Abstract
Reviewed by: Andrew G. Bonnell, University of Queensland, Australia
Hartwin Spenkuch introduces his ambitious thematic survey of Prussian history with the argument that the significant role of Prussia in German and European history, the findings of the substantial recent research into Prussian history, and the continuing prominence of Prussian history in media and public memory all justify a ‘new, concise treatment’ (7). The reader holding this weighty volume in their hands might blink at the use of the word ‘concise’ here. However, Spenkuch’s work, surveying three centuries of Prussian history across seven thematically organized chapters, is indeed a remarkable feat of compression.
As the author of a definitive history of the Prussian Herrenhaus (House of Lords), that bastion of Junker power and resistance to democratic reform, along with other works on Prussian history, Spenkuch is well equipped for this work, which constitutes a kind of critical companion to modern Prussian history. Such works are customarily written by teams of specialists, but Spenkuch displays an admirable mastery of his subject matter despite its thematic diversity and long timespan. Spenkuch has worked through a large and diverse body of historiography here, and while he is sceptical of some recent revisionist work, his knowledge of the field is consistently up-to-date.
The seven thematic chapters deal with Prussia’s external relations between East and West; the economy; Prussia’s regional diversity; Prussia’s society; Prussia’s political system; culture and civil society; and Prussia and the world. This last chapter consists of both a survey of Prussian historiography (covering German and non-German historians) and reflections on Prussian history in global perspective in the light of recent transnational and post-colonial historiography. The first, historiographical sections, might have been usefully placed at the start of the work. Spenkuch does, however, set a historiographical context in his introduction, in which he indicates that the book will take a more analytical, structural and critical approach than some popular narratives that put Prussia in too rose-coloured a light. Christopher Clark’s highly successful The Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947 (2006) is frequently mentioned in this context and to some extent serves as a foil to Spenkuch’s work. Spenkuch rejects Clark’s suggestion that Prussian militarism might have derived from a feeling of vulnerability (37), and also takes issue with Clark’s tendency to downplay the importance of German naval expansion in the lead-up to the First World War (41). Spenkuch also finds Clark’s portrayal of social relations on East Elbian Junker estates too positive (111), and notes the remarkably scanty treatment of the Social Democratic labour movement in Clark’s work and other popular works on Prussian history (127). He also rejects Clark’s suggestion that Social Democrats were largely reconciled with imperialism by 1914 (131).
Spenkuch’s unifying theme is the way in which Prussia’s rulers asserted the primacy of the state over society and culture, even while he seeks to give a comprehensive treatment of economic, social and cultural factors. The longest chapter in the book is in fact on culture and civil society. Here, Spenkuch distinguishes between Prussian official Staatskultur and Prussia as a Kulturstaat – tensions between the official culture prescribed by Prussia’s rulers and broader cultural life within Prussia persisted from the eighteenth century to 1918. Given the limited space available in this survey, it is pleasing to see Spenkuch give figures such as the painter Adolf Menzel and the profoundly humane novelist Theodor Fontane their due. Fontane became increasingly critical of the old, Junker-dominated Prussia in later life. The chapter also contains useful sections on monuments and festive culture in Prussia before and after 1918, and on confessional differences.
When it comes to the establishment of democratic, republican government in Prussia in 1918/19, Spenkuch insists on the positive achievements of the parties which turned the state into ‘the unlikely rock of democracy’ (in Dietrich Orlow’s phrase) in Weimar Germany. The destruction of that democracy, in Prussia in 1932 and Germany as a whole in 1933, was aided and abetted by prominent representatives of Old Prussia, such as Hindenburg and his clique (on this point Spenkuch is again in some disagreement with Clark). For Spenkuch, the break-up of Prussia by the Allied occupation powers was not an irrational act of exorcism by Prussia’s old enemies, but a simple product of political realism at the time. Furthermore, the Old Prussia was hardly mourned by the Rhinelanders who had been incorporated into the Kingdom of Prussia in 1815 or by Hessians or Hanoverians who became annexed Prussians half a century later, let alone the Poles and other ethnic minorities who had made up a significant part of Prussia’s population before 1918.
With its thematic structure and its sustained analysis of a large body of scholarship, Spenkuch’s book is unlikely to compete on the bestseller lists with more popular narrative works on Prussia. But it serves as a corrective to the waves of Prussian nostalgia that seem to recur every couple of decades, and it will be a valuable handbook for serious historical work on the state whose domination over the rest of Germany had such fateful consequences.