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
Baden-Württemberg
Baden-Württemberg is a state in southwest Germany, east of the Rhine, which forms the border with France. It is Germany's third-largest state, with an area of 11 million inhabitants. Baden-Württemberg is a parliamentary republic and sovereign, federated state, formed in 1952 by a merger of the states of Württemberg-Baden, Baden and Württemberg-Hohenzollern; the largest city in Baden-Württemberg is the state capital of Stuttgart, followed by Karlsruhe and Mannheim. Other cities are Freiburg im Breisgau, Heilbronn, Pforzheim and Ulm; the sobriquet Ländle is sometimes used as a synonym for Baden-Württemberg. Baden-Württemberg is formed from the historical territories of Baden, Prussian Hohenzollern, Württemberg, parts of Swabia. In 100 AD, the Roman Empire invaded and occupied Württemberg, constructing a limes along its northern borders. Over the course of the third century AD, the Alemanni forced the Romans to retreat west beyond the Rhine and Danube rivers. In 496 AD the Alemanni were defeated by a Frankish invasion led by Clovis I.
The Holy Roman Empire was established. The majority of people in this region continued to be Roman Catholics after the Protestant Reformation influenced populations in northern Germany. In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, numerous people emigrated from this rural area to the United States for economic reasons. After World War II, the Allies established three federal states in the territory of modern-day Baden-Württemberg: Württemberg-Hohenzollern, Württemberg-Baden. Baden and Württemberg-Hohenzollern were occupied by France, while Württemberg-Baden was occupied by the United States. In 1949, each state became a founding member of the Federal Republic of Germany, with Article 118 of the German constitution providing an accession procedure. On 16 December 1951, Württemberg-Baden, Württemberg-Hohenzollern and Baden voted via referendum in favor of a joint merger. Baden-Württemberg became a state in West Germany on 25 April 1952. Baden-Württemberg shares borders with the German states of Rhineland Palatinate and Bavaria, Switzerland.
Most of the major cities of Baden-Württemberg straddle the banks of the Neckar River, which runs downstream through the state past Tübingen, Heilbronn and Mannheim. The Rhine forms the western border as well as large portions of the southern border; the Black Forest, the main mountain range of the state, rises east of the Upper Rhine valley. The high plateau of the Swabian Alb, between the Neckar, the Black Forest, the Danube, is an important European watershed. Baden-Württemberg shares Lake Constance with Switzerland and Bavaria, the international borders within its waters not being defined, it shares the foothills of the Alps with Bavaria and the Austrian Vorarlberg, but Baden-Württemberg does not border Austria over land. The Danube River has its source in Baden-Württemberg near the town of Donaueschingen, in a place called Furtwangen in the Black Forest. Baden-Württemberg is divided into thirty-five districts and nine independent cities, both grouped into the four Administrative Districts of Freiburg, Stuttgart, Tübingen.
Map Baden-Württemberg contains nine additional independent cities not belonging to any district: The state parliament of Baden-Württemberg is the Landtag. The politics of Baden-Württemberg have traditionally been dominated by the conservative Christian Democratic Union of Germany, who until 2011 had led all but one government since the establishment of the state in 1952. In the Landtag elections held on 27 March 2011 voters replaced the Christian Democrats and centre-right Free Democrats coalition by a Greens-led alliance with the Social Democrats which secured a four-seat majority in the state parliament. From 1992 to 2001, the Republicans party held seats in the Landtag; the Baden-Württemberg General Auditing Office acts as an independent body to monitor the correct use of public funds by public offices. Although Baden-Württemberg has few natural resources compared to other regions of Germany, the state is among the most prosperous and wealthiest regions in Europe with a low unemployment rate historically.
A number of well-known enterprises are headquartered in the state, for example Daimler AG, Robert Bosch GmbH, Carl Zeiss AG, SAP SE and Heidelberger Druckmaschinen. In spite of this, Baden-Württemberg's economy is dominated by medium-sized enterprises. Although poor in workable natural resources and still rural in many areas, the region is industrialised. In 2003, there were 8,800 manufacturing enterprises with more than 20 employees, but only 384 with more than 500; the latter category accounts for 43% of the 1.2 million persons employed in industry. The Mittelstand or mid-sized company is the backbone of the Baden-Württemberg economy. Medium-sized businesses and a tradition of branching out into different industrial sectors have ensured specialization over a wide range. A fifth of the "old" Federal Republic's industrial gross value added is generated by Baden-Württemberg. Turnover for manufacturing in 2003 e
Rietheim-Weilheim
Rietheim-Weilheim is a town in the district of Tuttlingen in Baden-Württemberg in Germany
Black Forest
The Black Forest is a large forested mountain range in the state of Baden-Württemberg in southwest Germany. It is bounded by the Rhine valley to the south, its highest peak is the Feldberg with an elevation of 1,493 metres. The region is oblong in shape with a length of 160 km and breadth of up to 50 km; the Black Forest stretches from the High Rhine in the south to the Kraichgau in the north. In the west it is bounded by the Upper Rhine Plain; the Black Forest is the highest part of the South German Scarplands and much of it is densely wooded, a fragment of the Hercynian Forest of Antiquity. It lies upon rocks of the crystalline basement and Bunter Sandstone, its natural boundary with the surrounding landscapes is formed by the emergence of muschelkalk, absent from the Black Forest bedrock. Thanks to the fertility of the soil, dependent on the underlying rock, this line is both a vegetation boundary as well as the border between the Altsiedelland and the Black Forest, not permanently settled until the High Middle Ages.
