West Germany in the context of Fraternities

The European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) was a European organization created after World War II to integrate Europe's coal and steel industries into a single common market based on the principle of supranationalism which would be governed by the creation of a High Authority made up of appointed representatives from the member states who would not represent their national interest, but would take and make decisions in the general interests of the Community as a whole. It was formally established in 1951 by the Treaty of Paris, signed by Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and West Germany and was generally seen as the first step in the process of European integration following the end of the Second World War in Europe. The organization is a spiritual predecessor to the contemporary European Union (EU) as its subsequent enlargement of both members and duties ultimately led to the creation of the EU.

The ECSC was first proposed via the Schuman Declaration by French foreign minister Robert Schuman on 9 May 1950 (commemorated in the EU as Europe Day), the day after the fifth anniversary of the end of World War II, to prevent another war between France and Germany. He declared "the solidarity in production" from pooling "coal and steel production" would make war between the two "not only unthinkable but materially impossible". The Treaty created a common market among member states that stipulated free movement of goods (without customs duties or taxes) and prohibited states from introducing unfair competitive or discriminatory practices.

The social market economy (SOME; German: soziale Marktwirtschaft, German pronunciation: [zoˌt͡si̯aːlə ˈmaʁktˌvɪʁtʃaft] ), also called Rhine capitalism, Rhine-Alpine capitalism, the Rhenish model, and social capitalism, is a socioeconomic model and ideology combining a free-market capitalist economic system with social policies and enough regulation to establish both fair competition within the market and generally a welfare state. It is sometimes classified as a regulated market economy. The social market economy was originally promoted and implemented in West Germany by the Christian Democratic Union under Chancellor Konrad Adenauer in 1949 and today it is used by ordoliberals, social liberals and social democrats alike. Its origins can be traced to the interwar Freiburg school of economic thought.

The social market economy was designed to be a middle way between laissez-faire forms of capitalism and socialist economics. It was strongly inspired by ordoliberalism, which was influenced by the political ideology of Christian democracy. Social market refrains from attempts to plan and guide production, the workforce, or sales but support planned efforts to influence the economy through the organic means of a comprehensive economic policy coupled with flexible adaptation to market studies. Combining monetary, credit, trade, tax, customs, investment, and social policies, as well as other measures, this type of economic policy aims to create an economy that serves the welfare and needs of the entire population, thereby fulfilling its ultimate goal.

Leonardo da Vinci (April 15, 1452 – May 2, 1519) was an Italian Renaissance painter and polymath who achieved legendary fame and iconic status within his own lifetime. His renown primarily rests upon his brilliant achievements as a painter, as his Mona Lisa and The Last Supper are two of the most famous artworks ever created. But Leonardo is also known for his diverse skills as a scientist, inventor, engineer, theorist, sculptor, architect, descriptions and study of the human body, and more. He became so highly valued during his lifetime that the King of France bore him home like a trophy of war, supported him in his old age and, according to legend, cradled his head as he died.

Leonardo's portrait was used, within his own lifetime, as the iconic image of Plato in Raphael's School of Athens. His biography was written in superlative terms by Vasari. He has been repeatedly acclaimed the greatest genius to have lived. His painting of the Mona Lisa has been the most imitated artwork of all time and his drawing the Vitruvian Man iconically represents the fusion of Art and Science.

The entirety of Germany was occupied and administered by the Allies of World War II, from the Berlin Declaration on 5 June 1945 to the establishment of West Germany on 23 May 1949. Unlike occupied Japan, Nazi Germany was stripped of its sovereignty and its government was entirely dissolved. After Germany formally surrendered on Tuesday, 8 May 1945, the four countries representing the Allies (the United States, United Kingdom, Soviet Union, and France) asserted joint authority and sovereignty through the Allied Control Council (ACC).

Germany after the war was a devastated country – roughly 80 percent of its infrastructure was in need of repair or reconstruction – which helped the idea that Germany was entering a new phase of history ("zero hour"). At first, Allied-occupied Germany was defined as all territories of Germany before the 1938 Nazi annexation of Austria. The Potsdam Agreement on 2 August 1945 defined the new eastern German border by giving Poland and the Soviet Union all regions of Germany east of the Oder–Neisse line (eastern parts of Pomerania, Neumark, Posen-West Prussia, East-Prussia and most of Silesia) and divided the remaining "Germany as a whole" into four occupation zones, each administered by one of the Allies.

