Germany at the beginning of the 20th century had an economy in which much property was state-owned, in which even the private sector was state-regulated, and in which pursuit of profit as one’s sole motive was subject to official censure. The state also carried out both industrial and social welfare tasks, and rather better than in other comparable countries at the time. As a contemporary observer, Thorstein Veblen, commented:
The imperial state has come into the usufruct of this industrial state without the burden of its long-term institutional consequences. Carrying over a tradition bias of Romantic loyalty, infused anew with a military patriotism by several successful wars, and irritably conscious of national power in their new-found economic efficiency, the feudalistic spirit of the population has as yet been hardly dampened by their brief experience as a modern industrial community. And borne up by its ancient tradition of prowess and dynastic aggression the Prussian imperial state has faithfully fostered this military spirit and cultivated in the people the animus of a solidarity of achievement. Hence a pronounced retardation in the movement towards popular autonomy.
…Though much of this is in need of serious qualification, the conclusion is valid, namely that the Industrial Revolution in Germany did not lead to a liberal bourgeois society and that the motive power for all social, economic, and political changes remained the overmighty state with its citizens as worshippers. This of course raises the question as to why Prussian citizens, German citizens, should have acquiesced in a compromise between freedom and power. Prussian militarism, Teutonic aggressiveness, represent fillers in the cracks that show the lack of valid explanation.
Why was it that Prussian society, then German society as a whole and ultimately even its socialist component, subordinated their interests to the interest of the state, thus allowing it to become the preserver of the status quo as well as the prime mover in any change? The consciousness of the protective power of the state, the ideology of the state community prevalent in Prussia since the early 18th century, transformed itself in response to the call for German unification along the lines of the Romantic concept of the nation into an ideology of a national community. Prussia was an essentially artificial creation, intrinsically insecure, and in its army lay its one guarantee of survival. Both as a means of defense and as a means of consolidating the state territorially, the army decisively stamped its imprint upon Prussian society. German unification and the events which brought it about transferred the specifically Prussian problem onto Germany as a whole. In its interest of national security it was the object of government, as well as the desire of large parts of the German middle class, to absorb social and economic conflicts and to achieve a synthesis.
In terms of political developments a comparison is often made with Great Britain, France and the United States of America. Germany did not experience the revolutions that are said to have shaped the development of these nations, and Prussia in particular is alleged to have exercised an influence that prevented the feudal society from developing into a democratic one. Yet it can be argued that the Puritan Revolutions in England did not produce a democratic society, that that revolution – if revolution it was – enjoyed little popularity in England. In France revolution was made by a small minority and ended in a compromise between the aristocracy and the haute bourgeoisie which led to a division of the nation noticeable to this day, while in America the conservative character of the revolution is its most outstanding feature. A reading of the Federalist Papers will supply quick confirmation. Until well into the 19th century it was the ideas (in different guises) of Alexander Hamilton and John Adams that prevailed, not those of Jefferson , let alone Sam Adams and Tom Paine.
That the ideals of the French Revolution, particularly the concept of human rights, ‘cause in the supply trains of an army of invasion’, was hardly conducive to their recommendation. One tends to forget that enlightened absolutism brought benefits to its subjects which were the envy of many contemporaries abroad, and even a hundred years later Richard Coboden considered Prussia as a highly efficient, well-administered state which did more for its population than any other. Where is the need for revolution form below when reform is carried out from above? Schiller’s and Goethe’s contemporary Friedrich Daniel Schubart, himself the victim of absolutist practice of the worst kind and a fervent supporter of the French Revolution exclaimed: ‘Not from France, and not from England has true toleration come into Germany. Luther brought the liberty of thought, Frederick (the Great) and Joseph II were the pillars of toleration.’ And Goethe in 1824 in his conversations with Eckermann stated:
Revolutions are quite impossible so long as governments are always just and aware of what is going on in order that they can introduce necessary improvements and not resist until what is necessary is forced upon them from below. Enlightened despotism never occurred in France, while however great its faults in retrospect its practice in Prussia and under Joseph II in Austria served as an example to Washington and Mirabeau that of Frederick the Great. Frederick became a literary cult figure in a play that drew the crowds as did no other play in Paris in the revolutionary year of 1789. Indeed within the context of the 18th century, German progress made through enlightened absolutism was ultimately the cause of German political underdevelopment, when that development is compared with that of the nations to its west.
