From Prussia with love

Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia

(by Peter Preston, The Observer, 2006.8.13)

 

It began in true cash-for-peerages style. At the beginning of 1417, Frederick Hohenzollern from Nuremberg slapped 400,000 Hungarian guilders on the table and bought Brandenburg, one of seven electorates of the Holy Roman Empire. Hohenzollern therefore became Frederick I, Elector of Brandenburg. It was a start, a step on the road to power for a tiny, rather chilly statelet around Berlin, a once and future victim of geography as the tides of war washed through it.

Gradually, through five more centuries, a European superpower grew, then withered and perished, disgraced after the First World War, its Hohenzollern leader dispatched into exile and then clinically erased after the Second World War. No more Brandenburg, no more Prussia.

That story - historic rise, historic fall - is compelling enough, but Christopher Clark's masterful account also carries contemporary relevancies. It shows the power of a dynasty to dominate, innovate and renew itself. It rates human brilliance far ahead of systems and machines. And it also explains why the Germany that Bismarck helped build retains a social conscience and sense of social responsibility to this day.

Take three scions from that astonishing family. Take Frederick William, the 'Great Elector', serving for 48 years and building an army 30,000-strong that made Brandenburg a regional power to reckon with, strong enough to repel and maul marauding Swedes and Poles. He was cultured, witty and friendly.

Take his grandson, Frederick William I, a clever, cynical man full of violent rage. He spread the kingdom, built an even larger army, but also constructed a close-knit system of central administration to replace the previous patchwork of local autonomy. Berlin ruled OK. But he despised his son, just as he, in turn, had despised his father. They were very different, these Hohenzollerns. And now they sent Frederick the Great into bat.

Here, almost from day one of his innings, was the annexation of Silesia. Here was the invasion of Saxony, the dismemberment of Poland. Prussia was the 10th largest European nation with the third biggest army and used it relentlessly. But here, also, was a leader of profound originality and culture, a thinker who led by force of intellect, a statesman who began, in action, to refine the role of a modern state.

This burgeoning Prussia had an identity. Its junkers became the aristocracy of military life. Its salons made Berlin a pre-eminent place to write, think and argue. It cared about its people and what happened to them. Its armies marched with a sense of community. The kingdom of the Hohenzollerns was dynamic, determined, but also curiously thoughtful. It knew its vulnerabilities. It remembered how easily the tides of war could turn.

That is why Bismarck, continuing that momentum, put together the superpower called Germany. It is also how the last Hohenzollern king, the last William, saw his family legacy turn to mud in the trenches of northern France. There was no onwards and ever upwards here, only a moment when the penalty of defeat was so overwhelming that everything changed. The Nazis didn't build on this tradition. They fed on it like jackals.

You couldn't have the triumph and the tragedy of Prussia better told. Christopher Clark has a voracious appetite for detail and a tart turn of phrase. His study of Prussia, from beginning to end, vividly paints one of the big pictures of European history. Perhaps the Hohenzollerns flew too close to the sun as the centuries turned. Perhaps even Bismarck could not save them when talent, though not ambition, ran out: when hanging on was the name of their game. But, on full song, they were a wondrous dynasty. Three strikes and the rest of central Europe was out.