In this splendid volume, Christopher Clark clothes the history of Prussia in stylish twenty-first-century dress. Gone are the nineteenth-century conservative-monarchist (“Borussian”) school's unpoetical enthusiasms for battles and bureaucratic flow-charts. Gone is the twentieth-century Sonderweg—or German “special path”—school's puritanical proscription of Junker noblemen, cowed subjects, militarism, and pre-fascism. Gone, too, are the idealizations, which have not ceased flowing from formerly West German pens, of “old Prussia,” propped up (without authorial permission) by quotations from Theodor Fontane.

What, in Clark's interpretation, survives of traditional Prussian historiography is an emphasis on the power of the Hegelian view: “The Prussian state legitimated itself as the carrier of historical progress in terms so exalted that it became the model of a particular kind of modernity” (pp. xvii-xviii). Clark nicely juxtaposes this understanding of Prussia (which is partly also his own) to the Victorian British Whig vision, “according to which all history was the rise of civil society as the carrier of liberty vis-à-vis the monarchical state.” In Prussia, by contrast, “it was the state that rose, gradually unfolding its rational order in place of the arbitrary personalized regimes of the old grandees” (p. 615).

Though a sometimes unloved subject, Prussian history has inspired a masterful, passionate, and analytically rich literature, including in recent decades methodologically innovative work on family and gender, popular culture, army and society, politics high and low, and village life. Clark's Herculean reading endows him with an historiographical command unmatched east or west of the Rhine, and enables him to offer a synthesis of Prussian history that, in substantive breadth and interpretive freshness, towers above all others.Footnote ¹

A synoptic work such as Clark's inevitably embraces interpretive positions staked out in the pre-existing literature, and these will be familiar to the specialist reader (and are acknowledged in Clark's admirable notes). Clark also is true to the historian's craft in preferring argumentation by narration to thesis-demonstration, and indeed, no long-term macro-history of a whole state is easily encapsulated in a set of propositions. Yet there emerges from Clark's massive book a mapping or modeling of Prussian history such as no overarching work has offered before now.

Clark traces the emergence in the seventeenth century of the military-bureaucratic Prussian power state not to the trauma of war (which subsequently non-absolutist lands also suffered) but rather to the structural situation of the Prussian lands within the European power system. He abjures the still oft-invoked “compromise theory,” whereby state and nobility allied in the state-building project at villagers' and townspeople's cost. The bureaucratic state rather “cohabit[ed]” with older agrarian-aristocratic and guild-bound urban authorities, “disciplining” them to advance its military-fiscal interests, but otherwise leaving them intact. Hence the seeming paradox that the “‘rise of absolutism’… was accompanied by the consolidation of the traditional nobilities” (pp. 113-4; cf. p. 160).

Like other historians, Clark stresses the role of Calvinist German nobles and of immigrant French Calvinist refugees in the Great Elector Frederick William's administration.Footnote ² But he stresses especially the importance of Pietist Lutheranism in building bridges between Lutherans hitherto disengaged from the state-building venture and the Calvinist dynasty and political elites. Pietism cemented the whole nobility into the absolutist edifice, while creating a model of elite behavior, based on self-abnegation and devotion to duty, which helped to define “Prussianism” as a psychology and style of life.Footnote ³ Frederick II, “the Great,” bloodily baptized the Prussian state in glory and Great Power status. His regime also improved the common folk's judicial access and the state-dependent bourgeoisie's numbers and prosperity. The consequence, as Clark argues, was a more broadly based Prussian patriotism, preached to the people by the clergy and such “pro-Frederickian” (or, as Goethe said, fritzisch) Enlightenment intellectuals as Berlin's Friedrich Nicolai and Königsberg's Immanuel Kant, deepening Prussian identity and political culture.

