So this is the time of year when we take a moment to do a bit of navel-gazing, and in our case that means taking a look at our page views for the year just finished to see if they can tell us anything about our reader’s interests and travel habits.

The overall winner, way out on top, is our coverage of Germany’s theme parks, and particularly Europa Park, Rust, which recently celebrated its best-ever year. Lucky them, getting a lot of free traffic via us!

That is followed by our page on the beautiful beaches of the Baltic, which is perhaps a bit of a surprise, given that the former East doesn’t generally rank highly on most travel itineraries. But then our page on the East in general follows quickly on, suggesting that last year’s travellers may have been inspired by the 25th anniversary of the Fall of the Wall to have a peek at what once lay behind.

On a similar theme, but more historic, our page on What Happened to the Prussians ranks very highly, and attracts the most reader comments of all our pages, as people try to find out more about their ancestors.

Next on the list comes another less obvious choice: our page on Hut Hiking in the Alps. We presume that this page gets a lot of hits because it isn’t easy to get relevant information on this phenomenon, which isn’t widely known outside continental Europe.

Then come more obviously touristic subjects: the Black Forest and Harz Mountains, and Mad King Ludwig’s fabulous castles. Cultural and gastronomic traditions such as Shrebergarten alotments, beer, applewine, stollen, and nudity on the beaches are all popular.

A lot of people come onto the site looking for German-specialist tour operators, of which we provide a listing in our Getting There section (frankly, there aren’t many). A perennial favourite is our Weird & Wunderbar section, in which we store bits of video and images which have something unusual to say about Germany and the Germans.

Amongst the hotel options we recommend, the most popular is the delightful sleeping beauty’s castle Dornröschenschloss Sababurg, although we doubt many people actually stay there, given the limited availability of rooms. Also very popular is the Ayurveda Parkschlösschen on the banks of the Mosel.

There’s plenty of other stuff on the site which doesn’t get a lot of traffic, but it is all worth hunting out, depending on where you want to go, and when. We like to think of them as GermanyisWunderbar’s hidden gems!

You don’t come across them in news headlines much these days, but it wasn’t so long ago that the Prussians were a dominant force in European politics, and the architects of modern Germany.

They took their name from the Old Prussians, effectively the tribes of the Baltic States, who were eventually conquered by the Teutonic Knights back in the 13^th century. The Knights settled the land we now know as Poland with migrants from more Germanized regions of central Europe, and eventually established the Kingdom of Prussia, which covered a huge swathe of territory right across from the Dutch border to what is now Lithuania, including pretty much all of what we now consider northern and eastern Germany.

While the regions further south were riven with religious dispute and busy with the cultivation of vines, this largely flat and protestant north turned out to be excellent at wheat production, and the land-owning dynasties developed sophisticated trade links and transport to the North Sea ports.

The driving force in the uniting of the German states

Their wealth was considerable and their leadership was strong, primarily under Frederick the Great in the 18^th century, who established Berlin and nearby Potsdam as his power base (a large exhibition on Frederick will open in 2012 in the Neues Palais to mark his 300^th anniversary).

He was followed by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck in the 19^th century, and it was the latter who was the driving force in uniting all the various German principalities into the state we know as Germany today.

Prussians were the dominant force in that new state, but it was their King, Kaiser Wilhelm II, an impetuous, impatient man, who effectively globalised the First World War (by joining the Austrian declaration of war on Serbia after the assassination of Franz Ferdinand) because he thought the English and French were seeking his annihilation. That was the beginning of the end for Prussia; the Kaiser abdicated at the end of the war, and the Prussian state was abolished by the Nazis.

So while there’s no place called Prussia any more, the word ‘Prussian’ is still out there in general useage, but has become more generic, used to describe someone good at giving and obeying orders, being punctual, proper, disciplined, punctual, and honest. As well as rather blinkered, inflexible and unimaginative. As well as a kind of blue.