284 – United Germanic States

To the right of this postcard, a romantic Germanic warrior (if that isn’t an oxymoron) anachronistically admires a postcard-romantic German village from what looks to be around the 18th or 19th century.

The countries floating in the sky like so many proverbial castles together configure die Vereinigte Germanische Staaten (the United Germanic States) – a pipe-dream aspired to by at least some German nationalists around the beginning of the 20th century, to which this map can be traced.

This 1906 map shows a Mitteleuropa at its most Germanic, with Germany, Switzerland, Austria, the Dutch-speaking parts of the Low Countries, England, Ireland, the Baltic states and Scandinavia (also including a lighter-shaded Finland) and North America (i.e. Canada and the USA) as parts of the UGS.

This Germanic superstate would not be a Germany modelled on the US, quite the contrary: not a union based on the rule of law, the love of freedom and the pursuit of happiness, but a coalition of states whose Boden was dominated by Germanic Blut, even if that dominance would have been difficult to enforce democratically. This would have been the rule of tradition, the love of authoritarianism and the pursuit of racial purity. And in fact, something like that happened in Europe not too many decades later…

This map was taken at this page of Deutsche Schutzgebiete, a website dedicated to the former German colonies.