A pioneering study
The truth is that Prussia was a European state long before it became a German one. Germany was not Prussia’s fulfilment ... but its undoing.
Iron Kingdom deftly captures the many contradictions of Prussia, a medieval backwater that became a major European power and the force behind the mighty German empire. Clark argues that its military power was rooted in vulnerability – ‘Brandenburg-Prussia repeatedly stood on the brink of political extinction’ – and was balanced by enlightenment values that produced great works of art, religious tolerance and a modern civil administration.
With a cast of brilliant leaders, from the Hohenzollerns of Brandenburg to Frederick the Great and Bismarck, it is a story of hard-fought victories and ruinous defeats on the battlefield, of territorial gains punctuated by times of stagnation, of dynastic marriages and of treacherous alliances. Above all, Clark’s narrative rebuts the idea that Prussian arrogance inevitably pushed Germany down its own special path (Sonderweg) to Hitler and the horrors of National Socialism.