ABSTRACT
Germany experienced more radical regime changes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries than most other nations. In little more than 130 years the country has been governed by a constitutional monarchy (1871-1918), an unstable democracy during the period of the Weimar Republic (1919-33), National Socialist totalitarianism (1933-45), military occupation (1945-9), two separate German states in the period from 1949 to 1990, a liberal democratic one in western Germany and a communist one in the eastern part of the country, and since unification of West and East Germany in 1990 a unified democratic state.
