Brandenburg-Prussia, 1466-1806

This series, Studies in European History, has the objective of publishing up-to-date historiographical perspectives while also providing narrative histories for students and teachers. Karin Friedrich does an admirable job of addressing multiple layers of historiography integrated into a chronology covering more than three centuries of complex history, while offering her own interpretations. One of her main objectives is to refute ‘the most resistant of all myths . . . that of Prussia the “maker of Germany” whose every move was supposedly aimed at German unification’ (p. 1). This was the perspective of nineteenth-century Prussian nationalist historians who viewed the Hohenzollerns as a German dynasty leading the way towards the modern nation state. Historians of the Nazi era articulated an extreme version of this perspective, emphasizing the cultural, racial and economic superiority of the Germans in civilizing the Slavic east. Some Polish scholars responded by arguing the autochthonous nature of the Slavic people. Despite post-World War II revisionism, there is still the tendency in the West to filter the history of Brandenburg-Prussia through a German lens. Friedrich welcomes the ‘increasingly sophisticated historiography on the Teutonic period in Prussia’ (p. 10) that has developed since 1990.

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