[pfannkuchen]

Isn’t Austria culturally basically German?

My understanding is that Austria was the Germans who ended up running a multi ethnic empire ruling over Slavs also, while Germany was the Germans who didn’t do that.

Then once the Austrian empire fell apart only the German part was left in “Austria” and it basically has no reason to be separate from Germany anymore because the Slavs are no longer part of the same territory and there is no “top of the caste system” benefit anymore to the Germans there.

Feel free to chime in if I’m wrong. I’ve found topics related to Germany to be hard to actually figure out due to a lot of morality noise that gets injected into those topics (the Nazis wanted to unify and Nazis bad etc stuff like that).

[jjtwixman]

Both Prussia and Austria made their names outside of the historically German lands and ruled over non-Germans. It was in the end Prussia that unified Germany in 1871 having previously defeated Austria. Both settlements following WWs 1 and 2 forbade Germany from unifying with Austria. And now in any case there is no appetite for it regardless of legality.

[GTP]

I can say that the German spoken in Germany and the one spoken in Austria aren't exactly the same; there are some regional differences. But they still understand each other without issues.