Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (68 page)

Prussia’s westward expansion could not but dilute the multinational character of Prussian society. In 1800, when Prussia had held Warsaw,
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the Slav element in its population reached a peak of about 40 per cent. Thereafter it gradually declined, and receptiveness to German nationalism rose accordingly. ‘Old Prussia’ had been staunchly monarchist, stressing duty to the state, not the nation. Loyalty was its only yardstick for judging Germans, Poles and Danes alike. The Hohenzollerns looked askance at German unification until the very last moment. When the German Empire was declared in 1871, Poles still formed 10 per cent of the population, and had a huge cohort in Berlin. Their Germanized offspring sprinkled the provinces and the football teams with Polish surnames.
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Similarly, as Berlin grew mightily, the significance of the original, the historic, the ‘real Prussia’ shrank accordingly. Königsberg remained a substantial provincial town and the coronation city. No expense was spared to equip it with impressive modern fortifications. But compared to Berlin it was a backwater:

KOENIGSBERG
(Polish
Królewiec
), a town of Germany, capital of the province of East Prussia and a fortress of the first rank… Pop. (1905), 219,862… It consists of three parts: the Altstadt (old town), to the west, Löbenicht to the east, and the island Kneiphof, together with numerous suburbs…

Among the more interesting buildings are the
Schloss
, a long rectangle begun in 1255… and the cathedral, begun in 1333, adjoining which is the tomb of Kant. The
Schloss
was originally the residence of the Grand Masters of the Teutonic Order and later of the dukes of Prussia. Behind is the parade-ground, with the statues of Albert I and [many others]… To the east is the
Schlossteich
, a long narrow ornamental lake… The north-west side of the parade-ground is occupied by the new university buildings, completed in 1865, the finest architectural features of the town. The university (Collegium Albertinum) was founded in 1544 by Albert duke of Prussia, as a ‘purely Lutheran’ place of learning. It is chiefly distinguished for its mathematical and philosophical studies, and possesses a famous observatory…

Koenigsberg is a naval and military fortress of the first order. The fortifications were only completed in 1905… The works consist of an inner wall… and of twelve detached forts… on [either] bank of the Pregel. Between them lie two great forts, that of Friedrichsburg on an island, and the Kaserne Kronprinz on the east of the town… The protected position of its harbour has made Koenigsberg one of [Germany’s] most important commercial cities. A new channel has recently been [opened to] Pillau, 29 miles distant on the outer side of the Frische Haff…

The Altstadt grew up around the castle built… on the advice of Ottaker II. King of Bohemia… Its first site was near the fishing village of Steindamm, but after destruction by the Prussians in 1263 it was rebuilt in its present position… In 1340 [the city] entered the Hanseatic League…

Koenigsberg suffered severely during the war of liberation… The opening of a railway system [later] gave a new impetus to its commerce, making it the principal outlet for Russian grain, seeds, flax and hemp. It has now regular steam communication with Memel, Stettin, Kiel, Amsterdam and Hull.
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Despite the initial hint, few people reading this entry would have guessed which part of the city’s history had been quietly omitted.

