As I understand it, at the end of WWI the Allies went about carving up a great deal of the old empires in Central Europe. The Austro-Hungarian Empire became Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, etc. The Ottoman Empire got fragmented as well.
What I don't understand is why those empires (which were both, I'm given to believe, hundreds of years old) were dismantled while the ~40 year old German Empire was allowed to remain... Germany. Surely, unlike the case of the Ottomans and the Austrians, there were people in Germany who could honestly say 'I remember when this was Prussia/Wurttemberg/Bavaria/Hannover/etc.'
Of all the Central Powers to be dismantled like that, Germany seems like the most obviously easy one, yet I've never even heard of an attempt made to do something like that. I realise they ceded territory as well, to create Poland and so on, but they weren't shattered into their constituent parts like the others. Why not?
As I understand it, at the end of WWI the Allies went about carving up a great deal of the old empires in Central Europe.
The Entente did not dismantle the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires - they fell apart from inner conflict. This process had been going on for a long time. Mostly because of problems between the different national groups within the Empires. I mean World War I started on the Balkans when Serbian nationalism and Austrian hegemony clashed.
Germany was a relatively new nation state, however it had a much more homogeneous population, so it was never a question to divide it up along national lines. Well, actually this is what happened. France took the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine that had a big French population and areas in the East were ceded to Poland. There wasn't much else to divide the country between. If you look at the interwar period and the start of WWII you see how Germany started to re-occupy the areas that now had Germans living outside of its borders in the newly created states.
WWI effectively ends with the signing of the Armistice at Compiègne on the 11^th of November 1918, although the troops of Austria-Hungary had already stopped fighting following the Armistice of Villa Giusti on November 3^rd as a consequence of the total crumbling of their main front in Italy.
By that time, Austria-Hungary was already history without any signature and without any Entente soldier setting foot in the cpaital. On the 28^th of October the Bohemian assembly in Prague proclaimed their independence as Czechoslovakia, on the 29^th the southern Slavs in Dalmatia and Bosnia notified Vienna that they were going to join the Serbian Kingdom and on the 31^st the Diet in Hungary declared the real union binding them to Austria dissolved. Hungary wouldn't even acknowledge the Villa Giusti treaty, arguing that they were no longer affiliate with the signatory party, and instead broker their own deal.
The final Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye with Austria (and the Treaty of Trianon with Hungary) would only make the new rump state of German-Austria recognise them.