PENGUIN BOOKS
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‘The story of Prussia is one that has been told many times, but seldom as intelligently, elegantly and interestingly as it is here… a monumental history’ Richard Overy, Daily Telegraph
‘Outdistances the rest of the field, not only for the importance of its subject but for the verve and skill with which it is presented’ Michael Howard, The Times Literary Supplement Books of the Year
‘Lively, thoroughly engaging… Clark’s masterly and enthusiastic narrative takes in everything from the role of women in the Junker class to 1920s Berlin cabaret’ Sunday Times Books of the Year
‘Clark’s comprehensive account superbly navigates clear paths through the complexities of Prussian history over more than three centuries… This ambitious volume, with its elegance and humour, will become a classic’ BBC History Magazine
‘An impressive piece of work. The prose is clear and graceful, the narrative sustained and engaging… he has mined a wonderful collection of anecdotes and personal portraits’ The Times Literary Supplement
‘Excellent… a well-informed and fair-minded historical investigation’ Guardian
‘Iron Kingdom is not just good: it is everything a history book ought to be’ Sunday Telegraph
‘Excellent’ Literary Review
‘Masterful… triumphant… Written with growing verve and passion, it is the compelling story of why – of course – Prussia mattered so much more than any German state’ The Times Higher Education Supplement
‘Lively and thoughtful… an excellent account… yields valuable insights’ London Review of Books
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Christopher Clark is Reader in Modern History at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge. He is the author of The Politics of Conversion: Missionary Protestantism and the Jews in Prussia, 1728–1941 (Oxford, 1995) and a biography of Kaiser Wilhelm II.
CHRISTOPHER CLARK
Iron Kingdom
The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published by Allen Lane 2006
Published in Penguin Books 2007
1
Copyright © Christopher Clark, 2006
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s
prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in
which it is published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
EISBN: 978–0–141–90402–3
For Nina
Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Maps
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 The Hohenzollerns of Brandenburg
2 Devastation
3 An Extraordinary Light in Germany
4 Majesty
5 Protestants
6 Powers in the Land
7 Struggle for Mastery
8 Dare to Know!
9 Hubris and Nemesis: 1789–1806
10 The World the Bureaucrats Made
11 A Time of Iron
12 God’s March through History
13 Escalation
14 Splendour and Misery of the Prussian Revolution
15 Four Wars
16 Merged into Germany
17 Endings
Notes
Index
List of Illustrations
1 Lucas Cranach, Elector Joachim II, c . 1551
2 Richard Brend’amour, Elector George William
3 Illustration from Philip Vincent, The Lamentations of Germany, 1638
4 Albert van der Eeckhout (attrib.), Frederick William the Great Elector as Scipio, c . 1660
5 A view of the city of Königsberg, c . 1690
6 Samuel Theodor Gericke (attrib.), Frederick I, King in Prussia, after 1701
7 Anon., Jacob Paul von Gundling, 1729
8 Georg Lisiewski (attrib.), The Tobacco Ministry, c . 1737
9 Johann Christof Merk, Grenadier James Kirkland, c . 1714
10 Daniel Chodowiecki, Crown Prince Frederick greets Katte through the window of his cell
11 The main façade of the Orphanage in Halle
12 Anon., King Frederick William I greets the Protestant exiles from the archbishopric of Salzburg, 1732
13 Carved frieze from the epitaph of Mayor Thomas Matthias, St Gotthard’s church, Brandenburg, 1549/1576
14 Havelberg Cathedral
15 Daniel Chodowiecki, Soldier’s wife begging, 1764
16 E. Feltner, ‘The Junker’, 1906
17 Adolph Menzel, Frederick the Great visits a factory, 1856
18 Johann Gottlieb Glume, Frederick the Great before the Seven Years War
19 Battle of Kunersdorf, 12 August 1759
20 Johann Heinrich Christoph Franke (after), Frederick the Great, orig. 1764
21 Daniel Chodowiecki, Frederick the Great opens the sarcophagus of the Great Elector, 1789
22 Johann Michael Siegfried Löwe (after Daniel Chodowiecki), Moses Mendelssohn examined at Potsdam’s Berlin Gate, 1792
23 Anon., Baron Karl vom und zum Stein
24 Christian Rauch, Karl August, Prince von Hardenberg, 1816
25 Le Beau (after Nadet), Napoleon and Tsar Alexander meeting at Tilsit
26 Friederich Meyer (after Heinrich Anton Dähling), The Royal Family in the palace gardens at Charlottenburg, c. 1805
27 Johann Gottfried Schadow, The princesses Luise and Frederike of Prussia, 1795–7
28 Death mask of Queen Luise, 1810
29 Friedrich Bury, Gerhard Johann von Scharnhorst, before 1813
30 Luise Henry, Wilhelm von Humboldt, 1826
31 Anon., Major von Schill
32 Anon., Johann David Ludwig Count Yorck
33 Johann Lorenz Rugendas, The Battle of Leipzig
34 The Iron Cross
35 The Order of Luise
36 Moritz Daniel Oppenheimer, Return of the Jewish Volunteer from the Wars of Liberation to his family still living by the Old Custom, 1833–34
37 Karl Sand on his way to Mannheim
38 George French Angas, Old Lutheran settlement at Klemzig, South Australia, 1845
39 Franz Kugler, Hegel at the lectern, 1828
40 Anon., Frederick William IV as a tipsy Puss-in-Boots, 1843
41 Anon., Hunger and Desperatio
n, 1844
42 Anon., From the club life of Berlin in 1848
43 F. G. Nordmann, The Barricade on the Krone and Friedrichstrasse, 1848, as seen by an eyewitness
44 Anon., Frederick William IV receives a delegation from the Frankfurt Parliament, 1849
45 Anon., Otto von Bismarck at the age of thirty-two, 1847
46 Anon., Prussian troops storm the Danish entrenchments at Düppel, 18April 1864
47 Anon., (after Anton von Werner), King William I of Prussia is proclaimed German Emperor in the Hall of Mirrors, 1871
48 The Avenue of Victory, Berlin
49 Anon., Advertisement for Odol mouthwash
50 Ludwig Stutz, Anti-clerical cartoon, 1900
51 Wilhelm Friedrich Georg Pape, Kaiser William II with his family in the grounds of Sans Souci, 1891
52 Olaf Gulbransson, Imperial Manoeuvres, 1909
53 Bruno Paul, Buy War Bonds!, 1917
54 George Grosz, Cheers Noske, 1919
55 Max Liebermann, Otto Braun, 1932
56 The ‘Day of Potsdam’
57 Excavation of the Hindenburg Stone, 1935
58 Hindenburg’s coffin is carried into his mausoleum at Tannenberg, 1935(photograph courtesy of Matthias Bräunlich)
59 Jewish families are deported from Memel
60 Fallen fragments of a statue of William I, East Berlin, 1950
61 The capture of Königsberg by Soviet troops, 1945
62 Statues from the Siegesallee are buried in Bellevue Palace Gardens, 1954
List of Maps
A History of Brandenburg–Prussia in six maps
Brandenburg, 1600
The Jülich-Kleve Succession
Ducal Prussia
The first partition of Poland, 1772
The second and third partitions of Poland, 1793, 1795
The German Confederation, in 1815
Development of the Prussian–German Customs Union
The Prussian–Austrian war of 1866
Acknowledgements
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.’2 The 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.
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