National flag of Gemany
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Description
The national flag of Germany is a tricolour consisting of three equal horizontal bands displaying the national colours of Germany: black, red, and gold (German: Schwarz-Rot-Gold). The flag was first sighted in 1848 in the German Confederation. It was officially adopted as the national flag of the Weimar Republic from 1919 to 1933, and has been in use since its reintroduction in West Germany in 1949.
Since the mid-19th century, Germany has two competing traditions of national colours, black-red-gold and black-white-red. Black-red-gold were the colours of the 1848 Revolutions, the Weimar Republic of 1919–1933 and the Federal Republic (since 1949). They were also adopted by the German Democratic Republic (1949–1990).
The colours black-white-red appeared for the first time in 1867, in the constitution of the North German Confederation. This nation state for Prussia and other north and central German states was expanded to the south German states in 1870–71, under the name German Empire. It kept these colours until the revolution of 1918–19. Thereafter, black-white-red became a symbol of the political right. The Nazis (National Socialist German Worker's Party) re-established these colours along with the party's own swastika flag in 1933. After World War II, black-white-red was still used by some conservative groups or by groups of the far right, as it is not forbidden, unlike proper Nazi symbols.
Black-red-gold is the official flag of the Federal Republic of Germany. As an official symbol of the constitutional order, it is protected against defamation. According to §90 of the German penal code, the consequences are a fine or imprisonment up to five years.
Design
Article 22 of the German constitution, the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany, states:
Following specifications set by the West German government in 1950, the flag displays three bars of equal width and has a width–length ratio of 3:5; the tricolour used during the Weimar Republic had a ratio of 2:3.
At the time of the adoption of the flag there were no exact colour specifications other than "Black-Red-Gold". However on 2 June 1999, the federal cabinet introduced a corporate design for the German government which defined the specifications of the official colours as:
| Colour scheme | Black | Red | Gold | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| RAL | 9005 Jet black | 3020 Traffic red | 1021 Rapeseed yellow | |||
| HKS | 0, 0, 0 | 5.0PB 3.0/12 | 6.0R 4.5/14 | |||
| CMYK | 0.0.0.100 | 0.100.100.0 | 0.12.100.5 | |||
| Pantone (approximation) | Black | 485 | 7405 | |||
| Web colour | #000000 | #FF0000 | #FFCC00 | |||
| Decimal RGB | 0,0,0 | 255,0,0 | 255,204,0 | |||
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The flag is blazoned in English as, "Tierced in fess sable, gules and or."
Colour
Vexillology rarely distinguishes between gold and yellow; in heraldry, they are both Or. For the German flag, such a distinction is made: the colour used in the flag is called gold, not yellow.
When the black–red–gold tricolour was adopted by the Weimar Republic as its flag, it was attacked by conservatives, monarchists, and the far right, who referred to the colours with spiteful nicknames such as Schwarz–Rot–Gelb (black–red–yellow) or even Schwarz–Rot–Senf (black–red–mustard). When the Nazis came to power in 1933, the black–white–red colours of pre-1918 Imperial Germany were swiftly reintroduced, and their propaganda machine continued to discredit the Schwarz–Rot–Gold, using the same derogatory terms as previously used by the monarchists.
On 24 December 1951, the Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof) stated that the usage of "black–red–yellow" and the like had "through years of Nazi agitation, attained the significance of a malicious slander against the democratic symbols of the state" and was now an offence. As summarised by heraldist Arnold Rabbow in 1968, "the German colours are black–red–yellow but they are called black–red–gold."
Source : Wikipedia
