Pan-Germanism
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Pan-Germanism (German: Pangermanismus or Alldeutsche Bewegung) is a pan-nationalist political idea that seeks to unify all ethnic Germans, German-speaking people, broader groups of Germanic descent, or any combination of the three, into a single nation-state often called Greater Germany.
It was highly influential in 19th-century German politics amid the unification of Germany. Nonetheless, the German Empire was proclaimed as a nation-state in 1871 without Germanophone Switzerland,[a] Austria-Hungary, Luxembourg and Liechtenstein (Kleindeutsche Lösung/Lesser Germany). From 1891, many Pan-Germanist thinkers of the Pan-German League espoused ethnocentrism and racism. It was also influential in early 20th-century Austria-Hungary and Germany.
These ideas ultimately gave rise to Nazi Germany's foreign policy of Heim ins Reich, which was among the causes of World War II pursued under Adolf Hitler from 1938.[1][2][3][4]
In addition to the concept, The Greater Germanic Reich (German: Großgermanisches Reich), fully styled the Greater Germanic Reich of the German Nation (German: Großgermanisches Reich der Deutschen Nation), was an attempt by the Nazis to unify all Germanic peoples into one Reich.
After World War II, backlash against Pan-Germanism and other related ideologies limited it to a few nationalist groups, mostly on the political right in Germany and Austria.
Etymology
[edit]The word pan is a Greek word element meaning "all, every, whole, all-inclusive". The word "German" in this context derives from Latin "Germani" originally used by Julius Caesar referring to tribes or a single tribe in northeastern Gaul. In the Late Middle Ages, it acquired a loose meaning referring to the speakers of Germanic languages some of whom spoke dialects ancestral to modern German. In English, "Pan-German" was first attested in 1892.
In German various concepts can be included under the heading of Pan-Germanism, though often with slight or significant differences in meaning. For example adjectives such as "alldeutsch" or "gesamtdeutsch", which can be translated as "pan-german", typically refer to the Alldeutsche Bewegung, a political movement which sought to unite all German speaking people in one country,[5] whereas "Pangermanismus" can refer to both the pursuit of uniting all the German-speaking people and movements which sought to unify all speakers of Germanic languages.[6]
Origins (before 1860)
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The origins of Pan-Germanism began with the birth of Romantic nationalism during the Napoleonic Wars, with Friedrich Ludwig Jahn and Ernst Moritz Arndt being early proponents. Germans, for the most part, had been a loose and disunited people since the Reformation, when the Holy Roman Empire was shattered into a patchwork of states following the end of the Thirty Years' War with the Peace of Westphalia.
Advocates of the Großdeutschland (Greater Germany) solution sought to unite all the German-speaking people in Europe, under the leadership of the German Austrians from the Austrian Empire. Pan-Germanism was widespread among the revolutionaries of 1848, notably among Richard Wagner and the Brothers Grimm.[3] Writers such as Friedrich List and Paul Anton Lagarde argued for German hegemony in Central and Eastern Europe, where German domination in some areas had begun as early as the 9th century AD with the Ostsiedlung, Germanic expansion into Slavic and Baltic lands. For the Pan-Germanists, this movement was seen as a Drang nach Osten, in which Germans would be naturally inclined to seek Lebensraum by moving eastwards to reunite with the German minorities there.
The Deutschlandlied ("Song of Germany"), written in 1841 by Hoffmann von Fallersleben, in its first stanza defines Deutschland as reaching "From the Meuse to the Memel / From the Adige to the Belt", i.e. as including East Prussia and South Tyrol.
Reflecting upon the First Schleswig War in 1848, Karl Marx noted in 1853 that "by quarrelling amongst themselves, instead of confederating, Germans and Scandinavians, both of them belonging to the same great race, only prepare the way for their hereditary enemy, the Slav."[7]
The German Question
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"There is, in political geography, no Germany proper to speak of. There are Kingdoms and Grand Duchies, and Duchies and Principalities, inhabited by Germans, and each separately ruled by an independent sovereign with all the machinery of State. Yet there is a natural undercurrent tending to a national feeling and toward a union of the Germans into one great nation, ruled by one common head as a national unit."
— The New York Times, 1 July 1866[8]
By the 1860s Prussia and Austria had become the two most powerful states dominated by German-speaking elites. Both sought to expand their influence and territory. The Austrian Empire—like the Holy Roman Empire—was a multi-ethnic state, but the German-speaking people there did not have an absolute numerical majority; its re-shaping into the Austro-Hungarian Empire was one result of the growing nationalism of other ethnicities—especially the Hungarians. Under Prussian leadership, Otto von Bismarck would ride on the coattails of nationalism to unite all of the northern German lands. After Bismarck excluded Austria and the German Austrians from Germany in the German war of 1866 and (following a few other events over the next few years), the unification of Germany, established the Prussian-dominated German Empire in 1871 with the proclamation of Wilhelm I as head of a union of German-speaking states, while disregarding millions of its non-German subjects (Poles, Danes, Sorbs, etc.)[9] who desired self-determination from German rule. After World War I the Pan-Germanist philosophy changed drastically during Adolf Hitler's rise to power. Pan-Germanists originally sought to unify all the German-speaking populations of Europe in a single nation-state known as Großdeutschland (Greater Germany), where "German-speaking" was sometimes taken as synonymous with Germanic-speaking, to the inclusion of the Frisian- and Dutch-speaking populations of the Low Countries, and Scandinavia.[10]
Although Bismarck had excluded Austria and the German Austrians from his creation of the Kleindeutschland state in 1871, integrating the German Austrians nevertheless remained a strong desire for many people of both Austria and Germany.[11] The most radical Austrian pan-German