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Grossdeutschland)
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National assembly meeting in St. Paul's Church, 1848/49
Germany with protectorates in August 1939
Großdeutschland (German for "Greater Germany'") was an irredentist term that referred to the concept of one German nation-state.
In the 19th century, Großdeutschland was the idea of a unified Germany, led by Habsburg Austria and with Vienna as its capital, as opposed to the Prussian-led alternative, known as Kleindeutschland ("Small Germany"). With the foundation of the German Empire in 1871, which did not include Austria, the Kleindeutschland solution was put into practice. One of the main obstacles to the "Großdeutschland" option 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. In particular, the Czechs of Bohemia-Moravia-Silesia had rejected the idea in 1848.
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 informally renamed to Großdeutsches Reich.
See also
