Germany is one of the most powerful countries in the world, with the fourth largest economy
on Earth and the second largest population in Europe. The geography of this general area
has helped give the modern country the power it has today, however the same geography that
made Germany into what it is today also kept it fractured among hundreds of tiny kingdoms
until only 150 years ago. So what exactly are Germany’s geographic strengths and weaknesses,
and how did they work both to its advantage and its detriment, and how do they continue
to do so in the present?
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With a population of more than 80 million, Germany is the most populous country entirely
in Europe, with a similar population to that of Turkey or Iran, or about ¼ of the United
States… or like 6% of China… or about 1,064 Andorra's. Germany also shares borders
with nine different countries: Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Poland, France, Austria,
Luxembourg, Switzerland, and Czechia, although since these countries and Germany now form
part of the Schengen Area, this now means Germany is surrounded on all sides by friendly
countries, something that certainly was not the case throughout history.
Germany contains parts of some of the most important rivers in Europe, including the
Rhine, Danube, and Elbe, whose tributaries and watersheds encompass a massive chunk of
Central and Southeastern Europe. The first of these two are also connected via the Rhine-Main-Danube
Canal, allowing passage from the Black Sea to the North Sea (well, I suppose without
going through Turkish or Spanish/British/Moroccan waters, if you somehow managed to get on all
those countries’ bad sides, but not these countries‘ as well). However this is just
one of the newest among a whole series of canals traversing the country. The Mittellandkanal
for instance connects France with Poland through internal waterways. So if you’re a French
or Belgian or Dutch or even British shipping company and you want to trade with eastern
Europe…you could go all the way north through Schleswig-Holstein, or you could just send
a small barge through Germany’s other canals. This interconnectedness between so many of
these rivers throughout the entire country serves as the lifeblood of Germany and made
port cities like Hamburg economic powerhouses. With railroads too this is a similar case.
Even before Germany was unified, its kingdoms invested a lot of money in railroads. Railroads
were invented in England with the idea of speeding up transit from town-to-town, but
Germany was the first to build a long-distance railway. It opened in 1847 and connected the
Rhine river all the way at the western border to the Weser all the way to the east. Most
German railways were also either public or heavily regulated, so there were strict rules
about equal access to railroads. That meant that even small towns in remote areas got
train stations, and people from those areas had access to industrial jobs or education
in big cities. Compare that to the U.S., which didn’t build interstate highways until the
50s, and… yeah we won’t even talk about the U.S. rail system, at least not these days.
Looking at a topographic map, one of the key divisions within the country becomes clear,
not the Cold War division between east and west (believe me, we will get into that later
on), but the division between the flat north and mountainous south. This division in fact
explains why the dialects spoken in the north are called Plattdeutsch, (for low or “flat”
German) while those in the mountainous south are called Hochdeutsch (or High German, not
to be confused with the Standard German that you might learn on Duolingo). To this day
this difference in topography affects virtually all of Central Europe, from Austria being
separate from Germany, to which form of Aldi your country might have. But before we learn
more about Germany’s geography and how it affected its development over the centuries,
let me first talk to you about the people making videos like this possible.
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You know, it‘s not a good sign if you‘re getting vastly different headlines for the
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sleeve that I think you might like. For example, and keeping with the theme of
Germany’s geography, one thing I haven’t really touched upon is Germany’s dependence
on Russian oil and natural gas. It is thus pretty big news that a 50-meter section of
the ruptured Nord Stream 1 pipeline seems to be missing. You can see how it’s being
covered in left or right-wing newspapers, how they phrase their headlines, whether the
sources are international or local, and how factual these sources generally are. You can
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Germany’s economic core is largely situated in the west near the Rhine River, mostly in
the state of Nordrhein-Westfalen. While many of Germany’s economic centers however–
including the likes of Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Karlsruhe, and the Rhine-Ruhr megaregion–
all lie in the west of the country, within the so-called Blue Banana megaregion, the
capital and largest city Berlin lies all the way out in the middle of the east. Germany
is a much less centralized country than a country like France, which in comparison is
dominated by Paris. When Julius Caesar led the Roman army against
the Gauls, they encountered many of their numerous Germanic neighbors, such as the Suebi,
the Angles and Saxons, who eventually became English, the Goths, and the Vandals. Caesar
described these tribes as very decentralized, with patriarchs who would settle disputes
between families. Eventually a few of these families became a kind of ruling class, but
there was still no single monarch to unite all the tribes. Being so disconnected and
located right near the center of Europe meant that outsiders often found themselves interacting
with different groups, such as the Alemanni, the Saxons, or those people too dumb to speak
like us, hence all the different names the modern country has in different languages.
After this guy named Charlie (or who the history nerds know as Charlemagne) conquered the area
and was given the frankly amazing Christmas present of being crowned Emperor of the Romans
[Byzantium: Excuse me?], a new entity called the Holy Roman Empire came into power over
the region (or as HistoryTubers like to call it, the Godless Germanic Union). In fact,
that’s part of the reason countries like Luxembourg and Liechtenstein still exist,
as the Holy Roman Empire that ruled this area for 1,000 years wasn’t a kingdom but a weird
sort of confederacy between all these smaller kingdoms. German and French rulers constantly
fought over the “Holy Roman Emperor” title, but as the centuries went by and memories
of charismatic emperors like Charlemagne faded, the individual kingdoms got harder and harder
to control. Finally, Napoleon took over France, steamrolled through Europe, declared himself
the Holy Roman Emperor… and got defeated, which was the final nail in the coffin for
the Empire. After that, a few of the bigger kingdoms,
especially Prussia, led an effort to unify the Germanic peoples into one country. See,
Prussia– with its capital being Berlin– and its neighbors were right in the middle
of the Northern European plain, a region infamous in the eyes of anyone who knows what Poland
is. However in the south another kingdom had also been expanding its hegemony: Austria.
By the mid-19th century, Austria and Prussia were the clear dominant powers over Central
Europe, however with Prussia dominating more traditional German lands and Austria’s realm
spread out over the much more varied groups to the southeast, mostly down the Danube River.
But long story short, especially since I’ve already talked about the politics and history
of all this in greater detail in past videos, Germany finally became a unified country in
1871, blah blah blah enough backstory let’s get back to the geography!
Of course, after World War II, the Cold War made the now re-split Germany a potential
passageway for someone western Europe did not want in the area, the Soviet Union. The
Fulda Gap, this lowland area on the border between NATO-aligned West Germany and Soviet-Aligned
East Germany became one of the easiest targets for a Russian invasion. Thus Fulda became
a key location for NATO and Soviet forces to watch over each other. Germany and its
capital were divided between the NATO and Soviet spheres of influence, and a stark division
still exists between the East and the West. While not the poorest region in Europe, Eastern
Germany still lags behind their brethren in the West. For the West however, West Berlin
found itself entirely surrounded by the German Democratic Republic, effectively cut off by
not-so-friendly territory. This by the way, for those of you not familiar with Berlin,
is why the Berlin Wall didn’t split Berlin, but encircled West Berlin. Three different
highways in the east became ‘Transitstrecken’, which West German citizens could use to drive
between the two parts of the Federal Republic through East German territory, though with
the East restricting whether its citizens could leave, naturally these routes also became
a way for Easterners to try to get smuggled to the West.
Of course, nowadays it’s the 21st century, with a now reunited Germany surrounded by
nine fellow Schengen Area countries, eight of which being in the European Union. With
the aftermath of WWII, being split between NATO and the Warsaw Pact in the latter half
of the 20th century, and the rise of the European Union, Germany’s priorities today are those
which might seem almost nonsensical to those who led the country only a century earlier.