Germany
Germany sits at the crossing point of Europe, bordering nine countries — more than any other state on the continent — and its literature has circled that condition of being always in the middle of things.
- Capital
- Berlin
- Region
- Western Europe
- Area
- 357,114 km²
Geography
Germany covers about 357,600 square kilometres, running from the North Sea and Baltic coasts to the Bavarian Alps. The land rises as it goes south: the flat, sandy North German Plain gives way to the wooded central uplands, then to the Alpine foreland and finally the mountains themselves, where the Zugspitze reaches 2,962 metres.
Three great rivers organise the country. The Rhine runs north through the western industrial belt, the Elbe drains the centre toward Hamburg, and the Danube leaves Bavaria heading east — the only one of the three flowing away from the North Sea, and the reason southern Germany has always looked toward Vienna as much as Berlin.
History
For most of its history the territory was not one country but hundreds. The Holy Roman Empire held a patchwork of principalities, free cities and bishoprics together loosely for eight centuries, and the Reformation that began with Luther in 1517 split it along confessional lines that later wars did little to heal.
Unification came late and from the north: Prussia under Bismarck assembled the German Empire in 1871. The century that followed brought two world wars, the collapse of the Weimar Republic, and the Nazi dictatorship whose crimes remain the defining fact of modern German self-understanding.
Division followed defeat. From 1949 there were two German states, separated after 1961 by the Berlin Wall, until reunification on 3 October 1990 — still marked annually as the Day of German Unity.
Literary heritage
German literature has an unusually precise starting gun. Luther's Bible translation, completed in 1534, did not merely render scripture into the vernacular; it chose among competing dialects and in doing so largely invented standard written German. That it could be printed at all was down to Gutenberg, working in Mainz around 1450.
The classical age belongs to Weimar, where Goethe and Schiller worked in close and sometimes uneasy proximity. Goethe's Faust, written across sixty years, is the work German readers still measure others against.
The twentieth century produced Thomas Mann, whose Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain won him the Nobel in 1929 and who spent the Nazi years broadcasting against the regime from exile, and later Günter Grass, whose The Tin Drum (1959) forced a reckoning with what ordinary Germans had seen and chosen not to see.