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German territories were originally occupied by the Celts who
were uprooted by Germanic tribes that arrived around 2nd century
BC. Where the Romans were unsuccessful in their attempts to
take the region, Charlemagne succeeded, and incorporated the
various tribes into his vast empire. The treaty of Verdun
of 843 gave birth to the Kingdom of Germany. Control
over the kingdom gradually passed into the hands of the powerful
nobility, until the weakened Carolingian family was extinct.
The Saxons renewed the empire of Charlemagne, claiming a continuation
or succession of the Roman Empire (Holy Roman Empire), centring
on Germany and northern Italy. The turbulent relationships
bewteen the emperors and the Papacy, combined with the rise
of Protestantism, contributed to the eventual demise of the
empire. The various German states were unified into the German
Empire in 1862, only to be dissolved in 1918 after its defeat
in World War I. It was replaced with the Weimar Republic in
1919, which in turn was superseded by the Third Reich. World
War II devastated Germany and left it occupied by the victorious
Allied powers of the US, UK, France, and the Soviet Union
in 1945. With the advent of the Cold War, two German states
were formed in 1949: the western Federal Republic of Germany
(FRG) and the eastern German Democratic Republic (GDR). The
democratic FRG embedded itself in key western economic and
security organizations, the EC (now the EU) and NATO, while
the communist GDR was on the front line of the Soviet-led
Warsaw Pact. The decline of the USSR and the end of the Cold
War allowed for German reunification in 1990. Since then,
Germany has expended considerable funds to bring eastern productivity
and wages up to western standards. As Europe's largest economy
and second most populous nation (after Russia), Germany is
a key member of the continent's economic, political, and defence
organisations. In January 1999, Germany and 10 other EU countries
introduced a common European exchange currency, the euro.
Location:
Central Europe, bordering the Baltic Sea and the North Sea,
between the Netherlands and Poland, south of Denmark.
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