GermanyDeutschland

Roman Germany ended at the Rhine and the Danube. West and south of those rivers the Romans built Trier, Cologne, Mainz, Augsburg and Regensburg, with baths, bridges and a fortified frontier, the Limes, running between them. East and north lived Germanic peoples who never came under Rome's control after the defeat of three legions in the Teutoburg Forest in 9 CE. That old line still shows on the map of wine, cathedrals and Catholic regions today.

For about a thousand years from Charlemagne's coronation in 800, most of the German lands belonged to the Holy Roman Empire, a loose federation of kingdoms, duchies, bishoprics and free cities under an elected emperor. It never became a centralised state. The result, visible everywhere you travel, is a country of many former capitals: Dresden, Munich, Stuttgart, Hanover, Weimar, Bamberg and dozens of smaller residences each built palaces, opera houses and churches to match their neighbours. Martin Luther's challenge to the Church in Wittenberg in 1517 split these states between Protestant and Catholic, and the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648) that followed killed a large share of the population.

Prussia, a northern kingdom centred on Berlin, rose through the 18th and 19th centuries and unified Germany under its leadership in 1871 after wars with Denmark, Austria and France, leaving Austria outside. The new empire industrialised at speed: railways, coal and steel in the Ruhr, chemical works on the Rhine, grand stations and apartment blocks. Defeat in the First World War ended the monarchy in 1918, and the Weimar Republic struggled with hyperinflation, street violence and the Depression.

Hitler's Nazi party took power in 1933, destroyed democracy within months and led Germany into the Second World War and the Holocaust, the murder of six million Jews along with Roma, disabled people and others. By 1945 most big cities lay in ruins. The victors divided the country: the Federal Republic in the west, a democracy anchored in NATO and the European Community, and the German Democratic Republic in the east, a Soviet-bloc dictatorship that sealed its border and, in 1961, built the Berlin Wall.

The Wall fell on 9 November 1989 after mass protests in Leipzig and elsewhere, and the two states reunited on 3 October 1990. Berlin became the capital again, and billions went into rebuilding eastern cities. Differences in wages, pensions and political views between east and west persist a generation later, and they explain much of the country's politics in the 2020s, including the rise of the far right in the eastern states.

Few countries put their worst history on display the way Germany does. The word for it, Vergangenheitsbewältigung, means roughly 'working through the past', and it shapes city centres, school trips and law. It was not immediate: in the 1950s many former Nazis returned to careers in West Germany, and a real public reckoning came with the Auschwitz trials of the 1960s and the protests of 1968, when a younger generation questioned their parents.

The results are everywhere a traveller walks. Brass 'Stolpersteine' (stumbling stones) set into pavements name individual people deported from the house behind them. Former concentration camps such as Dachau, Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald are memorial sites with free entry. Nuremberg's unfinished Nazi Party Rally Grounds hold a documentation centre, and Berlin's Topography of Terror stands on the site of the Gestapo headquarters. Showing Nazi symbols or denying the Holocaust is a crime.

The GDR is remembered differently. The Stasi's files were opened to the people they spied on, and its Berlin headquarters and prison at Hohenschönhausen are museums. At the same time, a gentle nostalgia for eastern brands, traffic-light men and holiday camps, called Ostalgie, sits alongside memorials to people killed at the Wall. Visitors should treat memorial sites as places of mourning: no posing, no picnics, quiet voices.

Germany is a federation, and the states (Länder) are not just administrative. Bavaria calls itself a Free State, keeps its own police style, holidays and a politics dominated for decades by one party. Hamburg and Bremen are city-states with a merchant, Hanseatic self-image. Saxony and Thuringia carry the legacy of the GDR alongside older royal traditions. School holidays, shop hours and even the number of public holidays differ from state to state.

