Großdeutschland (German for Greater Germany) is a term referring to the concept of one German nation-state. The counter-concept is known as Kleindeutschland (Small Germany).

History

In the 19th century, Großdeutschland was the idea of a unified Germany including Austria, as opposed to the Prussian-promoted alternative of Kleindeutschland ("Small Germany"), which excluded Austria. With the foundation of the German Empire in 1871, which did not include Austria, the Kleindeutschland solution was put into practice.

The Habsburgs proposed a unified Germany with Vienna as its capital and including all the lands of the Austrian Empire. One of the main obstacles to this vision was the large Hungarian and Slavic component of the Austrian Empire (including Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Ukrainians, Slovenians, Croatians, and Serbs) that had no desire to be united with the German speaking lands. For this reason, the liberals of 1848 proposed an alternative Großdeutschland vision which would include Austria proper, Bohemia-Moravia-Silesia and the Austrian Slovenian lands, but not the lands of the Kingdom of Hungary (Hungary, Slovakia and Croatia) or Galicia . However, this would required the dismantling of the Austrian Empire, and the Czechs anyway rejected the idea.

After the World War I, the Austrian National Assembly and the German National Assembly supported the unification of the successor-states of the two reichs, but this was prohibited by the Allies. In a reference to the earlier concept of Großdeutschland, after the Anschluss (attachment) of Austria to the Deutsches Reich (German Empire) in 1938, the state was first informally and from 1943 formally renamed to Großdeutsches Reich.

See also

• The National Assembly meets in St. Paul's Church

History of Austria | History of Germany | Irredentism | Nationalism | Political movements | Pan movements

Großdeutsche Lösung | Suur-Saksa | Grossdeutschland | 大ドイツ主義 | Velika Njemačka | 大德意志