History of Germany

The concept of Germany as a distinct region in Central Europe can be traced to Julius Caesar, who referred to the unconquered area east of the Rhine as Germania, thus distinguishing it from Gaul. The victory of the Germanic tribes in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest prevented annexation by the Roman Empire, although the Roman provinces of Germania Superior and Germania Inferior were established along the Rhine. Following the Fall of the Western Roman Empire, the Franks conquered the other West Germanic tribes. When the Frankish Empire was divided among Charles the Great's heirs in 843, the eastern part became East Francia, and later Kingdom of Germany. In 962, Otto I became the first Holy Roman Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, the medieval German state.
During the High Middle Ages, the Hanseatic League, dominated by German port cities, established itself along the Baltic and North Seas. The development of a crusading element within German Christendom led to the Northern Crusades and the establishment of the State of the Teutonic Order along the Southern Baltic coast in what would later become Prussia. In the Investiture Controversy, the German Emperors resisted Catholic Church authority. In the Late Middle Ages, the regional dukes, princes, and bishops gained power at the expense of the emperors. Martin Luther led the Protestant Reformation within the Catholic Church after 1517, as the northern and eastern states became Protestant, while most of the southern and western states remained Catholic. The Thirty Years' War, a civil war from 1618 to 1648 brought tremendous destruction to the Holy Roman Empire. The estates of the empire attained great autonomy in the Peace of Westphalia, the most important being Austria, Prussia, Bavaria and Saxony. With the Napoleonic Wars, feudalism fell away and the Holy Roman Empire was dissolved in 1806. Napoleon established the Confederation of the Rhine as a German puppet state, but after the French defeat, the German Confederation was established under Austrian presidency. The German revolutions of 1848–1849 failed but the Industrial Revolution modernized the German economy, leading to rapid urban growth and the emergence of the socialist movement. Prussia, with its capital Berlin, grew in power. German universities became world-class centers for science and humanities, while music and art flourished. The unification of Germany was achieved under the leadership of the Chancellor Otto von Bismarck with the formation of the German Empire in 1871. The new Reichstag, an elected parliament, had only a limited role in the imperial government. Germany joined the other powers in colonial expansion in Africa and the Pacific.
By 1900, Germany was the dominant power on the European continent and its rapidly expanding industry had surpassed Britain's while provoking it in a naval arms race. Germany led the Central Powers in World War I, but was defeated, partly occupied, forced to pay war reparations, and stripped of its colonies and significant territory along its borders. The German Revolution of 1918–1919 ended the German Empire with the abdication of Wilhelm II in 1918 and established the Weimar Republic, an ultimately unstable parliamentary democracy. In January 1933, Adolf Hitler, leader of the Nazi Party, used the economic hardships of the Great Depression along with popular resentment over the terms imposed on Germany at the end of World War I to establish a totalitarian regime. This Nazi Germany made racism, especially antisemitism, a central tenet of its policies, and became increasingly aggressive with its territorial demands, threatening war if they were not met. Germany quickly remilitarized, annexed its German-speaking neighbors and invaded Poland, triggering World War II. During the war, the Nazis established a systematic genocide program known as the Holocaust which killed 11 million people, including 6 million Jews. By 1944, the German Army was pushed back on all fronts until finally collapsing in May 1945. Under occupation by the Allies, denazification efforts took place, large populations under former German-occupied territories were displaced, German territories were split up by the victorious powers and in the east annexed by Poland and the Soviet Union. Germany spent the entirety of the Cold War era divided into the NATO-aligned West Germany and Warsaw Pact-aligned East Germany. Germans also fled from Communist areas into West Germany, which experienced rapid economic expansion, and became the dominant economy in Western Europe.
In 1989, the Berlin Wall was opened, the Eastern Bloc collapsed, and East and West Germany were reunited in 1990. The Franco-German friendship became the basis for the political integration of Western Europe in the European Union. In 1998–1999, Germany was one of the founding countries of the eurozone. Germany remains one of the economic powerhouses of Europe, contributing about 1/4 of the eurozone's annual gross domestic product. In the early 2010s, Germany played a critical role in trying to resolve the escalating euro crisis, especially concerning Greece and other Southern European nations. In 2015, Germany faced the European migrant crisis as the main receiver of asylum seekers from Syria and other troubled regions. Germany opposed Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine and decided to strengthen its armed forces.

