Germany Table of Contents
 Early History to 1945
PEOPLE HAVE DWELLED for thousands of years in the territory now
occupied by the Federal Republic of Germany. The first significant
written account of this area's inhabitants is Germania, written
about A.D. 98 by the Roman historian Tacitus. The Germanic tribes he
describes are believed to have come from Scandinavia to Germany about
100 B.C., perhaps induced to migrate by overpopulation. The Germanic
tribes living to the west of the Rhine River and south of the Main River
were soon subdued by the Romans and incorporated into the Roman Empire.
Tribes living to the east and north of these rivers remained free but
had more or less friendly relations with the Romans for several
centuries. Beginning in the fourth century A.D., new westward migrations
of eastern peoples caused the Germanic tribes to move into the Roman
Empire, which by the late fifth century ceased to exist.
One of the largest Germanic tribes, the Franks, came to control the
territory that was to become France and much of what is now western
Germany and Italy. In A.D. 800 their ruler, Charlemagne, was crowned in
Rome by the pope as emperor of all of this territory. Because of its
vastness, Charlemagne's empire split into three kingdoms within two
generations, the inhabitants of the West Frankish Kingdom speaking an
early form of French and those in the East Frankish Kingdom speaking an
early form of German. The tribes of the eastern kingdom--Franconians,
Saxons, Bavarians, Swabians, and several others--were ruled by
descendants of Charlemagne until 911, when they elected a Franconian,
Conrad I, to be their king. Some historians regard Conrad's election as
the beginning of what can properly be considered German history.
German kings soon added the Middle Kingdom to their realm and
adjudged themselves rulers of what would later be called the Holy Roman
Empire. In 962 Otto I became the first of the German kings crowned
emperor in Rome. By the middle of the next century, the German lands
ruled by the emperors were the richest and most politically powerful
part of Europe. German princes stopped the westward advances of the
Magyar tribe, and Germans began moving eastward to begin a long process
of colonization. During the next few centuries, however, the great
expense of the wars to maintain the empire against its enemies, chiefly
other German princes and the wealthy and powerful papacy and its allies,
depleted Germany's wealth and slowed its development. Unlike France or
England, where a central royal power was slowly established over
regional princes, Germany remained divided into a multitude of smaller
entities often warring with one another or in combinations against the
emperors. None of the local princes, or any of the emperors, were strong
enough to control Germany for a sustained period.
Germany's so-called particularism, that is, the existence within it
of many states of various sizes and kinds, such as principalities,
electorates, ecclesiastical territories, and free cities, became
characteristic by the early Middle Ages and persisted until 1871, when
the country was finally united. This disunity was exacerbated by the
Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, which ended Germany's
religious unity by converting many Germans to Lutheranism and Calvinism.
For several centuries, adherents to these two varieties of Protestantism
viewed each other with as much hostility and suspicion as they did Roman
Catholics. For their part, Catholics frequently resorted to force to
defend themselves against Protestants or to convert them. As a result,
Germans were divided not only by territory but also by religion.
The terrible destruction of the Thirty Years' War of 1618-48, a war
partially religious in nature, reduced German particularism, as did the
reforms enacted during the age of enlightened absolutism (1648-1789) and
later the growth of nationalism and industrialism in the nineteenth
century. In 1815 the Congress of Vienna stipulated that the several
hundred states existing in Germany before the French Revolution be
replaced with thirty-eight states, some of them quite small. In
subsequent decades, the two largest of these states, Austria and
Prussia, vied for primacy in a Germany that was gradually unifying under
a variety of social and economic pressures. The politician responsible
for German unification was Otto von Bismarck, whose brilliant diplomacy
and ruthless practice of statecraft secured Prussian hegemony in a
united Germany in 1871. The new state, proclaimed the German Empire, did
not include Austria and its extensive empire of many non-German
territories and peoples.
Imperial Germany prospered. Its economy grew rapidly, and by the turn
of the century it rivaled Britain's in size. Although the empire's
constitution did not provide for a political system in which the
government was responsible to parliament, political parties were founded
that represented the main social groups. Roman Catholic and socialist
parties contended with conservative and progressive parties and with a
conservative monarchy to determine how Germany should be governed.
