Germany

Germany is the most populous country in the European Union, its largest economy, and — in its present borders and constitution — one of the youngest states in Europe. The Federal Republic in the shape a visitor encounters today has existed only since 3 October 1990. Bavaria has existed, in one form or another, since the sixth century. That gap explains a great deal about the place.

There is no single German centre, and this is the thing most first-time visitors get wrong. France has Paris and Britain has London; Germany has Berlin for politics, Frankfurt for money, Munich for industry and self-regard, Hamburg for trade and media, Cologne and the Ruhr for sheer population, and Stuttgart for engineering. Power is deliberately spread across sixteen federal states, each with its own parliament, its own school system, its own police, its own public holidays and, in several cases, its own strongly held view that it should not really be taking instructions from anywhere else.

For travellers this is good news. Germany is a country of about two dozen genuinely worthwhile cities rather than one capital with a hinterland, and the trains between them work. It is also a country of forests — a third of the land area — of a river gorge lined with castles, of the northern edge of the Alps, of a Baltic and a North Sea coast, and of an internationally underrated wine industry.

And it is the country that invented a word for confronting its own past. Vergangenheitsbewältigung — coming to terms with what happened — is not an academic term here. It is a memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe occupying prime ground beside the Brandenburg Gate, brass Stolpersteine set into pavements outside the houses of deported families in a hundred thousand places, and a school curriculum that takes every German child to a camp. Travelling in Germany means encountering this, and this guide does not treat it as an optional module.

Few countries are called so many different things by their neighbours. Germans say Deutschland, from Old High German diutisc, "of the people" — the vernacular as opposed to Latin. English and the Romance languages use forms of Germania, the Roman name for the territory beyond the Rhine. The French say Allemagne after the Alemanni, one tribal confederation among many. The Finns and Baltic peoples say Saksa after the Saxons.

And Czech and the Slavic languages say Německo, from the Proto-Slavic němьcь — literally "the mute one", meaning someone who does not speak an intelligible language. It is the frankest naming of a neighbour anywhere in Europe, and it is a thousand years old.

The multiplicity is the point: there was no single German polity for most of history, so everyone named the bit they met. The Holy Roman Empire, which nominally covered the German lands from 962 to 1806, was famously described by Voltaire as neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire — at its height it comprised something like three hundred separate territories with their own laws, coins and armies.

Germany runs 876 kilometres from the Danish border to the Alps and covers 357,600 km², and it is arranged in three broad bands. The North German Plain is flat, sandy, glacially scoured, and continues east into Poland and west into the Netherlands with nothing to stop it — which is why every army in European history has used it. Then the Central Uplands: a scatter of forested massifs of modest height — the Harz, the Eifel, the Rhön, the Thuringian Forest, the Black Forest, the Bavarian Forest — separated by river valleys. Then the narrow strip of Alpine foreland and Alps along the Austrian border, where the Zugspitze reaches 2,962 m.

The rivers organise everything. The Rhine is the great one — it enters from Switzerland, cuts the gorge between Bingen and Koblenz, drains the industrial Ruhr and leaves for the Netherlands, and is one of the busiest inland waterways on earth. The Danube rises in the Black Forest and runs east to the Black Sea. The Elbe comes out of Czechia through Dresden to Hamburg. The Main, the Mosel, the Neckar and the Oder do the rest.

Forest covers about a third of the country — some 11.4 million hectares — and it is almost entirely managed rather than wild. The Germans have a long, complicated and occasionally mystical relationship with it, which produced both the science of sustainable forestry (Nachhaltigkeit, coined in a 1713 Saxon treatise on silviculture) and the 1980s national panic over Waldsterben, forest death from acid rain.

Temperate oceanic in the north-west, shading to continental in the east and south-east: milder winters and cooler summers by the North Sea, colder winters and hotter summers in Bavaria and Brandenburg. Rain falls in every month, most of it in summer. There is no dry season and no reliable one.

The short answer: May, June or September. Avoid the second half of July and all of August in the cities if you can, go in December if the markets are the point, and understand that German weather forecasts are accurate and German rain is persistent rather than dramatic.

