Germany: independence and unification with power
2002
Anyone examining the map of Europe in 1830 would be unable
to locate Germany. There was the German Confederation, the
Bund, which was almost, but not quite, the same thing. The German
part of Schleswig, which later belonged to the empire, was not a
member. That is perhaps a minor point. But East and West Prussia
as well as Posen were also beyond the pale. Though Posen had
a mixed population of Poles and Germans, it was part of Prussia
and therefore entered the empire; it is now with Poland. Bohemia
and Moravia-then part of Austria-were inside the Bund. They
are now the Czech part of Czechoslovakia. Luxemburg was also
a member. Nine years later it lost its French speaking half to
Belgium and the German speaking half remained within the
Confederation. But is Luxemburg really a part of Germany? The
Confederation was not Germany. The language boundary did
not define its frontiers either. Alsace was solidly German-speaking,
as was north-eastern Lorraine; so were seven-tenths of Switzerland.
About one quarter of the Austrians were German speakers. But
were they also Germans? The nobility of the Russian Baltic
provinces were pure German as was their culture. Going by the
standards of the day it would not be unfair to regard these areas
as German too. Indeed in eastern Europe it was impossible to
draw geographical lines between different linguistic cultures.
There was many a city dominated by Germans and Yiddishspeaking Jews deep inside the Polish countryside. Here too each
social group was sometimes a separate linguistic nation. In other
words, in the east the lines of German nationhood were feathered,
geographically and socially. In the west the language frontierwas sharp and relatively stable over several generations. It ran
in a more or less straight line south from just east of Liege to the
north-eastern tip of Lake Geneva.
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