German question

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"What and where is Germany?" This question, posed by Goethe and Schiller in 1797, has been one of the crucial issues in European politics. It has had tremendous consequences over past two centuries and even now, long after the reunification of Germany, the question remains in the background, although in a somewhat changed form.

For more than two centuries, there has been a ‘German question’ in European politics. No matter how the question is phrased, as one of security, integration or division, its roots have always been found in the unresolved issues of nation and territory, of the geographical mismatch between the GermanKulturnation, as the German Romantic movement understood the concept, and the German Staatsnation.

Never since the foundation of the German Empire in 1871 have all Germans lived in one state. This in itself need not be a problem, but in the case of Germany it has, in combination with various other internal and external factors, led to two World Wars that have brought tremendous suffering upon the peoples on the European continent and elsewhere.

The German question is best described as the incompatibility of the territory of any German state with the extent of German "cultural space" and the different ways in which Germany and the relevant European and world powers have responded to the various problems arising from this incompatibility.

[edit] Origin of the German Question

The German Question first arose on August 6, 1806 when Franz II, the last Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, bowed down to an ultimatum from Napoleon, laid down his crown, relieved the Estates of their duties and thereby dissolved the “Old Empire”.

[edit] German Empire

Between 1871 and 1914, the peacetime of the Kaiserreich, nobody would have dreamed of referring to an unresolved German Question.

[edit] Post World War II

The German Question resurfaced when the German Reich surrendered unconditionally to the victors of The Second World War. The division of Germany into two states was a preliminary answer to the German Question. The final answer came in the form of the merger of the two states, together with the recognition under international law of the borders of 1945. Since October 3, 1990 it has been irrefutably laid down where Germany lies, what belongs to the country and what does not.

Since the end of the Second World War, the‘German question’ has manifested itself primarily on three levels – as the question of how to overcome the division of Germany into two states since 1949, as the question of how to relate to territories formerly belonging to Germany and/or inhabited by members of German minorities (especially in Central and Eastern Europe), and as the question of how to integrate millions of refugees, expellees and Aussiedler (i.e., ethnic Germans from Central and Eastern Europe migrating to Germany after 1950) into German society.

Naturally, East Germany and West Germany, throughout their existence as separate states, treated the first two of these questions very differently. The communist regime in the East always considered them as permanently solved. This assumption proved false inasmuch as German reunification happened in 1990, but it proved correct when West Germany formally recognised the Oder–Neisse line in the border treaty with Poland of 1990 (a step that had been taken by the Eastern government as early as 1950) and when it placed its external minority policy on legal ground by concluding bilateraltreaties with all the host-states of German minorities in Central and Eastern Europe in the years following the collapse of Communism.