How Germany Is Still Divided Today

▶ In this video I talk about how, despite having been reunited since 1990, Germany is still - statistically - divided in two. Showing the lasting consequences of its East-West Cold War division.

▶ Thanks for watching, remember to subscribe to catch future videos!

[General.Knowledge]

*Are there any other countries in which a similar 'division' or a big difference can be visible between two areas?*

[spaghettooschifo]

It would be maybe also interesting to see the difference between North and South Italy, since there the difference is even bigger then in Germany even tho the south is already a part of Italy for many many years

[tobiwan]

The East German farms are bigger because they were collectivized under Soviet rule and then privatized as a whole after reunification.
Btw, the unemployment situation has improved a lot, but differences are still there although they shrank a lot over the last decade.

[Peterk]

As an Eastern German who moved on trash:

It still feels that in the east the idea of maybe not throwing something away, because one day you might need it, seems stronger in the eastern parts.

Probably a leftover from the times where even if you had the money, you couldn't buy what you might wanted.

[nuster]

Actually the east of Germany is pretty nice if you have a good Job.
The Houses are not only Cheaper, they are also bigger, its not that dense, the Countryside is beautyfull.
The East of Germany is a very nice Region

[TrainsReloaded]

Aside from street lights Berlin also has very visible infrastructure differences - For example, while tram lines were still operating in East-Berlin, it's Western counterpart decommisioned and dismantled all tram lines in the West in order to have a more car-centric city. This is nowadays a problem for city planners, since for a more extensive public transport new lines have to be built in the Western part of the city from scratch again, while in the Eastern part the systems are still up and running.

[Micha-qvuf]

Just one little correction: you can't say east Germans were not allowed to leave the country. That's not correct. It was just difficult to go to western countries. But 1. It was not impossible, just difficult depending on the situation and 2. Travelling to the east European states was very common. You could also visit other communist countries like Vietnam if you had the money.

[gerategefunden]

A very good topic. What many people don't know is that only the Soviet-occupied part of Germany had to pay reparations to the USSR. Huge amounts of factories, railway tracks, agricultural machinery and other things were dismantled and taken to the USSR.

[falconJB]

"they were reunited in 1940"
That is impressive they reunited before they were even divided.

[luisalmeida]

A German friend told me that when Germany was split in two, West Germany changed its capital to a small town like Bonn because they always had in mind the reunification and restoration of Berlin as the nation's capital, which would have been much harder to do if they had changed the capital to a powerful city like Hamburg.

[sebastiankoch]

This is my first comment on youtube, but I really felt like I have to say this.If you make videos like this, you should really team up with people from both sides you are talking about. As an eastern German I can say that the facts you were talking about were right, but your conclusions about the reasons were terribly wrong. Most of these things could have been explained easily to you by someone who knows about the culture and history of the country.
For example are not many people working in eastern germany in agriculture and most of the farm land is not owned by private farmers. During GDR times farmers were expropriated by the state and the farmers were forced to go into agricultural production communities. These communities often still exist as private companies. So only a low amount of people is owning all the farm land.
Another Example is the relation of tents to campers. It was way more common in the gdr to go camping and it was allowed to camp in other countries of the eastern block. So saysing the eastern germans were not allowed to leave the country is wrong. But it was very difficult to get a camper, since they were expansive and you had to wait more than a decade for them so there are not many old campers in the eastern part and nowadays most people can't afford.

[kleckerklotz]

Let me say something to some points, which are not as accurate as they should be:
1:00 "Seperate areas of occupation were established depending on where each side had invaded." That's only partly true. A large chunk of East Germany was invaded by American and British soldiers. The western allies had fought their way to the western shores of the river Elbe. That means whole Thuringia, half of Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt was occupied by western allies. But they traded that chunk of land away for a tiny part of Berlin. This was agreed in 1945 during the Yalta conference.
4:36 Demographics. Here you get to a key point, why the East is different from the West. 2 Million mostly young people left East Germany for a better life in the West in the years between 1990 and 2010. That was a brain drain, which cripples the East in so many ways. And almost every other map you show is influenced and distorted by exactly that brain drain.
5:45 Trash and simple interpretation: more money means more consume means more trash. That's very likely the best explanation.
5:49 "But that could also be something cultural. Although it's odd, since the evironmental concern is higher in the West" I don't think so. Both can't be the case. The evironmental concerns are pretty much evenly distributed among Germans. I wonder where you get that from? Votes? (EDIT: Oh yes, you do. LOL) If it was from votes, let me tell you, that one of the main driving forces for the reunification was an enviromentalist movement in the GDR. And most of these people still live in the East. But the higher concern today is wealth distribution, that's why they do not vote for the green party. In the eyes of most (fortunately not all) West Germans every East German is some kind of right wing racist idiot, who doesn't care about anything. That bullshit is pushed by mass media. And I absolutely do not like this trend.
6:00 "Perhaps more people live of their land." Bad guess. Private land ownership is very low in East Germany. Land is mainly owned by big companies nowadays. And that's due to the fact, that the socialist state owned most of the land before and that land was sold out by the "Treuhand" after the reunification. Google "Landwirtschaftliche Produktionsgenossenschaft" or short "LPG". Private land owners were force to join the LPG by the communists after WW2. And that's why the size of farms is bigger in East Germany (4:25). And that's why private land ownership is way higher on average in West Germany.

