Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947

by Christopher Clark and Christopher Clark

Book Overview

With its capital in Berlin, Prussia grew from being a small, poor, disregarded medieval state into one of the most vigorous and powerful countries in Europe, the scourge of its many enemies and, ultimately, the motor behind the creation of the German Empire in 1871 with all that implied for the 20th century.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674023854
• ISBN13: 9780674023857
• Release Date: September 2006
• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Length: 776 Pages
• Weight: 2.88 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.9" x 6.5" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Worth the time invested

Very well written, Clark keeps the pace going while touching on the many issues involved with the history of Prussia. I bought this book because I found that I had learned very little about Prussia or Germany for that matter in the course of my high school and college education. It seems there is a distaste for the subject that is left over from the association of Nazi fascism and militarism with Prussia. Clark sets out to show that this is an incorrect association and does so convincingly. Full of helpful illustrations, photos, and maps, Iron Kingdom comprehensively covers the political, economic, and social history of Prussia, focusing on the key institutions, people, and moments that influenced its success and then its fall.

From Brandenburg to Brandenburg

Christopher Clark begins his survey of Prussian history with the death of his protagonist - the State of Prussia - at the hands of the Allied powers after WW II. He then proceeds to develop the reasons for that destruction. In doing so, he follows Prussia's growth from its swampy Brandenburg heartland to a continental power and threat to world peace. The story of this rise and fall has value for students of strategy and national security, as well as armchair historians interested in modern Europe. Strategists will recognize many facets of their discipline throughout this well-documented book. The Hohenzollerns, Nuremberg burgraves, purchased Brandenburg in 1417 for prestige. Burgrave Frederick paid a king's ransom in gold to become one of seven electors of the Holy Roman Emperor. As electors, the Hohenzollern were influential among the 300-odd sovereigns owing fealty - if not always paying loyalty - to the Habsburg emperor in Vienna. The position - and Hohenzollern ambition - eventually led Prussia to contend with Vienna for leadership of the German nation. Success came in 1871 - and meant the elimination of Prussia as an independent state. Along the way, Prussian rulers developed the tools of state necessary to match their ambition. The Great Elector played the game of diplomacy well, protecting his non-contiguous realm from encroachment by the great powers while strengthening it economically with Protestant immigrants. Frederick William II, the Soldier King, built a formidable army and a bureaucratic and economic structure to support it. His son, Frederick the Great, used that army to boost Prussia into the ranks of great powers. The student of national security will learn how Frederick's successors squandered his gains. They allowed the army and its supporting structures to ossify. Poor diplomacy and failure to ally with Austria and Russian against Napoleon led to defeat and occupation. Timid King Fredrick William III recognized that he could retake his kingdom only after massive reforms. Fortunately, he was blessed with a remarkable generation of administrative and military reformers. Professor Clark recounts the struggles of Hardenberg, Stein, Gneisenau and others in rebuilding the Prussian state. Their reforms ranged from education to agriculture to the bureaucracy, economics and citizenship. These efforts yielded a reconstituted Prussian army of citizen-soldiers - and an allied victory at Waterloo. The armchair historian will find more than the machinations of kings and generals in their quest for power. Clark sets each epoch into cultural context. The Prussian subject is here - the French Huguenot, the east Elbian peasant and independent-thinking Rhinelander. Great movers and shakers are here as well. In addition to the Napoleonic-era reformers are the Bismarcks, Hegels and Fontanes. Above all, Clark gives us the land and its people - the true underpinning of an agrarian society developing into a modern ind

The best book on Prussia - ever.

From its emergence as a major military power in the mid-eigteenth century to its dissolution at the hands of the Allies, shortly after World War II, Prussia played a critical, at times fateful, role in the shaping of European politics and culture. Christopher Clark, a history professor at Cambridge University, tells the epic story of Prussia's rise and fall with verve, wit and an erudition that is all the more impressive because he wears it so lightly. _Iron Kingdom_ is a bravura performance in every respect. The writing is fresh, elegant and thoroughly absorbing; Clark's vivid and almost conversational style leads the reader comfortably through more than three centuries of history, in which the map of Central Europe was constantly re-drawn as the result of bloody wars and bold diplomacy. The narrative is packed with nuggets of fact and anecdotes, culled from an astounding variety of sources, which bring to life and throw a fascinating new light on a host of complex characters, including Frederick the Great, Bismarck, William II ('the Kaiser') and Hindenburg. As vast as the scale of the undertaking is, the book is never heavy-going: it is carried, throughout, by an almost literary imagination, a profound (if not uncritical) sympathy for the subject and, most importantly, a novel as well as (in my eyes) utterly convincing argument that explodes many of the myths about Prussian and indeed German history. These myths, woven around images of spiked helmets and polished boots, are still with us. If you want to go beyond them, you should read _Iron Kingdom_. It is, quite simply, the best book on the subject and a must for anyone interested in how Germany came to be what it is today.

An interesting thesis

Clark has wriiten an interesting book about the history of Prussia in which he argues that Prussia has been misunderstood as a reactionary militaristic state when in reality it was the most progressive of the German states. Throughout the eighteenth century the Prussian government would protect small farmers from abusive aristocratic landowners and also educate the Prussian peasantry. This legacy of reforms would continue throughout the nineteenth century with a nationalized health insurance program and a state pension system. Moreover the Prussian state was tolerant to various ethnic groups such as Poles and Jews since there was no such thing as Prussian identity because Prussia included Catholics from the Rhineland and Protestant Poles in East Prussia. Clark contends that the Prussian idea of an enlightened cosomopolitan Prussian state dissapated after the German wars of Unification and the nationalist idea that stressed a racial notion of the nation took over. In the closing chapters of the book Clark seems to blame Nazism on the southern Germans and the Austrians since they formed most of the Nazi leadership and the fact that Prussia was the last German state to keep a democratic majority of mainly the SPD until the collaspse of the Weimer Republic. The only weakness of Clark's book is that he seems to ignore the fact that the origins of German nationalism originated in the writings of Herder and Hamman, who were both Prussians,despised the enlightenment and wanted a nation based on exclusively linguistic ties and not a cosmopolitan Prussian state. Nevertheless this book gives an interesting and new view of German history.