Karel Appel
Christiaan Karel Appel was a Dutch painter and poet. He started painting at the age of fourteen and studied at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam in the 1940s, he was one of the founders of the avant-garde movement Cobra in 1948. He was an avid sculptor and has had works featured in MoMA and other museums worldwide. Christiaan Karel Appel was born on 25 April 1921 in his parents' house at Dapperstraat 7 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands; as a child he was called'Kik'. On the ground floor his father, Jan Appel, had a barbershop, his mother, born Johanna Chevalier, was a descendant of French Huguenots. Karel Appel had three brothers. At fourteen, Appel produced his first real painting on a still life of a fruit basket. For his fifteenth birthday, his wealthy uncle Karel Chevalier gave him an easel. An avid amateur painter himself, Chevalier gave his namesake some lessons in painting. From 1940 to 1943, during the German occupation, Appel studied at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam, it was there he met the young painter Corneille and, some years Constant.
His parents opposed his choice to become an artist. Appel had his first show in Groningen in 1946. In 1949 he participated with the other CoBrA artists in the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, he was influenced by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, the French brute-art artist Jean Dubuffet. In 1947 he started sculpting with all kinds of used materials and painted them in bright colors: white, yellow and black, he joined the Experimentele Groep in Holland together with the young Dutch painters Anton Rooskens, Theo Wolvecamp, Jan Nieuwenhuys. The Belgian writer Hugo Claus joined the group. In 1948 Appel joined CoBrA together with the Dutch artists Corneille and Jan Nieuwenhuys, with the Belgian poet Christian Dotremont; the new art of the CoBrA group was not popular in the Netherlands, but it found a warm and broad welcome in Denmark. By 1939, Danish artists had started to make spontaneous art and one of their sources of inspiration was Danish and Nordic mythology, it was in Denmark that the CoBrA artists started cooperating by collectively painting the insides of houses, which encouraged and intensified the exchange of the typical'childish' and spontaneous picture language used by the CoBrA group.
Appel used this intensively. As a result of this controversy and other negative Dutch reactions to CoBrA, Appel moved to Paris in 1950 and developed his international reputation by travelling to Mexico, the USA, Brazil, he lived in New York City and Florence. His first American gallery exhibition took place in 1954 at the Martha Jackson Gallery; the following year his painting Child and Beast II was included in the influential exhibition, The New Decade at the Museum of Modern Art which featured the work of twenty-two European painters and sculptors including newcomers like Francis Bacon, Jean Dubuffet, Pierre Soulages. He is noted for his mural work. After 1990 he became much more popular in the Netherlands; the CoBrA-museum in Amstelveen organized several shows featuring his work. He became the most famous Dutch CoBrA artist. Appel's work has been exhibited in a number of galleries, including the Anita Shapolsky Gallery in New York City, Galerie Lelong in Paris, Galerie Ulysses in Vienna, Gallery LL in Amsterdam.
Appel died on 3 May 2006 in his home in Switzerland. He suffered from a heart ailment, he was buried on 16 May 2006 at the Père Lachaise Cemetery in France. Years before his death, Appel established the Karel Appel Foundation, whose purpose is "to preserve artworks, to promote public awareness and knowledge of Karel Appel's oeuvre, to supervise publication of the Oeuvre Catalogue of the paintings, the works on paper, the sculptures."In 2002 a number of Appel's works went missing on the way to his foundation, an event, not to be resolved before his death. However, in 2012 the works were returned to the foundation. In the wake of his death, the Foundation functions as his official estate in addition to its primary service as an image archive; the U. S. copyright representative for the Karel Appel Foundation is the Artists Rights Society. Among the public collections holding works by Karel Appel are: Museum de Fundatie, The Netherlands Aboa Vetus & Ars Nova, Finland Art Gallery of Hamilton, Canada Rijksmuseum, The Netherlands The Phillips Collection, Washington DC, USA Gallery Delaive, The Netherlands Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Poughkeepsie, NY, USA Appel, Karel: Psychopathological Notebook.
