A early German Empire

(This is impossible and implausible, so don’t criticize the idea. This is more for fun. To hypothesize what it would be like)

What if Fredrick the Great was the Kaiser of a early United German Empire, excluding Austria and its territories, around the 1740s? How would this change the course of history? How would it be like in the Sevens years war, or the Napoleonic? Would they start to colonize? What would diplomatic and political be like? Culture be like? How would this change the world?
 
At that point any German Empire would likely have an Holy Roman Emperor as Kaiser not the King of Prussia (can be from Bavaria or Saxony instead of Francis)
 
I think Frederick the Great had in mind an empire more along the lines of Austria; that is, a German minority (Brandenburg, East Prussia, Saxony) controlling large swathes of non-German territory (Poland, Bohemia). Prussia was rather lucky to get the Rhineland later on, as it gave them more clout in Germany proper.

With that said, I think Austria had a better chance of creating a more unified German state in the 15th/16th centuries, if the Spanish Habsburgs didn't get Lorraine and the Low Countries, for example.
 
I know this is tangent to the OP's demands yet in agreement with the thread title, but... Could a Prussian victory over Napoleon at the Battle of Jena-Auerstedt have resulted in an earlier Prussian hegemony over northern Germany?
 
Frederick the Great never even considered this. Prussia could have never unified Germany, or even considered it, until the Treaty of Vienna, which gave it multiple industrial centres in the Rhineland as well as a strong incentive to unify its two halves.

I know this is tangent to the OP's demands yet in agreement with the thread title, but... Could a Prussian victory over Napoleon at the Battle of Jena-Auerstedt have resulted in an earlier Prussian hegemony over northern Germany?

No. It wouldn't have gained the Rhineland and it wouldn't have lost Polish areas. Therefore, the trend towards becoming a binational German-Polish state that Prussia was going through before Tilsit would have continued.
 
What if during an alternate 30-year war, the northern protestant parts of the HRE manage to leave the HRE and founded their own variant of the HRE with an Hohenzoller as Emperor? Mind you, the 7 year wars and the Napoleonic wars would be butterflied away and I doubt that this variant of Germany would be able to colonise anything, since it would most likely be only a lose cooperation of more or less independent states, just like OTL HRE.
 
What if during an alternate 30-year war, the northern protestant parts of the HRE manage to leave the HRE and founded their own variant of the HRE with an Hohenzoller as Emperor? Mind you, the 7 year wars and the Napoleonic wars would be butterflied away and I doubt that this variant of Germany would be able to colonise anything, since it would most likely be only a lose cooperation of more or less independent states, just like OTL HRE.
I've thought about this before as well. However, this confederation would have to find some strong allies in order to prevent getting ripped apart by Austria, France, and Sweden (to name a few). It would have taken some serious luck and good timing in order to survive. But I think Prussia's rise IOTL was pretty improbable so who knows...
 
What if during an alternate 30-year war, the northern protestant parts of the HRE manage to leave the HRE and founded their own variant of the HRE with an Hohenzoller as Emperor? Mind you, the 7 year wars and the Napoleonic wars would be butterflied away and I doubt that this variant of Germany would be able to colonise anything, since it would most likely be only a lose cooperation of more or less independent states, just like OTL HRE.

If memory serves right, Gustavus Adolphus considered making himself Emperor of Sweden etc., as well as protector of the Protestants. That seems more plausible to me.
 
If memory serves right, Gustavus Adolphus considered making himself Emperor of Sweden etc., as well as protector of the Protestants. That seems more plausible to me.
Yeah, but that would be even further away from the proposal of the original poster.
 
A United German Empire by Frederick the Great is difficult, and even then I really doubt it would end up in a situation where the Kaiser had much power. If anything, I figure the Hohenzollern Kaiser would be little different to the previous Holy Roman Emperors in regards to actual power. I sort of imagine the POD would be during the Thirty Years War or before that. Protestant North Germany breaks free from the Catholic, Hasburg Emperors. They first establish one of their own, who also aren't powerful enough to try and overpower the other German rulers (thus, the Hohenzollerns-who also happen to ), as a counter-Protestant-Emperor. Obviously this doesn't work in establishing an internationally recognized Protestant Holy Roman Emperor. So they convert this anti-Emperor as a Kaiser of a new, North German Confederacy State. In this altered 30YW, Denmark and Sweden prefer having this buffer state that is too internally disunited to threaten them but still there to draw any Catholic aggression, and so they recognize it.

You could by the time of Frederick the Great end up with a revanchist Hasburg Emperors, that had since this split focused on Italy and the Ottomans, aiming to reestablish their control over northern Germany. So Frederick the Great is trying to prevent this, while also turn his ceremonial power into actual power through military victories. I'd imagine a French-English switch during the 7YW, with France supporting North Germany to keep the Holy Roman Empire divided and England seeking to recreate a land threat to France to force France to devote more strength to its army and away from its army. Although maybe England just sits this one out. North Germany wins, Europe is still divided. Habsurgs win, France has the Holy Roman Empire back in its flank. Not sure how having a Northern German Empire to its south would affect Scandinavian history without really stretching.

Assuming Frederick still wins, it probably crushes all Hasburg hopes of retaking northern Germany to the Holy Roman Empire. so they probably focus more on Italy and the Balkans. The latter really changes things with the Ottomans, and could bring about earlier tensions between the Hasburgs and Russians. This Northern Germany probably wouldn't include Bavaria or the other Catholic German states, so it wouldn't end up as powerful as the OTL German Empire even if it lasted to the 20th century.
 
Around 1743 Frederick the Great plotted with Louis XV and the Wittlesbach Holy Roman Emperor, Charles VII to create a centralized Holy Roman Empire. It involved German mediatization, which was the basically dissolving all Bishoprics, Free Cities, Archbishoprics, Abbeys, etc. and giving them to the main states. I’m sure it could’ve happen with a few other moves, but probably with the Wittlesbachs as the dominant House. But if Frederick did it for himself during the Seven Years War as he also planned, I can imagine we’d see a vastly different Europe with Protestant lands being more dominant over the Catholic powers such as Austria, France, and Spain. With this we can also see Prussia being the most powerful land in Europe for centuries to come.
 
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