Where have all the Prussians gone?

What's left of the Iron Kingdom, 77 years after its abolition

Despite having written so much about East Germany in recent months, I can’t get Prussia out of my mind. Maybe that’s because both are vanished states whose former territories overlap. My home region of Brandenburg was a Prussian heartland as well as East German. It was perfectly normal for me as a child to have a family outing to Frederick the Great’s Sanssouci Palace one weekend and go up East Berlin’s TV Tower the next.

Anton Graff’s portrait of Friedrich II

But there is another dimension, too. Like East Germany, Prussia has left a mark on Germany that didn’t vanish when the state did. There are historians today who constitute an ‘otherness’ of the country’s East based on the idea that it had already been ‘different’ when it was Prussia. Traditions of Prussian liberalism are ignored in this picture and the focus is on perceived attributes of militarism, autocracy and general backwardness. A line is still often drawn from Prussia to Nazi Germany, an image of continuity favoured by Hitler himself, who liked to put himself in line with Prussians like Frederick the Great, Otto von Bismarck and Paul von Hindenburg.

1933 postcard implying a continuity from Frederick the Great via Otto von Bismarck and Paul von Hindenburg to Adolf Hitler. Caption: “What the King conquered, the Prince forged, the Field Marshal defended was saved and united by the soldier.”

The battle around Germany’s complicated past continues to rage. So I was delighted to be given another reason to get involved when the Italian geopolitical magazine Limes, Rivista Italiana di Geopolitica — Italy’s answer to Foreign Affairs — approached me for an interview about Prussia and its geopolitical legacy. Since the interview appeared in Italian translation this weekend, I thought it was worth publishing an edited English version for my ZEITGEIST subscribers here. Enjoy!

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