Hamburg in the context of North Sea

Climate change and cities are deeply connected. Cities are one of the greatest contributors and likely best opportunities for addressing climate change. Cities are also one of the most vulnerable parts of the human society to the effects of climate change, and likely one of the most important solutions for reducing the environmental impact of humans. The UN projects that 68% of the world population will live in urban areas by 2050. In the year 2016, 31 mega-cities reported having at least 10 million in their population, 8 of which surpassed 20 million people. However, secondary cities - small to medium size cities (500,000 to 1 million) are rapidly increasing in number and are some of the fastest growing urbanizing areas in the world further contributing to climate change impacts. Cities have a significant influence on construction and transportation—two of the key contributors to global warming emissions. Moreover, because of processes that create climate conflict and climate refugees, city areas are expected to grow during the next several decades, stressing infrastructure and concentrating more impoverished peoples in cities.

High density and urban heat island effect are examples of weather changes that impact cities due to climate change. It also causes exacerbating existing problems such as air pollution, water scarcity, and heat illness in metropolitan areas. Moreover, because most cities have been built on rivers or coastal areas, cities are frequently vulnerable to the subsequent effects of sea level rise, which cause flooding and erosion; these effects are also connected with other urban environmental problems, such as subsidence and aquifer depletion.

Munich is the capital and most populous city of Bavaria, Germany. As of 30 November 2024, its population was 1,604,384, making it the third-largest city in Germany after Berlin and Hamburg. Munich is the largest city in Germany that is not a state of its own, and it ranks as the 11th-largest city in the European Union. The metropolitan area has around 3 million inhabitants, and the broader Munich Metropolitan Region is home to about 6.2 million people. It is the third largest metropolitan region by GDP in the European Union. Munich is located on the river Isar north of the Alps. It is the seat of the Upper Bavarian administrative region. With 4,500 people per km, Munich is Germany's most densely populated municipality. It is also the second-largest city in the Bavarian dialect area after Vienna.

The first record of Munich dates to 1158. The city has played an important role in Bavarian and German history. During the Reformation, it remained a Catholic stronghold. Munich became the capital of the Kingdom of Bavaria in 1806 and developed as a centre for arts, architecture, culture, and science. The House of Wittelsbach ruled until 1918, when the German revolution of 1918–1919 ended their reign and saw the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic. In the 1920s, Munich became a centre of political movements, including the rise of the Nazi Party. The city was known as the "Capital of the Movement". During World War II, Munich was heavily bombed, but much of its historic architecture has since been restored. After the war, the city's population and economy grew rapidly. Munich hosted the 1972 Summer Olympics and the 1974 FIFA World Cup final.

The Elbe (Czech: Labe [ˈlabɛ] ; German: [ˈɛlbə] ; Low German: Ilv or Elv; Upper and Lower Sorbian: Łobjo, pronounced [ˈwɔbʲɔ]) is one of the major rivers of Central Europe. It rises in the Giant Mountains of the northern Czech Republic before traversing much of Bohemia (western half of the Czech Republic), then Germany and flowing into the North Sea at Cuxhaven, 110 kilometres (68 miles) northwest of Hamburg. Its total length is 1,094 km (680 mi).

The Elbe's major tributaries include the rivers Vltava, Ohře, Saale, Havel, Mulde, and Schwarze Elster.

Saarland (German: [ˈzaːɐ̯lant] ) is a state of Germany in the southwest of the country. With an area of 2,570 km (990 sq mi) and a population of 990,509 in 2018, it is the smallest German state in area apart from the city-states of Berlin, Bremen, and Hamburg, and the smallest in population apart from Bremen. Saarbrücken is the state capital and largest city; other cities include Neunkirchen and Saarlouis. Saarland is mainly surrounded by the department of Moselle (Grand Est) in France to the west and south and the neighboring state of Rhineland-Palatinate in Germany to the north and east; it also shares a small border, about 8 kilometres (5 miles) long, with the canton of Remich in Luxembourg to the northwest.

