In the minds of many contemporaries, the link between ‘Prussianism’ and Nazism was obvious. The German émigré Edgar Stern-Rubarth described Hitler – notwithstanding the dictator’s Austrian birth – as ‘the Arch-Prussian’ and declared that ‘the whole structure of his dreamed-of Reich’ was based not only on the material achievements of the Prussian state, but ‘even more on the philosophical foundations of Prussianism’.132 In a study of German industrial planning published in 1943, Joseph Borkin, an American official who later helped to prepare the case against the giant chemicals combine I. G. Farben at Nuremberg, observed that the political evolution of the Germans had long been retarded by a ruling class of Prussian Junkers who had ‘never been unsaddled by social change’ and concluded that the Prussian ‘Weltanschauung of political and economic world hegemony is the well-spring from which both Hohenzollern imperialism and National Socialism flow’. Like many such accounts, this book drew on a tradition of German critical commentary on Prussian history and German political culture more generally.133
It would be difficult to overstate the hold of this scenario of power-lust, servility and political archaism over the imaginations of the policy-makers most concerned with Germany’s post-war fate. In a speech of December 1939, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden observed that ‘Hitler is not so unique as all that. He is merely the latest expression of the Prussian spirit of military domination.’ The Daily Telegraph published a discussion of the speech under the headline ‘Hitler’s Rule is in the Tradition of Prussian Tyranny’ and there were positive comments throughout the tabloid press.134 On the day of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Winston Churchill spoke memorably of the ‘hideous onslaught’ of the Nazi ‘war machine with its clanking, heel-clicking dandified Prussian officers’ and ‘the dull, drilled docile brutish masses of the Hun soldiers plodding on like a swarm of crawling locusts’.135 In an article for the Daily Herald in November 1941, Ernest Bevin, minister of labour in Churchill’s War Cabinet, declared that German preparation for the current war had begun long before the advent of Hitler. Even if one ‘got rid of Hitler, Goering and others’, Bevin warned, the German problem would remain unsolved. ‘It was Prussian militarism, with its terrible philosophy, that had to be got rid of from Europe for all time.’136 It followed that the defeat of the Nazi regime itself would not suffice to bring the war to a satisfactory close.
In a paper presented to cabinet in the summer of 1943, Labour leader and Deputy Prime Minister Clement Attlee warned passionately against the notion that it might be possible, in the aftermath of the regime’s collapse, to do business with some kind of German successor government drawn from the traditional elites of German society. The ‘real aggressive element’ in German society, he argued, was the Prussian Junker class, and the chief danger lay in the possibility that this class, which had allied itself with the masters of heavy industry in Westphalia, might depose the Nazi leadership and present itself to the Allies as a successor government prepared to settle peace terms. The error of 1918 had been to allow these elements to remain as a bulwark against Bolshevism. This must not happen again. Only the ‘liquidation of the Junkers as a class’, Attlee argued, would ‘eradicate the Prussian virus’.137
For President Roosevelt too, the assumption that Prussia was historically the source of German militarism and aggression played a central role in his conception of policy vis-à-vis Germany. ‘This is one thing that I want to make perfectly clear,’ he told Congress on 17 September 1943. ‘When Hitler and the Nazis go out, the Prussian military clique must go with them. The war-breeding gangs of militarists must be rooted out of Germany [… ] if we are to have any real assurance of future peace.’138 The memory of 1918, when Woodrow Wilson had refused to parley with ‘the military masters and the monarchical autocrats of Germany’ was still vivid.139 Yet the military system that had sustained the German war effort in 1914–18 had survived the privations inflicted by the Peace of Versailles to mount a renewed campaign of conquest only two decades later. For Roosevelt (as for Attlee), it followed that the traditional Prussian military authorities were no less of a threat to peace than the Nazis. There could thus be no negotiated armistice with the military command, even in the event that the Nazi regime were to be deposed from within or to collapse. In this way, the idea of ‘Prussianism’ made an important contribution to the policy of unconditional surrender adopted by the Allies at the Casablanca conference of January 1943.140