Bismarck had word and aimed towards a synthesis of society and state, but had only partially succeeded. Still molded by traditions of sobriety and rationality he approached problems by trying to achieve that which was possible. But in the end he himself no longer understood the age in which he lived. Politics to him was at best a very complex business, and with the intrusion of the masses it became virtually uncontrollable. His attempts to stem the tide were the fundamental reason for his downfall.
His departure marked the end of Prussia as idea and ethos. De facto it had ended in 1871. The old Prussian nobility, its social position rooted in the land and the army, found itself confronted by a new age; agriculture confronted the machines of the age of steam. The simple code of honor and duty to the state were no longer sufficient to cope with the complexity of the industrial age. Power acquired by sudden riches threatened to displace the old ruling class. The estate-owner was no match for the captain of industry. Bleichroder’s clientele provides ample evidence of the extent to which the scions of the old Prussian families, Bismarck included, succumbed to the temptations of wealth. What remained of the old Prussia were the external trappings, military parades, marching and counter-marching, the whip-cracking tone of the barracks square, uniforms, and saber rattling. The death of William I in 1888 was the beginning of the end of an era. Considering the determining influence of German liberalism in the policies of his successor Emperor Frederick III, there is nothing to suggest that had he not suffered form the fatal disease of which he died 100 days after his accession, his policy would not have been devoid of the new imperialist features which characterize late 19th century German nationalism. During the reign of the last Hohenzollern King and last German Emperor William II, shifts of policy occurred which abandoned the paths carefully trodden by Bismarck and moved into a realm of greater risk and danger without being very clear in their aim. William II was more of a German than a Prussian; that he was also half an Englishmen, inheriting from his mother a boundless degree of tactlessness of which he himself was never aware throughout his life, did not help matters either.
Prussia had fused into Germany and not Germany into Prussia. Germany’s confidence in her strength and the power of her state had not slowly matured but suddenly ripened into over-confidence. The period up to the First World War is one marked by a constant awareness of weakness, when German doubts about the solidity of the foundations of their new state were ever-present. Prussian policy had at long last been replaced by German policy; the ideas of 1848 had finally won supremacy.
Prussia had been a state which did not rest on the concept of the Volk, a concept in its original meaning derived from Herder’s postulate that state and nation should be conterminous, that ethnic as well as cultural origins predestined such a unit to statehood since it represented not an artificial but a natural, organically developed community. Prussia was an artificial creation, the product of the dynasty and its servants, as was the Hapsburg Empire. But unlike that Empire, throughout most of its history it was a purely German state untroubled by the problems of national minorities. These did not arise until the final phases of its history when the German national idea gained predominance and thus gave further strength and motivation to the forces of the national risorgimento that had affected eastern central, south-eastern and southern Europe throughout the 19th century. Particularly the Poles made it quite clear in 1871 that whilst they did not mind being subjects of the Prussian crown they adamantly refused to be German citizens.
Prussia had been the first state on German soil whose endeavors, at least since the reign of Frederick William I, had been directed towards the state rather than the dynasty. The concept of state provided unity and the force of integration over a patchwork of territories of vastly different traditions, economic social and political development. it was not the product of dynastic marriages or deaths. It could last only as long as in every one of its subjects or citizens the concept of state exercised its dominant influence. Why this concept exercised such an integrating force is a question difficult if not impossible to answer. After all, it has nothing to offer other than rigorous demands. From its monarchs downwards it did not reward pious intentions, only efforts and accomplishments. It never pretended to be or tried to become a democratic state. Its pride lay in being an authoritarian state, marked by its hierarchic structure. The totalitarian state whose origins are of a democratic character was alien to Prussia, as the Prussian substance was alien to totalitarianism. In its methods it had always been revolutionary, but in its nature it was and remained conservative.
