Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford
Bonn was chosen as the West German capital because Germans were afraid that if they chose Frankfurt, it would lessen odds of reunification. Bonn was obviously not a national capital, while Frankfurt was a natural capital
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Frankfurt has always been an important German city, but I'm not sure if it was apparent that it would have been the natural capital of West Germany.
A lot of the things that make Frankfurt important today were not even really well developed in 1949, like the financialization of the world and commercial air travel.
Between 1871 and 1933, Germany was really just Prussia and its Junker class steering the ship the way England is by far the most important part of the United Kingdom. The new postwar boundaries obviously killed Prussia completely - being that it was now chopped up among 4 countries and its inhabitants scattered by ethnic cleansing - but it wouldn't have been obvious at the time that Frankfurt, which was not even the historical capital of Hesse, could serve as a de facto capital for the Federal Republic.