Eleven things
people get wrong
about Prussia.

This is the deepest of all the Prussian misconceptions. Prussia was, at its largest, about two-thirds of the territory of the German Empire. The other third — Bavaria, Württemberg, Baden, Saxony, the Hanseatic cities, and a dozen smaller principalities — was emphatically not Prussian and resented being lumped in with it. The German Empire that existed from 1871 to 1918 was a federal monarchy in which Prussia was the largest state but not the whole. After 1918 the Weimar Republic was a federal democracy in which Prussia was the largest Land but not the whole. After 1949 there was no Prussia at all.

To say "Prussia" when you mean "Germany" is roughly as accurate as saying "Texas" when you mean "the United States." The mistake matters because it carries with it the implication that everything ever done by a German government was somehow a Prussian project. Most of it was. Some of it — Nazism, in particular — was not. Hitler was Austrian. The Nazi Party was founded in Munich. The post-war thesis that Nazism grew naturally out of Prussian militarism was a piece of wartime Allied propaganda that has, like many such pieces, outlived its usefulness.

The Prussian parade step, the Stechschritt ("piercing step"), was introduced as a drill exercise in the 1730s by Frederick William I to ensure unit cohesion in line-infantry formations. It was used in parades and on ceremonial occasions throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was not, however, particularly Prussian; it was used in some form by most continental European armies by the early nineteenth century. Its association with Nazi Germany is what has made it look distinctively Prussian to a modern observer.

The Stechschritt was abolished in the Bundeswehr at its foundation in 1955 precisely to distance the new West German army from the Nazi era. The East German army, by contrast, kept it. The most goose-stepping armies in the world today are the Russian, the Chinese, and the North Korean — three armies with no Prussian connection at all.

The potato had been grown in small quantities in Brandenburg-Prussia since the late seventeenth century, mostly as an experimental crop in court gardens. What Frederick did, between 1746 and 1772, was to issue fifteen formal edicts requiring provincial administrators to distribute seed potatoes, instruct peasants on cultivation, and incorporate the crop into agricultural rotation in the eastern provinces. The famine of 1770-72 in central Europe, which killed perhaps a quarter of a million people in Bohemia and Saxony, killed far fewer in Prussia — in part because of the potato.

The famous folk-tale of the king planting fields of potatoes near royal estates and posting guards by day but not at night, so that local peasants would steal and try them, is unattested in any eighteenth-century source. It appears first in late-nineteenth-century popular histories. It is, however, the story most often repeated on the cards left on Frederick's tomb at Sanssouci, on which visitors still pile potatoes each year. The myth has, in this case, become a Prussian artefact of its own.

The Prussian state from 1700 to 1815 was certainly a state organised around its army to a greater degree than any other European state of the period. Voltaire's quip that other states had armies but Prussia was an army that had a state is, at the level of public finance, almost literally accurate: in the early eighteenth century, about three-quarters of state spending went to the military.

But that ratio shifted dramatically in the nineteenth century. By 1900, under the Empire, military spending was around half of state expenditure — high by any contemporary standard but no longer dominant. Educational spending alone, by 1910, was roughly equal to military spending. Welfare spending, after the Bismarck reforms, was a third of the total budget. By the Weimar period, Prussia had been demilitarised entirely; the army was a federal not a state institution. So: was Prussia militarist? Yes, in some periods. Not, however, in all of them. It is one of those generalisations that obscures more than it explains.

The East Elbian landowning gentry — the so-called Junkers — were a numerically tiny class (perhaps three thousand families in 1800; perhaps twelve thousand by 1900) who held a disproportionate share of senior military and administrative positions until 1918. After 1918 their influence collapsed; the army was reduced to a hundred thousand men, the Prussian civil service was opened to social democrats, and the Junker economy was hammered by the agricultural depression. By the 1920s the Junkers were a politically marginal class, important chiefly as a constituency of the conservative parties.

The thesis that Prussia was "the Junkers in uniform" was a Marxist analysis of the late nineteenth century that became, in the 1930s and 1940s, an Allied propaganda commonplace. As applied to the Weimar Free State of Prussia — a state run by Social Democrats and Catholic Centre politicians — it is simply wrong.