Germany borders nine countries — more than any other in Europe except Russia: Denmark, Poland, Czechia, Austria, Switzerland, France, Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands. Berlin is in the north-east, Munich in the south, Hamburg on the Elbe estuary, and the Rhine-Ruhr conurbation in the west.

Fast-train times from Berlin: Hamburg 1h45; Leipzig 1h15; Dresden 1h50; Frankfurt 4h; Cologne 4h15; Munich 4h. From Munich: Nuremberg 1h05; Stuttgart 2h15; Salzburg 1h30. From Prague: Dresden 2h15 by train, Berlin 4h, Munich 5h30 by bus or 6h by train. Domestic flights within Germany are rarely worth it against the ICE network.

Understanding German federalism explains more about travelling here than any list of sights. The 1949 Basic Law — written under Allied supervision by people whose explicit goal was to make another centralised dictatorship structurally impossible — distributes power downward and sideways with some determination.

In 9 CE, in forest somewhere near modern Kalkriese, an alliance of Germanic tribes under Arminius destroyed three Roman legions over four days. The Romans never seriously tried to hold the country east of the Rhine again, and the river became the frontier — which is why Cologne, Mainz, Trier and Regensburg have Roman remains and Berlin, Hamburg and Munich do not.

Charlemagne was crowned in 800 and his empire was divided by his grandsons in 843; the eastern portion became the kernel of the German lands. In 962 Otto I was crowned emperor in Rome, founding what became the Holy Roman Empire — an elective monarchy over a patchwork that never became a state. At its height it held some three hundred territories, from substantial kingdoms down to individual imperial cities and abbeys, each with its own law, currency and tolls.

Two things then happened that shaped everything since. In 1440s Mainz, Johannes Gutenberg assembled movable metal type, oil-based ink and the press into a working system, and the cost of a book collapsed. In 1517 in Wittenberg, Martin Luther published his objections to the sale of indulgences, and the printing press turned a theological quarrel into a continental schism within months. His German Bible then did for the language what the King James did for English: it fixed a standard.

The bill arrived in 1618. The Thirty Years' War began in Prague and was fought largely on German soil, and it is one of the worst demographic catastrophes in European history — the population of the German lands fell by perhaps a third overall and by far more than that in the worst-hit regions. The 1648 Peace of Westphalia confirmed the fragmentation and is conventionally taken as the founding moment of the modern sovereign-state system.

Prussia rose through the eighteenth century — militarised, bureaucratic, Protestant, and under Frederick the Great a serious European power. Napoleon abolished the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 and, by wrecking the old order, made a German nation-state thinkable. The liberal revolution of 1848 tried to build one from below at the Frankfurt parliament and failed.

So it was built from above instead. Otto von Bismarck, Prussian minister-president from 1862, fought three short wars — against Denmark, Austria and France — and on 18 January 1871 had the German Empire proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, a location chosen precisely to humiliate the French. It was not a merger of equals; it was Prussia with attachments.

The Empire industrialised at extraordinary speed, built the world's first modern welfare state — Bismarck introduced health insurance in 1883 and old-age pensions in 1889, largely to undercut the socialists — and produced a scientific establishment that dominated chemistry and physics until 1933. It also acquired colonies in Africa and the Pacific, where German forces carried out the Herero and Nama genocide in South West Africa between 1904 and 1908; Germany formally recognised this as genocide only in 2021.

The First World War killed about two million German soldiers, ended the monarchy, and produced the Weimar Republic: a genuinely radical constitution, extraordinary cultural output — Bauhaus, Brecht, Fritz Lang, Berlin as the most permissive city in Europe — and an economy destroyed twice, by the 1923 hyperinflation and then by the 1929 crash. By 1932 unemployment was six million and the two largest parties in parliament both wanted to abolish the republic.

