Germany, Federal Republic of

Article Outline

Introduction; Land and Resources; Population; Economy; Government; History

History

This article surveys the history of Germany before 1949 and after 1990. For details on its history between 1949 and 1990, see Germany, East and Germany, West.

Origins of the Germans

Germany was inhabited from earliest times, but it took many millennia of migration, conquest, and intermingling to produce the people known as Germans.

Stone Age Peoples

During the Palaeolithic Age (see Stone Age), the German forests were thinly populated by wandering bands of hunters and gatherers. They belonged to the earliest forms of Homo sapiens, such as Heidelberg man, who lived about 400,000 years ago. Somewhat later more advanced forms of Homo sapiens appeared, as exemplified by skeletal finds near Steinheim, some 300,000 years old, and near Ehringsdorf, from about 100,000 years ago. Another human type was the Neanderthal, found near Düsseldorf, who lived about 100,000 years ago. The most recent type, which appeared by 40,000 bc, was the Cro-Magnon, a member of Homo sapiens sapiens, essentially of the same group as modern Europeans.

During the New Stone Age, the indigenous hunters encountered farming peoples from the more advanced south-west Asia, who were migrating up the Danube Valley into central Germany around 4500 bc. These populations mixed and settled in villages to raise crops and breed stock. Villagers of this Danubian culture lived with their animals in large, gabled wooden houses, made pottery, and traded with Mediterranean peoples for fine stone and flint axes and shells. As their hand-hoed fields wore out, they moved on, often returning years later.

Bronze Age Peoples

The Bronze Age began in central Germany, Bohemia, and Austria in about 2500 bc with the working of copper and tin deposits by prospectors from the eastern Mediterranean. Around 2300 bc new waves of migrating peoples arrived, probably from southern Russia. These battleaxe-wielding Indo-Europeans were the ancestors of the Germanic peoples that settled in northern and central Germany, the Baltic and Slavic peoples in the east, and the Celts in the south and west. The central and southern groups mixed with the so-called Bell-Beaker people, who moved east from Spain and Portugal about the year 2000 bc. The Bell-Beaker folk, probably Indo-Europeans, were skilled metalworkers. They developed a thriving Bronze Age culture in Germany and traded amber from the Baltic coast for bronze, pottery, and beads from the Mediterranean.

From 1800 to 400 bc, Celtic peoples in southern Germany and Austria developed a sequence of advanced metalworking cultures—Urnfield, Hallstatt, and La Tène—each of which spread throughout Europe. They introduced the use of iron for tools and weapons. The La Tène Celts did fine metalwork and used ox-drawn ploughs and wheeled vehicles. The Germanic people absorbed much Celtic culture and eventually displaced the Celts themselves.

Germans and Romans

From the 2nd century bc to the 5th century ad the Germanic and Celtic peoples, constantly pressed by migrations from the north and east, were in contact with the Romans, who controlled southern and western Europe. Roman accounts by Julius Caesar and Cornelius Tacitus describe these encounters.

The Cimbri and Teutons, about to invade Italy, were defeated by the Roman general Gaius Marius in 101 and 102 bc. The Suevi and other peoples in Gaul (modern France), west of the Rhine, were subdued by Julius Caesar around 50 bc. The Romans tried unsuccessfully to extend their rule to the Elbe, and the emperors held the border at the Rhine and the Danube. Between the two rivers they erected a limes, a line of fortifications to keep out raiding peoples.