Germany

Germany climbs from north to south. The North Sea coast is lined with the tidal mudflats of the Wadden Sea, while the Baltic shore has sandy spits and the chalk cliffs of Rügen. Inland, the North German Plain gives way to wooded uplands such as the Harz and the Black Forest, and the country ends in the Bavarian Alps, topped by the Zugspitze. The Rhine carries barges past vineyards towards the Netherlands, while the Danube rises in the Black Forest and flows east.

For most of its history there was no single German state. The Holy Roman Empire held hundreds of principalities and free cities loosely together for some eight centuries, which is why so many small towns have a palace or a university of their own. Luther began the Reformation at Wittenberg in 1517. Prussia drove unification in 1871. After two world wars and the crimes of the Nazi regime the country was divided in 1949; the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, and Germany reunited a year later.

Bavarians, Saxons, Swabians and Rhinelanders keep their own dialects, beers and festivals, and the sixteen states run their own schools and police. Bach and Beethoven, Goethe and Kant, Gauss and Einstein made German a language of music, philosophy and physics. The economy is built on making things: cars from Wolfsburg, Stuttgart and Munich, machine tools, chemicals and precision instruments, often from mid-sized family firms, the Mittelstand, that train their own apprentices.