Drawings and Gouaches 1948–1950. Bern – Berlin: Verlag Gachnang & Springer, 1999. ISBN 978-3-906127-57-6 Kuspit, Donald. "Titanic Power: Karel Appel in the Tradition of the New". Psychodrama: Modern Art as Group Therapy. London: Ziggurat. Pp. 13–45. ISBN 9780956103895. Tapié, Michel. Stedelijk Museum. Karel Appel OCLC 11554905 Lyotard, Jean-François. Karel Appel, A Gesture of Colour
Limburg (Netherlands)
Limburg is the southernmost of the 12 provinces of the Netherlands. It is in the southeastern part of the country, stretched out from the north, where it touches the province of Gelderland, to the south, where it internationally borders Belgium, its northern part has the North Brabant province to its west. Its long eastern boundary is the international border with the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia. Much of the west border runs along the River Maas, bordering the Flemish province of Limburg, a small part of the Walloon province of Liège. On the south end, it has borders with the Flemish exclave of Voeren and its surrounding part of Liège, Wallonia; the Vaalserberg is on the extreme south-eastern point, marking the tripoint of Netherlands and Belgium. Limburg's major cities are the provincial capital Maastricht, as well as Heerlen, Sittard-Geleen in the south, Venlo in the north and Roermond and Weert in the middle. More than half of the population 620,000 people, live in the south of Limburg, which corresponds to one-third of the province's area proper.
In South Limburg, most people live in the urban agglomerations of Maastricht and Sittard-Geleen. Limburg has a distinctive character; the social and economic trends that have affected the province in recent decades have generated a process of change and renewal which has enabled Limburg to transform its peripheral location into a globalized regional nexus, linking the Netherlands to the Ruhr metro area and the southern part of the Benelux region. A less appreciated consequence of this international gateway location is rising international crime drug-related in the southernmost part of the province. Limburg's name derives from the fortified town of the same name, situated on the river Vesdre near the High Fens, now in the nearby Belgian province of Liège, its name is derived from the Germanic elements *lindo, "lime tree," and burg, "fortification." Limburg town was the seat of the medieval Duchy of Limburg. None of present-day Limburg was part of this duchy, which had its northern border along what is the modern southern border of South Limburg.
South Limburg in the Middle Ages was made up of the lands of Valkenburg and Herzogenrath, which under the rule of the Duchy of Brabant came to be known collectively as the Lands of Overmaas. The Duchy of Limburg and its dependencies first came under Brabantian control in 1288, as a result of the Battle of Worringen in the 15th century under the Duchy of Burgundy. By 1473, the Lands of Overmaas and the Duchy of Limburg formed one unified delegation to the States General of the Burgundian Netherlands. Both the terms Overmaas and Limburg came to be used loosely to refer to this sparsely populated province of the so-called Seventeen Provinces. Maastricht was never part of this polity; the central and northern part of present-day Limburg belonged to different political entities, notably the Duchy of Jülich and the Duchy of Guelders. After 1794, the French unified the region, along with Belgian Limburg, removed all ties to the old feudal society; the new name, as with all the names of the départements, was based on natural features, in this case Meuse-Inférieure or Neder-Maas.
After the defeat of Napoleon the newly-created United Kingdom of the Netherlands desired a new name for this province. It was decided that the historic connection to the town and duchy of Limburg was to be restored, albeit only in name, it is important to note that the history given below is that of the region, the current province Limburg of the Netherlands. There existed no polity or other entity going by that name covering this territory until 1815. For centuries, the strategic location of the current province made it a much-coveted region among Europe's major powers. Romans, Habsburg Spaniards, Habsburg Austrians and French have all ruled parts of Limburg. For long periods of history the region was not united under the same rule; the first inhabitants of whom traces have been found were Neanderthals. In Neolithic times flint was mined in underground mines, including one at Rijckholt, open to visitors. Just after the Roman conquest the Eburones, the inhabitants of most of the area of current Limburg, were annihilated by the legions of Julius Caesar with help of neighbour tribes, this as a punishment for a successful ambush set by their leader Ambiorix.