In the years of the French Revolution and the Prussian Reform Era, an “authoritarian” Enlightenment liberalism, embodied in chief minister Karl von Hardenberg, intersected with a Romantic nationalism gripping the large public sphere—no longer amenable to steerage by the monarchical state—in which the educated and propertied middle classes predominated. To this volatile mixture the post-1815 years added Hegelian liberalism, the counter-Enlightenment redefinition of Prussia as a “Christian state,” anti-statist religious revivalism and dissent, and the rise of the proletariat. In assessing these powerful post-Frederickian forces, as well as the Prussian revolution of 1848, Clark aims to draw out their interactions and synergies, rather than to separate liberal sheep from reactionary goats. They formed the crucible in which the ideological politics of modernity caught fire.

At the end of Frederick II's reign, Prussia was, Clark holds, “a highly militarized state” but (considering the high proportion of mercenaries in the Prussian army) “not necessarily a highly militarized society” (p. 215). Clark contests a similar stereotype in arguing, about the pre-1848 years, that Britain, in contrast to Prussia, was “an incomparably more liberal polity, but,” as the differing incidence of “state violence” (e.g., in criminal justice) shows, “it was not necessarily a more humane one” (p. 465).

In the Prussian revolution of 1848, heavier fighting accompanied its outbreak than elsewhere in Germany. The Prussian National Assembly promulgated a markedly democratic constitution, while king Frederick William IV embraced Prussian leadership of the German national cause more ardently than any other German prince. Though the monarchically dictated constitution of December 1848, which prevailed until 1918, shielded executive initiative and military power from parliamentary control, and in 1850 organized the (male) electorate along blatantly plutocratic lines, it defined a field of political culture in which agrarian conservative and bourgeois liberal elites could agree to compete (and cooperate). Clark emphasizes the radicalism of revolutionary leftist populism, both on the Prussian and German national levels. Its effect was to draw liberal-minded supporters of constitutional government, whether in frock coats or army uniforms, closer to Frederick William's regime.

One wonders, though, whether the members across Germany of the Zentralmärzvereine, who took up arms in 1849 to defend the Frankfurt constitution and who were crushed by the Prussian army, are justly conceived as “social revolutionaries whose program recalled the politics of Jacobin radicalism” (p. 485). In general, Clark's book surrenders no hostages to leftist imaginings. (Rosa Luxemburgists especially should beware [cf. p. 624]). Yet when Clark cites Marx and Engels's ironical judgment of 1850 that Prussia in 1848 “was a power whose ability to be absolutist was no greater than its desire to be liberal” (p. 499), the menace of the revolutionary left to German democracy and nationalism seems to lose some force, the more so as Engels himself took gun in hand for Frankfurt's cause. In the end, as I see it, Prussian conservative-monarchical forces bestirred themselves to launch an armed counterrevolution, less from fear of the left than in an enactment of their own will to power.

Clark's Bismarck is a paladin of Frederickian-Hegelian modernizing Prussia, not its agrarian-aristocratic Doppelgänger (or alter ego). Just as earlier international constellations (in and after 1648, and in 1740) had favored Prussian power-aggrandizement, so did the post-Crimean War scene suit Bismarck's purposes. Clark stresses the extent to which both king William I and Bismarck hubristically viewed Prussian leadership of German national unification as, in the king's words, “destined” and, in Bismarck's, as “natural and justified” (p. 533). Yet Clark follows traditional historiography in judging Prussia's conquest of Germany as its self-dissolution as historical subject. Worse still, the retention within “the large and ponderous body of the new Germany” of the Prussian constitution of 1848–50, in its interaction with the anti-parliamentary executive organs of the Reich self-servingly crafted by Bismarck, ultimately spelled immobilization both for Prussian and Imperial German political development (pp. 556ff). In its post-1870 anti-Catholic Kulturkampf; in its increasingly radical anti-Polish policies; in its anti-Semitic discrimination in university and civil service practice; and in its backing for organizations staging rightist mobilizations up and down the folkish front, the Prussian state abandoned its Enlightenment and liberal traditions. “It was the idea of the (Prussian) state that gave way and the ideology of the (German) nation that prevailed” (p. 587). Why this was so Clark does not so clearly spell out.

