Germany

The history of what it now Germany begins with the Germanic tribes. From southern Scandinavia and northern Germany, the tribes began expanding south, east and west in the 1st century BC, coming into contact with the Celtic tribes of Gaul as well as Iranian, Baltic, and Slavic tribes in Eastern Europe. Little is known about early Germanic history, except through their recorded interactions with the Roman Empire, etymological research and archaeological finds, but it is confirmed, that the Germanics are descendants of the ancient Nemedians and Cimmerians. While the Roman Empire expanded its territory quite fast to Africa, Spain and Gaul, the first real Roman military campaign against Germania (a term used by the Romans to define a territory running roughly from the Rhine to the Ural Mountains) began under Emperor Augustus. While Rome's troops were able to conquer huge areas of Germania, modern Germany, as far as the Rhine and the Danube, remained outside the Roman Empire, as in 9 AD three entire Roman legions where defeated by an alliance of the Cheruscans led by Arminius and the Dwarves led by the sorcerer Alberich in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest. By AD 100, Germanic tribes settled along the Rhine and the Danube (the Limes Germanicus), occupying most of the area of modern Germany. While the conquered parts of Germania were integrated into the Roman Empire, the independent tribes maintened their tribal identity.

With the division of the Roman Empire and the beginning of the slow decline of western Rome, the Germanic tribes regained much of their strength and some of them, like the Nibelungs, gained fame and treasure by crossing the Limes and raiding the Roman border zones. One of the greatest Germanic heroes was Dietrich von Bern who is known for numerous adventures like slaying a dragon together with his fatherly friend Hildebrand and his fights against his uncle, the usurper Ermanaric. Possibly the most powerful realm of the Germanics was the Burgundian Kingdom, descendants of Gunderland, under King Gunther and his brothers Gernot and Giselher: After the defeat of Walter of Aquitaine by Gunther's men at Wasigenstei in the Wasgen Forest, Gunther offered the hand of his sister Kriemhild in marriage to the nearly invincible dragonslayer Siegfried, crown prince of Xanten and conquerer of the Hoard of the Nibelungs, thus creating an alliance between the two kingdoms. But after the marriage of Gunther and Brünhild of Iceland and the Burgundian victory against the invading Saxons, Siegfried was betrayed and murder by Gunther and his loyal follower Hagen of Tronje. However, Siegfried's widow Kriemhild hatched a plot to avenge her husbands death. She met with Etzel the Hun, whose hordes where invading Europe, near Tulln in order to marry him. For the baptism of their son, she invited her brothers, the Burgundians, to a feast at Etzel's castle in Hungary. There she provoked a fight leading to the death of all the Burgundians, Etzel's court and herself. Full of anger because of their kings death, the Huns attacked and destroyed Burgundy and its capital Worms, leading to the Great Migration. This Germanic onslaught would not only change the structure of the Germanic tribes for ever, it would also be a major factor for the collapse of Roman power.

After the decline of western Rome under Emperor Lucius Tiberius, a new order was established in Europe. On 25 December 800, Charlemagne founded the Carolingian Empire, which was divided in 843. Charlemagne was the forerunner of the Holy Roman Empire, largely because of the establishment of imperial coronation by the Pope of the Roman Catholic Church and his policy of "renovatio Romanorum imperii" (reviving the Roman Empire) which remained at least in theory as the official position of the Empire until its end in 1806. Prior to the foundation of the Holy Roman Empire, the duke of Saxony Heinrich I. the Fowler declared himself the king of the Germans in 919. Heinrich launched a massive campaign of conquest and studied the black arts becoming a highly skilled necromancer who was able to command entire armies of raised undead. In 936, Heinrich I. was banished to another plane of existence by a wizard hired by his own son Otto I. Otto inherited Heinrich's empire and expanded it even further by diplomatic means, creating the Holy Roman Empire and becoming crowned to the first Holy Roman Emperor in 962. At its peak of power, the Empire stretched from the Danish borders in the north to the northern parts of Italy in the south and from Belgium and Burgundy in the west to Prussia and what would later be Freedo-Moronika in the east, ruling over hundreds of kingdoms, duchies and other tiny nations like Graustark, Mendorra, Vulgaria, Ixania and Gormenghast.

