Karl Marx vs Konrad Adenauer

How we measured this

We downloaded every OpenStreetMap way tagged highway=* inside each state’s boundary whose name contains “Karl Marx”, “Thälmann”, “Rosa Luxemburg”, “Karl Liebknecht”, “Adenauer” or “Kennedy” (with or without hyphen), with the QLever SPARQL service (University of Freiburg) on the OpenStreetMap planet file of 21 September 2026 (queried 4 November 2026). Each way was assigned to the municipality (official municipality key, AGS) its nodes lie in. Because one street is usually split into many ways, we count distinct street names per municipality: a Karl-Marx-Straße and a Karl-Marx-Platz in the same town count as two, two pieces of the same Karl-Marx-Straße as one. The figure is the number of streets named after the four socialist figures per 100,000 inhabitants (Destatis, 31 December 2025).

• Matching is on the name only: a “Kennedy” street is assumed to honour John F. Kennedy (names containing Robert or Edward Kennedy were excluded), and “Thälmann” to mean Ernst Thälmann. Short forms such as “Marxstraße” or “Liebknechtstraße” are not counted because they can refer to other people (Wilhelm Marx, Wilhelm Liebknecht).
• Squares, alleys, footpaths and estate roads count if they are mapped as a named highway. Places, schools and parks that are not mapped as ways are not counted.
• Ways whose nodes fall in no area with a municipality key were dropped (0); platforms, bus stops and roads under construction were ignored (89).
• OpenStreetMap is compiled by volunteers. Coverage of Germany is among the best in the world but not complete, and how thoroughly a feature type is mapped can differ between regions.
• Our counts are derived from OpenStreetMap and are released under the Open Database License (ODbL) 1.0: © OpenStreetMap contributors.