There is a story, possibly invented, possibly true, about a German civil servant who visited Britain in 1955 on an exchange programme and was asked, by a polite Foreign Office host, what he most missed about Prussia, where he had grown up. He thought about it for a long time, the story goes, and then said: nothing. Everything that had been good about Prussia, he said, had been carried forward into the new Federal Republic in slightly different uniforms. The form of the bureaucracy. The structure of the universities. The shape of the school day. The Krankenkasse. The street layout of Berlin. The way the postman knocked twice. None of these things, he said, were going to disappear, and as long as they did not disappear, Prussia had not really disappeared either. It had merely changed its name.
The story may be apocryphal. The observation, however, is correct. The country called Prussia ended in February 1947 in a way that few countries have ever ended — by formal decree, with its name retired, with its territory split between three new countries and three new occupation zones. But the institutional, intellectual, and even physical inheritance of the Prussian state was carried forward, almost intact, into the German states that followed it. The reason no one outside Germany usually notices is that those institutions were not, in the conventional sense, branded as Prussian. They were branded simply as modern. They had been part of the modernity Prussia had largely invented.
The institutional inheritance
The Bismarckian welfare state is the most obvious example. The German social insurance system that exists today — sickness funds, the federal pension system, employer-and-employee contribution funding, the use of independent self-governing bodies as administrative intermediaries between the state and the individual — descends, in continuous institutional lineage, from the laws of 1883, 1884, and 1889. Every reform since has been an adjustment to the Bismarckian model rather than a replacement of it. And every European welfare state created in the twentieth century has been shaped by reference to the German model, either as imitation or as deliberate rejection.
The Humboldtian university is a second example. The unity of research and teaching, the central role of the seminar, the professorial autonomy, the doctoral dissertation as a piece of original work, the habilitation as a higher qualification — all of these are nineteenth-century Prussian inventions that became, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the global standard. Almost every research university in the world today operates on the Humboldtian model in some recognisable form.
The professional civil service is a third. The principle that public officials are recruited by competitive examination, hold their offices on permanent terms regardless of which government is in office, are paid by the state rather than by clients, and may not be dismissed without cause — all of these are Prussian inventions of the eighteenth century, regularised under Frederick the Great, formalised under Stein and Hardenberg, and exported around the world by direct and indirect imitation. The British civil service was reformed on Prussian lines after the Northcote-Trevelyan report of 1854. The Japanese civil service was built on Prussian lines in the 1870s and 1880s. The American federal civil service, after the Pendleton Act of 1883, took Prussian models for many of its administrative arrangements.
The school system — the kindergarten, the comprehensive elementary school, the academically selective Gymnasium leading to university — was the basis of the German educational system before 1945 and remains the basis of the German educational system today. The word Kindergarten, used unchanged in English, French, and a dozen other languages, is Prussian (Friedrich Fröbel, who coined it, opened his first one in the small town of Bad Blankenburg in 1837 with the support of the Prussian Ministry of Education).
The cultural inheritance
The intellectual products of Prussia are equally hard to remove from the present. The philosophy departments of the modern world were shaped by Kant — a lifelong Königsberger who never travelled more than thirty miles from his birthplace — and by Hegel, who taught for nearly twenty years at the University of Berlin until his death of cholera in 1831. The musicology of Mendelssohn and the brothers Grimm; the historiography of Ranke; the natural science of Helmholtz, Virchow, and Koch; the chemistry of Hofmann and Liebig and Bunsen; the physics of Planck, Einstein (a Bern patent clerk who was given a chair in Berlin in 1914), and Heisenberg — all of these are figures whose careers were enabled by the institutional machinery the Prussian state had built and continued to fund.
And the philosophy of public service — the idea, articulated by Frederick the Great and elaborated by Kant in his political writings, that the state is an ethical project to which the individual owes a measured loyalty and which owes the individual a guarantee of order, equality before the law, and freedom of conscience — is one of the foundations of modern continental European political thought. The Federal Republic of Germany, in its Basic Law of 1949, did not borrow this idea from somewhere else; it inherited it.