Having long been a relatively small part of the long-contested territories along the Franco-German linguistic border, Saarland first gained specific economic and strategic importance in the nineteenth century due to the wealth of its coal deposits and the heavy industrialization that grew as a result. Saarland was first established as a distinct political entity in 1920 after World War I as the Territory of the Saar Basin, which was occupied and governed by France under a League of Nations mandate.

North Rhine-Westphalia or North-Rhine/Westphalia, commonly shortened to NRW, is a state (Land) in Western Germany. With more than 18 million inhabitants, it is the most populous state in Germany. Apart from the city-states (Berlin, Hamburg and Bremen), it is also the most densely populated state in Germany. Covering an area of 34,084 km (13,160 sq mi), it is the fourth-largest German state by size.

North Rhine-Westphalia features 30 of the 81 German municipalities with over 100,000 inhabitants, including Cologne (over 1 million), the state capital Düsseldorf (630,000), Dortmund and Essen (about 590,000 inhabitants each) and other cities predominantly located in the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan area, the largest urban area in Germany and the fourth-largest on the European continent. The location of the Rhine-Ruhr at the heart of the European Blue Banana makes it well connected to other major European cities and metropolitan areas like the Randstad, the Flemish Diamond and the Frankfurt Rhine-Main Region.

Dortmund (German: [ˈdɔʁtmʊnt] ; Westphalian: Düörpm [ˈdyːœɐ̯pm̩]; Latin: Tremonia) is the third-largest city in North Rhine-Westphalia, after Cologne and Düsseldorf, and the ninth-largest city in Germany. With a population of 614,495 inhabitants, it is the largest city (by area and population) of the Ruhr as well as the largest city of Westphalia. It lies on the Emscher and Ruhr rivers (tributaries of the Rhine) in the Rhine-Ruhr Metropolitan Region, the second biggest metropolitan region by GDP in the European Union, and is considered the administrative, commercial, and cultural centre of the eastern Ruhr. Dortmund is the second-largest city in the Low German dialect area, after Hamburg.

Founded around 882, Dortmund became an Imperial Free City. Throughout the 13th to 14th centuries, it was the "chief city" of the Rhine, Westphalia, and the Netherlands Circle of the Hanseatic League. During the Thirty Years' War, the city was destroyed and decreased in significance until the onset of industrialisation. The city then became one of Germany's most important coal, steel, and beer centres; as a consequence, it was one of the most heavily bombed cities in Germany during World War II. The devastating bombing raids of 12 March 1945 destroyed 98% of the buildings in the inner city. Involving more than 1,110 aircraft, the raids were the largest targeting a single city during World War II. Today, around 30% of the city’s buildings date from before the war.

There are eleven metropolitan regions in Germany consisting of the country's most densely populated cities and their catchment areas. They represent Germany's political, commercial and cultural centres. The eleven metropolitan regions in Germany were organised into political units for planning purposes.

Based on a narrower definition of metropolises commonly used to determine the metropolitan status of a given city, only four cities in Germany surpass the threshold of at least one million inhabitants within their administrative borders: Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, and Cologne.

The Hamburg Police (German: Hamburger Polizei or Polizei Hamburg) is the German Landespolizei force for the city-state of Hamburg. Law enforcement in Germany is divided between federal and state (Land) agencies. A precursor to the agency, the Polizei-Behörde, has existed since 1814.

The State Minister for the Interior (German: Senator für Inneres) oversees the Hamburg Police, which consists of aviation, water, road and port patrols, and crime investigation. The city of Hamburg is served by police stations (German: Polizeikommissariate) of the Uniformed Police (German: Schutzpolizei). Head of police is Polizeipräsident Ralf Martin Meyer. In 2008 Hamburg Police had 500,335 deployments.

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (German: Der 18te Brumaire des Louis Napoleon) is an essay written by Karl Marx between December 1851 and March 1852, and originally published in 1852 in Die Revolution, a German monthly magazine published in New York City by Marxist Joseph Weydemeyer. Later English editions, such as the 1869 Hamburg edition with a preface by Marx, were entitled The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. The essay serves as a major historiographic application of Marx's theory of historical materialism.

