Kingdom of Prussia

gigatos | February 22, 2022

Summary

Kingdom of Prussia refers to the Prussian state during the reign of the Prussian kings between 1701 and 1918.

The Kingdom of Prussia emerged from the Brandenburg-Prussian territories after Elector Frederick III of Brandenburg crowned himself king in Prussia. It consisted of Brandenburg, which belonged to the Holy Roman Empire, and the eponymous Duchy of Prussia, which had emerged as a Polish fief from the Teutonic Order. The originally Prussian territories in the east of the kingdom were henceforth given the name East Prussia.

In the 18th century, Prussia rose to become one of the five major European powers and the second major German power after Austria. Since the middle of the 19th century, it decisively drove the creation of a German nation-state and was the dominant member state of the North German Confederation from 1867. In 1871, this federation was expanded into the German Empire and the King of Prussia assumed the office of German Emperor. With the abdication of the last emperor and king, Wilhelm II, as a result of the November Revolution in 1918, the monarchy was abolished. The Kingdom was absorbed into the newly created Free State of Prussia.

The history of the Kingdom of Prussia and its Prussian states includes two distinctive periods: The first half from 1701 to 1806, known as the period of the Old Prussian Monarchy, and the “New Prussian Monarchy” from 1807 to 1918. The years from 1806 to 1809 led to the renewal of all state institutions in a changed state territory, Old Prussian lines of tradition and structures were dropped and a new era began. In the course of the Prussian reforms, the “New Prussian State” came into being.

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Increase in rank under King Frederick I (1701-1713)

In 1700, the lands of the Hohenzollern dynasty, with their ruling center in the Mark Brandenburg, were a middle power by European standards. As electors of Brandenburg, the Hohenzollerns had held a prominent position as an imperial state in the Holy Roman Empire since the 15th century. The empire was able to consolidate itself once again after 1648, but the political position of the imperial princes had been considerably strengthened with the Peace of Westphalia. With their location in the northeast of the empire, the ties of the Hohenzollern territories to the emperor were looser than in the central areas on the Rhine and in southern Germany. Already in the preceding centuries, the Brandenburg electors, in the wake of the Reformation effects and religious wars, had at times formed a regional antipole to imperial power in the struggle between unitary imperial power and polycentric princely power in the empire, also together with the Saxon electors.

The rank, reputation and prestige of a prince were important political factors around 1700. Elector Frederick III, recognizing the signs of the times, aspired to the title of king. In doing so, he sought above all equality of rank with the Elector of Saxony, who was also King of Poland, and with the Elector of Hanover, who was a pretender to the English throne. With the consent of Emperor Leopold I, he finally crowned himself “King in Prussia” as Frederick I in Königsberg on January 18, 1701. In return, the Royal Prussian Army took up arms against France on the side of the Emperor in the War of the Spanish Succession. During the Great Northern War, which broke out at the same time on the northeastern border, Frederick managed to keep his country free from the fighting.

The restrictive “in Prussia” was retained because the designation “King of Prussia” would have been understood as a claim to rule over all of Prussia, i.e. also over the western part of the Teutonic Order state, which had belonged to Poland since 1466. The title “in” also averted possible Polish claims to East Prussia, although this was associated with a lower status in European diplomacy at the time.In the Hohenzollern state, the order of estates of the individual parts of the country continued to apply, of which the Mark Brandenburg followed by the province of East Prussia were the most prominent; the Duchy of Magdeburg, Hinterpommern and the Principality of Halberstadt formed the middle provinces. The smaller western provinces were initially given a subordinate role. All authorities, state institutions and office holders henceforth bore the Royal Prussian title, in deviation from the applicable constitution.

The turn of the century marked the beginning of the heyday of European absolutism, in which the sovereigns, following the secularization of church property that had already taken place in the 16th century, were also able to significantly reduce the power of the immediate cities and the landed nobility. In the course of the Hohenzollerns” rise to power, Berlin became the political center, at the expense of the once politically autonomous towns and the subservient peasants. Newly established sovereign institutions began to gradually displace outdated estates structures. The greatly expanded Electorate of Brandenburg”s army gained a central role that secured power for the king.

In the eastern areas of the kingdom, landlordism of the landed gentry had prevailed in the 17th century, turning formerly free peasants into serfs; the western provinces were not affected, partly because other trades dominated there. The density of settlement decreased toward the east; the largest cities were Berlin and Königsberg, which, with more than 10,000 inhabitants, were also among the 30 largest cities in the empire.

The king ruled in a cabinet, and a system of favoritism with networks formed around the king as a result of the frequent indirect action of the government. Beyond him, there were other influential officials at court who played a decisive role in shaping the government. In the 1700s, it was primarily the three-count cabinet that determined Prussia”s actual state policy. This created a considerable amount of corruption emanating from the highest state offices. The state finances were considerably strained as a result. This took place in a time of crisis, when the Great Plague struck the Kingdom of Prussia from 1708 to 1714, killing many thousands of people. In addition, the millennium winter of 1708 led to

Frederick I focused on a lavish French-style court. This and general state mismanagement brought the Prussian feudal state to the brink of financial ruin. Only by leasing more Prussian soldiers to the Alliance in the War of the Spanish Succession was the king able to meet the costly expenses of court pageantry. Thus, Prussia received 14 million thalers in subsidy payments from the Allies during his reign. In 1712, the state budget amounted to around four million thalers, 561,000 of which were allocated exclusively to court maintenance. The revenues consisted only in part of taxes. Subsidy payments from the Allies depended on the course of the war and thus did not constitute reliable revenue. During Frederick I”s term in office, there was no significant increase in pure tax revenues.

Nevertheless, the king afforded himself a lavish baroque court with the construction of new palaces (Charlottenburg Palace, Monbijou Palace) and hunting lodges in the environs of Berlin. The perceived lack of civilization of the traditional agrarian state compared to other principalities was to be made up for within a few years by an ambitious courtly expansion program. The arts and crafts were particularly promoted through increased commissions. For the first time in the history of Brandenburg-Prussia, internationally important artists and architects such as Andreas Schlüter worked in Prussia at this time. Frederick”s entire court was constantly on the move within the Berlin residential landscape. Building projects and infrastructural measures were initiated, whereby the Mark Brandenburg was more strongly integrated and developed from Berlin. A brilliant highlight of this period was the Epiphany meeting in 1709 at Caputh Castle. Here Frederick I was able to demonstrate the increased importance of the Prussian state since 1701. Due to the immigration of the Huguenots a few years earlier, there was by now an educated and economically active middle class, mainly in the Berlin area, which formed the basis for the now increasing social differentiation. The demand of the Berlin court led to the establishment of new trades and manufactories. The Huguenots also brought innovations to agriculture, such as tobacco cultivation in the Uckermark region. The Berlin residence was also considerably expanded and extended by suburbs (Friedrichstadt, Dorotheenstadt). The number of inhabitants of the Prussian capital increased considerably. The founding of the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin, but also the newly founded University of Halle, improved higher education.

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Internal consolidation under King Frederick William I (1713-1740)

Shortly after he took office, the War of the Spanish Succession ended, in which Prussian auxiliary troops fought for years far from their own territory in return for subsidies. Prussia had not played an independent role in the war; despite this weak position, however, it was awarded the previously conquered territories around Guelders, Neuchâtel and Lingen from the Oranian inheritance in the peace negotiations. The peace agreement of 1714 enabled the king to turn his attention to the Northern European conflict, which had not yet ended. Two years later he led the Pomeranian campaign, which lasted several months and increased Prussia”s possessions by a part of Swedish Western Pomerania, including the Oder delta with the important port city of Szczecin. There followed a prolonged period of peace in Europe, which allowed Prussia to devote itself to internal development.

During his reign, Frederick William succeeded in financing the army, which was oversized in relation to his resources, for decades and keeping it operational. As a result of mass desertions, there was a proliferation of compulsory enlistments to maintain manpower levels. With the introduction of compulsory military service, which primarily affected the lower estates, the cantonal regulations, as well as effective administration and the integration of all social forces, including the nobility, under the king”s goals, it was possible to consolidate the Prussian military state. Other foreign policy goals were not pursued at first.

The transformation of the state begun by Elector Frederick William in favor of princely power and at the expense of the estates and autonomous cities was essentially completed under his grandson King Frederick William I by 1740. The transformation of the state superstructure took place under the influence of the absolutism prevailing in Europe, which reached its peak in Prussia in the middle of the 18th century. In particular, King Frederick William I and his son and successor Frederick II “ruled by” means of individual decrees even in ancillary matters. This resulted in a highly personalized portrayal of Prussian history in older historiography, to the point of creating legends and myths around the great Prussian rulers of the era.

With the establishment of a directorate general, the initially purely princely administration was extended to general concerns of the commonwealth, creating a unified state-wide hierarchy with clear responsibilities. The influence of the nobility on the estates was pushed back by Frederick William I”s patriarchal leadership. With the central administration centered on the person of the monarch, which included a uniform royal civil service, and with the forced expansion of the standing army, institutions were created that united the geographically still fragmented country.

With an extensive domain estate and the excise, the administrative bodies had a concern for the development of agriculture that went far beyond fiscal interests. This was followed by a special reform of the royal domain management aimed at revenue growth, the annual revenues of which almost doubled between 1714 with 1.9 million talers and 1740 3.5 million talers. A broadened taxation system with a uniform land tax that included peasant and noble estates alike increased revenues. A mercantilist economic policy, the promotion of trade and commerce, and tax reform helped to double annual state revenues from 3.4 to 7 million talers. The measures as a whole led to a period of great state progress in the period from 1713 to 1740.

In foreign policy, the king did not always act happily. His Spartan conception of representation differed considerably from the dominant French conception of culture. At the foreign courts, the Prussian king was disreputable as a sergeant. In court intrigue, the opinion was widespread that the king could be “led around like a dancing bear on the diplomatic parquet.” All in all, the king gave himself “imperial” loyalty throughout the period. Dynastic ties existed with Hanover, which in turn had dynastic ties with Great Britain. The conflict with the heir to the throne, culminating in the attempted flight of Frederick II in 1730, developed into a diplomatic scandal. Frederick William I conducted a lively diplomacy with Saxony; alternately competing and cooperating with each other, several important state visits, trade agreements or even the Zeithain pleasure camp resulted. Significant alliance treaties were concluded with Russia, mainly directed against Poland.

As the influence of the Protestant church waned, the state, which under Frederick William I”s active influence was shaping itself, took on more and more social tasks with the help of an ethical civil service, including social reform, care for the poor and education. During his reign, the pious king promoted Halle”s Pietism, which became the state-determining intellectual basis in Prussia. According to the thesis of the historian Gerhard Oestreich, this was intended to achieve social discipline or “fundamental discipline. Social disciplining, implemented by means of an image of man developed in the 18th century and characteristic of Prussia, with extensive corporal punishment, also spread throughout Europe via state reform programs. The shaping of the population was the long-term goal of a state-directed economic policy and the building of a standing army. Thanks to a population accustomed to rules, norms, superior standards and duties, it was possible to create social institutions that included large parts of the state. The University of Halle became the most important school of enlightened officialdom. Reason as well as faith were to find implementation in state action. A state-political “Prussian style” emerged with certain ideas of legal and social equality. In addition to the “law of laws,” the administration now also took into account, to a certain extent, the “law of circumstances,” i.e., the sociopolitical effects of the law. In order to fulfill the idea of equalization, the administration also accepted compromises in the law. The first beginnings of a social policy emerged; individual institutions such as the Potsdam Military Orphanage or the Francke Foundations in Halle were founded. In order to recruit the necessary specialists, compulsory education was introduced and economics chairs were established at Prussian universities; they were the first of their kind in Europe. At the beginning of the reign of the Soldier King in 1717, there were only 320 village schools, but by 1740 there were already 1480 schools.

In the course of a massive peupling policy, he settled people from all over Europe; for example, he brought more than 17,000 Protestant Salzburg exiles and other religious refugees to sparsely populated East Prussia.

When Frederick William I died in 1740, he left behind an economically and financially consolidated country. He had increased Prussia”s area by 8,000 km² to 119,000 km², and it is considered his achievement that the population, which had been 1.5 million in 1688, had increased to 2.4 million by 1740. A downside of his term, however, was the strong militarization of life in Prussia.

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Rise to great European power under King Frederick II (1740-1786)

On May 31, 1740, his son Frederick II – later also called “Frederick the Great” – ascended the throne. Unlike his father, the latter thought of using the military and financial potential he had built up to expand his own power. Although the king, as crown prince, was inclined toward philosophy and the fine arts, his basic pacifist attitude did not have a noticeable effect on his governmental actions. In the very first year of his reign, he ordered the Prussian army to march into Silesia, to which the Hohenzollerns had disputed claims. Prussia prevailed over its southern neighbor, the Electorate of Saxony, which had also laid claim to Silesia, putting a lasting strain on relations between the two sides. The acquisition of Silesia considerably strengthened Prussia”s war economy infrastructure. In the three Silesian Wars (1740-1763), it succeeded in asserting its conquest against Austria, and in the last, the Seven Years” War (1756-1763), even against a coalition of Austria, France and Russia. This was the beginning of Prussian great power in Europe and Prussian-Austrian dualism in the Empire. As early as 1744, the county of East Frisia, with which trade relations had existed since 1683, had fallen to Prussia after the extinction of the Cirksena dynasty of princes there.

The age of enlightened absolutism began with Frederick II. This manifested itself in reforms and measures with which the king extended state influence to almost all areas. Torture was abolished and censorship was relaxed. By establishing the general Prussian Land Law and granting complete freedom of religion, he attracted more exiles to the country. In his opinion, in Prussia “everyone should be blessed according to his own façon. In this context, his statement became famous: “All religions are equal and good, as long as the people who profess them are honorable people, and if Turks and pagans came and wanted to plague the country, we would let them build mosques and churches. In the late years of his reign, which lasted until 1786, Frederick II, who saw himself as the “first servant of the state,” particularly promoted land development. The peopling of the sparsely populated areas east of the Elbe, such as the Oderbruch, was at the top of his political agenda.

The measures that followed Frederick”s enlightened conception of the state led to improved rule of law. Although the administration of justice was one of his sovereign rights as an absolute ruler, Frederick II largely dispensed with it for greater justice. In 1781, Frederick introduced a legislative commission to evaluate the laws he enacted. He thus lifted jurisdiction and legislation out of his purely subjective sphere of power without constitutionally restricting his princely sovereign rights. In an effort to displace the religious-patriarchal conception of the state that had prevailed until then (God”s grace, God with us) in favor of a more rational state system based on an immaterial contract of society and submission (Leviathan (Thomas Hobbes)), Frederick opted for the welfare of society and against regulatory arbitrariness. He no longer embodied the state, but was himself merely an institution in the service of the state; the servants of the state had to preserve law and security within the state community.

Nevertheless, the king”s will continued to be enforced autocratically by decrees, orders, secret service instructions, ordinances or patents. The administration lacked a legal and formal system, resulting in frequent reorganizations, disputes over competencies and aimlessness of official action. The king counteracted their work by ruling over them, and the administration reacted with embellished and falsified reports. The cumbersome state administration around 1750 nevertheless allowed for a relatively dense ruling intensity. A modern professional civil service that worked according to the departmental principle did not yet exist; therefore, to improve matters, a successfully completed university degree was introduced as a prerequisite for the recruitment of higher civil servants and officials. As the king grew older, he found it increasingly difficult to keep his hands on the reins of power, and the bureaucracy developed more and more vested interests, turning Frederick”s personally enlightened absolutism into a bureaucratic state absolutism.

Frederick II subordinated all political action to the reason of state. This led to a state-centrism that envisaged the willingness to make sacrifices and the subordination of every inhabitant as an obedient subject (“Dogs, will you live forever”). Frederick II did not envisage society as an active political entity; society and the economy remained subject to his claim to power. Until 1806, the nobility dominated the administrative and military leadership positions; commoners were denied access to the higher ministerial bureaucracy and to higher military service. Nevertheless, with royal protection, an economic bourgeoisie developed in the centers of trade and commerce.The goal of Frederick II”s social policy was to preserve the feudal order of status, thus preventing social mobility. Preserving the political and social status quo became the traditional cornerstone of Prussian domestic policy. By keeping all social classes within the boundaries assigned to them by the state, they benefited the state and its army in terms of an expansive foreign policy. In terms of fiscal policy, increasing revenues and limiting expenditures to maintain a high level of defense remained a perpetual state policy goal with high priority; economic policy was subordinate to fiscal policy and defense policy.

