In Search of Prussia

Abstract

The important historical literature on Prussia that has appeared in the last two years is linked to the organization of an exhibit that took place in Berlin from August 15 to November 15, 1981, and reflects the prodigious interest, and even in some quarters enthusiasm, aroused by the commemoration of a state which, for all intents and purposes, disappeared from history with the decree of the Allied High Commission on February 25, 1947. The exhibit,' which left a good deal of room for personal interpretation, reflected, moreover, the ambiguity of the Prussian state, which, as Mme. de Stael wrote in 1810, had a Janus head, one part philosophical, and the other military. Indeed, was Prussia a state founded in law (Rechtsstaat) or in armed force (Militdrstaat)? Was it a tolerant state or was it resistant to all forns of opposition? How did it reconcile administrative expertise with political and social reaction? Did the of AuJklirung or the spirit of Potsdam predominate during the course of its history? How can we judge impartially such contradictory figures as Frederick II, cynical conqueror and friend of the philosophes, and Bismarck, perpetrator of several wars of aggression, yet defender of the European Order? It is all the more difficult to answer these questions in that Prussia, unlike France or Great Britain, never constituted a national state with natural frontiers, but was an artificial dynastic creation, a state that rested on rational bases (Vernunftstaat), a concept (Begriff), formulated through the reconciliation of contradictory exigencies. First of all, what do we mean by Prussia? Rudolf von Thadden devotes a sensitive book to this seemingly elementary question, a book that could only have been written by a historian who finds himself, both by ancesty and through his own studies, at