The beginnings of the German health care system can be traced back to the Middle Ages, when craftsmen were members of guilds. The guilds provided an early form of health insurance based on the principle of solidarity: All guild members paid into a fund which was then used to help individual members if they had financial difficulties, for instance … [Read more...]

Following unification, the Federal Republic encompassed 356,958 square kilometers and was one of the largest countries in Europe. With about 81.3 million people in mid-1995, it ranked second behind Russia in population among the countries of Europe. Unification actually reduced the Federal Republic's population density, however, because East … [Read more...]

Roman Catholicism, one of Germany's two principal religions, traces its origins there to the eighth-century missionary work of Saint Boniface. In the next centuries, Roman Catholicism made more converts and spread eastward. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Knights of the Teutonic Order spread German and Roman Catholic influence by force … [Read more...]

Most of the workforce is employed in the services sector. West Germany completed the transition from an industrial economy to one dominated by the services sector in the 1970s, and by the late 1980s this sector employed two-thirds of the workforce. In contrast, when the Berlin Wall fell, East Germany still had not made this transition. Because more … [Read more...]

In the early 1990s, an age-gender distribution pyramid of unified Germany's population displayed at its apex the legacy of heavy war casualties: a preponderance of elderly women too great to be explained by women's greater longevity. Official statistics show that in 1990 there were approximately 2.7 million more females than males (41.2 million … [Read more...]