ABSTRACT
The democratic Prussia of Otto Braun, Carl Severing and Ernst Heilmann, which is celebrated by no monument, no institution and no street name, to a great extent makes up for the disasters that the heritage of Prussia brought to Germans and their history. The new Prussia in Weimar Germany, as Otto Braun attempted to make it a reality, was a democratic parliamentary state based on strict legal foundations, destined to unite permanentiy the democratic middle classes and the social democratic working classes, political Catholicism and the left. The political parties that, on the basis of elections to a Prussian constitutional regional assembly on 26 January 1919, grasped the reigns of power were the Social Democrats, the Catholic Centre Party and the left-wing Liberals. It was in the nature of things that, in this way, a strong party-political element was introduced into the upper levels of the civil service.