From north to south the Black Forest extends for over 160 km, attaining a width of up to 50 kilometres in the south, up to 30 kilometres in the north. Tectonically the range forms a lifted fault block, which rises prominently in the west from the Upper Rhine Plain, whilst seen from the east it has the appearance of a forested plateau; the natural regions of the Black Forest are separated by various features: Geomorphologically, the main division is between the gentle eastern slopes with their rounded hills and broad plateaux and the incised, steeply falling terrain in the west that drops into the Upper Rhine Graben. It is here, in the west, where the highest mountains and the greatest local differences in height are found; the valleys are narrow and ravine-like. The summits are rounded and there are the remnants of plateaux and arête-like landforms. Geologically the clearest division is between east and west. Large areas of the eastern Black Forest, the lowest layer of the South German Scarplands composed of Bunter Sandstone, are covered by endless coniferous forest with their island clearings.
The exposed basement in the west, predominantly made up of metamorphic rocks and granites, despite its rugged topography, easier to settle and appears much more open and inviting today with its varied meadow valleys. The most common way of dividing the regions of the Black Forest is, from north to south; until the 1930s, the Black Forest was divided into the Northern and Southern Black Forest, the boundary being the line of the Kinzig valley. The Black Forest was divided into the forested Northern Black Forest, the lower, central section, predominantly used for agriculture in the valleys, was the Central Black Forest and the much higher Southern Black Forest with its distinctive highland economy and ice age glacial relief; the term High Black Forest referred to the highest areas of the South and southern Central Black Forest. The boundaries drawn were, quite varied. In 1931, Robert Gradmann called the Central Black Forest the catchment area of the Kinzig and in the west the section up to the lower Elz and Kinzig tributary of the Gutach.
A pragmatic division, oriented not just on natural and cultural regions, uses the most important transverse valleys. Based on that, the Central Black Forest is bounded by the Kinzig in the north and the line from Dreisam to Gutach in the south, corresponding to the Bonndorf Graben zone and the course of the present day B 31. In 1959, Rudolf Metz combined the earlier divisions and proposed a modified tripartite division himself, which combined natural and cultural regional approaches and was used, his Central Black Forest is bounded in the north by the watershed between the Acher and Rench and subsequently between the Murg and Kinzig or Forbach and Kinzig, in the south by the Bonndorf Graben zone, which restricts the Black Forest in the east as does the Freudenstadt Graben further north by its transition into the Northern Black Forest. The Handbook of the Natural Region Divisions of Germany published by the Federal Office of Regional Geography since the early 1950s names the Black Forest as one of six tertiary level major landscape regions within the secondary level region of the South German Scarplands and, at the same time, one of nine new major landscape unit groups.
It is divided into six so-called major units. This division was refined and modified in several, successor publications up to 1967, each covering individual sections of the map; the mountain range was divided into three regions. The northern boundary of the Central Black Forest in this classification runs south of the Rench Valley and the Kniebis to near Freudenstadt, its southern boundary varied with each edition. In 1998 the Baden-Württemberg State Department for Environmental Protection published a reworked Natural Region Division of Baden-Württemberg, it is restricted to the level of the natural regional major units and has been used since for the state's administration of nature conservation: The Black Forest Foothills (Schwarzwald-Rand
Bärenthal
Bärenthal is a small municipality in the valley of river Bära, West Swabian Alb, district of Tuttlingen in Baden-Württemberg in Germany
Reichenbach am Heuberg
Reichenbach is a town in the district of Tuttlingen in Baden-Württemberg in Germany. Reichenbach lies on a high plateau in the south of the Swabian Jura; the Lower Bära river flows through the town. Additionally a small tributary, called the Reichenbach or Talbach, runs through the town and empties into the Bära. Reichenbach is bounded on the north by Obernheim, on the east by Nusplingen, both in the Zollernalbkreis. On the southeast it borders on Egesheim, in the southwest on Bubsheim, on the northwest on Wehingen; the community of Reichenbach consists of the village of Reichenbach am Heuberg and the hamlet of Holzwiesen. Reichenbach first appears in written records in the year 793; the village belonged to the County of Hohenberg. In the year 1391 it became part of Further Austria, where it remained until it became part of Württemberg. Between 1928 and 1966 Reichenbach was a terminus of the Heuberg Railroad. At one time a farming village it has now become an residential community. Reichenbach is affiliated with the tourist association "Donaubergland".
The rococo Catholic parish church of St. Nikolaus is home to a little known organ of the master organ builder Hieronymus Spiegel
Zollernalbkreis
The Zollernalbkreis is a Landkreis in the middle of Baden-Württemberg, Germany. The district is located in the Swabian Alb, contains the second highest elevation of this range, the 1,011-metre high Oberhohenberg. In the south-east the district nearly reaches to the river Danube; the district was created on January 1, 1973, when the two previous districts Balingen and Hechingen were merged. Neighboring districts are Tübingen, Sigmaringen, Tuttlingen and Freudenstadt; the coat of arms show the black-and-white checkered symbol of the Hohenzollern in the left half, the triple black deer antler on yellow ground as the symbol of Württemberg. All of the district's area belonged to these two states historically. In the area of Zollernalbkreis, Swabian German and Pleißne were spoken. Romani was spoken; the Pleißne was spoken by hawkers selling items such as baskets and whips, belongs to Rotwelsch. It was used as a code. Official website
Battaglia Terme, Italy
Bex, Switzerland
Draguignan, France
Waidhofen an der Ybbs, Austria
Salford, United Kingdom (1960's Pendleton High School)
Works related to Tuttlingen at Wikisource
(in German)
