- [Voiceover] Germany has certainly been in the news
in recent years.
From the bundling politics of Angela Merkel
to the famed beer festival in Munich,
known as the Oktoberfest,
Germany has repeatedly been in the spotlight,
and, far and away, the country most requested
by our Top Lists fans has been the Bundesrepublik.
So now, by popular demand, we bring you the top 10 things
you didn't know about Germany.
Germany is the largest economy in Europe.
It has the fourth largest nominal GDP in the world.
It might seem exaggerated to say, but everything
that has to do with the European Union and Euro
is highly dependent on Germany.
In fact, without Germany's economic participation
and continued support
the Eurozone would be a thing of the past.
Germany's support has allowed
for the continual participation
of substantially weaker economies,
such as Spain, Italy, and Greece,
and has kept their economies afloat
in the midst of horrible debt and economic mismanagement.
So theoretically, if Germany cut the purse strings,
it could send all of southern Europe into a downward spiral,
but that's probably not going to happen.
And here is why.
Germany is a country haunted by its past
and the possibility of being portrayed in a negative light
is something that Germans just can't afford.
You see, if Germany left the EU and cut off southern Europe,
you can only imagine the names it would be called,
and that's putting it mildly.
Because of this, Germany will be stuck
between a rock and a hard place for a long time to come.
Unfortunately, it hasn't been all beer and glory
as Germany has a pretty checkered past.
If you've never been to Germany before,
you probably have never heard of the stolperstein,
or literally a stumbling stone.
Conceived in the eary 1990s, by the German artist
Gunter Demnig, the stolperstein is a tile,
usually made of bronze, commemorating the victims
of the National Socialist regime in Germany.
Their names and place of residence are etched into the tile,
as is the approximate date of death
and sometimes time of deportation
to the concentration camps of the Nazis.
By now, stolpersteine have spread across Europe
to countries outside of Germany,
marking the popularity of the idea behind them.
According to the Cambridge historian Joseph Pearson,
it is not the information on the tiles
that gives passer-bys pause, but the lack thereof.
"It is not what is written on them which intrigues,
"because the inscription is insufficient
"to conjure a person.
It is the emptiness, void, lack of information,
"the maw of the forgotten,
"which gives the monuments their power
"lifts them from the banality of a statistic."
As a part of Germany's unfortunate past there're some things
you literally just cannot say in Germany.
That is, if you don't want to go to jail,
called Volksverhetzung in German, or incitement to hatred,
saying certain things about certain groups of people,
or denying the Holocaust
and the legacy of National Socialism
can actually land you in jail.
Some of the statute reads as follows:
"Whosoever publicly or in a meeting approves of,
"denies or downplays an act committed
"under the rule of National Socialism
"in manner capable of disturbing the public peace
"shall be liable to imprisonment
"not exceeding five years or a fine."
Such legal measures have been debated back and forth
on their merits by freedom of speech scholars
for several decades now.
But the German government seems intent
on upholding the measures for the foreseeable future.
From dark pumpernickel to light rye
to everything inbetween in over 300 types of bread,
Germany has more bread variety
than any other country in the world.
Bread forms a major part of just about every German meal
and with over 300 types it's not hard to see why.
In fact, one German word for dinner, Abendbrot,
literally means evening bread and indicates the importance
of one's daily bread in Germany.
Another popular sort of bread,
rarely seen outside of Germany,
is the Broetchen, which literally means little bread.
Which, in fact, is lesser type of bread,
there is a particular size and shape of bread.
Broetchen are typically small and can be held in one hand,
as opposed to full loaves of bread,
and are possibly the most popular type of food in Germany.
While most people think of beer when they think of Germany,
they're really missing out on all that bread.
Unlike the United States where piss water,
otherwise known as Coors Light and Budweiser,
counts as beer, Germany is rightly regarded
as the fatherland of beer.
Going as far back as Roman times,
when Germanic tribes were cited by Roman historians
for their beer brewing skills,
the tradition has continued throughout the Middle Ages
to the present, giving us a tremendous variety
of trully unique beer.
As a testament to German dedication
to a pure and tasteful beer, in the Middle Ages
there was legislation introduced called the Reinheitsgebot,
or purity decree,
proclaiming that only the purest of ingredients,
namely water, barley and hops, could go into beer.
