Germany's history: a state made in 1871 by leaving Germans out

Why the Holy Roman Empire never became Germany

The name is older than any state that carried it. Julius Caesar called the land east of the Rhine Germania, and after Arminius destroyed a Roman force in the Teutoburg Forest, Rome fixed its frontier on the Rhine and the Danube and stopped advancing. The provinces of Germania Inferior and Germania Superior were established in 85 AD along the river valleys.

The Treaty of Verdun split the Carolingian empire in 843 and gave Louis the German everything east of the Rhine. Otto I was crowned king at Aachen in 936 and emperor by Pope John XII in Rome in 962, and what followed governed central Europe for eight and a half centuries without becoming a country. The imperial title was elective. The Golden Bull of 1356 fixed the electorate at seven princes, and from 1438 the Habsburgs held the title almost without a break until 1806.

What the empire contained was several hundred separately governed territories: kingdoms, duchies, prince-bishoprics, imperial free cities, and the estates of imperial knights. German has a word for the condition, Kleinstaaterei, and two settlements entrenched it. The Peace of Augsburg in 1555 let every ruler fix the religion of his own principality, cuius regio, eius religio, which made the confessional map and the territorial map the same map. The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 confirmed the autonomy of the Imperial Estates against the emperor, ceded most of Alsace to France, and released the Netherlands from the empire altogether.

Westphalia ended a war fought almost entirely inside the empire, and what it cost is still given two ways. One estimate has the population falling 38%, from 16 million in 1618 to 10 million by 1650. The other has it falling 20%, from 20 million to 16 million.

Two things did unify while the state did not. Movable type was in use at Mainz around 1439, and Luther's translation of the Bible after 1517 carried a single written German into territories that spoke dozens of spoken ones. By 1530 more than 10,000 separate works had been printed in around ten million copies, and Modern Standard German descends from that translation. The written language was settled about three centuries before any government held all of its speakers.

Napoleon ended the empire. Francis II abdicated the imperial title on 6 August 1806, the Confederation of the Rhine replaced it under French control, and what came after has been a sequence of states, each of which ended by being defeated or dissolved.

How Prussia made a German state by war

The Congress of Vienna declined to restore the empire. It built the German Confederation in 1815 instead, a league of 39 sovereign states under a permanent Austrian presidency with a Federal Diet at Frankfurt. Metternich used it in 1819 to issue the Carlsbad Decrees, which shut down the nationalist student fraternities, removed liberal professors and widened censorship.

Economic union arrived first, and it arrived without Austria. The Zollverein of 1834 joined Prussia to most of the German states in a customs union that left the Habsburg lands outside, thirty-seven years before the political union that left them outside too.

The one attempt to build a German state from below failed. The Frankfurt National Assembly met in May 1848 to draft a national constitution and offered the imperial crown to Frederick William IV of Prussia. He refused the crown and the constitution with it, the assembly was dissolved, the princes broke the risings by force, and the German Confederation was back in working order by 1850.

What worked was war, three of them in seven years. William I appointed Otto von Bismarck Prussian minister president in 1862. Prussia and Austria took Schleswig and Holstein from Denmark together in 1864, then fought each other over how to administer them. At Sadowa-Königgrätz in July 1866 about half a million men met in a single battle, Prussian breech-loading needle guns told against Austrian muzzle-loaders, and Austria was pushed out of German affairs permanently. The German Confederation was dissolved and the North German Confederation took its place from 1867, under a constitution Bismarck wrote.

France declared war in July 1870 over a Hohenzollern candidacy for the Spanish throne. Napoleon III surrendered at Sedan, Paris capitulated in January 1871, and France was made to pay five billion francs and cede Alsace-Lorraine. On 18 January 1871, with the siege still running, the German princes assembled in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles and proclaimed Wilhelm I German Emperor.

Britannica describes the empire as forged through cabinet diplomacy and agreement among hereditary rulers, and not by nationalist pressure from below. The imperial constitution was the North German Confederation's, four years old and lightly revised, and the state was a set of bargains struck with the kings of Bavaria, Saxony and Württemberg.

What the German Empire was built to be

The empire was a federation of 25 states: four kingdoms, five grand duchies, thirteen duchies and principalities, and three free cities. Prussia held more than three fifths of the territory and about three fifths of the population, and set the terms. Integration was not automatic. The Hanseatic ports wanted free trade and would not sign the Zollverein treaties until 1888.

Bismarck's domestic method was to define the nation by naming enemies inside it. The Kulturkampf of 1871 to 1878 tried to break the political weight of the Catholic Church through secular schooling and civil marriage. It failed, and it antagonised Protestants along the way. From 1878 the Social Democrats' organisation and newspapers were outlawed, and from 1883 the same government introduced pensions, accident insurance, medical care and unemployment insurance. Historians call the combination negative integration, and several of them trace a line from it to a later politics that built unity by persecuting a minority.