Among the Allies, only the Soviets remained aware of the tension between Prussian tradition and the National Socialist regime. While the July plot of 1944 evoked little positive comment among western politicians, the Soviet official media found words of praise for the conspirators.141 Soviet propaganda, by contrast with that of the western powers, consistently exploited Prussian themes – the National Committee for a Free Germany, established as a propaganda vehicle in 1943 and composed of captured German officers, appealed explicitly to the memory of the Prussian reformers, above all Gneisenau, Stein and Clausewitz, all of whom had resigned their Prussian commissions during the French occupation and joined the army of the Tsar. Yorck, the man who ignored the command of his sovereign to walk across the ice to the Russians in 1812, naturally held pride of place.142
This was all eyewash, of course, yet it also reflected a specifically Russian perspective on Prussia’s history. The history of relations between the two states was no chronicle of unremitting mutual hatred. Stalin’s hero Peter the Great had been a warm admirer of the Prussia of the Great Elector, whose administrative innovations served as models for his own reforms. Russia and Prussia had cooperated closely in the partitioning of Poland and the Russian alliance was crucial to Prussia’s recovery against Napoleon after 1812. Relations remained warm after the Napoleonic Wars, when the diplomatic bond of the Holy Alliance was reinforced by the marriage of Frederick William III’s daughter Charlotte to Tsar Nicholas I. The Russians backed Austria in the dualist struggles of 1848–50, but favoured Prussia with a policy of benevolent neutrality during the war of 1866. The assistance rendered to the beleaguered Bolsheviks in 1917–18 and the close military collaboration between Reichswehr and Red Army during the Weimar years were more recent reminders of this long history of interaction and cooperation.
Yet none of this could preserve Prussia from dissolution at the hands of the victorious Allies. By the autumn of 1945, there was a consensus among the various British organs involved in the administration of occupied Germany that (in a tellingly redundant formulation) ‘this moribund corpse of Prussia’ must be ‘finally killed’.143 Its continued existence would constitute a ‘dangerous anachronism’.144 By the summer of 1946, this was a matter of firm policy for the British administration in Germany. A memorandum of 8 August 1946 by the British member of the Allied Control Authority in Berlin put the case against Prussia succinctly:
I need not point out that Prussia has been a menace to European security for the last two hundred years. The survival of the Prussian State, even if only in name, would provide a basis for any irredentist claims which the German people may later seek to put forward, would strengthen German militarist ambitions, and would encourage the revival of an authoritarian, centralised Germany which in the interests of all it is vital to prevent.145
The American and French delegations broadly supported this view; only the Soviets dragged their feet, mainly because Stalin still hoped to use Prussia as the hub of a unified Germany over which the Soviet Union might eventually be able to secure control. But by early February 1947, they too had fallen into step and the way was open for the legal termination of the Prussian state.
In the meanwhile, the extirpation of Prussia as a social milieu was already well advanced. The Central Committee of the German Communist Party in the Soviet zone of occupation announced in August 1945 that the ‘feudal estate-owners and the Junker caste’ had always been ‘the bearers of militarism and chauvinism’ (a formulation that would find its way into the text of Law No. 46 of the Allied Co
ntrol Council). The removal of their ‘socio-economic power’ was thus the first and fundamental precondition for the ‘extirpation of Prussian militarism’. There followed a wave of expropriations. No account was taken of the political orientation of the owners, or of their role in resistance activity. Among those whose estates were confiscated was Ulrich-Wilhelm Count Schwerin von Schwanenfeld, who had been executed on 21 August 1944 for his role in the July conspiracy.146
These transformations took place against the background of the greatest wave of migrations in the history of German settlement in Europe. During the last months of the war, millions of Prussians fled westwards from the eastern provinces to escape the advancing Red Army. Of those who remained, some committed suicide, others were killed or died of starvation, cold or illness. Germans were expelled from East Prussia, West Prussia, eastern Pomerania and Silesia, and hundreds of thousands perished in the process. The emigrations and resettlements continued into the 1950s and 1960s. The looting or burning of the great East-Elbian houses signalled the end not only of a socio-economic elite but also of a distinctive culture and way of life. Finckenstein, with its Napoleonic memorabilia, Beynuhnen with its collection of antiques, Waldburg with its rococo library, Blumberg and Gross Wohnsdorff with their memories of the liberal ministers von Schön and von Schroetter were among the many country seats to be plundered and gutted by an enemy bent on erasing every last trace of German settlement.147 So it was that the Prussians, or at least their mid-twentieth-century descendants, came to pay a heavy price for the war of extermination that Hitler’s Germany unleashed on Eastern Europe.
