Germans
Deutsche

Martin Luther • Otto von Bismarck • Ludwig van Beethoven • Immanuel Kant • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Johannes Gutenberg • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart • Johann Sebastian Bach • Richard Wagner • Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Friedrich Schiller • Karl Marx • Brothers Grimm • Konrad Adenauer • Albrecht Dürer Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz • Karl Benz• Konrad Zuse • Marlene Dietrich • Max Planck Claudia Schiffer • Albert Einstein • Johannes Kepler • Friedrich Nietzsche • Gisele Bündchen Willy Brandt • Otto Hahn • Wernher von Braun • Catherine the Great • Carl Friedrich Gauss
Total population
German Diaspora ca. 150 million[1]
Regions with significant populations
Germany        75 million[2][3][4]
see below; see also Ethnic Germans.
Languages
German: High German (Upper German, Central German), Low German (see German dialects)
Religion
Roman Catholic, Protestant (chiefly Lutheran)
Related ethnic groups
Austrians, Swedes,[5] Norwegians,[5] Danes, Dutch, Icelanders, Swiss Germans, and other Germanic peoples

The Germans (Deutsche) are a Germanic ethnic group native to Central Europe. The English term Germans has referred to the German-speaking population of the Holy Roman Empire since the Late Middle Ages.^[6] Legally, Germans are citizens of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Of approximately 100 million native speakers of German in the world, about 66–75 million consider themselves Germans. There are an additional 80 million people of German ancestry mainly in the United States, Brazil, Canada, Argentina, France, Russia, Chile, Poland, Australia and Romania who most likely are not native speakers of German.^[7] Thus, the total number of Germans worldwide lies between 66 and 160 million, depending on the criteria applied (native speakers, single-ancestry ethnic Germans, partial German ancestry, etc.).

Today, peoples from countries with a German-speaking majority or significant German-speaking population groups other than Germany, such as Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Luxembourg, have developed their own national identity and usually do not refer to themselves as "Germans" in a modern context.

Name[link]

Map of the Roman Empire and Magna Germania in the early 2nd century.

The German term Deutsche originates from the Old High German word diutisc (from diot "people"), referring to the Germanic "language of the people". It is not clear how commonly, if at all, the word was used as an ethnonym in Old High German.

Used as a noun, ein diutscher in the sense of "a German" emerges in Middle High German, attested from the second half of the 12th century.^[8]

The Old French term alemans is taken from the name of the Alamanni. It was loaned into Middle English as almains in the early 14th century. The word dutch is attested in English from the 14th century, denoting continental West Germanic ("Dutch" and "German") dialects and their speakers.^[9]

While in most the Romance languages the Germans have been named from the Swabians or Alamanni (some, like standard Italian, retain an older borrowing of the endonym), the Old Norse, Finnish and Estonian names of the Germans was taken from that of the Saxons. In Slavic languages, the Germans were given the name of němьci (singular němьcь), originally with a meaning "foreigner, one who does not speak [Slavic]".

The English term Germans is only attested from the mid-16th century, based on the classical Latin term Germani used by Julius Caesar and later Tacitus. It gradually replaced Dutch and Almains, the latter becoming mostly obsolete by the early 18th century.^[10][11]

History[link]

The Germans are a Germanic people, which as an ethnicity emerged during the Middle Ages.^{[citation needed]} From the multi-ethnic Holy Roman Empire, the Peace of Westphalia (1648) left a core territory that was to become Germany.

Germanic Kingdoms in Europe c. 500 A.D

The area of modern-day Germany in the European Iron Age was divided into the (Celtic) La Tène horizon in Southern Germany and the (Germanic) Jastorf culture in Northern Germany.

The Germanic peoples during the Migrations Period came into contact with other peoples; in the case of the populations settling in the territory of modern Germany, they encountered Celts to the south, and Balts and Slavs towards the east.

The Limes Germanicus was breached in AD 260. Migrating Germanic tribes commingled with the local Gallo-Roman populations in what is now Swabia and Bavaria. The migration-period peoples who would coalesce into a "German" ethnicity were the Saxons, Franci, Thuringii, Alamanni and Bavarii. By the 800s, the territory of modern Germany had been united under the rule of Charlemagne. Much of what is now Eastern Germany became Slavonic-speaking (Sorbs and Veleti), after these areas were vacated by Germanic tribes (Vandals, Lombards, Burgundians and Suebi amongst others) which had migrated into the former areas of the Roman Empire.

