Volume 54, Number 14 · September 27, 2007
Mighty Prussia: Rise and Fall
By R.J.W. Evans
Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947
by Christopher Clark
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 776 pp., $35.00
Christopher Clark begins his enthralling, shrewd, and sparkling narrative at the end, with one of the two things most people know about Prussia: that it no longer exists. In February 1947 the Allied powers issued a formal decree abolishing the Prussian state, in the aftermath of the calamitous events provoked by the Third Reich, a Germany in which Prussia had made up by far the largest territory. Not just the area around the capital, Berlin, but almost the whole of the plain from the Rhine across to the Baltic Sea, with outlying regions south to the river Main and cities such as Frankfurt and Cologne: all belonged to Prussia. Whereas the states of western, northern, and southern Europe enjoyed a more stable and continuous evolution, Prussia was by no means the only large historic polity in the center of the continent to be totally expunged over recent centuries. In fact that fate successively befell all four of them: the Holy Roman Empire, Poland, the Habsburg monarchy, and lastly Prussia, whose history, as we shall see, was closely entwined with that of the other three.
Review, 4674 words
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