However, the essentially German character of Prussia was a source of both its inane strengths and weaknesses. On the one had it caused Prussia to exercise a magnetism which attracted many who saw in it the only German state capable of reforming the German nation into a politically relevant unit, into the Reich. But because it was comprised of such differing elements as Westphalians, Lithuanaians, Frisian, Pomeranians, Brandenburgers, East Prussians and Poles, none of whom had to sacrifice their own identity in order to be Prussians, the common link which Prussia represented broke asunder after German reunification. Unlike the Bavarians, for instance, ‘the Prussians’ did not represent an ethnic group whose consciousness had developed over almost 2,000 years of common history. Therefore, the concept of Germany was bound to dilute that of Prussia once Germany was politically unified again. From that moment onwards the integrating force which Prussia had exercised over its constituent parts was bound to be severely weakened. As Bismarck once put it: ‘As Prussians we had and still have a particular national feeling, originally a branch of that great German one. Basically it has no more justification than the specific patriotism of the German state. As far as I was concerned it was self-evident that I felt deeply this Prussian consciousness in which I had grown up, but as soon as I became convinced that Prussian national feeling was the anvil on which to forge together the others, I gave up pursuing one-sided Prussian aims.’
‘The idea of Prussia’ became a romanticized vehicle of German nationalism, in that from supplying ample ammunition of its critics inside and outside the Empire of Bismarck and William II. In terms of domestic policy it became synonymous with the economic interests of the land-owners east of the Elbe, the Prussian Conservatives and their opposition to the advance of an industrial society and the demand for greater democratization. Yet, the Conservatives represented only one component of Prussia. If Prussia was the heartland of conservatism in Germany, it was also the heartland of Germany’s Social Democracy. By 1912 the Social Democrats were the largest single party represented in the Reichstag and the largest socialist party in the world, renowned for their organization and ‘Prussian’ discipline. To the world outside, judging mainly on the basis of surface appearances, it was all to easy to see in Germany an enlarged Prussia and nothing else, to find a common thread linking Frederick the Great to Bismarck and to William II and later even to Hitler, to refer to German’s foreign policy as one of typical ‘Prussian expansionism’, conveniently forgetting that, strictly speaking, Prussia in its entire history had conducted only two aggressive wars that of 1740 and that of 1866.
Prussia was identified as that part of Germany untouched by the civilizing Roman influence, therefore barbaric to the core, a product of the east ideally suited to Lutheranism and the subservience to secular powers that it preached. Again, such an identification is misleading, neglecting as it does the strong intellectual currents coming from the west, especially that of Calvinism from the Netherlands and France, producing a stoic ethos, a sense of duty rejecting the Romanesque Baroque as hollow vanity devoid of efficiency’. But then efficiency is a quality often appreciated but never loved, especially when that efficiently is deployed in the service of the state and not that of private enterprise; service to the ultimate, to death. It belonged to the standard introductory speeches delivered to 10-year-old boys entering the Prussian cadet institutes: ‘Gentlemen! You have chosen the most beautiful profession there is on the earth. Before your eyes you have the highest aim there can be. Here we teach you to reach that aim. you are here to learn that which gives your life its ultimate meaning. You are here in order to learn how to die.’ And whatever may be said against Prussia and the Prussians, no one can say that they did not know how to die well on the battlefields of Europe or Hitler’s gallows.
Prussia did not cease to exist with the abdication of William II in 1918 and the proclamation of the German republic (a republic whose constitutional assembly had been careful to play down any reference to the Republic in the Weimar constitution). The surprising thing is that it was non-Prussians, men like Frederich Ebert from the Palantine, or the Generals Reinhardt and Groener from Wurttemberg, who were the most anxious to preserve Prussia and frequently invoked the old Prussian virtues.
Although in the Weimar Republic Prussia’s influence in the politics of the Reich was diminished, it was not eliminated. In the Reichsrat, that chamber in which the lands of the republic were represented, Prussia, although still the largest German state had no more influence than any of the others. Moreover the Reichsrat could not initiate any legislation. What marks the history of Prussia during the Weimar Republic is its great stability compared with that of the republic as a whole. Between 1920 and 1932 Prussia’s government was headed by the Social Democrat Otto Braun and consisted of representatives of those parties which had also led the original Weimar coalition (Social Democrats, Liberals and the Centre Party), joined between 1921 and 1925 by a representative of Stresemann’s German People’s Party. During almost the same period 1919 to 1933, the Weimar Republic had 20 governments. This stability allowed Prussia to carry out a process of democratization in its administrative apparatus, and civil servants opposing this process could be removed quickly, something virtually impossible in the civil service of the Reich. Prussia could keep under control the extremes of both left and right, producing in its administration a synthesis between the old Prussian and the new democratic forces.
