I know that Hamburg and Berlin are cities but also they are states in Germany as well.
And this makes some sense as Berlin and Hamburg are the two largest cities in Germany. Also Hamburg is a major port and Berlin is the seat of government.
But why Breman? It isn’t large the state only has 664,000 people and the state has two parts. The city of Breman and Bremerhaven (pop 116,000)
OK so why is such a small city a state. There are a lot bigger cities, like Munich which are not states in their own rite.
I am assuming there must be a historical reason for this. I also know at one time there was no unified Germany just a lot of “German States,” so I reckon it must be historical (the reason this city is also a state)
Bremen was a free Imperial city under the Hanseatic League, which meant they were ruled directly by the Holy Roman Emperor and not by a local prince who owned the surrounding territory. The Wikipedia articles don’t state how it became a free Imperial city but the two most common methods were either as a gift from the Emperor or becoming rich enough to buy the status. Bremen was a pretty important trading town along the route so it may have been the latter. So when German federation came around they weren’t part of a larger territory that became a state. Munich, on the other hand, was the seat of the kingdom of Bavaria, so its fate was different.
There were a lot of independent city states in the old empire: 51 by 1803, then a resolution (Reichsdeputatationshauptschluß) of the estates and territorial entities made 45 of them part of larger states. Augsburg and Nuremberg were snapped up by Bavaria in 1805/1806, Frankfurt by Prussia in 1866 (being on the losing side of the Prussia-Austria war.) Lübeck was given to Schleswig-Holstein by the Nazis in 1937 (which neither the Allied military government nor the Federal Republic chose to reverse). Which, after WWII, left Hamburg and Bremen. Those two cities chose not to become part of other states later.
Berlin is a special case - it was historically never a free city but the capital of Prussia. That it’s a city-state now is an artifact of the Allies each wanting a piece of it, and of the abolition of Prussia. In 1996 the Berliners voted in a referendum to amalgamate with the state of Brandenburg, but the Brandenburgers voted that they would not have them.