD) and the Soviet zone became the German Democratic Republic (DDR). The Federal Republic/West Germany adopted a liberal democratic constitution, while in the Democratic Republic/East Germany the Soviet Union installed a Communist dictatorship. Divided Germany and its divided former capital Berlin (in 1961 the East German government erected a wall to seal off Berlin’s eastern sector) became a symbol of the division of Europe between East and West during the Cold War period. One year after the collapse of the Communist regime in East Germany in October 1989, East and West Germany were reunited.