What’a the point of asking “Are Austrians still considered to be Germans?” if you already have your answer?
There are probably lots of people in Austria who would be considered “ethnically German” by various definitions - there are tons in America, too. Who cares about ethnicity, though? Americans are American and Austrians and Austrian. Get over it.
A German guy I knew back in the 1980s (youngish and, I think, fairly leftish politically) told me that he considered Austrians to be Germans. They all share the same cultural and linguistic heritage. Dosen’t the very name Austria just mean “the south,” i.e., the south part of the Germanic lands (as Australia is the southern continent).
The name Austria comes from the German word for East, and the name of Australia comes from the Latin word for south. It’s just our luck that they sound pretty much the same and are translated into English with similar spellings.
**GermanicPride **the question you ask doesn’t present difficulties because of factual issue but because of a lack of clear definition.
You ask whether Austrians can be “considered German”. Do something for yourself. Set out exactly what it is to be German. Type out a definition and post it here.
I would quite confidently predict that by the definition you would use, Austrians are German.
However, I would also quite confidently predict that Austrians who don’t call themselves German would use a different definition, by which they are Austrian and not German.
In other words, the debate here is not “who is German” it is “what is it to be German”? And there is no objective way of deciding the debate.
I would however comment that I suspect your definition involves reference to the past (and perhaps past perceived glories) while the definition used by Austrians who do not see themselves as German would involve reference to the present.
Yes they did and the pre-Anschluss in 1918 was only stopped by the Treaty of Versailles, read up on the Republic of German-Austria.
I’m sure you could google ethnic group and find out quite easily yourself what an ethnicity of someone is.
Your argument on pigs could fly if history had turned out differently is totally flawed in what I was meaning, if the Austrians had unified Germany and not the Prussians nobody now would be saying Austrians are not Germans… Bismarck even wanted to keep the Bavarians out of Germany they only got included in the German Empire because the Bavarians joined in with the Franco-Prussian war of 1870.
Like I said as well, Hitler was Austrian by birth and always considered himself German many felt the same as Austrian Germans.
I am on about why is it Austrians can’t be considered Germans when they are ethnic Germans.
Austria and Germany share much more than just a language, and America is just defined as a nationality not an ethnicity, I never said Austrians weren’t just Austrians in the nationality sense, since they are not born German citizens.
This is what I mean… some say they are Germans (lots of whom I spoke to agree) and Southern Germany and Austria have shared land of the years, from Bavarian to Austrian rule loads.
Yes, Austria means “east” “reich” of Germany.
I think that’s true, what means German now did not mean the same as 100 years ago or 200 years ago, like was Mozart an Austrian or German? No nation-state of Germany existed but the Austrians considered themselves Germans.
I define Austrians as ethnic Germans, so do demographics of Austria as well - I think they just reject the German identity since WW2 for obvious reasons, despite like I’ve said Hitler the German Nazi leader himself was an Austrian by birth, but you can see as he was an ethnic German why many Austrians felt the same as him since Austria for centuries had been the most dominant German state, Pan-Germanism only declined in popularity since WW2.
It sounds like they don’t think of themselves that way. Your original question wasn’t “can they be considered German,” it was “are they considered German?” And it sounds clear the answer is no.
Oh, so by your definition, Germans aren’t ethnic Germans, only Austrians? I guess you can define the words you use however you like, but I’ve got to tell you, that’s an awfully peculiar definition.
And the Anschluss might not have ruled out Austrian self-identification as German at the time, but nowadays, nobody sane wants to associate themselves with the Nazis.
German is a language group. Swabians and Saxons aren’t really the same ethnicity, why would Austrians be “the same ethnicity”? Many Lithuanian Jews spoke a German dialect, as did others in Mitteleuropa. Are they all “ethnic Germans”?
I’m from Missouri, for crying out loud. I’m descended from Germans, but I speak American English. What’s my “ethnicity”?
Yes. The Germans living in Austria share the same linguistic, historic, ethnic, and cultural background as the Germans living in Germany. And only by some particular historic circumstances did they not end up in the same nationstate as the majority of Germans. Although manipulated by the Nazis, the Anschluss was undoubtedly genuinely popular.
I think many Austrians identify themselves as both Germans and Austrians, the same way a Frenchman may identify himself as French and a person from Lorraine; I think other Europeans have a hard time differentiating between Germans and Austrians without being specifically told which is which. Certainly it is not particular evident when driving south through the two nations.
