A nation assembled late
For most of its history "Germany" was a patchwork of hundreds of principalities within the Holy Roman Empire. Prussia forged them into a single Reich under Bismarck in 1871, and the new state industrialised at breakneck speed. Defeat in the First World War toppled the monarchy; the fragile Weimar Republic gave way to Adolf Hitler in 1933, whose regime murdered six million Jews and plunged the world into war.
Divided in 1945 into a democratic, capitalist West and a communist East, with Berlin walled in two from 1961, Germany became the front line of the Cold War. The wall fell in 1989 and the country reunified in 1990. Since then it has anchored the euro, absorbed more than a million refugees in 2015, and served as the pragmatic centre of European politics.
Berlin, the Conference, and a genocide
Germany came late to empire but shaped Africa's fate more than almost anyone. It was in Berlin, over the winter of 1884 to 1885, that Bismarck hosted the conference where European powers set the rules for carving up the continent, drawing borders across peoples who were never consulted. Germany took Togo, Cameroon, Tanganyika and South West Africa, today's Namibia.
There, between 1904 and 1908, German troops under Lothar von Trotha crushed a Herero and Nama uprising with an explicit extermination order, driving people into the desert to die and inventing the concentration camp; historians call it the first genocide of the twentieth century, and a rehearsal for what Germany would later do in Europe. In 2021 Germany finally acknowledged the genocide and offered around 1.1 billion euros in development aid, a gesture many Herero and Nama rejected as too little and negotiated over their heads. Berlin's new Humboldt Forum, opened the same year, has become a battleground over the looted African art in its collections, including Benin Bronzes now being returned.
The engine of Europe
Germany's economy runs on cars, machines and chemicals: Volkswagen, Siemens, BASF, the Mittelstand of family manufacturers. Its decision to phase out nuclear power and, until 2022, to rely on Russian gas left it exposed when Russia invaded Ukraine. After sixteen years of Angela Merkel, the chancellorship passed to Olaf Scholz in 2021 and, following the February 2025 election, to Friedrich Merz of the Christian Democrats, governing amid the rise of the hard-right Alternative für Deutschland.