The most beautiful cities in Germany

Germany’s most beautiful cities and towns stand among the best places to visit in the European Union. They span almost the full range of European variety.

• There are cities with Roman origins and remains such as Trier, Cologne, Regensburg and Mainz.
• Medieval cities such as Nuremberg, Erfurt, Bamberg and Worms and the half-timbered Harz region towns of Goslar, Quedlinburg and Wernigerode.
• Renaissance showpiece cities such as Lübeck, Augsburg or Bremen.
• Cities with Baroque survivals, including Dresden, Heidelberg or Passau.
• Plenty of German cities have beautiful palaces on their streets or nearby, like Potsdam, Munich, Stuttgart, Würzburg and Weimar.
• The great cathedrals such as Cologne, Regensburg, Bamberg, Mainz, Erfurt, Worms, with countless other churches, sometimes in Romanesque but more commonly in the Gothic style. The münster of Ulm has the tallest spire of them all.
• Museums of culture and art among world’s best, including Deutsches Museum, Deutsches Nationalmuseum, Alte Pinakothek and the Pergamonmuseum.

All these places can be reached by train and bus (Quedlinburg is on a branch line). All offer a range of hotels, hostels, guest houses and other types of accommodation. All are very walkable and, like most German towns and cities, are really best seen on foot. But trams and buses help get people to and from hotels or attractions and for the bigger centres, Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Cologne, Stuttgart, Düsseldorf and Nuremberg, there are fast regular options in the form of S-bahn and U-bahn trains and light-rail transport.

History

Germany's history and variety are the biggest lure for travellers. This is largely because Germany has a long history, but had to wait until 1871 to become a nation.

But history weighs on the Germans like few other peoples. Many historians have seen in the German story a ‘special path’ (Sonderweg) of interrupted development that bred a fear of disorder and submissive responses to authority, leading to the nation’s 20th century nightmares. Begging to differ, Steven Ozment writes: “Historical experience has instead left Germans more fearful of anarchy than of tyranny, inclining them to hedge, if hedge they must, on the side of good order. This they have done in a compelling belief that it is not freedom, once attained, but discipline, carefully maintained, that keeps a people free.’’ Most students, reviewing the German past, could come together on this view.

The perceived boundaries of the German lands changed many times, largely because there were very different foundations for the old German kingdom, the Holy Roman empire and the modern German state. At times there were hundreds of tiny territories and cities such as Prague, Strasbourg, Gdansk (Danzig) and Kaliningrad (Königsberg) became largely German-speaking. For various periods The Netherlands, Switzerland and Austria counted themselves part of the German lands. Even the German Empire of 1918 looks very different from the Germany of today and after World War II Germany was two countries. All this takes a history book to follow.

From Romans to Franks

Rome failed to penetrate fully what is now Germany but left its mark in military colonies or towns such as Cologne, Trier, Xanten, Augsburg, Regensburg and Passau. Broadly the Rhine and the Danube regions became Rome’s frontiers. German tribes are often credited with the final destruction of Rome but the German spirit took more from the imperial example than its arms and riches. Of the wandering Germanic tribes the group that became known as the Franks emerged among the strongest – in Gaul, where Roman authority made a strong impression.

By war the Frankish king Clovis I united the tribes of what is now France and, on accepting baptism in 496, helped give the Catholic confession a firm foothold against paganism and the claims of Arian Christianity. He also established Frankish power east of the Rhine. But he refused to enforce the conversion of his people and the legacy of his Merovingian successors was a return to divided rule.

Charlemagne & empire

Charlemagne, as he has become known, was determined to unite and expand a Christian kingdom. Between his accession to the Frankish throne in 768 and his death in 814, he re-established the notion of central power that had vanished with the fall of Rome and created a court based in Aachen that returned law and scholarship to the forefront. His coronation as emperor in 800 is regarded as the rebirth of Western civilisation, although the expansion of his power to Rome and protectorate over the papacy created the questions for the power struggles of the late Middle Ages – was emperor or pope pre-eminent, would German-speaking rulers retain control of the eastern lands,   and who would control Italy?

The concept of elected kingship – superseded only by force – predated hereditary royalty among Germanic tribes but Charlemagne was one ruler who anticipated heredity by anointing his son in his lifetime. Charlemagne and his Carolingian successors spread Frankish power north, south and east. But in the continued absence of unified hereditary succession – the Frankish inheritance principle divided everything equally among children – family internal struggles began to draw the borders of modern Europe, weakening the imperial concept. 

