... Willy II wanted to give was giving E-L to FF kids ...
That was the idea, alongside E-L great duchy,those proposal never happened because the war, ...
... only that the first was one of the many utterances without any substance and to make it a "Grand Duchy" was also far from any possibility since already on 31st of May 1911 with the
law reagrding the constitution Elsaß-Lothringen WAS already an
almost equal to every other memberstate of the German Realm.
(
... sometime it helps to look at other language sources as well ...)
In other words : the ... "proposal" of making it a Grand Duchy not to speak of giving it to some austrians was anything but some ... dinner table boasting without any consequences (
aside some later people even of today keeping on repeating it as if it was some actual policy) Willy was so well known for.
While I render the proposal of
@Helmuth48 also rather ... "optimistic" to umrealistic (
esp. if I look at the inequalities the german states of german union republik of today show) it might be possible that by some ... "steps in between" something similar might realize. Maybe at first the prussian provinces might be given some ... more autonomy in regulating their own things as well as within the confederation. ... somewhat as proposed for the thuringian states :
a federation within the federation
Same might then also come for Bavary.
In the end one would get something between ... 24 to 28 (?) or so memberstates or ... "provinces" with only some remnants of prussian or bavarian "higher" rule over these provinces (maybe some unified trading agencies or some common ... juridical procedures or some common ... traffic administrations or similar.
In the course of time these smaler states might merger to somewhat larger and more sensible administrative units again to something between 20 and 25 more alike what Helmuth48s proposal looks like.