After Prussia”s high war losses – estimates put the number of civilians killed during the Seven Years” War at 360,000 and the number of soldiers killed at 180,000 – Frederick II devoted himself after 1763 to rebuilding the country within the framework of an overall plan, the long-term goal of which was to raise the level of national education, improve the situation of the peasants and create manufactories. To this end, he used mercantilist methods, with state subsidies for enterprises and bans on exports and imports, as well as other measures to regulate the market. Against great internal resistance, he introduced French direction and leased the excise to Marcus Antonius de la Haye de Launay. He restricted the Polish grain trade on the Vistula in 1772 by an unequal trade treaty. A coinage decree with currency devaluation by 33 to 50 percent brought relief to the state”s finances in 1764. The famine years of 1771 and 1772 thus passed Prussia by. Prussia engaged in trade wars with Saxony and Austria. Hundreds of new colonist villages sprang up in riverine lowlands on previously drained marshlands (Friederidzian colonization).

Prussian foreign policy remained shaped by the unstable European power system after 1763. Crises threatened to escalate into continental crises, but Prussia, as well as Austria and France, were too exhausted for new armed conflicts after 1763. The antagonism between Austria and Prussia continued, coming to a head in the War of the Bavarian Succession. The Prussian policy of its own state sovereignty vis-à-vis the Reich remained dominant. With the founding of the League of Princes, Frederick II temporarily acted as the protector of the empire. Together with Austria and Russia, Frederick pursued the partition of Poland. In the first partition in 1772, Polish Prussia, the Netzedistrict and the Prince-Bishopric of Warmia fell to Brandenburg-Prussia. The land connection between Pomerania and the Kingdom of Prussia, which was outside the imperial territory and important for Frederick II, was thus established. Now “both Prussia” were in his possession and he could call himself “King of Prussia”. Administratively, this kingdom consisted of the provinces of West Prussia and East Prussia as well as the Netzedistrict.

The king increased his territory during his reign by 76,000 km² to 195,000 km² (1786). During this period, the population of Prussia grew from about 2.4 million to 5.629 million inhabitants, despite the loss of about 500,000 people during the Seven Years” War. The number of immigrants to Prussia in the period from 1740 to 1786 is estimated at 284,500. Despite temporary disruption of the economy due to the prolonged wars during his reign, state revenues increased from 7 million thalers in 1740 to 20 million in 1786. Frederick the Great died at Sanssouci Palace on August 17, 1786.

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Hubris and Nemesis (1786-1807)

The death of Frederick II marked the end of the phase of the Prussian monarchy in which the king, as a political actor, could independently set his own programmatic goals, define them in packages of measures and order them. Frederick II, who was constantly on inspection tours, still tried to cope with the increasing tasks with his pronounced service ethos, which gave rise to the legend of the “king everywhere”. In the meantime, however, the state apparatus had grown to a size that no longer allowed him to oversee and control the political business of even the highest level of government. By 1800 at the latest, the kingdom had already become too large and social development too advanced. His successors confined themselves to a less time-intensive style of rule in the business of government. The steadily growing substructure of the state administration now took over problem definition and the development of solutions, which the king, as the highest authority, only had to approve.

In 1786, Frederick”s nephew, Frederick William II (1786-1797), became the new Prussian king. Due to his lack of ability, the monarchical system fell into disarray and a court with mistresses and minions was established. His most famous mistress was Wilhelmine Enke, whom he ennobled with the title of Countess Lichtenau. Berlin grew into a respectable residential city in the 1790s. In 1791, the Brandenburg Gate was completed by architect Carl Gotthard Langhans. Other neoclassical buildings followed.

The Enlightenment movement under Frederick II had led to a steadily growing society of mature, self-confident and independent individuals whose political sense of mission was reflected in demands for co-determination and critical debates in the existing media and public circles. The fall of the absolute monarchy in France led to fears among the German princes that the ideas of the French Revolution might also spread in their own countries with the help of the enlightened middle classes. Frederick William II was therefore early under the influence of counter-Enlightenment efforts, represented by Johann Christoph Wöllner and Johann Rudolf von Bischoffwerder. The enlightened Berlin Wednesday Society therefore had to meet in secret; members included the authors of the General Land Law Carl Gottlieb Svarez and Ernst Ferdinand Klein, the editors of the Berlinische Monatsschrift Gedike and Biester, the publisher Friedrich Nicolai and, as an honorary member, Moses Mendelssohn. However, since 1790, people who expressed revolutionary and derogatory views about the Prussian government were either detained for several weeks and also expelled, while others emigrated voluntarily. In 1794, the General Land Law for the Prussian States, already begun under Frederick II, was introduced. Although this comprehensive body of law lost its enlightened character during the reign of Frederick William II, it nevertheless provided a generally applicable legal basis for all Prussian provinces.

The partition policy towards Poland was continued by Frederick William II as well as by Russia and Austria. In the second and third partitions of Poland (1793 and 1795) Prussia secured additional territories up to Warsaw. These territorial gains also increased the population by 2.5 million Poles and they were faced with the difficult task of integrating them into the state. Whether this would have been successful in the end cannot be said conclusively, since the territories of the last two partitions of Poland were initially lost to Prussia again under Napoleon”s rule.

In terms of foreign policy, Prussia was primarily interested in reducing Austria”s strength and influence in Germany. In the 1780s, tensions between the two great powers had increased considerably. Prussia, for example, supported revolts against Austrian rule in Belgium and Hungary. This prompted the emperor and Austrian King Leopold II to draw closer to Prussia during the period of the French Revolution. With the Convention of Reichenbach of July 27, 1790, the era of bitter Prussian-Austrian dualism that had characterized the politics of the Holy Roman Empire since 1740 was over. From then on, both powers pursued their interests together. A first meeting between Leopold II and Frederick William II on August 27, 1791, at the instigation of the Count of Artois, later King Charles X of France, resulted in the Pillnitz Declaration. In it they declared their solidarity with the French royalty and threatened military action, but with the proviso that the other European powers would agree to such a step. Going further, a defensive alliance, the Treaty of Berlin, was concluded between Austria and Prussia on February 7, 1792. Revolutionary France then declared war on Austria, and thus Prussia, on April 20, 1792. The advance of the Prussian-Austrian army came to a halt on September 20, 1792, after the unsuccessful cannonade of Valmy, so that French troops were again able to advance as far as the Rhineland. In this energy-sapping first coalition war against France, Prussia finally sought a settlement. The two powers came to an agreement in the Prussian-French Special Peace of Basel of 1795. Prussia recognized France”s conquests on the left bank of the Rhine and achieved a northern German zone of neutrality extending to Franconia. Germany thus drew a demarcation line that defined the zones of influence of the three great powers France, Austria and Prussia and led to peace in the German north, while the south of Germany remained a theater of war.

The Prussian solo effort caused the other European powers to distrust the Prussian king, so that he was isolated in the following years. By unilaterally withdrawing from the war coalition, Prussia showed its indifference to the fate of the empire. Austria, too weak on its own, also gave up, thus conceding the end of Prussian-Austrian great power politics in Europe. While the imperial press sharply condemned Prussia for its uncoerced peace with France, the other imperial states remained reticent. With the Berlin treaties of August 5, 1796, Prussia came into possession of the bishoprics of Münster, Würzburg, and Bamberg.For the north, the Congress of Hildesheim constituted a kind of Gegenreichstag; payments from the northern German imperial estates now went to the Prussian treasury rather than to the emperor. France completed the transformation of the European state system with the businesslike liquidation of the empire.On November 16, 1797, Frederick William II died, and his son Frederick William III. (1797-1840) became his successor. In keeping with the personal character of the new king, Prussian governance became more vacillating, deliberate, and stalling, both internally and externally. Although the king still formally ruled absolutely around 1800, the state administration had taken over the political initiative in many areas, while the king merely reacted without being able to be programmatically active and formative.

In 1802, the Imperial Deputation Treaty enabled Prussia to

The beginning of the 19th century completed a period of growth and expansion that had lasted for over a hundred years. As the original European middle power, Prussia had risen to the top ranks by 1800. Among the five great powers of the continent, which was economically, socially, technologically and militarily the most advanced at the time, Prussia was still by far the smallest in terms of its economic power, population density and even its army of 240,000 men. Its political reputation around 1800 drew mainly on symbolic factors from the past glories of the Silesian Wars. This led to misperceptions among the national competitors of the time about their real own forces.

Prussia”s fickle policy of neutrality caused its political devaluation, especially in France. In contemporary analyses, discourses, and reports, French voices demanded that Prussia renounce claims “which would have been due only to the genius of the great Frederick for thirty years, but which did not correspond to the strength of the other powers” (Conrad Malte-Brun, 1803). Instead, it was to submit to France as an ally, just like the other German states, without expecting a special position.

The superiority of the French army posed a novel and existential threat. Napoleon I was also unwilling to limit French expansion and therefore disregarded international treaties and agreements. As a result, the Prussian government faced a test of strength. In 1806, after several provocations, Prussia made the momentous mistake of taking on France militarily without first securing the support of the other great powers. In the Battle of Jena and Auerstedt, the kingdom suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of Napoleon”s troops. King Frederick William III and his family had to flee temporarily to Memel, and for Prussia the so-called “French period” began. In the Peace of Tilsit in 1807, it ceded about half of its territory, including all areas west of the Elbe River as well as the land gains from the second and third partitions of Poland, which now fell to the new Duchy of Warsaw established by Napoleon.

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State Reforms and Wars of Liberation (1807-1815)

Christian Wolff”s theory of the state (Wolffianism) was further developed by Immanuel Kant in his state-theoretical drafts toward the end of the 18th century; for a good coexistence of the people of the state, the basis of all law should be the freedom of the individual. In doing so, he drew on ideas of Adam Smith, Rousseau and Montesquieu, and especially on the idea of separation of powers and volonté générale. The experience of the American and French Revolutions promoted ideals that were incompatible with the existing political conditions of an insistent absolute monarchy. Although the need for reform was great after the death of Frederick II, reform efforts initially remained tentative and limited. These ideas were instrumental in the realization of later reforms, but this first required a total overthrow of the existing political system.

In 1807, Prussia had to endure French occupation, supply the foreign troops and make large tribute payments to France. These restrictive peace conditions in turn brought about its state-political renewal with the aim of preparing the foundations for the liberation struggle. The Stein-Hardenberg reforms, led by Freiherr vom Stein, Scharnhorst and Hardenberg, revamped education, abolished peasant serfdom and introduced self-government for the cities in 1808 and freedom of trade in 1810. The army reform was completed in 1813 with the introduction of universal conscription.

After the defeat of the “Grande Armee” in Russia, the armistice was signed on December 30, 1812 at Tauroggen by the Prussian Lieutenant General Count Yorck and for the Russian Empire by General Hans von Diebitsch. In the Convention of Tauroggen, which York initially agreed on his own initiative without the king”s involvement, it was decided to withdraw the Prussian troops from the alliance with the French army; this was the beginning of the uprising against the French foreign rule. By the beginning of February 1813, the entire province of East Prussia had already been removed from the grasp of the Prussian king, with the authority being exercised by Baron vom Stein as the authorized representative of the Russian government. In this situation, the Berlin government also slowly distanced itself from the French ally. By mid-February, the rebellious mood had already spread across the Oder to the Neumark, and the first signs of revolution were appearing. Advisors to the king made it clear to him that the war against France would take place with him at the helm or, if necessary, without him. After a period of indecision, the king finally decided to join forces with Russia at the end of February; the Treaty of Kalisch was concluded as an anti-Napoleonic alliance and arrangements were made for the future possession of territories of neighboring countries.

When the king called for a liberation struggle on March 17, 1813 with the slogan “To My People,” 300,000 Prussian soldiers (6 percent of the total population) were on standby due to universal conscription. Prussia once again became a war zone. The main fighting along the Prussian-Saxon border zone ended for Prussia and its allies with victory over the remnants of French troops. After the decisive Battle of the Nations at Leipzig, in which 16,033 Prussians were killed or wounded, the end of Napoleon”s domination of Germany was within reach. The Autumn Campaign of 1813 and the Winter Campaign of 1814 further decisively weakened Napoleon”s forces. Prussia saw itself rehabilitated after the humiliating defeat of 1807 and once again on a par with the Empire of Austria. Under Marshal Blücher, Prussian troops, together with their allies, achieved final victory over Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.

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Restoration and Reaction, Pre-March and March Revolution (1815-1848)

After the end of the revolutionary era, negotiations for a stable post-war order in Europe began among the victorious great powers, leading to a conservative turn and the establishment of the Metternich system. Frederick William III, the Emperor of Russia (it was to suppress democratic efforts throughout Europe and restore the absolute monarchical system.

At the Congress of Vienna in 1815, Prussia received back part of its old territory. New additions were Swedish Pomerania, the northern part of the Kingdom of Saxony, the Province of Westphalia and the Rhine Province. Prussia received back the previously Polish province of Posen, but not the territories of the second and third Polish partitions, which went to Russia. From then on, Prussia consisted of two large but spatially separate blocks of states in eastern and western Germany. The newly won provinces had traditional spatial structures and ties that now fell away. The term Musspreuße refers to the difficult and emotionally stressful transition of the inhabitants of that time to the new state. The population, primarily of the Rhine Province, with its large and self-confident urban middle class, brought constant unrest to the kingdom.

In terms of power politics, Prussia was unable to assert itself at the Congress of Vienna; it could not decisively influence the future shape of the German states, and Saxony remained as a state. The Prussian delegation wanted a Germany with strong and central government functions under its own leadership. However, the Austrian conception prevailed in the Final Act of June 8, 1815, on the German Confederation Act. Prussia thus became a member of the German Confederation, a loose association of German states under Austrian leadership that existed from 1815 to 1866. Although Prussia did not formally have any power over northern Germany, it had enough leeway to exercise a limited de facto hegemonic position.

The new defensive foreign policy order in Europe led to a revival of fortress construction. In the new provinces in the west, mighty fortresses were built in Koblenz, Cologne and Minden in the New Prussian fortification style. After 1815, Prussia remained by far the smallest of the major European powers. Because of its limited scope in foreign policy, Prussia was, strictly speaking, neither a great power nor a small state, but lay somewhere between these two levels. For Prussia, this marked the beginning of a long period of passivity in foreign policy, during which it tried to stay out of all conflicts and, as far as possible, to get on good terms with all powers. Prussia avoided conflict with Austria. It also maintained largely good relations with Russia, accepting Russian hegemony over larger parts of Europe.

The murder of the theater poet and Russian envoy August von Kotzebue in Mannheim by the student Karl Ludwig Sand demonstrated the radical nature of the national unification movements. The Carlsbad resolutions of August 1819 enacted stricter censorship and surveillance measures, which were unanimously approved by the Bundestag in Frankfurt am Main on September 20, 1819. The conservative councilors around the Huguenot Jean Pierre Frédéric Ancillon, who had gained influence over King Frederick William III during the French occupation, initiated a wave of arrests known as demagogue persecution. The royal cabinet government, consisting primarily of the trio of Sophie Marie von Voß, Wilhelm zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Hohenstein and Ancillon, opposed Chancellor Hardenberg, on whom the king had become dependent. Intrigue and an overall more conservative political climate in Europe led to a conservative turn. A poisoned political atmosphere that cast suspicion on anyone who did not adhere strictly to the line led to the dismissal of such important reformers as Humboldt, Beyme, and von Boyen in late 1819; finally, Heinrich Dietrich von Grolman and August Neidhardt von Gneisenau also left. The promise made during the wars of liberation to give the country a constitution was never kept by Frederick William III. Instead of a central representation of the people, as in other German states, Prussia had only provincial parliaments from 1823, which were elected and organized according to the principles of the estates and required long-standing land ownership for the deputies. Quotas initially ensured that the local nobility initially had a preponderance. Due to a structural economic crisis, the Prussian landed gentry was increasingly forced to sell off landed property to the bourgeois classes. In the province of East Prussia, the nobility”s share of land ownership thus fell from 75.6 percent in 1806 to 48.3 percent in 1829. As a result, the provincial estates increasingly came under the control of plutocrats.