Prehistory

Paleolithic and Neolithic ages

Pre-human apes such as Danuvius guggenmosi, who were present in Germany over 11 million years ago, are theorized to be among the earliest apes to walk on two legs prior to other species and genera such as Australopithecus. The discovery of the Homo heidelbergensis mandible in 1907 affirms archaic human presence in Germany by at least 600,000 years ago, so stone tools were dated as far back as 1.33 million years ago. The oldest complete set of hunting weapons ever found anywhere in the world was excavated from a coal mine in Schöningen, Lower Saxony. Between 1994 and 1998, eight 380,000-year-old wooden javelins between in length were eventually unearthed.
One of the oldest buildings in the world and one of the oldest pieces of art was found in Bilzingsleben.
In 1856, the fossilized bones of an extinct human species were salvaged from a limestone grotto in the Neander valley near Düsseldorf, North Rhine-Westphalia. The archaic nature of the fossils, now known to be around 40,000 years old, was recognized and the characteristics published in the first-ever paleoanthropologic species description in 1858 by Hermann Schaaffhausen. The species was named Homo neanderthalensis, Neanderthal man in 1864.
The oldest traces of homo sapiens in Germany were found in the cave in Ranis, where up to 47,500-year-old remains were discovered, among the oldest in Europe. The remains of Paleolithic early modern human occupation uncovered and documented in several caves in the Swabian Jura include various mammoth ivory sculptures that rank among the oldest uncontested works of art and several flutes, made of bird bone and mammoth ivory that are confirmed to be the oldest musical instruments ever found. The 41,000-year-old Löwenmensch figurine represents the oldest uncontested figurative work of art and the 40,000-year-old Venus of Hohle Fels has been asserted as the oldest uncontested object of human figurative art ever discovered. These artefacts are attributed to the Aurignacian culture.
Between 12,900 and 11,700 years ago, north-central Germany was part of the Ahrensburg culture.
File:Smac Neolithikum 122.jpg|thumb|Stroke-ornamented ware culture settlement with long houses and
circular enclosures, c. 4700 BC|211x211px
The first groups of early farmers different from the indigenous hunter-gatherers to migrate into Europe came from a population in western Anatolia at the beginning of the Neolithic period between 10,000 and 8,000 years ago.
Central Germany was one of the primary areas of the Linear Pottery culture, which was partially contemporary with the Ertebølle culture of Denmark and northern Germany. The construction of the Central European Neolithic circular enclosures falls in this time period with the best known and oldest being the Goseck circle, constructed. Afterwards, Germany was part of the Rössen culture, Michelsberg culture and Funnelbeaker culture. The oldest traces for the use of wheel and wagon ever found are located at a northern German Funnelbeaker culture site and date to around 3400 BC.

Bronze Age

The settlers of the Corded Ware culture, that had spread all over the fertile plains of Central Europe during the Late Neolithic were of Indo-European ancestry. The Indo-Europeans had, via mass-migration, arrived into the heartland of Europe around 4,500 years ago.
By the late Bronze Age, the Urnfield culture had replaced the Bell Beaker, Unetice and Tumulus cultures in central Europe, whilst the Nordic Bronze Age had developed in Scandinavia and northern Germany. The name 'Urnfield' comes from the custom of cremating the dead and placing their ashes in urns, which were then buried in fields. The first usage of the name occurred in publications over grave sites in southern Germany in the late 19th century. Over much of Europe, the Urnfield culture followed the Tumulus culture and was succeeded by the Hallstatt culture. The Italic peoples, including the Latins, from which the Romans emerged, come from the Urnfield culture of central Europe.

Iron Age

The Hallstatt culture, which had developed from the Urnfield culture, was the predominant Western and Central European culture from the 12th to 8th centuries BC and during the early Iron Age. It was followed by the La Tène culture.
The people who had adopted these cultural characteristics in central and southern Germany are regarded as Celts. How and if the Celts are related to the Urnfield culture remains disputed. However, Celtic cultural centres developed in central Europe during the late Bronze Age. Some, like the Heuneburg, the oldest city north of the Alps, grew to become important cultural centres of the Iron Age in Central Europe, that maintained trade routes to the Mediterranean. In the 5th century BC the Greek historian Herodotus mentioned a Celtic city at the Danube – Pyrene, that historians attribute to the Heuneburg. Beginning around 700 BC, Germanic peoples from southern Scandinavia and northern Germany expanded south and gradually replaced the Celtic peoples in Central Europe.