In western Frankish areas regional officials or counts had been in place since Roman times and the Franks adapted this machinery. The district or Gau came to be administered by the count (Graf), taking over from the earlier tribal assemblies. As Frankish rule spread east under the Carolingians in the eighth and ninth centuries, counts there operated as governors over the old Saxon, Swabian and Bavarian tribes. But the hundreds, local traditional units made up of free men, survived many changes in medieval royal organisation and retained their regional names and character. Imperial diets or assemblies were informal arrangements.

The need to defend Europe against new invaders, the Vikings and the Magyars, brought another layer of authority in the so-called tribal duchies, with dukes as military leaders of regions on a war footing. One of these dukes, from Franconia, was elected king as Conrad I when the eastern Carolingian line died out in 911. Then the Saxon dukes were installed with the choice of Henry the Fowler (Heinrich I) as German king in 918. This period is identified with the birth of a German state, in which church institutions were put to work enforcing secular authority, while becoming independent of the king’s administration – but not the king himself. A unified Germany was still centuries away.

For almost 40 years there was no imperial title, but in 962 Heinrich’s son Otto I inaugurated what became known as the Holy Roman empire, being crowned by the pope in Rome as an echo of the coronation of Charlemagne. This was a revival of the Carolingian spirit in which the elective German kingship and imperial title coincided, with the Saxon line dominating both. The church remained a vital support to this authority.

The Salian dynasty of Franconia came to power with Conrad II and worked to establish central royal authority and administration, appointing all officials including bishops and standing on the principle that kings were God's anointed instruments. Hereditary power was about to be challenged by new trends in elective principles.

Crown versus church

The empire, which included Burgundy and much of modern Italy, was distinct from Germany as it was then understood. The differing demands of the two entities presented important challenges for successive emperor-kings. Complicating the conflict was the fact that bishops were in many cases also temporal lords. And, if the church anointed kings, who enjoyed higher favour with God?

The period of the so-called investiture contest began as a battle of wills between the pope Gregory VII and the Salian emperor Heinrich IV. German kings enjoyed rights in appointing senior church officials, but the pope sought to assert the authority of God in these appointments. He was also prepared to enlist the German aristocracy against the throne to drive through his reforms and excommunicate Heinrich. Trying to consolidate most of the gains of the crown, Heinrich took the guise of a penitent in 1077 and met the pope at Canossa in Italy, receiving absolution. But this was not to be the end of the crisis.

Heinrich managed to retain the backing of most of the German church but the appointment by the aristocracy of alternative kings and a long period of civil wars did critical damage to imperial authority. By the start of the 12th century lesser princes were binding local magnates and the free population to their authority and the simple structures of power were differentiating into a complex feudal web. 

The surge of feudalism

The 1122 Concordat of Worms formally resolved the investiture contest in favour of the kings but the chaos already in train had begun to divide the German lands and weaken influences that might have encouraged institutional and economic development. The kings damaged themselves further by reapportioning lands and privileges among great feudal lords to win back support and counter the papacy, while the feudal lords where they could played papacy and crown off against each other to increase their personal power. It was a critical period for German history, leading to the proliferation of aristocratic castles – from which their owners increasingly took their names. They began ruling the local lands from these strongholds, doing grave damage to the notion of the state. Germany was becoming a land of castles.

As the Salian line failed the great princes seized control of the process of succession to the imperial throne. Out of self-interest their choices began to fall on weak candidates who did not command the authority of extensive strategic landholdings. The dukes who had been the military leaders and the counts who had been the king’s officers were meanwhile being absorbed into a network of more than 1000 territorial units and the feudal ties that went with it. By the mid-12th century real power was shifting to the aristocracy, which included churchmen ruling territories of their own. The Crusades were now under way, another force starting to shape aristocratic loyalties.

Expansion: the Hohenstaufen & the Teutonic Knights

The Hohenstaufen dynasty of Swabia asserted itself through Friedrich I, best known as Frederick Barbarossa, who was elected king in 1152 and emperor a few years later. Frederick restored the imperial image vis-a-vis the papacy and turned south to reassert imperial authority in Italy, relying on force and Classical notions of law. His policy of using feudal relations to consolidate royal control irked the powerful Henry the Lion, Welf duke of Saxony, who stinted in his support for Frederick’s Italian campaigns, but Frederick triumphed in a compelling struggle of personalities and seized and redistributed Henry’s lands.

