Nine neighbours, and the centre is nowhere

On the atlas Germany looks like the default European country: a compact block in the middle, one language, a capital in the north-east that everyone can name. That picture holds only as long as you do not count the edges.

Nine states share a land border with Germany: Denmark, Poland, Czechia, Austria, Switzerland, France, Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands. No other member of the European Union has more land neighbours. The country that looks like a centre is in fact a hinge. Goods, languages and people have always crossed here, long before there was a German state that could collect customs on all nine sides.

A centre with nine edges

Germany stretches from the North Sea and the Baltic to the Alps. Between them lies no single landscape and no single centre. The geographic midpoint of the country sits near Niederdorla in Thuringia, a place almost nobody names when asked where Germany “is”. Berlin, the capital, lies far in the north-east. The Rhine-Ruhr, where the most people live and work close together, lies in the west. The political, economic and geographic centres do not coincide.

That is not an accident of the map. It is the result of a country assembled from many territories. The North German Plain, the low mountain ranges, the Rhine valley and the Alpine foothills were never one economic space. The rivers run to three seas: the Rhine and the Elbe to the North Sea, the Oder to the Baltic, the Danube to the Black Sea. A country whose rivers leave in three directions does not have a natural capital.

The edges do the work. At the Danish border the land is flat and the language mixed. In the Alps the border climbs over passes. Along the Moselle, Germany and Luxembourg do not even draw a line: they share the river as joint territory. Between Aachen and the Eifel a Belgian railway embankment still cuts German exclaves out of German land. The middle of Europe is full of seams.

The country that looks like a centre is in fact a hinge.

— TerraTally · Countries desk

A state that arrived later than its neighbours

France, Denmark and the Netherlands were states long before there was a Germany that could sit at a table with them. The German Empire of 1871 was a late founding: a federation of kingdoms and duchies under Prussian leadership, not a nation that had grown from one centre. The Basic Law of 1949 kept that federal idea. Sixteen Länder hold their own governments; the federation in Berlin does not replace them.

1949 and 1990 are the two dates that made the present state. The Basic Law of 1949 built a republic in the west after the collapse of the Nazi dictatorship. In 1990 the GDR acceded to that republic. The border that had cut the country for forty years disappeared from the map, but not from the figures: incomes, voting patterns and the age of the housing stock still show where the inner-German border ran.

Unification did not move the capital to the geographic middle. It moved it to Berlin, which had been the capital of Prussia, the Empire and the first republic, and which after 1945 sat inside the other German state. The choice was historical, not geographic. That is why the official centre of the country and the place from which it is governed are hundreds of kilometres apart.

A language that tips over inside its own country

German is the official language. That sentence is true and incomplete. North of a line that linguists call the Benrath line, people said “maken”; south of it, “machen”. The line still runs through the country. It is not a political border and it does not appear on road signs, but it organises dialects, and it is older than the state.

Standard German is a written agreement. It lets a speaker from Kiel and a speaker from Passau read the same newspaper. It does not make them sound the same. In the west, along the Rhine, the spoken language takes words from French. In the east it takes them from Slavic neighbours. A country with nine borders does not keep its language sealed.

The same is true of the people. After 1945 millions were expelled from the east and settled in the west. From the 1960s, workers came from Italy, Spain, Greece, Turkey and Yugoslavia. After 1990, people moved from east to west inside the country. Germany’s present population of 83.6 million is the result of these movements, not of a closed national body that was always here.

Germany is easy to draw and hard to locate. The atlas puts it in the middle of Europe. The middle itself carries no single story. What the country is, it is at the edges: nine neighbours, a language that changes in the middle of the land, and a capital that governs from the side.