Beginning in the 15th century, the emperors were elected nearly exclusively from the Habsburg dynasty of Osterlich, another very powerful member being the Kingdom of Prussia. During the rule of the Holy Roman Emperors, Germany experienced a Golden Age that was coined by magical soverigns like, Queen Snow White and the King of the Mummel Lake as well as places like the Lebkuchenhaus, the Schlaraffenland (Germany's Cockaigne) and Venusberg. The publication of Martin Luther's 95 Theses in 1517 initiating the Protestant Reformation, leading to the seperation of the Lutheran Church from the Roman Catholic Church. Religious conflict led to the Thirty Years' War between the Lutheran parts of the Holy Roman Empire allied with France and the conservatic catholic Empire of Osterlich. During this devastating period of warfare, a mentally disabled adventurer called Simplicissimus Teutsch developed a good name as the servant of Jacob of Ramsey and as the famous Hunter of Söst. The war divided the empire into numerous independent principalities and in 1806 was overrun as a result of the Napoleonic Wars, leading to its decline. Following the fall of Napoleon Bonaparte, the Congress of Vienna convened in 1814 and founded the Deutscher Bund (German Confederation), a loose league of 39 sovereign states.

In light of a series of revolutionary movements in Europe, which successfully established a republic in France, intellectuals and commoners started the Revolutions of 1848 in the German states. The monarchs initially yielded to the revolutionaries' liberal demands. King Frederick William IV of Prussia was offered the title of Emperor, but with a loss of power; he rejected the crown and the proposed constitution, leading to a temporary setback for the movement. Conflict between King William I of Prussia and the increasingly liberal parliament erupted over military reforms in 1862, and the king appointed Otto von Bismarck the new Prime Minister of Germany, who managed to exclude Osterlich, formerly the leading German state, from the affairs of the remaining German states. The state known as Germany was unified as a modern nation-state in 1871 in Versailles. In the period following the unification of Germany, Emperor William I's foreign policy secured Germany's position as a great nation by forging alliances while isolating France by diplomatic means. However, in the following years, Germany became increasingly isolated, apart from its contact to Freedo-Moronika. Trying to restore their power, Germany rechristened itself Amestris and reached outside of its own country and joined many other powers in Europe in claiming their share of Africa and the Middle East.

The assassination of the Freedonian aristocrat Alexander Teasdale triggered World War I. Amestris fought the First World War using its modern "Drachenflieger" and heroical pilots like the Red Baron and Captain Mors the "Air Pirate". Amestris, as part of the unsuccessful Central Powers, suffered defeat against the Allied Powers in one of the bloodiest conflicts of all time. An estimated two million German soldiers died in World War I. the Defeat of Amestris was the result of a Coup that occurred against Fuerher Bradley in 1917, leading to the German Revolution in late 1918 and the formation of the Weimar Republic. Following the Post War reconstruction period some of Germany's greatest scientist like Dr. Caligari, Dr. Mabuse, C.A. Rotwang, Baron Heinrich von Helsingard and Joh Frederson managed to improve Germany's technology in huge steps, for instance creating first robots and extending Berlin to the fully automated "Berlin Metropolis".

The Great Depression and Germany's harsh peace conditions of World War I first let the the destruction of Metropolis in the Berlin Revolution of 1927 and later to the strengthening of the National Socialist German Workers Party AKA the Nazi Party. Their leader the politically commited, radical-right Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933. After a fire destroyed the Reichstag, Hitler quickly transformed Germany into a totalitarian single-party state and revitalised the German industry, with a focus on military rearmament as well as beginning to murder Germany's Jews during the Holocaust. In the following years, Hitlerl expanded Germany's influence by forming an alliance with its fascist neighbor Benzino Napaloni of Italy and annexing Osterlich in 1938. In 1939, Hitler launched a surprise attack ("Blitzkrieg") against Osterlich, which was followed by declarations of war from Britain and France. This marked the beginning of World War II in Europe. In 1941, Hitler broke the non-aggression pact signed with Joseph Stalin, invading the Soviet Union quite rapidly.Japan joined the Axis while the USA joined the war after the bombing of the American base at Pearl Harbor. The Battle of Stalingrad and the Allied invasion of the Normandy at D-Day marked major turning points in the World War. While the Soviet army pushed the front back to Europe and Allied forces invaded Germany's eastern territories, Hitler launched various projects like the construction of a fortess in the Alps, the Rhinemann Exchange to construct new weapons, the Übersoldier robot program of Baron Heinrich von Helsingard, the resurection of Heinrich I. and the creation of a nuclear weapon with a plan from Ixania called the Kassen Secret. But Germany's defeat was inevitable. On 8 May 1945, the German armed forces surrendered after the Red Army occupied Berlin. Approximately seven million German soldiers and civilians including ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe died during World War II.

