Central Europe at the Beginning of the Film Era

Just to get us started, I thought it would be good to have a sense of the boundaries of German-speaking central Europe at the beginning of the 20th century, which is also the beginning of the age of film.

Germany itself was much bigger than it is today, reaching far into what is not Poland. East Prussia is now a Russian enclave.

To the south and east of Germany was the Austro-Hungarian Empire, ruled from Vienna and Budapest by the Habsburgs. As can be seen from this map, after the First World War what was once a vast, polyglot, multinational empire was subdivided into many individual nations, including Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic and Slovakia), Romania, and Yugoslavia (now Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzogovina). Other parts of the former empire fell to Poland, Ukraine, and Italy.