The European Economic Community (EEC) was a regional organisation created by the Treaty of Rome of 1957, aiming to foster economic integration among its member states. It was subsequently renamed the European Community (EC) upon becoming integrated into the first pillar of the newly formed European Union (EU) in 1993. In the popular language, the singular European Community was sometimes inaccurately used in the wider sense of the plural European Communities, in spite of the latter designation covering all the three constituent entities of the first pillar. The EEC was also known as the European Common Market (ECM) in the English-speaking countries, and sometimes referred to as the European Community even before it was officially renamed as such in 1993. In 2009, the EC formally ceased to exist and its institutions were directly absorbed by the EU. This made the Union the formal successor institution of the Community.

The Community's initial aim was to bring about economic integration, including a common market and customs union, among its six founding members: Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and West Germany. It gained a common set of institutions along with the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) and the European Atomic Energy Community (EURATOM) as one of the European Communities under the 1965 Merger Treaty (Treaty of Brussels). In 1993, a complete single market was achieved, known as the internal market, which allowed for the free movement of goods, capital, services, and people within the EEC. In 1994 the internal market was formalised by the EEA agreement. This agreement also extended the internal market to include most of the member states of the European Free Trade Association, forming the European Economic Area, which encompasses 15 countries.

The European Green Belt initiative is a grassroots movement for nature conservation and sustainable development along the corridor of the former Iron Curtain. The term refers to an environmental initiative as well as the area it concerns. The initiative is carried out under the patronage of the International Union for Conservation of Nature and formerly Mikhail Gorbachev. It is the aim of the initiative to create the backbone of an ecological network that runs from the Barents to the Black and Adriatic Seas.

The European Green Belt as an area follows the route of the former Iron Curtain and connects national parks, nature parks, biosphere reserves and transboundary protected areas as well as non-protected valuable habitats along or across the (former) borders.

The 1972 Summer Olympics (German: Olympische Sommerspiele 1972), officially known as the Games of the XX Olympiad (German: Spiele der XX. Olympiade) and officially branded as Munich 1972 (German: München 1972; Bavarian: Minga 1972), were an international multi-sport event held in Munich, West Germany, from 26 August to 11 September 1972. It was the second Summer Olympics to be held in Germany, after the 1936 Games in Berlin, which had taken place under the Nazi rule. Germany became only the second country at that point after the United States to have two different cities host the Summer Olympics.

The West German government had been eager to have the Munich Olympics present a democratic and optimistic Germany to the world, as shown by the Games' official motto, "Die Heiteren Spiele", or "the cheerful Games". The logo of the Games was a blue solar logo (the "Bright Sun") by Otl Aicher, the designer and director of the visual conception commission. The hostesses wore sky-blue dirndls as a promotion of Bavarian cultural heritage. The Olympic mascot, the dachshund "Waldi", was the first officially named Olympic mascot. The Olympic Fanfare was composed by Herbert Rehbein. The Soviet Union won the most gold and overall medals.

The 1992 Winter Olympics, officially known as the XVI Olympic Winter Games (French: XVI Jeux Olympiques d'hiver) and commonly known as Albertville '92 (Arpitan: Arbèrtvile '92), were a winter multi-sport event held from 8 to 23 February 1992 in and around Albertville, France. Albertville won the bid to host the Winter Olympics in 1986, beating Sofia, Falun, Lillehammer, Cortina d'Ampezzo, Anchorage, and Berchtesgaden. The 1992 Winter Olympics were the last winter games held in the same year as the Summer Olympics. The next Winter Olympics were held two years after this one instead of the usual four, which allowed the Olympic Games to take place on every even-numbered year instead of every four years. The Games were the fifth Olympic Games held in France and the country's third Winter Olympics, after the 1924 Winter Games in Chamonix and the 1968 Winter Games in Grenoble. This games was the first of two consecutive Olympic games to be held in Western Europe, preceding the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona, Spain.

