As neighbors since the ninth century the German and Czech inhabitants of the Austrian and
Bohemian Lands have experienced substantial political economic social and cultural changes.
In the Holy Roman Empire Premyslides Babenbergs Habsburgs and Luxembourgs founded abbeys
and towns and promoted settlement based on German law. In 1526 Ferdinand I began common
Habsburg rule. Under his successors confessional conflict erupted in the Thirty Years' War.
The Peace of Westphalia allowed absolute control of the realm but not the Holy Roman Empire
until victory over the Ottomans. Reforms under Maria Theresa and Joseph II brought
modernization. After the Congress of Vienna ethnic nationalism increased leading to
Czech-German national conflict in the Bohemian Lands. Still Austria-Hungary experienced
economic technological educational and cultural quantum leaps under Emperor Francis Joseph I
until it disintegrated in WW I a fate sealed by the unbalanced Treaties of Saint-Germain
(1919) and Trianon (1920). Hitler's policy of aggression the forced Anschluss of Austria the
Munich Agreement and the creation of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia pitted Austrian
Czech and Sudeten-German societies against each other and annihilated the Jews. In 1945 46
the BeneS Decrees forced the expropriation expulsion and resettlement of Sudeten Germans. In
1948 Austria and Czechoslovakia were separated by the Iron Curtain. Twenty years after the
suppression of the Prague Spring by the Warsaw Pact in 1968 a socio-political watershed
occurred in 1989 90 creating a new Central European community: Austria joined the European
Union in 1995 Czechia in 2004.
