BRD (German: Bundesrepublik Deutschland) is an unofficial abbreviation for the Federal Republic of Germany, which was mainly used during the Cold War by East Germany. It was used consistently by the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) between 1968 and 1990 to refer to what was generally known in English as West Germany. Unlike the English equivalent FRG, which was used as an IOC country code and a FIFA trigramme, the use of BRD was increasingly discouraged by the authorities of the Federal Republic of Germany itself, because it was considered to be a derogatory communist term. The term was not banned by law, but its use was discouraged or forbidden in schools. After German reunification, the country is usually referred to simply as Germany (German: Deutschland), and hence the need fo