local coverage or droste effect

I watch re-broadcasts of the various state news programmes in the mornings as I get ready for work, and sometimes regret that I missed some local happening from the day before so I’ll have to work on that—finding out when these shows first air. There’s a revue of reporting from each region, distinguished by a state map, generally, and I think I might be getting a little better at recognizing the Saarland or Baden-Württemberg in a line up and outside of the context of a map of all of Germany. I noticed the other day, that although the correspondence is not exact, most Länder do mirror the larger country in a miniature sense—especially Bavaria and Brandenburg-Berlin. It cannot be intentional, like neighbourhoods streets grouped by trees, composers and sister-cities, and maybe it’s just an illusion of wanting to categorize these chunks of land. It would be an interesting bit of planning, however, if sub-units did reflect the structure of their larger constituency, a quarter, district cut as a smaller, nested map of its greater surroundings.