The provincial estates had no legislative or fiscal powers, but were primarily advisory bodies. The conservatives had prevailed without thereby creating real political stability. On the one hand, the reformers had brought about lasting changes in the thinking of the political class, and the conservatives themselves had already adopted many of the reform ideas. These included the changed view of the Prussian state as a nation that included all its inhabitants and had grown organically. Considerable centers of power remained with the government, however, especially in the departments of finance, foreign policy, education, religion and health. Ultimately, the provincial assemblies developed into important focal points of political change. Increasingly, the provincial assemblies sought to expand the role assigned to them and gradually increased liberal political pressure in the provinces. As political forums, they demanded that the government hold a general assembly and fulfill its constitutional promise. Their embedding in the provincial public sphere through the provincial press and political circles in urban society, such as the Aachen Casino Club, led to the increasing dissemination of provincial parliamentary debates, which were in themselves secret. This participation of the political hinterland, which was rather unwanted by the government, increased the influence of public opinion on the role of the provincial parliaments. Many petitions from broad sections of the population demanded expanded decision-making rights from the Berlin government.

Due to the division of its territory into two parts, the economic unification of Germany was in Prussia”s own interest. The royal government”s efforts to combat liberalism, democracy and the idea of unifying Germany were thus countered by strong economic constraints. Economic deregulation and customs harmonization were enacted with the Customs Act of May 26, 1818; the first homogeneous and nationwide customs system was created. With the founding of the German Customs Association under Prussian auspices in 1834, harmonization succeeded beyond Prussia”s borders. As a result, more and more supporters outside the country were betting on German unification; Protestants in particular hoped that Prussia would replace Austria as the leading power of the German Confederation. The government, however, did not want to hear about “Prussia”s German mission” for the political unification of Germany and still resisted the louder calls for a constitution and a parliament even in its own country.

The phase of the so-called Vormärz, which began in France in 1830 with the overthrow of the Bourbon king Charles X and destroyed Metternich”s foreign policy system of restoration, made itself increasingly felt in Prussia from 1840. Restoration policies had failed to permanently suppress the dynamic forces of the bourgeois movement and political progress. In the 1830s, Prussia”s ruling conservative forces had still been strong enough to suppress the liberal forces that were flaring up here and there and thus prevent their importance from growing. Collective protests and outbreaks of discontent against state domination remained short-lived phenomena and subsided again after their suppression without any significant political consequences. Protest actions such as the Berlin Tailors” Revolution of September 16-20, 1830, as well as tumults in Cologne, Elberfeld, Jülich and Aachen have become known. Prussia was also indirectly hit by a wave of revolutions in the East. In the Polish dominated province of Posen, a spread of the uprising from Congress Poland had to be prevented. A Germanization policy was implemented in an attempt to control the wave of enthusiasm triggered by the Polish uprising of 1830, as a result of which thousands of Poseners crossed the border to fight for the Polish nation.

The German micro- and medium-sized states were more strongly affected by the July Revolution of 1830, which originated in France. In four states, social protests forced the transition to more modern constitutional forms. The unconstitutional great powers Prussia and Austria, on the other hand, prepared new repressive measures in secret talks, which were adopted by the Federal Assembly for the German Confederation in 1832.

The aging King Frederick William III died on June 7, 1840, and the new King Frederick William IV was awaited with hope by liberal forces. Among the innovations associated with the change of government was a relaxation of censorship decreed in December 1841. Exuberant political journalism followed, so that new censorship regulations were introduced in February 1843. With the cabinet order of October 4, 1840, the new king, like his predecessor in 1815, explicitly distanced himself from the constitutional promise made.

The hopes that the accession of Frederick William IV (1840-1861) had initially raised among liberals and supporters of German unification were soon disappointed. The new king also made no secret of his aversion to a constitution and an all-Prussian parliament. In order to obtain the necessary funds for the construction of the Eastern Railway, which had been demanded by the military, the king convened a committee of the estates, which included representatives of all the provincial parliaments. When this committee declared itself not competent, and due to growing public pressure, Frederick William IV finally agreed in the spring of 1847 to convene a unified Landtag, which had long been demanded.

Even in his opening speech, the king made it unmistakably clear that he regarded Parliament only as an instrument for approving money and that he did not want to see any constitutional issues discussed; he would not allow “a written page to intrude between our Lord God in heaven and this country, as it were, as a second providence”. Since the majority of the Landtag demanded from the outset not only the right to approve the budget but also parliamentary control of state finances and a constitution, the body was dissolved after only a short time. This revealed a constitutional conflict that ultimately led to the March Revolution.

Following the popular uprisings in southwestern Germany, the revolution finally reached Berlin on March 18, 1848. Frederick William IV, who had initially ordered the rebels to be shot, had the troops withdrawn from the city and now seemed to bow to the revolutionaries” demands. The United Diet met once again to decide to convene a Prussian National Assembly. The elections for the Prussian National Assembly were held at the same time as the elections for the all-German National Assembly, which was to meet in Frankfurt am Main.

The Prussian National Assembly had been given the task by the crown of working out a constitution together with it. However, the assembly, which contained fewer moderates than the United Diet, did not agree to the government”s draft constitution, but instead drew up its own draft, the “Charte Waldeck. The counter-revolution decreed by the king after apparent concessions eventually led to the dissolution of the National Assembly and the introduction of an octroyed Prussian constitution of 1848

The Frankfurt National Assembly initially assumed a Greater German solution: The part of Austria that had already belonged to the Confederation was to belong to the emerging German Reich as a matter of course. However, since Austria was not prepared to set up a separate administration and constitution in its non-German parts, the so-called small-German solution was finally adopted, i.e. unification under Prussian leadership. Democracy and German unity failed, however, in April 1849, when Frederick William IV rejected the imperial crown that the National Assembly had offered him. The revolution was finally crushed in southwestern Germany with the help of Prussian troops.

After Prussia”s failed policy, with the Erfurt Union (1849

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As a constitutional monarchy until the founding of the empire (1849-1871)

Industrialization brought about a restructuring of the social classes. In Prussia, there was a rapid growth of the population. In the structure of the workforce, this was followed by an even faster growth of the factory proletariat, triggered by the rural exodus. The urban proletariat generally lived at the subsistence level. A new social class emerged, which, driven by its predicament, henceforth pushed itself to the fore politically. Railroad construction boosted mining and metallurgy in the Ruhr region.

The value system of pre-March liberalism lost importance after the failed revolution of 1848. Although the bourgeoisie was denied a political voice, it was still able to operate in the economy. Through the accumulation of capital and means of production, the most capable among them reached top social positions comparable to those of the nobility. The formation of economic classes and class antagonisms was followed by the rupture of the unity of education and property. The bourgeois groups, which until then had upheld the idea of the rule of law and freedom, flagged in their struggle for a just liberal order. Among the propertied elite, interest in comprehensive political reform waned as their economic and social position strengthened. The bourgeois educated elite, too, had become wavering in its belief in the possibilities of political action after the experience of the 1848 Revolution. The working class, in competition with the bourgeois institutions, adopted some of the progressive programming for its own newly forming labor movement. The latter was not prepared to fight as an auxiliary for a German nation-state dominated by education and property; the opposition movement against the state regime was henceforth divided. Only the idea of German unity had retained its luster for the bourgeoisie, despite all disappointments. Political developments in the 1850s and 1860s gave the bourgeois national movement a powerful boost.

Wilhelm I, who had already taken over the regency in 1858 for his brother Frederick William IV, who was incapable of ruling after several strokes, assumed the royal title in 1861 and established a phase of the “New Era”; with it, the time of political reaction seemed to be over. With War Minister Roon, he sought army reform that included longer terms of service and rearmament of the Prussian army. However, the liberal majority of the Prussian Parliament, which had budgetary power, did not want to approve the necessary funds. A constitutional conflict ensued, in the course of which the king considered abdication. As a last resort, he decided to appoint Otto von Bismarck as prime minister in 1862. The latter was a vehement supporter of the royal claim to autocracy and ruled for years against the constitution and parliament and without a legal budget. The liberal parliament and also Bismarck made several proposals of compensation to each other, but both rejected them again and again. Thus it came about that in 1866, after the war against Austria had been won, Bismarck presented the Indemnity Act as a declaration of indemnity, in which the unapproved budgets were subsequently approved.

Assuming that the Prussian crown could gain popular support only if it placed itself at the forefront of the German unification movement, Bismarck led Prussia into three wars that earned King William the German imperial crown.

The King of Denmark was duke of the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein in personal union, about which the Treaty of Ripen in 1460 states that they should remain “op ewig ungedeelt” (“undivided forever”). Although there were several subsequent divisions of land within the duchies, the German national liberals in the 19th century invoked this very statement of the Treaty of Ripen to justify their demand for Schleswig to be annexed to Holstein and the German Confederation. In terms of state law, only the Duchy of Holstein belonged to the German Confederation as a former Roman-German fiefdom, while Schleswig was a Danish fiefdom (see also: Danish Entire State). The decision of the Copenhagen government to adopt a constitution for Schleswig and Denmark alone with the November Constitution after the rejection by the German Confederation of the previous state constitution led in December 1863 first to a federal execution against Holstein, which belonged to the Confederation, and from February 1864 finally, under protest of the German Confederation, to the German-Danish War and the occupation of Schleswig and further parts of northern Jutland by Prussia and Austria. After the Prussian-Austrian victory, the Danish crown had to renounce the duchies of Schleswig, Holstein and Lauenburg in the Peace of Vienna. The duchies were initially administered jointly in a Prussian-Austrian condominium. After the Gastein Convention of 1865, Schleswig fell under Prussian administration, Holstein initially under Austrian administration, while Austria sold its rights to the Duchy of Lauenburg to the Prussian crown. In 1866, Schleswig, the previously annexed Holstein and Lauenburg were united to form the new Prussian province of Schleswig-Holstein.

Soon after the end of the war with Denmark, a dispute broke out between Austria and Prussia over the administration and future of Schleswig-Holstein. Its deeper cause, however, was the struggle for supremacy in the German Confederation. Bismarck succeeded in persuading King Wilhelm, who had long been hesitant for reasons of loyalty to Austria, to accept a solution by war. Prussia had already concluded a secret military alliance with the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont, which included cessions of territory from Austria. Austria, in turn, had promised France the establishment of a “Rhine state” at Prussia”s expense in a secret treaty. These were clear breaches of law, since the 1815 Act of Confederation prohibited members of the German Confederation from entering into alliances against other member states.

After the Prussian invasion of Holstein, which was under Austrian administration, the Frankfurt Bundestag decided to execute the Confederation against Prussia. Prussia, for its part, declared the German Confederation extinct and occupied the kingdoms of Saxony and Hanover as well as Kurhessen. On Austria”s side were also the other German kingdoms and other, mainly southwestern and central German states. The Free City of Frankfurt, as the seat of the Bundestag, leaned toward the Austrian side but remained officially neutral. On the Prussian side, the Kingdom of Italy joined the war (→ Battle of Custozza and Naval Battle of Lissa), along with a number of small states in northern Germany and Thuringia.

In the German War, Prussia”s army under General Helmuth von Moltke won the decisive victory in the Battle of Königgrätz on July 3, 1866. With the Peace of Prague of August 23, 1866, the German Confederation, which had in fact already disintegrated as a result of the war, was also formally dissolved and Austria had to leave German politics. By annexing the opposing states of the Kingdom of Hanover, the Electorate of Hesse, the Duchy of Nassau and the Free City of Frankfurt, Prussia was able to unite almost all of its territories. From the territories it won, it formed the provinces of Hanover, Hesse-Nassau and Schleswig-Holstein.

Five days before the conclusion of peace, Prussia had already founded the North German Confederation together with the states north of the Main River. Initially a military alliance, the parties to the treaty gave it a constitution in 1867, making it a federal state dominated by Prussia, but one that did justice to federalism in Germany. Its constitution, drafted by Bismarck, anticipated in essential respects that of the German Empire. The King of Prussia held the Federal Presidency and appointed the Prussian Prime Minister Bismarck as Federal Chancellor. The southern German states remained outside the North German Confederation, but entered into “protective and defensive alliances” with Prussia.

In the run-up to the founding of the North German Confederation, Bismarck”s popularity, which had risen as a result of his military success, had prompted him to ask the Prussian parliament to grant him immunity from prosecution for the period of government without a budget. The adoption of this indemnity bill led to the split of liberalism into a part that obeyed the authorities (the National Liberal Party) and a part that continued to oppose the government (the German Progressive Party as a rump party). The German Customs Parliament, established in 1867 as a result of Bismarck”s tough negotiating tactics and pressure from business, brought about the inclusion of southern German representatives in an institution dominated by Prussia or northern Germany. Majority decisions replaced the veto rights of the individual states that had previously existed in the German Customs Union. Bavarian and Württemberg patriots reacted with as much concern as the French Emperor Napoleon III, but when the latter demanded territorial compensation in return for France”s standstill policy toward Prussia, he unintentionally fueled public distrust in the southern German states. This in turn strengthened their ties to Prussia.

With vague promises to eventually cede Luxembourg to France, Bismarck had persuaded Napoleon III to acquiesce in his policy toward Austria. Now France was faced with a strengthened Prussia, which no longer wanted to know anything about the earlier territorial promises. Relations between the two countries deteriorated visibly. Finally, Bismarck deliberately escalated the dispute over the Spanish candidacy for the throne of the Catholic Hohenzollern Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen in the Ems Dispatch affair to such an extent that the French government declared war on Prussia. This constituted the case of alliance for the southern German states of Bavaria, Württemberg, Baden and Hesse-Darmstadt, which was still independent south of the Main River.

After the rapid German victory in the Franco-Prussian War and the ensuing national enthusiasm throughout Germany, the southern German princes now also felt pressured to join the North German Confederation. Bismarck bought King Ludwig II of Bavaria”s willingness to offer King Wilhelm the German imperial crown with money from the so-called Guelph Fund. The German Empire was founded as a small German unified nation-state, which had already been proposed as a unification model by the National Assembly in 1848.

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As a federal state in the German Empire (1871-1918)

With the foundation of the Reich, the individual German states ceased to be subjects of international law and sovereign members of the European system of states. They were now represented within the international society of states by the German Empire. As late as 1848, the Prussian elite was self-sufficient and opposed the national movement. At the time of the founding of the Reich, Prussian particularism was no longer so prominent. However, fears remained on the part of the ruling class that Prussia would completely recede behind the Reich.

From 1871 onward, Prussia was absorbed into the German Empire as much as the German Empire took on a Prussian character. Prussia”s leadership role was constitutionally anchored in Article 11, which granted the King of Prussia the presidency of the Reich with the title German Emperor. The personal union of king and emperor also resulted in the personal union of the offices of Prussian prime minister and imperial chancellor, although this was not prescribed in the constitution. The prime minister and chancellor did not necessarily have to be Prussian, however, as the appointment of Clovis zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst shows. In all, there were three such brief interruptions, none of which proved successful. The imperial chancellor needed for imperial policy the power backing that the presidency of the Prussian state ministry gave him. The designation “German Emperor” and not “Emperor of Germany” meant hierarchically a lowering of the title of emperor. This created title was intended as primus inter pares in relation to the other sovereigns in the empire. Direct rule by the Prussian king as German emperor over non-Prussian territory was constitutionally impossible.

Prussian hegemony in the Reich was based on its real power in Germany. About 2

The drafting of imperial laws and the performance of other imperial tasks by Prussian ministers and authorities meant that the empire was initially ruled and administered by Prussia. This superiority was further reinforced by the fact that the Reich had few authorities of its own in the early years and had to rely on Prussian authorities to conduct official business. In order to guarantee the constitutional tasks of the Reich, Prussia ceded several ministries and other central authorities to the Reich in the 1870s. These included the Foreign Office, the Central Bank of Prussia, the General Post Office, and the Navy Ministry.