Frederick’s pragmatic politics left German law and power in a better condition than he found them but he drowned in 1190 on his way to the Third Crusade. Italy was more fascinating to his Hohenstaufen successors, none of whom had Frederick’s charisma or commitment to the German lands. They continued on a much weakened throne until the 1250s. The time of the duchies was also ending and they began to disintegrate into smaller units. As the number of castles multiplied, the high medieval poetic tradition of Minnesang was reaching its height. The troubadours (Minnesänger) carried their love poetry from castle to castle to satisfy aristocratic and royal patrons and their courts.

In the 12th century German settlers looked east, some encouraged by German princes, some being sponsored by Slav princes in a bid to harness the land more productively. Baltic ports also began to host German traders and a Germanisation east of the river Oder took place – out of all proportion to the actual numbers of German settlers. But at the western frontiers of the empire France was making inroads, seeking to establish a new frontier on the Rhine and advance its aspirations to the imperial throne.

Crusades were not confined to the Holy Land. The knights of the Teutonic Order (Deutscher Orden), who owed their origins to the shortlived Christian presence in Acre, pushed east in the 1230s to Christianise the Baltic lands of what was then called Prussia. There they established a state and built mighty castles. After almost a century the order was driven out by Polish-Lithuanian armies, but the name of Prussia would return to the German story.

The Black Death did as much damage in German lands as anywhere in Europe, killing anything up to half the population, although estimates vary widely. In many places Jews were blamed and, half a century after the so-called Rintfleisch pogroms in Franconia, many of the scenes of slaughter were repeated.

In 1356 the emperor Charles IV’s so-called Golden Bull formalised the election process for the imperial title, resting with seven great princes – three of them archbishops – who became known as electors (Kurfürsten). The Golden Bull weakened forever the pope's hand in determining the emperor but in elevating the electors' rights it also devalued the crown. This eventually fell by custom to the Austrian Habsburg line, in whose hands Germany became a field for distributing land and wealth to political ends. Dynastic lands meant more than states and German disintegration continued. 

The rise of towns

As former feudal vassals became comfortable in effective ownership of their lands and levying of taxes, their neglect of towns had two effects. First, the prince-bishops’ authority grew over the towns where they lived and led worship. Second, the rise of the estates – groups concerned to ensure the taxes were being properly used – was encouraged. The estates, which came to comprise towns, knightly classes and clergy, began to develop their own notion of rights and sometimes showed outright resistance to their lords. The towns, as providers of revenue, and the knights, the rural administrators, used their positions to apply pressure.

Some towns, the imperial cities (Reichsstädte), enjoyed a direct relationship with the emperor unencumbered by duties to other lords and the income they contributed was significant. Free cities (Freie Städte) had many rights and privileges while under ruling bishops. The interests of the town residents, or burghers, and those of the prince-bishops often clashed. In the different social environment of the towns artisans and a commercial middle class could flourish. The Minnesänger were to give way to the Meistersinger — middle-class poets with an urban audience.

The division of German lands was not conducive to broader economic development, but in the 13th century the merchants of Lübeck had begun to leverage their dominance of the ancient trading routes of the Baltic Sea, bringing the compelling logic that wealth followed order. They adopted an independent attitude toward the aristocracy, convinced that the future lay in self-government and settling their own disputes.

The laws of the city of Lübeck were adopted or adapted by many towns of northern Germany and beyond, which formed a trading league known as the Hanse. Where the sword had failed gold triumphed and the ports of the Baltic coasts were increasingly speaking German. The wealth continued to flow for three centuries and the red-brick northern cities of today are the legacy of Hanseatic power.

In the south, Augsburg became a commercial centre of Europe. Thanks to its links with Italy, its influence in a banking and mining increased and for a time the powerful Fugger family even took over papal banking.

The Reformation & the Thirty Years War

In 1489 an imperial assembly (Reichstag) first sat in two colleges – the electors and the other princes and dukes. Eventually the representatives of free imperial cities arrived as another group.

Martin Luther’s doctrinal break with the Catholic church had varying effects. In the age of printing Luther’s German bible found wide appeal, shaking ecclesiastical authority while he sided with temporal princes on grounds of order. Reformers had come and gone for centuries – the wars caused by the revolt of Jan Hus had damaged German lands a century before – but Luther’s ideas received many princes' support. Luther refused to support a 1524 peasant uprising but reformist ideas – especially those of John Calvin – spread beyond the German lands, which at this time were losing touch with the independent-minded Swiss. Territories lined up as Protestant or Catholic supporters, the former mainly in the north while the south (and the empire) stayed with Catholicism as the prince-bishops maintained a strong electoral hand. Yet Luther's work laid the foundations of a standard German language in a land of many dialects and his grievances with the church of Rome struck chords of German nationalism.

