Four ways
to drive through Prussia.

This is the easiest of the four routes — entirely within modern Germany except for one half-day in Poland — and the one to do first if you have never been to Prussia. The country it crosses is what the original Brandenburg-Prussia looked like: flat, sandy, forested, dotted with lakes and small brick towns, broken occasionally by an unexpectedly grand palace.

Day 1 — Berlin to Potsdam. The S-Bahn from Berlin to Potsdam takes twenty-eight minutes; the drive is forty-five. Visit Sanssouci, the Neues Palais, and the Garrison Church reconstruction in the centre of Potsdam. Stay in Potsdam itself, in the old town near the Holländisches Viertel — a quarter of Dutch-built houses commissioned by Frederick William I for his Dutch craftsmen.

Day 2 — Potsdam to Rheinsberg. Eighty kilometres north through the Mark Brandenburg. Stop at Oranienburg for the Sachsenhausen memorial (a sobering interlude). The Rheinsberg palace itself is small, but the surrounding lake country — the Stechlinsee, the Grosser Rheinsberger See — is some of the loveliest countryside in northern Germany. Stay overnight in Rheinsberg or in nearby Neuruppin.

Day 3 — Rheinsberg to Küstrin. A hundred and forty kilometres south-east, crossing into Poland at Kostrzyn nad Odrą — the small Polish-German border town that was once the Prussian fortress of Küstrin. The fortress is largely ruined but freely accessible. Walk the streets within the walls; almost no one will be there. Have lunch at a roadside stand. Drive back across the Oder into Germany the same afternoon.

Day 4 — Frankfurt-an-der-Oder and return. A small German town on the Oder, with a fine fourteenth-century brick church (the Marienkirche), a university founded in 1506 (the Viadrina, now bi-national), and a quiet riverbank promenade. From here, sixty kilometres back to Berlin on the A12.

Best with: an interest in Frederick the Great and the early Hohenzollern family.

This is the route for the Teutonic Order, the Hanseatic League, and the early history of the Prussian state. It runs through Polish territory the whole way (no border crossings other than the initial one from Germany). Roads are good. Hotels are inexpensive. Polish is helpful, but most of the towns on this route have enough English-speaking staff in the major hotels.

Day 1 — Berlin to Toruń (550 km). A long driving day on the A2 motorway. Stop at Poznań for lunch; the central square is one of the finest Renaissance public spaces in central Europe. Arrive at Toruń by evening. The old town is best seen at dusk, when the streetlamps light the brick Gothic walls.

Day 2 — Toruń. A full day in the medieval city. The leaning tower, the Copernicus house, the cathedral, the Teutonic ruins on the river bank.

Day 3 — Toruń to Malbork (130 km). A short driving day along the Vistula. Spend the afternoon at Malbork castle; allow at least three hours. Stay overnight in Malbork town itself (modest hotels right by the castle) or push on to Gdańsk in the evening.

Day 4 — Gdańsk. A full day in the old town. Don't miss the Mariacka church, the Long Market, and the European Solidarity Centre at the old Lenin Shipyard — a strikingly designed museum of the labour movement that ended Communist Poland.

Day 5 — Gdańsk to Frombork to Olsztyn (180 km). Drive east along the coast. Frombork cathedral is the morning. Lunch in Elbląg. Olsztyn by evening — a town with a substantial Polish-Lithuanian heritage, a small castle, and a relaxed old square.

Day 6 — The Masurian Lakes. Day trip into the Masurian lake district. Visit Grunwald (the battlefield of 1410, with a museum), the Wolf's Lair at Gierłoż (the ruined Nazi headquarters complex of 1944), and Reszel (a small bishopric town with a complete medieval centre).

Day 7 — Olsztyn to Berlin (640 km). A long return drive. Allow an overnight stop at Poznań or Toruń if you want to break the journey.

Best with: an interest in the Teutonic Order, in Hanseatic architecture, and in the Polish-German border country.

The most ambitious of the four routes, and the one for readers who have absorbed chapters VI through VIII of this book and want to walk the fields. The drive can be done in a week with discipline. The order matters: Jena before Leipzig, Leipzig before Königgrätz, Königgrätz before Sedan, Sedan before Versailles. The narrative arc — from the destruction of 1806 to the proclamation of 1871 — only makes sense in chronological sequence.