After this genocide the area was repopulated with a diverse set of peoples that under Roman rules, amalgated in the Tungri. The southern part of current Limburg, along the Via Belgica was Romanized and a few still existing towns and cities were founded in this period, including Mosa Trajectum and Coriovallum. Bishop Servatius introduced Christianity in Roman Maastricht, where he died in 384; as Roman authority in the area weakened, Franks took over from the Romans, the area, now called Austrasia, flourished under their rule. The middle and southern part of the current province formed an important part of the heartland of Austrasia. In 714 Susteren Abbey was founded, as far as is known the first proprietary abbey in the current Netherlands. Main benefactor was the consort of Pepin of Herstal. Charles Martel was born in nearby Herstal and Charlemagne had close links with the area, he made Aachen the capital of the Frankish empire. In 870 the treaty of Meerssen, the third partition
Sol LeWitt
Solomon "Sol" LeWitt was an American artist linked to various movements, including Conceptual art and Minimalism. LeWitt came to fame in the late 1960s with his wall drawings and "structures" but was prolific in a wide range of media including drawing, photography, painting and artist's books, he has been the subject of hundreds of solo exhibitions in museums and galleries around the world since 1965. LeWitt was born in Connecticut to a family of Jewish immigrants from Russia, his mother took him to art classes at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. After receiving a BFA from Syracuse University in 1949, LeWitt traveled to Europe where he was exposed to Old Master paintings. Shortly thereafter, he served in the Korean War, first in California Japan, Korea. LeWitt moved to New York City in 1953 and set up a studio on the Lower East Side, in the old Ashkenazi Jewish settlement on Hester Street. During this time he studied at the School of Visual Arts while pursuing his interest in design at Seventeen magazine, where he did paste-ups and photostats.
In 1955, he was a graphic designer in the office of architect I. M. Pei for a year. Around that time, LeWitt discovered the work of the late 19th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge, whose studies in sequence and locomotion were an early influence; these experiences, combined with an entry-level job as a night receptionist and clerk he took in 1960 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, would influence LeWitt's work. At MoMA, LeWitt's co-workers included fellow artists Robert Ryman, Dan Flavin, Gene Beery, Robert Mangold, the future art critic and writer, Lucy Lippard who worked as a page in the library. Curator Dorothy Canning Miller's now famous 1960 "Sixteen Americans" exhibition with work by Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella created a swell of excitement and discussion among the community of artists with whom LeWitt associated. LeWitt became friends with Hanne Darboven, Eva Hesse, Robert Smithson. LeWitt taught at several New York schools, including New York University and the School of Visual Arts, during the late 1960s.
In 1980, LeWitt left New York for Italy. After returning to the United States in the late 1980s, LeWitt made Chester, his primary residence, he died at age 78 in New York from cancer complications. LeWitt is regarded as a founder of both Conceptual art, his prolific two and three-dimensional work ranges from wall drawings to hundreds of works on paper extending to structures in the form of towers, geometric forms, progressions. These works range in size from gallery-sized installations to monumental outdoor pieces. LeWitt's first serial sculptures were created in the 1960s using the modular form of the square in arrangements of varying visual complexity. In 1979, LeWitt participated in the design for the Lucinda Childs Dance Company's piece Dance. In the early 1960s, LeWitt first began to create his "structures," a term he used to describe his three-dimensional work, his frequent use of open, modular structures originates from the cube, a form that influenced the artist's thinking from the time that he first became an artist.
