An old German joke claims Bavaria is not Germany. As anywhere, a minority could not agree more. But in fact, Bavaria was the only German state to have protested against the 1949 Constitution. However, they were outvoted. Nevertheless, one could go following this vein forever, for regionalism and unification are recurrent themes in German history. That said, many German institutions have Bavarian branches. German Red Cross for example features in the form for the rest of Germany, with a Bavarian separate section.The Free State of Bavaria is the largest German state, and a predominantly Catholic one, which lies in the south-east of Germany. It has 12.5 million inhabitants, composed of three ethnic groups: Bavarians, Franconians and Swabians. Munich is the state capital. The current Pope, Dürer, Wagner, Brecht, Planck and Fassbinder for example - they were all Bavarians. Bavarian history goes back to Roman times. Its inhabitants did not violently emerge from a direction or other but Bavarians were formed of the remaining citizens after the collapse of the Empire. Bavaria was literally for hundreds of years a duchy within the scope of the Holy Roman Empire, a strange land comprising of such different nations of today as Italians and French and Germans, that stretched all the way to the North Sea. Next, Napoleon conquered the territory and made Bavaria a kingdom, incidentally increasing its size. But Bavaria was weak and found itself between Austria and Prussia. Finally it entered the German Reich. Bavaria is also one out of two states in Germany that remained Catholic, not reacting to Reformation, which can be supposed to still have repercussions on the national identity. Thus, Bavaria was the only German state that opposed the introduction of the 1949 post-war German constitution.