The economy outran the politics. Industrial production rose about 500% between 1870 and 1914. In 1913 German firms made 90% of the world's dyestuffs and exported 80% of what they made.

Abroad, the empire took the colonies Bismarck had argued against taking, hosted the Berlin Conference of 1885 that set the rules for the partition of Africa, and in German South West Africa between 1904 and 1908 conducted the campaign against the Herero and Nama that has been charged as genocide.

Wilhelm II forced Bismarck out in 1890 and let the Reinsurance Treaty with Russia lapse, which produced the Franco-Russian Alliance of 1894, and from 1898 he built a fleet against Britain.

The war that followed destroyed the state that fought it. The attempt to encircle Paris failed on the Marne and the British naval blockade held from 1914 to 1919. Brest-Litovsk in March 1918 handed Germany control of eastern Europe, and the Allies cited it later when Germany called Versailles harsh. By the summer of 1918 American troops were landing in France at 10,000 a day. In October General Ludendorff pressed for the government to be democratised so that the capitulation would be signed by the parliamentary parties. The sailors at Kiel mutinied on 3 November, a republic was declared on 9 November, and Wilhelm II left for the Netherlands.

How the Weimar Republic came apart

Friedrich Ebert signed the Weimar Constitution on 11 August 1919. It made a federal republic with a chancellor dependent on the Reichstag and a president who could govern by decree, and the second provision is the one that mattered.

The Treaty of Versailles cost Germany 65,000 square kilometres in Europe, about 13% of its territory, along with 7 million people, 48% of its iron resources and all of its colonies. The army was capped at 100,000 men. The war guilt clause made Germany liable for reparations, set by the Allies in 1921 at 132 billion gold marks.

The republic was attacked from both directions from the start. The Kapp Putsch of 1920 collapsed under a general strike; the Ruhr rising that followed was put down with more than 1,200 dead; the former minister Matthias Erzberger was assassinated in 1921 and the foreign minister Walther Rathenau in 1922; 1923 brought a communist rising, the Küstrin Putsch and Hitler's attempt in Munich. In the same year French and Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr over reparations defaults, the government paid the striking workers with printed money, and the currency collapsed. The Rentenmark stopped it in November 1923.

Then it worked for six years. Locarno in 1925 settled the western borders, Germany entered the League of Nations in 1926, and industrial production passed its 1913 level in 1928.

The Depression undid it in three. Several major banks failed in 1931 and unemployment reached six million by early 1932, close to 30% of the workforce. In September 1930 the Nazi Party gained 95 seats and became the second largest in the Reichstag. In July 1932 it took 37% of the vote against 22% for the Social Democrats and 14% for the Communists, and in November it dropped to 33% and stayed largest. Hindenburg beat Hitler in the presidential election of 1932 by 6 million votes. From 1930 four chancellors governed by presidential decree, which left the Reichstag with nothing to do, and on 30 January 1933 Hindenburg appointed Hitler to the chancellorship.

How the Nazi state took power and used it

Hitler called an election and then made elections unnecessary. After the Reichstag fire of 27 February 1933 the Reichstag Fire Decree suspended civil liberties and about 4,000 communists were arrested. The election of 5 March 1933, the last free one, gave the Nazi Party 44%, short of a majority, which the German National People's Party supplied. On 23 March 1933 the Enabling Act let the cabinet legislate without the Reichstag or the president, and the Weimar constitution stopped operating without ever being repealed. The Länder were dissolved as units of government and every party but one was suppressed. When Hindenburg died on 2 August 1934 the cabinet declared the presidency vacant and moved its powers to Hitler.

What the regime did to Germany's Jews

Persecution was legislative before it was lethal. The first concentration camp opened at Dachau in March 1933. The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service pushed Jews out of the civil service and the law. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 removed their citizenship and criminalised sexual relations with other Germans. Synagogues burned in the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938. About half of Germany's 500,000 Jews had left before 1939, after which leaving became close to impossible.

The killing was decided on in 1941 and industrialised from 1942. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum records six million European Jews murdered, nearly 2.7 million of them at the five killing centres and as many as 2 million in mass shootings and gas vans. Estimates for Roma and Sinti killed run from 250,000 to 500,000. Under the Aktion T4 programme of 1939 onward, as many as 300,000 people held in institutions were murdered as unworthy of life, and more than 400,000 were sterilised without their consent.

How the war ended the German state

Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939 and by 1942 controlled most of continental Europe and North Africa. Hitler killed himself on 30 April 1945 and the final instrument of surrender was signed on 8 May. German war dead came to about 6 million, 9% of a prewar population of 69 million; military losses have been estimated at 5.3 million and civilian deaths at around 900,000.

The Allies then abolished the German state in law. The remaining territory and Berlin were divided into four occupation zones, the provinces east of the Oder and the Neisse were transferred to Poland and the Soviet Union, and around 12 million ethnic Germans were expelled westward from eastern Europe. Germany lost roughly a quarter of its prewar territory and had no government of its own for four years.

