Pan-Germanism

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Pan-Germanism

Pan-Germanism's origins began in the early 1800s following the Napoleonic Wars. The wars launched a massive new movement that was born in France itself during the French Revolution, Nationalism. Nationalism during the 1800s threatened the old aristocratic regimes. Many ethnic groups of Central and Eastern Europe had been divided for centuries, ruled over by the old Monarchies of the Romanovs and the Habsburgs. Germans, for the most part, had been a loose and disunited people since the Reformation when the Holy Roman Empire was shattered into a patchwork of states. The new German nationalists, mostly young reformers such as Johann Tillmann of East Prussia, sought to unite all the German-speaking and ethnic-German (Volksdeutsche) people.
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