Ph.D. Vladimir Petrov Kostov
2013
It is natural to consider the following countries as belonging or having once belonged to the zone of direct geopolitical influence of Germany: Austria, Hungary, Poland, Lithuania, The Czech Republic, Slovakia, Croatia, Slovenia, Italy, Switzerland, France, Luxembourg, Belgium, The Netherlands and Denmark. The reasons (except in most of the cases to be direct neighbours) are the following ones: - some of them (namely, Austria, Hungary, parts of Poland, The Czech Republic, Slovakia, Croatia and Slovenia) have belonged to the Austro- Hungarian Empire, where German was the official language; - others (France, Belgium, Denmark, Lithuania and Italy) have annexed after World War I territories peopled at least in part by ethnic Germans; these were the German territories respectively Alsace and Lorraine for France, the cantons Eupen and Malmedy for Belgium (today they constitute its German speaking linguistic zone), Northern Schleswig for Denmark, the port Memel (Klaipeda) for Lithuania; Italy has annexed the German speaking Southern Tyrol belonging up to then to Austria-Hungary; today this is one of the five Italian regions having greater autonomy than the others; - Poland has been created after World War I in part on former German and in part on former Russian territory; after World War II it has acquired other such territories – part of Pomerania, Silesia and parts of Eastern Prussia (the rest of it being today incorporated into Russia as its enclave of Königsberg/Kaliningrad and in Lithuania); - Denmark, Belgium, The Netherlands, Luxembourg and Switzerland have linguistic ties with Germany – Danish and Dutch belong to the German language group, the official language of Luxembourg can be qualified as a dialect of German, German is one of the official languages of Switzerland with Schwyzerdütsch as the most spoken dialect; finally, Lithuanian belongs to the group of the Baltic languages which includes also the already dead East Prussian; - some of these countries were inv
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