For nearly 2,000 years, Germany was a collection of independent monarchies and republics. Individual kingdoms within this group were sometimes allies, sometimes enemies. Politically and economically, they were independent of each other. They were bound by a common language and culture, which in turn gave rise to artistic and educational bonds.
Why didn’t these small territories unite to form a country until 1871? Multiple causes suggest themselves. Regional variations in language were significant: while written German was standardized — or standardized enough — by around 1500 to allow for correspondence between individuals and the publishing of books throughout the region, spoken language varied wildly. A Bavarian from southern Germany and a Plattdeutscher from northern Germany were not mutually intelligible.
Certainly the political ambitions of local dynasties worked against unification.
The physical geography of the region worked against a merger as well: a journey from Kiel to Vienna went through multiple different landscapes, each of which shaped the mentality of its inhabitants, and the totality of which made travel difficult.
Historian William Hagen writes:
Apart from Russia, the German-speaking lands long formed, in a geographical sense, the largest and, in recent times, the most populous European country. Yet it was never, nor is it today, a uniform land.
Hagen notes that “six distinctive regions have stood out” and lists them: the Rhine River basin, from Switzerland to the North Sea; the Alpine-Danube watershed from Switzerland east to Hungary and sometimes beyond; the upland area, parallel to and north of the Alpine-Danube region; the maritime region, the northwest coast along the North Sea, including the western coast of Jutland; Middle Germany, between the Rhine and Elbe from west to east, and between the Alps and the coast from south to north; and eastern Germany, the Baltic coast between the Elbe and the eastern end of the Baltic Sea, including the eastern coast of Jutland.
The boundaries between these regions are not distinct. Linguistically and culturally, they fade into one another in some border areas. Yet regional cultures and speech patterns can be clearly identified.
William Hagen continues:
Each of these six regions possessed historically distinctive socioeconomic structures and political and cultural traditions that are still discernable today. Their existence underpinned a powerful centrifugal or federalist tendency that lives on in present-day Germany’s decentralized structure. Partly because of such far-flung regionalism, unity or unification was never comprehensively achieved, as is evident now in the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany, German-speaking Austria (and Italian South Tyrol), Switzerland (where Swiss German most widely prevails), Liechtenstein (a tiny remnant-principality of the Holy Roman Empire, tied now to Switzerland), Luxemburg (largely speaking German in several forms), and the Dutch and Flemish lands (once also part of the Germanophone world, as the connection “Dutch/deutsch” suggests).
To Hagen’s list could be added the southern border regions of Denmark, parts of Poland, parts of the Baltic republics, and a few other bits and pieces of eastern central Europe.
In the decades leading up to the actual unification in 1871, various versions of a potential German state were discussed, among them a “greater German” or “pan-German” territory, which would have included some of these other territories which did not become part of Germany in 1871 and are not part of Germany today.
Responsible historians do not speculate about what might have happened if things were different — about counterfactual situations — but the reader may imagine how world history would have been different if the 1871 unification had included all the German people instead of merely some of them.