After creating an early body of work made up of closed form wooden objects, heavily-lacquered by hand, in the mid-1960s he "decided to remove the skin altogether and reveal the structure." This skeletal form, the radically simplified open cube, became a basic building block of the artist's three-dimensional work. In the mid-1960s, LeWitt began to work with the open cube: twelve equal linear elements connected at eight corners to form a skeletal structure. From 1969, he would conceive many of his modular structures on a large scale, to be constructed in aluminum or steel by industrial fabricators; each of his large open cubes is 63 inches high eye level. At this scale, the artist introduced bodily proportion to his fundamental sculptural unit. Beginning in the mid-1980s, LeWitt composed some of his sculptures from stacked cinder blocks, still generating variations within self-imposed restrictions. At this time, he began to work with concrete blocks. In 1985, the first cement Cube was built in a park in Basel.
From 1990 onwards, LeWitt conceived multiple variations on a tower to be constructed using concrete blocks. In a shift away from his well-known geometric vocabulary of forms, the works LeWitt realized in the late 1990s indicate vividly the artist's growing interest in somewhat random curvilinear shapes and saturated colors. In 2007, LeWitt conceived 9 Towers, a cube made from more than 1,000 light-coloured bricks that measures five-meters on each side, it was installed at the Kivik Art Centre in Lilla Stenshuvud, Sweden, in 2014. In 1968, LeWitt began to conceive sets of guidelines or simple diagrams for his two-dimensional works drawn directly on the wall, executed first in graphite in crayon in colored pencil and in chromatically rich washes of India ink, bright acrylic paint, other materials. Since he created a work of art for Paula Cooper Gallery's inaugural show in 1968, an exhibition to benefit the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, thousands of LeWitt's drawings have been installed directly on the surfaces of walls.
Between 1969 and 1970 he created four "Drawings Series", which presented different combinations of the basic element that governed many of his early wall drawings. In each series he applied a different system of change to each of twenty-four possible combinations of a square divided into four equal parts, each containing one of the four basic types of lines LeWitt used (vertical, diagonal left, diag
Meuse
The Meuse or Maas is a major European river, rising in France and flowing through Belgium and the Netherlands before draining into the North Sea from the Rhine–Meuse–Scheldt delta. It has a total length of 925 km. From 1301 the upper Meuse marked the western border of the Holy Roman Empire with the Kingdom of France, after Count Henry III of Bar had to receive the western part of the County of Bar as a French fief from the hands of King Philip IV; the border remained stable until the annexation of the Three Bishoprics Metz and Verdun by King Henry II in 1552 and the occupation of the Duchy of Lorraine by the forces of King Louis XIII in 1633. Its lower Belgian portion, part of the sillon industriel, was the first industrialized area in continental Europe; the Afgedamde Maas was created in the late Middle Ages, when a major flood made a connection between the Maas and the Merwede at the town of Woudrichem. From that moment on, the current Afgedamde Maas was the main branch of the lower Meuse.
The former main branch silted up and is today called the Oude Maasje. In the late 19th century and early 20th century the connection between the Maas and Rhine was closed off and the Maas was given a new, artificial mouth - the Bergse Maas; the resulting separation of the rivers Rhine and Maas reduced the risk of flooding and is considered to be the greatest achievement in Dutch hydraulic engineering before the completion of the Zuiderzee Works and Delta Works. The former main branch was, after the dam at its southern inlet was completed in 1904, renamed Afgedamde Maas and no longer receives water from the Maas; the Meuse and its crossings were a key objective of the last major German WWII counter-offensive on the Western Front, the Battle of the Bulge in the winter of 1944/45. The Meuse is represented in the documentary; the name Meuse is derived from the French name of the river which derives from the Celtic or Proto-Celtic name *Mosā. The Dutch name Maas descends from Middle Dutch Mase, which comes from the presumed but unattested Old Dutch form *Masa, from Proto-Germanic *Masō.
