David Blackbourn, whose Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape and the Making of Modern Germany was reviewed in the LRB by Neal Ascherson, teaches history at Harvard.
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Vol. 16 No. 22 · 24 November 1994
pages 18-19 | 2583 words
Theme-Park Prussia
David Blackbourn
- Prussia: The Perversion of an Idea by Giles MacDonogh
Sinclair-Stevenson, 456 pp, £20.00, July 1994, ISBN 1 85619 267 9
In 1947, the Allied Control Commission pronounced the death of Prussia, symbol of militarism and knee-jerk obedience, and alleged progenitor of Nazism. It has stayed dead. The GDR was never, as some liked to believe, the continuation of Prussia by other means. Junker estates were broken up, and Prussia was distributed among the Poles and Russians as well as the Germans. Recent events are unlikely to change any of that. Restitution of property almost certainly does not apply to the former estates, and the Oder-Neisse line is fixed. Leningrad may have become St Petersburg again, but Wroclaw will not revert to Breslau. Meanwhile, the Hohenzollerns have much less chance of staging a comeback than several Ruritanian dynasties with an equally grubby record. Lord Vansittart and A.J.P. Taylor can rest easily in their graves.
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Letters
Vol. 16 No. 24 · 22 December 1994
From Jörg Rademacher
Since I grew up in West Germany after the Wall had been built and the East was to remain an intangible presence to most members of my generation, I tended to identify the GDR with some sort of Prussian continuity. Nevertheless, we had little interest in nostalgic reconstructions because these ran counter to the liberal ideology that prevailed in both secondary and higher education. This way of thinking has, however, declined since Helmut Kohl came to power in 1982. Books like Prussia: The Perversion of an Idea reviewed by David Blackbourn (LRB, 24 November) amply demonstrate that those historians who glorify Prussia and propose a relativist view of history have returned to the forefront. MacDonogh’s one book in English, alas, is matched by an increasing output in German. It is a consolation to read David Blackbourn’s harshly critical review.
Jörg Rademacher
Münster