A day on which at least some of Königsberg’s past glories returned was 18 October 1861. King Wilhelm I (r. 1861–88) arrived with his new chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, to initiate what became Prussia’s most glorious decade. The painter Adolf Menzel attended the coronation to make sketches, and four years later, after completing 152 portraits of the participants, he produced a vast documentary canvas, overwhelming in its detailed realism. Unfortunately, Menzel’s conceit of showing the king and future emperor swinging his ceremonial sword in a gesture worthy of Grand Master von Salza was not thought appropriate. The picture was duly consigned to a bedroom in the Sanssouci Palace at Potsdam.
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The standard text on nineteenth-century Prussian military attitudes was composed by General Friedrich von Bernhardi (1849–1930), a Baltic German, a cavalryman, a military writer and a pupil of Treitschke. Born in St Petersburg, he may conceivably have absorbed something from the country of his birth, though his main claim to fame was to have been the first German soldier to ride through the Arc de Triomphe in Paris at the head of the victory parade in 1871. His
Germany and the Next War
(1912) was copiously quoted by Allied apologists eager to justify their anti-German animosity. From Treitschke’s
Politics
(1897) it borrowed ‘The end-all and be-all of a State is power, and he who is not man enough to look this truth in the face should not meddle with politics’. And ‘God will always see to it that war always recurs as a drastic medicine for the human race’. Bernhardi’s own epigrammatic contributions include: ‘War is a biological necessity’; ‘The maintenance of peace can never be the main goal of policy’; ‘War is the greatest factor in the furtherance of culture and power’; ‘The State is a law unto itself. Weak nations do not have the same right to live as powerful and vigorous nations’; and ‘Any action in favour of collective humanity outside the limits of the State and nationality is impossible’.
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Bernhardi’s detractors did not always notice that his rant was framed as an attack on the treatise on ‘Perpetual Peace’ by Immanuel Kant, who was rather more Prussian than he was; Bernhardi’s admirers, who could be found everywhere Europe, did not enquire too closely why warmongering was right in one country but wrong in others. Patriotism and partisanship framed most people’s views on the cause of the First World War; they have started to fade only lately. ‘It was the British government’, writes a prominent British historian, ‘which ultimately decided to turn the continental war into a world war.’
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Nonetheless, it would be unwise to distance Prussian-led Germany very far from the heart of debates on the road to war. German unification had been achieved in 1871 through Prussia’s crushing military victory over France, and the next four decades were overshadowed by the near-universal conviction that military preparedness was the key to the successful pursuit of international relations. No one was more convinced than Kaiser Wilhelm II, the last German emperor and the last king of Prussia (r. 1888–1918), and no country was better equipped than the homeland of Alfred Krupp, the world’s largest industrial firm, for making elaborate preparations. When Wilhelm set his ‘New Course’ and dismissed Bismarck in his reign’s second year, France was already engaged with Russia in building a military counterweight and the British Empire was soon fearing for its naval supremacy. Rightly or wrongly, he was widely regarded as the embodiment of Prussian values:

He believed in force and ‘the survival of the fittest’ in domestic as well as foreign politics. [He] did not lack intelligence but he did lack stability, disguising his deep insecurities by swagger and tough talk… He was not so much concerned with gaining specific objectives, as had been the case with Bismarck, as with asserting his will. This trait in the ruler of the most important Continental power was one of the main causes of the prevailing uneasiness in Europe at the turn-of-the-century.
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According to an unattributed but shrewd assessment, the Kaiser, ‘if not the father of the Great War, was its godfather’.

By 1914, Europe’s two strongest military powers, Russia and Prussian-led Germany, were poised on the verge of a trial of strength, before which neither would flinch. Indeed, both Berlin and St Petersburg were convinced that the coming clash had better be fought sooner than later.
Russia was aligned with France and Britain. Germany stood alongside Austria and Italy at the head of the so-called Central Powers. The ‘Great War’ exploded very nearly 100 years after Waterloo had ended the last Continent-wide conflagration. All sides blamed their opponents for the conflict. Western analysts, who denounced ‘the Kaiser’s War’, pointed to Germany’s ‘Schlieffen Plan’, the tactics of which determined that Germany should strike first before being struck a double blow. Though his original plan was modified, the dead General Schlieffen was roundly denigrated as a treacherous Prussian warmonger. Germany’s fears of encirclement were given little credence.

Russia’s equally ambiguous actions attracted less criticism in the West. Yet in the chain reaction that led from the assassination at Sarajevo to the outbreak of war, Russia’s unconditional support for Serbia matched Germany’s ‘blank cheque’ to Austria, and it was Russia’s provocative mobilization that finally pushed Germany over the edge.
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The speed of the Russian army’s double-pronged attack on the Eastern Front showed how the tsarist military command, like its German counterpart, had been planning a pre-emptive blow. Kaiser Wilhelm II and his entourage were undoubtedly paranoiac, but their readiness to resort to war did not exceed that of the Russians.