Hitler was appointed Chancellor on 30 January 1933 by a conservative establishment that believed it could control him. Within six months every other party was banned, the trade unions dissolved, the first concentration camp opened at Dachau, and rule by decree established. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 stripped German Jews of citizenship; the pogrom of 9–10 November 1938 destroyed synagogues and businesses across the country.

The Second World War, launched by Germany in September 1939, killed somewhere between 70 and 85 million people worldwide. Within it, the German state organised and carried out the industrial murder of approximately six million Jews, alongside the systematic killing of Roma and Sinti, disabled people, Soviet prisoners of war, Poles, political opponents and gay men. This was not incidental to the war; it was a policy pursued with bureaucratic thoroughness and it required the participation of an enormous number of ordinary people.

What Germany did afterwards is, by international standards, unusual. Denial of the Holocaust is a criminal offence. Nazi symbols are banned. Every German schoolchild studies the period in depth and visits a memorial site. Berlin's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe — 2,711 concrete stelae — occupies two and a half acres of the most valuable land in the capital, beside the Brandenburg Gate. More than 100,000 brass Stolpersteine, each recording one deported person outside their last freely chosen home, are set into pavements across Europe in what is the largest decentralised memorial in the world.

This was not immediate or automatic. The 1950s were a decade of silence and quiet reintegration of former officials; it took the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials of 1963–65 and the generational revolt of 1968 to force the subject open. But it happened, it is ongoing, and it is visible everywhere you travel.

In 1949 the western occupation zones became the Federal Republic, with its capital at Bonn — a small university town chosen partly to signal that the arrangement was temporary — and the Soviet zone became the German Democratic Republic. Berlin, deep inside the GDR, was divided in four and became the sharpest point of the Cold War: the Soviet blockade of 1948–49 was answered by the Allied airlift, which flew in over two million tonnes of supplies in fifteen months.

West Germany's Wirtschaftswunder — the currency reform, the Marshall Plan, Ludwig Erhard's social market economy — took the country from rubble to prosperity within fifteen years, with several million Gastarbeiter, mostly from Turkey, Italy, Greece and Yugoslavia, doing a great deal of the work. Most were expected to leave, and did not. Germany's four-million-strong Turkish-origin population dates from this.

East Germany built a functioning industrial state with full female employment, universal childcare and no unemployment, and it also built the most comprehensively surveilled society in history. The Stasi employed about 91,000 full-time officers and ran perhaps 180,000 informers in a population of 16 million — roughly one watcher for every sixty citizens. The files, six hundred thousand of which survived the shredders, have been open to those they concern since 1992, and reading your own file remains one of the more devastating things a German of a certain age can do.

The GDR also killed people at its own border. The 1953 workers' uprising was put down by Soviet tanks. And by 1961 some 2.7 million people had left for the West, which is why the border was closed.

On the night of 12–13 August 1961, East German forces sealed the border through Berlin with barbed wire and began building. Berliners woke to find streets bricked up, U-Bahn stations closed, and families separated by a line drawn through their own city. The Wall stood for 28 years, two months and 27 days.

It was not a wall but a system: an outer concrete barrier, a lit death strip with raked sand, anti-vehicle obstacles, dog runs, watchtowers and an inner wall. At least 140 people were killed at the Berlin border and around 600 in total along the inner-German frontier, though the precise figures remain contested. Peter Fechter, shot in 1962 and left to bleed to death in the death strip in view of both sides, was eighteen.

It opened by accident. On the evening of 9 November 1989, at the end of a rambling press conference, Politburo member Günter Schabowski was handed a note about eased travel rules and, asked when they took effect, looked at it and said "as far as I know... immediately, without delay". It was broadcast, crowds went to the crossing points, and the overwhelmed guards eventually opened the barriers rather than shoot. Nobody had ordered it.

Reunification took eleven months from the fall of the Wall to 3 October 1990 and was, in economic terms, a takeover. The Treuhandanstalt privatised or closed some 8,500 East German enterprises; industrial employment in the east collapsed by roughly four-fifths; and around two million people, disproportionately young and female, moved west. Well over a trillion euros has since flowed east through the solidarity surcharge and other transfers, and the infrastructure gap has largely closed. The wage and wealth gap has not, nor has the sense among many easterners that their lives were reorganised by people who did not ask.