The scouring of Prussia from the collective awareness of the German population began before the end of the war with a massive aerial attack on the city of Potsdam. As a heritage site with little strategic or industrial significance, Potsdam was very low on the list of Allied targets and had been spared significant bombardment during the war. Late in the evening of Saturday 14 April 1945, however, 491 planes of British Bomber Command dropped their payloads over the city, transforming it into a sea of fire. Almost half the historical buildings of the old centre were obliterated in a bombing that lasted for only half an hour. When the fires had been extinguished and the smoke had cleared, the scorched 57-metre tower of the Garrison Church stood as the dominant landmark in a cityscape of ruins. Of the fabled carillon, famous for its automated renditions of the ‘Leuthen Chorale’, there remained only a lump of metal. The scouring continued after 1945, as entire districts of the old city were cleared to make way for socialist reconstruction. The imperatives of post-war city planning were reinforced by the anti-Prussian iconoclasm of the Communist authorities.148
60. East Berlin, 1950: five years after the end of the Second World War, the upper torso and head of a fallen statue of Kaiser William I rest near a chunk of his horse
Nowhere was the rupture with the past more comprehensive than in East Prussia. The north-eastern part of the province, including Königsberg, fell to Soviet Russia as war booty. On 4 July 1946, the city was renamed Kaliningrad, after one of Stalin’s most faithful henchmen, and the sovietized district around it became the Kaliningradskaya oblast. The city had been bitterly fought over during the last months of the war and during the early post-war years it remained a lunar landscape of ruins. ‘What a city!’ one Soviet Russian visitor declared in 1951. ‘The tram leads us through the humped, narrow streets of erstwhile Königsberg. “Erstwhile” because Königsberg truly is an erstwhile city. It doesn’t exist. For kilometres in every direction, an unforgettable landscape of ruins. The old Königsberg is a dead city.’149 Most of the historical buildings in the old centre were stripped and torn down in an attempt to erase memories of its history. In some streets, only the Latin letters inscribed on the steel manhole covers of the city’s late-nineteenth-century sewerage system survived to remind the passerby of an older history. Around the devastation, a new Soviet city took shape, monotonous and provincial, cut off from the world by a military exclusion zone.
