Prussia

• 1. Introduction

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  Prussia stood at the centre of the North European Plain and, for more than four centuries, shaped the fate of an entire continent. From a secularized monastic territory in 1525 to the engine of German unification in 1871, its story touches war and diplomacy, religious revolution and enlightened reform, democratic experiment and violent suppression. At its height, Prussia contained three-fifths of German territory and two-thirds of its population. By 1947 it was officially declared dissolved, condemned by the Allied powers as "a bearer of militarism and reaction". How did a flat, wheat-farming territory on the Baltic coast become one of the dominant forces in modern European history? And what did it leave behind when it disappeared?

• 2. Baltic Origins

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  In 1211, King Andrew II of Hungary granted the region of Burzenland in Transylvania to the Teutonic Knights, a German military order of crusading knights based at Acre in the Kingdom of Jerusalem. By 1225 he had expelled them, and they transferred their operations to the Baltic. Duke Konrad I of Masovia had twice failed to conquer the pagan Prussian tribes himself, in 1219 and 1222. In 1226 he invited the Teutonic Knights to do what he could not.

  Over roughly sixty years of fighting, the Order subdued the Old Prussians and built an independent state on the Baltic coast. After the Livonian Brothers of the Sword merged with the Order in 1237, the Knights also controlled what is now Latvia and Estonia. Around 1252 they completed the conquest of the northernmost Prussian tribe, the Skalvians, and erected Memel Castle, which grew into a major port.

  The land they occupied was flat and fertile, ideally suited to large-scale wheat farming. Teutonic Prussia became known across Western Europe as the Kornkammer, the granary, and the port cities that rose on the back of that wheat trade included Stettin, Danzig, Riga, Königsberg, and Memel. When the Hanseatic League formally organized in 1356, Prussia found itself at the centre of a trading monopoly that reached deep into the European interior.

  That commercial grip carried a geopolitical consequence. As Prussia expanded through its connection with the League, it cut both Poland and Lithuania off from direct access to the Baltic Sea. The two kingdoms became, by necessity, Prussia's traditional enemies.

• 3. The Hohenzollern Inheritance

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  On the 10th of April 1525, in the main square of the Polish capital Kraków, Albert I resigned his position as Grand Master of the Teutonic Order. King Zygmunt I of Poland received his homage and granted him the title Duke of Prussia. As a visible sign of submission, the black Prussian eagle on Albert's new standard was augmented with the letter "S" for Sigismundus and given a crown around its neck.

  Albert was a member of a cadet branch of the House of Hohenzollern. His conversion to Lutheranism made the Duchy of Prussia the first state in the world to officially adopt Lutheranism, in that same year of 1525. It also meant he could now marry and produce legitimate heirs, which no Grand Master of the Order had been permitted to do.

  The union that made Prussia a great power came a generation later. In 1594, Duchess Anna of Prussia married her cousin John Sigismund of Brandenburg. When her father Albert Frederick died without male heirs in 1618, John Sigismund gained the right of succession to the Duchy. The two territories entered a personal union, and the resulting state, known as Brandenburg-Prussia, consisted of geographically disconnected lands spread across Prussia, Brandenburg, and the Rhineland.

  The Thirty Years' War proved how dangerous that disconnection could be. Various armies marched repeatedly across the scattered Hohenzollern territories; the Elector George William fled Berlin for Königsberg in 1637. His successor, Frederick William I, who ruled from 1640 to 1688, set about rebuilding. He went to Warsaw in 1641 to render feudal homage to the Polish king for the Duchy, but by the end of the Second Northern War he had won full sovereignty. The Edict of Potsdam in 1685 opened Brandenburg-Prussia to Protestant refugees, especially Huguenots, and a new bureaucracy gave the state administrative coherence. Frederick William earned the title the "Great Elector" for transforming a vulnerable personal union into a functioning absolute monarchy.

• 4. Kingdom and Military Genius

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  On the 18th of January 1701, Elector Frederick III crowned himself King Frederick I in Prussia, elevating the duchy to a kingdom. The Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I had, in the Crown Treaty of the 16th of November 1700, permitted Frederick only the title "King in Prussia", not "King of Prussia", a distinction that reflected the awkward constitutional reality that most Hohenzollern territory lay outside Prussia proper.

  Frederick I sponsored the arts at the expense of the treasury. His son Frederick William I, who ruled from 1713 to 1740, reversed course entirely. Called the "Soldier King", he cared nothing for the arts and everything for fiscal discipline and military power. He built the Prussian bureaucracy into one of the most professionalized in Europe and expanded the standing army until the military consumed a proportion of the population that prompted the observation, attributed to Mirabeau among others, that Prussia was "not a state with an army, but an army with a state."

  Frederick William also settled more than 20,000 Protestant refugees from Salzburg in thinly populated East Prussia and, in the Treaty of Stockholm of 1720, acquired half of Swedish Pomerania.

  His son Frederick II had as a crown prince focused on philosophy and the arts, playing the flute and composing music. When Frederick William I died in 1740, the new king moved immediately. Prussian troops crossed the undefended border of Silesia and rapidly seized the region, which was the richest province of Habsburg Austria. Three Silesian Wars followed, running from 1740 to 1763. At the Battle of Mollwitz on the 10th of April 1741, Frederick won Lower Silesia. By 1742 he held Upper Silesia as well.

