Germany

From the forests beyond the Rhine to the heart of a united Europe.

Germany's history is one of a people long bound by language and culture yet politically fragmented for most of a millennium. From the Germanic tribes who halted Rome at the Rhine, through the loose sprawl of the Holy Roman Empire and the religious rupture of the Reformation, the German lands coalesced only in 1871 under Prussian leadership. The unified nation rose swiftly to industrial and military power, descended into two world wars and, between 1933 and 1945, into the dictatorship of the Third Reich and the genocide of European Jewry. Defeated and divided in 1945, Germany spent four decades split between a democratic west and a communist east before its peaceful reunification in 1990 restored it as a single democratic state at the centre of the European Union.