Germany's geography: nine neighbours and almost no natural edge

Why Germany's borders follow almost nothing

Nine countries touch Germany and the line shared with them runs to 3,714 km. Almost none of it is a feature a walker would notice. The Alpine crest carries part of the Austrian and Swiss borders in the far south, and the sea closes the country at the top; in between, the frontier crosses farmland, forest, canal and suburb without the ground changing on either side of it.

The country is 889 km deep, from List on the island of Sylt at 55°03' north to the Haldenwanger Eck above Oberstdorf at 47°16', a little under eight degrees of latitude. East to west it runs from Deschka on the Neisse in Saxony to Isenbruch in Selfkant, on the Dutch border. Coastline accounts for a further 2,389 km, split between two seas that behave nothing alike.

Frontiers drawn across open country leave debris, and Germany's are full of it. Büsingen am Hochrhein is a German village on the Swiss side of the river, cut off from the rest of the country by a strip of Swiss territory 680 metres wide at its narrowest. Five German exclaves sit inside Belgium, left over when the bed of the Vennbahn railway was awarded to Belgium in 1919 along with the track running through German ground. Near Jungholz the German-Austrian border crosses itself at a single point. On Lake Constance, 536 km² of water with 62% of the shore in German hands, no border has ever been agreed at all, and the three states around it have simply left the question open.

Which way German rivers run

Nearly the whole country drains north. The Ems, the Weser, the Elbe and the Rhine reach the North Sea; the Oder reaches the Baltic. One river disagrees. The Danube rises on the eastern slope of the Black Forest, a short walk from ground that drains the other way into the Rhine, and runs east across Bavaria to leave Germany at Passau, bound for the Black Sea.

How the northern plain was left by ice

The northern third of Germany is the German share of the North European Plain, and it was arranged by ice rather than by rivers. Successive glaciations dumped sand and gravel across it, blocked the drainage and left the shallow depressions that hold the lakes of Mecklenburg, of which the Müritz at 117 km² is the largest wholly German lake. The terrain is flat enough that the watercourses crossing it wander, and marsh survives in quantity near the Dutch border, along the Frisian coast and in the Spreewald south of Berlin.

The coast itself is two different places. The Baltic side is a low shore of bays, lagoons and chalk cliffs, with almost no tide. The North Sea side is a tidal flat, and a large one: remote sensing puts 2,783 km² of tidal flat in Germany, the eleventh largest area of it in any country, and the Wadden Sea that results is protected by three national parks and a UNESCO listing shared with the Netherlands and Denmark.

A coast of mud and sand in front of a plain at sea level is a coast that moves. The storm surges of 1362 and 1634 cut the west coast of Schleswig-Holstein into its present shape, drowning parishes and turning what had been marsh into open water and islands. The North Sea flood of 1962 killed several hundred people in Hamburg, more than 20 km inland from the sea. The lowest natural ground in the country, at Neuendorf-Sachsenbande in the Wilstermarsch, lies 3.54 metres below sea level and is dry only because it is diked and pumped.

What the middle uplands did to German settlement

Between the plain and the Alps lies a wide belt of low wooded ranges, the Mittelgebirge, and it has no single grain. The Eifel, the Hunsrück and the Palatine Forest stand west of the Rhine; the Taunus rises north of Frankfurt; the Vogelsberg is the eroded remains of a volcano; the Rhön, the Thuringian Forest, the Harz and the Ore Mountains run east towards Czechia. Further south the Swabian and Franconian Alb curve from the source of the Danube up to the valley of the Main, and the Bavarian Forest holds the Czech border.

None of these is high. The Harz tops out near 1,140 metres, the Black Forest a little higher, and the highest permanently inhabited settlement in Germany is Feldberg at 1,277 metres. They are the wrong size to be a frontier and the wrong size to ignore: too low to stop an army, high enough to make a detour worth taking, and forested enough that clearance came slowly and separately in each basin. The consequence is a country parcelled into compartments, each with its own patch of farmland, its own river, its own market town and, in time, its own ruler. The Holy Roman Empire's several hundred territories were not an administrative accident; they were the terrain written into law. Germany still has more than 2,000 cities and towns, sixteen states with their own constitutions, and eleven officially recognised metropolitan regions, and the older map is visible underneath all three.

The one continuous gap through the belt is the Rhine, which has carried traffic between the plain and the south since the Roman frontier ran along it. The other is the Main corridor east of Frankfurt, which is why an airport and a banking district ended up in a city of under 800,000 people.

How the climate splits west from east

Germany's weather divides along the same axis as its terrain, but the stronger gradient is west to east. The north-west is oceanic: westerlies off the North Sea keep winters cool and summers moderate, with rain spread through the year, and the coast almost never freezes hard. The east is continental, with colder winters, warmer summer peaks and recorded dry spells. The Alps block most of the warm Mediterranean air that would otherwise reach the south, so altitude and distance from the Atlantic pull in the same direction.

