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Revision as of 17:26, 16 June 2004
The Germans (German: die Deutschen) are people of German descent, i.e. them associating themselves with the heritage of German culture. The term Germans is in Germany of today often used to exclude immigrants.
The concept of who is a German has varied. Until the 19th century, it denoted the speakers of German, and was a much more distinct concept than that of Germany, the land of the Germans. The Dutch and the Swiss had already split off and shaped separate national identities. The German Swiss, however, retained their cultural identity as Germans, although a specific kind of Germans.
In the 19th century, after the Napoleonic Wars and the fall of the Holy Roman Empire (of the German nation), Austria and Prussia would emerge as two opposite poles in Germany, trying to re-establish the divided German nation. In 1871, Prussia attracted even Bavaria at the founding of her German Empire, and the multi-ethnical Austrian Habsburg monarchy was effectively excluded from the attempt to create a German nation state. From this and on, the connotation of Germans came to shift gradually from "speakers of the German language" to "Imperial Germans" and today "nationals of the Federal Republic of Germany".
But still in the 1920s, most Austrians considered themselves Germans. It was first after the Nazi Anschluss (re-unification) of Austria to Nazi Germany, and the following defeat in World War II, this began to change. After the world war, the Austrians increasingly see themselves as a nation distinct from the German one, and today no more than 10 percent of the German-speaking Austrians consider themselves as Germans.
Ethnic Germans form an important minority group in several Central European countries (Poland, Hungary, Romania) and the Commonwealth of Independent States) as well as in Namibia and in southern Brazil.
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