After Bismarck's dismissal in 1890 by the young emperor Wilhelm II,
Germany stepped up its competition with other European states for
colonies and for what it considered its proper place among the great
states. An aggressive program of military expansion instilled fear of
Germany in its neighbors. Several decades of military and colonial
competition and a number of diplomatic crises made for a tense
international atmosphere by 1914. In the early summer of that year,
Germany's rulers acted on the belief that their country's survival
depended on a successful war against Russia and France. German
strategists felt that a war against these countries had to be waged by
1916 if it were to be won because after that year Russian and French
military reforms would be complete, making German victory doubtful. This
logic led Germany to get drawn into a war between its ally
Austria-Hungary and Russia. Within weeks, a complicated system of
alliances escalated that regional conflict into World War I, which ended
with Germany's defeat in November 1918.
The Weimar Republic, established at war's end, was the first attempt
to institute parliamentary democracy in Germany. The republic never
enjoyed the wholehearted support of many Germans, however, and from the
start it was under savage attack from elements of the left and, more
important, from the right. Moreover, it was burdened during its
fifteen-year existence with serious economic problems. During the second
half of the 1920s, when foreign loans fed German prosperity,
parliamentary politics functioned better, yet many of the established
elites remained hostile to it. With the onset of the Great Depression,
parliamentary politics became impossible, and the government ruled by
decree. Economic crisis favored extremist politicians, and Adolf
Hitler's National Socialist German Workers' Party became the strongest
party after the summer elections of 1932. In January 1933, the
republic's elected president, Paul von Hindenburg, the World War I army
commander, named a government headed by Hitler.
Within a few months, Hitler accomplished the "legal
revolution" that removed his opponents. By 1935 his regime had
transformed Germany into a totalitarian state. Hitler achieved notable
economic and diplomatic successes during the first five years of his
rule. However, in September 1939 he made a fatal gamble by invading
Poland and starting World War II. The eventual defeat of Hitler's Third
Reich in 1945 occurred only after the loss of tens of millions of lives,
many from military causes, many from sickness and starvation, and many
from what has come to be called the Holocaust.
GERMANY WAS UNITED ON OCTOBER 3, 1990. This event came after
forty-five years of division that had begun with the partition of
Germany into four occupation zones following its defeat in 1945 by the
Four Powers--the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union.
Once a powerful nation, Germany lay vanquished at the end of World War
II. The war's human cost had been staggering. Millions of Germans had
died or had suffered terribly during the conflict, both in combat and on
the home front. Intensive Allied bombing raids, invasions, and
subsequent social upheaval had forced millions of Germans from their
homes. Not since the ravages of the Thirty Years' War had Germans
experienced such misery. Beyond the physical destruction, Germans had
been confronted with the moral devastation of defeat.
Germans refer to the immediate aftermath of the war as the Stunde
Null (Zero Hour), the point in time when Germany ceased to exist as
a state and the rebuilding of the country would begin. At first, Germany
was administered by the Four Powers, each with its own occupation zone.
In time, Germans themselves began to play a role in the governing of
these zones. Political parties were formed, and, within months of the
war's end, the first elections were held. Although most people were
concerned with mere physical survival, much was accomplished in
rebuilding cities, fashioning a new economy, and integrating the
millions of refugees from the eastern areas of Germany that had been
lost after the war.
Overshadowing these events within Germany, however, was the gradual
emergence of the Cold War during the second half of the 1940s. By the
decade's end, the two superpowers--the United States and the Soviet
Union--had faced off in an increasingly ideological confrontation. The
Iron Curtain between them cut Germany in two. Although the Allies'
original plans envisioned that Germany would remain a single state,
Western and Eastern concepts of political, social, and economic
organization gradually led the three Western zones to join together,
becoming separate from the Soviet zone and ultimately leading to the
formation in 1949 of two German states. The three Western occupation
zones became the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG, or West Germany), and
the Soviet zone became the German Democratic Republic (GDR, or East
Germany).