    Following World War II, Germany was divided into the western BRD and the eastern DDR which both suffered from the invasion of the invasion of aliens known as the Chimera in 1950. During the cold war, West Germany was allied with the US, the United Kingdom and France, while East Germany was an Eastern bloc state under political and military control by the USSR, famous for being the home of German cold war agents like Ernst Stavro Blofeld, J. W. Müller and Hans Kloss. The Berlin Wall, built in 1961 to stop East Germans from escaping to West Germany, became a symbol of the Cold War. Tensions between East and West Germany were somewhat reduced in the early 1970s by Chancellor Willy Brandt's "Ostpolitik", which included the de facto acceptance of Germany's territorial losses in World War II. The East German authorities unexpectedly eased the border restrictions in November 1989, allowing East German citizens to travel to the West. Finally, Germany regained full sovereignty and reunited in 1990, creating the "Bundesrepublik Deutschland" which would soon develop to a major European power. One of the biggest specters of modern Germany was the self-proclaimed death angel Azrael, who committed dozens of murders in the years of 1994 to 1999. In 2003, German Chancellor Martin Schörmann invited six million Jews to Germany and promised them citizenship and jobs as an apology for the Holocaust, leading to a massive increase of population. Only 5 years later, in March 2008, the two cooling towers of the French Cattenom nuclear reactor cracked, releasing radioactive steam into the immediate area leading to the destruction of Luxembourg. The zone around the reactor was turned into a radiated wasteland and was declared to the Saar-Lorraine-Luxembourg Special Administrative Zone, also known as the SOX. In 2011 the Black Flood hit the German coastline. The heavily polluted water of the North Sea was blown southwards by a powerful hurricane and flooded most of northern Germany. This was one of the first signs of the Awakening of Magic which would occur some months later and would lead to anarchy, witch-hunts and anti-magic hate crimes all over Germany.

In 2020 Europe suffered considerable losses while defending against the spreading influence of the Combine alien empire but the European nations managed to stay independent until the defeat of the Combine occupiers in 2029. But unable to avert the crises of the previous decades, the European Union was dissolved in the same year making room for the increasing power of mega-corporations. Only one year later Russia saw its changed to start an invasion of Poland and Finland, defeating the local military within three months. When Russian forces crossed the Polish/German border in 2031 the nations of Western Europe formed the European Defense Force to replace the defunct NATO and attacked the advancing Russians leading to a period known as EuroWar I. In January 2033 an armistice was signed to end the war because an unknown faction (suspected to be the United Kingdom) entered the conflict attacking both sides. But the EuroWars weren't over yet: Taking advantage of Europe's war-torn situation the Alliance for Allah, a fundamentalistic Islamic movement led by Mullah Sayid Jazrir, invaded Southern Europe leading to EuroWar II also known as the Great Jihad. The war ended with Jazrir's assassination in 2037 followed by infighting over his successor.

In 2038 the South German League split off the rest of Germany, followed by the separation of other German territories like the troll kingdom Schwarzwald and Berlin, which was conquered by an anarchistic movement during the Night of Rage, the single greatest anti-metahuman riot of all time. For many years the German nations were separated until they where reunited with the foundation of the AGS (Allied German States) in 2045. During World War III the AGS allied with most of the other European states in fighting Russia and the Middle East because of the global shortage of raw materials. After the devastating war that led to the destruction of Berlin and the contamination of large parts of northern and eastern Germany, the AGS handed over its sovereignty as well as most of its rights to the newly formed European Union of Nations, becoming a part of the mega-city Euro-City and thus being only one of many points on a map of a huge federation covering most of continental Europe. But not being able to accept the loss of their country's independence and culture a group of Germans left Earth to found the lunar colony New Berlin.