In 1616, a geographer named Philipp Clüver gave a range of hills in northwestern Germany a new name. Until then it had been the Osning. Clüver believed the Romans had lost three legions in its forests in AD 9, so he called it the Teutoburg Forest.
The name stuck. The battle, as it turns out, most likely happened somewhere else. The strongest evidence points to Kalkriese, north of Osnabrück, at the foot of another range of hills.
That’s German regions in a nutshell. Their names come from mountains and rivers, or from old tribes and medieval officials. Now and then they come from pure wishful thinking.
Below, the regions follow the land from the flat north to the Alps. The names come first, because they give away more than you’d expect.
How to Read a German Region Name
Start with an old word for mountain forest, Hart. It survives in the name of the Harz, and it forms the second half of Spessart, which means “woodpecker forest.”
The Rothaargebirge looks as if it were built from the German words for red and hair. Wrong on both counts. The name goes back to Rod-Hardt, a cleared mountain forest, so the old Hart is hiding in there, too. ;-)
The Siebengebirge near Bonn promises seven mountains. Its nature park counts forty-two summits, all of them shaped by ancient volcanoes.
Rivers named plenty of others. The Rhine gave us the Rhineland and the Rheingau, and the Ruhr gave us the Ruhrgebiet. The Emsland sits on the Ems, and the Wetterau is named after the river Wetter. The Uckermark takes its name from the Ucker, with Mark being an old word for borderland.
Other regions carry the names of peoples. Franconia comes from the Franks and Swabia from the Suebi. Frisia is the land of the Frisians, and it runs along the North Sea coast into the Netherlands.
A few remember who was in charge. The Vogtland is the land of the Vögte, the reeves Emperor Frederick Barbarossa put in place in the twelfth century. The Markgräflerland (Margraves’ Land) belonged to margraves of the House of Baden. And the Bergisches Land is named after the Counts of Berg, not after its hills.
Some were states in their own right. Baden and Württemberg existed side by side for almost 150 years before they merged in 1952. Between them lay Hohenzollern, which belonged to Prussia for about a century.
Bavaria is divided into seven regions. Four of them are Upper Bavaria, Lower Bavaria, the Upper Palatinate, and Bavarian Swabia. The other three split Franconia into Upper Franconia, Middle Franconia, and Lower Franconia.
And then there’s wishful thinking. Germany has dozens of little “Switzerlands,” a fashion of the Romantic era that Theodor Fontane was already poking fun at in the nineteenth century. Saxon Switzerland probably got its name from two Swiss painters at the Dresden art academy, whom the sandstone cliffs reminded of home.
In Holstein Switzerland, a hill of 167 m (548 ft) was apparently enough. :-)
Finally, there’s the compass. North Germany, South Germany, and Central Germany are loose terms with no official borders. East Germany and West Germany today usually mean the eastern and western states, rather than the two Germanys of the Cold War.
The Flat North from the Coast to Lusatia
Everything north of the low mountains belongs to the North German Plain. Ice Age glaciers shaped it, and people have been reworking it ever since.
On the North Sea, East Frisia and North Frisia share the tidal flats and the Frisian name. Schleswig-Holstein adds quieter corners, such as the Dänischer Wohld (Danish Wahld), the Aukrug Nature Park, and the Lauenburg Lakes Nature Park.
Near Hamburg, the Altes Land started out as marsh. Dutch settlers diked and drained it in the twelfth century, and today it’s the largest continuous fruit-growing area in northern Europe.
The Lüneburg Heath looks like wilderness. It isn’t. For thousands of years, people cleared the forest here and grazed their animals. Today, flocks of Heidschnucken, a local breed of sheep, keep the birch and pine from coming back. The heather turns it all purple in late summer.
The Wildeshausen Geest and the Drawehn are two nature parks in Lower Saxony. To the southwest, the Münsterland keeps more than a hundred moated castles and palaces in its flat parkland.
Along the Rhine in the west, the Lower Rhine and the Cologne Bay are lowlands where the plain reaches in toward the hills.
In the northeast, the Mecklenburg Lakes and the Müritz National Park are lake country the glaciers left behind. South of them, the Altmark sits in Saxony-Anhalt, and the Uckermark in Brandenburg is dotted with boulders the ice dragged down from Scandinavia.
South of Berlin, the Spreewald (Spree Forest) breaks up into more than 1,000 km (621 mi) of waterways. In Lehde, the mail still arrives by boat. Road signs here are in German and Sorbian, the language of a Slavic people who settled the area in the sixth century.
Lusatia reaches from Brandenburg into Saxony. Lower Lusatia forms its northern half and Upper Lusatia its southern one, and both extend across the border into Poland.
The Low Mountain Ranges Across the Middle
Across the middle of the country runs a broad band of Mittelgebirge, rounded and wooded low mountain ranges. Only a handful climb above 1,000 m (3,281 ft), and most summits stay below the tree line.
