Günter Grass (with The Tin Drum and The Flounder). Geographical distribution of government In West Germany, most of the political agencies and buildings were located in Bonn, while the German Stock Market was located in Frankfurt which became the economic center. The judicial branch of both the German Federal Constitutional Court () and the highest Court of Appeals, were located in Karlsruhe. The West German government was known to be much more decentralised than its state socialist East German counterpart, the former being a federal state and the latter a unitary one. Whilst East Germany was divided into 15 administrative districts (), which were merely local branches of the national government, West Germany was divided into states () with independently elected state parliaments and control of the , the second legislative chamber of the Federal Government. Present geographical and political terminology Today, North Rhine-Westphalia is often considered to be Western Germany in geographical terms. When distinguishing between former West Germany and former East Germany as parts of present-day unified Germany, it has become most common to refer to the (old states) and the (new states), although and are still heard as well. See also Economic history of the German reunification Petersberg Agreement Notes Footnotes References Sources Further reading Bark, Dennis L., and David R. Gress. A History of West Germany Vol 1: From Shadow to Substance, 1945–1963 (1992); ; vol 2: Democracy and Its Discontents 1963–1988 (1992) Berghahn, Volker Rolf. Modern Germany: society, economy, and politics in the twentieth century (1987) ACLS E-book online Hanrieder, Wolfram F. Germany, America, Europe: Forty Years of German Foreign Policy (1989) Henderson, David R. "German Economic Miracle." The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics (2008). Jarausch, Konrad H. After Hitler: Recivilizing Germans, 1945–1995 (2008) Junker, Detlef, ed. The United States and Germany in the Era of the Cold War (2 vol 2004), 150 short essays by scholars covering 1945–1990 MacGregor, Douglas A. The Soviet-East German Military Alliance, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1989. Main, Steven J. "The Soviet Occupation of Germany. Hunger, Mass Violence and the Struggle for Peace, 1945–1947." Europe-Asia Studies (2014) 66#8 pp. 1380–1382. Maxwell, John Allen. "Social Democracy in a Divided Germany: Kurt Schumacher and the German Question, 1945–52." PhD dissertation, West Virginia University, 1969. Merkl, Peter H. ed. The Federal Republic of Germany at Fifty (1999) Mierzejewski, Alfred C. Ludwig Erhard: A Biography (2004) online Pruys, Karl Hugo . Kohl: Genius of