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Here’s a fun fact: the Saalkreis was one of two districts in the GDR not to be named after their seat of government. Can you guess the other one?
Berlin, Haupstadt der DDR?
Here’s a fun fact: the Saalkreis was one of two districts in the GDR not to be named after their seat of government. Can you guess the other one?
Nope - East Berlin was a sui generis district that probably came closer to a Bezirk than a Kreis in its powers. Also, I think it's fair to say it was named for its seat of government - "Hauptstadt der DDR" was less a part of the name and more a title of the sort that German municipalities quite often adopt (Universitätsstadt, Hansestadt, Landeshauptstadt etc.)
I was about to say my favourite is Point-Alpha-Gemeinde Rasdorf, but that might actually trump it.Hamelin is actually officially Rattenfängerstadt Hameln, which is just taking this tradition to eleven.
The answer, BTW, is Rügen. Originally it was divided into two districts, based in (and named for) the towns of Bergen and Putbus, but when they were merged in 1956, the new district was just named for the island.Here’s a fun fact: the Saalkreis was one of two districts in the GDR not to be named after their seat of government. Can you guess the other one?
Finland 1916
I saw a map of it on Wikimedia Commons and thought I was damned if I let that get past me.I think this is the first time I've seen that beautiful Mynämäki-Mietoinen-Karjala border gore mapped.
There has to be some joke in here about Schweinfurt's ball bearing factory and Hitler only having one...you get the idea.I found out that Nürnberg maintains a statistics website that includes election reports going back to 1928. Among them - a breakdown of the July 1932 election results in Franken.
This is, of course, the most depressing free election held in the Weimar Republic, with the Nazis getting 37 percent of the vote and becoming the strongest party by far in Germany. We can see this very clearly in Franken, which as the home of the NSDAP congress grounds in Nürnberg-Dutzendteich and the offices of Der Stürmer, the Nazi tabloid (whose editor Julius Streicher was also the head of the local party organisation), was a key region for the Nazis. Coburg was the first city to fly the swastika flag from its town hall, the party having won an overall majority in the 1929 local elections, and in January 1932 gave Hitler honorary citizenship. In April, Hitler failed to be elected President, losing by a 15-point margin to Paul von Hindenburg, the incumbent, who had the backing of every party but the Nazis and the KPD. Even so, the Nazis looked with confidence to the next Reichstag elections, which came surprisingly soon - the emergency government of Heinrich Brüning was dismissed in May, and the new cabinet under Franz von Papen looked likely to be toppled by the Reichstag if it were allowed to meet, so Hindenburg and Papen gambled on an early dissolution.
The result was disastrous for pretty much everyone except the Nazis, or possibly including the Nazis - with the NSDAP holding over a third of the seats and the KPD another sixth, there was no path to a majority for anyone. With only the KPD, SPD, Centre/BVP, DNVP and NSDAP breaking into double figures of seats, the usual formula of a centre-right government relying on passive support from the centre-left or vice versa was completely unfeasible, and the SPD and KPD's mutual distrust made a popular front a nonstarter even if such an alliance could've won majority support (it probably wouldn't have, unless the Centre somehow got on board - considering Brüning and his faction were in ascendance at this point, I'd rate that unlikely). The only option left was another early election, which came in November and yielded another inconclusive result.
Returning to Franken, the religious split within the region is on clear display here. The former prince-bishoprics of Würzburg, Bamberg and Eichstätt showed strong majorities for the BVP (in grey), mirroring the general pattern in Catholic Germany, while the Protestant regions around Ansbach and Bayreuth (both formerly Hohenzollern principalities) were equally strong for the Nazis. The only areas not to vote for either were the small industrial cities of Schwabach and Schweinfurt, which both voted SPD by narrow margins - Nürnberg and Fürth, which had been SPD cities until then, came out with small Nazi pluralities due to the vote split between the SPD and KPD.
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