Yet Clark rejects Sonderweg arguments linking the outbreak of World War I to social imperialism and Prussian militarism. On a comparative scale, Clark holds, Imperial Germany was not obviously more militarized or militaristic than its Great power rivals, while the German peace movement was impressively strong. Granting the German government's co-responsibility for war in 1914, “this was a war of the German Empire, not of the Prussian state” (p. 607). Yet, in view of the fusion of the two that had occurred earlier, one wonders if the distinction is really meaningful. Wolfgang Mommsen, speaking of “Prusso-German power elites,” stands on seemingly firmer ground.Footnote ⁴ In any case, Clark reserves his book's harshest condemnation for the Hindenburg-Ludendorff military dictatorship after 1916, and for Hindenburg's fatuous dealings with Hitler. Were these two (Poznanian-born) warlords the dire executors of “Prussia's most fateful legacy to the new Germany,” namely, that “the Prussian-German military system … remained a foreign body within the German constitution” (p. 604)? This view is persuasive, but in my judgment the more fateful legacy still was the non-democratic nationalist legitimization of the power-state that Bismarck and his followers effected, opening the path to domination within German society to the military imperialists of World War I and their influential civilian backers (and mass following).

The democratic Prussia of the Weimar Republic, embodied in minister-president Otto Braun (onetime Social Democratic organizer of east-Elbian rural laborers) presents another aspect of Prussian tradition (also on display in 1848): political mobilization from the left in the name of a “people's” Prussia. But it cannot be said that the disparate forces behind the 1920–32 liberal-democratic government—Prussian Social Democracy (Ferdinand Lassalle is absent from Clark's pages), the left-liberal bourgeois Progressives (with strong Prussian Jewish backing), and pro-Weimar Prussian Catholics—receive searching analysis in this book. Here, too, Clark follows entrenched historiographical tradition, fixed more on the monarchy's partners than its antagonists.

The fact that Hindenburg, the Junker-friendly German National People's Party, and the Papen-Schleicher clique eased Hitler into the saddle might lead one, Clark writes, to suppose that “particularist, agrarian Prussia laid an axe to the universalist, state-centred Prussia of the Weimar coalition” or that “the descendants of von der Marwitz,” the reactionary early nineteenth-century Junker, “triumphed over the spirit of Hegel” (p. 652). But by the 1930s, little remained of Prussian political culture. “Precisely because it had become so abstract, so etiolated, ‘Prussiandom’ was up for grabs.” With some rhetorical overkill, Clark writes that, by the time of World War II, Prussia “was not an identity, nor even a memory. It had become a catalog of mythical attributes whose historical and ethical significance was, and would remain, in contention” (p. 670). As early as the Weimar and Nazi eras serious governmental projects to dissolve Prussia into lesser administrative units anticipated its abolition as a political concept by the Allies in 1947.

The foregoing summary leaves much unsaid about Clark's far-ranging analysis, which does not neglect issues of masculinity and gender. One might try to grasp the book's deep structure by proposing that it traces the interplay among four Prussias—that is, historically evolving, rather than reified or hypostatized Prussias. First came agrarian-aristocratic Prussia, the Prussia of the pre-absolutist estates system (Ständestaat) and of noble lordship on the land. Second was the military-bureaucratic (“absolutist”) power state, modernizing and, eventually, Enlightening. Third, there emerged Prussia as the forger and master of the German nation-state. Fourth came a liberal-democratic “counter-Prussia,” in the form of popular mobilizations against the authoritarian state, agrarian lordship, and oligarchical capitalism.

In retrospect, it seems that, in the nineteenth century, agrarian-conservative Prussia (Prussia 1) appropriated German-nationalist Prussia (Prussia 3) so as to defeat liberal-democratic “counter-Prussia” (Prussia 4). This had the effect that the modernizing power-state (Prussia 2) lost its autonomous legitimization and connection to the Enlightenment. It was left on the historical stage as a formidable military-bureaucratic instrument, to be abused by nationalist, folkish, and eventually fascist hands.