18 events in Figure skating, short track speed skating, speed skating, and the opening and closing ceremonies took place in Albertville. The 39 other events were held in the nearby 9 villages and resorts around Savoie: Courchevel, La Plagne, Les Arcs, Les Menuires, Les Saisies, Méribel, Pralognan-la-Vanoise, Tignes, and Val d'Isère. Sixty-four National Olympic Committees and 1,801 athletes participated in six sports and fifty-seven events. This included both the Unified Team, representing the non-Baltic former Soviet republics, and Germany, newly consolidated again as a team following the reunification of the former East and West Germany in 1990. The event also saw the debut of eight nations in the Winter Olympics. The Winter Olympic program has grown this time with the addition of 11 new events. While sports that were already on the program received 5 new events (2 new events in cross-country skiing, at the same time women were allowed to compete in biathlon for the first time and won 3 events exclusive to them.) Another 6 events were added with the implementation of 2 sports that were demonstrated 4 years earlier (freestyle skiing and short track speed skating). These were the last Winter Olympics to include demonstration sports, consisting of curling, aerials and ski ballet, and speed skiing. Due to a rule change implemented in 1986, this was the last edition in the history of the Winter Olympic Games in which all speed skating events were held in an open-air venue.

Rhineland-Palatinate (/ˌraɪnlænd pəˈlætɪnɪt, -lənd-/ RYNE-land pə-LAT-in-it, -⁠lənd-, US also /-ɪneɪt/ -⁠in-ayt; German: Rheinland-Pfalz [ˌʁaɪnlant ˈpfalts] ; Luxembourgish: Rheinland-Pfalz [ˌʀɑɪ̯nlɑm ˈpfɑlts]; Palatine German: Rhoilond-Palz) is a western state of Germany. It covers 19,846 km (7,663 sq mi) and has about 4.05 million residents. It is the ninth largest and sixth most populous of the sixteen states. Mainz is the capital and largest city. Other cities are Ludwigshafen am Rhein, Koblenz, Trier, Kaiserslautern, Worms, and Neuwied. It is bordered by North Rhine-Westphalia, Saarland, Baden-Württemberg and Hesse and by France, Luxembourg and Belgium.

Rhineland-Palatinate was established in 1946 after World War II, from parts of the former states of Prussia (part of its Rhineland and Nassau provinces), Hesse (Rhenish Hesse) and Bavaria (its former outlying Palatinate kreis or district), by the French military administration in Allied-occupied Germany. Rhineland-Palatinate became part of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949 and shared the country's only border with the Saar Protectorate until the latter was returned to German control in 1957. Rhineland-Palatinate's natural and cultural heritage includes the extensive Palatinate winegrowing region, picturesque landscapes, and many castles and palaces.

East Germany, officially the German Democratic Republic (GDR), was a country in Central Europe from its formation on 7 October 1949 until its reunification with West Germany (Federal Republic of Germany) on 3 October 1990. Until 1989, it was generally viewed as a communist state and described itself as a socialist workers' and peasants' state. The economy of the country was centrally planned and state-owned. Although the GDR had to pay substantial war reparations to the Soviet Union, its economy became the most successful in the Eastern Bloc.

Before its establishment, the country's territory was administered and occupied by Soviet forces following the Berlin Declaration abolishing German sovereignty in World War II. The Potsdam Agreement established the Soviet-occupied zone, bounded on the east by the Oder–Neiße line. The GDR was dominated by the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED), a communist party, before being democratized and liberalized amid the revolutions of 1989; this paved the way for East Germany's reunification with West Germany. Unlike the government of West Germany, the SED did not see its state as the successor to the German Reich (1871–1945). In 1974, it abolished the goal of unification in the constitution. The SED-ruled GDR was often described as a Soviet satellite state; historians describe it as an authoritarian regime.

German reunification (German: Deutsche Wiedervereinigung), also known as the expansion of the Federal Republic of Germany (BRD), was the process of re-establishing Germany as a single sovereign state, which began on 9 November 1989 and culminated on 3 October 1990 with the dissolution of the German Democratic Republic and the integration of its re-established constituent federated states into the Federal Republic of Germany to form present-day Germany. This date was chosen as the customary German Unity Day, and has thereafter been celebrated each year as a national holiday. On the same date, East and West Berlin were also reunified into a single city, which eventually became the capital of Germany.

The East German government, controlled by the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED), started to falter on 2 May 1989, when the removal of Hungary's border fence with Austria opened a hole in the Iron Curtain. The border was still closely guarded, but the Pan-European Picnic and the indecisive reaction of the rulers of the Eastern Bloc started off an irreversible movement. It allowed an exodus of thousands of East Germans fleeing to West Germany via Hungary. The Peaceful Revolution, part of the international revolutions of 1989 including a series of protests by East German citizens, led to the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 and the GDR's first free elections on 18 March 1990, and then to negotiations between the two countries that culminated in a Unification Treaty. Other negotiations between the two Germanies and the four occupying powers in Germany produced the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany, which granted on 15 March 1991 full sovereignty to a reunified German state, whose two parts had previously been bound by a number of limitations stemming from their post-World War II status as occupation zones, though it was not until 31 August 1994 that the last Russian occupation troops left Germany.

