Christopher Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006), 800 pp., $35.00.
RUDYARD KIPLING's 1897 poem Recessional warned of the transience of greatness with the lines "all our pomp of yesterday/Is one with Nineveh and Tyre." While imperial decline marks a recurring cycle, rarely have nations truly landed in history's graveyard. Many nations-partitioned like Poland or dominated by foreign empires for centuries like Serbia-eventually regained their independence. Prussia, however, met the fate of which Kipling warned. Its official dissolution in 1947 ratified the consequences of defeat and ethnic cleansing that left no chance for revival. Prussia's legacy brings to mind the scene of Percy Shelley's Ozymandias where a traveler encounters ruins that mock the pretensions of a long-forgotten imperious ruler who had warned rivals: "Look on my works, ye mighty and despair."
The left-leaning historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler rejected a Social Democratic minister's 2002 proposal to revive the name in an article provocatively entitled "Prussia Poisons Us." The article, published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, rehearsed long-standing arguments that Prussian culture caused Germany's failure to embrace liberal democracy and representative government. Prussia bears the blame for Germany's twentieth-century transition from the land of Dichter und Denker (poets and philosophers) into the domain of Richter und Henker (judges and hangmen) during the Nazi era. Foreigners have associated Prussia with aggression since 1914, and Prussia, for today's anglophone readers, equals militarism-if not fascism itself.
