States of Germany

The Federal Republic of Germany is a federation and consists of sixteen partly sovereign states. Of the 16 states, 13 are so-called "area-states" ; in these, below the level of the state government, there is a division into local authorities that have their own administration. Two states, Berlin and Hamburg, are city-states, in which there is no separation between state government and local administration. The state of Bremen is a special case: the state consists of the cities of Bremen, for which the state government also serves as the municipal administration, and Bremerhaven, which has its own local administration separate from the state government. It is therefore a mixture of a city-state and an area-state.
Three states, Bavaria, Saxony, and Thuringia, use the appellation Freistaat ; this title is merely stylistic and carries no legal or political significance.
The Federal Republic of Germany was created in 1949 through the unification of the three western zones previously under American, British, and French administration in the aftermath of World War II. Initially, the states of the Federal Republic were Baden, Bavaria, Bremen, Hamburg, Hesse, Lower Saxony, North Rhine-Westphalia, Rhineland-Palatinate, Schleswig-Holstein, Württemberg-Baden, and Württemberg-Hohenzollern. West Berlin, while still under occupation by the Western Allies, viewed itself as part of the Federal Republic and was largely integrated and considered a de facto state. In 1952, following a referendum, Baden, Württemberg-Baden, and Württemberg-Hohenzollern merged into Baden-Württemberg. In 1957, the Saar Protectorate joined the Federal Republic as the state of Saarland.
The next major change occurred with German reunification in 1990, in which the territory of the former German Democratic Republic became part of the Federal Republic, by accession of the re-established eastern states of Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, and Thuringia, and the reunification of West and East Berlin into a city state. A referendum in 1996 to merge Berlin with surrounding Brandenburg failed to reach the necessary majority vote in Brandenburg, while a majority of Berliners voted in favour.

States

It was the individual states that formed the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949. This contrasted with post-war developments in Austria, where the national federation was established first, and the individual states were subsequently defined as units within that federal framework.
The German use of the term Länder dates back to the Weimar Constitution of 1919. Previously, the states of the German Empire had been called Staaten. Today, it is common to use the term Bundesland. Officially, the term "Bundesland" appears in neither the 1919 constitution nor the current one. Three Länder call themselves Freistaaten : Bavaria, Saxony, and Thuringia. Of the 17 states at the end of the Weimar Republic, six still exist :

Bavaria.
Bremen
Hamburg
Hesse
Saxony
Thuringia

The other 11 states of the Weimar Republic either merged into one another or were separated into smaller entities:

Anhalt is now part of the state of Saxony-Anhalt.
Baden is now part of Baden-Württemberg.
Braunschweig is now part of Lower Saxony.
Lippe is now part of North Rhine-Westphalia.
Lübeck is now part of Schleswig-Holstein.
Mecklenburg-Schwerin and Mecklenburg-Strelitz are now parts of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.
Oldenburg is now part of Lower Saxony, with its former exclaves now belonging to their neighbouring states of Rhineland-Palatinate and Schleswig-Holstein.
Prussia was divided among the states of Berlin, Brandenburg, Lower Saxony, North Rhine-Westphalia, Rhineland-Palatinate, Saxony-Anhalt and Schleswig-Holstein. The erstwhile Prussian provinces of Brandenburg, Saxony, Schleswig-Holstein and Hanover formed the core of the states of Brandenburg, Saxony-Anhalt, Schleswig-Holstein and Lower Saxony, respectively. The Prussian provinces of Westphalia and Rhineland contributed most territory to the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, and Rhineland province contributed about half of the territory of the state of Rhineland Palatinate. Most of the Prussian province of Hesse-Nassau was merged with the existing state of Hesse.

Some territories bordering other states were annexed to the bordering state. Also, Prussia had exclaves that were surrounded by other states. These became part of their surrounding states. All states, except Bavaria, now have territory of the former Free State of Prussia. Other former Prussian territories lying east of the rivers Neisse and Oder were lost in 1945 and are now part of Poland or Russia. They are Silesia, Pomerania, West Prussia-Posen, and East Prussia respectively.

Schaumburg-Lippe is now part of Lower Saxony.
Württemberg is now part of Baden-Württemberg.

Possible boundary changes between states continue to be debated in Germany, in contrast to how there are "significant differences among the American states and regional governments in other federations without serious calls for territorial changes" in those other countries. Arthur B. Gunlicks summarizes the main arguments for boundary reform in Germany: "the German system of dual federalism requires strong Länder that have the administrative and fiscal capacity to implement legislation and pay for it from own source revenues. Too many Länder also make coordination among them and with the federation more complicated." But several proposals have failed so far; territorial reform remains a controversial topic in German politics and public perception.

List

State

State code

Since

Capital

Legislature

Head of state and government

Bundesrat
votes

Area

Pop.

