Three stripes, black, red and gold, born in the struggle to unite Germany, which the country has lost and recovered several times.
Every fact about the flag, each with what it means.
Normal flagFIAV symbol: the form of the flag.
Civil and state, on land and at seaFIAV symbol: who may fly the flag.YesIt carries the coat of arms on the cloth.The flag in the words of vexillology and heraldry.
It is a rectangular field with a 3:5 ratio divided into three equal horizontal stripes.
Each element and how many of the 1,390 flags in the catalogue carry it. In yellow, the rarest.
Every date in its story, at a glance.
The three stripes came out of a movement to unify Germany that had already proposed the tricolour…
The current flag was adopted on 23 May 1949
How it was born, how it has changed and what it means.
The flag of Germany is a tricolour of three equal horizontal stripes: black, red and gold. It has no coat of arms or figures: it is the civil and national flag.
The current flag was adopted on 23 May 1949, weeks after the Federal Republic was founded. The three stripes came out of a movement to unify Germany that had already proposed the tricolour in 1848 and that the Nazi Republic had set aside.
The result is a flag so simple that there is almost no blazon to explain: three bands of colour, with no figures.
It has had several lives. The tricolour was proposed in 1848, used in the Weimar Republic and replaced by the Nazi flag; in 1949 West Germany recovered the tricolour, and in 1990, with reunification, it became that of the whole country.
Black
the upper stripe.
Red
the central stripe.
Gold
the lower stripe, yellow in practice.
State version
official buildings fly the same tricolour with the black federal eagle in the centre of the red stripe.
Three equal stripes and nothing else. No coat of arms, no crown, no emblem. It is the national and civil flag at once: the same one that flies at a street demonstration and at a government building.
1848, 1919, 1933, 1945, 1990: the tricolour has been interrupted and restored several times. It is the result of a unification movement that proposed it almost a century before the state that carries it existed.
The flag flown by official buildings is not identical to the civil one: it carries the black federal eagle in the centre of the red stripe. The eagle, instead of sitting in the middle of the field, shifts the balance upwards.
Where it is and what borders it.
Test what you have read about the flag of Germany.
Text based on the article “Bandera de Alemania” from the Spanish Wikipedia, published under the licence CC BY-SA 4.0.
Sources consulted:
Flag image: User:SKopp, User:Madden, and other users, Wikimedia Commons · Public domain.
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