Regional identity shows most in speech, food and religion. A Swabian in Stuttgart, a Cologne native and a Berliner speak very different dialects and joke about each other. The Catholic south and Rhineland celebrate Carnival and Corpus Christi; the Protestant north is plainer. Food follows the same lines: dumplings and beer in Bavaria, spätzle in Swabia, Riesling on the Rhine and Moselle, fish and kale in the north.

For travellers, federalism means that there is no single 'best of Germany'. Berlin is the political and cultural capital but not the economic one; Frankfurt is the financial centre, Munich the richest big city, Hamburg the port, Cologne the media hub, Leipzig the rising creative city. A good trip picks two or three of these rather than trying to find one city that stands for everything.

Germany's food reputation is heavy, but daily eating is lighter and more varied than the stereotype. Bread is the base: more than 3,000 registered kinds, from dark rye to seeded rolls, and bakeries open at dawn in every village. Lunch has traditionally been the main hot meal and dinner a cold 'Abendbrot' of bread, cheese and cold cuts, though city habits now follow the rest of Europe.

Beer is regional and local. Bavaria's 1516 purity law, the Reinheitsgebot, limited ingredients to water, barley and hops (yeast was added later) and is still used in marketing. Franconia around Bamberg has the highest density of breweries in the world, many tiny and village-owned. Cologne drinks Kölsch in small glasses, Düsseldorf dark Altbier, Berlin sour Berliner Weisse. Wine is the other tradition: Riesling from the steep Moselle and Rhine slopes is among the world's great white wines.

The most eaten fast food is not the sausage but the döner kebab, developed by Turkish immigrants in West Berlin in the early 1970s into its German form with salad and sauce in flatbread. Turkish, Italian, Greek, Vietnamese (from GDR contract workers) and, recently, Syrian food are part of ordinary German eating. Berlin has become one of Europe's leading vegan cities.

The German lands produced an outsized share of Western music: Bach in Leipzig, Handel, Beethoven in Bonn, Brahms, Wagner in Bayreuth, Schumann and Mendelssohn. The small-state tradition left more than 80 publicly funded opera houses and 130 professional orchestras, so even mid-sized cities have seasons worth booking. Weimar, home of Goethe and Schiller, was the centre of German classical literature; Kant, Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche shaped modern philosophy.

Architecture runs from Romanesque cathedrals at Speyer and Worms through Gothic Cologne, the Baroque of Würzburg and Dresden, and Schinkel's Neoclassical Berlin. In 1919 the Bauhaus school in Weimar, later Dessau, set out the principles of modern design. After 1945 much was rebuilt: Dresden's Frauenkirche was reconstructed stone by stone and reopened in 2005, while other cities chose modern centres.

Berlin has been Europe's magnet for artists, musicians and techno since reunification, when cheap empty buildings in the East turned into clubs and studios. Rising rents have changed that, but the city's museums, galleries and club culture remain a main reason to visit. The Documenta exhibition in Kassel, held every five years, is one of the world's key contemporary art shows.

Germany in 2026 is the EU's largest economy but one that grew little in the mid-2020s. The export model built on cars, machinery and cheap Russian gas came under strain after 2022, and the energy transition away from nuclear (the last plants closed in 2023) and coal is expensive. The government elected in 2025 under Chancellor Friedrich Merz promised investment in infrastructure and defence, after decades of under-spending that travellers notice in delayed trains and patchy mobile coverage.

Migration is the defining political question. About a quarter of residents have a migration background, from post-war Turkish and Italian 'guest workers' to Russian-Germans, EU citizens, and more than a million refugees from Syria, Afghanistan and Ukraine since 2015. The far-right AfD became the second-largest party in the 2025 election, strongest in the east. Temporary border checks on all land borders are one visible result.

Daily life for a visitor is easy and orderly, with some habits to learn: cash is still more common than in most of northern Europe, shops close on Sundays, rules about recycling and noise are taken seriously, and directness is politeness rather than rudeness. The Deutschlandticket, a nationwide monthly regional-transport pass introduced in 2023, has made rail travel cheaper for residents and visitors alike.