East versus West Berlin: does the divide still show in the data?

The wall came down in 1989, but the line it drew is still the first thing many people reach for when they describe Berlin. The expectation is a poorer East and a richer West. On the numbers we map, that expectation no longer holds. Average income per resident is now slightly higher in the former-East Bezirke than in the former-West ones. Where the old divide does still show is in two specific places: new homes are built overwhelmingly in the East, and the international population leans to the West and the centre.

One caveat before the figures. Two Bezirke, Mitte and Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, straddle the old border, because each merged an East district and a West district in the 2001 reform. We leave both out of the East and West averages below and compare only the Bezirke that sit clearly on one side.

The income gap has closed, and slightly reversed

Across the four clearly former-East Bezirke, income per resident averages about 27.6k euro a year. Across the six clearly former-West Bezirke it averages about 26.4k euro. So the East now sits a little above the West, the opposite of the usual assumption.

The averages hide a wide spread within each group. The single highest Bezirk is in the West, Steglitz-Zehlendorf at 30.4k, and the single lowest is also in the West, Neukölln at 22.8k. The East is more tightly bunched in the middle.

Read the table and the old map breaks down. The East and West Bezirke are interleaved from top to bottom, and the West holds both the highest and the lowest figure. On income, the side of the city tells you very little now.

New construction is overwhelmingly in the East

Where the divide is still sharp is in building. We look at the share of homes built in roughly the last ten years, and here the East and West separate cleanly with almost no overlap.

Every East Bezirk sits above every West Bezirk, with only Spandau coming close to the bottom of the East range. Treptow-Köpenick, at 12.2 percent, has more than five times the recent-build share of Tempelhof-Schöneberg at 2.4 percent. The West was largely built up before reunification, while the East still had open land and large estates ripe for redevelopment. For anyone looking for a newer flat, this is the clearest practical legacy of the split.

The international population leans West and centre

The last divide runs the other way. The born-abroad share of residents is higher in the West and the central Bezirke than in the East.

In the West, Neukölln stands at 30 percent born abroad, Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf at 28 percent, Spandau at 26 percent and Tempelhof-Schöneberg at 24 percent. In the East the figures are lower: Lichtenberg at 24 percent, Pankow at 19 percent, Marzahn-Hellersdorf at 17 percent and Treptow-Köpenick at 16 percent.

The pattern reflects history. Postwar labour migration settled in the West, and that international population and its networks have stayed and grown there. The East started from a much lower base after 1990 and is catching up only slowly. Lichtenberg is the clearest exception, an East Bezirk now level with the lower end of the West.

What the line means today

So the divide is real, but it has moved. It is no longer mainly about money. It is about which side got the new buildings, where the East now leads, and which side draws international residents, where the West and centre still lead. The old map is a poor guide to income and a good guide to housing stock and who your neighbours are likely to be.

You can look at any Bezirk on its own page, or compare neighbourhoods yourself in the explorer, and every figure comes from the public sources on our data sources page.