Iron Kingdom: the Rise and Downfall of Prussia 1600-1947

"The next one is Prussia, which is another huge topic. Prussia is not one of the forgotten countries. It’s one of the kingdoms which was so powerful in its final phase, in the late 18th century to 1918, that memory of Hohenzollern Prussia, Bismarck and the creation of the German Empire is so recent and powerful that the memory of the earlier Prussia has all but been obliterated. The book I recommend, Chris Clark’s Iron Kingdom , a history of Prussia, is an extremely good book about modern Prussia. But it doesn’t give any indication of the many things that came before it. Namely, that the original Prussians were not Germans – they were Balts like the Lithuanians. The medieval history of Prussia that brings them into recorded history is when the German Teutonic knights lead a crusade to Christianise Prussia. And they are so successful that they eradicate the local people, the local language and culture. It did survive long enough to be recorded. The Teutonic state is 1224 until 1525. Then in come the Poles. The last Grand Master of the Teutonic knights, Albert, accepts Lutheranism. He’s been the Grand Master of a Catholic crusading order, and he sets himself up as secular Duke of Prussia and recognises the King of Poland as his suzerain. You’ve got quite a long period of Prussia and Poland being closely involved. Albert, of the House of Hohenzollern, the great German hero – his mother was Polish! And because he had rejected Catholicism (the Hohenzollern relatives in Brandenburg and Berlin were Catholics at the time) he was a black sheep, and he was much closer to his Polish relatives than he was to his German relatives. But all this is, as it were, forgotten history. Well, the rise of Hohenzollern Prussia comes about through the decline of all its neighbours. Until that point, Prussia was not a premiership player – it was the Swedes or the Poles or the Holy Roman Empire. These were the big powers of the area. They all declined, and Prussia rose up. Then Prussia gets caught up in German history, and the kingdom of Prussia comes to an end in 1918, when the Kaiser – who was also King of Prussia – abdicated. But most of these stories have an afterlife. There is a state of Prussia which continues within the Weimar Republic and even in the Third Reich. Goering was prime minister of Prussia. People don’t know that because they don’t think of it that way. It’s only when you have a different entry point to history that you get all these different connections. Prussia was still alive in 1945. The last pre-Nazi prime minister of Prussia appeared in 1945 saying we Prussians are the victims of the Nazis, a bit like Austria, and Prussia must be restored by the Allied powers. But there was no way Stalin was going to allow the restoration of Prussia, and in 1947 the Allied powers arrived with their certificates and Prussia no longer existed."

"There are very few books that neatly cover the 19th century. Sheehan starts in 1770. Clark starts in 1600 and goes on until 1947. This is a much more recent book. Chris Clark—Sir Christopher Clark as he is now—is Regius Professor of History at Cambridge University. He has spent a long time working on modern German history. This book was published by Penguin in 2006. Prussia was the largest kingdom—the largest state—in Germany up to and beyond unification in 1871. It took up a good half of the whole area and comprised more than half the population of the country. It was under Prussian leadership that Germany was unified. Many of the institutions of the Empire—the Reich—from 1871 were, in fact, Prussian institutions translated onto a bigger scale. Other German states, like Bavaria, Württemberg or Saxony, had to follow Prussia’s lead. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Prussia was abolished by the Allies in 1947 as part of the post-war settlement. And it was abolished because the Allies—that’s Britain, France, America and the Soviet Union—considered it a powerhouse of militarism, lust for conquest, authoritarianism, hostility towards democracy and everything bad about Germany that had given rise to Nazism. It was abolished to provide a more democratic foundation for post-war Germany. That view was in contrast to the Borussian historians, who saw Prussia as a fountainhead of values that included duty, obedience, discipline and industry. In their view, Prussians were the source of the—clichéd—stereotype of the Germans as hardworking and law-abiding people. Christopher Clark provides a much more balanced view than the hostile account from the Allies and the over-positive account from the Borussian historians—the great tradition beginning with Ranke and going on to Treitschke, a more dubious figure, Droysen and many others. What you’ve got with Iron Kingdom is a two-sided view in which you can see the pluses and minuses of Prussia. You can understand how these values worked, he relativizes them, and he is a wonderfully readable writer. His book is full of anecdote and wit, illuminating illustrations, examples and quotations. “Borussian historians saw Prussia as a fountainhead of values that included duty, obedience, discipline and industry” He covers many different sides of the history of Prussia. It’s not just the political side, or the military side. He covers the bureaucracy, religion and society. It’s a very readable book and it helps you understand, better than any other book, the role Prussia has played in modern German history. This is why Clark starts in 1600. Prussia itself—Prüsa—is outside Germany, believe it or not. It’s on the southeastern Baltic coast. And East Prussia is now divided among various eastern European countries, particularly Poland. But in the early modern period , you can’t really think of states as territorial. They were the hereditary possessions of particular monarchs. The key thing about Prussia is that it acquired, by war and by diplomatic settlements, a number of other territories. It acquired Brandenburg, which is a prosperous agricultural area in northern