Werner Reutter - The German Länder: An Introduction (essentials)

The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content.

Responsible Editor: Jan Treibel

This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH part of Springer Nature.

The registered company address is: Abraham-Lincoln-Str. 46, 65189 Wiesbaden, Germany

This is the English version of a textbook about the German Lnder. It is an offspring of my research interest on German federalism and its constituent units, the Lnder. In fact, I studied the Lnder, some of their policies, their institutions and how they fit into the overall political system of Germany for some time and found that they deserve an introduction that can be used by students and all those interested in this subject in Germany.

Even though there are a number of books on German federalism also in English there is no up-to-date overview on the German Lnder. With this book I try to provide such an overview and introduce a topic which I find deserves greater interest also abroad. In order to disseminate my findings also to a wider audience in other countries, my publisher, Springer VS, offered me the chance to participate in a larger project in which artificial intelligence comes into play. Springer VS cooperated with DeepL an online tool for translations. Deepl made a first translation of the original text.

However, I took some liberties in correcting and adjusting the translated version provided by DeepL.com to make the book more accessible to readers not familiar with the details and intricacies of German federalism and German Lnder. This included also some decisions on terms. In many cases, I retained the German term instead of replacing it with its English twin. E.g. throughout the book I talk about the Lnder even though subnational units very often are called states like in the USA. However, this would have been rather confusing as we use the term state in Germany to refer to what Americans or English people would call government. With regard to German quotes, I mostly translated them into English. However, if it seemed more sensible I left out the quotation marks but kept, of course, the reference.

The textbook looks at German federalism from the perspective of the Lnder. The first Chapter introduces the topic and explains the concept of the federal state. In addition, the structure of the book is presented.