If all your information is from maps, you will miss important facts. And all your conclusions are very distorted, simply you do not get the main point, why the East and the West is different: That brain drain that crippled the East.

[Hendricus]

4:25 Actually, that was because many small farms were put together under 1 control in the early years, for which LPGs, Landwirtschaftliche Produktionsgenossenschaften (Agricultural Production Cooperative) were created to manage them. But yes, there is a tendency of people growing some stuff themselves here, which isn't nearly as present in the west

[rehurekj]

I dunno, but there's a lot left out or misrepresented in this vid. e.g. the economic collapse of East was to large part caused by 1:1 exchange rate and privatisation almost always meant not that HQ moved to West but that company from the West bought and immediately closed the East German company etc etc. 
One can clearly see that in East German case there was less of actual reforms or privatisation and more of market share and labour force takeover- you just have to look at Czechia: both regions had similar GDP/ capita and still have similar GDP PPP/ capita and were and still are similarly highly developed but Czechia didn't have Western cousin to be bought out by so they had to repair their own roads and homes and reform their economy by themselves and it took them more time but the same time they managed to preserve most of their industrial base and even many established communist brands are still around and thriving.

[NeLiT]

The last point of East Germans not being able to travel during Soviet times is a lie. I'm a Bulgarian, have met many elderly Germans that used to be part of the East. Have heard stories from them, they've always loved travelling to Bulgaria for Vacations even during Soviet times. Tbh many of the old photos of my city ( Varna ) is made by East German Photographers who used to travel here frequently for vacation during the summer. Many have also complained how the city was a lot better during the communist era, lmao D:

[Laura.hrtmnn]

I was born in former east Germany in the early 2000s and my grandparents were very involved when it came to raising me. Born after the unification, my homecountry was always considered a western country, when actually the former sowiet influence still played a role in my upbringing. It was kind of like being too western for the east, yet still too eastern to fully belong to the western nations.
Many people my age take big pride in being from the former GDR. They hold on to artefacts of their parents youth and feel some kind of nostalgia for a seemingly more simple time, which they never got to live in. (The German word for East is Osten or Ost for short, so we even got the word Ostalgie, to describe this feeling)
The older generation sometimes longs for this as well, saying things like "of course we were locked in, of course the system was kind of set up for failure, of course there were things like espionage, but the huge majority of us still had easy, good and affordable life's with everything they needed"

[raymondhartmeijer]

8:46 No, in the old GDR, citizens could leave the country for holiday for example, but only in other European Soviet-influenced states ofc. Hungary, I believe was a popular destination

[SuperAxewielder]

The reason for the camping difference is also that there weren't a lot of cars in the gdr. Why would you buy a trailer, if you are still waiting for your car.

[tobiasmazur]

5:06 it's true that the population density is higher in the West, but this has also been the case prior to the Cold War. Especially the region around the Rhine river, which is part of the "blue banana", has always had the highest population density in Germany, and the Ruhr region with its coal mining and steel production was basically the economic center of Germany during the Industrialization era. Of course the Iron Curtain and its fall deepened the situation, since, as you mentioned, company HQs move to more economic stable regions (which leads to higher economic growth, which leads to higher population influx), but the roots of the different population densities lie in the decades before WWII.

[endura]

Living in east Germany myself, i belief the main reason for the lower trash production is the low availability of goods in the GDR. Since people were not able to just buy any new product anytime they wanted to they stored old things instead of throwing them away because maybe they could use them in the future. This still happens today in almost any family.