Modern unification of Austria and Germany?

Impossible. After the first world war there was a kind of feeling that Germans and Austrians belong together. But after WW2 this feelig was complete gone in Austria. And after 60years of seperate ways there is an own national feeling in Austria. So a kind of Reunification is really ASB. Unless the EU gets totaly torn apart and everybody is looking for new allies, perhaps then, but there has to happen a lot more before Austria joins Germany. There is not even a major politcal party in both countries which want something like that.
 
merging inside a federalized eu is possible.

if it survives.

anyway, both countries are so similar, if you cross the border you would'nt know you've entered another country if there was no "welcome to austria" sign.
 
Until you talk to the Austrians and find out what they think of the Germans.
Ja. I'll bet the Austrians vs Germans are a lot like Canadians vs. Americans: Like the joke
"Canadians and Americans are so similar that the easiest way to tell which one a person is, is to make this observation to them."
 
The only way I could *possibly* see it happening would be Austria had been partitioned between the Soviets and the Western Allies. In that case, perhaps a small "West Austria" would have been merged into West Germany. After the end of the Cold War, perhaps "East Austria" would have merged back into Germany, or maybe it would have remained independent.
 
There's *a* possibility in some Weimar TLs that there might be a peaceable plebiscite held on mutual agreements and with international monitoring that leads to the Anschluss, but this is one thing. What Hitler failed to do the first time and succeeded in the second time is a completely different idea and concept. Germany can't strongarm Austria by military force, but it might be possible for it to secure by plebiscite what the UK and France might equally be more willing to accept by elections, as opposed to marching armies.
 

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The only way I could *possibly* see it happening would be Austria had been partitioned between the Soviets and the Western Allies. In that case, perhaps a small "West Austria" would have been merged into West Germany. After the end of the Cold War, perhaps "East Austria" would have merged back into Germany, or maybe it would have remained independent.

Apart from federalization of the EU, a division of Austria during the Cold War is indeed the only plausible way to have Austria and Germany reunify after 1945. If Stalin loses faith in using a united, neutral Austria as an example bait to lure West Germany out of the Western bloc, you can have the Communists seize power in the Soviet occupation zone of Austria by coup in 1949-50.

This would inevitably lead to the division of Austria and quite easily bring a merger of West Germany and West Austria in the 1950s. A separate Austrian national consciousness would never develop in these conditions and the Western bloc would eventually authorize a second Anschluss within the EU/NATO framework. When Communism falls, East Austria would inevitably reunify with the rest of Greater Germany.
 
Maybe if Churchill's partition plan had been used (to a degree) and all of south Germany is split off and united with Austria.

Then later when unification occurs we could see über-Austria unite with Germany.
 
Alternative route: Austria remains united as in OTL, but German nationalism and pan-German sentiment survive the Cold War strong enough that the people of Germany and Austria are all up for a merger between their countries after the East-West reunification of Germany in 1990, though obviously without the right-wing extremism that Naziism had "bestowed" upon the concept. Bonus points if it also leads to the Germans and Austrians rejecting the Allied powers' insistence on the post-1945 borders (particularly the Oder-Neisse line), as well as demanding reparations for damages incurred as a result of Allied occuption policy, mass expulsions of Germans, and other expressions of anti-Germanism in the wake of WW2 and throughout the Cold War.

Now the hard part: How can German nationalism and pan-German sentiment in both Germany and Austria survive the Cold War? And would they have any chance of succeeding in their defiance of the territorial changes that the Allies wish to impose upon them? IIRC, OTL West Germany's official stance regarding the Polish- and Russian-annexed formerly Prussian territories were that they were "temporarily under Polish/Russian administration", and they only renounced all claims to them after German reunification.
 
IIRC, OTL West Germany's official stance regarding the Polish- and Russian-annexed formerly Prussian territories were that they were "temporarily under Polish/Russian administration", and they only renounced all claims to them after German reunification.

That was actually a very smart move to keep this stance - if you have some claims, you can demand a compensation for relinquishing them. Dropping them for free, no matter how nonsensical or unenforceable they are, would be a stupid move.
 
And what good their objections would've done? The Berlin Wall already went down, reunification is pretty much de facto already under way (i.e. it's "facts on the ground" rather than something the East and West Germans are aiming for), the East Germans have basically flipped the bird to any past warnings from Moscow about breaking away from the Eastern Bloc with their nation-wide revolution (then again, Moscow had already set a precedent by not intervening at all in the other Eastern Bloc members that had their own anti-Commie revolutions), and Poland wouldn't be able to do squat besides holding on to the already annexed German territories.
 
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