Briefly trace the process of German unification .
Answers
In the mid-1800s, nationalist feelings were strong and engraved in the hearts of the middle-class Germans. They all came united in 1848 to create a nation-state out of the numerous German States. But the monarchy and the military members got together to repress them and they gained support from the landowners of Prussia (the Junkers) as well. Prussia then became the leader of the German unification movement. Chief Minister Otto von Bismarck at that time was the architect of the process with support from the Prussian army and Prussian bureaucracy
The Unification of Germany into a German Empire with tight political and administrative integration, replacing the decentralized German Confederation and Holy Roman Empire, was officially proclaimed on 18 January 1871, in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles in France. Princes of the German states, excluding Austria-Hungary and its House of Habsburg-Lorraine (the dynasty that formerly ruled over the German princes during the German Confederation and Holy Roman Empire), gathered there to proclaim William I of Prussia and the House of Hohenzollern as German Emperor, following the French capitulation in the Franco-Prussian War.
A confederated realm of German princedoms had been in existence for over a thousand years, dating to the Treaty of Verdun in 843. However, there was no German national identity in development as late as 1800, mainly due to the autonomous nature of the princely states; most inhabitants of Holy Roman Empire territories, outside of those ruled by the emperor directly, identified themselves mainly with their prince, and not with the emperor or the German realm as a whole. In the mountainous terrain of much of the territory, isolated peoples developed cultural, educational, linguistic, and religious differences over such a lengthy time period. This internal division became known as the "practice of kleinstaaterei", or the "practice of small-statery". By the nineteenth century, transportation and communications improvements brought these regions closer together.
This changed drastically after the Holy Roman Empire's defeat and dissolution by France in 1806, and even though a German Confederation was re-established in 1815 after the defeat of France, the beginnings of an unprecedented wave of German nationalism swept through Germany during the first half of the 19th century. By mid-century, Germany had already seen movements supporting centralization, with or without the traditionally ruling Austrian Habsburgs