The prince-electors, pl. Kurfürsten, Czech: Kurfiřt, Latin: Princeps Elector) were the members of the electoral college that elected the ruler of the Holy Roman Empire.
A Regierungsbezirk means "governmental district" and is a type of administrative division in Germany. Currently, four of sixteen Bundesländer are split into Regierungsbezirke. Beneath these are rural and urban districts.
The Protestant Church in Germany, formerly known in English as the Evangelical Church in Germany, is a federation of twenty Lutheran, Reformed, and United Protestant regional Churches in Germany, collectively encompassing the vast majority of the country's Protestants. In 2022, the EKD had a membership of 19,153,000 members, or 22.7% of the German population. It constitutes one of the largest Protestant bodies in the world. Church offices managing the federation are located in Herrenhausen, Hanover, Lower Saxony. Many of its members consider themselves Lutherans.
The Federal Republic of Germany, as a federal state, consists of sixteen states. Berlin, Hamburg and Bremen are called Stadtstaaten ("city-states"), while the other thirteen states are called Flächenländer and include Bavaria, Saxony, and Thuringia, which describe themselves as Freistaaten.
The Kingdom of Prussia constituted the German state of Prussia between 1701 and 1918. It was the driving force behind the unification of Germany in 1866 and was the leading state of the German Empire until its dissolution in 1918. Although it took its name from the region called Prussia, it was based in the Margraviate of Brandenburg. Its capital was Berlin.
Prussia was a German state located on most of the North European Plain, also occupying southern and eastern regions. It formed the German Empire when it united the German states in 1871. It was de facto dissolved by an emergency decree transferring powers of the Prussian government to German Chancellor Franz von Papen in 1932 and de jure by an Allied decree in 1947. For centuries, the House of Hohenzollern ruled Prussia, expanding its size with the Prussian Army. Prussia, with its capital at Königsberg and then, when it became the Kingdom of Prussia in 1701, Berlin, decisively shaped the history of Germany.
The Province of Saxony, also known as Prussian Saxony, was a province of the Kingdom of Prussia and later the Free State of Prussia from 1816 until 1944. Its capital was Magdeburg.
A Landtag is generally the legislative assembly or parliament of a federated state or other subnational self-governing entity in German-speaking nations. It is usually a unicameral assembly exercising legislative competence in non-federal matters.
The Provinces of Prussia were the main administrative divisions of Prussia from 1815 to 1946. Prussia's province system was introduced in the Stein-Hardenberg Reforms in 1815, and were mostly organized from duchies and historical regions. Provinces were divided into several Regierungsbezirke, sub-divided into Kreise (districts), and then into Gemeinden (townships) at the lowest level. Provinces constituted the highest level of administration in the Kingdom of Prussia and Free State of Prussia until 1933, when Nazi Germany established de facto direct rule over provincial politics, and were formally abolished in 1946 following World War II. The Prussian provinces became the basis for many federal states of Germany, and the states of Brandenburg, Lower Saxony, and Schleswig-Holstein are direct successors of provinces.
Municipalities are the lowest level of official territorial division in Germany. This can be the second, third, fourth or fifth level of territorial division, depending on the status of the municipality and the Land it is part of. The city-states Berlin and Hamburg are second-level divisions. A Gemeinde is one level lower in those states which also include Regierungsbezirke as an intermediate territorial division. The Gemeinde is one level higher if it is not part of a Gemeindeverband.
The entirety of Germany was occupied and administered by the Allies of World War II from the Berlin Declaration on 5 June 1945 to the establishment of West Germany on 23 May 1949. Unlike occupied Japan, Germany was stripped of its sovereignty and former state: after Nazi Germany surrendered on 8 May 1945, four countries representing the Allies asserted joint authority and sovereignty through the Allied Control Council (ACC). At first, Allied-occupied Germany was defined as all territories of Germany before the 1938 Nazi annexation of Austria; the Potsdam Agreement on 2 August 1945 defined the new eastern German border by giving Poland and the Soviet Union all regions of Germany east of the Oder–Neisse line and divided the remaining "Germany as a whole" into four occupation zones, each administered by one of the Allies.
The bilateral relations between Germany and the United Kingdom span hundreds of years, and the countries have been aligned since the end of World War II.
The Free State of Prussia was one of the constituent states of Germany from 1918 to 1947. The successor to the Kingdom of Prussia after the defeat of the German Empire in World War I, it continued to be the dominant state in Germany during the Weimar Republic, as it had been during the empire, even though most of Germany's post-war territorial losses in Europe had come from its lands. It was home to the federal capital Berlin and had 62% of Germany's territory and 61% of its population. Prussia changed from the authoritarian state it had been in the past and became a parliamentary democracy under its 1920 constitution. During the Weimar period it was governed almost entirely by pro-democratic parties and proved more politically stable than the Republic itself. With only brief interruptions, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) provided the Minister President. Its Ministers of the Interior, also from the SPD, pushed republican reform of the administration and police, with the result that Prussia was considered a bulwark of democracy within the Weimar Republic.
The People's State of Hesse was one of the constituent states of Germany from 1918 to 1945, as the successor to the Grand Duchy of Hesse after the defeat of the German Empire in World War I, on the territory of the current German states of Hesse and the Rhineland-Palatinate. The State was established after Grand Duke Ernest Louis was deposed on 9 November 1918. The term "People's State" referred to the fact that the new state was a Republic and was used in the same manner as the term Free State, which was employed by most of the other German States in this period.
This is a list of coats of arms of Germany.
The Alliance of Germans, Party for Unity, Peace and Freedom was a political party in the Federal Republic of Germany.
From the 1680s to 1789, Germany comprised many small territories which were parts of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. Prussia finally emerged as dominant. Meanwhile, the states developed a classical culture that found its greatest expression in the Enlightenment, with world class leaders such as philosophers Leibniz and Kant, writers such as Goethe and Schiller, and musicians Bach and Beethoven.
The Länderpokal is the oldest cup competition of the German Football Association. It came into existence as the Kronprinzenpokal but has changed its name various times since. The cup is held annually at the Sportschule Duisburg-Wedau. Contestants in the cup are teams of the 21 regional football associations, composed of youth players from that area. Also guest teams are invited each year since 2005, which play in the competition but will not be awarded a place in the final standings.
Concordats between the Holy See and individual German states were concluded both before and after the unification of Germany in the 1870s. Early examples include:
In the London Protocol signed on 12 September 1944, the Allies of World War II agreed on dividing Germany into three occupation zones after the war.
