Andrei said:I'm also against the independence of Bavaria. One of the reasons which led to WWII was that the Germans were forced to live in two states that wanted to unite ( Austria really wanted to unite with Germany in 1919 ) and that large German territories were given to other countries ( West Prussia , Sudetenland ).
That's how Hitler gained popular support , by getting back German territories.
This is one of the great historical myth of the 20th century (another one is that the Weimar republic went down because of the unrealistic war reparations imposed by the victors). Both Austria-Hungary and Germany were in a state of shock after WW1, and the first imperative was to survive. there was a strong political polarization in all the three countries (Germany, Austria and Hungary), which resulted into rightist coups (Kapp in Berlin), red insurrections (Spartacist revolt in Berlin and the Ruhr, Bavaria republic, Bela Kun's soviet in Hungary), generally repressed by the conservatives, with the support of Frei Korps and what remained of the armies.
It is true that the first austrian constitution in november 1918 called for "a union with Germany", but at the elections in February 1919 the pan-Germans got just 15% of the popular vote, with the rest more or less equally divided between the socialists and the conservatives (Vienna was staunchly socialist, while most of the farmlands were conservative). However, the main issue in Austria and Hungary (and in lesser measure in Germany) in the winter 1918-1919 was how to survive the scarcity of food.
Even when the situation improved, the socialist majority was never in favor of the Anschluss (and even the conservatives turned against it). The aborted attempt to stage a nazi coup in 1934, and the real Anschluss in 1938, were hardly supported by a majority of Austrians.
The situation improved in Germany too, but once again the main weakness of the Weimar republic was the incapacity of producing a centrist majority, and the need of getting support either from the extreme right or the extreme left.
A major fallacy of the post-WW1 Germans was the incapacity to accept the defeat: this disbelief turned into the myth of the "back-stabbing": Jews, Socialists and Anarchists betraying the winning German army by stubbing it in the back [once again, just like after WW2, the German generals proved to be better as apologists of themselves than as strategists
I do not believe that a partitioning of Germany would have made thing worse.
IMHO, what the situation wouldhave been much better if the french were not so stubborn and vindictive in their behaviour (see the french occupation of Frankfurt and the Ruhr, the bloody repression of the Spartacist strike in the west, the insistence on receiving livestock from germany in a moment when the country could not feed herself. Even the refusal of the French government to invite the Germans at the Sanremo conference); the main fault of both the British and the Italians was to accept this behavior, and not to force France to be more realistic.