Recent content by Iserlohn

Very true! And even today you again have a positive connotation to the label "Hanseatic" with lots of cultural and institutional partnerships going on, even including non-sovereign historic Hanseatic cities. And, for the record, the Hatje article specifically claims that this movement around the...

As part of my research on German state reorganization proposals I occasionally stumble across other wonderful sources that contain interesting proposals that don't find the limits of my personal thread. This here is one of them: I've found two articles, "Die hidden agenda einer »Hanseatischen...

I just wanted to do a quick update on what the following few posts will entail. My aim is to get two posts out before Pentecost (when I'll be going on a little vacation), and then the last two, which will be quite hefty, in June. After that, this project will go on hiatus for a bit. Probably...

This is one big reason why this topic fascinates me so much. The identities of Germans are mostly based on relatively small units, either cities or regions within states. E.g. a 2016 YouGov poll had only 31 percent of Germans state that they identify primarily as Germans (39 in the East, 29 in...

Yes, pretty much this. Besides the KPD no German political organization that I know of had a preference for a unitary German state. Not even the Nazis were that interested in unitarianism, given how much free range the many Gauleiter had. The closest there ever was to a non-Communist proposal...

Crossposting my most recent entry on German state border reorganization proposals because it includes two maps!

Germany 1949 - A Chance For Immediate Reorganization? Walter Christaller & Werner Münchheimer As should be evident by earlier posts in this little collection of mine, the time between 1945 and 1956 was an especially productive time for German state reorganization proposals due to the...

Very nice! To me this setup feels like if there was never a proper French occupation zone established, at most something akin to the way the British handled their occupation zone by having other Western allies (and Poland) establish small zones. All very sensible options. But also, as someone...

Due to financial contraints I can't order these types of books new, and getting them used is a crapshoot, so I've mostly been limiting myself to online publications.... A bunch of books are available to borrow digitally at Archive.org, some are legitimately available for free by their...

Sharing a quick update that I got my hands on both "Hessen im 20. Jahrhundert: Eine politische Geschichte" by Walter Mühlhausen (very good book, really glad I got it, I'm working on a Hesse follow-up post already) and on Werner Münchheimer's "Die Neugliederung Deutschlands", a 1949 publication...

Hesse - Part One: The Personal Accounts of Ludwig Bergsträsser of the Post-Nazi Order I stumbled across two sources created by Ludwig Bergsträsser, a Social Democratic politician who worked closely with the American military administration, even serving as the “President of the German...

Yes, I've also seen proposals regarding Hessen that are like the ones you've described (both in the early years and more recent ones), and one from the Kaiserreich (apparently suggested by the Grand Duke of Hesse himself) on which I'd like to do more research myself. However most of these...

There seems to be a general discussion on how big states need to be in order to function under modern Germany's federalism. Advocates for smaller states (especially ones based on cultural lines) usually pair their proposals with certain degrees of regional cooperation or for a stronger federal...

No problem, it's fun! Anyway, I did now create that thread and I'll share any future findings there. However, if I do have access to a good visual aid, then I'll also share it here. Speaking of which, let me crosspost my introduction to it, which includes two proposals from the Truman...

Hey y'all! Since my posts on the reorganization of Germany in the "Proposals and War Aims That Didn't Happen Map Thread" are quite popular and it's very fun to research, I decided to spin it off into its own thread. This allows me to do the following: 1) Make multiple posts in a row without it...