Why did the Czechs not become 'fully' Germanized?

Alright, quick question... What is the difference between 'German' and 'Austrian'? I really haven't a clue,
If I was being crass I'd say the number of kidnapped girls and/or family members they have locked in the basement. ;)

More seriously this is kind of something I've been meaning to ask about for a while regarding Austria and being German. From the early to mid-1800s or so how much if any different did the Austrians feel in regards to being Germans, or did that only get built up post-1866 when they were unceremoniously excluded from the unification process?
 
The Austrians, interestingly enough, felt that they were more German than that rotten lot in Germany, and in fact this continued long after. ;)

Now, that is slightly anachronistic terminology because at this time German was a loose confederation to which Austria belonged - though the idea of 'little Germany' was very much in ideas-space. But the question of what form a national German state should take was being bitterly debated in the newspapers and historical journals of Germandom, and the schools can with plenty of generalisations be called "Prussian", ''Protestant", "northern" against "Austrian", "Catholic", "southern".

Each held themselves to be passionately German and out to reform Germany for the better. But they had completely opposed ideas of what had gone wrong in Germany (the idea that Germany had been the victim of some disaster that had prevented its become a proto-nation-state like England or France was ubiquitous) and what the solution must therefore be.

The Austrians, naturally enough, believed that the tragedy of the HREGN was that it failed. According to them, the Hapsburgs had launched the Thirty Years War against some dirty (Czech) troublemakers and had in the process been about to organise all Germany under their benevolent confederal rule, when along came the dastardly Swedes, assisted by anti-German elements (like the Prussians) who proceeded to rape everybody and ruin everything.

According to the Prussians, this same moment had been the moment when the medieval flotsam of the HREGN should have been swept out and replaced by a centralised, ambitious, modern (that is, Protestant) monarchy with the help of the Germanic Swedish brothers.

In the present, this obviously bore on the German question: was Germany to draw gradually together as an ecumenical confederation under the light hand of a Hapsburg dynasty that would retain its extensive empire elsewhere and its ties to the papacy and the world that was? Or was it to chuck out the dead weight that was Austria for the time being and set up in the rest of Germany a relatively centralised nationalistic empire that would take no guff from the pope or anybody else?

(Then there were the radicals and socialists, who were in their way great Germans too, but that is another story.)

The question was answered, of course, on the field of Sadowa. But it lingered long after in both sections of divided Germandom: in Germany, the Kulturkampf was fought to follow up the military victory of the Prussian ideal with an intellectual one.

As for Austria, everybody continued to profess their German-ness, but this identity became fraught as radical pro-kaiserreich nationalism became entangled with anti-monarchist, anti-Catholic, anti-Slav sentiment in the early ancestors of Nazism. 'The Germans' were a large and growing political bloc embracing people - these and others much less radical - who stood up for German interests in the way that other nationalist factions did; but the majority of Austrians remained peasants whose identity was Catholicism, or Viennese whose religion was rapidly becoming socialism. Passionate political self-definition as a German was characteristically middle-class activity (being far too modern for most of the aristocracy). This was reflected in parliamentary politics in the waning days of the empire: the Catholic and Socialist parties, which were the biggest, both had mainly German-speaking memberships; but there were also a wide variety of German parties with mostly anxious-middle-class electorates.

An Austrian republic was an accident for which nobody argued: to support independent Austria was to support the monarchy, and if this glue were removed everything would dissolve into nationalities, including a German one. This was precisely why the Catholics and, perhaps more surprisingly, the Socialists were committed to the empire. But when it was gone, and Germany at the same time became a young republic in which, though everything was a mess, liberal, Catholic, and socialist looked able to participate on equal terms, there was no reason for anyone in the German rump of Austria to oppose incorporation. That was done by the Entente powers.

It was the growing political hardening and polarisation that defeated the quiet assumption, common throughout the twenties, that union was inevitable and desirable. Austria became clerical-fascist, Germany Nazi, and there could be no squaring these regimes. But the plebiscite which provoked anschluss was still to have asked whether Austrians wanted to live in a state that was 'independent, sovereign, Catholic, and German'.

In short: Austrians believed in their German-ness until 1945, but just like Germans, different groups of Austrians had radically different ideas about what it meant to be a German.
 
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I think both the Hussite movements and the early 17th century revolt that started the 30 YW played a role. The first was a period of a great national revolts while IIRC the second decimated the local (but Germanized/ing) nobility which was replaced by Austrian/Germans who separated from the local lower classes.
 
Consider that in early modern times the rural areas remain Czech speaking while the cities, notably Prague, were highly Germanized in language and culture although the population was ethnically Czech in origin. Rural migrants would emigrate into the cities and those that survived the high urban death rates accultruated into German-speakers and became "German". The POD was the demographic revolution of the mid-late 19th century. As the urban death rate declined, the in-migration of Czech speakers from the country side without the traditional die-off increased the number of Czech speakers in the cities so that within 50 years cities like Prague changed from German in speech adn culture to Czech. Imperial Bohemia was transformed into the future Czechia. The same process took place throught out the Habsburg Empire (including Hungary) and in Slavic areas of Prussia/Germany and played a major role in the internal disintegration of the Habsburge empire prior to and during WWI.
 
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