This staggered transfer of institutions from Prussia to the Reich transformed the image of Prussian dominance over time. This was also structurally promoted by the Clausula antiborussica. On the one hand, Prussia received only 17 of 58 votes in the Bundesrat, the central federal state body of the Reich. This meant that it could be outvoted by the other German states on decisions, even if this rarely happened. On the other hand, Prussia had the right to veto amendments to the military constitution, customs laws and the imperial constitution (Articles 5, 35, 37 and 78 of the imperial constitution).

Overall, the imperial authorities emancipated themselves from Prussia over time, and the earlier relationship between Prussia and the Reich was reversed. The state secretaries of the imperial offices now pushed into the top Prussian offices. Thus, the interests of imperial politics took precedence over Prussian interests.

The new empire”s foreign policy was conducted in Berlin, by largely Prussian personnel led by Prussia”s foreign minister, Bismarck, who was also the Reich”s chancellor. The foreign policy continuities of Prussian foreign policy remained intact even after the founding of the state. The German Empire, which in essence represented an enlarged Prussia, continued to be geopolitically squeezed between Russia and France and could face an existential threat from a coalition of the two great powers. The continuation of the traditional eastern alliance with Russia was intended to secure the status quo. The German Reich, like Prussia before it, could also maneuver between the powers to prevent a broad anti-German coalition of the major European powers.

Between 1871 and 1887, Bismarck led the so-called Kulturkampf in Prussia, which was intended to push back the influence of political Catholicism. However, resistance from the Catholic population and clergy, especially in the Rhineland and in the former Polish territories, forced Bismarck to end the struggle without results. In the parts of the country inhabited by a majority of Poles, the Kulturkampf was accompanied by an attempt at a policy of Germanization. The Prussian Settlement Commission, for example, tried with limited success to acquire Polish land for new German settlers. After Bismarck”s dismissal, the Germanization policy was continued by the German Ostmarkenverein, which was founded in Posen in 1894.

Wilhelm I was succeeded in March 1888 by Frederick III, who was already seriously ill and died after a reign of only 99 days. In June of the “Three Emperors” Year,” Wilhelm II ascended the throne. He dismissed Bismarck in 1890 and from then on, in late-Byzantine fashion, tried to have a say in the country”s supreme politics. The court and the court ceremonial swelled once again in all its splendor. The emperor strove to maintain his position and function as an important official, or at least to create the impression in representation that he, the king, was still the most important figure in politics.

The period of high industrialization brought Prussia a comprehensive modernization push, at the peak of which around 1910 the federal state of Prussia and the German Empire belonged to the group of politically, economically and technologically leading states on earth. Cities grew by leaps and bounds, and Berlin developed into one of the world”s largest metropolises. The Ruhr region and the Rhineland also experienced unprecedented growth. Within just a few years, these insignificant provincial towns were transformed into vibrant metropolises. In particular, the rural exodus, but also the inhabitants from the eastern areas of Prussia, contributed to this population growth on the Rhine and Ruhr. Demographics bore traits of a population explosion. Large families were the norm. Associated with this, epidemic outbreaks such as cholera but also pauperism were widespread. The founders” boom brought a surge in economic development.

Innovation, progress and excellence in Prussia were concentrated in the decades around 1900. The economy became more scientific, especially in the electrical and chemical industries, in mechanical engineering and shipbuilding, and in large-scale agriculture. This development began earlier and more strongly in Prussia than in the other German states. In connection with economic interests, numerous regional or local science-promoting societies, academies, foundations and associations were founded. As a result, Berlin, the Ruhr region, Upper Silesia and the Rhineland became globally significant innovation clusters. The Kaiser Wilhelm Society for the Advancement of Science emerged as the central network sponsoring society.

The prevailing imperialism led to an exaggeration of self-perception that developed megalomaniac traits and gripped all strata of the population. In the run-up to World War I, warmongering, Germanophilia and masculine aggressive behavior (“We Germans fear God, but nothing else in the world”) took on the character of a widespread, culturally accepted mass phenomenon. The Prussian patriarchal model of society and the imperious behavior of the state elites were now also imitated by the hierarchically lower men in their immediate environment at work, in their families, on the streets, and in clubs. The Prussian culture of masculinity (e.g., fraternity members, conscripts) of this period led the vast majority of men to wrest an unnatural toughness, but also heteronormative ideas of compulsion, from themselves in order to outwardly conform to the socially demanded type of a “(real) German man.” This in turn shaped a structural social potential for violence and fostered the militaristic attitude of most men of the time. The mischaracterization in the culture of upbringing and socialization was exemplified by Wilhelm II, who wanted to prevent his physical disability at all costs. Through suppression of the individual personality and the resulting emotional divisions, a type of man with an authoritarian personality spread in Prussia, who then passed on these self-limiting social forms to the next generation and thus, as a “psychological basis,” helped to cause the misconduct of German history between 1933 and 1945.

At the same time, however, the standard of living of society as a whole rose significantly between 1850 and 1914. A broader bourgeois middle class was formed and the top achievers of the bourgeois class made it into high society. Thus, there were sufficient incentives and offers of integration by the (state) elites for the representatives of the bourgeois class, so that they resigned themselves to the prevailing political conditions and came to terms with them. The character of the state elites changed from feudal-aristocratic to plutocratic. This was accompanied by a change in the way the new elites portrayed themselves. The de facto restructuring of the elite in Prussia since 1850 brought about an increase in the control competencies of the elite class, which now included both state officials and the propertied forces from the business world. To an increasing extent, softer methods of rule (soft power) were used, which also changed the character of the hitherto rather authoritarian, paternal state. The state thus gained a caring, quasi-maternal component that complemented the authoritarian pattern of the state superstructure without displacing it. At this time, the state treated its citizens more like a parent-child relationship. The state did not yet regard its citizens as mature and independent individuals.

Consequently, after 1848, social innovations no longer took place in the area of political participation and democratic co-determination, but predominantly in the social (welfare) sphere. The state”s response to the social question raised by the struggles of the working class led to new state welfare obligations, which were expressed in incipient social legislation. It was an attempt, after the bourgeois class had been given greater consideration in the state institutions after 1848 and had thus become “agents of the monarchical system”, to bind the workers to the ruling system as well and to neutralize their radicalism and revolutionary ideas. Social insurance and a broader network of social institutions were created. These were intended to combat the abuses such as child labor, wage dumping, and slum-like housing conditions that had gripped some 30 to 35 percent of the population in the course of high industrialization.

The merit of the working class was to have shifted the center of gravity of social development. Previously, under the bourgeois reformers, this revolved around an elite-like debate about a hypothetical co-determination on a theoretical and abstract level, from which the mass of the people hardly benefited noticeably. Now the social discourse was about very concrete and practical issues that revolved around the satisfaction of basic individual needs (enough to eat, labor rights, limited working hours, protection in case of emergencies, education, medical care, security, hygiene, housing).

The initial social situation, on the basis of which social development took place, was still low around 1850. Thus, the mass of people in the 18th century were exposed to even greater constraints in social life and were provided with even less legal protection (people on the level of objects without basic rights). In this respect, all problems but also improvements already bore signs of a more advanced civilization with higher cultural standards than before.

Around 1900 there was at the same time a heterogeneous club-related social life in sports, culture, leisure. Tourism became increasingly important. Pluralism of opinion became more and more prominent.

As a result, the overall development of society is positive, even if the problems and areas of conflict in society remained large due to the low initial level of development during the imperial period. Precise measurement data for determining the ratio are lacking (except for political election results), but it is plausible to assume a roughly balanced relationship between liberal-progressive-democratic and social-progressive, in part politically radicalized forces on the one hand and the backward-looking, aggressively behaving national-reactionary forces on the other in the society of Prussia before World War I. The two sides were more or less in balance. Both sides were more or less in balance.

As a result of the German militaristic threat culture, which manifested itself in an exuberant rearmament, the Empire increasingly isolated itself internationally. The spark for the outbreak of the Great War in 1914 ended the previous era, in which the kingdom perished along with it.

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End of the monarchy in Prussia

The Kingdom of Prussia was an economic, military, cultural and scientific heavyweight in the world. On the one hand, Prussia was a global leader in various fields, but on the other hand, despite the progress made in the 19th century, its political system remained structurally too backward and not adaptable enough compared to the social and economic development, which did not stand still but steadily gained momentum.

New social forms with mass attachments (trade unions, parties) had formed since high industrialization and demanded participation on a broad scale. In the last decades of the monarchy, Prussia”s old elites, which consisted of a combination of the military dominated by the nobility and the civil service as agents of internal state-building, were no longer able to control the mobilized society in an integrative way and to hold it together. State and society fell into unresolved antagonisms until 1918; the Prussian guiding maxims that manifested themselves in an immaterial social contract among the bourgeois, monarchical, and aristocratic elites of the time and that fostered Prussia”s rise in the 17th and 18th centuries no longer worked under the fundamentally changed conditions of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The state forces, incapable of integrating external parts of society into the political-administrative system, deepened the political-structural backwardness to the extent that, due to a socio-political reform backlog, significant socio-political forces in Prussia, as in other equally politically backward states of Central, Eastern and Southern Europe, accumulated outside state power and then exploded in the crisis situation of World War I (“militarism is finished”).

On November 9, 1918, as a result of the November Revolution, the Republic was proclaimed in Berlin. Wilhelm II abdicated as King of Prussia and as German Emperor. The Prussian state became a country of the German Empire with a republican constitution as the Free State of Prussia. The Prussian royal crown is now kept at Hohenzollern Castle near Hechingen.

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National income

According to contemporary estimates, Prussia”s national income in 1804 was 248 million RT. Of this, 41 million RT was generated in the manufactory-based industrial sector (excluding the crafts) and a further 43 million RT in the guild-based brewing and distilling of spirits.

Between 1871 and 1914, Prussia”s national income grew four times faster than the population of the period, significantly increasing the average net national income per capita. In 1913, only Hamburg and Saxony had higher per capita incomes than Prussia.

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Economic sectors

Prussia”s economic structure around 1800 exhibited typical characteristics of an agrarian state. The cultivation of cereals, especially wheat, rye, barley and oats, dominated. Legumes, flax, madder and tobacco were also cultivated around 1800. Intensive lumbering was also practiced. In addition, the rural population engaged in extensive livestock farming. 10.2 million sheep of the sheep farm generated 1,000 tons of wool per year, which was processed for textile production. The total population of 5.06 million cattle, 2.48 million pigs and small livestock was used for meat production. 1.6 million horses were kept for the economy and the army. There were a total of three royal studs in Trakehnen, Neustadt an der Dosse and Triesdorf.

The Emder Heringsfischerei-Gesellschaft (Emden Herring Fishing Company), founded in 1769, engaged in logger fishing and deployed over 50 galleys along with two hunting vessels around 1800.

The grain surpluses were mostly exported to Western Europe. Together, Prussia produced a total of around 4.8 million tons of grain around 1800. Germany, which is around nine times more populous, produced 45.3 million tons of grain in 2016 on a similarly large national area.

The circumstances of the implementation of potato cultivation in Prussia were stylized into a historical legend and persist in the collective memory of today”s inhabitants.

Prussia”s natural resources included salt, which was mined in 14 salt mines in 1800. Alum was also mined. Around 1800, hard coal was mainly produced in Westphalia (50 percent of total production) in 135 mines and in Silesia (33 percent of total production).

Ummendorfer sandstone, Bebertaler sandstone, Rüdersdorfer limestone, Prieborner marble, Groß-Kunzendorfer marble and others were mined as building materials.

In the first decades of the kingdom, Prussian trade was at a low level of development. Only the few capitals of the kingdom, mainly Berlin, Königsberg and Magdeburg, had significant supraregional wholesale trade. Land transit between the west and the east was more important than exchange via seaports. A separate maritime shipping of superior importance did not yet exist. State trade policy began a protective tariff and privilege policy (monopoly rights) to promote domestic trade.

The monetary economy developed only slowly. In the 18th century, large parts of the rural kingdom were not yet connected to the few metropolitan centers of monetary economy, but continued to operate their own extensive natural farming, pasture and forestry systems.

As early as the 1670s and 1680s, Brandenburg-Prussia had attempted to participate in the triangular trade in slaves in the Atlantic with the Brandenburg-African Company, but was unable to cope with European competitive pressure in the long run. Frederick II tried to conclude trade agreements with Spain and France in the 1740s to promote Silesian linen exports, but was unsuccessful. In this situation, he had the Asiatic Company founded in Emden, which began trading with China. Four ships sent to Canton returned with cargoes of silk, tea and porcelain. However, the naval war that broke out in 1755 put an end to the activities of the over-trading company after a few years for lack of protection by its own naval fleet, which the land power Prussia could not afford.

The court bankers the banking and trading house Splitgerber & Daum and the (Berlin) Jews dominated the financial business of Prussia in the 18th century. Around 1750, the Jewish community in Berlin consisted of 2200 people in 320 family households. 78 percent of the mostly wealthy Jewish heads of households in Berlin were active in the commercial business. 119 heads worked in wholesale trade as money lenders, money dealers, money changers, coin suppliers, bankers, 42 worked as pawnbrokers and 28 as commission merchants, fair and wine merchants. Significant financier was Veitel Heine Ephraim and Daniel Itzig. State activities in public finance did not take place at all at first.

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Economic History

During the reign of the Soldier King, the focus of economic policy was on “making a profit,” i.e., striving for lasting economic gain. During his reign, Prussia achieved economic stability and prosperity. It was the foundation of an orderly state budget that enabled Prussia to rise to become one of Germany”s economic powers in the 18th century and made the military expansion of his son, Frederick II, conceivable in the decades that followed.

One driver of the positive development of the centralized economy was the Prussian army, which had to be supplied. In 1713, Frederick William I founded a cloth manufactory in Berlin, the Königliches Lagerhaus, which employed 4,730 people in 1738. In 1717, the settlement of weavers in Luckenwalde laid the foundation for the textile industry there. With an export ban on local wool in 1718, the king ensured further processing in his lands.

A gun manufactory was established in Spandau and Potsdam from 1722. The skilled workers needed were mainly recruited in Liège, a center of gun manufacturing. The rifle factory was operated by the Splitgerber & Daum trading house, which was endowed with royal privileges and leased other metalworking factories, making it the largest arms manufacturer in Prussia. For civilian needs, the trading house produced copper sheets (roofing), copper kettles (breweries, boiling houses), brass parts (containers, fittings, hinges) and iron and steel products (drills, scissors, knives).

From 1716, the royal dike commission for the Oder began its work. The drainage of Havelländisches and Rhinluch (northwest of Nauen) brought good gains in relatively productive soil. Religious refugees from Franconia and Swabia were assigned settlement sites in deserted areas in the Uckermark to make them arable.

In 1733, in order to control the trade activity, the king issued a trade order, which subjected all guilds to state supervision, curtailed their rights, prohibited the connection with neighboring states and controlled the wandering of the journeymen.

The economic upswing was sustained, for promotion was no longer limited primarily to the court-centered branches of the economy-as it had been under Frederick I-but extended far beyond the radius of the residences, and was concentrated in the military sector, which was present almost everywhere in the Old Prussian state.

The Prussian economy, largely disrupted as a result of the costly wars (1740-1742, 1744-1745, 1756-1763) in the second half of the 18th century under Frederick II, gained an economically important region (textile industry, mineral resources) with the conquest of Silesia. Progress was also made by draining and reclamation of the Oderbruch, Netzebruch and Warthebruch and the settlement of large numbers of farmers and craftsmen. The king promoted the development of waterways, such as the connection of Berlin with Szczecin through the Finow Canal, the Bromberg Canal, the regulation of the nets and, in the west, the Ruhr Canalization. However, the road network remained in poor condition; due to excessive costs, the construction of permanent roads could not begin until after the death of Frederick the Great.