The remembered country
The Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz — the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, established by the Federal Republic in 1957 — is the present-day administrator of the museums, archives, and libraries that had belonged to the old Prussian state. It runs the great museums of Berlin: the Pergamon, the Bode, the Old National Gallery, the New Museum with Nefertiti, the Gemäldegalerie. It runs the State Library, the Secret State Archives in Dahlem, and the Ibero-American Institute. It is funded jointly by the Federal Republic and all sixteen German Länder. It is, in some respects, the institutional legatee of the Prussian state itself, holding in trust what was salvaged when the country was abolished.
Frederick the Great's bones, having been moved to the Hohenzollern castle of Burg Hohenzollern in southern Germany during the war and held there for forty-five years, were returned to Sanssouci on the 17th of August 1991 — the two hundred and fifth anniversary of his death — and reinterred on the terrace of the palace, beside his eleven Italian greyhounds, exactly as he had asked to be buried in his will of 1769. The reburial was a small private ceremony attended by the Federal Chancellor and by Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia, the head of the House of Hohenzollern. The dynasty as a political force has been gone for over a century. As a family it continues. The current head, Georg Friedrich, lives in Potsdam and works in business.
The Garrison Church of Potsdam, in which the Day of Potsdam was staged in 1933 and in which Frederick the Great had been buried until 1943, was destroyed by Allied bombing in April 1945 and demolished by the East German authorities in 1968 as a "symbol of Prussian militarism." A reconstruction of the church, funded by private donations, is underway as this is being written; the tower was completed and reopened in 2024.
The renamed country
The places themselves remember Prussia in different ways. In what is now Russian Kaliningrad, the German past is acknowledged in the local university, in some of the museums, in the restored cathedral with Kant's tomb, and not much elsewhere. In Polish Warmia, Mazury, and Pomerania, the German past is acknowledged in the carefully preserved Marienburg castle, in the cathedrals of Toruń, Frombork, Olsztyn, and Wrocław, in the open-air ethnographic museums of villages whose architecture is still partly Prussian. In Lithuanian Klaipėda — once the Prussian town of Memel — the past is acknowledged in the small old town and in the local archives. In what is now eastern Germany — the modern state of Brandenburg, which surrounds Berlin — the Prussian past is acknowledged everywhere, openly and confidently, as a regional inheritance that is no longer politically dangerous to discuss.
The street names in central Berlin, in particular, are the closest thing to a complete documentation of the Prussian state that exists. Friedrichstraße, after Frederick I. Wilhelmstraße, after his son and grandson. Leipziger Straße, leading to Leipzig — the route by which the Prussian armies marched to and from the Saxon front. Potsdamer Platz, the gate to the country residence. Unter den Linden, the avenue Frederick the Great had improved as a coronation route. The Brandenburg Gate, the western gate of the city, built in 1791 in the year that the constitution of the United States was being ratified across the Atlantic, and surviving today as the most famous Prussian monument in the world.
The end of the book
This is where the long story ends. The country called Prussia, founded in 1525 in a market square in Kraków, abolished in 1947 by a sentence drafted in English in occupied Berlin, was never replaced. The land it had occupied is now part of three different countries with their own legitimate national histories. The dynasty it produced lives quietly in modern Germany. The institutions it built are still working, in adapted form, around the world. The intellectual tradition it nurtured is part of the air that anyone with a university education breathes without thinking about it. The Prussian state itself is gone in the way that few states ever go — completely, formally, deliberately, and with the broad agreement of its former subjects that it should not be brought back.
If you have read this far, you now know what Prussia was. You can argue about its meaning. You can criticise its faults — and they were considerable, particularly in its last incarnation. You can defend, with appropriate qualifications, its achievements. You can place its name back in the discussion of where modernity came from, where the welfare state began, where the modern university was invented, where the modern school was invented, where the world's first reliable bureaucracy was put together out of memos and salary scales.
What remains, if you wish to use the rest of this volume, is to go and stand on the ground. The places are still there. The walls are still there. The graves are still there. The amber, even, is still there. We have written a travel guide to take you to them. You can begin it on the next page.
End of the book.