Day 1 — Berlin to Jena (290 km). The motorway runs through eastern Thuringia, partly along the route of the French army's retreat in 1813. Visit the battlefield in late afternoon. The small Cospeda museum closes at five; the viewing platform above the field is open at all hours.

Day 2 — Jena and Auerstedt. The two battles were fought twenty miles apart on the same morning of the 14th of October 1806. Walk the village of Auerstedt; it is a small, quiet place, with a memorial in the church and almost no tourists. Drive to Leipzig in the evening (100 km).

Day 3 — Leipzig. The Battle of the Nations site is in the south-east of the city. Climb the Völkerschlachtdenkmal (300 steps). The Forum 1813 museum at the base of the monument is excellent. The Leipzig old town and the Bach church (St Thomas's) are well worth the remainder of the day.

Day 4 — Leipzig to Hradec Králové (320 km). Cross into the Czech Republic via Chemnitz. Spend the afternoon at the Chlum battlefield, with its small museum and view over the fields where the Austrian centre collapsed on the 3rd of July 1866. Sleep in Hradec itself; it has good Czech beer and a quiet central square.

Day 5 — Hradec Králové to Sedan (1,000 km). A long driving day, the only one of the route. Use the German autobahns. Overnight at Trier or Luxembourg if you want a midpoint; the next morning continue to Sedan and the Ardennes.

Day 6 — Sedan and Bazeilles. The 1870 battlefield is small and walkable. The town of Bazeilles, on its southern edge, has the best small museum of the Franco-Prussian War in either country, with the small house in which the local fighting culminated.

Day 7 — Sedan to Versailles (270 km). Drive west through the Marne valley. The Hall of Mirrors at Versailles is the place where Wilhelm I was proclaimed German Emperor on the 18th of January 1871. The hall is open to all visitors with a Versailles ticket. The proclamation painting by Anton von Werner, which depicts the scene, hangs in the Bismarck Museum at Friedrichsruh, not here.

Day 8 — Return to Berlin. Long drive (1,000 km) or fly from Paris.

Best with: an interest in nineteenth-century European warfare and the unification of Germany.

The hardest and most rewarding of the four routes. The Russian portion — the Kaliningrad Oblast — has, since 2022, required substantial advance planning and, in many cases, alternative travel arrangements. Check the current advice of your foreign ministry before booking, and consider doing this route in its Lithuanian and Polish portions only if direct Russian travel is not currently feasible.

The reward of doing the full route, when it is possible, is that it follows the coastline along which the Old Prussians lived for a thousand years before the Teutonic Knights arrived. Amber is on every beach. The Curonian Spit is one of the great landscapes of northern Europe. Königsberg is a city of ghosts.

Day 1 — Gdańsk. Start in Gdańsk. Visit the Hevelianum science centre, which houses one of the best small Hanseatic-period museums in Poland.

Day 2 — Gdańsk to Klaipėda (450 km). Drive north-east along the Polish coast and into Lithuania. The road runs along the Baltic for most of the journey; stop at the Vistula Lagoon and the small Polish coastal village of Krynica Morska, where the dunes are enormous.

Day 3 — Klaipėda and the Curonian Spit. Take the ferry across to the Spit. Drive south through pine forests and shifting dunes. The German-era resort of Nida (Nidden), thirty kilometres south, has the Thomas Mann summer house, the Parnidis dune, and the small wooden Lutheran church that the family attended in the 1930s. Stay overnight in Nida itself.

Day 4 — Nida to Kaliningrad (200 km). The southern half of the Spit is in Russia. Border crossing requires a Russian visa and current open border. If travel into Russia is not possible, skip this day and return via Klaipėda; the route can be completed by flying from Vilnius to Gdańsk on day 5.

For those who can enter Russia: drive south to Zelenogradsk (the former Cranz), a small Baltic resort, and then west along the coast to Yantarny — the open-pit amber mine and the beach where amber still washes up after winter storms.

Day 5 — Kaliningrad. A full day in the city that was Königsberg. The cathedral with Kant's tomb. The Amber Museum. The Brandenburg Gate of Königsberg. The fish market. The walking tour, in the right hands, takes about five hours.

Day 6-7 — Return to Gdańsk. The southern route through the Polish border post at Bezledy. Allow time at the border. Drive via Olsztyn — the Polish provincial capital of former southern East Prussia — and overnight there. Continue to Gdańsk the following day.

Best with: an interest in the Old Prussians, the Baltic landscape, and the strange afterlife of Königsberg as Kaliningrad.