Pop. per km²

HDI

GDP per capita

Baden-Württemberg

History

has a long tradition in German history. Until the early 19th century, the majority of the territory that later became Germany was part of the Holy Roman Empire, which in 1796 was made up of more than 300 individual political entities subject to the Holy Roman Emperor in Vienna. The number of states was greatly reduced during the Napoleonic Wars, and the Empire itself was abolished in 1806. The Congress of Vienna, which restructured Europe after the wars, created the highly federalized 39-state German Confederation in 1815. The Confederation was dissolved after the Austro-Prussian War in which Prussia defeated the Austrian Empire and effectively excluded it from taking part in the eventual unification of Germany.
Following the war, the states of northern and central Germany united under the leadership of the Kingdom of Prussia to form the federal North German Confederation. During the Franco-Prussian War, the four southern German states of Bavaria, Württemberg, Baden and Hesse-Darmstadt joined the North German Confederation, which was rechristened the German Empire with Prussia's victory. The Reichstag and Federal Council gave the Prussian king the title of German Emperor. With only relatively minor changes that did not affect its federalized nature, the North German Constitution became the imperial constitution. The new German Empire included 25 states plus the imperial territory of Alsace–Lorraine, which had been won from France in the war. Within the empire, 65% of the territory and 62% of the population belonged to Prussia.
The Treaty of Versailles at the end of World War I stripped the former German Empire of 12 to 13 percent of its land area and population, the majority of it from Prussia. Only Alsace–Lorraine, which had never attained full statehood, was wholly lost to Germany. The new Weimar Republic remained federal in nature, with a total of 17 states. Seven small states in east-central Germany consolidated into Thuringia in 1920, Coburg chose to merge into Bavaria, and Prussia absorbed Pyrmont and Waldeck. During the Weimar period, there were a number of unsuccessful proposals to make radical changes to Germany's state structure, seven short-lived unrecognized states, four of them self-declared soviet republics during the German revolution of 1918–1919, plus two separatist republics in the Rhineland in 1923/24.
After the Nazi Party seized power in January 1933, the states were gradually abolished and reduced to provinces under the Nazi regime via the Gleichschaltung process, as the states administratively were largely superseded by the Nazi Gau system. Three changes are of particular note: on 1 January 1934, Mecklenburg-Schwerin was united with neighbouring Mecklenburg-Strelitz; and, by the Greater Hamburg Act of 1937, the territory of the city-state was extended, while Lübeck lost its independence and became part of the Prussian province of Schleswig-Holstein.

West Germany, 1945–1990

During the Allied occupation of Germany after World War II, internal borders were redrawn by the Allied military governments. New states were established in all four zones of occupation: Bremen, Hesse, Württemberg-Baden, and Bavaria in the American zone; Hamburg, Schleswig-Holstein, Lower Saxony, and North Rhine-Westphalia in the British zone; Rhineland-Palatinate, Baden, Württemberg-Hohenzollern and the Saarland which later received a special status in the French zone; Mecklenburg, Brandenburg, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, and Thuringia in the Soviet zone. No single state comprised more than 30% of either population or territory; this was intended to prevent any one state from being as dominant within Germany as Prussia had been in the past. Initially, only seven of the pre-War states remained: Baden, Bavaria, Bremen, Hamburg, Hesse, Saxony, and Thuringia. The states with hyphenated names, such as Rhineland-Palatinate, North Rhine-Westphalia, and Saxony-Anhalt, owed their existence to the occupation powers and were created out of mergers of former Prussian provinces and smaller states.
Former German territory that lay east of the Oder-Neisse line fell under either Polish or Soviet administration but attempts were made at least symbolically not to abandon sovereignty well into the 1960s. The former provinces of Farther Pomerania, East Prussia, Silesia and Posen-West Prussia fell under Polish administration with the Soviet Union taking the area around Königsberg, pending a final peace conference with Germany which eventually never took place. More than 8 million Germans had been expelled from these territories that had formed part of the German-speaking lands for centuries and which mostly did not have sizable Polish minorities before 1945. However, no attempts were made to establish new states in these territories, as they lay outside the jurisdiction of West Germany at that time.
In 1948, the military governors of the three Western Allies handed over the so-called Frankfurt Documents to the minister-presidents in the Western occupation zones. Among other things, they recommended revising the boundaries of the West German states in a way that none of them should be too large or too small in comparison with the others.
As the premiers did not come to an agreement on this question, the Parliamentary Council was supposed to address this issue. Its provisions are reflected in Article 29 of the Basic Law. There was a binding provision for a new delimitation of the federal territory: the Federal Territory must be revised. Moreover, in territories or parts of territories whose affiliation with a Land had changed after 8 May 1945 without a referendum, people were allowed to petition for a revision of the current status within a year after the promulgation of the Basic Law. If at least one tenth of those entitled to vote in Bundestag elections were in favour of a revision, the federal government had to include the proposal into its legislation. Then a referendum was required in each territory or part of a territory whose affiliation was to be changed. The proposal should not take effect if within any of the affected territories a majority rejected the change. In this case, the bill had to be introduced again and after passing had to be confirmed by referendum in the Federal Republic as a whole. The reorganization should be completed within three years after the Basic Law had come into force. Article 29 states that "the division of the federal territory into Länder may be revised to ensure that each Land be of a size and capacity to perform its functions effectively".
In their letter to Konrad Adenauer, the three western military governors approved the Basic Law but suspended Article 29 until such time as a peace treaty should be concluded. Only the special arrangement for the southwest under Article 118 could enter into force.
Upon its founding in 1949, West Germany thus had eleven states. These were reduced to nine in 1952 when three south-western states merged to form Baden-Württemberg. From 1957, when the French-occupied Saar Protectorate was returned and formed into the Saarland, the Federal Republic consisted of ten states, which are referred to as the "Old States" today. West Berlin was under the sovereignty of the Western Allies and neither a Western German state nor part of one. However, it was in many ways integrated with West Germany under a special status.
A new delimitation of the federal territory has been discussed since the Federal Republic was founded in 1949 and even before. Committees and expert commissions advocated a reduction of the number of states; academics and politicians made proposals some of them far-reaching for redrawing boundaries but hardly anything came of these public discussions. Territorial reform is sometimes propagated by the richer states as a means to avoid or reduce fiscal transfers.