The Prussian crown jewels — most of which date from the early eighteenth century, since the Hohenzollerns did not have a crown before 1701 — survived the war intact. They had been moved from Berlin to the Hohenzollern castle in Swabia for safekeeping in 1943. After the war they were transferred to the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz. The crown of Frederick I, the orb, the sceptre, and a number of other regalia are now displayed at Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin. The crown is small — smaller than visitors expect — and has not been worn since the coronation of 1701.

The British bombing of Königsberg on the nights of the 26-27th and 29-30th of August 1944 destroyed the historic city centre, including the castle, the cathedral, the old university, and most of the medieval and early modern architecture of the Kneiphof and Altstadt districts. The siege of April 1945 added further damage.

But significant portions of the city — the German residential suburbs, the harbour quarter, several outlying churches and forts — survived the war. They were demolished, in stages, by the Soviet civilian authorities between 1955 and 1968 on the grounds that they were "Prussian-militaristic" and incompatible with the new Soviet character of the city. The royal castle, gutted but partly standing in 1945, was finally demolished by dynamite in 1968 on the personal order of Leonid Brezhnev. The cathedral was preserved (because of Kant) but left as a ruin until the 1990s, when it was restored with German co-funding.

Bismarck did not begin his career wanting German unification. As a young Prussian deputy in the 1840s and 1850s he was hostile to the liberal national movement and to the idea of a unified Germany. He came around to unification only as the result of a calculation about Prussian state interest: that Prussia could not safely coexist with a strong German national movement led by liberals, and that the safest way to neutralise the movement was for the Prussian crown to lead it and shape it on conservative terms.

The empire he built was the empire he had calculated would protect Prussian dynastic interests — a federal monarchy under Hohenzollern leadership, with universal manhood suffrage as a sop to the masses but executive power firmly in the hands of the crown. He spent the rest of his career trying to keep this arrangement from being radicalised in either a liberal or a socialist direction. He told friends at the end of his life that he expected the Empire to last about a generation, and that it would probably end in a war his successors would mishandle. He was off, in the end, by about ten years.

The territory that became East Prussia was inhabited from at least the early Iron Age by Baltic-speaking peoples — the Old Prussians, the Sambians, the Sudovians, and a number of smaller related groups. They were not Germans. They did not speak a Germanic language. They were related to modern Lithuanians and Latvians. The German population arrived as colonists in the wake of the Teutonic Order's conquest in the thirteenth century and replaced or assimilated the original population over the following four centuries.

By the seventeenth century the country was predominantly German-speaking, but pockets of Polish, Lithuanian, and Old Prussian (until c. 1700) speakers persisted in the rural east. East Prussia was a German country between, broadly, 1525 and 1945 — about four hundred years out of a much longer regional history. To call it "always German" is to mistake a particular four-century episode for the whole of a place.

Allied Control Council Law No. 46 of February 1947 abolished Prussia, in its preamble, on the grounds that the state had been "a bearer of militarism and reaction in Germany from early days." The argument was that Prussian institutions had nurtured the political culture out of which Nazism had grown, and that the dissolution of Prussia was necessary to prevent the recurrence of German militarism.

This was the public justification. The practical reasons were rather different. Prussia, in 1947, contained territory in all four occupation zones — a fact that made coordinated occupation policy difficult. Dissolving the state simplified administration. The Soviet zone wanted Prussia gone because it included Brandenburg, the political heartland of the old Hohenzollern state, which the Soviets wanted to remake. The Allies broadly agreed because no one in 1947 had any constituency for keeping Prussia. The "militarism and reaction" wording was the legal vestment for a decision taken largely on administrative grounds.

The country is gone. The state is gone. The dynasty is gone, except as a private family. But the architectural inheritance survives in twenty-six cities across three modern countries. The institutional inheritance — the civil service, the universities, the schools, the welfare system — is the daily working environment of one in fifty people on the planet. The intellectual inheritance — Kant, Hegel, the Humboldts, Bismarck's welfare policy, the German philosophical tradition — is unavoidable in any serious modern education.

If you want to find Prussia, you can. The pages of this guidebook tell you where to look.