Plenty of them ignore state lines, too. The table shows the main ranges, their highest peaks, and the states they spread across.
| Range | Highest Peak | Height | States |
|---|---|---|---|
| Black Forest | Feldberg | 1,493 m (4,898 ft) | Baden-Württemberg |
| Bavarian Forest | Großer Arber | 1,456 m (4,777 ft) | Bavaria |
| Ore Mountains | Fichtelberg | 1,215 m (3,986 ft) | Saxony |
| Harz | Brocken | 1,141 m (3,743 ft) | Lower Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, Thuringia |
| Fichtelgebirge | Schneeberg | 1,051 m (3,448 ft) | Bavaria |
| Swabian Alb | Lemberg | 1,015 m (3,330 ft) | Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria |
| Thuringian Forest | Großer Beerberg | 983 m (3,225 ft) | Thuringia |
| Rhön | Wasserkuppe | 950 m (3,117 ft) | Bavaria, Hesse, Thuringia |
| Taunus | Großer Feldberg | 881 m (2,890 ft) | Hesse, Rhineland-Palatinate |
| Rothaargebirge | Langenberg | 843 m (2,766 ft) | North Rhine-Westphalia, Hesse |
| Hunsrück | Erbeskopf | 816 m (2,677 ft) | Rhineland-Palatinate, Saarland |
| Franconian Forest | Döbraberg | 795 m (2,608 ft) | Bavaria, Thuringia |
| Vogelsberg | Taufstein | 773 m (2,536 ft) | Hesse |
| Eifel | Hohe Acht | 747 m (2,451 ft) | Rhineland-Palatinate, North Rhine-Westphalia |
| Palatinate Forest | Kalmit | 673 m (2,208 ft) | Rhineland-Palatinate |
| Westerwald | Fuchskaute | 657 m (2,156 ft) | Rhineland-Palatinate, Hesse, North Rhine-Westphalia |
| Odenwald | Katzenbuckel | 626 m (2,054 ft) | Hesse, Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria |
| Spessart | Geiersberg | 586 m (1,923 ft) | Bavaria, Hesse |
| Saxon Switzerland | Großer Zschirnstein | 561 m (1,841 ft) | Saxony |
| Teutoburg Forest | Barnacken | 446 m (1,463 ft) | North Rhine-Westphalia, Lower Saxony |
| German Alps | Zugspitze | 2,962 m (9,718 ft) | Bavaria |
The Harz and the Rhön each reach into three states. The Rhön sits where Bavaria, Hesse, and Thuringia meet. Farmers cleared its high plateaus in the Middle Ages, so the views go on and on. Its highest peak, the Wasserkuppe, is where gliding took off as a sport.
The Ore Mountains earned their name the hard way. Miners dug silver there from the twelfth century on, and between 1460 and 1560 the range was Europe’s largest source of silver ore. Together with the Czech side of the border, the old mining landscape is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Along the Czech border, the Bavarian Forest became Germany’s first national park in 1970. Together with Šumava on the Czech side, it forms the largest protected forest area in Central Europe. The Upper Palatinate Forest carries the same border woods on to the northwest.
In the northwest, the Teutoburg Forest from the opening story runs past Bielefeld and then bends south into the Eggegebirge. The Teutoburg Forest/Eggegebirge Nature Park covers much of both. The Tecklenburger Land spreads along the western foothills, and the Weserbergland follows the Weser to the east.
South of the Ruhrgebiet, the Sauerland and the Siegerland belong to a big block of slate uplands that the Rhine cuts in two. The Sauerland also holds the Ebbegebirge Nature Park. The Eifel and the Hunsrück lie on the left bank, the Taunus and the Westerwald on the right.
The Eifel’s highest peak, the Hohe Acht, is an old volcano. Its name once covered only a small district around a few river sources. In the Hunsrück, the Saar-Hunsrück Nature Park takes in the highest summit, the Erbeskopf.
The Thuringian Forest, the Franconian Forest, and the Fichtelgebirge belong to one chain of hills. It runs for about 200 km (124 mi) southeast to the Czech border. Thuringia also has the Hainich National Park.
Franconia keeps a set of hills of its own. Franconian Switzerland is the part of the Franconian Jura known for its rock towers and caves. Farther south, the river Altmühl cuts the Altmühltal (Altmühl Valley). The Steigerwald, the Frankenhöhe, and the Hassberge Nature Park fill in the rest.
In the southwest, the Swabian Alb hides some of the oldest art in the world. Carvings of mammoth ivory about 40,000 years old came out of its caves, along with the oldest flutes ever found. The Biosphere Reserve Swabian Alb protects part of the range, and the Swabian-Franconian Forest rises farther north.
West of the Rhine, the Palatinate Forest is the largest continuous forest in Germany. Its red sandstone hills carry on across the French border as the Northern Vosges, and both halves form one UNESCO biosphere reserve.
Valleys and Wine Country in Between
Between the ranges lie the warm valleys where much of our wine grows.
The Upper Rhine Valley is a rift valley, and the Kaiserstuhl rises out of it northwest of Freiburg. It’s what remains of a volcano that erupted some 15 million years ago, and in places the vines root straight in the volcanic rock.
On the Black Forest side, the Breisgau and the Ortenau join the Markgräflerland. Farther north come the Kraichgau and the Hohenloher Ebene (Hohenlohe Plain).
Along the Rhine, Rhenish Hesse has more vineyard land than any other German wine region. Just south of it, the Palatinate grows its wine along the eastern edge of the Palatinate Forest, where the German Wine Route runs.
The Alpine Foothills and the Alps
South of the Danube, the land climbs toward the Alps through the foothills. Glaciers dug the lakes here, too, so the ones south of Munich share a birth story with the lakes of Mecklenburg.
In Baden-Württemberg, the foothills take in Upper Swabia and the Hegau. In Bavaria, the Chiemgau spreads around the Chiemsee. The Allgäu, which reaches a little into Baden-Württemberg too, climbs from rolling foothills into real mountains. Neuschwanstein stands at its southeastern edge, in Schwangau.
The Alps themselves are only a thin strip along the Austrian border, and their high peaks lie almost entirely in Bavaria. The Bavarian Alps run from the Allgäu to Berchtesgaden, and the highest of them all is the Zugspitze.
One practical tip before you plan around a region. Public holidays and school vacations follow the state, not the landscape. So if your trip crosses the Harz or the Rhön, check which state each stop belongs to.
The states themselves are on German states. For the wider view of the country, go back to Germany. And if you’d rather choose by what you like doing, start with tourist attractions in Germany.