Medieval period[link]

The Holy Roman Empire around AD 1000. The sphere of German influence (Regnum Teutonicorum) is marked in blue.

A German ethnicity emerged in the course of the Middle Ages, ultimately as a result of the formation of the kingdom of Germany within East Francia and later the Holy Roman Empire, beginning in the 9th century. The process was gradual and lacked any clear definition, and the use of exonyms designating "the Germans" develops only during the High Middle Ages. The title of rex teutonicum "King of the Germans" is first used in the late 11th century, by the chancery of Pope Gregory VII. Natively, the term ein diutscher "a German" is used of the people of Germany from the 12th century.

After Christianization, the Roman Catholic Church and local rulers led German expansion and settlement in areas inhabited by Slavs and Balts (Ostsiedlung). Massive German settlement led to their assimilation of Baltic (Old Prussians) and Slavic (Wends) populations, who were exhausted by previous warfare. At the same time, naval innovations led to a German domination of trade in the Baltic Sea and parts of Eastern Europe through the Hanseatic League. Along the trade routes, Hanseatic trade stations became centers of German culture. German town law (Stadtrecht) was promoted by the presence of large, relatively wealthy German populations and their influence on political power. Thus people who would be considered "Germans", with a common culture, language, and worldview different from that of the surrounding rural peoples, colonized trading towns as far north of present-day Germany as Bergen (in Norway), Stockholm (in Sweden), and Vyborg (now in Russia). The Hanseatic League was not exclusively German in any ethnic sense: many towns who joined the league were outside the Holy Roman Empire and a number of them may only loosely be characterized as German. The Empire was not entirely German either.

Early Modern period[link]

The Holy Roman Empire after the Peace of Westphalia, 1648

From the late 15th century, the Holy Roman Empire came to be known as the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation, even though it was not exclusively German, and notably included sizeable Slavic minorities. The Thirty Years' War, a series of conflicts fought mainly in the territory of modern Germany, weakened the coherence of the Holy Roman Empire, leading to the Kleinstaaterei in 18th-century Germany.

The Napoleonic Wars were the cause of the final dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire, and ultimately the cause for the quest for a German nation state in 19th-century German nationalism. After the Congress of Vienna, Austria and Prussia emerged as two competitors. Austria, trying to remain the dominant power in Central Europe, led the way in the terms of the Congress of Vienna. The Congress of Vienna was essentially conservative, assuring that little would change in Europe and preventing Germany from uniting.^{[citation needed]} These terms came to a sudden halt following the Revolutions of 1848 and the Crimean War in 1856, paving the way for German unification in the 1860s.

18 January 1871: The proclamation of the German Empire in the Hall of Mirrors of the Palace of Versailles. Bismarck appears in white. The Grand Duke of Baden stands beside Wilhelm, leading the cheers. Crown Prince Friedrich, later Friedrich III, stands on his father's right.

In 1866, the feud between Austria and Prussia finally came to an end. There were a few reasons behind this war. As German nationalism grew strongly inside of the German Confederation and neither of them could decide on how Germany was going to be unified into a nation-state, the Austrians were favouring the Greater Germany unification but were not willing to give up any of the German-speaking land inside of the Austrian Empire and take second place to Prussia, the Prussians on the other hand wanted to unify Germany as Little Germany primarily by the Kingdom of Prussia whilst excluding Austria. In the final battle of the German war (Battle of Königgrätz) the Prussians successfully defeated the Austrians and succeeded in creating the North German Confederation.^[12]

In 1870, after France attacked Prussia, Prussia and its new allies in Southern Germany (among them Bavaria) were victorious in the Franco-Prussian War. It created the German Empire in 1871 as a German nation-state, effectively excluding the multi-ethnic Austrian Habsburg monarchy and Liechtenstein. Integrating the Austrians nevertheless remained a strong desire for many people of Germany and Austria, especially among the liberals, the social democrats and also the Catholics who were a minority in Germany.

During the 19th century in the German territories, rapid population growth due to lower death rates, combined with poverty, spurred millions of Germans to emigrate, chiefly to the United States. Today, roughly 17% of the United States' population (23% of the white population) is of mainly German ancestry.^[13]

Twentieth century[link]

The German Empire of 1871–1918. By excluding the German-speaking part of the multinational Austrian Empire, this geographic construction represented a little Germany solution.

