Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany is one of the world's leading industrialised countries, located in Europe. It is bordered to the north by the North Sea, Denmark, and the Baltic Sea, to the east by Poland and the Czech Republic, to the south by Austria and Switzerland, and to the west by France, Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands.
Germany is a democratic federal parliamentary nation, made up of 16 federal states so called Bundesländer. It has approx. 82 million inhabitants. The Federal Republic of Germany is a member state of the United Nations, NATO, the G8 and the G4 nations, and is a founding member of what is now the European Union. It is the European Union's most populous and most economically powerful member.
Germany's contributions to the world's cultural heritage are numerous, and the country is often known as das Land der Dichter und Denker (the land of poets and thinkers). The mostly admired German poets and authors are without doubt Goethe, Hoffmann, Keller and Schiller. Other poets include Heinrich Heine, Rainer Maria Rilke and authors of the 20th century include Nobel prize winners Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Heinrich Böll, and Günter Grass. Germany's influence on world philosophy was significant as well, as exemplified by Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Engels, Feuerbach, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche.

In the field of music, Germany's influence is noted through the works of, among others, Bach, Händel, Telemann, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Brahms, Schumann, Schubert, Webern, Lachenmann, Orff and Wagner.
In Art, there are several fine German painters such as the Renaissance artist Dürer, the romanticist Friedrich, the surrealist Ernst, the expressionist Marc, or the conceptual artist Beuys. Architecture also flourished in Germany. Famous architects include neoclassicist Schinkel and Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus.
Germany was also the homeland of scientists like, Fahrenheit, Humboldt, Einstein, Born, Planck, Creuzfeldt, Hertz, Mayr and Bunsen; and inventors and engineers such as Gutenberg, Otto, Bosch, Siemens, von Braun, Daimler, Benz and Diesel.
Many historical figures, though not citizens of Germany in the modern sense, were important and influential figures in German culture, such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Franz Kafka, Stefan Zweig and Nicolaus Copernicus.