ABSTRACT

The fateful developments in Germany and Austria that led to the events of 1938 stand in a double connection. Essentially the result of aberrations in power politics, they were at once the result of ideological confusions that arose from the unsolved problemat of an allGerman nation-state. Following the ‘smaller German’ outcomes of 1866 and 1870, both German and Austrian questions then erupted anew and intensified with the defeat of the central powers and the division of the Habsburg monarchy. Now, both national assemblies and both republican constitutions-hindered, of course, by the Paris peace treaties-demanded the annexation of ‘German Austria’ to the German Reich.1