Iron Kingdom : The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (2 page)

Between March 1985 and October 1987, I lived and studied in West Berlin, a place that no longer exists. It was a walled city islanded in Communist East Germany, ringed by a palisade of concrete slabs, ‘a cage,’ as one visiting Italian journalist put it, ‘in which one feels free.’ No one who lived there will forget the unique atmosphere of this marooned western citadel – a vibrant, multi-ethnic enclave, a haven for youthful refuseniks dodging West German military service, and a symbol of the Cold War in which formal sovereignty still rested with the victorious powers of 1945. There was little in West Berlin to invoke the Prussian past, which seemed as remote as antiquity.

Only when you crossed the political border at Friedrichsstrasse station, passing through turnstiles and metal corridors under the scrutiny of unsmiling guards, did you encounter the heart of the old Prussian city of Berlin–the long line of graceful buildings on Unter den Linden and the breathtaking symmetries of the Forum Fredericianum, where Frederick the Great advertised the cultural pretensions of his kingdom. To cross the border was to travel back into the past, a past only partly obscured by wartime devastation and decades of post-war neglect. A tree had sprouted in the broken dome of the eighteenth-century French Church on the Gendarmenmarkt, its roots reaching deep into the stonework. Berlin Cathedral was still a blackened hulk disfigured by the artillery and rifle fire of 1945. For an Australian from easygoing seaside Sydney, these crossings had an inexhaustible fascination.

Students of the Prussian past can draw on one of the world’s most sophisticated and varied historiographies. There is, first of all, the rich and still robust tradition of transatlantic Anglophone writing on Prussia. For readers of German, there is the extraordinary native Prussian canon, which reaches back to the beginnings of history as a modern academic
discipline. The articles and monographs of the classic era of Prussian historiography are still remarkable for the depth and ambition of their scholarship and for the verve and elegance of their writing. The years since 1989 have seen a renewal of interest among younger German scholars and brought wider recognition to those East German historians whose work, notwithstanding the narrow intellectual horizons of the German Democratic Republic, did much to illuminate the evolving textures of Prussian society. One of the chief pleasures of working on this book has been the licence to browse widely in the writings of so many colleagues, alive and dead.

There are also more immediate debts. James Brophy, Karin Friedrich, Andreas Kossert, Benjamin Marschke, Jan Palmowski, Florian Schui and Gareth Stedman Jones shared with me pre-publication versions of their manuscripts. Marcus Clausius sent copies of his transcripts from the archives of the German Colonial Office. I benefited from the advice and conversation of Holger Afflerbach, Margaret Lavinia Anderson, David Barclay, Derek Beales, Stefan Berger, Tim Blanning, Richard Bosworth, Annabel Brett, Clarissa Campbell-Orr, Scott Dixon, Richard Drayton, Philip Dwyer, Richard Evans, Niall Ferguson, Bernhard Fulda, Wolfram Kaiser, Alan Kramer, Michael Ledger-Lomas, Julia Moses, Jonathan Parry, Wolfram Pyta, James Retallack, Torsten Riotte, Emma Rothschild, Ulinka Rublack, Martin Rühl, Hagen Schulze, Hamish Scott, James Sheehan, Brendan Simms, Jonathan Sperber, Thomas Stamm-Kuhlmann, Jonathan Steinberg, Adam Tooze, Maiken Umbach, Helmut Walser-Smith, Joachim Whaley, Peter Wilson, Emma Winter and Wolfgang Mommsen, a frequent visitor to Cambridge, whose unexpected death in August 2004was such a shock to his friends and colleagues here. Like many historians of Germany now working in the United Kingdom, I learned a great deal from collaborating on ‘The Struggle for Mastery in Germany’, the Cambridge Specified Subject convened by Tim Blanning and Jonathan Steinberg in the 1980s and early 1990s. I owe much to twenty-five years of spirited conversation with my father-in-law, Rainer Lübbren, a discerning reader of history.

Special thanks are due to those friends who had the generosity and stamina to read and comment on part or all of the manuscript: Chris Bayly, my father Peter Clark, James Mackenzie, Holger Nehring, Hamish Scott, James Simpson, Gareth Stedman Jones, and John A. Thompson. Patrick Higgins dispensed imaginative advice and ran a red
line through passages of bombast and irrelevance. Working with the people at Penguin – Chloe Campbell, Richard Duguid and Rebecca Lee–has been another of the pleasures of this project. Simon Winder is the editor’s Platonic ideal, endowed with that second sight that sees more clearly than authors themselves the book trapped within the manuscript. Bela Cunha’s copy-editing was a vigilante rampage against error, inconsistency and syllogism. Thanks also to Cecilia Mackay for help in resourcing the pictures. With all this able support, the book ought in theory to be faultless – I take full responsibility for the fact that it is not.

