Yet in 1701, when Frederick I proclaimed the ‘Kingdom in Prussia’, the map of Europe looked very different from that of a later age. The Grand Duchy of Moscow had already taken to calling itself Rossiya or ‘Russia’, and its recent seizure of Ukraine from Poland had given it territorial weight in Europe to match its vast, empty holdings beyond the Urals. But the Russian Empire did not formally exist. In 1703, in an act of bravado parallel to that of Frederick I’s, Grand Duke Peter Romanov laid the foundations of his imperial city-to-be on Swedish land at the mouth of the River Neva, and called it Sankt Petersburg. Russia, like Prussia, was gambling on the outcome of the Great Northern War. Henceforth, the competition between these two gamblers introduced a new factor into European history, matching in their rivalry for control of the East the older, Franco-Imperial competition for supremacy in the West.
At the time, neither Frederick nor Peter could be classed as premiership players. The Hohenzollerns were preoccupied with Brandenburg’s neighbour, Saxony. The Romanovs were preoccupied with Sweden, whose provinces on the southern Baltic shore promised a future ‘window on the West’. As yet, the Hohenzollerns could not dare to challenge their German masters, the Habsburg emperors, and the Romanovs, though masters of the limitless wastes of Siberia, had so far failed to establish a permanent outlet either to the Baltic or to the Black Sea. To the west, they faced Poland-Lithuania, whose internal maladies were masked by Sobieski’s military reputation; in the south, they were hemmed in by the lands of the Ottoman sultan.
Given these constraints, the modern Prussian story centres on the ways and means whereby a peripheral, partly dependent and initially third-class outfit contrived in the space of five or six generations to become Europe’s leading power. The transformation is surrounded by the aura of a near-miracle. The main stages can be summarized under five headings: (1) the international recognition of Prussia’s royal status by the Treaty of Nystadt in 1721; (2) the phenomenal military feats of Frederick II the Great (r. 1740–86), whose acquisition of ‘Royal Prussia’ inspired him to change his title to ‘King of Prussia’; (3) the astonishing revival of the kingdom and the Prussian army after their defeat and near-extinction during the Napoleonic Wars; (4) Prussia’s colossal territorial gains at the Congress of Vienna (1815), which laid the foundations of its subsequent industrial pre-eminence; and (5) the three textbook wars of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who in less than a decade turned Prussia into Europe’s supreme military power. The zenith of Prussia’s success arrived after victory in the Franco-Prussian War of 1871, when, in the great Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, the Prussian king was declared emperor of Germany.73
The most precarious moment in the whole saga occurred in January 1762 towards the end of the Seven Years War. Königsberg, captured by Russian forces four years earlier, was administered by military governors and for practical purposes had been annexed to the Russian Empire. After the storming of the fortress of Kolberg in Pomerania, Berlin was put under siege, and was on the point of capitulating. Frederick II, whose army had lost half its troops, was said to be on the point of suicide. But suddenly the Russian empress died; her nephew Peter III succeeded, and as a declared Prussophile, called off the offensive; Frederick was offered an honourable exit from the war. He called his lucky escape the ‘Miracle of the House of Brandenburg’. Prussia survived, recovered and went on to outperform the aspirations of even her most fervent admirers.
Infuriatingly for Berlin, many Europeans reacted to Prussia’s success with a mixture of fear and ill-disguised jealousy. Some turned to satire and caricature: a Victorian schoolbook from England, which presented a ‘brief sketch of the growth of Prussian power’, speaks for the whole genre:
By her insatiable ambition, guided by consummate skill and complete disregard of what is lawful and right, she [Prussia] has succeeded within the last century of robbing Austria, Poland, Saxony, Denmark, Hanover and France of provinces belonging to their respective empires. And thus, for a season, [she has] succeeded in making herself the head boy of Dame Europa’s School.74
How, one wonders, can the head boy be a ‘she’? The gender confusion may be symptomatic. ‘Prussian militarism’, which all the other powers were trying to emulate, would soon be denounced as a fundamental cause of Europe’s miseries.
