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Basically, if any other part of Germany roughly the size of OTL eastern Germany had fallen under socialist control as a Soviet satellite, would it have become the same sort of place, and evolved in a similar way?

Say a GDR centered mostly around Bavaria. Bavaria has a bit of a reputation of having an especially strong regional identity. How would that have coloured their relationship with authoritarian socialism and the soviet union? Would pre-existing Bavarian exceptionalism have encouraged them to evolve into a distinct nation, combining ideology with an ""ethnic"" component, making reunification that much harder?

But it also raises economic/strategic questions. Say we'd have a GDR controlling the entire German coast, or one stretching far enough west to control at least a part of the German economic heartland in the Rhine/Ruhr region.

How much of a difference would that make? How much of the GDR was just "Germans + socialism", and how much of it was "these SPECIFIC germans, in that SPECIFIC part of Germany, + socialism"?
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