Germany: Home of the Reformation and the testing ground for whether the church would acknowledge another lord beside Christ—yet most of its churches now stand empty. Keys to the culture: Vergangenheitsbewältigung · Ordnung · Gemütlichkeit · Feierabend. Geography and history, the church, films and books, and prayer for this land.
Home of the Reformation and the testing ground for whether the church would acknowledge another lord beside Christ—yet most of its churches now stand empty.
Germany covers about 358,000 square kilometres and has roughly 84 million people. It is the European Union's most populous country.
The first key to Germany is its position: it lies at Europe's centre, with nine land neighbours, among the highest totals in Europe, and no great natural barrier on any side. This explains two sides of German history. The land was long both battlefield and thoroughfare; and where geography offers no defensive wall, institutions become the defence. This is one starting point for German seriousness about rules, process, and accuracy. See Ordnung under Cultural Keys. It also explains why the European Union is more than an optional policy for Germany: living well with nine neighbours is a geographical necessity, not a diplomatic preference.
The landscape has three broad bands from north to south: the low North German Plain on the North and Baltic seas, the hills and uplands of central Germany, and the Bavarian plateau and Alpine foothills in the south. The Rhine is an artery flowing from Switzerland to the North Sea; two thousand years ago it marked Rome's frontier.
The climate shifts from temperate maritime to continental. Winters are not exceptionally cold but long, wet, and grey; from November to February, weeks can pass without sunshine. This connects directly to Germany's indoor culture, candles, and Gemütlichkeit: a place with a long winter takes the making of an interior seriously.
One more fact is easy to miss: more than 25% of Germany's residents now have an immigrant background. People of Turkish heritage form the largest group, first invited after the war as Gastarbeiter, “guest workers,” who stayed and raised families. The lived meaning of “German” has changed greatly from many outsiders' image of the word.
Rome treated the Rhine and Danube as frontiers and never fully conquered Germania east of them. The Middle Ages brought Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire, but the crucial fact is that Germany was not one country for centuries. It consisted of hundreds of principalities, prince-bishoprics, and free cities, and unification came only in 1871. Gutenberg developed movable-type printing in Mainz in the 1450s. That invention made the later Reformation possible: without print, propositions posted on one church door could not have spread through German lands within weeks.
Luther posted the Ninety-Five Theses at Wittenberg in 1517. The Peace of Augsburg in 1555 adopted the principle that the ruler's religion would be the territory's religion, placing confessional choice in the ruler's hands. Yet the Thirty Years' War of 1618–48 still followed. German lands lost perhaps one-third of their population in Europe's most devastating religious conflict. Its lesson was the cost of using force to settle doctrine: an entire generation.
Prussia rose in the eighteenth century. The Holy Roman Empire ended in 1806, and Bismarck completed unification in 1871. The imperial proclamation took place at Versailles, a detail that echoed forty-eight years later, when the Treaty of Versailles was signed in the same palace. Defeat in the First World War and that treaty were followed by the Weimar Republic: hyperinflation and street politics, but also a golden decade of film, Bauhaus design, and science. Hitler came to power in 1933.
The Nazi period must be stated plainly. Racial laws stripped Jewish people of citizenship, and Nazi Germany then systematically murdered about six million Jews and millions of Roma, disabled people, political prisoners, prisoners of war, and others deemed unworthy of life. Its wars of aggression killed tens of millions. This was among history's most systematised state crimes. It was carried out not simply by mobs, but through the procedures of civil servants, railway schedulers, doctors, lawyers, and neighbours.
Defeat in 1945 divided Germany. Two German states emerged in 1949; the Berlin Wall rose in 1961, fell in 1989, and reunification came in 1990. The most important postwar task was not physical rebuilding but Vergangenheitsbewältigung—the work of confronting and assuming responsibility for the past. It did not happen automatically. The 1950s and 1960s were marked by long silence. Only when a younger generation pressed its parents to speak did today's textbooks, memorials, school visits to camp sites, and laws take shape. German has a word for the work of a people facing the crimes it committed.
Germany is now Europe's largest economy and faces an ageing population and labour shortages. It received about one million refugees in 2015, and the resulting social tensions remain politically alive. History leaves a question: how can a country that institutionalised remembrance continue truly to remember when those who lived through the events are gone?
Roman cities along the Rhine—Trier, Cologne, and Mainz—had bishops by the fourth century. The church on German soil is therefore fifteen centuries older than the German state. Boniface evangelised inland Germanic peoples in the eighth century; his felling of Thor's oak is his best-known act. Medieval monasteries carried literacy, brewing, and agricultural skills, while the imperial church and emperors fought for two centuries over the appointment of bishops.
In 1517, a biblical lecturer at Wittenberg proposed debate on indulgences through Ninety-Five Theses. At the Diet of Worms in 1521 he faced the emperor and spoke the words later remembered as “Here I stand.” Hidden at Wartburg Castle, he translated the New Testament into German in eleven weeks. The result reached beyond the church: it helped create both a standard literary German and a people able to read Scripture for themselves.
One of Luther's most criticised judgments must also be recorded. During the Peasants' War of 1524–25, peasants appealed to his arguments in demanding relief from feudal burdens; Luther wrote urging princes to suppress them. Tens of thousands were killed. The event remains on the Reformation's account.
The territorial confessional settlement of 1555 was followed by the Thirty Years' War. From its ruins grew Pietism, associated with Spener and Francke at Halle, emphasising personal conversion, small groups, Scripture, and practical works of mercy. Its effect on world mission was immense. The Halle mission sent Ziegenbalg to India. See the India page. Zinzendorf's Moravian community left Herrnhut and became one of the eighteenth century's most active mission movements. A community of only a few hundred sent more missionaries than the rest of European Protestantism combined at the time.
Nineteenth-century Germany became a centre of liberal theology and historical criticism at Tübingen and Berlin, and also a golden age of biblical philology and archaeology. Much theology read across the global church, in both constructive and critical forms, came from Germany.
The church's division under Nazism is this chapter's centre. The “German Christians,” Deutsche Christen, embraced the regime. They sought to exclude Christians of Jewish ancestry and rebuild the church on racial principles. In 1934 the Confessing Church issued the Barmen Declaration, proclaiming Jesus Christ as the one Word of God and rejecting other events, powers, figures, and truths as sources of the church's proclamation. Everyone present understood what that meant in Germany then. Bonhoeffer and Niemöller belonged to this movement.
Honesty requires more: the Confessing Church was a minority. Most German Protestants followed the current, and even the Confessing Church's protest against persecution of Jews was far too weak. Niemöller admitted this after the war. The Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt of October 1945 became a public confession by Protestant leaders. Every church should read its admission that they had not confessed more courageously, prayed more faithfully, believed more joyfully, or loved more ardently.
The church today: Germany has a church tax. The state collects money from registered members and transfers it to their churches, leaving the institutions very wealthy. Yet leaving church is an administrative procedure completed at the municipal office, and hundreds of thousands do so each year. Protestant and Catholic membership combined has fallen below 50% of the population; weekly attendance is in the single digits. Church buildings have become a maintenance burden, and some are now libraries, housing, or climbing centres. Independent investigations of sexual abuse in several Catholic dioceses have prompted a large wave of departures.
Germany's church gave the world the Reformation, the German Bible, Pietism's missionary energy, and a declaration written in its darkest hour. It also gave a warning: when the true test comes, only a minority may stand within a wealthy, organised, respected church. The Barmen Declaration deserves reading not because it is old, but because its question—whether the church will acknowledge another lord beside Christ—has never become obsolete.