Climate: Temperate and marine; cool, cloudy, wet winters and summers; occasional warm mountain foehn wind. Germany is a federation of 16 states, roughly corresponding to regions with their own distinct and unique cultures.
If you have perceptions of Germany as simply homogeneous, it will surprise you with its many historical regions and local diversity. The roots of German history and culture date back to the Germanic tribes and after that to the Holy Roman Empire.
Since the early middle ages Germany started to split into hundreds of small states. It was the Napoleonic wars that started the process of unification, which ended in , when a large number of previously independent German kingdoms united under Prussian leadership to form the German Empire Deutsches Kaiserreich. Because the young republic was plagued with massive economic problems stemming from the war such as hyperinflation and disgrace for a humiliating defeat in World War I, strong anti-democratic forces took advantage of the inherent organizational problems of the Weimar Constitution and the Nazis were able to seize power in Under the Nazi dictatorship, democratic institutions were dismantled and a police state was installed.
Germany and much of Europe was destroyed. By April of Germany was in ruins with most major cities bombed to the ground. The reputation of Germany as an intellectual land of freedom and high culture Land der Dichter und Denker had been decimated and tarnished for decades to come. Therefore, German provinces east of the rivers Oder and Neisse like Silesia and Pomerania were entirely cleared of its original population by the Soviets and Polish in the largest ethnic cleansing ever — most of it an area where there had not been any sizable Polish or even Russian minorities at all.
Even more refugees came with the massive numbers of ethnic Germans expelled from their ancient eastern European homelands in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia. United Kingdom and the US decided to merge their sectors, followed by the French.