Herein lie the roots of another historiographic phenomenon. Having been made the centrepiece of a dubious moral parable about Good and Evil in modern times, German history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has reached unequalled prominence in the academic syllabus, commanding by far the largest number of theses, textbooks, courses and researchers. Especially in Anglo-American opinion, whose English-language media rule the globalized roost, former complaints about ‘Prussian militarism’ have merged with the horror of Nazism, the culmination of all past evil. Adolf Hitler (who was not a Prussian), the author of the Holocaust and warlord of the Axis, has been presented not only as an ogre to obliterate all other ogres, but also as the inevitable product of long-term German trends. Hitler, as one gadfly historian put it, was no more of an accident than ‘when a river flows into the sea’.75 Other tyrants, other victims, other tragedies, have been pushed aside or emotionally defused. Among them is the tragedy of Prussia itself.
This ‘Allied Scheme’ has the further effect of endowing Russia with a relatively benign image. Since the Empire of the tsars, and later the Soviet Union, fought stoutly as allies of the West in two world wars, ‘Russia’ is not judged by the same standards by which Prussia and Germany are judged. People talk of Prussian militarism but not of Russian militarism; of the ‘German jackboot’ but not of the Russian or the Soviet jackboot (even though goose-stepping was introduced into Russia by Prussian military advisers). Russian imperialism and expansionism, though far more extensive than anything in the German record, are somehow taken to be normal. German ideas of Lebensraum, ‘living space’, which long predated Hitler, are uniquely aggressive and obnoxious. Russia’s development, especially in its Soviet form, which under Lenin and Stalin followed a course filled with human misery and mass murder, has sometimes been described as a noble experiment that lost its way. Until very recently, German development has been widely described in terms of its Sonderweg, a sinister ‘Special Path’ that was leading in the wrong direction from the start. Communist crimes are rarely measured by the same criteria as Nazi crimes, and, despite a plethora of historical truth-telling in recent decades, Russia is still perceived, on balance, as having been a force for good.76 Young scholars who challenge the German-centred consensus can still sometimes expect a roasting.77
A better balance between East and West is called for. Thanks to Prussia’s location on Germany’s eastern flank, Russia always loomed large on the Prussian mental map. Once Poland-Lithuania was removed from the reckoning, Prussia and Russia gained a common frontier, and fear of Russia nourished many Prussian attitudes. By the same token, thanks to repeated bloody campaigns, it was the Prussian element within Germany that Russians learned to hate. These tendencies need to be recognized, and correctives applied. Western strands in German history must not be forgotten. But Russo-Prussian relations must feature with due prominence in the long, last act of the tale which leads eventually to Prussia’s annihilation.
Such is the context within which one of the most formidable of recent history books needs to be examined. Few writers can ever have received such an extravagant shower of plaudits as the author of Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia. To almost universal acclaim, Christopher Clark, a Cambridge don of Australian provenance, has written a text whose intellectual content is as cogent as its style is lucid. The reviews bristle with flattering adjectives: ‘riveting’, ‘illuminating’, ‘profoundly satisfying’, ‘enthralling’, ‘authoritative’, ‘shrewd’ and ‘judicious’. Clark rejects the jaded accusations against the Hohenzollern state, offering in their place a portrait of a polity that was progressive, cosmopolitan and enlightened. His tour de force is all the more welcome because it undermines the frame
work of prejudice into which German history has so often been forced.
Nonetheless, at least one half sentence in Clark’s text must be called into question. It is not insignificant, since it makes up the first clause of the first sentence on the first of 688 pages. The words read: ‘In the beginning, there was only Brandenburg’, and they are conditioned by a further phrase, ‘the heartland of the future state of Prussia’.78 One has to wonder. It is hard to see why the eastern part of the equation is ignored. A better opening might have read: ‘Once upon a time, there was a place called Brandenburg, and another called Prussia.’ It might have prepared the reader better for the long exposition which follows, and which shows how Brandenburg and Prussia came together. In fact, Iron Kingdom does not start at the beginning either of Prussia or of Brandenburg or indeed of the kingdom. It picks up the thread in the year 1600, more than halfway through Prussian history, and more than a century before the kingdom’s launch. And one cannot help noticing the book’s final sentence. ‘In the end’, it states, ‘there was only Brandenburg.’ It is an elegant flourish to bring the argument full circle, but it also reveals the author’s secret. He has adopted the standpoint of a latterday liberal Berliner; he has not been relating the history of ‘all the Prussias’. Despite the very original interpretation, the focus, like that of the Borussian School, is firmly placed on the Hohenzollerns’ creation: its origins, its prime and its sorry end. Once this is understood, all further quibbles can be forgotten. The remaining 99.99 per cent of Iron Kingdom can be read with great benefit. It deals in depth with the 250-year period that the present sketch is regrettably obliged to skimp.