The warmest ground is the Upper Rhine rift, the strip between Mannheim and the Swiss border west of the Black Forest, where summer days can pass 40 °C and nights sometimes fail to drop below 20 °C. It is also where the vineyards, the orchards and the German Wine Route are. The coldest lowlands sit at the other corner, in the south-east of eastern Germany around Dresden and Görlitz and up towards Berlin, which is where Siberian air lands when it reaches the country at all.

The extremes on record run from 41.5 °C at Möckern-Drewitz in June 2026 to −37.8 °C at Pfaffenhofen an der Ilm in February 1929. Averages are far duller and describe ordinary life better: monthly means between February 2019 and February 2020 ran from 3.3 °C in January 2020 to 19.8 °C in June 2019, and monthly sunshine from 45 hours in November 2019 to 300 hours in June 2019. Overcast skies from November to February are the single most reliable feature of the German year.

What is changing is the tail rather than the mean. Longer heat waves, flash flooding after concentrated summer rain, coastal flooding and reduced water availability in late summer are the documented trends, and Germany's last glacier is on course to disappear.

What Germany digs out of its own ground

By the standards of a country its size, German soil is poor. Only lignite and potash salt occur in quantities worth extracting; oil, gas and metal ores are mostly imported. What Germany does have, it has in the wrong places for scenery and the right places for industry. The bituminous coal came out of swamps that ran from what is now southern England across the Ruhr and into Poland more than 300 million years ago. The lignite formed the same way but far later, around 66 million years ago, and the wood in it never finished turning into coal, so it carries less energy per tonne and does not repay long-distance transport. That single fact explains the map of German power generation: the pits are in North Rhine-Westphalia, Saxony and Brandenburg, and the power stations sit beside them.

It also produced the strangest number in German geography. The lowest point in the country is not a marsh but a hole. The Hambach opencast lignite mine near Niederzier reaches 293 metres below sea level, nearly a hundred times deeper than anything the land manages on its own, and it was dug in living memory.

The Ore Mountains on the Czech border were mined for silver from the twelfth century and for uranium afterwards. Between 1947 and 1990 the Wismut company produced 230,400 tonnes of uranium there, and left a cleanup that outlasted the state that ordered the mining. Above the western coalfield, meanwhile, the Ruhr grew into the largest urban area in Germany. Geology decided where the greatest concentration of Germans would end up living.

Where Germany put its national parks

Sixteen national parks, seventeen biosphere reserves and 105 nature parks cover a country in which, as of 2016, 51% of the land was farmed, 30% forested and 14% built on or paved. The protection went almost entirely to the edges.

Nothing on that list sits in the fertile middle. The loess belt running from the Rhineland through Lower Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and into Saxony is the best arable ground in the country, and it has been ploughed continuously for so long that there is no reference condition left to protect.

German forest is heavily made, too. The National Forest Inventory puts conifers at roughly 60% of the standing timber and beech, oak and other broadleaves at just over 40, which inverts what would grow there without help: spruce and pine were planted in quantity from the eighteenth century onwards because they grow straight and fast on exhausted soil. The wildlife is what survives farming and forestry rather than what once lived there. Roe deer, wild boar, fox, badger, hare and mouflon are common, the beaver and the lynx have returned in small numbers, the wolf has come back across the Polish border, and the bison and the brown bear are gone.

Why Germany has no single dominant city

The population, 84.7 million at the 2023 census, is spread unusually evenly for its size. Density averages 236 people per square kilometre. Berlin is the biggest city, the Ruhr is the biggest urban area, and neither is the country's financial, industrial or media centre.

Each of the large cities is where a specific piece of ground put it. Hamburg stands at the head of navigation on a tidal river. Cologne, Düsseldorf and Duisburg line the Rhine at the point where the uplands release it onto the plain. Frankfurt sits in the gap the Main cuts eastward through the hills. Munich is on the gravel outwash of the Alpine foreland, on the old salt road. Stuttgart fills a bowl above the Neckar, and Berlin grew on sand at a crossing of the Spree marshes, which is why it needed a Prussian state to make it matter at all.

Germany came out the inverse of France or the United Kingdom. A country open at its edges and broken into compartments in the middle acquired a dozen centres of comparable weight, spread over eleven metropolitan regions and 400-odd districts, and its road network grew dense in every direction because there was no single hub for it to radiate from. The federal structure written into the Basic Law in 1949 is often read as a reaction to dictatorship, and it was, but it was also the easier arrangement to impose on ground that had never organised itself around one place.