German states, found on the map

Every one on the map

Every place listed below can be asked in this game. Places you find in a passed round drop out of your remaining pool. Grouped into 4 learning regions, matching the rounds on the Germany guide. Regions with no places in this map’s selection are omitted.

What the map tells you about each one

The paragraph the game shows when you find a place, for all 16 of the ones written by hand. Reading them first is not cheating.

Bavaria

Bavaria is about 70,550 square kilometers, a fifth of Germany, and was a kingdom in its own right until 1918. It joined the empire in 1871 on terms that let it keep its own army, railways and postal service, and it still keeps its own political party, its own dialect and a habit of describing everything north of it as Prussia.

Baden-Württemberg

Two old territories stitched together in 1952 by the only state-forming referendum in German history. The Black Forest runs down its western side and the Danube rises on the eastern edge of it. Mercedes and Porsche are both in Stuttgart, and Carl Benz built the first car here in 1885, about 100 kilometers away in Mannheim.

North Rhine-Westphalia

It has around 18 million people, more than any other state and more than the Netherlands. The Ruhr inside it was the coal and steel district that armed Germany through two wars and was occupied by France in 1923 for failing to pay reparations in it. The last hard coal mine closed in 2018.

Lower Saxony

Second largest by area and mostly flat: the North German Plain runs across it to the Wadden Sea. Volkswagen was built at Wolfsburg from 1938 on empty heath, and the state government still owns about twenty percent of the company, which is why Wolfsburg is a town of 125,000 with a car factory the size of a district in it.

Hesse

Frankfurt is in it, and with it the European Central Bank, the German stock exchange and the busiest airport in the country. Hesse’s landgraves rented out their soldiers, and around 30,000 of them fought for Britain in the American War of Independence, which is why the word Hessian means a mercenary in English.

Rhineland-Palatinate

About two thirds of German wine is grown here, most of it on slate slopes above the Moselle that are among the steepest cultivated ground in the world. The Middle Rhine gorge runs through it, some 65 kilometers of narrow valley with about forty castles along the top of it, and it is on the UNESCO list for that.

Berlin

Berlin is a city and a state at once, about 892 square kilometers with 3.7 million people. From 1961 to 1989 a wall of about 155 kilometers ran around West Berlin rather than through the city, because the western half was the island: the whole of it sat 160 kilometers inside East Germany.

Brandenburg

This was the core of Prussia, and its soil is so sandy that it was called the sandbox of the Holy Roman Empire. Potsdam is in it, where the Allies met in July 1945 to divide Germany, and it has more lakes than anywhere else in the country outside the state above it.

Saxony

Meissen, near Dresden, made the first true porcelain outside China in 1710, after the elector locked an alchemist in a castle and told him to produce gold. In autumn 1989 the Monday demonstrations in Leipzig grew from a few hundred people to 300,000 in six weeks, which is what brought the East German state down.

Schleswig-Holstein

The question of who owned it was tangled enough that Palmerston said only three people had ever understood it, of whom one was dead, one mad and he had forgotten. The Kiel Canal crosses it: 98 kilometers opened in 1895, which saves the 460-kilometer trip around Denmark and is the busiest artificial waterway in the world.

Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania

It is the least densely populated state in Germany, with about 69 people per square kilometer against a national 235. The lake district in the middle of it holds over a thousand lakes left by the ice, and the chalk cliffs on Rügen at its eastern end are the ones Caspar David Friedrich painted.

Saxony-Anhalt

Luther nailed up his theses at Wittenberg here in 1517, and the Bauhaus moved to Dessau here in 1925 and built the school building that is the shorthand for the whole movement. Both towns are inside forty kilometers of each other, which gives one middling state two of the more consequential addresses in Europe.

Thuringia

Thuringia calls itself the green heart of Germany and is a third forest. Weimar is in it, where Goethe and Schiller lived and where the 1919 republic was named after the theater it met in, and Buchenwald was built on the hill above that town sixteen years later.

Hamburg

Hamburg is the second largest city in Germany and its largest port, and it is a hundred kilometers from the sea because the Elbe is tidal that far up. It was a free imperial city for centuries and still calls itself the Free and Hanseatic City, and it has more bridges inside it than Venice and Amsterdam put together.

Bremen

Bremen is about 419 square kilometers and is two cities 60 kilometers apart: Bremen itself, up the Weser, and Bremerhaven at the river mouth, which Bremen bought in 1827 when its own harbor silted up. Both were Hanseatic, and the state has stayed a state on the strength of that history and very little else.

Saarland

Saarland is about 2,570 square kilometers, the smallest of the area states. France administered it after both world wars and it voted twice on where it belonged: it chose Germany by ninety percent in 1935 and rejected a European statute in 1955, which returned it to Germany politically in 1957 and economically in 1959.

How this one works

The other maps of Germany

India has the same map in Indian states. Mexico has the same map in Mexican states. United States has the same map in American states. Brazil has the same map in Brazilian states. All three together on the Germany atlas page, the country itself on the Germany guide, and the other two hundred on the world map.