Iron Kingdom. The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947 (review)

Christopher Clark's study constitutes one of the most significant works on Prussia in the last thirty years. Indeed, one is hard put to cite a German-language work that has achieved similar results. Standing on the shoulders of recent scholarship as well as upon his earlier research on religion and the Hohenzollern monarchy, Clark has written a thematically rich narrative that is judicious, openminded, and balanced. Reminiscent of Thomas Nipperdey's sovereign impartiality, the author strides over apologia and condemnation, the usual pitfalls of Prussian historiography. Both specialists and non-specialists will profit immensely from this re-evaluation of Prussia's place in German and European history.

Iron Kingdom briskly surveys four centuries of Prussian history. For the early modern period, the evolving transformation of the Hohenzollern dynasty into a bureaucratic absolutist state is the principal hook upon which Clark hangs other critical features of Prussian culture, public life, and state building: Pietism, the Enlightenment, the landed aristocracy, social hierarchies, and the military. He tempers the conventional notion that Prussia's bureaucratic absolutism was a well-oiled machine and further draws attention to local elites resisting centralizing authority. Similarly, he corrects the view of impoverished serfs cowering before their lords, underscoring instead peasants' property rights, market economies, legal protections, and assertive resistance. For the modern period, the book examines the Prussian state's struggle to balance dynastic prerogative and aristocratic privilege with nationhood, constitutionalism, capitalism, and a participatory political culture. Prussia's merger with Germany after 1870, Clark argues, marks a crucial turning point, whereby the ideology of the German nation and Volk engulfed Prussia's older identity of a dynastic state serving particular interests. For Clark, the true onset of Prussia's decline begins with the Wilhelminian period and its nationalisms, ideological alloys that the First World War steeled. The final chapter, a compressed epilogue for the Weimar and Nazi periods, surveys a range of compelling issues and themes that capture the era's hopes and sorrows: a fledgling republican political culture undone by elites' complicity with authoritarianism, völkisch nationalism, and National Socialism. With varying degrees of enthusiasm, Prussian conservative elites submitted to the Nazi revolution because they failed to articulate a program autonomous from other right-wing nationalisms. Allied authorities dissolved Prussia in 1947, but its political identity had in fact already disappeared.

With analytial brio and vivid prose, Clark reworks the set-pieces of Prussian history, transforming standard portraits into innovative compositions. Whether with Hohenzollern character sketches, the execution of Hans Hermann von Katte, General Yorck and the Reform Era, the Battle of Nations, Berlin in March 1848, the Punctation of Olmütz, or Bismarck's character, Clark throws new light on old material. He resists invoking the figurative trope of Janus, the two-faced dyad of contrasts and paradoxes, for analysis that emphasizes varying shades of grey. In doing so, he exposes a multidimensional, culturally porous Prussian society. Alongside the milieux of the Hohenzollern state establishment (court, army, clergy, bureaucracy) and East Elbian corporatist privilege, Clark also presents Catholics, Jews, socialists, liberals, democrats, Poles, Walloons, and Kaschubians. Prussia's social heterogeneity and ethnic diversity are well known to specialists, but Clark portrays Prussia's composite character to a qualitatively new degree. In doing so, he opens up new space for future research.

Blending political, social, military, religious, and intellectual topics, the book deploys various methods and approaches of historical argument. Clark is at home with structural history as he is with memory work and the biographical art. He re-asserts the importance of military history but embeds it in social and political historical frameworks that fuse all three into an indivisible unity. Clark writes persuasively about the self-reflexive elements of myth and memory in Prussian history and incorporates these modalities of perception into Hohenzollern rulership. Equally crucial, the book succeeds in situating Prussia in the maelstrom of European history. Comparative discussions of educational systems, state violence...