The Federal Republic since has been defined by a series of decisions taken with characteristic deliberation and mixed results: the euro; Gerhard Schröder's Hartz labour reforms; Angela Merkel's sixteen years and her 2015 decision to admit around a million refugees; the Energiewende and the phase-out of nuclear power completed in 2023; and the Zeitenwende — the reversal of decades of defence and Russia policy after February 2022, which included abandoning Nord Stream and cutting a gas dependency that had reached 55% of imports.

The country a visitor meets in the mid-2020s is prosperous, functional in most respects and unsettled. Manufacturing is under pressure from energy costs and Chinese competition; the far-right AfD polls strongly, especially in the eastern states; and the deutsche Bürokratie, digitalisation and the state of the railways are subjects of continuous and largely justified national complaint.

None of this affects a trip. It does explain why the person you talk to may be gloomier about their country than you expect, and why complaining about Deutsche Bahn is the single most reliable conversational opener in Germany.

Berlin is nine times the size of Paris by area and has half its population density, which is the first thing to understand: it is a very large, very green, rather empty city built for an imperial capital, wrecked, split, and then reassembled with the seams showing. It has more bridges than Venice and about a third of its area is water, forest or park.

The city's character is a direct product of its history. It was cheap for thirty years after the Wall fell because half of it was a failed state's second city, and that cheapness bought the squats, the clubs, the galleries and the Berlin of international reputation. It is no longer cheap — rents have roughly doubled since 2010 and the city voted in 2021 to expropriate large corporate landlords, a referendum the state government has spent years not implementing.

Bavaria is a quarter of Germany's land area, richer than most European countries, Catholic, conservative, and thoroughly convinced of its own distinctiveness. It has its own greeting (Grüß Gott), its own party that exists nowhere else (the CSU), and a constitutional court that once ruled crucifixes must hang in classrooms. It also supplies almost everything the world pictures when it pictures Germany — the lederhosen, the beer halls, the castles, the Alps — which is a source of some irritation elsewhere in the country.

Munich is the wealthiest large city in Germany and behaves like it: expensive, orderly, handsome and slightly smug. Marienplatz with the neo-Gothic Neues Rathaus and its Glockenspiel is the centre; the Englischer Garten is bigger than Central Park and has a standing river wave that surfers ride year-round; the Deutsches Museum is one of the great science museums anywhere; and the Alte and Neue Pinakothek hold a first-rank art collection.

The city is also where the Nazi party was founded and had its headquarters, a fact Munich spent decades not discussing and now addresses directly at the NS-Dokumentationszentrum on the site of the former Brown House.

Hamburg is a city-state, Germany's second largest city, and one of Europe's biggest ports despite being 100 kilometres from the sea up the Elbe. It is Hanseatic — merchant, Protestant, understated, oriented towards Britain and Scandinavia rather than southern Germany — and it has more millionaires and more bridges than any other German city.

The Rhine-Ruhr is Germany's largest urban region — over ten million people across Cologne, Düsseldorf, Dortmund, Essen and Duisburg — and it is the part of the country foreign visitors most often skip. It is post-industrial, dense, unglamorous and much more interesting than its reputation.

Cologne is Germany's fourth city and its least German-seeming: Catholic, Carnival-mad, talkative and comfortable with mess. Ninety per cent of the old town was destroyed in the war and the rebuilding was fast rather than careful, so the cathedral stands in a setting of 1950s concrete — but the cathedral is extraordinary, the Romanesque churches around it are a serious body of medieval architecture, and Kölsch, the local beer, is served in 200 ml glasses that waiters replace without asking until you put your beer mat on top.

The eastern states are cheaper, emptier and — for a traveller coming from Prague — much closer than the west. They also contain some of the country's finest baroque, its most interesting recent urban history and its most contested politics.

