Holiday Inn Germany Hotels - Best prices, best places

Regional characteristics , indeed, are a strong feature of German life, and there are many hangovers from the days when the country was a political patchwork, even though some historical provinces have vanished from the map and others have merged. Hamburg and Bremen , for example, retain their age-old status as free cities. The imperial capital, Berlin , also stands apart, as an island in the midst of the erstwhile GDR where the liberalism of the West was pushed to its extreme, sometimes decadent, always exciting. In polar opposition to it, and as a corrective to the normal view of the Germans as an essentially serious race, is the Rhineland , where the great river's majestic sweep has spawned a particularly rich fund of legends and folklore, and where the locals are imbued with a Mediterranean-type sense of fun. The five new Länder which have supplanted the GDR, and in particular the small towns and rural areas, are in many ways the ones which best encapsulate the feel and appearance of Germany as it was before the war and the onset of foriegn influences which were an inevitable consequence of defeat.

Germany has always been the problem child of Europe. For over a millennium it was no more than a loose confederation of separate states and territories, whose number at times topped the thousand mark. When unification belatedly came about in 1871, it was achieved almost exclusively by military might; as a direct result of this, the new nation was consumed by a thirst for power and expansion abroad. Defeat in World War I only led to a desire for revenge, the consequence of which was the Third Reich, a regime bent on mass genocide and an European, indeed world, domination. It took another tragic global war to crush this system and its people. When the victors quarrelled over how to prevent Germany ever again becoming dominant, they divided it into two hostile states; the parts held by the Western powers were developed into the Federal Republic of Germany , while the eastern zone occupied by the Soviets became the German Democratic Republic.

Bavaria (Bayern) is the original home of many of Germany's best-known clichés: beer-swilling Lederhosen-clad men, sausage dogs, cowbells and Alpine villages, Sauerkraut and Wurst and the fairy-tale castle of Neuschwanstein. Yet all this is only a small part of the Bavarian picture, and one that's restricted to the southern areas in and around the Alps. more

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