When Field-Marshal von Hindenburg succeeded the dead Ebert in 1925 it seemed that with the arch-Junker at the helm of state the forces of reaction had triumphed, a feeling which ignored the fact that Ludendorff had been defeated in the presidential election. On the whole, Hindenburg was more loyal towards the republic than was to be expected of a man of his background. When elected again in 1932, he was ultimately also the candidate of the moderate left, opposed to the Austrian Hitler, the candidate of the extreme right. It is difficult to find among the Weimar politicians one who could have defended the republic, then already in its death throes, more energetically and successfully than the Kaiser’s erstwhile field-marshal. His election did not dig the grave of the republic; the parliamentarians of the republic were unwittingly busy doing this themselves. Given a functioning parliamentary democracy – which the Weimar Republic was not –and given less severe external pressures than those to which the republic was subjected, Hindenburg could well have been the bridge between the forces of tradition and those of democracy.
Hindenburg manifested a greater reserve and skepticism towards Hitler than did most of his younger contemporaries. Without the obstacle called Hindenburg Hitler would have been at the seat of power rather earlier than was ultimately the case. In the last two years of the republic it was Hindenburg’s constant endeavor to return to a government supported by a parliamentary majority. That he wanted that majority to consist of center-to-right parties (excluding Hitler) rather than a left-wing coalition (in fact an impossibility because the Communists hated the ‘Social Fascists’, as they called the Social Democrats, more than they feared Hitler) shows his own personal political inclination but does not demonstrate any design to subvert the constitution.
The one alternative open to the republic to prevent Hitler coming to power was military dictatorship. General von Schleicher appears to have thought of this. Hindenburg thwarted the scheme, remaining true to the letter of the constitution. Because the president refused to take or sanction an unconstitutional step, the Weimer Republic, already on its deathbed, finally expired. But the president preserved his skepticism of Hitler to the last and tried his utmost to keep the most powerful instrument of the executive, the army, out of his hands. That, following the advise of his son and Papen and appointing Blomberg as Reichswehr minister he had appointed a man who sympathized with Hitler, the last president of the republic did not know. Once Hitler was in power the old man, like the rest of the Conservatives who believed that they could tame and contain Hitler was taken in. Still that last law passed by the Reichstag of the republic, the Enabling Act giving Hitler extraordinary dictatorial powers, was passed by a two-third’s majority, which would still have been a two-third’s majority had all the members of the opposition been present. But it was not a presidential decree. If the concept of guilt has any meaning in history, then in Hindenberg’s case it would apply only to his sanctioning of Hitler’s purge of 1934, a little more than month before the death of the old man.
Hitler’s policy of Gleichschaltung had, as far a Prussia was concerned, already been anticipated during the chancellorship of Franz von Papen when on 20 July 1932 after the Prussian government had lost its majority in the Prussian diet, the Braun government carried on as a caretaker government. Papen, under the pretext of preserving law and order, had it forcibly dismissed and subjected Prussia to the government of a Reich commissioner. On exactly the same date, 12 years later, it was representatives of the Prussian nobility who formed the core of the conspiracy against Hitler and who risked the last attempt upon the dictator’s life. The conspiracy failed, and in retrospect was bound to have failed, one important reason among many being the equation made by the Allies between ‘Prussianism’ and National Socialism. Their failure was almost tantamount to the liquidation of a former ruling class. ‘Rarely has a social class succeeded in making its “exit from history” more impressively.’ (Joachim Fest)
But the history of Prussia had, to all appearances, already ended long before that. yet in order to make quite sure, the Allied Control Council, on 25 February 1947, thought it necessary to promulgate its Law No. 46 which formally dissolved the state of Prussia. States can be dissolved by law, not so their underlying those which can be resurrected at any time and place. The famous Prussian names that are left are no longer fond in its armed forces but in the management of industry, or in political parties on whose banners the cause of social reform is writ large, while in the former East Germany the Prussian virtues are driven home incessantly with Saxon accents to a population that has never had the opportunity to test the alternatives.
The name of Prussia is still highly evocative, eliciting a range of responses form the affirmative to the negative, but rarely without great emotional intensity. As times move on and generation succeeds generation, these emotions will simmer down; what will remain is a historical memory of a state and its ethos to which Shakespeare’s words might very well be used as an epitaph:
Beat thou the drum, that it speak mournfully;
Trail your steel pikes. Though in this city he
Has widowed and unchilded a many one,
Which to this hour bewail the injury,
Yet he shall have a noble memory.