Why the Federal Republic was written to be temporary

The document that has governed Germany since 1949 is not called a constitution. The Parliamentary Council sitting at Bonn adopted the Basic Law on 8 May 1949, the parliaments of more than two thirds of the participating Länder ratified it between 16 and 22 May, and it was promulgated on 23 May. The name was the point. A constitution for two thirds of a country would have made the division permanent, so the drafters produced a Grundgesetz and wrote its own expiry into it: Article 146 provided that the Basic Law would cease to apply on the day a constitution freely adopted by the German people came into force, and Article 23 provided for it to take effect in other parts of Germany on their accession. Bonn was named a provisional capital for the same reason.

Nothing else about the arrangement stayed provisional. The currency reform of 1948 provoked the Soviet blockade of West Berlin and the airlift that answered it. Marshall Plan aid came to $1.4 billion, industrial production doubled between 1950 and 1957, and gross national product grew at about 9% a year, the run that took the name Wirtschaftswunder. The Saarland joined on 1 January 1957. West Germany entered NATO in 1955 and the European Economic Community as a founding member in 1958.

Labour came from outside. Recruitment agreements with Italy, Spain, Greece and Turkey brought in hundreds of thousands of workers on terms describing them as temporary, and most of those already in the country stayed when the Turkish agreement ended in 1973.

Willy Brandt, chancellor from 1969 to 1974, pursued Ostpolitik on the formula of two German states in one German nation. It brought him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1971 and took both Germanys into the United Nations in 1973. It also meant treating the other Germany as a state, the outcome the Basic Law had been drafted to postpone.

What the German Democratic Republic was

The Soviet zone became the German Democratic Republic on 7 October 1949, four and a half months after the Federal Republic. Power sat with the Politburo of the Socialist Unity Party, a Soviet-style command economy was installed, and the Ministry for State Security ran an informant network against the population it policed. The Soviet Union took 23% of East German gross national product in reparations; in the west, reparations were minor.

The border was the state's standing problem. About 2.6 million people had left for the west by 1961, when Walter Ulbricht, party leader from 1950 to 1971, sealed the frontier and began the Berlin Wall on 13 August. Chronik der Mauer, compiled by the Federal Agency for Civic Education with the Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam, counts at least 140 people killed at the Wall between 1961 and 1989 or dying from causes directly tied to the border regime. Erich Honecker replaced Ulbricht in 1971 promising attention to living standards, and by 1989 the economy was failing and the emigration had started again.

How reunification happened and what it cost

It began outside the country. Hungary opened its border with Austria in 1989 and the Pan-European Picnic in August turned the opening into an exodus, while East Germans occupied West German diplomatic buildings across eastern Europe. Demonstrations grew through the autumn, Honecker resigned in October, and on the evening of 9 November 1989 the East German authorities let their citizens cross into West Berlin.

What followed was an accession, and the legal route it took still shapes the country. Under the Two Plus Four Treaty Germany renounced every claim to the former eastern territories and recovered full sovereignty from the four occupying powers. On 3 October 1990 the German Democratic Republic dissolved itself and its five re-established Länder acceded to the Federal Republic under Article 23. Article 146 went unused. No new constitution was drafted and no referendum was held on one. United Germany counted in law as the enlarged continuation of West Germany, which is why it kept every treaty and membership it held without renegotiating any of them.

The bill came afterwards. The Berlin/Bonn Act of 1994 returned the capital to Berlin and left Bonn several ministries as a federal city, and the move of government finished in 1999. The transfer programme to modernise the eastern economy was scheduled to run until 2019. Germany adopted the euro in January 1999.

Why Germany argues about its own past

Almost every figure in the sections above is contested somewhere, and the arguments belong in the record with the figures.

Denazification is the first. The Nuremberg trials and the occupation courts removed, imprisoned or executed most senior Nazi officials and left most of the middle and lower ranks in place. In the Soviet zone the Stasi employed former Nazis directly.

The expulsions are the second. The West German government estimated 2 million deaths arising from the flight and expulsion of Germans and from forced labour in the Soviet Union. Some historians put the figure at about 600,000. Both are still cited, and the gap between them is a question about counting method.

The third is continuity. One argument holds that Bismarck's campaigns against Catholics and Social Democrats trained a politics of unity through the persecution of a minority. Another holds that the colonial campaign against the Herero and Nama between 1904 and 1908 belongs in the prehistory of the Holocaust. Historians make both cases and other historians dispute both. This catalogue records that the arguments are live and takes no position in either.

The fourth is the constitution that was never written. Article 146 is still in the Basic Law, and whether a united Germany should have used it in 1990 in place of the accession clause has been argued since the day it was not used. The Basic Law took effect on 23 May 1949 and remains in force, which is longer than the German Empire and the Weimar Republic lasted put together.