WW-II and all that silliness is water under the bridge, the only people that give a damn anymore are ironically Germans. I’m all for the Germanic people uniting in a single pan-Germanic nation if they so wish. But I think there is little interest in it these days, and it seems like a quaint idea from another time. Anyway they have the EU, so perhaps there is also little reason. Perhaps if the EU fails, we’ll see a resurgent of pan-Germanic sentiments.
Bolding mine.
Oh, yes, WWII and all that silliness - nobody talks about that anymore. :rolleyes:
Nowadays we just have a good laugh at the Holocaust and millions of people killed in a senseless war started by a madman and a criminal evil regime. Truly water under the bridge, no harm, no foul.
Go ahead, ask the Swiss and the Austrians about this awesome idea of yours about the pan-Germanic nation, but be sure to wear your running shoes.
Maybe the OP and you should get together sometime and exchange ideas (or maybe not).
Did I write that? No I did not. People will continue to talk about WW-II for a long time, but its everyday immediate political relevance has receded to something comparable of WW-I, the Russian Revolution, or one of the many other calamities of European history. One of the last cases where WW-II had immediate political relevance was when Thatcher opposed the reunification of East and West Germany. A view, I think, even she later regretted. Certainly most people today have no problem with the reunification. Similar I think few people will have any great misgivings if Austria and Germany should decide to merge.
Read again. Not my idea. What I wrote is that if they wish to unite, then they should go ahead. If not, then don’t. Either way, I don’t care.
You’ll have to do better than that. What is it to be German? I’m looking for a list of objective factors. How can I, knowing nothing of the subject, decide if someone is or is not “German”? Give me some rigour.
Otherwise you’re just shooting the breeze.
Elaborate why it is no.
German has two meanings doesn’t it, you can be considered a German by being born in Germany therefore a German-born citizen or you can be ethnically German and it won’t matter whether you are born in Germany or not.
Hitler was an Austrian born citizen but he was an ethnic German.
Einstein was a German born citizen but was an ethnic Jew.
No, German is not a “language group” at all - get your facts right.
You are probably the only one who has spoke some sense so far, you recognise and understand that Austrian Germans are just as German as the Germans from Germany.
I pity you, I really do.
You’ve been brainwashed don’t you realise history is written by the winners and the victors tell the stories - you do realise the original number in Auschwitz alone was 4 million it later then got dropped to 1.5 million… go figure.
Nobody is laughing at all and WW2 was not soly just started by Hitler (I guess who you are referring to as a ‘madman’) and evil is subjective.
Nobody ever mentions Stalin’s regime, Pol Pot’s regime… and so forth.
I love your sarcasm, you even confuse German with Germanic, you are hilarious! 
It seems to only have been since the end of WW2 the Austrians deny their German roots and hate the German identity or belonging to the German nation.
A Greater Germany includes Austria, for the right reason - all Germans under one state.
Someone of pure ethnic German heritage, regardless of their birthplace. 
Oh, only 1.5 million? I guess it was alright then!
Rune was laughing with his line “WW-II and all that silliness” - I wouldn’t say that’s an appropriate description for the horror of that time, even 70 years removed from it.
In Hitler’s case, I would argue evil is pretty damn objective, if we cannot agree on that, I’m afraid we are so far removed that any sort of discussion becomes pointless.
No one mentions Stalin or Pol Pot? Lots of people do, they’re just not very relevant in a discussion about Germany and Hitler.
You will find that Holocaust deniers and their kin are not looked upon favorably around these here parts, and it’s not because all Dopers are brainwashed Germans such as myself.
See - this is why, to paraphrase some Nazi, when people start talking about “Germanic pride”, I reach for my Uzi.
It took less than 70 years for American people to go from being British to being not-British. Why should it take more than 70 years for Austrians to become not-Germans?
Austrians don’t deny their German roots, by the way. They just consider the idea of Greater Germany a particularly terrifying anachronism.
Think of it as a series of 2 yes or no answers:
Question 1) Is there such a thing as being Austrian?
Question 2) If there is, do Austrians qualify as being it?
If you perform this little exercise, I think you will find that Austrians are Austrian.
You can say that they are German, too, I suppose - but that kind of defeats the purpose of categorizing people (although I’m not exactly sure what that purpose is).
Whatever you do, don’t mention the war. I mentioned it once but I think I got away with it.
FWIW I don’t think “German” is relevant any longer as an ethnic term. It’s a linguistic category and it’s a political (citizenship) category and it’s a geographic category. But it has no meaning as an ethnicity. I don’t think you can really break white Europeans down into very many ethnicities any more. And even from a historic perspective, the French and the Germans amd the Northern Italians can’t logically be cut into neat ethnic groups.
You started it!