Greater European powers led the political game against the background of this struggle of faiths and in the 17th century Germany became their battlefield. The Thirty Years War, with its main antagonists Austria, Spain, Bohemia, France, Sweden and Denmark and their German allies, killed one-third of the German population, wrecking lives and towns and halting commercial activity. The free imperial cities, lacking protection by a local magnate, generally were hit hardest. For centuries Germans would remember this war and its consequences with terror.

The 1648 Peace of Westphalia continued the disintegration of the German lands by breaking them into small, independent, landlocked units, handling portions to other nations and diverting the benefits of northern trade elsewhere. It became an article of faith among Europe’s diplomats for 200 years afterwards that a divided Germany was a guarantee of a healthy balance of power. The Reformation and the decline in towns had allowed princes to reassert their authority over the estates and a drift toward absolutism was clear.  Further, Westphalia drove the tendency for the German states to regard themselves as sovereign and separate, pursuing only their own interests. These states were weak and, after Westphalia, dominated by France. But one state, Brandenburg-Prussia, emerged and in 1701 became a kingdom. 

The Enlightenment & Prussia

The battles of the War of the Grand Alliance and the War of the Spanish Succession brought home Germans' fears of France. But courtly fashion also arrived from Versailles and it was from France and England that the Enlightenment was to arrive in the 18th century. When it did, it took up residence in the new kingdom of Prussia, in its rising capital Berlin, and the Potsdam court of the Hohenzollern king Friedrich II, better known as Frederick the Great.

Frederick’s enigma was that of an absolute monarch espousing ideals of individual liberty, an artistic intellectual who planned daring wars for political ends. He challenged Austria to win Silesia and risked all during the Seven Years War, emerging but narrowly in triumph. The political pattern right up to the late 19th century was set as Prussia became the counterpoint to Austria, the two representing the Catholic and Protestant faiths. Under French influence Frederick (an amateur composer) led a musical court, like his enemies the Wettin Saxon elector-dukes, who however displayed more Italian tastes. A flowering of German Baroque was under way, from Telemann to Handel and J.S. Bach and his family, leading to the door of the Classical period. 

Prussia’s growth and military prowess was a threat to all, especially the weaker Saxony, which was focused on maintaining the delicate power balance necessary to the Wettin dynasty’s grip on the Polish throne. Prussia’s military elite managed to harness its rural peasantry in an almost feudal thraldom, establishing a martial-bureaucratic state. It seemed that the Enlightenment – outside the salons of Berlin and the universities – was faltering and, constitutionally, having little effect on German lands.

It was left to the words of Goethe and Schiller and the music of Beethoven to champion a new brand of Classicism. The emergence of Immanuel Kant and the later Idealism of Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel took German thinking in bold but nonetheless inward directions and if anything encouraged an attitude of submissiveness. The universities, which were revolutionising themselves under the influence of Pietism, created new structures that were to pioneer Western discovery and learning, but not new social orders. Thought was the real realm of freedom, ideas were the business of academicians and politics was left to a few.

Under Napoleon

In the wake of revolution, France marched against Austria and Prussia and subjugated Rhineland areas. Soon the ancient political landscape had been shaken up, bishops losing their lands and independent cities and small provinces being taken over by large states. So the consolidation of Germany began.

Napoleon marched east in 1805, bringing the western German lands under his control, defeating Austria, secularising the remaining prince-bishoprics  and in 1806 putting an end to the doddering institutions of the Holy Roman empire. Briefly he occupied Berlin. Under the protectorate of Napoleon, the western and southern German states came together in the Confederation of the Rhine, covering much of the modern Germany and greatly reducing the number of tiny states. Only Prussia and Austria were excluded.

But the spirit of reform was at work in Prussia as leading figures set about creating a modern state. Napoleon's dominance stirred nationalist sentiment in many parts of the German lands and Napoleon's societal agenda, which included the work of standardising weights and measures, anticipated notions of German unity.

After Napoleon’s 1812 retreat from Russia a resurgent Prussia fought back and Russia and Prussia joined to defeat the French at Leipzig in 1813. The next year Napoleon abdicated but after a brief exile returned in 1815 to make a stand near Brussels. A British army under Wellington and a Prussian army under Blücher forced Napoleon’s surrender at Waterloo.

