East Germany was named the German Democratic Republic. It was under a Communist government. West Germany became the Federal Republic of Germany.
In 1949, Winston Churchill described the division of Europe. " From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe.....All these famous cities and the populations around them lie in the Soviet sphere and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and increasing measure of control from Moscow"--Iron Curtain speech, March 5, 1946.
Churchill's phrase "iron curtain" came to represent Europe's division between a mostly democratic Western Europe and a Communist Eastern Europe.