By systematically creating grain stores, it was possible to control grain prices even in times of need. Frederick II also particularly promoted the silk industry. To this end, numerous manufacturers, skilled workers and specialists were brought to Prussia and domestic workers and assistants were trained. This was achieved with the help of gifts, advances, privileges, chair premiums, export bonuses, apprentice allowances, tax exemption for raw materials and a ban on imports of foreign products. This made it possible both to meet the country”s demand for silk and to generate a surplus for export. The cotton industry, which had still been banned under King Frederick William (1713-1740) so as not to endanger the country”s own wool weaving, was also promoted. In 1742, the first cotton factory was established, and by 1763 there were already ten cotton factories in Berlin. Compared to the silk industry, this branch of industry managed almost without state support. In 1763, the Berlin porcelain manufactory KPM was purchased by the Prussian state.

The king also had several factories built at his own expense for which private entrepreneurs did not want to take the risk:

The manufactured goods and handicrafts produced in the country were able to satisfy almost all domestic demand and also generate a larger export, which more than compensated for the necessary import of raw materials from a fiscal point of view. The balance of trade – still in deficit by half a million talers in 1740 and in surplus by three million talers in 1786 – turned positive for the first time under Frederick the Great.

In the period after the death of Frederick II, from 1786 to 1806, there were disputes in Prussia between the supporters of the ruling mercantile system and the advocates of the newly emerging liberal currents. Under Frederick William II, they were content to dismantle some of the protectionist barriers and prohibitions:

Under this mitigated protectionism, the Prussian economy experienced a significant upswing, in the wake of a good external economy. Prussia had achieved significant economic progress in the century and a half between the end of the Thirty Years” War in 1648 and the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars in 1806. The most modern state of the 17th and 18th centuries was also one of the most economically developed states in Europe around 1800. Nevertheless, around 1800 the majority of the economically active people in Prussia still worked in agriculture.

The catastrophe of the Napoleonic occupation in 1807 also brought Prussia to the brink of economic collapse. In this respect, the reform laws of the post-1806 period, in terms of their economic spheres and consequences, were necessary to keep the state alive economically and financially and to make a later war of liberation possible. The Prussian economic reform after 1806 was one of the more successful innovative measures of the Prussian reforms at the beginning of the 19th century.

The nominal liberation of the peasants was the prerequisite for the economic upswing of the next decades in Prussia. The same applied to the granting of complete freedom of trade, since this had made possible the mobility of large masses of people, the movement of Prussia”s rural inhabitants to the country”s growing industrial cities, in the first place. The Prussian state administration, for its part, took a number of important measures to help the country”s economy, which was in a state of depression at the time, get back on its feet. Prussia established its own unified customs territory without internal tariffs with the Trade and Customs Act of May 26, 1818.

After all domestic trade barriers had fallen in Prussia, the German Customs Union was founded on Prussia”s initiative in 1834. Prussia had a vested interest in abolishing customs borders in the German Confederation, partly because of its fragmented national territory. This measure boosted trade within Germany and contributed significantly to economic growth in the following decades.

In the course of industrialization, a number of land routes, waterways and canals were built that connected the West with the East across Germany. In the uplands of West and East Prussia, the Oberland Canal was built, connecting the Baltic Sea and Elbing in the north with Masuria in the south. With the establishment of the Royal Prussian Elbe River Construction Administration in 1865, the Elbe was divided into six districts, which were responsible for overseeing bridge and canal construction, ferries, mills, harbor facilities and dikes. Formerly insignificant regions (Ruhr, Saar and Upper Silesian industrial areas) developed into prosperous centers of coal and steel industry and mechanical engineering in the period after 1815, due to the exploitation of coal deposits and the later construction of railroads. This increased Prussia”s economic weight vis-à-vis Austria in the German Confederation.

Prussia lagged behind internationally in railroad construction for a long time. This also had consequences for its economy. As a result, American grain, English and Belgian coal and pig iron and other items were cheaper than domestic products. This was due to the fact that efficient railroad networks already existed in England, Belgium and the United States for the transportation of bulk goods. The first major private railroads were therefore established in 1837 with the Rheinische Eisenbahn-Gesellschaft (Cologne – Aachen – Belgian border) and in 1843 with the Köln-Mindener Eisenbahn-Gesellschaft from the Rhineland to the navigable ports in Minden (with access to the Bremen ports). The state of Prussia itself became active in railroad construction in 1850 with the Königlich-Westfälische Eisenbahn-Gesellschaft and the Preußische Ostbahn, and in 1875 with the Berliner Nordbahn. Subsequently, private railroads were increasingly subjected to state direction through financial support, through buyouts or through expropriation (after the Prussian-Austrian War of 1866).

Although Prussia rose to become a great power in economic terms in the first half of the 19th century, the Hohenzollern state was agricultural until well into the 19th century.

From 1880 to 1888, most of the private railroads were nationalized. By the end of World War I, the Prussian state railroads formed a 37,500 km rail network. The regular additional revenues of the Prussian State Railways also served to balance the state budget.

The totality of all individuals and groups on the territory of the Prussian state did not form a society in the sense of a nation. There were very different regional, cultural and social worlds. After 1815, the formation of a nation took place only rudimentarily in the old Prussian provinces, to the exclusion of the New Prussian territories on the Rhine and in Westphalia.

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Representative (feudal) and civic publics

In the first decades of the 18th century, Prussia, like other European states, was still almost exclusively a “representative public sphere. Its system-immanent characteristics did not sufficiently separate the private and the public, but only the common and the privileged. The bearer of the representative public sphere was the court ceremonial, i.e. the Prussian court, court life in general. This meant the exclusion of the people from the public sphere. Everything noncourtly was thus a backdrop and in a passive, spectator role, while the courtly occupied the stage to which the subjects had to orient themselves.In the further course of the 18th century, the feudal powers, church, principality and gentry, to which the representative public clung, broke down into a public and a private sphere. Since the end of the 17th century, news traffic in Central Europe became generally accessible and thus acquired a public character. The print media were given the role of door openers for the constrained bourgeois class on its way to maturity. Among the important periodicals of the Enlightenment was the Berlinische Monatsschrift. Its journalistic style contained a discursive, dialogue-like character in the majority of its contributions. Other notable newspapers were the Schlesische Zeitung, Schlesische Provinzialblätter, Spenersche Zeitung, the Vossische Zeitung (since 1785: Königlich Privilegirte Berlinische Zeitung von Staats- und gelehrten Sachen).

From the newly won private sphere that had emerged alongside the state-representative public sphere, the preliminary form of the bourgeois public sphere developed. This was initially the literary public sphere. The foundations for this were laid by the intellectual current of the Enlightenment, which was active in Europe and the Americas in the 18th century. This promoted the emergence of a mature class of inhabitants who no longer saw themselves merely as obedient subjects with thing-like, automaton-like basic traits, but as self-confident individuals with innate natural rights. Since the readership was a genuine group from the social elite that self-educated itself, a new social categorization thus emerged, later commonly characterized as the educated middle class.

The increasing independence of these “citizens of the state” promoted the formation of autonomous social networks that were no longer influenced by monarchical-state regulations. The networks of clubs and societies functioned like popular assemblies with free speech rights. They were intended to provide the private public with an opportunity to reflect on themselves and the most important issues of the day. This encouraged the emergence of reading societies. Some covens and circles met informally. Bookstores were also important meeting places for the newly educated public. In addition to reading societies, lodges, and patriotic-philosophical societies, there were still numerous literary and philosophical associations and groups of scholars specializing in natural science, medicine, or languages. In mid-18th-century Prussia, the practitioners of this emerging civil society included writers, poets, publishers, club, society, and lodge members, readers, and subscribers. These intellectual groups were concerned with the great issues of the day, literary as well as scientific and political. Important personalities of the time in Prussia were, for example, Karl Wilhelm Ramler or the publisher Friedrich Nicolai.

As a result, what was once a very quiet and lethargic Prussian society in the 17th century became a loud, lively and diverse public sphere with open discourse. The literary public sphere later transformed further into a political public sphere, which established itself as a critique of autocratic state power as a whole. This was promoted by the temporary abolition of censorship at the beginning of Frederick II”s reign in 1740. Criticism of the political system and the monarch had become possible with the Berlin Enlightenment, uniquely for Europe. In principle, the feudal and bourgeois public spheres existed in parallel until the end of the monarchy in 1918, although a steady loss of substance and importance of the monarchical, aristocratic public culture was discernible.

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Prussian agricultural constitution

In the 17th century, manorial rule had become established in the East Elbe regions of Brandenburg-Prussia. The disenfranchised peasants were bound to the lord of the manor as unfree peasants and rendered servitude to him. Essential powers were in the hands of the noble landowners, the Junkers. A few wealthy nobles with large landholdings controlled almost all provincial politics. The Prussian state, from the district level down, had only limited powers to shape policy. The social mobility that began with the liberation of the peasants in the early 19th century led to a rural exodus of large parts of the population to the cities. The resulting availability of cheap labor was a prerequisite for the onset of the Industrial Revolution.

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From a society of estates to a class society

At the end of the 17th century, the urban bourgeoisie traditionally consisted of the guild-based craftsmen who shared power in the city councils with a few influential patricians. With the Enlightenment and the onset of mercantilism around 1700, the craftsmen increasingly lost their influence to a small, wealthy stratum of big burghers consisting of manufactory owners, big merchants and money exchange bankers, the new urban upper class. Important representatives in the 18th century were Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky, Wilhelm Kaspar Wegely, Johann Jacob Schickler, Friedrich Heinrich Berendes. The Prussian civil service also gained in importance; the military consisting of serving soldiers with their families and invalids formed a legally separate intermediate class in the 18th century.

The landlordism that existed in the East Elbe regions is often described in history as “economic backwardness,” “Junkerwillkür” (Junker despotism) and “Untertanengeist. Beatings were a common means of discipline used by the lords of the manor. The simple rural population was loyal to the king and believed in the legend of the “just king. The state, however, forbade cruder mistreatment, but also supported the landowners, since indentured servitude and compulsory shearing characterized rural society. The state used military force against peasant revolts, which occurred several times in Silesia from 1765 to 1793, 1811 and 1848. Only peasant liberation, replacement, rural exodus and the enforcement of wage labor led to a slow change in these conditions.

Remaining class influences and state intervention shaped urban society in the 19th century. Due to social inequality combined with large income disparities, a broad economic underclass emerged in the cities. This consisted of manufactory workers, who only gained self-confidence in the course of the 19th century. Prussian civil society in the 18th and 19th centuries consisted largely of day laborers and beggars who often lived as sleepers on the verge of homelessness. This class society changed only slowly as a result of increasing education, occupational differentiation, growth in prosperity and intervention by the state.

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Feudal-capitalist master caste

Prussia”s system of rule was based on kingship. The king secured his power over the landed gentry and in the cities through his garrisons and the state bureaucracy. The influence of the urban bourgeoisie was limited to local self-government. In the course of the Enlightenment, a class of educated citizens emerged who developed new ideas and concepts of participation and demanded a say. As a result, the feudal class was put on the defensive for the first time between 1789 and 1815. Feudal rule consolidated during the Restoration period, only to be challenged again by the further strengthened bourgeois class in the Vormärz.

After the failed revolution of 1848, the political bourgeoisie had once again withdrawn and reduced itself to its core economic competencies. It once again left political power to the “old elites. But new interest groups emerged that, although they had no political power, possessed significant means of power through capital, production and labor that granted them great influence over state policy. These new elites gathered in free business associations beyond the already existing public chambers of industry and commerce. The established aristocratic class, which continued to set the tone and came predominantly from the central and eastern rural provinces, claimed to embody the common good in a mixture of paternalism and welfare.

However, as a result of industrialization, the nobility lost its economic leadership role based on land ownership and agriculture to the bourgeoisie, but retained its high social rank. The economic bourgeoisie initially lacked an independent class consciousness. Instead of political participation, they strove for inclusion in the aristocratic class (marriage, nobilization). The “nouveau riche” copied the lifestyle of the nobility and bought and moved into their manors, creating a new, feudal-capitalist ruling class in Prussia.

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Socio-political movements

The differentiation of the emerging non-state civil society gained momentum in the 19th century. Both the bourgeois class and the working class formed further lower classes of their own, which also heterogenized and developed in different social directions.

The upheavals of the French Revolution led to unification efforts in Germany, which were supported primarily by the enlightened, urban bourgeois class. After Jena, the Tugendbund was founded in Königsberg in 1808, which the king regarded as the first revolutionary cell of a movement that in reality did not exist as a closed formation. The intellectual leaders were Ernst Moritz Arndt, Friedrich Schleiermacher and Johann Gottlieb Fichte.

Supporters of German unification efforts were disproportionately often among the war volunteers in Prussia during the wars of liberation. Citizen militias and volunteer associations were results of the wave of patriotism. A total of 30,000 men of the Prussian armed forces, about 12.5 percent of the total strength, were made up of these Freikorps, of which the Lützow”s Jäger were the most famous. These were independent groups, moreover armed outside the monarchical structures. The emotional patriotism of the volunteers, who were also endowed with potentially subversive visions, was imbued with the notion of an ideal political order for Germany and Prussia. They took their oath not to the king, but only to the German fatherland. They understood the war against France as an uprising of the people. The common intersection of political content with the monarchical system was thus conceivably small.

The German national movement was closely linked to liberalism during this phase. Its left wing in particular aimed at a national democracy: Small-scale statehood, perceived as anachronistic and reactionary, was to be replaced by a liberal nation-state of equal citizens.

Out of the youthful political discontent after the end of the wars of liberation, which marked the end of national hopes, the Turner movement, which was especially important for Prussia, and the Burschenschaft communities emerged as quasi-political centers. The movement quickly spread to other universities. After the Wartburg Festival, both movements were banned for fear of a resurgence of Jacobinism. As a result, the national and liberal movement was hit hard organizationally and set back in its development for 20 years. The German national movement led by Barthold Georg Niebuhr, Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, Karl Theodor Welcker and Joseph Görres had around 40,000 followers by then.

Many members of the bourgeoisie responded to the conservative turn that had occurred in Prussia by retreating into the domestic. An apolitical style of living oriented toward comfort and tranquility with a pronounced social life with strong borrowings from Romanticism prevailed among the better-off bourgeois circles. The term Biedermeier illustrates the retreat into the private domestic forced by reactionary politics. Despite the restoration of the monarchical order, liberal and national ideas continued to be promoted, especially among the middle classes and at the universities.

In the long run, state actors learned to harness the mobilization potential of the idea of national unification for themselves. A synthesis emerged in which popular and dynastic elements were seen as complementary. despite all contradictions and oppositions, the Prussian war against Napoleon was ultimately rededicated as a war of national liberation, and the National Liberal movement was thus hemmed in by the state.

The workers” movement was the largest democratic emancipation movement in Prussia. It formed a part of the European social emancipation process between 1789 and 1918. The need arose once from the social consequences (social question) of industrialization, population explosion and rural exodus, which had created a broad layer of impoverished and propertyless day laborers and wage laborers without rights (pauperism).

Moreover, the bourgeoisie in Prussia had recognizable difficulties in asserting its interests against the traditional ruling classes.Politically, after the failure of the Revolution of 1848, the bourgeois class was

The prologue events to the founding of the workers” movement, formed in workers” associations, the Social Democratic Party and trade unions, were the revolution of 1848. Its formative phase took place in the 1860s and 1870s. First, however, the Central Committee of Workers was formed in Berlin in April 1848 under the leadership of Stephan Born, who convened a General German Workers” Congress in Berlin for August 23. There the General German Workers” Brotherhood was founded. Influenced by the New Era in Prussia, a new national movement arose and with it, partly also influenced recursively, new workers” associations emerged. These strived for autonomy from bourgeois-liberal paternalism and demanded independent workers” associations from 1862. This resulted in the formation of the ADAV, whose sphere of action encompassed the core areas of Prussia. Overall, the workers” movement was organized on an all-German basis, as demonstrated by the founding of the SPD, initially as the SDAP in Eisenach in 1869. From then on, its organizational and network center was Leipzig.

Social democracy was critical of Bismarck”s policies and became an opposition party that rejected the system. The latter reacted with the Socialist Act and began a wave of persecution.