  The Seven Years' War brought Frederick to the edge of destruction several times. He allied with Britain, Hanover, and Hesse-Kassel against a coalition of Saxony, the Habsburg monarchy, France, and Russia. On the 3rd of November 1760 he won the hard-fought Battle of Torgau, and in the end he held all of Silesia. His close friend Voltaire described Frederick's Prussia as "Sparta in the morning, Athens in the afternoon."

  In the last twenty-three years of his reign, Frederick understood himself as the "first servant of the state". He introduced a general civil code, abolished torture, promoted an advanced secondary education system that became the forerunner of the German gymnasium, and participated in the First Partition of Poland with Austria and Russia in 1772. That partition geographically connected Brandenburg with Prussia proper for the first time, allowing Frederick to re-style himself King of Prussia without qualification.

• 5. Defeat, Reform, and Waterloo

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  Prussia suffered one of the most catastrophic reversals in its history at the Battle of Jena-Auerstedt in 1806, when Napoleon's forces shattered the Prussian army and forced King Frederick William III and his family to flee to Memel. Under the Treaties of Tilsit in 1807, Prussia lost about one-third of its territory, was obliged to pay a large indemnity, and had its army capped at 42,000 men, with French troops garrisoned throughout the kingdom.

  The response was systematic reinvention. Reformers Stein and Hardenberg modernised the Prussian state: they liberated peasants from serfdom, emancipated Jews as full citizens, reorganised the school system, and introduced free trade in 1818. Army reform ended in 1813 with the introduction of compulsory military service. By 1813, Prussia could mobilise nearly 300,000 soldiers, more than half of them conscripts of the Landwehr.

  After Napoleon's defeat in Russia, Prussia quit its alliance with France and joined the Sixth Coalition. Marshal Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher led Prussian troops that contributed crucially to the final victory over Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo in June 1815.

  At the Congress of Vienna in 1814-15, Prussia recovered its lost territories and gained the whole of the Rhineland, Westphalia, and 40% of Saxony. Those western territories were of vital strategic and economic importance: they included the Ruhr region, the centre of Germany's nascent industrialisation and arms production. The territorial gains also doubled Prussia's population. Prussia joined the German Confederation in 1815.

• 6. Bismarck and German Unification

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  In 1862, King Wilhelm I appointed Otto von Bismarck as Minister President of Prussia. Bismarck was determined to increase Prussian supremacy among the German states and guided Prussia through three wars in quick succession.

  The Danish Wars over Schleswig and Holstein came first. Prussia led the German Confederation against Denmark in the First War of Schleswig from 1848 to 1851. In 1864, Prussian and Austrian forces together crossed the border into Schleswig and defeated the Danes, who surrendered both territories. The Gastein Convention of 1865 gave Prussia administration of Schleswig and Austria administration of Holstein, a deliberately unstable arrangement.

  Bismarck then manoeuvred Austria into the Austro-Prussian War of 1866. At the Battle of Königgrätz, the better-armed Prussian forces under Helmuth von Moltke the Elder won the decisive engagement. Prussia then annexed four of Austria's former allies: Hanover, Hesse-Kassel, Nassau, and Frankfurt. Prussia now stretched uninterrupted across the northern two-thirds of Germany and contained two-thirds of its population. The German Confederation was dissolved, replaced by the North German Confederation under Prussian dominance, a constitution drafted by Bismarck himself.

  The final act came with the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. When France declared war, the German states honoured their treaties and joined forces against it. On the 18th of January 1871, the 170th anniversary of the coronation of Frederick I, Wilhelm was proclaimed German Emperor in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, while the French capital remained under siege. The German Empire had been formed, and Prussia, with three-fifths of its territory and two-thirds of its population, was its dominant core.

• 7. Democracy, Coup, and Dissolution

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  After the German Revolution of 1918 forced Wilhelm II to abdicate, Prussia was proclaimed a Free State within the new Weimar Republic and received a democratic constitution in 1920. The abolition of the old Prussian franchise transformed it into a stronghold of the left. Its incorporation of "Red Berlin" and the industrialised Ruhr ensured left-wing dominance.

  From 1919 to 1932, a coalition of Social Democrats, Catholic Centre, and German Democrats governed Prussia. The East Prussian Social Democrat Otto Braun served as minister-president almost continuously from 1920 to 1932 and is considered one of the most capable Social Democrats in German history. Together with his minister of the interior Carl Severing, Braun implemented reforms that became models for the later Federal Republic. One of the most lasting was the principle that a minister-president could only be forced out of office if a majority simultaneously elected a successor. This concept, known as the constructive vote of no confidence, was directly incorporated into the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany.

  Historians regard the Prussian government of the 1920s as far more successful than that of Germany as a whole. But it was destroyed on the 20th of July 1932 in what became known as the Preußenschlag, the Prussian coup. Reich Chancellor Franz von Papen deposed the Prussian government under the pretext that it had lost control of public order, using fabricated evidence manufactured by Defence Minister General Kurt von Schleicher. Papen appointed himself Reich Commissioner for Prussia. Less than half a year later, the institutional machinery of the Prussian government, including its police, was at Hitler's disposal.

  Hermann Göring remained Minister President of Prussia until the end of World War II, even as the real substance of the state was dismantled into Nazi Gaue. Allied forces occupied Germany and, on the 25th of February 1947, the Allied Control Council passed Law No. 46, officially proclaiming the dissolution of Prussia. The Allies declared it "a bearer of militarism and reaction". The Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, established in 1957 by federal statute, continues to operate from Berlin, protecting what remains of the cultural legacy of a state that no longer exists.