Germany fits inside California with room left over.
California has about 39 million people. Germany has around 83 million in the smaller space, more than any other country in the European Union. Hold on to that ratio, because it explains most of what follows. Nothing here is far from anything else, and almost nowhere is empty.
What follows is the plain profile: size, shape, people, and how the pieces are stacked.
The Shape of the Land
Germany covers about 357,600 km² (138,000 sq mi), which makes it the fourth-largest country in the European Union. France, Spain, and Sweden are bigger. Everybody else is smaller.
The land does something tidy as you head south. Flat marsh and sand along the two coasts, then a belt of low wooded ranges through the middle, then the foothills, then the Alps. The Zugspitze tops out at 2,962 m (9,718 ft).
The other end of the scale is easier to miss. The lowest point in the country sits in the Wilstermarsch in Schleswig-Holstein, about 3.5 m (11 ft) below sea level. A few hundred people live down there behind the Elbe dikes. A small sign by the road is the only thing that gives it away. :-)
There are two coastlines. The North Sea in the northwest, the Baltic in the northeast, and Denmark sitting between them.
The Rhine is the river that carries the most of everything. It runs 865 km (537 mi) through Germany out of a total of 1,233 km (766 mi). No other country gets a longer stretch of it.
Much of what’s left is trees. A third of the country is forest, more than half is farmland, and roughly an eighth is built on. Germany carries more standing timber than any other member of the EU.
Almost half of that forest is privately owned, and you’re allowed to walk into it anyway. Federal law gives everyone the right to enter the woods on foot, whoever holds the deed. Bikes and horses stay on the paths.
Nine countries share a border with us, which is more than any other country in Europe manages. Denmark to the north. Poland and Czechia to the east, Austria and Switzerland to the south. France, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands to the west.
The People and Where They Live
Those 83 million work out to roughly 235 people per km² (about 610 per sq mi). Deaths have outnumbered births here for decades. Whether the total rises or falls comes down to how many people move in.
Where everybody lives is the part that surprises visitors. There is no single dominant city here. Berlin is the capital and the biggest one, and it is neither the financial center nor the industrial one.
The banks and the big airport are in Frankfurt. Carmakers and insurers cluster around Munich and Stuttgart. The port is Hamburg. And the largest built-up area in the country isn’t a city at all. It’s the Rhine-Ruhr in the west, a chain of cities that grew into each other and never agreed on a middle. ;-)
About one in seven residents holds a foreign passport, and that share runs much higher in the cities than in the countryside.
German is the only official language, and it isn’t the only one spoken here by right. Four national minorities are recognized. The Danes in the north, the Frisians on the coast, the Sorbs in the east, and the German Sinti and Roma. Their languages are protected by treaty, along with Niederdeutsch (Low German) as a regional language. That’s why some place-name signs in Lusatia carry two spellings.
How the Country Is Put Together
Germany is a federal republic of sixteen states, and those states are not administrative districts. They write their own laws on schools, police, and public holidays. So an answer that holds in Hamburg can be wrong in Bavaria.
Three of the sixteen are cities in their own right. Berlin, Hamburg, and Bremen count as states. That gives Bremen its own seat in the upper house, with a population smaller than Munich’s.
The capital moved twice inside one lifetime. Berlin until 1945, then Bonn for the western half, then Berlin again from 1990. Bonn kept the title of federal city, and a good chunk of the government apparatus never left.
West Germany joined NATO in 1955. Two years later it signed the Treaty of Rome with five other countries, and that is where the European Union starts.
The number worth carrying around is still the first one. A country the size of California, with the Alps at one end and the Baltic at the other. Nothing in it is more than a few hours from anything else.
The sixteen states each have a page of their own over on German states. If you want the places themselves, start at German cities. And the rest of the small print sits on Germany info.