Capital of Germany

The capital of Germany is the city state of Berlin. It is the seat of the President of Germany, whose official residence is Schloss Bellevue. The Bundesrat ("federal council") is the representation of the Federal States (Bundesländer) of Germany and has its seat at the former Prussian Herrenhaus (House of Lords). Though most of the ministries are seated in Berlin, some of them, as well as some minor departments, are seated in Bonn, the former capital of West Germany. Although Berlin is officially the capital of the Federal Republic of Germany, 8,000 out of the 18,000 total officials employed at the federal bureaucracy still work in Bonn, about away from Berlin. Prior to 1871, Germany was not a unified nation-state, and had no capital city. The medieval German Holy Roman Empire used to have Aachen as its preferred seat of government during Charlemagne's reign, and until 1531 it was the place where 31 Holy Roman Emperors were crowned Kings of the Germans. The coronation later moved to Frankfurt. However, after Charlemagne, none of the subsequent Holy Roman Emperors moved to Aachen or Frankfurt, instead retaining their own original constituent kingdom or principality as base or moving into temporary Royal palaces dotted around the confederate realm known as Kaiserpfalz. The last imperial ruling house (the Habsburgs) had Vienna as its permanent seat of government. After the Congress of Vienna created the formal German Confederation in 1815, a Federal Assembly convened at the Free City of Frankfurt, representing not the people of the individual German Lands but their sovereigns. Subsequently, Frankfurt briefly became the official German capital during the short-lived Revolutions of 1848 in the German states. It was only during the 1871 unification of Germany that the newly unified German Reich was first assigned an official capital. Since Berlin was the capital of Prussia, the leading state of the new Reich, it became the capital of Germany as well. Berlin had been the capital of Prussia and its predecessor, Brandenburg, since 1518.