Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (67 page)

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.
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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.
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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’.
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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.
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Young scholars who challenge the German-centred consensus can still sometimes expect a roasting.
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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 framework 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’.
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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.