Beyond the Barricades

It is fair to say that Prussia has an image problem. After the Second World War it became fashionable to argue that the Junkers and the authoritarian heritage of the Hohenzollern monarchy had set up German democracy to fail. Even before the Nazi dictatorship, a plethora of critics, ranging from Social Democrats and the Catholic Church to British propaganda in the First World War, saw in Prussia the spiritual home of ‘militarism’. However, thanks in large part to newer scholarship in the vein of Abigail Green’s Fatherlands (2001; rev. ante, cxviii [2003], 1,018–20), Siegfried Weichlein’s Nation und Region (2004) and Christopher Clark’s Iron Kingdom (2006), German state-building in the nineteenth century has undergone a reassessment. Many impulses for reform in areas such as the construction of railway networks, industrial development and mass education emanated precisely from conservative governments that were long viewed as impediments to modernisation. The period between

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