Today, there're dozens and dozens of beers in Germany,
many of them regional, such as the Cologne-based Koelsch,
which is actually illegal
to brew outside of the Cologne region.
But rest assured, every type of German beer bears the stamp
of umparalleled German quality.
Germany was the birthplace of one of the greatest
and most long-standing religious and political conflicts
in the world.
Martin Luther, theologian and religious radical,
infamously posted his 95 Theses
on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences
on the door of a church in Wittenberg,
as a critique of the Catholic Church's corruption,
and shortly thereafter Europe exploded in conflict.
This action on the part of Martin Luther
is widely regarded as the beginning of the splintering
and fracturing of Christianity in Europe
as protestantism was born.
This led to centuries of political and religious conflict
accompanied by mass bloodshed and loss of human life
in such conflicts as the Thirty Years' War,
which is widely regarded as one
of the most destructive conflicts in European history,
and the infamous St. Bartholomew's Day massacre in France
where Catholics engaged in mass murder
of thousands of French protestant calvinists,
known as Huguenots.
Without the German theologian Martin Luther
modern Europe as we know it today
and indeed Christianity would be very, very different.
You may not know it,
but Germany is a comparatively young country.
Prior to the 19th century and throughout the Middle Ages
much of what was modern Germany
had simply been known as the Holy Roman Empire.
But in the 19th century, under the visionary authority
of the Prussian statesmen Otto von Bismarck,
the modern concept of the nation-state of Germany was born.
Germany is often referred to as the Bundesrepublik,
and this is because modern Germany is composed
of 16 federal states, which all differ from each other
often in subtle ways.
They are: Buden-Wuerttemberg, Bavaria, Hesse,
Saarland, Rhineland-Palatinate, Thuringia,
North Rhine-Westphalia, Lower Saxony, Hamburg,
Bremen, Saxony-Anhalt, Saxony, Brandenburg,
Berlin, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern,
and finally, Schleswig-Holstein.
The modern German consolation of 16 federated states
is relatively new in German history.
But each one retains a fiercely independent character
dating back to before the time of German unification.
For example, the state of Bavaria refers to itself
as Freistaat Bayern, which means the free state of Bavaria.
The Bundeslander, as they are called in German,
all have different customs, histories, foods,
and even cultures, often going back many centuries,
giving them each a unique flavour
despite falling under the banner of greater Germany.
Just as modern Germany evolved from many separate states
that were fused together
under the iron fist of Otto von Bismarck,
so too is modern standard German,
called Hochdeutsch in German,
an album of many different elements fused into one.
The dialects of Germany are even older
than the regions they seem to come from,
harking back to the earliest Germanic tribes,
mentioned by the Romans.
From that period onwards the Germanic tribesmen
settled in many different places
and their languages evolved on their own.
Fast forward to the present and you have a country
with literally hundreds of different dialects,
some of which are so different from each other
so as to be considered different languages.
For example, the High German word for squirrel
is Eichhoernchenschwanz, but in Bavarian
it's Orchkatezlschworf.
Even if you don't know German,
you can certainly hear the difference.
A Bavarian speaking his native dialect
to a person from Hamburg will not be understood at all.
So to communicate across the many states
and indeed countries, such as Switzerland and Austria,
German speak High German, a standardized German
with a fixed grammar and set of rules,
albeit each with their own regional accents.
For some four decades Germany was a divided land.
There was West Germany and East Germany,
also known as the DDR,
or Deutsche Demokratische Republik.
A legacy of the Cold War that ensued after World War II,
it all ended when East Germany was united as one country
with the West after the fall of the Berlin Wall
on November, 9th, 1989.
There were great hopes at the time with many people
long separated from each other reconnected,
but many of these hopes have been dashed
in the ensuing decades.
Close to three decades after the fall of the wall,
eastern Germany still lags behind its western counterpart
economically by as much as one third.
Greater unemployment and fewer life opportunities
have also given rise to a comparatively disproportionate
number of so-called anti-establishment groups,
such as neo-Nazis, fascists, and the far-right,
compared to western Germany.
It's sad to admit, but it just might be the case
that eastern Germany may never catch up
with western Germany, something that,
given Germany's troubled history,
might bring with it potentially dire
political and social consequences
not just for Germany, but for the world at large.
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