How does one thank the most important people of all? Josef and Alexander grew taller during the writing of this book and distracted me in a thousand happy ways. Nina Lübbren bore my selfish obsession with humour and good grace and was the first reader and critic of every paragraph. It is to her that I dedicate this book with much love.

Introduction

On 25 February 1947, representatives of the Allied occupation authorities in Berlin signed a law abolishing the state of Prussia. From this moment onward, Prussia belonged to history.

The Prussian State, which from early days has been a bearer of militarism and reaction in Germany, has de facto ceased to exist.
Guided by the interests of preservation of peace and security of peoples, and with the desire to assure further reconstruction of the political life of Germany on a democratic basis, the Control Council enacts as follows:
ARTICLE I
The Prussian State together with its central government and all its agencies is abolished.
¹

Law No. 46 of the Allied Control Council was more than an administrative act. In expunging Prussia from the map of Europe, the Allied authorities also passed judgement upon it. Prussia was not just one German territory among others, on a par with Baden, Württemberg, Bavaria or Saxony; it was the very source of the German malaise that had afflicted Europe. It was the reason why Germany had turned from the path of peace and political modernity. ‘The core of Germany is Prussia,’ Churchill told the British Parliament on 21 September 1943. ‘There is the source of the recurring pestilence.’
²The excision of Prussia from the political map of Europe was thus a symbolic necessity. Its history had become a nightmare that weighed upon the minds of the living.

The burden of that ignominious termination presses on the subject matter of this book. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the history of Prussia had been painted in mainly positive tones. The Protestant historians of the Prussian School celebrated the Prussian state
as a vehicle of rational administration and progress and the liberator of Protestant Germany from the toils of Habsburg Austria and Bonapartist France. They saw in the Prussian-dominated nation-state founded in 1871 the natural, inevitable and best outcome of Germany’s historical evolution since the Reformation.

This rosy view of the Prussian tradition faded after 1945, when the criminality of the Nazi regime cast its long shadows over the German past. Nazism, one prominent historian argued, was no accident, but rather ‘the acute symptom of a chronic [Prussian] infirmity’; the Austrian Adolf Hitler was an ‘elective Prussian’ in his mentality.
³The view gained ground that German history in the modern era had failed to follow the ‘normal’ (i.e. British, American or west European) route to a relatively liberal and untroubled political maturity. Whereas the power of traditional elites and political institutions had been broken in France, Britain and the Netherlands by ‘bourgeois revolutions’, so the argument ran, this had never been achieved in Germany. Instead, Germany followed a ‘special path’ (
Sonderweg
) that culminated in twelve years of Nazi dictatorship.

Prussia played a key role in this scenario of political malformation, for it was here that the classical manifestations of the special path seemed most clearly in evidence. Foremost among these was the unbroken power of the Junkers, the noble landowners of the districts to the east of the river Elbe, whose dominance within government, the military and rural society had survived the age of the European revolutions. The consequences for Prussia and by extension for Germany were, it appeared, disastrous: a political culture marked by illiberalism and intolerance, an inclination to revere power over legally grounded right, and an unbroken tradition of militarism. Central to nearly all diagnoses of the special path was the notion of a lopsided or ‘incomplete’ process of modernization, in which the evolution of political culture failed to keep pace with innovation and growth in the economic sphere. By this reading, Prussia was the bane of modern German and European history. Imprinting its own peculiar political culture on the nascent German nation-state, it stifled and marginalized the more liberal political cultures of the German south and thus laid the foundations for political extremism and dictatorship. Its habits of authoritarianism, servility and obedience prepared the ground for the collapse of democracy and the advent of dictatorship.
⁴

This paradigm shift in historical perceptions met with energetic
counterblasts from historians (mainly West German, and mainly of liberal or conservative political orientation) who sought to rehabilitate the reputation of the abolished state. They highlighted its positive achievements – an incorruptible civil service, a tolerant attitude to religious minorities, a law code (from 1794) admired and imitated throughout the German states, a literacy rate (in the nineteenth century) unequalled in Europe and a bureaucracy of exemplary efficiency. They drew attention to the vibrancy of the Prussian enlightenment. They noted the capacity of the Prussian state to transform and reconstitute itself in times of crisis. As a counterpart to the political servility emphasized by the special-path paradigm, they stressed notable episodes of insubordination, most importantly the role played by Prussian officers in the plot to assassinate Hitler in July 1944. The Prussia they depicted was not without flaws, but it had little in common with the racial state created by the Nazis.
⁵

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