Modern Dutch and German Maas and Limburgish Maos preserve this Germanic form. Despite the similarity, the Germanic name is not derived from the Celtic name, judging from the change from earlier o into a, characteristic of the Germanic languages; the Meuse rises in Pouilly-en-Bassigny, commune of Le Châtelet-sur-Meuse on the Langres plateau in France from where it flows northwards past Sedan and Charleville-Mézières into Belgium. At Namur it is joined by the Sambre. Beyond Namur the Meuse winds eastwards, skirting the Ardennes, passes Liège before turning north; the river forms part of the Belgian-Dutch border, except that at Maastricht the border lies further to the west. In the Netherlands it continues northwards through Venlo along the border to Germany turns towards the west, where it runs parallel to the Waal and forms part of the extensive Rhine–Meuse–Scheldt delta, together with the Scheldt in its south and the Rhine in the north; the river has been divided near Heusden into the Afgedamde Maas on the right and the Bergse Maas on the left.
The Bergse Maas continues under the name of Amer, part of De Biesbosch. The Afgedamde Maas joins the Waal, the main stem of the Rhine at Woudrichem, flows under the name of Boven Merwede to Hardinxveld-Giessendam, where it splits into Nieuwe Merwede and Beneden Merwede. Near Lage Zwaluwe, the Nieuwe Merwede joins the Amer, forming the Hollands Diep, which splits into Grevelingen and Haringvliet, before flowing into the North Sea; the Meuse is crossed by railway bridges between the following stations: Netherlands: Hasselt – Maastricht Weert - Roermond Blerick – Venlo Cuijk – Mook-Molenhoek Ravenstein – Wijchen's-Hertogenbosch – ZaltbommelThere are numerous road bridges and around 32 ferry crossings. The Meuse is navigable over a substantial part of its total length: In the Netherlands and Belgium, the river is part of the major inland navigation infrastructure, connecting the Rotterdam-Amsterdam-Antwerp port areas to the industrial areas upstream:'s-Hertogenbosch, Maastricht, Liège, Namur. Between Maastricht and Maasbracht, an unnavigable section of the Meuse is bypassed by the 36 km Juliana Canal.
South of Namur, further upstream, the river can only carry more modest vessels, although a barge as long as 100 m. can still reach the French border town of Givet. From Givet, the river is canalized over a distance of 272 kilometres; the canalized Meuse used to be called the "Canal de l'Est — Branche Nord" but was rebaptized into "Canal de la Meuse". The waterway can be used by the smallest barges that are still in use commercially 40 metres long and just over 5 metres wide. Just upstream of the town of Commercy, the Canal de la Meuse connects with the Marne–Rhine Canal by means of a short diversion canal; the Cretaceous sea reptile. The first fossils of it were discovered outside Maastricht in 1780. An international agreement was signed in 2002 in Ghent, Belgium about the management of the river amongst France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Belgium. Participating in the agreement were the Belgian regional governments of Flanders and Brussels. Most of the basin area is in Wallonia, followe
Asger Jorn
Asger Oluf Jorn was a Danish painter, ceramic artist, author. He was a founding member of the Situationist International, he was born in Vejrum, in the northwest corner of Jutland and baptized Asger Oluf Jørgensen. The largest collection of Asger Jorn's works—including his major work Stalingrad—can be seen in the Museum Jorn, Denmark. Asger Jorn willed his property and the works of art located inside to the Municipality of Albissola Marina, so that the italian museum called "Casa Museo Jorn" was created for displaying his works, he was the second oldest of an elder brother to Jørgen Nash. Both of his parents were teachers, his father, Lars Peter Jørgensen, a fundamentalist Christian, died in a car crash when Asger was 12 years old. His mother, Maren, née Nielsen, was more liberal but a committed Christian; this early heavy Christian influence had a negative effect on Asger who began progressively to inwardly rebel against it, more against other forms of authority. In 1929, aged 15, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis, although he made a recovery from it after spending three months on the west coast of Jutland.
