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Can you place all 198 districts of Hungary?
Can you place all 98 municipalities of Denmark?
Can you locate all 11 provinces of Belgium?
Can you locate all 21 counties of Sweden?
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Germany is divided into sixteen states, and below them into the tier that actually issues your number plate: 400 Landkreise and kreisfreie Städte. Every German address sits in exactly one, the boundaries are signposted, and the first letters of every car around you were handed out by the district office of whichever one you are standing in. This page is the whole list, grouped by state the way the game groups it.
A Landkreis is a rural district: a county of small towns and villages, run by an elected Landrat and a Kreistag sitting in the Kreisstadt. A kreisfreie Stadt is a city that does the same job for itself, so it belongs to no district at all and answers to the state directly. The two are the same rank. Of the 400 in this game, 294 are Landkreise and 106 are kreisfreie Städte, and between them they cover the country with nothing left over.
The word changes with the state, which is the first thing to get used to. North Rhine-Westphalia and Schleswig-Holstein call theirs a Kreis rather than a Landkreis. Baden-Wuerttemberg calls its independent cities Stadtkreise instead of kreisfreie Städte. Three districts have opted out of the vocabulary altogether: Region Hannover, Städteregion Aachen and Regionalverband Saarbrücken are each a city and its surrounding district merged into one body, and each kept a name of its own invention. This game marks every independent city "(Stadt)", so the type is on the label wherever the name alone would leave you guessing.
Three of the sixteen states are cities themselves. Berlin and Hamburg are a state and a district at once, so each is a single click on this map. Bremen is a state of two: the city of Bremen, and Bremerhaven sixty kilometres downstream with Lower Saxony in between.
What makes this a clue rather than trivia is the Kfz-Kennzeichen. The letters at the left hand end of a German plate are issued by a district's registration office, so B is Berlin, M is Munich, HH is Hamburg, and three letter codes like MSP or NEA belong to rural districts nobody outside Bavaria has heard of. Learn the districts and you have learned the shape of that system. The same boundaries carry the K roads, the Kreisstraßen, whose numbers restart inside every district and mean nothing outside it.
Below a district are the Gemeinden, the eleven thousand or so municipalities that actually run the schools and the water. Above it, in the larger states, sits the Regierungsbezirk, an arm of the state government rather than an elected tier, and it is not on this map.
The traps are mostly names that travel. There are two Frankfurts, and the game distinguishes them the way Germany does, as Frankfurt am Main and Frankfurt (Oder). Rostock is a city and a district of the same name, and the district is officially called "Landkreis Rostock" for exactly that reason, which is why it is the one name on this map with the word in front rather than behind. Neustadt appears three times over with three different tails, and Oldenburg is both a city in the north and the rural district beside it. None of that is a memory problem, it is a reading problem: the whole name is the answer.
Each state can be switched on and off on its own in the start dialog, which is the only sane way through a list this long. Saarland is ten minutes, Bavaria is a project, and nobody should meet all sixteen at once.
The clearest example of the pattern that makes this map hard. The city of Munich is its own district, and this is the separate rural district wrapped around three sides of it, holding the airport road, the lakes to the south and about 350,000 people who do not live in Munich. Ask for the Stadt and you want the shape in the middle; ask for the Landkreis and you want the horseshoe. Ansbach, Bayreuth, Osnabrück, Kassel and fifteen or so others work exactly the same way.
Hanover stopped being a kreisfreie Stadt in 2001, when the city and the district around it merged into a single body that took a new name rather than either of the old ones. No district that is not itself a city holds more people, and on this map it is the large blob in the middle of Lower Saxony with no hole cut out of it. Städteregion Aachen did the same thing in 2009, and Regionalverband Saarbrücken is the third of the kind.
The largest district in Germany, about 5,500 square kilometres of lakes and forest between Neubrandenburg and the Müritz, and a good illustration of how the east reads: a few enormous districts created by merging older ones, with names describing the landscape instead of naming a town. Compare Schweinfurt, the smallest of the 400, which is a city of 35 square kilometres sitting inside the rural district that shares its name.
Worth knowing because older maps disagree with this one. Eisenach was a kreisfreie Stadt until July 2021, when it lost its independence and joined the Wartburgkreis that already wrapped around all but its northern edge, taking Germany from 401 districts to 400. Count the districts on a map printed before then and you will be one out; the Göttingen of today likewise swallowed Osterode am Harz in 2016.
A rural district: the tier of German government between a state and a municipality. It is run by an elected Landrat and a Kreistag, sits in a Kreisstadt, and looks after the things a single village cannot, such as hospitals, waste, vehicle registration and the secondary schools. North Rhine-Westphalia and Schleswig-Holstein call the same thing a Kreis.
400, made up of 294 Landkreise and 106 kreisfreie Städte. That has been the number since July 2021, when Eisenach joined the Wartburgkreis and the count fell from 401. The districts are spread very unevenly: Bavaria has 96 of them, Saarland has six, and Berlin and Hamburg are one apiece.
Rank, no. Coverage, yes. A kreisfreie Stadt is a city large enough to do a district's work for itself, so it belongs to no district and deals with the state directly. A Landkreis does that work for the towns and villages inside it. Both answer to the state above them, which is why a German map shows independent cities as holes punched out of the districts around them.
Yes, and it is the main reason to learn them. The one to three letters before the seal are issued by a district registration office, so a plate starting M was registered in Munich, one starting SHK in the Saale-Holzland-Kreis in Thuringia, and so on. Since 2012 a district may reissue codes belonging to towns it absorbed in an older reform, so a few codes now point at a neighbour of the district they are named for, but the letters still land you within a district or two.
Mostly from geography. A district is named after its main town, after a river or range it covers, or after the two towns that were merged to make it, joined with a hyphen. Endings in -kreis simply mean district, as in Ortenaukreis or Rhein-Sieg-Kreis. The word Land in a name, as in Weimarer Land or Altenburger Land, marks the countryside around a town rather than the town itself.
The city districts of the Ruhr, which are a dozen small shapes packed edge to edge with no countryside between them, and the rural districts of Bavaria, where 96 names cover a quarter of the map and many of them are villages you have never heard of. The pairs where a city and its surrounding district share a name are the third group, and they are lost by reading too fast rather than by not knowing.
The tier above this one is Germany States, and the sixteen answers there are the sixteen groups here, so it is the place to start if this map is too much at once. Germany Guardrails is those same states read off the side of a road. For another country's districts, Indonesia Regencies is the only other map here at this level.