The dissolution of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire after World War I led to a strong desire of the population of the new Republic of German Austria to be integrated into Germany or Switzerland.^[14] This was, however, prevented by the Treaty of Versailles.

The Nazis, led by Adolf Hitler, attempted to unite all the people they claimed were "Germans" (Volksdeutsche) into one realm, including ethnic Germans in eastern Europe,^[15] many of whom had emigrated more than one hundred fifty years before and developed separate cultures in their new lands. This idea was initially welcomed by many ethnic Germans in Sudetenland, Austria,^{[citation needed]} Poland, Danzig and western Lithuania. The Swiss resisted the idea. They had viewed themselves as a distinctly separate nation since the Peace of Westphalia of 1648.

After World War II, eastern European nations, including areas annexed by the Soviet Union and Poland, expelled ethnic Germans from their territories, including Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia. 14 million ethnic German refugees fled to western Germany and Europe, the United States, Canada, and South America.

After WWII, Austrians increasingly saw themselves as a separate nation from the German nation. Recent polls show that no more than 6% of the German-speaking Austrians consider themselves as "Germans".^[16] An Austrian identity was vastly emphasized along with the "first-victim of Nazism theory."^[17] Today over 80 percent of the Austrians see themselves as an independent nation.^[18]

1945 to present[link]

The former President of Germany Christian Wulff and his wife.

Between 1950 and 1987, about 1.4 million ethnic Germans and their dependants, mostly from Poland and Romania, arrived in Germany under special provisions of right of return. With the collapse of the Iron Curtain since 1987, 3 million "Aussiedler" – ethnic Germans, mainly from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union – took advantage of Germany's law of return to leave the "land of their birth" for Germany.^[19]

Approximately 2 million, just from the territories of the former Soviet Union, have resettled in Germany since the late 1980s.^[20] On the other hand, significant numbers of ethnic Germans have moved from Germany to other European countries, especially Switzerland, the Netherlands, Britain, Spain and Portugal.

Since 1990 Germany has become home to Europe's third-largest Jewish population. In 2004, twice as many Jews from former Soviet republics settled in Germany as in Israel, bringing the total inflow to more than 200,000 since 1991. Some Jews from the former Soviet Union are of mixed heritage.

In its State of World Population 2006 report, the United Nations Population Fund lists Germany with hosting the third-highest percentage of the main international migrants worldwide, about 5% or 10 million of all 191 million migrants.^[21]

Ethnicity[link]

A depiction of a Germanic family, ca. 300 AD. Illustration from Costumes of All Nations (1913).

German-Argentines at Multitud Crespo.

The German ethnic identity is complex, and has been described as forming a continuum of "Germanness" defined by factors such as language, appearance, family background, country of residence and country of origin.^[22]

The German ethnicity is linked to the Germanic tribes of antiquity in central Europe.^[23] The early Germans originated on the North German Plain as well as southern Scandinavia.^[24] By the 2nd century BC, the number of Germans was significantly increasing and they began expanding into eastern Europe and southward into Celtic territory.^[25] During antiquity these Germanic tribes remained separate from each other and did not have writing systems at this time.^[26] By 55 BC, the Germans had reached the Danube river and had either assimilated or otherwise driven out the Celts who had lived there, and had spread west into what is now Belgium and France.^[27]

Conflict between the Germanic tribes and the forces of Rome under Julius Caesar forced Germanic tribes to retreat to the east bank of the Rhine.^[28] Roman emperor Augustus in 12 BC ordered the conquest of the Germans, but the catastrophic Roman defeat at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest resulted in the Roman Empire abandoning its plans to completely conquer Germany.^[29] Germanic peoples in Roman territory were culturally Romanized, and although much of Germany remained free of direct Roman rule, Rome deeply influenced the development of German society, especially the adoption of Christianity by the Germans who obtained it from the Romans.^[30] The adoption of Christianity would later become a major influence in the development of a common German identity.^[31] The first major public figure to speak of a German people in general, was the Roman figure Tacitus in his work Germania around 100 AD.^[32] However an actual united German identity and ethnicity did not exist then, and it would take centuries of development of German culture until the concept of a German ethnicity began to become a popular identity.^[33]