Germany is Europe's largest economy and the most populous country in the European Union. Famed for its technological achievements, it has also produced some of Europe's most celebrated composers, philosophers and poets.
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Achieving national unity later than other European nations, Germany quickly caught up economically and militarily, before defeats in the two world wars left it shattered, facing the difficult legacy of Nazism, and divided between Europe's Cold War blocs.
Germany rebounded to become the continent's economic giant, and a prime mover of European cooperation. With the end of the Cold War, the two parts of the country were once again united, although the economy of the former east continues to lag behind the rest of the country.
Since reunification, Germany has taken a more active role in the European Union, signing the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 and the Lisbon Treaty in 2007 and co-founding the Eurozone.
FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY: FACTS
- Capital: Berlin
- Area: 357,022 sq km
- Population: 83.6 million
- Language: German
- Life expectancy: 78 years (men) 83 years (women)
LEADERS
Chancellor: Olaf Scholz
The 63-year-old former finance minister defied earlier expectations by winning the September 2021 election.
He formed a coalition with the Greens and business-friendly Free Democrats in December, becoming the first Social Democrat chancellor since 2005.
He took over from the Christian Democrat Angela Merkel, Germany's first female chancellor, who governed for 16 years in coalition with either the Free Democrats or the Social Democrats.
Mr Scholz was her vice-chancellor as well as finance minister in 2018-2021.
Despite having a much more restrained and cautious response than that of other Western countries to Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Scholz oversaw an increase in Germany's defence budget, weapons shipments to Ukraine and a discontinuance of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.
Scholz set out the principles of a new German defence policy in his "Zeitenwende" speech to parliament immediately after the invasion.
Scholz described the attack as a "historic turning point" and announced that in response his government would use a €100bn fund to significantly increase military spending, reversing Germany's previously cautious defence policy.
President: Frank-Walter Steinmeier
TIMELINE
Some key dates in Germany history:
1871 - Otto von Bismarck unifies
1914-1918 - World War One. Germany is defeated and becomes a republic.
1933 - Adolf Hitler, head of the far-right Nazi Party, becomes chancellor.
1939-45 - World War Two sees defeat of Germany and its partition into the pro-western Federal Republic (BRD) in the west and the Soviet-controlled German Democratic Republic (DDR) in the east.
1955 - West Germany joins Nato, East Germany joins the Warsaw Pact.
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