ABSTRACT
The foundation of the Prussian army state has been called the most remarkable accomplishment in German political history. The state whose foundations were laid down by the Great Elector survived until 1945. Exactly 200 years after the accession of Frederick the Great in 1740, as German troops marched through Paris, men had cause indeed to brood upon the way in which the rest of Germany had been grafted on to the Prussian state; upon the character of that state; upon the succession of policies and accidents that had finally fused the traditions of the Prussian army with an exclusive nationalism and ‘state socialism’ into a Nazi state that yet remained in some respects the Prussian state of earlier times. The army was destroyed at Stalingrad and in Normandy; the state was dismembered at Potsdam in 1945. Königsberg, capital of Prussia, is today the Russian town of Kaliningrad. There is special interest in the beginnings and causes of such a dire fulfilment; equally, there is scope for distortion and myth. The failures of liberalism in the nineteenth century were not solely due to the success of Prussian autocracy or the strength of military tradition. The French Revolution did as much as Frederick the Great to shape the Germany of Bismarck. But no revolution had destroyed Prussia’s ancien régime: the army reformed by Scharnhorst after Jena preserved the traditions of the earlier Hohenzollern rulers.