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Education

In the course of the early Enlightenment and the work of Halle”s Pietism in the Prussian state, a royal edict in 1717 introduced compulsory school attendance in the Prussian states. The state administration, which was only slightly developed at the time, did not have the means to control school attendance. It also lacked the necessary finances to establish a comprehensive and professional school system. The emerging village schools of the level of simple cliff schools continued to be run by sextons. Frederick William I”s edict had little effect in practice, but it formed the basis for the General School Regulations issued by Frederick II in 1763. Legally, this once again confirmed and deepened compulsory schooling. It provided for compulsory schooling of eight years instead of six. Classes were to be held regularly for three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon, according to a fixed curriculum and with properly trained teachers. At the beginning of the 19th century, only about 60 percent of children attended classes regularly. This only changed when child labor was banned by law.

In 1804 there were eight universities on the territory of the Prussian state.

In addition, there were the Prussian Academy of Arts and the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin, which were founded as academic learned societies in Berlin around 1700 and built up a great reputation in the international artistic and scientific community.

In the course of the Prussian reforms, the education system was also reformed, and Wilhelm von Humboldt was commissioned to do so. He presented a liberal reform program that completely turned education in Prussia upside down. The kingdom received a unified, standardized public education system that incorporated current pedagogical developments (Pestalozzi”s pedagogy). In addition to teaching professional and technical skills, the main aim was to promote the intellectual independence of students. A central department was created at the ministerial level, which was given responsibility for creating curricula, textbooks and learning aids. Teacher colleges were established to train suitable personnel for the chaotic elementary schools. A standardized system of state examinations and inspections was established.

In 1810, today”s Humboldt University in Berlin was founded as Friedrich Wilhelm University. Soon thereafter, it attained a predominant position among the Protestant German states.

The expansion and professionalization of teacher training made rapid progress after 1815. By the 1840s, more than 80 percent of children between the ages of six and fourteen attended elementary school. Only Saxony and New England achieved a similarly high rate at the time. The illiteracy rate was correspondingly low.

Prussia”s education system and promotion of science had been regarded as exemplary since the early 19th century, even internationally. The effectiveness, broad access and liberal tone of the institutions were admired. Children were already taught at this time to use their intellectual abilities themselves, by teachers who no longer used the classic authoritarian means (beatings). Punishment for misbehavior or means of generating fear were no longer part of the educational repertoire of the teaching staff at that time. In the contemporary judgment of international witnesses from progressive societies, astonishment outweighed the simultaneous existence of such a progressive pedagogical system within a despotic state.

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Culture

Prussian culture includes the core areas of state culture (buildings, monuments, celebrations), cultural statehood (state support and supervision in schools, universities, museums, theaters, etc.) and civil society outside the state (free art scene, big city life, labor movement) but also, in a broader sense, the areas of education, science and the Christian churches.

Culture in the Kingdom of Prussia encompassed the intellectual and social forms of life, both material and immaterial. The cultural sphere was subdivided in several ways. The core was formed by high culture, which included the fine arts (painting, sculpture, architecture). In addition, music, literature, theater and opera were also included. Educational and scientific disciplines, religion and state culture (commemorative days, monuments, rituals) completed the expanded concept of culture.

The culture of Prussia was divided over the centuries into the European-dominated art epochs (Baroque, Classicism, Sturm und Drang, Romanticism, Biedermeier, Impressionism, Historicism, Gründerzeit, Art Nouveau, Expressionism) but also according to regional aspects. Culture and art should create expression and world interpretation and represent the state, church or social groups.

In the 17th century, the Prussian territory was considered culturally backward compared to the other imperial territories. Until the bourgeois class was formed, cultural promotion emanated primarily from the small stratum of the high nobility. Under Frederick William of Brandenburg, significant cultural progress was made, which was continued by his successor Frederick III.

After the first cultural flowering at the beginning of the Prussian kingdom under Frederick I, an abrupt impact on all cultural life occurred in 1713 under his successor Frederick William I, which lasted until 1740. Military matters penetrated into the entire cultural life. Portrait painting in Prussia declined sharply. The mediocrity of the works of art by the court painter Dismar Degen were style-defining for the entire art sector of Prussia at that time. With the accession of Frederick II to power, a higher culture unfolded again in the Prussian state. Frederick II pushed the state”s mission to elevate the national culture and at the same time served his own monarchical need for representation. In the 1740s, Prussia”s first opera house, the Royal Court Opera in Berlin, was built, later supplemented by a royal library as part of the Forum Fridericianum in Berlin. Plans for the square were discussed in the forming Prussian public through publications in Berlin newspapers and in salon conversations. Prussia”s most central square became a residence square without a residence, distinguishing it from other European palace squares. With this prominent urban planning layout, the creators made clear that the representation of the state was decoupled from that of the Prussian dynasty.

During the reign of Frederick II, a regional expression of the Rococo style emerged, known as the Frederician Rococo. Compared to the style of the time, the decorations are mostly more restrained, delicate and elegant and can be traced back to the work of the stucco-worker and sculptor Johann August Nahl and the master builder Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff.

From then on, the state of Prussia maintained a court orchestra at the financial level of a medium-sized power. The expansion of residences in the Berlin area was intensified. In Berlin, dozens of new city palaces geared to representation and splendor were built. New theater buildings, such as the French Comedy House for a short time or the Royal Playhouse in Potsdam, were built.

Beginning with the decades of peace that followed after 1763, Prussia began to blossom culturally. It continued with the support of the following kings and tended to intensify after 1800. Along with Weimar and its successor, Berlin became the most important intellectual and cultural center in Germany.

Andreas Schlüter opened, the court architects Johann Friedrich Grael and Philipp Gerlach shaped, Carl Gotthard Langhans and Friedrich Gilly completed the Prussian style. The influences of the Prussian state through government policy on society helped shape the expression and formation of cultural forms. Accordingly, militarism, Prussian officialdom with its postulated virtues, and Kant”s philosophy also affected the shaping of the Prussian style. This also expressed the masculine character of the Prussian state, understood as the fatherland.

The term Prussian Classicism applies to the totality of cultural phenomena in Prussia for the period of Classicism. The emergence of Prussian Classicism was closely linked to the political expansion of Prussia as a power state. This generated the means but also the increasing need and claim for an appropriate cultural expression of the gained possibilities and the increased status. According to the influential programmatic writing of the art historian Arthur Moeller “The Prussian Style (1916)”, for him the Prussian Classicism was subsumed claim (of the ruling elites) to develop artistic forms of expression from the idea of a “genteel Spartan way of life”. This gave rise, for example, to the country castles and manor houses of the Mark Brandenburg, which were regarded in the art world as both “tasteful” but also “barren” (or “noble-cold” forms).

In terms of architectural history, the aspirations of Prussian Classicism, which were to be understood both politically and culturally, culminated in the imitation of a new Doric order similar to the ancient model. The northern Greek Dorians, like the Prussian state, were considered equally inferior in cultural terms to the rest of the Greek world in their early civilizational phase and relied more on harsh, warlike means of politics that enabled them to conquer Ancient Greece. The assumed historical parallels between the Dorians and the Old Prussian state, which, in short, according to contemporary (Prussian) explanatory patterns, “formed a great power with little more than barren soil, willpower and organizational talent,” led to mirror-image recognition effects of contemporary actors in Prussia”s cultural spheres. The role model effect of Doric art thus symbolized led to intensive artistic references and imitations in artistic works in Prussia.

In sculpture, the Berlin Sculpture School movement emerged in 1785. The term Berlin Romanticism appears in literature for this phase. Important individual personalities in the cultural-social field in Prussia were, among others, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Albert Dietrich Schadow, Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Carl von Savigny, Heinrich von Kleist, Christian Friedrich Tieck, E.T.A. Hoffmann (Berlin Romanticism). The often used name of Spree-Athens for Berlin describes the prevailing cultural spirit in Prussia at that time.

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Characteristics and features

The development of the Prussian state was embedded in the development of European society. This means that every development that took place in Prussia always absorbed the currents from outside at the same time or at least with a delay and adapted them to the specifically Prussian needs. Consequently, Prussia did not develop autonomously on its own, but rather the state and society changed along isomorphic lines in accordance with the social precursors from the Netherlands, France and England.

The beginning of modern European state development in the early modern period was initially marked by the secularization of public power, with the Catholic Church being pushed out of all secular spheres of power during the Renaissance. After this process was completed, the thus strengthened secular territorial princes set about creating their own substructure, which overhauled the existing estates-based administrative structures. This process began in the 17th century, decisively defined programmatically in Leviathan, and was completed in Prussia around 1750. Until that time, the Prussian state was a weak state. The weakly developed statehood applied equally to all states worldwide at that time. Already at this time, Prussia developed a concise form of a constitutional state, which was considered exemplary at the time (cf. Müller-Arnold case). The state was supported primarily by its professionalized civil service. The Prussian state therefore bore the traits of a typified civil service state with a pronounced bureaucracy, which included regulated record keeping, writing, incorruptibility and other characteristics based on Max Weber”s model. Since the officials had to legitimize their actions insufficiently, the Prussian state was also considered an authoritarian state for a time.

After that, the work of new intellectual currents led to other bourgeois groups of influence pushing into the center of power and demanding a say. This resulted in the Prussian constitutional state after protracted internal political struggles between monarchical forces and reformers in the period from 1790 to 1850.

The character of the state changed during this period not only politically, but also institutionally through its constant growth in tasks, expenditures and personnel. Initially, however, the state was little more than a private instrument of the sovereign to secure his position of power both internally and externally. In Prussia, at times 90 percent of state funds were used only for the army. While more than 100,000 members were already serving as quasi-public servants in the army, the administration consisted of fewer than 1,000 people around 1750. This disproportion caused the Prussian state to be classified as a military state or even a military monarchy throughout time and also in hindsight.

Later, the functions of this regulatory state expanded as society developed. New standards and technologies gave rise to new fields of activity, which were developed by the state under the direction of the administration.

The state in the sense of today”s welfare state only began to develop in the last decades around 1900. Until then, ordoliberal ideas were predominant in the area of the state.

Starting from an accumulated monarchical conglomerate of territories (composite monarchy), the central state developed only gradually. The Prussian states of the 18th century had all formed their own inherited internal administrative structures, which had developed since the late Middle Ages and the formation of the Estates system. The local and regional (estates) actors of these structures, such as the district organizations, district committees or district assemblies within their own landscapes, continued to exist until the beginning of the Prussian reforms. The immediatary cities, the estates of the landed nobility with all the villages, outworks and people on them, and the offices of the king”s domain estates also together formed the local and supralocal administrative level under the emerging overall state and its own provincial institutions. The frequent small-scale nature of these organically interwoven structures and also their traditional and ongoing efforts at preservation by their members in exchange for the central state structures paralyzed the political process. Innovations and changes took place slowly and laboriously. Around 1800, this led to gradual fundamental change efforts that were pushed from the top of the state.

The Prussian provinces were transformed into a modern organization of provinces, administrative districts and counties in 1815-1818 as part of the administrative reforms following the freedom wars won against Napoleon and the territorial gains in the wake of the 1815 Congress of Vienna.

Like the states of today, Prussia was divided into a national level, a state level (provinces) and a municipal level with local and supra-local responsibilities.

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Form of government and head of state

The Prussian monarchy was an absolute monarchy from 1701 to 1848. The head of state was the Prussian king, who held his claim to the kingship as a hereditary right of the Hohenzollern dynasty by birth. The princely house formed the core of statehood before the modern institutional state displaced the monarchy from the center of the state throughout Europe in the Civil Age. The most striking deviation of the monarchy from a modern state was the role that the Prussian court held in the structure of government. The king”s cabinet, from which he ruled by means of ministerial lectures and written reports, held a special position due to its power, standing between the public and private spheres and thus still considered pre-modern from the perspective of constitutional law.

The actual process of ousting the monarchy from state institutions began in Prussia with the unsuccessful attempts to defend against the excesses of the French Revolution, which began with the Pillnitz Declaration and reached its first negative climax for the monarchy in the Battle of Jena and Auerstedt. The restoration of absolute royal power after 1815 was followed by the Vormärz and the 1848 Revolution, which now also put constitutional restraints on royal power.

From 1848 to 1918, the state was a constitutional monarchy. Formally, the king remained the highest-ranking institution in the state. With Bismarck”s government at the latest, state and political control lay with the ministerial government and no longer with the king. In the 19th century, the king”s importance decreased here to the same extent as the size and scope of tasks of the bureaucratic state increased. The office developed a more representative significance in its design, which was tantamount to a loss of importance.

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Symbols and guiding principles

The Prussian Song, Borussia and Heil dir im Siegerkranz were Prussia”s folk and national anthems, respectively. The Prussian flag featured a black eagle on a white background, which also appeared on the Prussian coat of arms. In a series of insignia, the Iron Cross became an identitarian symbol in relation to the Prussian kingdom.

The monarchy was symbolized by the Prussian Crown Jewels.

The Prussian motto Suum cuique was the house order motto of the Order of the Black Eagle, founded by Frederick I in 1701. The motto made clear the Prussian kings” desire to exercise justice and righteousness. On the soldiers” belt locks was the common battle cry Gott mit uns (God with us).

Since the Kingdom of Prussia was a monarch state and not a people”s state, the political ideas of the people, freedom or material prosperity played no role in the state”s self-image.

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Laws and regulations

In order to implement programs or actions, written government action finally resulted in the creation of a document that firmly defined the rules or instructions for action. Their publication and dissemination formed the basis for the successful implementation of the measures taken.

The Prussian laws and ordinances were published in the Preußische Gesetzessammlung (Prussian Collection of Laws) and thus made present. These were numbered consecutively from 1810 onward. While the so-called cabinet ordinances are to be understood as administrative orders with a statutory character, ordinances had a general character.

The written documents had an order character, which were subdivided into individual articles and sections and contained individual provisions with partial explanatory and descriptive character. The length of a law varied from a few pages to several dozen, depending on the subject. The written form of the document usually opened with a personal reference by the king (We, the King, by the Grace of God, King of Prussia, hereby proclaim and add to know the contents). The end of a legal document was the mention of the king”s name together with the place and date.

Document designations in the 19th century were subject to changes in nomenclature and depended on the circle of destination (inward or to the people) and were mainly structured according to:

In the 19th century, privileges or royal decrees were not referred to as laws; they were regulations of a case-by-case nature. In the 18th century, legal documents were referred to as rescripts, regulations, circulars, edicts, patents, and declarations.

The number of laws increased until 1870 as a result of a general increase in government tasks. More and more aspects of society and living conditions had to be standardized and regulated. Thereafter, the form structure of the regulations changed into a stricter division of documents with the character of laws and norm sheets below the level of laws, so that the number of laws decreased, but not the density of regulation as such.

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Struggle for the Constitution

The political disputes over the introduction of a constitution were linked to a political evolutionary process that gained momentum in the middle of the 18th century. The Frederidzian system of rule of enlightened absolutism established at that time carried the claim that the monarch was only “a first servant of the state,” whereby the state first separated itself from the institution of the state and then, in a second step, lowered itself in relation to one another, so that the monarch could no longer assert all-encompassing sovereignty over the state. Around 1740, this was still a significant social advance; until then, the monarchical saying, L”état, c”est moi was still considered permissible in continental Europe. The saying of Louis XIV meant the self-exaltation of the king over the state, united in itself. As a result of this political system claim, which existed in real terms in Europe between 1650 and 1750, the state was a legally dependent organization without legal personality that functioned as a private treasury as a quasi-oversized private property of the king. This first system transformation, which took place in Prussia in the 1740s, was to be recorded in a general body of laws and made binding.

In accordance with the distribution of forces in the Prussian political-administrative system, the reactionary forces outweighed the progressive factions for a long time. It is true that since the 1780s the body of laws had been drafted and it acquired a basic legal character. However, after the final General Land Law was passed, it was already outdated. It merely codified the already existing conditions, thus it was only a representation of the status quo of the ruling power relations without realizing a new system approach. Because of its outdated system construction, only secondary aspects of the law remained significant, ultimately insufficient for a true constitution. These included the fact that, as the supreme body of laws of the absolute monarchy, it gave the state a comprehensive legal system that applied equally to all provinces. In contrast, no thought was given to the participation of citizens in the political process. In historiography, the long-lasting body of laws was seen as an important prerequisite for subsequent reform efforts.

