In precise political terms, the emigrants from Külsheim in the Grand Dutchy of Baden departed in 1870 and 1872 from different souvereign countries. When Maria Theresia Adelmann and Karl Friedrich Adelmann left Külsheim in early 1870, the Grand Dutchy of Baden (dating from 1806) was technically an independent state. After the military losses in the war of 1866, the Dutchy had left the German Alliance (Deutscher Bund), to which it had belonged as a largely sovereign member since 1815. It concluded treaties with Prussia that were at first secret, and the ruling aristocracy in both lands was often related, but the Dutchy retained and in some sense enhanced its sovereignty, at least in a formal sense. That all changed on 18 January 1871, when the Prussian King was declared German Emperor and the Grand Dutchy of Baden forfeited its unlimited sovereignty to become a member state of the German Empire. It retained the title and many but not all of the structures of the previous Grand Dutchy of Baden. The tensions between the Grand Dutchy and its majority Catholic Church that had begun around 1860 would continue until around 1880. The emigrants would have experienced most of the years of the most intense conflict (1864-1876).