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Teaching aim: The key intention is to establish and to foster a problem-oriented knowledge of Germany as a territorial and/or national unit over time. At the same time, a picture of the complexity of today’s territorial configuration and population structure is portrayed
Keywords: Steps of territorial evolution over time, modification of national boundaries, neighbour states, Central Europe, political structure since 1945, differences between the Länder with regard to size and population numbers |
One of the difficulties to find access to the geography of Germany is how to define the country. In its present political boundaries, Germany has only existed since 1990 [1]. With a total area of now 356,974 sqkm (one third the size of Ontario) it is the fifth largest country of Europe after the Ukraine, France, Spain and Sweden. Hence, prior to WWI (1914-1918) the territory [2] was as big as 540,657 sqkm. As one of the consequences of that war, Germany lost about 10 percent of its territory, mainly in the south-western part where Alsace-Lorraine was ceded to France, and in the very north where some territorial changes occurred to the profit of Denmark. Major losses took place in the East, where Western Prussia and Posen were awarded to Poland. After WWII (1939-1945), territorial changes were much more dramatic. The Eastern parts of the Hitlerian Reich beyond the rivers of the Oder and Neisse were annexed to Poland and partly to the Soviet Union. The remainder of the Reich became subdivided into four occupational zones controlled by the Allies (US, France, Great Britain and Soviet Union). In 1949 two German states were founded under their control:
The definition of Germany becomes even more complicated if one looks at the earlier history. The name of the country derives from the Germanic tribes who lived in extended parts of Northern and Central Europe for hundreds if not thousands of years. When the Romans conquered Central Europe at the beginning of the first century A.D., they made a distinction between Upper Germania (Germania superior) and Lower Germania (Germania inferior), but neither one had anything to do with what became Germany much later. During the Middle Ages, the so-called Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation was nothing more than a highly fragmented mosaic of more or less independent kingdoms, principalities, ecclesiastical states and other political entities which were but loosely tied together under the German Emperor.
Consequently, the famous cosmograph Sebastian Muenster, in the 16th century, described Germany not as a country, but as that part of Central Europe where the German language was being used. 200 years later, Anton Friedrich Buesching, one of the most influential geographers of the 18th century, claimed that the German nation as a political unit at that time had nothing to do with what could be considered as being Germany in geographical terms. It was only in 1871 [3] that Germany was founded as a unified nation under the famous chancellor Bismarck, hence it lasted not even 50 years and was succeeded by the Weimar Republic after 1918 and the so-called Third Reich after the rise of Adolf Hitler in 1933. Each of these entities had its unique constitution and forms of operation. It is therefore not surprising that today's Germany cannot be understood as a perfect and homogeneous unit. History explains that there are many different cultures, different linguistic dialects and different economic patterns, let alone regional differences in religious zones, following the historical principal of cuius regio, eius religio (he who has the power, decides upon the religion).
The geographical location of Germany is in the centre of Western Europe. Since reunification in 1990 it borders on nine neighbouring states [4]. Denmark in the north, The Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France in the west, Switzerland and Austria in the south and the Czech Republic and Poland in the east. The total length of its border is 3,758 km, not counting the shorelines of the North Sea (Nordsee), the Baltic Sea (Ostsee) and Lake Constance (Bodensee). One of the longest borders is with the Czech Republic, some 811 km long. It happens also to be one of the oldest in central Europe, created in the Middle Ages and separating at that time Germany from what was then the Kingdom of Bohemia.
Present-day Germany is a federal state that consists of 16 Laender [5] (provinces), including three city states. Since reunification, they are often referred to as the so-called:
There are striking differences between the Laender as far as their sizes and their populations are concerned. The city state of Bremen, the smallest of all, only covers 404 sqkm. On the other end, Bavaria's surface is more than 70,000 sqkm, almost as much as the three neighbouring states Baden-Wurttemberg, Rhineland-Palatinate and Hesse taken together. The same holds true for the population numbers within the Laender. They vary from 0.68 million (Bremen) to almost 18 million (North Rhine-Westfalia) people with a total population [6] of just over 82 million in 1997. Germany's total size of some 357,000 sqkm corresponds to only 4% of Canada's land mass, but it has almost three times as many people. With this, Germany has one of the highest population densities [7] in Europe. The distribution, however, is very uneven. Significant differences exist between the western and eastern Laender, between the North and the South as well as between urbanized and rural areas. Some 68 million people live in the 11 old Laender [8] and only 14.1 million in the five new Laender [9]. Consequently, in the East the density is only 145 people per sqkm, while in the West (former FRG) it is 261. Nearly one third of the overall population live in the 84 largest cities, all of which have populations of more than 100,000 people. Only 7.3 million live in communities with a population of less than 2,000 (after Sperling, 1997, p. 41).
These few introductory remarks already show how difficult it is to define Germany as a political and geographical unit. Comparisons to the historical development and to the spatial dimensions of Canada reveal major differences and rise questions.
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Questions that may be asked:
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[1] http://eu.daad.de/images/deutschland.gif
(27.08.2003)
[2] http://www.uni-oldenburg.de/nausa/KARTE/framd71.htm
[3] http://www.dhm.de/lemo/objekte/karten/D1871/index.html
(27.08.2003)
[4]
http://www.destatis.de/basis/e/geo/geogrent.htm
[5]
http://www.uni-oldenburg.de/nausa/brdk/frambrd.htm
[6]
http://www.statistik-portal.de/Statistik-Portal/en/en_jb01_jahrtab1.asp
[7]
http://www.bmgs.bund.de/download/statistiken/stat2004/Stb9_1.xls
[8]
http://www.destatis.de/download/d/bevoe/bev_bl_02_03.pdf
[9] http://www.destatis.de/download/d/bevoe/bev_bl_02_03.pdf
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