In the nineteenth century Hohenzollern Prussia bore little resemblance to the kingdom of Frederick I, still less to the Prussia of Duke Albrecht. Its possessions stretched from Aachen to Tilsit, from the Danish frontier to Switzerland. It had many heartlands: the twin industrial heartlands of the Ruhr and of Silesia, the state heartland in Brandenburg and the historical heartland in a province that had now become ‘East Prussia’. It was Europe’s leading industrial power, and its huge military-industrial complex explains the basis of its leading role in the German Empire.
Russia, meanwhile, having acquired the largest slice of Poland-Lithuania and most of the Ottoman Empire’s Black Sea lands, had become Prussia’s immediate neighbour. It was by far the largest state in the world, possessing a larger population than all the German states together, untold natural riches and gargantuan ambitions. Once France had been humbled in 1871, it was self-evident that the Empire of the tsars was the only continental power that might one day challenge Prussian-controlled Germany.
As these circumstances became apparent, Prussia adopted a policy of studied non-confrontation. For decades on end, Berlin avoided all hints of wishing to extend Prussia’s eastern frontier. During the Crimean War it stayed aloof from Britain and France’s quarrel with Russia; each of Bismarck’s short wars – in 1864, 1866 and 1870–71 – were conducted exclusively in Western or Central Europe. In his testament, the first modern German emperor, Wilhelm I, proffered the crucial advice to his son, ‘never to provoke those Russian barbarians’. His restraint postponed, but did not dispel, the conflict which many considered inevitable.
Prussia’s westward expansion could not but dilute the multinational character of Prussian society. In 1800, when Prussia had held Warsaw,* the Slav element in its population reached a peak of about 40 per cent. Thereafter it gradually declined, and receptiveness to German nationalism rose accordingly. ‘Old Prussia’ had been staunchly monarchist, stressing duty to the state, not the nation. Loyalty was its only yardstick for judging Germans, Poles and Danes alike. The Hohenzollerns looked askance at German unification until the very last moment. When the German Empire was declared in 1871, Poles still formed 10 per cent of the population, and had a huge cohort in Berlin. Their Germanized offspring sprinkled the provinces and the football teams with Polish surnames.79 Similarly, as Berlin grew mightily, the significance of the original, the historic, the ‘real Prussia’ shrank accordingly. Königsberg remained a substantial provincial town and the coronation city. No expense was spared to equip it with impressive modern fortifications. But compared to Berlin it was a backwater:
KOENIGSBERG (Polish Królewiec), a town of Germany, capital of the province of East Prussia and a fortress of the first rank… Pop. (1905), 219,862… It consists of three parts: the Altstadt (old town), to the west, Löbenicht to the east, and the island Kneiphof, together with numerous suburbs…
Among the more interesting buildings are the Schloss, a long rectangle begun in 1255… and the cathedral, begun in 1333, adjoining which is the tomb of Kant. The Schloss was originally the residence of the Grand Masters of the Teutonic Order and later of the dukes of Prussia. Behind is the parade-ground, with the statues of Albert I and [many others]… To the east is the Schlossteich, a long narrow ornamental lake… The north-west side of the parade-ground is occupied by the new university buildings, completed in 1865, the finest architectural features of the town. The university (Collegium Albertinum) was founded in 1544 by Albert duke of Prussia, as a ‘purely Lutheran’ place of learning. It is chiefly distinguished for its mathematical and philosophical studies, and possesses a famous observatory…
Koenigsberg is a naval and military fortress of the first order. The fortifications were only completed in 1905… The works consist of an inner wall… and of twelve detached forts… on [either] bank of the Pregel. Between them lie two great forts, that of Friedrichsburg on an island, and the Kaserne Kronprinz on the east of the town… The protected position of its harbour has made Koenigsberg one of [Germany’s] most important commercial cities. A new channel has recently been [opened to] Pillau, 29 miles distant on the outer side of the Frische Haff…
The Altstadt grew up around the castle built… on the advice of Ottaker II. King of Bohemia… Its first site was near the fishing village of Steindamm, but after destruction by the Prussians in 1263 it was rebuilt in its present position… In 1340 [the city] entered the Hanseatic League…
Koenigsberg suffered severely during the war of liberation… The opening of a railway system [later] gave a new impetus to its commerce, making it the principal outlet for Russian grain, seeds, flax and hemp. It has now regular steam communication with Memel, Stettin, Kiel, Amsterdam and Hull.80
Despite the initial hint, few people reading this entry would have guessed which part of the city’s history had been quietly omitted.