Dresden was destroyed on 13–14 February 1945 in a firestorm that killed around 25,000 people — a figure established by an independent historical commission in 2010 against decades of inflated claims used first by Goebbels and later by the far right. The rebuilt Frauenkirche, reopened in 2005 with a British-funded cross made by the son of a Lancaster bomber navigator, is the single most eloquent building in Germany about all of this.

The Romantische Straße was invented in 1950 by tourism officials to sell southern Germany to American servicemen, and it worked so completely that it now defines what much of the world means by Germany. It runs 350 kilometres from Würzburg to Füssen through walled towns, vineyards and the Alpine foothills.

Rothenburg ob der Tauber is the centrepiece and is exactly as pretty and as busy as advertised. The trick is to stay the night: the coaches leave by five, the walls can be walked at dusk, and the Night Watchman's tour is genuinely good. Around forty per cent of the town was destroyed in March 1945 and rebuilt with international donations, a fact the town does not hide.

Germany has around 1,500 breweries — roughly half of all the breweries in the European Union — and about half of those are in Bavaria. Franconia alone, the region around Bamberg, has the highest density of breweries per head anywhere on earth, with villages of four hundred people supporting two.

The Reinheitsgebot, the purity law, was issued in Bavaria in 1516 and restricted beer to barley, hops and water; yeast was added when its role was understood. It is often described as the world's oldest food regulation, which is roughly true, and as a guarantee of quality, which is more arguable — its original purposes included reserving wheat and rye for bakers and squeezing out competitors. It has not been binding law since 1987, when the European Court struck down its use against imports, but almost every German brewery still advertises compliance.

Germany is the world's most under-rated fine-wine country, and the reason is a self-inflicted wound. In the 1970s and 80s the industry flooded export markets with cheap sweetened Liebfraumilch, and it took thirty years to undo the damage. The good stuff never stopped being made; it just stopped being noticed.

Riesling is the point. Germany has about 45% of the world's plantings, and on the slate of the Mosel and the Rhine it produces a wine of very high acidity, low alcohol — 7.5% to 9% is normal for a Kabinett — and an ability to age for decades that almost no other white grape matches. It runs from bone dry (trocken) through off-dry to the sweet late-harvest categories, and the labelling that terrifies people is actually precise: Kabinett, Spätlese, Auslese, Beerenauslese, Trockenbeerenauslese and Eiswein describe the ripeness of the grapes at picking, not necessarily the sweetness of the wine.

German food has a reputation for being heavy, brown and pork-based, which is fair about one strand of it and misses the rest. There is no national cuisine; there are regional ones, and they differ more than a visitor expects — a Rhineland kitchen and a Bavarian one have little in common beyond the pig.

The classics. Sauerbraten, beef marinated three to five days in vinegar and spice then braised. Schweinshaxe, roast pork knuckle with crackling, Bavarian and enormous. Currywurst, a Berlin invention of 1949 — sausage, tomato sauce, curry powder — that has its own museum and sells 800 million portions a year. Döner kebab, invented in Berlin in the 1970s by Turkish migrants and now Germany's most-eaten fast food by a wide margin. Spätzle, Swabian egg noodles, and Käsespätzle, which is macaroni cheese's superior cousin. Maultaschen, Swabian ravioli, traditionally invented to hide meat from God during Lent — the nickname is Herrgottsbscheißerle, "little God-cheaters".

Bread is where Germany is genuinely world-class. Over 3,000 registered varieties, a dense sourdough rye tradition unmatched anywhere, and UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage status for German bread culture since 2014. Germans abroad complain about bread more than about anything else, and they are right to.

Regional. Spring means white asparagus — Spargelzeit, roughly late April to 24 June, is a genuine national event with roadside stalls and restaurant menus given over to it. Autumn means game, mushrooms and Zwiebelkuchen with new wine. The north eats fish: Matjes herring, Labskaus, and the Fischbrötchen that is the correct lunch anywhere near the coast.

Between three and four in the afternoon, particularly on Sundays, Germany stops for coffee and cake. This is not a snack; it is a meal with its own name and its own social rules, and refusing a second slice takes some determination.

