ABSTRACT
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 frontier
was sharp and relatively stable over several generations. It ran in a more or less straight line south from just east of Liège to the north-eastern tip of Lake Geneva.