The Congress of Vienna soon before the battle, dominated by the Austrian statesman Klemens von Metternich, repeated the pattern of holding the German states in check as part of the balance of power. The new German Confederation after the departure of France was confronted with the Prussia-Austria rivalry. But a key deal in the settlement was that Prussia acquired more territory, including western areas around the lower Rhine and western Poland.

The new nationalism was being expressed by Neoclassical architecture in both Berlin (led by Karl Friedrich Schinkel) and Bavaria (Leo von Klenze) under state patronage.  But Romanticism was in full flower in literary taste and the music of Beethoven had begun moving in this direction, a development to be fully realised in the work of Wagner.

Bismarck & the new empire

The European revolutions of 1848 found echoes in German states, and uprisings were widespread. In Prussia middle-class liberals demanded a new constitution and in Frankfurt a parliament met in an attempt to unite the states and bring in a German constitution. The reform effort failed and the Prussian throne reasserted itself, backing other German states in a conservative reaction. But in the restoration it was Austria that gained the presidency of the confederation. Part of the reason for the liberal failure was the still largely agrarian economic and population base. The German states were late to industrialise, so there was no large urban proletariat and a small capital class, while craftsmen and small, conservative bureaucracies were still dominant.

The conservatism of the Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck proved another stumbling block to the middle class but ultimately he became the figure who united Germany. His husbandry of Prussia’s military might and ruthless statesmanship could exploit nationalist sentiments and in the 1860s Prussia defeated both Denmark and Austria on the battlefield before turning against France. Victory allowed Prussia to cement its leadership over the German-speaking lands, absorbing Bavaria, and Germany was unified in a new empire in 1871.

The industrialisation that was so long delayed arrived with a rush in the 30 years before World War I. Coal and steel were the new economic drivers, Berlin, Munich and the Ruhr areas led the growth in urbanisation and the port of Hamburg rose to global importance. The Social Democratic Party grew in popularity with the new urban working class in the face of Bismarck's efforts to maintain a conservative grip. Germany became preeminent on the Continent and a new rivalry with Britain began as Germany began developing naval strength to match its new colonial ambitions.

World War I & the Weimar Republic

War has been blamed on the web of European alliances, including German support for Austria, and a clash of interests among stagnating empires. Germany, which clearly preferred meeting an underprepared Russia, defeated its eastern enemy but was fought to a standstill on the Western Front and late in 1918 the Prussian-led empire began to collapse under the strain. German society was becoming militarised and left-wing forces rose against the government when the expectation of armistice was replaced by the dictates of the Versailles Treaty (which was in turn opposed by the right). The emperor had sought exile and Germany was being forced to disarm and pay heavy war reparations.

The political battle went to the streets. Although a centre-left government under Friedrich Ebert came to power in a new republican state forged in Weimar, it maintained close ties with the military. Right-wing elements remained mobilised, often under their wartime commanders, in opposition to the radical left.

Coup attempts in the early 1920s, one led by Adolf Hitler, failed but found sympathisers among judges, generals and rightist politicians. A period of steepling inflation around 1923 wreaked havoc in the economy. By 1930 the Nazis were a significant electoral force, buoyed by unease over post-war political, social and artistic freedoms and anger over the outcome of the war. Amid political manoeuvres in which military figures pulled many of the strings, Hitler was appointed chancellor in 1933.

Hitler & World War II

Within weeks the president and former army chief Paul von Hindenburg suspended civil liberties in response to a fire at the Reichstag and soon Hitler’s government was handed legislative powers. Then Hitler, whose party storm troopers had free rein from the Prussian police, persuaded the Reichstag to hand over even wider powers. The following year, at the death of Hindenburg, Hitler made himself head of state. Democracy had failed.

The Nazi system came to pervade every aspect of German life. Agreements for demilitarisation of the Rhine regions neighbouring France were violated in 1936. Meanwhile internal opponents and Jews were being dealt with by murder and imprisonment. Others, including intellectuals, fled. In 1938 a Nazi coup in Austria led to union with Germany.

Hitler’s goal was rearmament for eventual war in eastern Europe but his political opportunism secured him territorial concessions in Czechoslovakia, the prelude to a march into the rest of the country. Calls for the reunification of Danzig with Germany (another a revocation of Versailles provisions) were resisted by Britain and the crisis built around Poland as 1939 proceeded. In August Germany signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union and the next month invaded Poland. Britain and France declared war but, as neither was ready for combat, there was little fighting.