Germany. And then, in 1815, with the end of the Napoleonic Wars, it acquired the Rhineland, the more northerly areas around the river Rhine, to the south of Holland and east of France. That was part of a kind of security settlement to box in the French, should they try to ‘do a Napoleon’ again, as it were. The Rhineland happened to be a very wealthy and soon-to-be industrialized mercantile, trading area. Traditional Prussia was rather poor and miserable, with large and middle-sized agrarian estates run by the famous ‘junkers’. But these new acquisitions were quite separate. They were separated by the Kingdom of Hanover in the middle which, of course, was under the English crown. “Prussia itself—Prüsa—is outside Germany, believe it or not. It’s on the southeastern Baltic coast” Part of the reason for the drive to German unification, which was spearheaded by the Prussians in the mid-nineteenth century, was a desire to join up all this territory, which required abolishing the Kingdom of Hanover. Fortunately for them, when Queen Victoria succeeded to the English throne in 1837, the Salic law in Germany prohibited a woman from becoming monarch and so her uncle, the Duke of Cumberland, became King of Hanover. He was a rather nasty character, who became extremely unpopular because he was anti-liberal. That allowed the Prussians to absorb Hanover eventually, in the 1860s. Somebody once said, “Where some states have an army, the Prussian army has a state.” It’s a social system, what’s been called the ‘second feudalism’. With all the wars and disturbances of the early modern period, beginning with the Thirty Years War from 1618-1648, the landed aristocracy were able to impose many more restrictions on the mass of peasants and small farmers. These groups had a lot of servile obligations, which continued until the effective abolition of serfdom in the 19th century. That was one of the big social changes of the period, with serfdom ending with the 1848 revolutions. One of these obligations was military service. The small farmers had to provide various agrarian services and work on the feudal landlords’ fields and so on. But they also had to put up their sons for the army. Prussian monarchs came in two shapes. One was the military martinet, the general, who emphasized discipline and wanted to have a big army—like Friedrich Wilhelm I. Or they came as the slightly bonkers aesthete type like Wilhelm II or Friedrich Wilhelm IV. And it’s often said that the only one who combined both of these characteristics was Frederick the Great—although Tim Blanning, in his recent and brilliant biography , has made a case for him being a completely incompetent general. In any case, he inherited a huge army from his father, whose hobby was building it up. His father’s military interests included collecting giants. He even got an Irish giant, who was about seven foot tall, to serve in his Grenadiers. His son disbanded the giants’ regiment and had a much wider range of interests. He was also a composer and a musician, knew Bach and corresponded with Voltaire . He tried to reform the system of serfdom, to loosen it up a bit, and to create modern judicial and administrative systems. The militarism came partly from the militarism of the kings and partly from the insecurities of Prussia and the Prussian territories themselves. They were surrounded by enemies in the 18th century. Berlin was even occupied for a time by the Russians. It was the whole system of serfdom and military service that boosted the military strength of the state. That’s where it came from and it was mixed up with these Prussian values where aristocrats were supposed not just to run their estates, but to serve in the army as well. There’s an endless series of wars in the 18th century, culminating in the Napoleonic Wars, in which Prussia took part. I think Clark’s Iron Kingdom manages to strike a balance. It’s not uniformly hostile to the Prussians by any means at all. It points out, for example, the strong role of pietistic Protestantism in the state, which is attached to different kinds of values emphasizing suffering and patience and so on. It also discusses the complete failure of Prussian militarism in the Napoleonic Wars , where the Prussians were roundly defeated and had a very bad time indeed. And then it covers the subsequent military reforms of the 19th century which enabled them, particularly as a result of the addition of the wealthy, industrializing Rhineland, to equip themselves with better guns, better equipment and railways. Railways were the key to moving troops about rapidly in the wars of German unification in the 1860s. The abolition of Prussia was a rather symbolic act. The fact is that most of Brandenburg and Prussia—most of the territory apart from the Rhineland—was part of the Soviet zone of occupation and so became East Germany, the communist state of the German Democratic Republic. General de Gaulle actually used to refer to it as Prussia. Interestingly, the East Germans, first of all under Walter Ulbricht, identified themselves as the heirs of the tradition of the German labour movement, the very large and powerful social democratic, and then, communist movement. But, later on, they switched and identified themselves much more as the heirs of Prussia. The East Germans actually restored quite a few Prussian monuments. For example, they restored some famous sculptures by Schinkel on the Schlossbrüke, a Berlin bridge. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter There was a reason for the switch. Claiming to be the heir of the German labour movement involved claiming to be part of the whole of Germany, which Ulbricht wanted to reunite on a socialist basis. But Honecker, who succeeded him, partly because the Soviets decided that that wasn’t a good line to take, wanted to emphasize the separate nature of East Germany and hence identified with Prussia and the Prussians. And, of course, you can see the communist values as practised by Honecker—discipline, obedience, all of that kind of thing—as Prussian in a different form."