The German Weihnachtsmarkt is a medieval institution — Dresden's Striezelmarkt is documented from 1434 — and there are around 3,000 of them, in every town of any size, running from the Friday before the first Sunday of Advent to 23 December.

The Bundesliga has the highest average attendance of any football league in the world — around 39,000 — and it is not close. The reason is structural: the 50+1 rule requires clubs to retain majority voting control, so they cannot be bought outright by an individual or a state. That keeps ticket prices low (standing terraces still exist, and a season ticket at a top club can cost less than a single Premier League match), keeps membership democratic, and produces the Yellow Wall at Dortmund — 25,000 people standing on one terrace.

Germany is Czechia's largest neighbour, its biggest trading partner and, for most destinations, best reached by land. Flying from Prague to Berlin or Dresden makes no sense at all; flying to Hamburg or Cologne sometimes does.

The Deutschlandticket. €58 a month (2025 rate, reviewed annually) for unlimited travel on every regional train, U-Bahn, S-Bahn, tram and bus in Germany — not on ICE, IC or EC. It is a monthly subscription bought online and cancellable at the end of any month, and it is available to foreigners. For a trip of a week or more that stays off the fast trains it is transformative value: Berlin to Munich on regional trains is possible, slow, and costs nothing extra.

Before you go. Czech citizens need only an ID card and travel freely. The MZV ČR advisory at mzv.cz is worth a glance for current entry rules, and registering in DROZD (drozd.mzv.cz) is quick and sensible even for a neighbouring country. The Czech embassy is in Berlin, with consulates general in Munich, Dresden and Düsseldorf — an unusually dense network that reflects how many Czechs are in Germany at any time.

Health cover. Your Czech EHIC card covers state healthcare in Germany. It does not cover a private clinic, a mountain rescue or a repatriation, so commercial travel insurance is still worth having if you are going into the Alps.

Germany is mid-range by western European standards — noticeably cheaper than Switzerland, Scandinavia or central Paris, noticeably more expensive than Czechia, and with a wide internal spread. Munich and Frankfurt are expensive; Leipzig, Dresden and the Ruhr are not.

German rail is comprehensive, fast, and — this is the part that surprises people who have not been recently — unreliable. Long-distance punctuality has been running around 60–65%, which is to say that roughly one ICE in three arrives more than six minutes late. A ten-year, €80 billion programme of full-closure corridor rebuilds began in 2024 and will make things worse before they get better. Build slack into connections; do not book a same-day flight off a long ICE journey.

Germany is a safe country by any measure, with violent crime rates well below the European average. The realistic risks to a visitor are pickpocketing in crowds, bicycle theft, and the social risk of breaking a rule you did not know existed.

Germany is the country most Czechs know best and have thought about least. It is next door, half the family has worked there, everyone has driven through it — and hardly anyone treats it as a destination in its own right rather than as the thing between here and the sea.

That is a mistake, and it is a mistake with a specific shape: people go to Berlin, or they go to Munich for the beer, and they conclude they have seen Germany. They have seen two cities that are unrepresentative in opposite directions. The country is in the middle-sized places — Bamberg, Görlitz, Lübeck, Trier, Regensburg, Quedlinburg — where the old towns survived, the beer is local, the museum is free on Wednesdays and nobody is on a stag weekend.

Two pieces of advice. First: buy the Deutschlandticket. Fifty-eight euros for a month of every regional train and every city tram in the country is the best transport deal in Europe, and it turns a trip from a series of expensive point-to-point hops into something you can improvise. Second: go to the memorial sites. Not out of duty and not to feel appropriately grave — go because Germany has done something with its history that no other country has managed, and standing in the stelae field beside the Brandenburg Gate, or in the Topography of Terror on a wet Tuesday, tells you more about the country you are actually in than any castle will.

And learn twenty words. German is a hard language with a merciful phonetic spelling, and the effort is noticed. The reputation for coldness is mostly a reputation for not performing warmth at strangers; get past the first exchange, and particularly get to the second beer, and you will find the reserve was never the whole thing.

— Radim Kaufmann