61. The capture of Königsberg by Soviet troops, 1945
In the western zones of occupation too, the work of erasure proceeded apace. French policy-makers and commentators spoke in the early postwar years of the need for wholesale ‘déprussification’.150 The bronze relief panels on the base of the Victory Column, raised in 1873 in celebration of the triumphs of Prussian arms over the Danes, the Austrians and the French in the Wars of German Unification, were removed by the French occupation authorities and shipped to Paris. They were handed back to Berlin only on the occasion of the city’s 750 thanniversary celebrations in 1986. An even more emblematic fate awaited the colossal figures representing historic rulers from the House of Hohenzollern that had once lined the Siegesallee. These objects – bombastic masses of carved white stone – were transferred by the Nazi authorities to the Grosse Sternallee, one of the axes of the future Reich capital planned by Albert Speer, Hitler’s Chief Inspector of Buildings. Here they spent the war draped in camouflage netting. In 1947, they were torn down on the orders of the Allied Control Council in Berlin. In 1954 they were secretly buried in the sandy soil of Brandenburg, almost as if this were necessary to prevent the Germans from re-grouping for battle around their ancestral Prussian totems.151
62. Workers bury the statues of Hohenzollern ancestors in the Bellevue Palace gardens, 1954
These impulses were carried over into the sphere of Allied re-education policy in the occupied zones. Here, the objective was to eliminate Prussia as a ‘mental construct’, to ‘deprussianize’ the German imagination. What exactly this would mean in practice was never agreed among the Allies or concretely defined by any of the zonal administrations, but the idea was influential none the less. Prussia was de-emphasized in the teaching of German history. In the French zone in particular, traditional textbooks charting a teleological nationalist narrative culminating in the formation of the Bismarckian Empire of 1871 made way for narratives focused on Germany’s pre-national history and its manifold ties with the rest of Europe (especially France). The chronicle of battles and diplomacy that was the staple of the old Prussocentric history made way for the study of regions and cultures. Where references to Prussia were unavoidable, they were given a markedly negative spin. In the new textbooks of the French zone, Prussia figured as a voracious, reactionary power that had thwarted the beneficent effects of the French Revolution and destroyed the roots of enlightenment and democracy in Germany. Bismarck in particular emerged from this process of re-orientation with his reputation in ruins.152 Frederick the Great, too, retreated from his privileged position in public memory, despite the best efforts of the conservative historian Gerhard Ritter to rehabilitate him as an enlightened ruler.153 Allied policies were successful precisely because they harmonized with homegrown German (especially Catholic Rhenish and South German) traditions of antipathy to Prussia.
These endeavours were reinforced, moreover, by the global geopolitical imperatives that governed German politics after the establishment of two separate states in 1949. The German Federal and the German Democratic Republics now lay on either side of the Iron Curtain that divided the capitalist and Communist worlds. While Konrad Adenauer, the first Chancellor of the Federal Republic, pursued a policy of unconditional commitment to the West, the Communist eastern neighbour became a political dependency of Moscow, a ‘homunculus from the Soviet test-tube’. Under the pressure of this partition, which came to seem a permanent feature of the post-war world, the Prussian past retreated to the horizons of public memory. Berlin meanwhile, islanded deep within the eastern republic, acquired a new and charismatic identity. In 1949, when the Soviets blocked supplies to the western-occupied zones of the city, the Allies broke the siege with a massive airlift. Across the western world there was a surge of solidarity with the beleaguered outpost. It was a crucial first step towards the rehabilitation of western Germany as a member of the international community. The city’s prominence was further heightened by the erection of the Berlin Wall in August 1961, a s
pectacular monument to the polarities of the Cold War. In the 1960s and 1970s, West Berlin evolved into a showcase of western liberty and consumerism, a vibrant walled enclave of neon go-go bars, high culture and political ferment. It no longer belonged to Prussia, nor even to Germany, but to the western world – a condition memorably encapsulated in President John F. Kennedy’s declaration during a visit to the city on 26 June 1963 that he, too, was ‘ein Berliner’.
BACK TO BRANDENBURG
In a sparkling essay of 1894, the celebrated Prussian novelist Theodor Fontane, then an elderly man, recalled the occasion of his first literary composition. The reminiscence took him back six decades to the year 1833, when he had been a fourteen-year-old schoolboy lodging with an uncle in Berlin. It was a warm Sunday afternoon in August. Fontane decided to put off his school homework, a German composition ‘on a self-chosen theme’, and visit family friends in the village of Löwenbruch, some five kilometres to the south of Berlin. By three in the afternoon he had reached the Halle Gate on the city boundary. From there the road led south across the broad Teltow plateau through Kreuzberg and Tempelhof to Grossbeeren. As he reached the outskirts of Grossbeeren, Fontane sat down at the foot of a poplar tree to rest. It was nearly evening and wisps of mist hung over the newly ploughed fields. Further down the road he could make out the raised ground of the Grossbeeren cemetery and the village church tower glowing in the rays of the sinking sun.
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