The Eighteenth Brumaire focuses on the 1851 French coup d'état, by which Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, president of the Second Republic and Napoléon Bonaparte's nephew, became emperor of the Second French Empire as Napoleon III. It seeks to explain how capitalism and class struggle created conditions which enabled "a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero's part". Marx describes the divisions and alliances among the bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie, the peasantry, revolutionaries, and social democrats, among other groups, and how a lack of dominance of any one group led to the re-emergence of monarchy, despite the Revolution of 1848. Marx describes the Second Empire as a "Bonapartist" state, an exception to the basic Marxist conception of the state as an instrument of class rule in that the Bonapartist state becomes semi-autonomous, representing the interests of no single class.

Dresden (/ˈdrɛzdən/; German: [ˈdʁeːsdn̩] ; Upper Saxon: Dräsdn; Upper Sorbian: Drježdźany, pronounced [ˈdʁʲɛʒdʒanɨ]) is the capital city of the German state of Saxony and its second most populous city after Leipzig. It is the 12th most populous city of Germany, the fourth largest by area (after Berlin, Hamburg, and Cologne), and the third-most populous city in the area of former East Germany, after Berlin and Leipzig. Dresden's urban area comprises the towns of Freital, Pirna, Radebeul, Meissen, Coswig, Radeberg, and Heidenau and has around 790,000 inhabitants. The Dresden metropolitan area has over 1.3 million inhabitants.

Dresden is the second largest city on the River Elbe after Hamburg. Most of the city's population lives in the Elbe Valley, but a large, albeit very sparsely populated, area of the city east of the Elbe lies in the West Lusatian Hill Country and Uplands (the westernmost part of the Sudetes) and thus in Lusatia. Many boroughs west of the Elbe lie in the Ore Mountain Foreland, as well as in the valleys of the rivers rising there and flowing through Dresden, the longest of which are the Weißeritz and the Lockwitzbach. The name of the city as well as the names of most of its boroughs and rivers are of Sorbian origin.

The Lombards, Longobards or Langobards (Latin: Langobardi) were a Germanic people who conquered most of the Italian Peninsula between 568 and 774 AD. They had previously settled in the Middle Danube in the 5th century, near what is now Austria, Slovenia and Hungary. Their previous homeland was in the north, near present day Hamburg. Roman-era historians in the 1st and 2nd centuries AD mention the Lombards as one of the Suebian peoples, and report them living on the Lower Elbe already in the early 1st century. Their legacy is apparent in Lombardy, northern Italy, the region deriving its name from them.

There are no contemporary accounts of the Lombards in the 3rd or 4th century, or for most of the 5th century, which is when they reappear, near the Danube river far to the south. Legendary accounts of the Lombard migration are found in several early medieval texts, the oldest being the Origo Gentis Langobardorum (Origin of the Lombard People). There are two other notable later adaptions, the Chronicon Gothanum and the more scholarly History of the Lombards by Paul the Deacon, written between 787 and 796 AD, which contain more information. All three describe the Lombards as a people who moved to the Danube from somewhere near the North Sea. The details, however, differ until they enter "Rugiland" soon after Odoacer's defeat in 487/488 AD of the Rugii, who had a kingdom near what is now Vienna.

The Port of Hamburg (German: Hamburger Hafen, pronounced [ˈhambʊʁɡɐ ˈhaːfn̩] ) is a seaport on the river Elbe in Hamburg, Germany, 110 kilometres (68 mi) from its mouth on the North Sea.

Known as Germany's "Gateway to the World" (Tor zur Welt), it is the country's largest seaport by volume. In terms of TEU throughput, Hamburg is the third-busiest port in Europe (after Rotterdam and Antwerp) and 15th-largest worldwide. In 2014, 9.73 million TEUs (20-foot standard container equivalents) were handled in Hamburg.

The Federal Republic of Germany is a federation and consists of sixteen partly sovereign states (German: Länder, sing. Land). Of the 16 states, 13 are so-called "area-states" (Flächenländer); in these, below the level of the state government, there is a division into local authorities (counties and county-level cities) that have their own administration. Two states, Berlin and Hamburg, are city-states, in which there is no separation between state government and local administration. The state of Bremen is a special case: the state consists of the cities of Bremen, for which the state government also serves as the municipal administration, and Bremerhaven, which has its own local administration separate from the state government. It is therefore a mixture of a city-state and an area-state.Three states, Bavaria, Saxony, and Thuringia, use the appellation Freistaat ("free state"); this title is merely stylistic and carries no legal or political significance (similar to the US states that call themselves a commonwealth).