During the next four decades, the two states led separate existences.
West Germany joined the Western community of nations, while East Germany
became the westernmost part of the Soviet empire. The two German states,
with a common language and history, were separated by the mutual
suspicion and hostility of the superpowers. In the mid-1950s, both
German states rearmed. The FRG's armed forces, the Bundeswehr, became a
vital part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The GDR's
National People's Army (Nationale Volksarmee--NVA) became a key
component of the Warsaw Pact. The construction of the Berlin Wall in
1961 by the GDR further divided the two states.
In West Germany, by the early 1950s a system of parliamentary
democracy with free and contending political parties was firmly
established. The Christian Democratic Union (Christlich Demokratische
Union--CDU), along with its sister party, the Christian Social Union
(Christlich-Soziale Union--CSU), led the coalitions that governed West
Germany at the national level for two decades until late 1969. In that
year, the Social Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei
Deutschlands--SPD) formed the first of a series of coalition governments
with the Free Democratic Party (Freie Demokratische Partei--FDP) that
governed the country until 1982. Late that year, the SPD was ousted from
power when the CDU/CSU and the FDP formed a new coalition government.
These parties ruled for the rest of the 1980s. As successful, however,
as West Germany's adoption of democratic politics had been after 1945,
the country's economic recovery was so strong that it was commonly
referred to as the "economic miracle " (Wirtschaftswunder
). By the 1960s, West Germany was among the world's wealthiest
countries, and by the 1990s, Germany's economy and central bank played
the leading role in Europe's economy.
East Germany was not so fortunate. A socialist dictatorship was put
in place and carefully watched by its Soviet masters. As in the Soviet
Union, political opposition was suppressed, the press censored, and the
economy owned and controlled by the state. East Germany's economy
performed modestly when compared with that of West Germany, but of all
the socialist economies it was the most successful. Unlike West Germany,
East Germany was not freely supported by its citizens. Indeed, force was
needed to keep East Germans from fleeing to the West. Although some
consolidation of the GDR was assured by the construction of the Berlin
Wall, the GDR remained an artificial entity maintained by Soviet
military power. Once this support was withdrawn, the GDR collapsed.
During the four decades of division, relations between the two German
states were reserved and sometimes hostile. Despite their common
language and history, the citizens of the two states had limited direct
contact with one another. At times, during the 1960s, for example,
contact was reduced to a minimum. During the 1970s, however, the two
peoples began to mix more freely as their governments negotiated
treaties that made relations between the two states more open. During
the 1980s, although relations continued to improve and contacts between
the two peoples became more frequent, persons attempting to flee from
East Germany still died along its mined borders, GDR officials continued
to harass and arrest dissidents, and the Socialist Unity Party of
Germany (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands--SED) rigidly
controlled political life.
A key reason for the collapse of the GDR was the poor performance of
its state-owned and centrally directed economy. The efforts of Soviet
president Mikhail Gorbachev, beginning in the mid-1980s, to liberalize
the Soviet Union and reform its economy were met with hostility by the
GDR's top leadership. Word of these measures nevertheless reached East
German grassroots opposition groups. Encouraged by the waves of reform
in the Soviet Union and in neighboring socialist states, opposition in
the East German population grew and became more and more vocal, despite
increased state repression. By the second half of 1989, the East German
opposition consisted of a number of groups with a variety of aims and
was strong enough to stage large demonstrations.
The massive flow of East Germans to the West through neighboring
socialist countries in the summer and fall of 1989, particularly through
Hungary, was telling evidence that the GDR did not have the support of
its citizens. Public opposition to the regime became ever more open and
demanding. In late 1989, confronted with crushing economic problems,
unable to control the borders of neighboring states, and told by the
Soviet leadership not to expect outside help in quelling domestic
protest, the GDR leadership resigned in the face of massive and
constantly growing public demonstrations. After elections in the spring
of 1990, the critics of the SED regime took over the government. On
October 3, 1990, the GDR ceased to exist, and its territory and people
were joined to the FRG. The division of Germany that had lasted decades
was ended.
Source: U.S. Library of Congress
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