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The article is about the flag of Germany. Civil flag and ensign of Germany is made up of three equal horizontal bands coloured black (top), red and gold. There are two main theories on the exact origins of these colours: the first claims they go back to the uniforms of the Lützow Free Corps, comprised mostly of university students, that formed during the end of the struggle against the Napoleonic occupation of much of Germany; the other holds that they are derived from the similar colours of the Imperial coat of arms of the Holy Roman Empire. The first seems the more accepted theory nowadays and it may be that the second explanation simply provided the true origin with a more extensive historic background. In either case, these colours soon became to be regarded as the national colours of Germany during the period of the German Confederation in the first half of the 19th century. The revolutionary year of 1848 saw a nationalistic movement try to transform the loosely-knit Confederation into a more unified state. When the Frankfurt parliament convened on March 9, 1848, they declared them as official federal colours and adopted the black-red-gold (schwarz-rot-gold) flag.

Following Germany's defeat in World War IWorld War I (also known as the First World War , the Great War the War of the Nations and the "War to End All Wars") was a world conflict occurring from 1914 to 1918. No previous conflict had mobilized so many soldiers, or involved so many in the field of this Imperial flag fell into disuse and the new Weimar RepublicThe period of German history from 1919 to 1933 is known as the Weimar Republic (in German Weimarer Republik ). It is named after the city of Weimar, where a national assembly convened to produce a new constitution after Germany's defeat in World War I. officially reinstated the black-red-gold sequence on August 11, 1919. Throughout the days of the Weimar Republic there was a debate on which flag to use, with monarchists in favour of re-adopting the black-white-red flag. When the Nazis came to power in 1933 they did just that, though they would eventually, on September 15, 1935, replace virtually all German governmental flags with designs based on the swastika flag that had been their party flag. It featured the same colours as the Imperial flag, but it was arranged as a red flag with a white disk in the centre containing a black swastika. The old black-white-red flag was then banned by the Nazis as "reactionary". (See Flag of Nazi Germany

After the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II, Germany was occupied by the Allies. The occupation government banished the existing national flags, and issued an order designating the international signal pennant representing the letter "C" (minus a triangular cutout) as the ship flag of Germany.

After the Allied occupation ended, the black-red-gold flag was once again adopted as the federal flag for the Federal Republic of ( West) Germany on May 9, 1949 which it has remained to this day. The German Democratic Republic (East-Germany) had initially used the same flag, but on October 1, 1959 it introduced a communist emblem (a hammer (symbolizing the workers), and a pair of compasses (symbolizing the intellectuals) inside ears of grain (symbolizing the farmers)), to the centre of the flag, which remained almost until East Germany was reunited with the Federal Republic in 1990 (East Germany formally removed the emblem shortly before reunification).