Cologne (/kə.ˈloʊn/ kə-LOHN; German: Köln [kœln] ; Kölsch: Kölle [ˈkœ̂lə] ) is the fourth-most populous city of Germany and the largest city of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia with nearly 1.1 million inhabitants in the city proper and over 3.1 million people in the Cologne Bonn urban region. Cologne is also part of the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region, the second biggest metropolitan region by GDP in the European Union. Centered on the left bank of the Rhine, Cologne is located on the River Rhine (Lower Rhine), about 35 kilometres (22 mi) southeast of the North Rhine-Westphalia state capital Düsseldorf and 22 kilometres (14 mi) northwest of Bonn, the former capital of West Germany.

The city's medieval Cologne Cathedral (Kölner Dom) was the world's tallest building from 1880 to 1890 and is today the third-tallest church and tallest cathedral in the world. It was constructed to house the Shrine of the Three Kings and is a globally recognized landmark and one of the most visited sights and pilgrimage destinations in Europe. The cityscape is further shaped by the Twelve Romanesque churches of Cologne. Cologne is famous for Eau de Cologne, which has been produced in the city since 1709; "cologne" has since come to be a generic term.

The Inner Six (also known as the Six or the Six founders) are the six founding member states of the European Union, namely Belgium, France, West Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. They were the original members of the European Communities, which were later succeeded by the European Union. Named for their location on a map of western Europe, the Inner Six contrasted with the "Outer Seven", which pursued a free-trade system.

The Treaty of Rome, or EEC Treaty (officially the Treaty establishing the European Economic Community), brought about the creation of the European Economic Community (EEC), the best known of the European Communities (EC). The treaty was signed on 25 March 1957 by Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and West Germany, and it came into force on 1 January 1958. Originally the "Treaty establishing the European Economic Community", and now continuing under the name "Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union", it remains one of the two most important treaties in what is now the European Union (EU).

The treaty proposed the progressive reduction of customs duties and the establishment of a customs union. It proposed to create a common market for goods, labour, services, and capital across member states. It also proposed the creation of a Common Agriculture Policy, a Common Transport Policy and a European Social Fund and established the European Commission.

Bonn (German pronunciation: [bɔn] ) is a federal city in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, located on the banks of the Rhine. With a population exceeding 300,000, it lies about 24 km (15 mi) south-southeast of Cologne, in the southernmost part of the Rhine-Ruhr region.

Bonn served as the capital of West Germany from 1949 until 1990 and was the seat of government for reunified Germany until 1999, when the government relocated to Berlin. The city holds historical significance as the birthplace of Germany's current constitution, the Basic Law.

Law enforcement in Germany is constitutionally vested solely with the states, which is one of the main features of the German political system.

Policing has always been a responsibility of the German states even after 1871 when the country was unified. The 1919 constitution of the Weimar Republic did provide for the possibility of creating a national police force, should the necessity arise, but it was only in the Nazi era that Gestapo (Secret State Police) were unified under central control and a national police force created (the Reich Security Main Office—Reichssicherheitshauptamt, or RSHA). The police became a tool of the centralized state and the Nazi party.Following the defeat of 1945, Germany was divided; in 1949 the three western zones were turned into the new West Germany, while the Soviet zone became East Germany. Each country pursued a different path concerning law enforcement.

The Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) is one of two treaties forming the constitutional basis of the European Union (EU), the other being the Treaty on European Union (TEU). It was previously known as the Treaty Establishing the European Community (TEC).

The Treaty originated as the Treaty of Rome (fully the Treaty establishing the European Economic Community), which brought about the creation of the European Economic Community (EEC), the best-known of the European Communities (EC). It was signed on 25 March 1957 by Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and West Germany and came into force on 1 January 1958. It remains one of the two most important treaties in the modern-day European Union (EU).

The Treaty of Paris (formally the Treaty establishing the European Coal and Steel Community) was signed on 18 April 1951 by Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and West Germany establishing the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), which subsequently became part of the European Union. The treaty came into force on 23 July 1952 and expired on 23 July 2002, exactly fifty years after it came into effect.

The treaty was intended to bring diplomatic and economic stability in western Europe after the Second World War. Some of the main enemies during the war were now sharing production of coal and steel, the key resources which previously had been central to the war effort.