Germany : History Profile

Germany. History Profile. Germany is bounded at its extreme north on the Jutland peninsula by Denmark.

East and west of the peninsula, the Baltic Sea (Ostsee) and North Sea coasts, respectively, complete the northern border.

To the west, Germany borders The Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg; to the southwest it borders France.

Germany shares its entire southern boundary with Switzerland and Austria.

In the southeast the border with the Czech Republic corresponds to an earlier boundary of 1918, renewed by treaty in 1945.

The easternmost frontier adjoins Poland along the northward course of the Neisse River and subsequently the Oder to the Baltic Sea, with a westward deviation in the north to exclude the former German port city of Stettin (now Szczecin, Poland) and the Oder mouth.

This border reflects the loss of Germany's eastern territories to Poland, agreed to at the Yalta Conference (February 1945), mandated at the Potsdam Conference (July-August 1945) held among the victorious World War II Allies, and reaffirmed by subsequent governments.

The major lineaments of Germany's physical geography are not unique.

The country spans the great east-west morphological zones that are characteristic of the western part of central Europe.

In the south Germany impinges on the outermost ranges of the Alps.

From there it extends across the Alpine Foreland (Alpenvorland), the plain on the northern edge of the Alps.

Forming the core of the country is the large zone of the Central German Uplands, which is part of a wider European arc of territory stretching from the Massif Central of France in the west into the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Poland in the east.

In Germany it manifests itself as a landscape with a complex mixture of forested block mountains, intermediate plateaus with scarped edges, and lowland basins.

In the northern part of the country the North German Plain, or Lowland, forms part of the greater North European Plain, which broadens from the Low Countries eastward across Germany and Poland into Belarus, the Baltic states, and Russia and extends northward through Schleswig-Holstein into the Jutland peninsula of Denmark.

The North German Plain is fringed by marshes, mudflats, and the islands of the North and Baltic seas.

In general, Germany has a south-to-north drop in altitude, from a maximum elevation of 9,718 feet (2,962 metres) in the Zugspitze of the Bavarian Alps to a few small areas slightly below sea level in the north near the coast.