By the age of 16 he was influenced by N. F. S. Grundtvig, although he had started to paint, Asger enrolled in the Vinthers Seminarium, a teacher-training college in Silkeborg where he paid particular attention to a course in 19th century Scandinavian thought. At about this time Jorn became the subject of a number of oil paintings by the painter Martin Kaalund-Jørgensen, which encouraged Jorn to try his hand in this medium; when he graduated from college in 1935, the principal wrote a reference for him which said that he had attained'an extraordinary rich personal development and maturity' – because of his wide reading in areas outside the topics required for his studies. While at college he joined the small Silkeborg branch of the Communist Party of Denmark and came under the direct influence of the syndicalist Christian Christensen, with whom he became close friends and who, Jorn was to write, was to become a second father to him. In 1936 he traveled to Paris to become a student of Kandinsky.
However, when he discovered that Kandinsky was having economic difficulties able to sell his own paintings, Jorn decided to join Fernand Léger's Académie Contemporaine. In 1937 he joined Le Corbusier in working on the Pavillon des Temps Nouveaux at the 1937 Paris Exhibition, he returned again to Denmark in the summer of 1937. He again traveled to Paris in the summer of 1938, before returning to Denmark, traveling to Løkken and Copenhagen. Asger Jorn was a good friend of the Danish art dealer Børge Birch, owner of Galerie Birch, who sold his art as early as the 1930s. On Jorn held many group exhibitions and solo exhibitions in different galleries. From 1937 to 1942, he studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen; the occupation of Denmark by Nazi Germany was a time of deep crisis for Jorn, inculcated with pacifism. The occupation sank him into deep depression, he subsequently became active in the communist resistance movement. During the war he co-founded with the architect Robert Dahlmann Olsen the underground art group, Helhesten or "hell-horse," and was a contributor to its journal.
In 1939, he wrote the key theoretical essay, "Intimate Banalities," published in Helhesten, which claimed that the future of art was kitsch and praised amateur landscape paintings as "the best art today." He was the first person to translate Franz Kafka into Danish. After the war, he complained that opportunities for critical thinking within the context of the communist arena had been curtailed by what he characterised as a centralised bourgeois political control. Finding this unacceptable, he broke with the Communist Party of Denmark, although he did not hand in his membership until the mid-1960s and remained committed philosophically to a revision of the Marxist analysis of capitalism from the point of view of the artist, he traveled again to France where he, together with Christian Dotremont and Constant, founded COBRA, edited monographs of the Bibliothèque Cobra. He returned and ill with tuberculosis, to Silkeborg in 1951 and resumed work in the ceramics field in 1953; the following year he traveled to Albissola Marina in Italy where he became involved with an offshoot of COBRA, the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus.
In 1954 he met Guy Debord, to become a close friend. The two men collaborated on two artist's books, Fin de Copenhagen and Mémoires, along with prints, forewords to each other's work, he participated in the conference that led to the merger of the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus, the Lettriste Internationale, London Psychogeographical Association to form the Situationist International in 1957. Here he applied his scientific and mathematical knowledge drawn from Henri Poincaré and Niels Bohr to develop his situlogical technique. Jorn never believed in a conception of the Situationist ideas as artistic and separated from political involvement, he was at the root and at the core of the Situationist International project sharing the revolutionary intentions with Debord. The Situationist general principles were an attack on the capitalist exploitation and degradation of the life of people, solution of alternative life experiences, construction of situations, unitary urbanism, with the union of play and criti
Germany
Germany the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central and Western Europe, lying between the Baltic and North Seas to the north, the Alps to the south. It borders Denmark to the north and the Czech Republic to the east and Switzerland to the south, France to the southwest, Luxembourg and the Netherlands to the west. Germany includes 16 constituent states, covers an area of 357,386 square kilometres, has a temperate seasonal climate. With 83 million inhabitants, it is the second most populous state of Europe after Russia, the most populous state lying in Europe, as well as the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is a decentralized country, its capital and largest metropolis is Berlin, while Frankfurt serves as its financial capital and has the country's busiest airport. Germany's largest urban area is the Ruhr, with its main centres of Essen; the country's other major cities are Hamburg, Cologne, Stuttgart, Düsseldorf, Dresden, Bremen and Nuremberg. Various Germanic tribes have inhabited the northern parts of modern Germany since classical antiquity.
