Comment by frantathefranta

7 hours ago

The German acronym (DDR) is much better known among Eastern Europeans. My parents (Czech) would almost never call it East Germany.

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frantathefranta

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spankibalt  2 hours ago

East German here. I have never met East Germans who called their home country Ostdeutschland before the Wende; that was very much a West German thing, and even then not as widespread as one might think (i. e. "DDR" was the much more common name amongst them). After the Wende it became (more of) a thing for Easterners as well, especially in context with the identity: Ostdeutsche(r).

  • mobilio  2 hours ago

    Bulgarian here - for me DDR/GDR is well known. Also FRG.

    • paganel  11 minutes ago

      Romanian here, the same applied here on all counts. Back in the '80s and going into the '90s we also used to name an infamous and poor Bucharest area as RFG (FRG in English), which was the capital letters of those three neighborhoods taken together as an acronym.

holgerschurig  1 hour ago

In West-Germany we used a plethora of names:

* "SBZ" -> Sowjetisch besetzte Zone -> sowjet occupied zone

* "Ost-Zone"

* "DDR"

* "Ost-Deutschland"

Almost no one spelled out "DDR" with "Deutsche Demokratische Republik", since that was a lie. There was little democracy there.

People that fled from east-germany early (e.g. before the wall) usually used "SBZ "or "Zone". And it was usually meant in a derogatory sense. "DDR" was more neutral, although few people in west-germany had a neutral view on the eastern regime.

holgerschurig  1 hour ago

Fun thing: some people here in Germany act like there is no East Germany. For them it is "Middle Germany". As if we still had Schlesien and Pommern ...

Look at radio stations. We have SWR: Süd-West Rundfunk (south west) in Baden-Württemberg and Rheinland-Pfalz. We have WDR: Westdeutscher Rundfunk (west) in Nordrhein-Westfalen. We have NDR: Norddeutscher Rundfunk (north). In Niedersachsen, Schleswig-Holstein, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Hamburg (not Bremen).

... and then we have Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk (middle) in Sachsen, Sachsen-Anhalt, Thüringen.

And no one is in the east ...