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Growth in Germany: In the west, the population grew faster than in Germany as a whole
Photo: Orbon Alija / Getty Images
The population in Germany has more than quadrupled within the current national borders in the past 200 years.
At the beginning of the 19th century, almost 20 million people lived in what is now the Federal Republic of Germany, as the Federal Institute for Population Research (BiB) announced on Tuesday in Wiesbaden.
Today there are more than 83 million people.
However, the number rose differently in individual regions of Germany.
The population increased most in the west in North Rhine-Westphalia, Hesse, Rhineland-Palatinate and Saarland.
In comparison, around six times as many people live in these four federal states today as they did 200 years ago.
Today there are 29.3 million - 200 years ago it was 4.9 million.
In Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg, the number quadrupled from 5.7 to 24.2 million.
Schleswig-Holstein, Hamburg, Lower Saxony and Bremen recorded an increase from 3.0 to 13.4 million inhabitants within 200 years.
There were ups and downs in the East German federal states, including Berlin.
For a long time between 1850 and 1920 this region was the most populous when compared to the west, north and south.
Until the Second World War, the development ran parallel to the west.
The division of Germany has a share in population dynamics
"This changed with the division of Germany and the founding of the GDR," announced the BiB.
Since 1950 the population has decreased from 20.5 to 16.1 million, while the west and south of Germany have once again recorded significant increases.
This illustrates the considerable influence of the division of Germany on population dynamics, explained the BiB geographer Sebastian Klüsener.
In the meantime there were about as many people in eastern Germany as there were around 1910. In the past ten years, however, the region has grown again by 265,000 people.
joe / AFP / dpa