Hitler invaded the Low Countries and France in May 1940, sweeping all before him and isolating Britain. He threatened to invade but his air force could not suppress the British fighter force, so in 1941 he turned on his Soviet ally, initially with success. But opening a second front backfired as Germany also became entangled in north Africa just as the eastern campaign bogged down. The US entered the European war in 1942 and by 1943 German armies were facing disaster in both Africa and Russia.

By the time of the D-Day invasion of France in June 1944 the main industrial cities of Germany were being pounded from the air and levels of strategic materials were running low, despite high industrial production. A last German fling on the Belgian front in the depths of winter failed as Soviet forces swept towards Berlin. Hitler committed suicide in April 1945 and days later a ruined Germany surrendered, to be divided into occupation zones by the US, Britain, France and the Soviet Union. Germany lost further territory in the east, which went to Czechoslovakia and a reshaped Poland, and was again divided from Austria.

Cold War & division

Three of the four occupying powers had agreements that involved a division of Europe into eastern and western spheres. Germany – and independently Berlin – was to be split into four zones. Ideological strains between capitalist and communist were clear but the mutual distrust became open in 1947 when the Soviets rejected the US-driven Marshall Plan for funding economic recovery.

In 1948 the extension of a western zone currency reform to Berlin irked the Soviets, who blockaded the western sectors of the city for almost a year: the western powers responded with a mammoth airlift to supply them. Months after the blockade was lifted the US, Britain and France set up the Federal Republic of Germany, with its capital in Bonn, and the Soviet Union responded by declaring a client state, the German Democratic Republic, with a one-party constitution establishing the communist SED as its ruling force. The creation of what Winston Churchill called the Iron Curtain – a north-south divide between Western capitalism and the communist East, was complete. Saarland did not become part of the FRG (West Germany) until 1957.

As well as maintaining a strong military presence, the western powers planned further support for the West German economy, sourcing much equipment for the Korean War from its rebuilt heavy industry and starting what became known as West Germany’s economic miracle. Economic constraints in East Germany and raised national work quotas in June 1953 led to a workers’ uprising, which was bloodily suppressed.  Plans for nationalised industry and agricultural collectivisation of East Germany proceeded, while West Germany emerged among the world’s mightiest industrial economies.

In 1961 came a further flashpoint when the East German government decided to stop the westward leak of population and built a barrier between the halves of the city, along which the Berlin Wall began to appear. The wall did not prevent escapes but succeeded in stabilising the population and to some extent the East German economy for more than 20 years. Yet that economy could not provide modern goods to meet the demands of its people and the perception of two classes – the ruling SED and the people – grew.

While West Germany dreamed of a united nation, it pressed on with economic integration projects with former enemy France and a growing group of European countries in forums aimed at building a single market that increasingly took on political significance. There was also social disillusionment in West Germany, expressed most forcefully by student protests and an extremist terrorist network dubbed the Red Army Faction. But West German organised labour by and large co-operated with employers and the political base of discontent did not widen.

Reunification

The work of the Solidarity democracy movement in Poland in the 1980s led a wave of reformist sentiment in eastern and central Europe. From 1985 Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev introduced economic and social liberalisation. Poland itself introduced reforms in 1987. In 1989 Hungary carried out electoral changes and opened its border with Austria. Poland held free elections that brought a Solidarity government to power.

Demonstrations demanding East German reform, notably in Leipzig, were growing. In October Erich Honecker resigned as SED leader. On November 8, under pressure, the whole SED leadership resigned and next day a statement was issued announcing the intention to open the Berlin border crossings long closed to East German citizens. Crowds swarmed through, mounted the Berlin Wall and began dismantling it. West German chancellor Helmut Kohl soon announced a program to begin co-operation aimed at unification. The first free East German elections were held in March 1990, leading to talks for a unification treaty. Formal reunification took place, with Berlin as capital, on October 3.

The strains of change and political and economic integration of the former western and eastern communities soon showed and in 1992 a riot against refugees erupted in Rostock. Redevelopment of unified Berlin has repeatedly caused controversy. But Germany shaped as the dominant force in the new Europe, confirmed by the start of full European monetary union in 1999.

A politician from the former East Germany, Christian Democratic Union leader Angela Merkel, became chancellor in 2005. German economic strength became critical in Europe's response to the 2008 global financial crisis and Merkel championed the cause of refugees escaping war in the Middle East. Long before her retirement in 2021, Merkel was acknowledged as the leading political figure in the European Union.