ABSTRACT
Prussia was Bismarck’s country and it was he who transformed it into the German Reich. Prussia was a country that had no geographical or ethnic identity and its shape and the composition of its population changed over the course of time. For a short period at the end of the eighteenth century it contained almost as many Polish speakers as German speakers. What gave it shape and identity was its ruling dynasty, the Hohenzollerns. They came from South Germany and their rule in what later became Prussia began in the march of Brandenburg in 1415. The Hohenzollerns established in the territories they acquired an ethos that impressed itself upon the peoples they ruled. It was this ethos more than anything else that constituted the Prussian identity. Three great Hohenzollern rulers following each other with hardly a break in the seventeenth and eighteenth century put Prussia on the map as a major European power. They were the Great Elector, who ruled from 1640 to 1688, Frederick William I, the soldier king, who ruled from 1713 to 1740, and, most famous of all, his son Frederick the Great, whose reign extended from 1740 to 1786.
