Reasons to visit Germany

One of the biggest nations in Europe, Germany is home to a diverse range of landscapes, including the forested hills of the urbanized west, the tall, vertical mountains of the south, the sandy, rolling plains of the north, and the plains of the agricultural east. The Rhine River, which flows northward from Switzerland and is celebrated in visual art, literature, folklore, and song, and the magnificent east-central city of Berlin, which rose phoenix-like from the ashes of World War II and is now, after decades of partition, the capital of a reunified Germany, are at the spiritual center of the nation. For millennia, the Germanic-speaking peoples who ruled over a large portion of western Europe north of the Alps have constituted the loose, fluid polity known by the term Germany, rather than any specific location. Even though Germany is an ancient country in that sense, the German nation in roughly its current form did not exist until the 19th century, when the German Empire was formed in 1871 by Prussian Prime Minister Otto von Bismarck, who united numerous German-speaking kingdoms, principalities, free cities, bishoprics, and duchies. This fictitious "Second Reich" swiftly rose to prominence in Europe and amassed colonies in Asia, the Pacific, and Africa. Germany has worked hard to remember the victims of the Holocaust and atone for its crimes since the Second World War. It has supported Israel politically and materially and has aggressively pursued cases against hate crimes and the spread of neo-Nazi doctrine; the latter became problematic in the 1990s when anti-immigrant skinhead groups gained popularity in Germany and Hitler's Mein became accessible online. Clearly, contemporary Germany faces challenges in striking a balance between its national interests and those of a large influx of political and economic refugees from abroad, primarily from Turkey, South Asia, and North Africa. This influx has increased ethnic tensions and given rise to nationalist political parties, especially in eastern Germany, where unemployment was twice as high as in the west.