Remember Prussia?

• Author: Hay, William Anthony
• Position: Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 - Book review

Christopher Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006), 800 pp., $35.00.

RUDYARD KIPLING'S 1897 poem Recessional warned of the transience of greatness with the lines "all our pomp of yesterday/Is one with Nineveh and Tyre." While imperial de cline marks a recurring cycle, rarely have nations truly landed in history's graveyard. Many nations--partitioned like Poland or dominated by foreign empires for centuries like Serbia--eventually regained their independence. Prussia, however, met the fate of which Kipling warned. Its official dissolution in 1947 ratified the consequences of defeat and ethnic cleansing that left no chance for revival. Prussia's legacy brings to mind the scene of Percy Shelley's Ozymandias where a traveler encounters ruins that mock the pretensions of a long-forgotten imperious ruler who had warned rivals: "Look on my works, ye mighty and despair."

The left-leaning historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler rejected a Social Democratic minister's 2002 proposal to revive the name in an article provocatively entitled "Prussia Poisons Us." The article, published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, rehearsed long-standing arguments that Prussian culture caused Germany's failure to embrace liberal democracy and representative government. Prussia bears the blame for Germany's twentieth-century transition from the land of Dichter und Denker (poets and philosophers) into the domain of Richter und Henker (judges and hangmen) during the Nazi era. Foreigners have associated Prussia with aggression since 1914, and Prussia, for today's anglophone readers, equals militarism--if not fascism itself.

Such views contrast sharply with the positive way in which English-speaking societies saw Prussia before the late 19th century. They associated militarism, expansionist ambitions and political extremism with France, not Prussia. Protestant Germany, especially Prussia, instead held a reputation for technology, music and education. Americans took the model for the modern research university from Germany, and associated Prussia with Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel and Wilhelm von Humboldt. Foreigners also noted Pietism's influence on a society viewed as orderly and progressive. Observers saw its victories over Austria and France as largely positive developments rather than portents of catastrophe.

Christopher Clark's Iron Kingdom presents a thoroughly researched and well-written account of Prussia's rise and fall. As an Australian-born historian at Cambridge University, Clark stands outside the quarrels among German academics that make their country's history an arena for struggling over cultural politics. Consciously avoiding the tendency to compress Prussian history into a teleology of German national guilt, he focuses instead on the fact that Prussia became a great power before it dominated German> Indeed, Clark argues persuasively that far from being Prussia's destiny, Germany became its undoing. Prussia's fate offers a cautionary tale with more than historical interest. It engages timely questions about the nature of state-building and the dangers of using foreign policy to bind a fragile domestic consensus.

PRUSSIA ROSE from inauspicious beginnings outside the lands from which it took the name. Frederick Hohenzollern, the ambitious burgrave of Nuremberg, bought Brandenburg in 1417 for 400,000 gold guilders. It conferred the rank of elector in the Holy Roman Empire, with a combination of prestige and political leverage that provided a considerable asset. The territory itself offered much less. A...