Such a view offers not so much a Prussocentric version of the German Sonderweg as a Prusso-German variation on a wider pattern in the western world of right-wing conservative radicalization in face of “modernization offensives” from the left or ethnic outsiders. But the political immobilization that Clark concedes occurred in Imperial Germany in consequence of Prussian conservative intransigence does comprise one mighty pillar upholding the analytical edifice of the “special path,” whose recent forceful restatement by Hartwin Spenkuch does not appear threatened by Clark's arguments.Footnote ⁵

That the Prussian government came gradually in the course of the nineteenth century to establish a bureaucratic mastery in east-Elbia that left the Junkers increasingly dependent on the state for the advancement of their political and economic interests has been demonstrated in persuasive detail by Patrick Wagner.Footnote ⁶ The danger this engendered was of state power and economic modernization as ends in themselves, disconnected both from ideological conservatism and liberalism, and thus, in a crisis, available for fascism's authoritarian modernity. This perspective, though absent from Clark's book, is not incompatible with it.

Historians are presently engaged in rethinking Germany's imperialist ventures, and one may ask how Clark's book contributes to this project.Footnote ⁷ Clark's is the first synthetic history of Prussia to take seriously the problems posed by Prussia's participation in the partitions of Poland and the resultant challenge of administering Prussia's once-Polish provinces and their Polish-speaking population. Clark's analysis is well-informed and persuasive. He draws the parallel between the self-esteem that empire inspired in the British and the heightened confidence in the “Prussian way” that arose in Prussian officialdom, and in Prussian political culture, in the course of the attempted Prussianization of the Polish regions (see especially pp. 230–39 and 576–87). Yet, considering that eastern Europe was modern German imperialism's crucial locus, and that the Holocaust and related catastrophes of German policy occurred precisely in consequence of German expansion into eastern Europe, a deeper look is needed into pre-1914 Prussian Polish policy, especially the Prussian Colonization Commission's post-1886 work in seeking to “Germanize the soil” in the name of “Kulturarbeit im Osten.”

Finally, Clark's book offers only fleeting glimpses into the emergence of the above-proposed fourth Prussia that populist movements variously sought to create. Clark downplays the scale of village insubordination and litigiousness before 1806. More needs to be known of the radical implications of dissent among eighteenth-century theological students and nineteenth-century Protestant sectarians. How did it come to pass that the 1848 National Assembly, drawn from the first comprehensive election in Prussian history, so readily embraced a progressive democratic constitutional and social program? What accounts for the popularity of the Progressive liberals' anti-governmental stand after 1858, and the paradoxically broad anti-war sentiment in Prussia in 1866? The rapid rise of a massive Social Democratic movement in the Prussian lands? The crushing defeat of agrarian-monarchist conservatism in 1918–19 (forcing it to attempt a comeback in brown shirts)? The stability and success of the Braun-Severing Weimar Coalition government? Much is known of such matters, of course, but it remains to synthesize them with the better-known histories of the other three Prussias.

Would it have been better if Prussia, like a failed soufflé, had never risen? It might have gone the way of Saxony and Bavaria, crippled by military-diplomatic failures and lack of concentration of their social forces. Could the Austrian-protected Holy Roman Empire have lasted longer? Was the Napoleonic partition of Germany sustainable? Could the Habsburg Empire have peacefully engineered German unity in the nineteenth century, or was it doomed to dissolution in ethnic strife which might have ignited central European war and revolution? Or to Pan-German dictatorship over a suborned east-central Europe? Were German liberals capable of forging a national state without themselves possessing state power, and in the teeth of dynastic particularism in the non-Prussian lands? These are unanswerable questions. But they hint at the difficulties that German-speaking Europe would have faced had Prussia not, for so long, played its cards so successfully.

Iron Kingdom is a new pillar of modern German historiography. Christopher Clark has, with immense energy, harvested the whole field of post-1945 research, without losing sight of the classic literature, starting with seventeenth-century Samuel Pufendorf. His book is written with grace and wit. It is generous to divergent views and not self-important. It is the Prussian history for the present age, and the starting point for future expeditions into this still only half-explored German archipelago.