States of Germany

Lore & Background

Of those original 18, five still exist today: Bavaria, Bremen, Hamburg, Saxony, and Thuringia, though partly with different borders.

Reader's Guide

They exercise significant administrative and fiscal responsibilities, implementing federal legislation and funding it from own-source revenues. The system of dual federalism requires strong Länder, and debates over boundary changes continue, with proposals for reform often failing due to political and public controversy. The states vary in type: 13 area-states have local authorities below the state level; Berlin and Hamburg are city-states with no separation between state and local administration; Bremen is a mixture, with the state government serving as municipal administration for Bremen city while Bremerhaven has its own local administration. Three states—Bavaria, Saxony, and Thuringia—use the stylistic title Freistaat. The historical legacy of Prussia, which once comprised 65% of the empire's territory and 62% of its population, is reflected in the fact that all states except Bavaria now contain former Prussian territory.

Did You Know?

• Three states—Bavaria, Saxony, and Thuringia—call themselves Freistaaten, an older German term for 'republic' with no legal or political significance.

Structural Diversity of the Sixteen States

Germany's sixteen Länder are far from uniform in how they organize governance beneath the state level. Thirteen of them, known as Flächenländer or area-states, subdivide their territory into counties and county-level cities, each operating its own local administration under the state government. Two, Berlin and Hamburg, function as city-states in which the state government and municipal administration are identical, with no intermediate tier of local authorities. Bremen occupies a distinctive middle position: the city of Bremen itself functions under a system where the state government doubles as the municipal authority, while Bremerhaven runs its own separate local government apart from the state. This makes Bremen a hybrid of both models. The word "Länder" dates to the Weimar Constitution of 1919, when it replaced the older imperial term "Staaten." Today, people commonly use the compound "Bundesland," although that phrase appears in neither the 1919 text nor the current constitution. A state capital carries the title Landeshauptstadt, reinforcing each Land's distinct administrative identity.

Forging a Federation from Occupation Zones

The Federal Republic of Germany was not born as a single unified entity. It was assembled in 1949 from the three western occupation zones under American, British, and French administration in the aftermath of World War II. What distinguished the German model was the sequence: the individual states came first and then formed the federation, the reverse of the Austrian approach where the national Bund was established before its constituent units were defined. The original roster included eleven states, among them Baden, Württemberg-Baden, and Württemberg-Hohenzollern, all of which existed only briefly. West Berlin, still under Western Allied occupation, regarded itself as part of the new republic and was largely integrated as a de facto state. In 1952, a referendum led to the merger of the three short-lived southern states into Baden-Württemberg. Seven years later, in 1957, the Saar Protectorate entered the federation as Saarland, completing the western map.

Reunification and the Eastern States

The most consequential reshaping of Germany's state map came in 1990, when the territory of the former German Democratic Republic acceded to the Federal Republic. Five re-established eastern states—Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, and Thuringia—joined the federation, and the divided city of Berlin was reunified into a single city-state. This single political act expanded the federation from eleven to sixteen states. The question of whether to further consolidate the eastern map was put to voters in 1996, when a referendum proposed merging Berlin with the surrounding state of Brandenburg. Berliners voted in favour, but the necessary majority in Brandenburg was not reached, and the two remain separate to this day. Among the current sixteen, three carry the appellation Freistaat: Bavaria (since 1919), Saxony (originally from 1919 and again since 1990), and Thuringia (since 1994). The title is purely stylistic and carries no additional legal or political significance, much like American states that style themselves commonwealths.

From Weimar to the Present: Territorial Continuity and Change

Of the seventeen states that existed at the end of the Weimar Republic, only six—Bavaria, Bremen, Hamburg, Hesse, Saxony, and Thuringia—survive today, though some with altered borders. The other eleven were absorbed into larger entities or split apart. Prussia, the most significant of the lost states, was dissolved and its territory distributed among Berlin, Brandenburg, Lower Saxony, North Rhine-Westphalia, Rhineland-Palatinate, Saxony-Anhalt, and Schleswig-Holstein. Every current state except Bavaria contains at least some former Prussian territory. Territories east of the Neisse and Oder rivers, including Silesia, Pomerania, West Prussia-Posen, and East Prussia, were lost in 1945 and now belong to Poland or Russia. Despite this largely settled geography, boundary debates persist. As scholar Arthur B. Gunlicks observes, the German system of dual federalism demands strong Länder with the fiscal and administrative capacity to implement and fund legislation, and an excess of states complicates coordination. Yet every reform proposal to date has failed, keeping territorial questions a live and contentious topic in German politics.