Like many men, I pass time during my days’ quieter hours thinking of eras gone by. Unlike some, the Roman Empire has not been a recent focus. Instead, I found myself wondering about a different society, and a more recent one at that. I have been asking myself one question repeatedly: What happened to Prussia?
Initially, I leaned on Google searches to supplement my knowledge of WW2 history. This provided answers both visible on maps and in the wording of post-war legal changes in Allied-occupied Germany. However, Preußen, or Prussia as we call it in English, was more than a frequently shifting empire across Northern and Central Europe and Eurasia.
Prussia had a culture, a famously militaristic one. In fact, its militaristic tendencies are a primary reason post-war Germany was forced to de-Prussify in tandem with its de-Nazification efforts.
Militarism aside, Prussia had a tradition too. Its tradition was one of invention, intellectual advancement, and artistic achievement. For proof, the American public school system was heavily influenced on the Prussian model, which one could argue has served us well.
You can remove Prussia from a map and change the name of its former regions within the Bundesrepublik. I know you could do this because it has been done, but I also know you do not simply make cultures disappear at a whim. Nor can you remove the legacy of Prussia’s influence on modern Germany. After all, it was the Prussian Otto von Bismarck who is the primary figure to thank for piecing together what we now know to be Germany with his life’s work of unification culminating in 1871.
Bismarck’s lasting influence aside, Prussia is not the first State or culture to be removed from the world, although its disappearance may be fuller and more peculiar than others.
Less than 30 years prior to the erasure of Prussia, the partially German speaking Austria-Hungary was broken up with the passing of 1919’s Habsburg Law following the end of WW1. This law’s dictates formally ended Austria’s K und K era and removed the Habsburg family from power.
Many of this family’s descendants remain in positions of prominence (e.g., Eduard Habsburg is Hungary’s ambassador to the Holy See and a popular Twitter personality to boot). However, the former Austria-Hungary is decidedly no longer under royal rule. Habsburg family members in the former empire cannot even take advantage of using a ‘von’ in their surname as a means of signaling their familial membership in the once globe-spanning House of Habsburg.
Today, despite the Habsburg Law’s impact, a brief stroll through Vienna’s Innere Stadt shows visitors that the K und K era continues to be remembered fondly. This pearl of the Donau has maintained its charm and its culture despite losing its imperial and royal ruling family. Habsburg palaces like Schloss Belvedere are now publicly accessible, and Austria’s government is now democratically elected. Yet, in differing from the case of Prussia, Vienna maintains the German name Wien and Austria is still formally known as Österreich.
Removing even a hobbled government may not be simple, but it can require less effort than it does to remove a culture. Culture, good or bad, is a sticky thing.
The USSR, which substantial portions of Prussia once fell under, crushed the Orthodox church as an institution for 70+ years. However, even amid this atheist regime’s crackdown on religion, countless secret baptisms and religious ceremonies took place. More visibly, Brezhnev's wife Victoria defied authority by publicly making the sign of the cross over his casket in 1982. That symbolic gesture took place 65 years after the Russian Revolution, proving Christianity had not been forgotten in the face of tremendous effort by the Soviet state.
Today, over three decades since the collapse of the USSR, we see figures from various sources that estimate the Russian Orthodox Church’s membership at roughly 100 million within Russia’s borders with millions more spread across that nation’s diaspora. The Church as an institution and Christianity in practice may have been widely suppressed, but the culture each formed proved impossible to eliminate completely.
Coincidentally, a deeper look into the former USSR can provide us with a better understanding of what happened to Prussia.
Enter German historian Katja Hoyer. Ms. Hoyer was born in East Germany just four years before the fall of the Berlin Wall and recently released ‘Beyond the Wall: A History of East Germany’. This work is enormously informative and meticulously researched. It is also controversial.
The common thread of Western discussion related to East Germany tends to revolve around its top-down communist rule, terrifying secret police force known colloquially as the Stasi, and its negative comparison in relation to the freer West Germany. Even today, long after reunification, the former East Germany lags its Western counterpart in many economic and social indicators. This difference provides reason enough to maintain an East vs West distinction despite both former States now sharing a common nationality once more.
With millions alive today who lived under both East German rule and the reunified State’s government, it is no wonder many look back on this bygone period with interest. It may surprise some in the West that there remain Germans who feel nostalgic about their land’s former era as a Soviet Satellite. This unique form of nostalgia, for a no longer extant communist East Germany is known in German as Ostalgie (roughly translates to ‘nostalgia for the East’).
Ms. Hoyer’s honest portrayal of both the good and the bad (she does not shy away from communist horrors) that East Germans experienced have led to her being accused of harboring a sense of Ostalgie. This assumption has led to her new history book being met with a bit of pushback, particularly within Germany. It appears some believe it wrong to give East Germany a fair shake without coupling their review with an outsized helping of criticism about its undeniable negative aspects.
Hoyer herself counteracts these suggestions by saying that her goal in writing ‘Beyond the Wall’ was to give the East Germans as a people and the culture they lived within an honest portrayal. They may have been trapped under an oppressive system, but as she notes, “The citizens of the G.D.R. lived, loved, worked, and grew old... Their story deserves a place in the German narrative.”
I do not know Katja Hoyer, but I am not joining others in accusing her of being nostalgic about communist rule in Germany. Far from it. Instead, I wanted to refer to her work because it sheds a bit of light on what happened to Prussia and because it shows what occurs when an attempted cultural erasure takes place.
As you read ‘Beyond the Wall’ you discover that amidst the reign of the Stasi and one-party communist rule, East Germans did more than suffer. They listened to music, got excited to buy jeans when that workman’s fashion staple became hip and available (either via import or state production), and many youths eventually bucked the dictatorship’s edicts. Angela Merkel was one of these youths and despite becoming an icon of Western Democracy, the former Kanzlerin worried publicly about East Germany’s cultural disappearance and paid homage to the land in which she came of age.
Today, we continue to hear references to the Stasi whenever spy scandals break out and can see reminders of East Germany’s militaristic image in the stage wear of bands like Rammstein. We also see books like Ms. Hoyer’s arrive to show the world that younger Europeans are interested in looking back and learning about a forgotten and partially erased world they know existed just decades ago.
These efforts and symbols shed light on my original question: what happened to Prussia? While incomplete, and incomplete for many reasons, I am slowly piecing together an answer.
The piecemeal development of my understanding is a natural result of how Prussia’s dissolution took place. Prussia, as it once was known lives on physically in modern day Germany, Poland, Russia, Czechia, Denmark, and Belgium, with additional islands of land in other surrounding areas. With mass German expulsion from many of these places following WW2, Prussia’s culture may have largely left its former lands, but the artifacts of its history will never fully disappear.
So, what happened to Prussia? Hoyer’s ‘Beyond the Wall’ brings us a bit closer to an answer, but reaching a satisfactory conclusion is something that seems as elusive as official German references to this long-ago erased empire and region.
It is important to remember that cultures rarely die out completely, but some of the key components of Prussia’s may well be forever blended into the liberalism of Modern Europe and the Slavic societies that inhabit the remaining parts of its sweeping former territories. Perhaps other parts will remain ember-like, someday to return in one form or another.
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