Germany historical timeline

Germany is old as a culture and young as a state, and it has been assembled, broken and reassembled inside living memory. That is why it has no single dominant city in the way France or Britain does: power moved, and the places that held it kept their institutions. A traveller meets the consequence constantly -- sixteen states with their own museums, universities, holidays and licensing laws, world-class collections in cities most visitors have never heard of, and two versions of the recent past visible in the same street.

Chronology

1. 1226 Lübeck becomes a free imperial city of the Holy Roman Empire, as Hamburg had in 1189, and its law is adopted by most of the Hanseatic towns, which appealed to Lübeck's city council in all legal matters. Hanseatic wealth is why the northern ports have brick Gothic churches and warehouses on a scale their present populations would never build.
2. 1248 Construction of Cologne Cathedral begins. It was halted around 1560 and stood unfinished for roughly three centuries -- the medieval crane left on the south tower became a landmark in its own right, and the building a visitor sees is therefore both a Gothic design and a nineteenth-century completion of it.
3. 1517 Luther writes the Ninety-five Theses, beginning the debate that split German Christianity. The consequence is still on the map: which towns have a Lutheran church at the centre and which a Catholic one, which regions still keep Catholic feast days as public holidays, and why the north and south feel culturally distinct before anyone mentions beer.
4. 1648 The Peace of Westphalia ends the Thirty Years' War of 1618 to 1648 and brings peace to the Holy Roman Empire, closing a period that killed millions. It confirmed the patchwork of separate German states, which is the direct ancestor of today's federal structure and of the regional pride a visitor meets everywhere.
5. 1810 Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria marries Princess Therese on 12 October, and the celebration becomes the Oktoberfest. It is now the world's largest Volksfest, held on the Theresienwiese from mid-September to the first Sunday in October, drawing around seven million visitors a year and a record 7.2 million in 2023.
6. 1871 The German Empire is proclaimed on 18 January in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, completing the first unification under Bismarck. Unification was of existing states rather than of territory, and those states kept their courts, universities and collections -- which is why Dresden, Munich and Kassel hold holdings a single-capital country would have concentrated in one place.
7. 1880 Cologne Cathedral is completed, 632 years after work began. It was declared a World Heritage Site in 1996, and it is the clearest example in the country of a nineteenth-century nation finishing a medieval building as a statement about itself.
8. 1914 The First World War runs from 28 July 1914 to 11 November 1918. Defeat ended the empire proclaimed in 1871 and produced the Weimar Republic, and the war cemeteries and memorials in almost every German village -- usually a stone list of names outside the church -- date from it.
9. 1919 Walter Gropius founds the Bauhaus in Weimar. The school ran only until 1933, but its attempt to unify artistic vision with mass production and function is why Weimar, Dessau and Berlin all carry Bauhaus sites a visitor can walk into, and why so much of what looks ordinary in a German city was once radical.
10. 1933 Hindenburg formally appoints Hitler chancellor on 30 January, and the new cabinet is sworn in the same day. Everything a visitor encounters as Germany's memorial culture begins its clock here: the documentation centres, the preserved rally grounds at Nuremberg, and the decision -- taken much later -- to keep rather than clear the physical evidence.
11. 1939 The Second World War runs from 1 September 1939 to 2 September 1945, the deadliest conflict in history, causing 60 to 75 million deaths, a majority of them civilians. It is the reason the historic cores of Cologne, Dresden, Frankfurt, Hamburg and Nuremberg are reconstructions rather than survivals.
12. 1941 The Holocaust: from 1941 to 1945 Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murder around six million Jews across German-occupied Europe, approximately two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population, primarily by mass shootings in eastern Europe and poison gas in extermination camps. The camps kept as memorials, the Stolpersteine set into pavements outside the houses people were taken from, and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin exist to make this unavoidable rather than commemorated, and they are among the most visited sites in the country.
13. 1949 The three western occupation zones combine into the Federal Republic on 23 May, and in October the Soviet zone becomes the German Democratic Republic. The federal structure the western allies insisted on is the one still in force, and it is why a visitor's practical rules -- shop opening hours, school holidays, museum funding -- are set by the state rather than nationally.
14. 1961 Construction of the Berlin Wall is commenced by the GDR on 13 August, encircling West Berlin. The line it took is now the most walked historical route in the country, and the reason central Berlin has wide empty margins and abrupt changes of building stock where the death strip ran.
15. 1989 After weeks of civil unrest the East German government announces on 9 November that all its citizens may visit the West. The date ended the division and started the largest urban rebuilding programme in postwar Europe, which is what a visitor to Berlin, Leipzig and Dresden is actually looking at.
16. 1990 On 3 October the GDR ceases to exist and five new federated states join the Federal Republic. Those five states are still visibly different -- restored historic centres surrounded by rebuilt housing, and museums funded to explain a country that no longer exists.

What survived, and what did not

Most German city centres a visitor walks through are reconstructions, and the honest version of that is worth knowing before arriving. Allied bombing and the ground fighting of 1944 and 1945 destroyed the historic cores of Cologne, Hamburg, Dresden, Frankfurt, Nuremberg and dozens of smaller places. What followed was a choice made city by city: some rebuilt to the old plan and the old elevations, some rebuilt modern, and some did both in different quarters. Nuremberg's old town and Dresden's Frauenkirche are restorations, not survivals, and they are no less worth seeing for it.

What did survive tends to be what the war passed over. Bamberg, Regensburg, Quedlinburg, Görlitz and the Rhine and Mosel valleys kept their fabric largely intact, and several are UNESCO-listed for precisely that reason -- they are what the bombed cities looked like. The other deliberate survival is the opposite of preservation: the memorial sites, the camps kept as evidence, and the sections of Wall left standing. Those exist because a decision was taken not to clear them, and they are the part of the German landscape that is maintained in order to be confronted rather than admired.