Capital

Berlin

Continent

Europe

Flag adopted

1949

Designer

Not individually credited

Germany

Colors and meaning

• Black[1] #000000

  Historically drawn from the black-red-gold colors of the 1848 Frankfurt Parliament and the fight for German unity and liberal democracy

• Red[1] #DD0000

  The same 1848 liberal tradition

• Gold[1] #FFCC00

  The same 1848 liberal tradition

What the law specifies[1]

The Basic Law constitutes the flag in six words: "Die Bundesflagge ist schwarz-rot-gold." It names the three colours and stops. Everything else usually said about this flag — the order of the bands, the ratio, the meaning, the history — is not in the instrument that establishes it.

Symbolism and history

A plain black-red-gold horizontal tricolor, readopted by West Germany in 1949 and by unified Germany in 1990, deliberately reviving the flag of the failed 1848 liberal revolution rather than the Prussian black-white-red used under the Empire and, briefly, the Nazi regime.

Most similar flags

The 6 closest of the 194 other national flags, ranked by a similarity index computed from the flag images themselves. The number is that index, 0–100 — not a claim that the two flags are “X% identical”.

• 
  Uganda91

  the same horizontal band layout; near-identical colour proportions.

• 
  Mozambique76

  the same horizontal band layout; the same colours in similar amounts.

• 
  Angola73

  the same horizontal band layout; the same colours in similar amounts.

• 
  Belgium73

  near-identical colour proportions.

• 
  Malawi73

  the same horizontal band layout; similar colours in a different arrangement.

• 
  Ghana71

  the same horizontal band layout; the same colours in similar amounts.

Computed at build time: each flag is rasterised to 64x48, and the score is 0.55 × colour overlap + 0.45 × structure. A different weighting would rank these differently. How the index works.

Further reading: Flag of Germany on Wikipedia