The Federal Republic of Germany ("West Germany") was created in 1949 through the unification of the three western zones previously under American, British, and French administration in the aftermath of World War II. Initially, the states of the Federal Republic were Baden (until 1952), Bavaria (Bayern), Bremen, Hamburg, Hesse (Hessen), Lower Saxony (Niedersachsen), North Rhine-Westphalia (Nordrhein-Westfalen), Rhineland-Palatinate (Rheinland-Pfalz), Schleswig-Holstein, Württemberg-Baden (until 1952), and Württemberg-Hohenzollern (until 1952). West Berlin, while still under occupation by the Western Allies, viewed itself as part of the Federal Republic and was largely integrated and considered a de facto state. In 1952, following a referendum, Baden, Württemberg-Baden, and Württemberg-Hohenzollern merged into Baden-Württemberg. In 1957, the Saar Protectorate joined the Federal Republic as the state of Saarland.

Northern Germany (German: Norddeutschland, [ˈnɔʁtdɔɪ̯tʃlant] ) is a linguistic, geographic, socio-cultural and historic region in the northern part of Germany which includes the coastal states of Schleswig-Holstein, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Lower Saxony and the two city-states Hamburg and Bremen. It contrasts with Southern Germany, Western Germany, and Eastern Germany.

Rotring (stylized rOtring) is a manufacturer of technical drawing tools and writing implements. Established in Germany in 1928 as a fountain pen manufacturer, Rotring went on to be acquired by Newell Brands in 1998. The name "Rotring" directly translates to "red ring", which refers to the company's signature: a red band placed around the barrel of the pen. The company's name was changed to Rotring in the early 1970s to match the trademark.

Since the Rotring factory and headquarters in Hamburg were shut down, production has been handled and distributed by Japanese manufacturer Holbein and other manufacturers.

George Frideric (or Frederick) Handel (/ˈhændəl/ HAN-dəl; baptised Georg Fried[e]rich Händel, German: [ˈɡeːɔʁk ˈfʁiːdʁɪç ˈhɛndl̩] ; 23 February 1685 – 14 April 1759) was a German-British Baroque composer well-known for his operas, oratorios, anthems, concerti grossi, and organ concerti.

Born in Halle, Handel spent his early life in Hamburg and Italy before settling in London in 1712, where he spent the bulk of his career and became a naturalised British subject in 1727. He was strongly influenced both by the middle-German polyphonic choral tradition and by composers of the Italian Baroque. In turn, Handel's music forms one of the peaks of the "high baroque" style, bringing Italian opera to its highest development, creating the genres of English oratorio and organ concerto, and introducing a new style into English church music. He is consistently recognised as one of the greatest composers of his age.

An incunable or incunabulum (pl.: incunables or incunabula, respectively) is a book, pamphlet, or broadside that was printed in the earliest stages of printing in Europe, up to the year 1500. The specific date is essentially arbitrary, but the number of printed book editions exploded in the following century, so that all incunabula, produced before the printing press became widespread in Europe, are rare, where even some early 16th-century books are relatively common.

They are distinct from manuscripts, which are documents written by hand. Some authorities on the history of printing include block books from the same time period as incunabula, whereas others limit the term to works printed using movable type.

A recreational vehicle, often abbreviated as RV, is a motor vehicle or trailer that includes living quarters designed for accommodation. Types of RVs include motorhomes, campervans, coaches, caravans (also known as travel trailers and campers), fifth-wheel trailers, popup campers, and truck campers.

Typical amenities of an RV include a kitchen, a bathroom, and one or more beds. RVs can range from utilitarian – containing only sleeping quarters and basic cooking facilities – to luxurious, with features like air conditioning (AC), water heaters, televisions and satellite receivers, and quartz countertops.