With the strengthening of the bourgeois forces in the last decades of the 18th century and the simultaneous global developments (declaration of the Virginia Declaration of Rights in 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789), the impact of the Enlightenment writings of Rousseau and Montesquieu, which demanded the formation of popular sovereignty on the basis of an established separation of powers, the political disputes in the Prussian state between the various currents gained in contour and intensity after 1800.

The monarchy came under considerable pressure in this process and, using tactical delays, maneuvering, stalling and loose promises, tried to evade the pressure of the primarily bourgeois and idealistic state reformers. In the end, the royalty succeeded in doing so. Several times, once after 1815 and again in 1848, the monarchs succeeded in restoring their political position in the political system and keeping themselves at the center of the state as the supreme political authority.

This was not (yet) changed by the Prussian constitution, which was finally introduced on February 6, 1850. At least with the catalog of fundamental rights in Articles 3 to 42, the concepts and goals of the liberal movement and the 1848 revolution found their way into the text. With the declared equality of all citizens before the law (§ 4), the legal institutions of the birthright social order were abolished. Thus the basic principle of modern bourgeois society had been declared. Personal freedom of religious confession, science and the press, inviolability of home and property, freedom of association and assembly were also established. Compulsory education and compulsory military service were further pillars of the state.

However, the monarch remained ruler in his own right, while the people and the people”s representatives derived their rights from the constitutional charter. As a result, the monarch was inviolable and bore no responsibility for government. The king alone had executive power. He commanded the army, declared war and peace, and concluded treaties under international law.

With the introduction of the constitution, Prussia”s political system aligned itself with international developments and standards, or rather followed them. This development meant the end of a “quasi-despotic” regime that had outlived its usefulness and, from a constitutional perspective, was succeeded by the constitutional state. Legitimation and succession to power were thus on a broader basis than before.

However, the level of development achieved was only the first half of the road to genuine democratically legitimized popular sovereignty, as it was to become reality for the first time with the Weimar Republic.

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State budget

At the beginning of the kingdom, state revenues consisted primarily of (private royal) dominal income. This included the revenues from the domain offices or estates, the regal revenues from the mint, post office, customs duties, salt monopoly, and the charge tax (a kind of income tax for state employees). Around 1700, these revenues amounted to about 1.9 to 2.0 million RT. Of this, 700,000 Rt belonged to the king”s private property (Schatullkasse, cf. Schatullrechnungen of Frederick the Great). From the rest, the court and wages were paid. The discrepancies in the use of state funds were particularly evident in the plague year of 1711, when only 100,000 RT were used for the stricken province of East Prussia with many thousands of victims.

Since the time of the Great Elector, an indirect consumption tax on consumer goods, the excise, was levied at the city entrances and exits. This was collected by the tax and war commissioners.

As a result of steady reform measures, revenues from domain estates increased from RT 1.8 million to RT 3.3 million between 1713 and 1740. Revenues from land taxes also increased during the period. This included the general hoof tax on landed property introduced between 1716 and 1720, which for the first time included the landowning nobility. The introduction of a tribute for the inherited feudal canon led to bitter disputes with the local nobility, but was enforced by the king. Peasants had to pay tribute (land tax) to the state, which amounted to 40 percent of the net income. After that, of the remaining 60 percent, the claims of the landowners still had to be served.

In 1740, state revenues consisted of the following sources: Domain goods 2.6 million RT, contributions 2.4 million RT, excise 1.4 million RT, postal regal 0.5 million RT, salt regal 0.2 million RT. Of these, six million RT were used for the maintenance of the army. 0.65 million RT were allocated to the state treasury. The accumulation of a state treasury in the form of coins and silverware stored in chests in the Berlin City Palace led to economically damaging deflationary tendencies, as these economically significant funds were withdrawn from monetary circulation and were not tied up in new activities. The economic cycle was damaged by government hoarding. The court received 740,000 RT for its expenditures. Of the court”s expenditures, wage costs, craftsmen”s and manufactory orders accounted for the majority.In the period from 1713 to 1740, the following capital expenditures were incurred:

In 1785, one year before the death of Frederick II, the revenues for the state budget amounted to 27 million RT. The Prussian court cost 1.2 million RT that year, the Prussian army had a budget of 12.5 million RT, the diplomatic corps had 80,000 RT, pensions accounted for a budget of 130,000 RT, and other expenses amounted to five million RT. In 1797, of the total budget of 20.5 million RT, 14.6 million RT was spent on the Prussian army, 4.3 million RT on court and civil administration, and 1.5 million RT on debt repayment and interest service.

In 1740, the year Frederick II took office, the state treasury had reached the level of seven million RT. In 1786, the state reserves amounted to 60 to 70 million RT. The Prussian state had become independent in terms of power politics thanks to its financial autarky. In a few years thereafter, under the aegis of Frederick William II, these reserves were completely depleted and state debt was incurred, and Prussia was once again on the road to a debt economy and subsidy dependence. Under the succeeding King Frederick William III, the debts were paid off again.

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State tasks

Until well into the second half of the 18th century, state power lay with the owning landed gentry, who had around 75 to 80 percent of the rural population on their estates. In addition to jurisdiction, this also included police duties.

Purely executive officers with security duties did not exist at the beginning of the 18th century. Police power rested with the magistrates and city servants commissioned by them; special police departments did not exist in the city administrations.

The first eight police officers with security duties were hired in 1735. Berlin received police districts in 1742, each headed by a commissioner. By the middle of the century, the non-military security institution in Berlin consisted of 18 commissioners, eight policemen and 40 night watchmen. The Berlin police system was also adopted by other cities. The military, however, held the dominant position everywhere. In Berlin, as late as 1848, there were only 204 policemen for every 400,000 inhabitants.

In the 18th century, major urban development projects began throughout Europe. Defense policy aspects were also a key driver of these central government expansion programs. Thus, military functional buildings and facilities initially dominated state activities alongside residential building programs.

In Prussia, however, some of these spatial planning developments were delayed in the 18th century. These included, first of all, the late surveying of the country and the creation of maps. The development of traffic routes and route guidance systems were also introduced later in Prussia than in other German states. Often, defense considerations hindered ambitious projects. After all, a well-developed system of routes and signposts or even publicly accessible, accurate maps could have given a military opponent an advantage. Reasons for this were city fires (two out of 100 cities burned down every year in Prussia), war destruction or natural forces. Urban and spatial planning served mainly to preserve and rebuild. Such activities were bundled in the Oberbau Department of the General Directorate.

The state invested increasingly in the construction of civil and military buildings since the 18th century. Barracks were built from the mid-18th century onward, including two artillery barracks and five infantry barracks with stables and magazines between 1763 and 1767, followed by others from then on. In Berlin, 149 town houses were built at state expense between 1769 and 1777. Between 1780 and 1785, a total of 1.2 million RT was spent from royal funds for the construction of barracks, churches, the royal library, 91 large residential buildings, the palace of Prince Heinrich and numerous manufactories. In and around Potsdam, the king invested a total of RT 3.5 million between 1740 and 1786 for the construction of 720 residential and colonist houses. In addition, there were expenditures of 216,000 RT for factories, 450,000 RT for military buildings and 1.1 million RT for the Great Military Orphanage, churches and city gates. Frederick II invested a total of 10.5 million RT for the expansion of Potsdam. For the rest of the Kurmark, 9.2 million RT were used in the period from 1740 to 1786 for the construction of residential and factory buildings and the enhancement of the country”s culture.

The Prussian Reichstaler was the currency of Prussia until 1857.

Formally, the Imperial Coinage Regulations created in the Coinage Cedicts of 1551, 1559 and 1566 continued to apply to the Holy Roman Empire in the 17th century. However, the norms were not observed, so the Brandenburg Elector, together with the Saxon Elector, issued his own coinage convention. From 1667, the Zinna Coin Convention applied to Brandenburg-Prussia. Prussian-Austrian dualism led to monetary upheavals that divided the territory of the Holy Roman Empire into two currency areas. In 1750, Frederick II carried out a coinage reform according to the plan of his mint director Johann Philipp Graumann. Graumann”s coinage reform introduced the 14 thaler foot in Prussia. In addition, Prussia issued the slightly lighter imperial thaler and gold coins, the Friedrich d”or. The reform made Prussia independent of foreign countries in terms of monetary policy. 1821 As part of a coinage reform, the Prussian thaler was divided into 30 silver groschen of 12 pfennigs each.

Until then, the thaler was divided into 24 groschen, each worth 12 pfennigs. In addition, further subdivisions existed in the eastern provinces. Prussia”s currency was unified in 1821, which eliminated these subdivisions. In 1857, the Prussian thaler was replaced by the Vereinstaler.

Until the establishment of a dense railroad network, the Royal Prussian Post Office was the first publicly operated transportation network that connected all the provinces and parts of Prussia and thus had a central integration function for the growing together of the Prussian state.

In 1786, there were 760 post offices in Prussia, four chief post offices in Berlin, Breslau, Königsberg and Stolzenberg, 246 post offices and 510 postmaster”s offices, which were not independent post offices and were assigned to the nearest post office.The chief post office was the General Post Office, which was elevated to an independent authority in 1741. The postmaster general held the rank of a minister of state and at the same time headed the Factory, Trade and Salt Department of the General Directorate. This was later incorporated into the newly created Ministry of the Interior.

In 1850, the Prussian postal service employed a total of 14,356 staff in 1,723 post offices. The postal administration maintained 6,534 mail wagons and 12,551 horses. Over 2.1 million travelers were transported.

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Federal structure

The “States of the King of Prussia”, for whose totality the name “Prussia” became naturalized around the middle of the 18th century, consisted at the beginning of the 18th century of the provinces Kingdom of Prussia, Margraviate of Brandenburg, Duchy of Pomerania, Guelders, Cleves, Moers, Tecklenburg, Lingen, Minden, Mark, Ravensberg, Lippstadt, Duchy of Magdeburg, Halberstadt, the sovereign Principality of Neuenburg and the sovereign County of Valangin. In 1713, the territories were divided into the following provinces: Middle, Ucker and Altmark, Neumark-Pomerania-Kassuben, Prussia, Guelders-Kleve, Minden-Mark-Ravensberg, Magdeburg-Halberstadt, Neuenburg (Land) and Valangin (Land). In 1740, the provincial authorities were transferred or reorganized into War and Domain Chambers. Their shape also changed several times in the course of the following decades, when further territories, including Silesia as a sovereign possession, came to Prussia.

After the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the state of Prussia was divided into ten provinces by the Ordinance for Improved Establishment of Provincial Authorities of April 30, 1815, which, with the exception of East Prussia, West Prussia and Posen, were administrative units of Prussia that belonged to the territory of the German Confederation. After the merger of the two Rhenish provinces, which had already taken place in 1822, these were nine provinces (capital in parentheses):

From 1829 to 1878 East and West Prussia were united to form the Province of Prussia (capital Königsberg).

After the German War of 1866, Prussia annexed the Kingdom of Hanover, the Electorate of Hesse, the Duchy of Nassau, the Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, and the Free City of Frankfurt. Three provinces were formed from these territories:

Prussia thus comprised twelve provinces. This division remained in place until the Treaty of Versailles came into force in 1920.

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Supreme state authorities and provincial administration

Prussian kings ruled “in cabinet,” which in Frederick II”s time consisted of two to three Privy Cabinet Councillors and several Cabinet Secretaries, which meant that the king communicated primarily in writing with his ministers. His instructions, the famous Cabinet Orders, amounted to laws. The cabinet, justice and state ministers, as well as high-ranking diplomats, also belonged to the originally central Privy Council, which, however, became increasingly less important. The actual central administration was taken over by the Ministry of Justice, the Cabinet Ministry and the Directorate General in the late 18th century. The Cabinet Ministry, which advised the king on foreign policy, consisted of one to two ministers and five to six privy legation councils. Since 1723, the Directorate General was responsible for Prussia”s financial, internal and military administration. In 1772, the provinces had a total of 12 so-called War and Domain Chambers, which were responsible for financial, police and military administration. They were headed by a noble chamber president who was assisted by one or two directors. They had several chief foresters, a director of construction and, depending on the size and importance of the province, between five and 20 war councillors and also tax councillors, who were in charge of local supervision in police, trade, commerce and excise matters. In addition, there were the noble Landräte, who presided over the districts of the provinces; these were royal retainers and at the same time, as elected representatives of the district assemblies, representatives of the Landstände. There was also a Superior Chamber of Accounts, which, with 25 councilors and 13 secretaries, was a kind of audit chamber. Closely connected to the General Directorate were the Royal Main Bank, the Sea Trading Company and the General Salt Administration, each headed by its own Minister of Finance. Each department of the General Directorate was headed by a minister. By 1806, the scope of this “super-ministry” had expanded with the creation of new departments. In 1806, there were seven department heads, the number of councilors was 52, and the number of secretaries was 73. Next to the Directorate General stood the Silesian Finance Department, with its headquarters in Wroclaw. This authority had its own jurisdiction over the two War and Domain Chambers in Wroclaw and Glogau. Thus, in the 18th century, the principalities of Silesia occupied a special position in Prussia. The Ministry of Justice was led by four ministers and seven councillors. It was also responsible for religious affairs. It was subordinate to the “governments” as well as the court and higher courts, which represented the administration of justice; these also administered sovereignty, border, feudal, church and school affairs.

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Rule of law

The nationwide organization of the administrative authorities since Frederick William I led to the establishment of a centralized court structure in the area of the judiciary as well. This was intended to unite the previously unconnected top courts responsible for the various parts of the country. In 1748, the so-called Great Frederick”s College was established as the central state supreme court, in which the Court of Appeal and the higher appellate courts located in Berlin were merged. An organic organization of the judiciary with a single head responsible for all Prussian states was not realized until 1782, when the Supreme Tribunal associated with the Court of Appeal became independent and henceforth, as the Secret Supreme Tribunal, became the highest instance for the entire monarchy. From then on, the Brandenburg Court of Appeal, the East Prussian Tribunal, the Silesian Oberamtsregierungen and, in the other parts of the country, the so-called “governments” functioned as intermediate instances in the provinces.

The main shaping of the Prussian legal system in the 18th century was worked out and directed by Samuel von Cocceji and Johann Heinrich von Carmer.

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Foreign

With its power politics, Prussia expanded its position in the international structure of the European balance of power. It was considered an emerging military power and was therefore courted as an auxiliary power by the major European powers until 1740. Without natural borders, Prussia had no security zone, which led to an increasing lack of scruples in the choice of its foreign policy means and earned it the accusation of unreliability.

Prussia”s foreign policy was therefore changeable and always geared to its own requirements; this sometimes resulted in a “seesaw” policy. Alliances were concluded for short periods of time and to achieve individual goals, and loyalty to international treaties was “lax. This resulted in unpredictability and uncertainty for its neighbors.

Prussia maintained direct and close relations with the Russian Empire, with which it had concluded various alliance treaties in the 18th and 19th centuries. Prussia had a confrontational, often belligerent relationship with Sweden, which, as a declining hegemon in the struggle for the Dominium maris Baltici, long maintained aggressive tendencies toward its southern neighbors. Between 1630 and 1763, it fought a total of five wars against Sweden. The Kingdom of Denmark, on the other hand, was a natural ally for Prussia and an important reference and orientation power. The relationship with the Netherlands was similarly positive; its importance for the early Prussian state and its elites consisted primarily in cultural adaptation, reference and referentiality. Positive mutual exchange prevailed with Great Britain as a world power. Prussia was repeatedly and persistently in conflict with France, the leading continental power. From 1674 to 1807, there were a total of six armed conflicts with France. The former great power Poland, which stagnated in the 18th century, became a victim of the Prussian-Russian-Austrian partition policy.

Prussian policy toward the Holy Roman Empire led to a considerable weakening of imperial cohesion in the 18th century. For one thing, the invasion of Silesia by Prussian troops at the end of 1740 was a blatant violation of the legal order of the empire. In addition, Prussia was intent on expanding its autonomy as a kingdom vis-à-vis the empire. In this way, it positioned itself above all against the primary imperial power, Austria, which advocated the preservation of the empire. This gave rise to the German dualism that lasted until 1866.

