How we work

Methodology

What counts as East and West

"Former East" means the five eastern states, Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia, which together made up the GDR outside Berlin. "Former West" means the ten western states. Berlin is shown separately wherever the source allows, because the city was itself divided and official statistics rarely split it into East and West. When a source only publishes "East including Berlin", we say so next to the figure.

District borders follow today's state borders, which follow the 1949–1990 line almost exactly. The main exception is Amt Neuhaus, which belonged to the GDR and is now part of Lüneburg district in Lower Saxony. It is too small to change any district-level figure.

Sources

We use official statistics only: the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis), the statistical offices of the states, the Federal Employment Agency, the Federal Returning Officer, the Federal Motor Transport Authority, the Robert Koch Institute and comparable public bodies. Every chart names its publisher, table code, reference date and the date we downloaded it. Where we create our own data (for example by counting locations in public registers), we publish the method and the raw list.

Recency

Each theme shows the latest reference year published by the source at the time of access. Some statistics appear with a lag of one to three years; the reference year is always printed on the map.

Colour scales

Each map uses one hue, light to dark, with six classes of equal width; darker always means more. The classes span the 2nd to 98th percentile of districts, so the few extreme districts fall into the open-ended lowest and highest classes instead of washing out the rest of the map. Missing districts are shown in neutral grey. In then/now comparisons both maps share one colour key, so a change of colour is a real change of value.

Districts that changed

District reforms since 1990 (for example Saxony-Anhalt 2007, Saxony 2008, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern 2011, Göttingen 2016, Hanau 2026) mean that older figures do not always match today's 401 districts. For historical comparisons we either use state-level figures or re-aggregate to current boundaries, and say which.

Fun facts

Some differences have no official statistics at all: flag sales, snack habits, the survival of GDR brands. In the clearly labelled Fun facts section we measure these ourselves, mainly with Google Trends search interest (an index from 0 to 100 by state) and counts of places in OpenStreetMap. Every fun fact states its method and caveats. These are indicators of interest and habits, not sales figures, and they never appear in the main themes. Data we derive from OpenStreetMap is released under the Open Database License (ODbL).

Corrections

If you find an error, write to us via the press page. We correct quickly and log every correction on the theme page.