It's some old trolling from back in 2013. Same reason as the South Korean trolling Japan over Tsushima.
Not feasible in the slightest. Berlin lays ontop marshy ground, in fact, Berlin's name is thought to be derived from the Old Polabian word for swamp. This poses a multitude of problems when it comes to construction, especially footings and load distribution. Berlin's soil isn't strong enough to withstand something as grand and heavy as the Volkshalle. There was a test conducted by Speer: the Schwerbelastungskörper, the tl;dr of the wiki page says that anything before a 6 cm drop would be deemed suitable for further construction, in actuality, the concrete cylinder sank 19 cm in 2 1/2 years.
It's from the excellent book Lost States: True Stories of Texlahoma, Transylvania, and Other States that Never Made It, by Michael J. Trinklein. It's got a bunch of maps and brief descriptions of states that were proposed but never came to fruition. It's pretty interesting, and was my first introduction to alternate history.
I'm curious about why they wouldn't just divide California directly along the 36-30 line, given that the debate over whether California would be a free state or a slave state was the main reason for people calling for it to be divided (at least to my knowledge).That’s a good question. As some were upset at the size of Texas at the time, I could see it being its own state (sort of a rump Rio Grande Republic, in that it’s a republican government and would probably be called Rio Grande). More interesting is whether they’d go ahead with the plan to split California (including Baja, of course), because everyone was upset at how big it was OTL.
To my knowledge that was about the plan originally, though maybe some plans deviated from that?
What about a non-Soviet city?
That's a good one; I thought it was gone from the internet forever when the hosting site for it went down.