There was a diverse and dense exchange with the other German states. In the course of the 18th century, Prussia assumed the leading role as the first Protestant imperial state ahead of Saxony. From 1763, Prussia had great influence on German domestic politics with the formation of the League of Princes under its leadership.

From 1700 onward, permanent legations emerged throughout Europe, displacing the temporary missionary legations that had been common in European diplomacy until then. In the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, all imperial princes had also formally received the right of alliance and thus also the right to an independent foreign policy.

Subsequently, Prussia also established a pan-European legation system at the courts of European rulers.When the authority, established in 1728 as the “Department of Foreign Affairs,” was transferred in 1867, first to the North German Confederation as the Foreign Office and then, from 1871, to the German Empire, the diplomatic corps of the former Prussian authority consisted of a total of 60 budgetary posts. The authority maintained a total of four embassies in London, Paris, Petersburg and Vienna, 16 legations, eight legations within the Reich, eight ministerial residencies, seven consulates general with diplomatic status, 33 professional consulates and four professional vice-consulates.

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Overview

The individual parts of Prussia were very different in terms of landscape, society and structure. Between the city of Memel in the east and the westernmost Prussian city of Geldern was 1080 kilometers as the crow flies. Between Memel in the north and Silesian Pless in the south, the distance as the crow flies was 655 kilometers.The most important neighboring states in the east were Poland-Lithuania and, from 1720, the Russian Empire. Until 1815 Prussia had a land border with Sweden, with Denmark it was neighboring from 1866. There was a direct land connection with the Austrian Empire via Silesia. In the west, Prussia had a direct border with the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France.The western Prussian provinces were more commercial and urban, while the eastern provinces were agrarian with less privileged, peasant populations. In the structurally weak eastern region, urban centers were rare. The economic core regions were the Berlin area, Silesia as a trade-centered region and, since 1850, the Rhine and Ruhr areas, which grew rapidly. There were important raw material deposits in the Ruhr area and in the Silesian mining district.

Geographically, most of the state”s territory belongs to the North German Plain. The Baltic Sea formed an important and long maritime northern border for the Prussian state. The participation in the Baltic Sea trade but also in the continental East-West trade (among others via the Via Regia, Leipzig Fair, Frankfurt on the Oder Fair) was of fundamental economic interest for the Prussian state.

On the one hand, the territory disintegrated into several mutually isolated territorial blocks and was marked by a strong dynamic of change over time. Many later territories of Prussia changed their nationality in the course of war defeats of foreign powers or the transfer of inheritance claims, purchase or in diplomatic exchange for other territories into the possession of Prussia.

Four main geographical blocks with similar socio-cultural contexts formed the old Prussian monarchy until 1806. This was first the core area of Prussia with the central provinces around the Mark Brandenburg, then the eastern provinces with their ideal center in Königsberg, the northwest with various smaller parts of the country came into the possession of the Hohenzollern dynasty since the beginning of the 17th century. The southern provinces formed a short-lived exception to the Prussian territory. These territories were ceded again as early as 1805 in exchange for Electoral Hanover, which was also ceded within a year because of the defeat in the war against France.

Also read, biographies – Attila

National territory

The development of Prussia”s state territory between 1701 and 1939 shows a strong upward trend: from 1608, shortly before the first territorial acquisitions by the Hohenzollerns outside Brandenburg, to the collapse of the old Prussian state almost 200 years later, the feudal state expanded by almost ten times its original size. Based on population development, the growth factor during this period was 1:23.6.

The Hohenzollern rulers pursued a consistent (dynastic) expansion policy since the 16th century. Initially, the dynasty was interested in marrying into and taking over inheritance claims in keeping with the times. The inheritance policy succeeded with the seizure of the Duchy of Prussia, the later Duchy of Magdeburg and some southern German principalities. In the west, the Hohenzollerns maintained claims to some smaller territories. In the course of the Clevian Succession Dispute, they succeeded in asserting themselves on a Europe-wide conflict level. The Hohenzollerns also maintained hereditary claims to Pomerania for a long time, until they were granted Hinterpommern in 1648.

In 1715, Swedish Pomerania was added to the Prussian state as far as the Peene River. By inheritance, East Frisia became part of the Prussian states. In 1742 the principalities of Silesia were conquered and held as a province for Prussia. In 1776 the province of West Prussia was added to the Prussian state. From 1790 to 1806, the territorial reorganization of the collapsing Holy Roman Empire and the simultaneously expanding French Empire added large areas in northwestern Germany and Franconia to the Kingdom of Prussia. The completed partition of Poland also brought Prussia further territorial gains. The character of Prussia as a state had thus been completely changed within a few years. The New Prussian territories in the west of Germany and in the old Polish settlement area had no Prussian (German) traditions at all, had their own or other spatial ties and were lost again through the provisions of the Peace of Tilsit in 1807. Prussia, however, regained its approximate former size in the course of the Congress of Vienna in 1815. The previously isolated Prussian provinces on the Rhine were now combined into an overall Rhenish-Westphalian territorial complex. This was a British idea, not a Prussian one, whose actors would have preferred to receive all of Saxony. Instead, according to the British will, Prussia was to take on the role of “guardian on the Rhine” vis-à-vis France as a replacement for the departed Habsburg. This new territorial unity significantly changed the Prussian state after 1815. The central provinces of Prussia, which had been dominant until then, lost some of their importance in favor of the Rhenish provinces by 1918. The foreign policy aspirations of the Prussian government after 1815 were secretly aimed at uniting the two large territories geographically separated by a 40-kilometer-wide gap in the west and in “Old Prussia.” The intervening principalities, such as the Kingdom of Hanover, thus became, as had happened earlier with the reduction of the Kingdom of Saxony, a territorial disposal of Prussia in its foreign policy ambitions. Since only a part of the formerly Polish acquisitions from the third partition of Poland was again assigned to Prussia, the overall state of Prussia regained a more all-German position.

Also read, biographies – Jannis Kounellis

Population

The increase in population in the 17th and 18th centuries was based on territorial gains and an intensively pursued peupling policy. The targeted recruitment and settlement of foreign colonists, often exiles and religious refugees from Habsburg lands, in the rather sparsely populated eastern provinces of East Prussia, West Prussia, Neumark and Hinterpommern promoted the expansion of the country, which also included the cultivation and reclamation of swamp areas. In the 18th century, many hundreds of colonist villages were founded in the deserted areas along the regulated Warta and Oder rivers. The weavers” settlements of Nowawes and Zinna were the most important. Further population growth occurred through territorial expansions as a result of the unification wars and was also based on high natural population growth in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Around 1800, almost 43 percent of the population were considered Slavs. Another minority were the French Huguenots who immigrated in the 17th century and, including their descendants, comprised a total of 65,000 people. A total of 250,000 Jews were classified and recorded as an “ethnic group” by the surveys of the time.

50.6 percent of the inhabitants were Lutheran, 44.1 percent Catholic, and the rest were Reformed, Mennonite, Greek Orthodox and Hussite.

The population in 1804 was composed of the following social classes:

Also read, biographies – Robert Ryman

Cities

Urban density decreased from west to east. The city of Berlin underwent exceptionally strong growth from 1700 to 1918 and possessed the largest urban region at the end of the monarchy. With Berlin, the cities of Brandenburg an der Havel (court and early capital), Potsdam (residence), and Frankfurt an der Oder (fair, university) formed the traditional core of the expanding Prussian state. The cities of the Prussian Rhine provinces did not attain increased importance until the 19th century. The cities in what is now Saxony-Anhalt, Magdeburg, Halle, Quedlinburg and Halberstadt, were strategically important because of their central location and therefore long disputed between Saxony and Brandenburg. The eastern metropolises of Danzig and Königsberg formed dominant monocenters in their respective provinces.

The 1804 list of the most populous Prussian cities differs considerably in composition from that for 1910. The 19th century as a whole was a century of urbanization and rural exodus in Europe, so that after the rather stagnant course of the early modern period, the cities increased in population. Since a large migration movement from the eastern provinces of Prussia to the economically booming Rhine provinces began at the same time, the cities in the Rhine and Ruhr regions grew faster than those in the central and eastern national territory between 1850 and 1910.

Also read, biographies – Che Guevara

Rivers

The rivers Havel, Spree, Elbe, Oder and later the Rhine were important as trade routes.Spree, Havel, Oder and Elbe were connected by the construction of artificial waterways from the 17th century onwards and formed a common network of river routes through which a considerable proportion of Prussian grain exports but also other goods (e.g. limestone from Rüdersdorf to Berlin) were transported to the ports on the Baltic and North Seas.

Also read, biographies – Plotinus

Mountains

Prussia consisted largely of plains or had a flat-wavy character; only in the southern territory of the state were there prominent elevations. Silesia, which had belonged to Prussia since 1741, was its most mountainous province, with the Riesengebirge mountains as part of the Sudeten Mountains. In addition, the Harz Mountains were the next most important mountain range, which Prussia had at least partial access to since the end of the 18th century and then completely included in its state territory after the territorial acquisitions of 1866.

With the enlargement of the Prussian territory since 1815 by large parts of the German Rhineland, the smaller low mountain ranges of Hunsrück, Westerwald and Eifel also belonged to it. Westphalia”s low mountain ranges, the Rothaargebirge and the Weserbergland, also belonged to the Kingdom of Prussia from then on.

The highest Prussian mountain was the Schneekoppe with an altitude of 1,603 meters, followed by the Reifträger with an altitude of 1,362 meters, the Brocken with an altitude of 1,141 meters and the Ochsenberg with an altitude of 1,033 meters.

Also read, biographies – Joseph of Anchieta

Vegetation, soils and landscapes

In the 18th and 19th centuries, large parts of the national territory were characterized by swamps, heaths and dunes. Human intervention in the 20th century adapted these natural landscapes for the most part to the needs of civilization in favor of settlement and agricultural areas and considerably reduced the original manifestations, .

The quality of the soils varied considerably depending on the region. There were very nutrient-rich and high-yielding soils, such as in the Magdeburg Börde, in southern Prussia or western Silesia. Large parts of the central provinces or East Prussia, on the other hand, had nutrient-poor sandy soils.

With newly constructed dikes, river straightening and canal construction, thousands of square kilometers of marshland were permanently drained. The development of agricultural land was an important part of state policy. In 1804, 21.5 percent of the province”s area was forested, the largest forest area being the Johannisburg Heath and the Rominter Heath in East Prussia. The province of Westphalia was rather sparsely forested in comparison.

Also read, biographies – Niccolò Machiavelli

Lakes, bays and islands

The coastal sections that belonged to Prussia at different times showed a strong overall structure. Striking bays were the Szczecin Lagoon, the Vistula Lagoon and the Curonian Lagoon with its Curonian Spit. The most important old Prussian islands were Usedom and Swinemünde, since 1815 also Rügen, after 1866 also the island chains of Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein were added.

The largest chain of lakes in Prussia formed the Masurian Lake District in East Prussia, including Lake Spirding.

Also read, biographies – Lucas van Valckenborch

Climate

While in the western provinces, Westphalia and the Rhineland, a maritime transitional climate prevails, the eastern areas are characterized by more continental conditions. This meant for the east tended to colder winters with warmer summers and for the western areas lower temperature fluctuations throughout the year with a slightly longer growing season.

In the period of the kingdom”s existence, the man-made global warming caused by industrialization was not yet noticeable. In the early period of the kingdom, the Little Ice Age was at its peak, and winters generally brought severe and prolonged frosts everywhere.

The historiography of the Prussian monarchy is extremely extensive and thematically multifaceted. Its content is subject to the influences of contemporary trends and changing value judgments. Main research areas are: Transnational linkages and transfer processes, structural situation between East and West, actors of internal state formation, regional actors, military system, consequences of state economic policy, effective power of elite groups, treatment of minorities, significance of culture, science, education and churches, democratization and nation building.

It was not until the 19th century that individual specialized historical fields of research on Prussian history emerged from the main field of event history. These included agrarian history (Georg Friedrich Knapp), the history of state structure, and administrative history (e.g., Siegfried Isaacsohn).

Until 1945, German historiography of the 19th and early 20th centuries was predominantly “Borussophilic.” The two most important representatives of this period were Otto Hintze and Johann Gustav Droysen. Subsequently significant were also Heinrich von Sybel and Leopold von Ranke. Many of the historians of the time were senior teachers and jurists, concise types of the historically interested Prussian educated bourgeoisie. The most comprehensive work of this period was the Acta Borussica, founded by Gustav von Schmoller.

German nationalism from 1871 to 1945 shaped the image of an all-German mission of Prussia, to which the House of Hohenzollern is said to have been committed from the beginning. According to Wolfgang Neugebauer, the term national-teleological historiography applies to this. In addition, a strong person-fixated historiography prevailed, which reduced the events in the period from 1640 to 1786 to the actions of the monarchs, according to the recurring pattern:

After the end of the Third Reich, Prussia”s strong militarization and pronounced authoritarianism led to the assumption that Prussia was intellectually close to fascism, which is said to have provided the breeding ground for the totalitarian Nazi dictatorship (continuity thesis: from Frederick II to Bismarck to Hitler). Gordon A. Craig is an important author of this current.

Since 1990, more recent topics have included the construction and deconstruction of Prussian historical myths and memory culture, socio-historical military history, micro-historical reconstruction of lifeworlds, gender history, and international entanglements and transnational exchange in Prussian politics.

GDR historiography produced a number of better-known specialist authors, including Erika Hertzfeld and Ingrid Mittenzwei. Thematically, the focus was on class-centered course history, in that the relationship between the feudal class, the bourgeois class, and the working class was repeatedly analyzed according to a fixed flow chart and with a fixed outcome: In the end, the working class was victorious and the feudal aristocracy was perpetually in a desperate defensive struggle. Moreover, the bourgeois elite in the 19th century had supposedly entered into an alliance with the aristocratic Junkertum, which fought everything progressive. Such an alliance was never questioned, nor could its existence be proven; it was merely anchored as a given fact in the GDR historians” historical world system.

The repatriation of the most important archival materials from the collections of the former GDR provided an additional boost for Prussian research. The Handbook of Prussian History and Modern Prussian History 1648-1947 are considered standard historiographical works.The Historical Commission on Berlin, which had devoted itself to Prussian history in monographs, essay collections, editions, and international symposia since its founding in 1958, lost its research mandate by decision of the Berlin Senate in 1996, forcing the institute to close, but it continues to exist as a scholars” association.The most frequently cited current authors on Prussian history are Wolfgang Neugebauer, Otto Büsch, and Christopher Clark. They were or are members of the Prussian Historical Commission, which is a central interface for research on Prussian history. The Geheime Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz holds the most important primary sources, and the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz administers the cultural and material legacy of the Prussian monarchy.

The Prussia Museum in Minden, the Prussia Museum in Wesel and the Brandenburg-Prussia Museum are museums of remembrance. War memorials or monarchical monuments were erected in many places during the German Empire and are still maintained today. Since the Prussia exhibition Prussia – Attempt to take stock in 1981, the handling of the subject of Prussia has relaxed overall, so that one also speaks of a Prussian renaissance.

The Prussian memory, which is also supported by the state, is essentially driven by the person of Frederick II. In reunified Germany, the repatriation of his remains from Hohenzollern Castle to Potsdam gained significance in 1991, when the state of Brandenburg made it possible for Frederick II to be buried at Sanssouci Palace and his father in the mausoleum of the Peace Church in Potsdam. A church service and memorial ceremony were organized to mark the occasion. A unit of the German Armed Forces escorted the coffin and the then Chancellor Kohl attended the ceremony as a private citizen.

In the media, the kingdom is also present in public events such as the Prussian Year 2001 or the celebrations of the 300th anniversary of the birth of Frederick II. Regularly recurring special issues of the magazines Geo, Der Spiegel and Stern are aimed at a large readership. Television series or multi-part television films such as Saxony”s Splendor and Prussia”s Glory and The Heir to the Throne (1980) also dealt with the topic. Today, Prussia”s military component is echoed in reenactment clubs: on certain occasions, amateur actors in period uniforms reenact war events, such as the Potsdam Long Guys.

Sources

1. Königreich Preußen
2. Kingdom of Prussia