Black Legends

David Blackbourn

  • Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia 1600-1947 by Christopher Clark
    Allen Lane, 777 pp, £30.00, August 2006, ISBN 0 7139 9466 5

Too much history can be bad for you. ‘The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living’ – that was Marx’s famous comment on France in 1848. When Nietzsche elaborated on the same idea in one of his ‘untimely meditations’, he had Germany in mind, the Prussia-writ-large created under the auspices of Bismarck. We have become familiar with the idea that the dead weight of Prussian history deformed the development of modern Germany. Junker-ridden, archaic and feudal, the epitome of the centralised, militarist state, Prussia was the albatross that hung round the neck of unified Germany. Clement Attlee used a stronger term in 1943, arguing that history suggested the need to ‘eradicate the Prussian virus’.

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Vol. 28 No. 22 · 16 November 2006 » David Blackbourn » Black Legends (print version)
Pages 18-20 | 2608 words