Western commentators have not generally wanted to hear how their Russian allies hoped to harm Germany, but war aims published by the Russian foreign office in September 1914 reveal their intentions. They foresaw (
a
) the total liquidation of East Prussia; (
b
) the re-creation of a Russian-run Kingdom of Poland; and (
c
) the establishment of a new Russo-German frontier on the Rivers Oder and Western Neisse (exactly as eventually happened in 1945).
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From Germany’s viewpoint, they were deeply threatening. They do not absolve the German leadership, but they certainly show that Prussia’s militarism was not unique. Of course, Russia’s plans were quickly forgotten. The attack on East Prussia was efficiently repulsed; the Russian ‘steamroller’ repeatedly stalled and after 1915 German forces carried all before them on the Eastern Front. Even so, the Prussians who dominated Germany’s military circles had received a nasty shock, a shock which goes a long way to explaining their punitive terms imposed on Soviet Russia at the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (1918). The chief German negotiator at Brest-Litovsk, General Max Hoffmann (1869–1927), had been Field Marshal Hindenburg’s chief-of-staff in East Prussia four years earlier. It was Hoffmann who suggested changing the name of the victory of 1914 to the ‘Battle of Tannenberg’,
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thereby claiming revenge for the defeat of the Teutonic Knights at nearby Grunwald 500 years before.
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Any narrative which stresses the Russian dimension in the First World War automatically invites protests about neglect of the French dimension. Surely, one hears, the Russo-German contest in the East must be discussed in conjunction with the centuries-old Franco-German saga in the West. This is true. Yet a contradistinction between the French and Russian factors is not entirely valid. Unlike in 1871, the French had forged a close military partnership with Russia, ensuring that in 1914 Germany faced a concerted challenge on two fronts. As seen from Berlin, the hostile double-headed Franco-Russian hydra was a monster which no one else had to face. What is more, the hydra’s Russian head was judged more dangerous than the French one. Schlieffen and his colleagues reckoned that France had to be dealt with first, because Russia, with far more territory and far more troops, could not be neutralized so readily.

Berlin, moreover, was still looking at the military landscape through Prussian spectacles. The Kaiser and his Junker-dominated. staff had good reason to worry about the proximity of the Russian frontline. At its nearest point, Russian troops were deployed within 60 miles of Königsberg, and in the border province of Grenzmark Posen, less than 200 miles from Berlin. The French frontier was much more distant. If the campaigns were to go badly, the French might retake Alsace and Lorraine, or invade the Rhineland. The Russians would capture the Empire’s capital.

For all these reasons, the outcome of the First World War was deeply bewildering. By late 1918, the German army had gained a complete victory on the Eastern Front, had eliminated its most dangerous enemy and had dictated the terms of peace. Its stalwart performance on the Western Front, against an array of powerful allies, had not faltered for more than four years; and it was brought to an end without experiencing anything that might have been described as a rout. Yet the German Empire collapsed. Revolution erupted in Berlin; the Kaiser was forced to abdicate; the Hohenzollerns were banished; the invincible ‘Iron Kingdom’, around which Germany’s imperial personality had been forged, was demolished; and the victorious Allies, representatives of the ‘Western civilization’ with which most Germans identified, chose to act vindictively and to punish Germany for all the war’s disasters and bloodshed. The resultant bewilderment opened the door to a variety of political hucksters and fanatics whose very existence was previously unknown.

Strategic thinking with strong nationalist and racial overtones was very much in fashion in those days, not only in Germany. Already before the war, strident publicists and learned professors from various countries had raised the so-called ‘Jewish Question’ or the ‘Thousand-Year Struggle between Teuton and Slav’; the success of Bolshevik revolutionaries, who made no secret of their international aspirations, greatly heightened existing tensions. As the Armistice silenced the guns on the Western Front, the prospects of a lasting peace in the East were receding fast. The Bolsheviks were promising to export their Revolution to the heart of ‘capitalist Europe’. If and when they decided to put their promises into practice, the eastern provinces of Germany would find themselves in the first line of attack. Western Europeans were breathing a sigh of relief, but the nations of Eastern Europe were bracing themselves for further conflict. As subsequent history proved, the stay of execution lasted for just thirty years. In late August 1914 the Cossacks of Russia’s General Rennenkampf had ridden up to the outer walls of Königsberg. Given the historical inclinations of Russian ‘imperial tourism’, there was every possibility that in one guise or another they would be back.