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Be careful with the causality here. Some East/West distinctions predate the wall. A vivid example is the 1933 electoral map http://brilliantmaps.com/nazi-votes

Be careful with the causality here. Some East/West distinctions predate the wall. A vivid example is the 1933 electoral map http://brilliantmaps.com/nazi-votes/ http://brilliantmaps.com/nazi-votes/ but this too reflects an older reality. (Of course some of the contrast is indeed due to the postwar history, just not all.) And likewise, the US North/South culture war long predates the civil war. Puritans and Cavaliers didn't exactly see eye to eye 200 years before that.

toyg 9y ago
Even limiting ourselves to post-WW2, the wall went up more than 15 years after the end of the war; actual border lines were basically marked in 1944 already, and made official in 1949. That’s almost a generation spent apart before the wall symbolized the division. East Germany officially lasted 50 years; that buoy will only be passed in 2039.
- improbable22 9y ago
  Sure! Perhaps I should have said iron curtain instead of wall. My point was only that quite a few of these differences East/West of the border would have been unsurprising long before the war. Some long long before: bits of the west were part of Charlemagne's empire. Likewise the US, where it's not so much of a stretch to map the culture war onto the English civil war.
taejo 9y ago
Regions 1 and 5-9 are now part of Poland rather than East Germany, and once you remove them the pattern is a lot less clear.
- improbable22 9y ago
  This is true. About the people, I don't actually know much about where they were moved to. Do you perhaps know of a good summary? Within the current borders, names ending -ow & -itz (of slavic origin) look like they have a transition near the iron curtain: http://truth-and-beauty.net/experiments/ach-ingen-zell/ http://truth-and-beauty.net/experiments/ach-ingen-zell/ I thought this was very old, but I guess there could be some mass renaming campaign I somehow didn't know about...

toyg 9y ago

Even limiting ourselves to post-WW2, the wall went up more than 15 years after the end of the war; actual border lines were basically marked in 1944 already, and made official in 1949. That’s almost a generation spent apart before the wall symbolized the division. East Germany officially lasted 50 years; that buoy will only be passed in 2039.

improbable22 9y ago
Sure! Perhaps I should have said iron curtain instead of wall. My point was only that quite a few of these differences East/West of the border would have been unsurprising long before the war. Some long long before: bits of the west were part of Charlemagne's empire. Likewise the US, where it's not so much of a stretch to map the culture war onto the English civil war.

taejo 9y ago

Regions 1 and 5-9 are now part of Poland rather than East Germany, and once you remove them the pattern is a lot less clear.

improbable22 9y ago
This is true. About the people, I don't actually know much about where they were moved to. Do you perhaps know of a good summary? Within the current borders, names ending -ow & -itz (of slavic origin) look like they have a transition near the iron curtain: http://truth-and-beauty.net/experiments/ach-ingen-zell/ http://truth-and-beauty.net/experiments/ach-ingen-zell/ I thought this was very old, but I guess there could be some mass renaming campaign I somehow didn't know about...