This map was printed and distributed by the Austro-German People’s League [Oesterreichisch-Deutscher Volksbund], which lobbied after World War I for the union of Germany and Austria, referred to as an Anschluss. Its title, “Das ganze Deutschland soll es sein!”, references Ernst Moritz Arndt’s 1813 poem, “Des Deutschen Vaterland,” a nineteenth-century rallying cry for German unification. The League grew out of early calls in 1918 by a few Austrians living in Berlin who saw such a union as an expression of national self-determination and thus fully in the spirit of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s vision for the postwar settlement.  Although the League’s membership only numbered at around 20,000 at its peak, it drew prominent German politicians and civic leaders to its ranks and opened branches across Germany and, after 1925, throughout Austria as well. 

The legend in the lower left of the map calls attention to Article 2 of the Weimar Constitution as providing a legal basis for Germany’s union with Austria. It states, “The territory of the Reich consists of the territories of the German states. Other territories may be incorporated into the Reich by way of Imperial Law if their populations desire it by virtue of their right to self-determination.” [“Das Reichsgebiet besteht aus den Gebieten der deutschen Länder. Andere Gebiete können durch Reichsgesetz in das Reich aufgenommen werden, wenn es ihre Bevölkerung kraft des Selbstbestimmungsrechts begehrt.”] Despite the force of this assertion, the League knew full well that both the Treaty of Versailles (between Germany and the victorious powers) and the Treaty of Saint-Germain (between Austria and the victorious powers) explicitly prohibited a political union of the two countries. The League sought, therefore, both to shift international opinion about an Anschluss and to rally national opinion in favor of it, the latter being the clear aim of this map.

This map was first published in 1925, an especially active year for the League, since it opened its first chapters in Austria that summer and began receiving funding from the German ministries of the interior and foreign affairs that year as well. The map’s creator, Friedrich Lange, born in 1885, was a librarian and cartographer with a particular interest in mapping the distribution of German speakers throughout Europe as well as in drawing attention to territories that Germany had lost after World War I and that ostensibly belonged back within the German nation. In the same year that this map appeared, Lange also published the book Deutschlands gerechte Grenzen. Mit 14 Zeichnungen und 1 Landkarte [Germany’s Rightful Borders. With 14 Sketches and 1 Map], under the pseudonym “Adriaticus.” Because his interests aligned so closely with those of the Nazi regime, Lange went on to produce many more maps and books during the Third Reich than the Weimar Republic.