A day on which at least some of Königsberg’s past glories returned was 18 October 1861. King Wilhelm I (r. 1861–88) arrived with his new chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, to initiate what became Prussia’s most glorious decade. The painter Adolf Menzel attended the coronation to make sketches, and four years later, after completing 152 portraits of the participants, he produced a vast documentary canvas, overwhelming in its detailed realism. Unfortunately, Menzel’s conceit of showing the king and future emperor swinging his ceremonial sword in a gesture worthy of Grand Master von Salza was not thought appropriate. The picture was duly consigned to a bedroom in the Sanssouci Palace at Potsdam.81
The standard text on nineteenth-century Prussian military attitudes was composed by General Friedrich von Bernhardi (1849–1930), a Baltic German, a cavalryman, a military writer and a pupil of Treitschke. Born in St Petersburg, he may conceivably have absorbed something from the country of his birth, though his main claim to fame was to have been the first German soldier to ride through the Arc de Triomphe in Paris at the head of the victory parade in 1871. His Germany and the Next War (1912) was copiously quoted by Allied apologists eager to justify their anti-German animosity. From Treitschke’s Politics (1897) it borrowed ‘The end-all and be-all of a State is power, and he who is not man enough to look this truth in the face should not meddle with politics’. And ‘God will always see to it that war always recurs as a drastic medicine for the human race’. Bernhardi’s own epigrammatic contributions include: ‘War is a biological necessity’; ‘Th
e maintenance of peace can never be the main goal of policy’; ‘War is the greatest factor in the furtherance of culture and power’; ‘The State is a law unto itself. Weak nations do not have the same right to live as powerful and vigorous nations’; and ‘Any action in favour of collective humanity outside the limits of the State and nationality is impossible’.82
Bernhardi’s detractors did not always notice that his rant was framed as an attack on the treatise on ‘Perpetual Peace’ by Immanuel Kant, who was rather more Prussian than he was; Bernhardi’s admirers, who could be found everywhere Europe, did not enquire too closely why warmongering was right in one country but wrong in others. Patriotism and partisanship framed most people’s views on the cause of the First World War; they have started to fade only lately. ‘It was the British government’, writes a prominent British historian, ‘which ultimately decided to turn the continental war into a world war.’83
Nonetheless, it would be unwise to distance Prussian-led Germany very far from the heart of debates on the road to war. German unification had been achieved in 1871 through Prussia’s crushing military victory over France, and the next four decades were overshadowed by the near-universal conviction that military preparedness was the key to the successful pursuit of international relations. No one was more convinced than Kaiser Wilhelm II, the last German emperor and the last king of Prussia (r. 1888–1918), and no country was better equipped than the homeland of Alfred Krupp, the world’s largest industrial firm, for making elaborate preparations. When Wilhelm set his ‘New Course’ and dismissed Bismarck in his reign’s second year, France was already engaged with Russia in building a military counterweight and the British Empire was soon fearing for its naval supremacy. Rightly or wrongly, he was widely regarded as the embodiment of Prussian values:
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