The Germans, (German: die Deutschen), or the German people, are a nation in the meaning an ethnos (in German: Volk), defined more by a sense of sharing a common German culture and having a German mother tongue, than by citizenship or by being subjects to any particular country.
The concept of who is a German has varied. Until the 19th century, it denoted the speakers of German, and was a much more distinct concept than that of Germany, the land of the Germans. The Dutch and the Swiss had already split off and shaped separate national identities. Swiss Germans, however, retained their cultural identity as German, albeit as a specific German subculture. In the last two centuries, German and Germany have more and more come to be connected with a succession of German states -- but the borders of those states have fluctuated so widely during that time that the language-based definition of Germanness remains perhaps the most useful. While there are approximately 100 million native German speakers in the world, only about 80 million considers themselves to be German.
The Free State of Bavaria (German: Freistaat Bayern), with an area of 70,553 km² (27,241 square miles) and 12.4 million inhabitants, forms the southernmost state of Germany. Its capital is Munich.
The Federal Republic of Germany (German: Bundesrepublik Deutschland, listen (help·info)), or simply Germany, is one of the world's leading industrialised countries. Located in Central Europe, it is bordered to the north by the North Sea, Denmark, and the Baltic Sea, to the east by Poland and the Czech Republic, to the south by Austria and Switzerland, and to the west by France, Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands.
Germany is a democratic parliamentary federal republic, made up of 16 states called Länder, which in certain spheres act independently of the federation. Historically consisting of several sovereign nations with their own history, culture as well as religion, Germany was unified as a nation state during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870/1871.
The Federal Republic of Germany is a member state of the United Nations, NATO, the G8 and the G4 nations, and is a founding member of the European Union. It is the European Union's most populous and most economically powerful member state. Germany also plays a role as one of the world's major powers.
German beer is highly diverse and an important part of Germany's culture. There are more than 1300 breweries in Germany, the highest number of breweries in the world. The German beer market is a bit sheltered from the rest of the world beer market by the German brewers' adherence to the Bavarian Reinheitsgebot (purity requirement) dating from 1516, according to which the only allowed ingredients of beer are "Wasser (water), Hopfen (hops) und (Gersten-)Malz (barley-malt)". Many breweries worldwide adopted the Reinheitsgebot for their own beers. After its invention, cultured yeast became the fourth legal ingredient. Through the agreement (which was law up to 1988 but is still adhered to by virtually all German brewers), beers from Germany tend to have a good reputation for their quality. The Germans are behind only the Czechs and the Irish in their per capita consumption of beer.
German Cuisine varies greatly from region to region. The southern regions of Bavaria and Swabia share many dishes among them and with their neighbours to the south, Switzerland and Austria. In the West, French influences are more pronounced, while the eastern parts of the country have much in common with Eastern European cuisine and there are marked Scandinavian influences in the northern coastal regions.
Europe is conventionally considered one of the seven continents of Earth which, in this case, is more a cultural and political distinction than a physiographic one, leading to some dispute as to Europe's actual borders. Physically and geologically, Europe is a subcontinent or large peninsula, forming the westernmost part of Eurasia.
Europe is bounded to the north by the Arctic Ocean, to the west by the Atlantic Ocean, and to the south by the Mediterranean and, according to the traditional geographic definition, by the Caucasus. Europe's boundary to the east is vague, but has traditionally been given as the divide of the Ural Mountains and the Caspian Sea to the southeast: The Urals are considered by most to be a geographical and tectonic landmark separating Asia from Europe.