A region named Germania was documented before 100 AD. During the Migration Period, the Germanic tribes expanded southward. Beginning in the 10th century, German territories formed a central part of the Holy Roman Empire. During the 16th century, northern German regions became the centre of the Protestant Reformation. After the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire, the German Confederation was formed in 1815; the German revolutions of 1848–49 resulted in the Frankfurt Parliament establishing major democratic rights. In 1871, Germany became a nation state when most of the German states unified into the Prussian-dominated German Empire. After World War I and the revolution of 1918–19, the Empire was replaced by the parliamentary Weimar Republic; the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 led to the establishment of a dictatorship, the annexation of Austria, World War II, the Holocaust. After the end of World War II in Europe and a period of Allied occupation, Austria was re-established as an independent country and two new German states were founded: West Germany, formed from the American and French occupation zones, East Germany, formed from the Soviet occupation zone.
Following the Revolutions of 1989 that ended communist rule in Central and Eastern Europe, the country was reunified on 3 October 1990. Today, the sovereign state of Germany is a federal parliamentary republic led by a chancellor, it is a great power with a strong economy. As a global leader in several industrial and technological sectors, it is both the world's third-largest exporter and importer of goods; as a developed country with a high standard of living, it upholds a social security and universal health care system, environmental protection, a tuition-free university education. The Federal Republic of Germany was a founding member of the European Economic Community in 1957 and the European Union in 1993, it is part of the Schengen Area and became a co-founder of the Eurozone in 1999. Germany is a member of the United Nations, NATO, the G7, the G20, the OECD. Known for its rich cultural history, Germany has been continuously the home of influential and successful artists, musicians, film people, entrepreneurs, scientists and inventors.
Germany has a large number of World Heritage sites and is among the top tourism destinations in the world. The English word Germany derives from the Latin Germania, which came into use after Julius Caesar adopted it for the peoples east of the Rhine; the German term Deutschland diutisciu land is derived from deutsch, descended from Old High German diutisc "popular" used to distinguish the language of the common people from Latin and its Romance descendants. This in turn descends from Proto-Germanic *þiudiskaz "popular", derived from *þeudō, descended from Proto-Indo-European *tewtéh₂- "people", from which the word Teutons originates; the discovery of the Mauer 1 mandible shows that ancient humans were present in Germany at least 600,000 years ago. The oldest complete hunting weapons found anywhere in the world were discovered in a coal mine in Schöningen between 1994 and 1998 where eight 380,000-year-old wooden javelins of 1.82 to 2.25 m length were unearthed. The Neander Valley was the location where the first non-modern human fossil was discovered.
The Neanderthal 1 fossils are known to be 40,000 years old. Evidence of modern humans dated, has been found in caves in the Swabian Jura near Ulm; the finds included 42,000-year-old bird bone and mammoth ivory flutes which are the oldest musical instruments found, the 40,000-year-old Ice Age Lion Man, the oldest uncontested figurative art discovered, the 35,000-year-old Venus of Hohle Fels, the oldest uncontested human figurative art discovered. The Nebra sky disk is a bronze artefact created during the European Bronze Age attributed to a site near Nebra, Saxony-Anhalt, it is part of UNESCO's Memory of the World Programme. The Germanic tribes are thought to date from the Pre-Roman Iron Age. From southern Scandinavia and north Germany, they expanded south and west from the 1st century BC, coming into contact with the Celtic tribes of Gaul as well
_De_graflegging_(ICN_NK2832).jpg)
.svg){kind=small}
