Why do central European nations use the color black as their national colors?
Upvote:10
I believe it is ultimately inherited from the colors of the holy roman empire.
Upvote:23
Wikipedia (in German) has a long and fascinating article on the history of the German national colours. Without getting in all the details, it seems that the link with the colours of the Holy Roman Empire symbols isn't historically established and might have been a later rationalisation for the choice.
Still according to this article, the first use of these colours in association with the idea of a German nation dates back to the wars against Napoleon and specifically to the Lützow Free Corps. The flag seems to have been derived from the colours of their uniforms, which was in turn mostly a matter of practicality. As volunteers had to buy their equipment themselves, black coats would have been cheaper to obtain at the time. This regiment was strongly associated with the colour black and one of their nickname was in fact “Black rangers” (Schwarze Jäger).
The first sources explicitly linking the colours with the imperial banner date from the time of the 1848 revolutions, more than 30 years later, at a time when the flag and the colours were already strongly associated with (progressive) German nationalism.
To your broader question, black does not seem particularly unusual in flags (Wikipedia counts 69). Among larger countries, it's used by Egypt and if you discount the many other Arab and African countries using it as not being “major nations”, you only have very few countries left, with Germany (in its various shapes) being the only one using black (so no evidence of any association with Central Europe as such). In such a small sample, the absence of any given colour could therefore easily happen by chance and is not in need of any specific explanation.
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