Iron Kingdom : The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (117 page)

Was this passage about Prussia, or was it about Brandenburg? Fontane invoked a recognizably Prussian historical narrative (though only in fragments), but the immediacy of the recollection derives from the intimacy of the local setting: ploughed fields, a poplar tree, a low hill, a church tower glowing in the rays of the setting sun. It was the landscape of Brandenburg that opened the portals of memory into the Prussian past. An intense awareness of place was one of the signal features of Fontane’s work as a writer. Indeed, the walk to Grossbeeren in 1833 was the prototype – he subequently claimed – for the provincial excursion narrative he would later establish as a literary genre. Fontane is now best known for his novels – sharply observed dramas of nineteenth-century society – but his most famous and best-loved work during his lifetime was the four-volume homage to his native province known as
Walks Through the Mark Brandenburg
.

The
Walks
are a work unlike any other. Fontane made notes during a long sequence of meandering excursions across the Mark and interwove these with material drawn from inscriptions and local archives. The wandering began in the summer of 1859, with two trips to the Ruppin and Spreewald districts, and continued throughout the 1860s. Initially published as articles in various newspapers, the essays were subsequently revised, compiled by district and published from the early 1860 sas bound volumes. Readers encountered an unfamiliar mix of topographical observations, inscriptions, inventories and architectural sketches,
romantic episodes from the past and scraps of unofficial memory gleaned from conversations with cab-drivers, inn-keepers, landowners, servants, village mayors and agricultural labourers. Passages of blank descriptive prose and wry vignettes of small-town life are interspersed with meditative scenes – a graveyard, a still lake enclosed by frowning trees, a ruined wall drowning in grass, children running in the stubble of a freshly mown field. Nostalgia and melancholy, those markers of modern literary sensibility, pervade the whole. Fontane’s Brandenburg is a memoryscape that shimmers between past and present.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the
Walks
is their emphatically provincial focus. There seemed to many contemporaries, as Fontane well knew, something preposterous about devoting four volumes of historical travelogue to prosaic, featureless, backwoods Brandenburg. But he knew what he was doing. ‘Even in the sand of the Mark,’ he told a friend in 1863, ‘the springs of life have flowed and still flow everywhere and every square foot of ground has its story and is telling it, too – but one has to be willing to listen to these often quiet voices.’
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His aim was not to survey the
grand récit
of Prussian history, but to ‘re-animate locality’, as he put it in a letter of October 1861.
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In order to do this he had to work against the grain, uncovering the ‘hidden beauties’ of his native country, teasing out the nuances of its understated topography, gradually pulling Brandenburg from under the political identity of Prussia. The Mark had to be detached from Prussia’s history in order to appear in its individuality.
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Prussian history is present in the
Walks
, but it seems remote, like the rumour of a distant battlefield. It is the Brandenburgers, with their peppery wit and the spare cadences of their speech, who have the last word.

The
Walks
did not escape the strictures of historical pedants, but they were hugely popular with the broader public and have been widely imitated since. Their success draws our attention to the abiding strength of provincial attachments in the Prussian lands. Prussia remained, at the end of its life as in the beginning, a composite of provinces whose identity was substantially independent of their membership within the Prussian polity. This was most obviously the case for the more recently acquired provinces. The relationship between the Rhine province and Berlin remained a ‘marriage of convenience’, despite the relatively pragmatic and flexible governance of successive Prussian administrations.
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In Westphalia, which was not, strictly speaking, a single historical entity
but a jigsaw of culturally diverse lands, the later nineteenth century witnessed an intensified sense of regional belonging, heightened by confessional polarities. In Catholic areas of Westphalia such as the bishopric of Paderborn there was little enthusiasm for Prussia’s war against France in 1870; volunteers were thin on the ground and many conscripts fled to Holland to avoid service.
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It is thus misleading to speak of the ‘assimilation’ of the Rhineland provinces after 1815; what happened was rather that the western territories joined the Prussian amalgam, forcing the state to constitute itself anew. Paradoxically (and not only in the Rhineland), the introduction of Prussian governance, with its provincial presidencies and provincial diets, actually reinforced the sense of a distinctive provincial identity.
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These effects were intensified by Prussia’s territorial expansion in the aftermath of the Austrian war. Many in the conquered provinces resented the high-handed annexations of 1866. The problem was particularly pronounced in Hanover, where the ancient dynasty of the Guelphs was deposed and its landed wealth sequestered by the Bismarck administration, an act of robbery and
lèse-majesté
that stuck in many conservative throats.
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These concerns found expression in the German-Hanoverian Party, which advocated a Guelph restoration, but also pursued broader conservative-regionalist objectives. Guelphist Hanoverians might eventually become enthusiastic Germans, but they would never become wholeheartedly Prussian. To be sure, the Guelph regionalists were opposed within Hanover by the province’s powerful National Liberal movement, which strongly supported the new Bismarckian state. But the National Liberals, as their name suggests, were enthusiasts of Germany, rather than of Prussia. They hailed Bismarck as the instrument of a German, rather than a specifically Prussian, mission.

Prussia’s last great phase of expansion happened to coincide with an intensification of regionalist sentiment across Germany. Archaeological and historical associations run by local worthies dedicated themselves to laying bare the linguistic, cultural and political history of the many German ‘landscapes’. In Schleswig-Holstein, this trend was intensified by the Prussian annexation of 1866. There was a burgeoning of regionalist loyalties, not only among the Danish-speaking ‘Prussians’ of north Schleswig, who remained unreconciled to the new order and seceded when they had the chance in 1919, but also among those ethnic Germans who were attached to the idea of Schleswig-Holstein as an autonomous
state. Most of the deputies who represented the duchies in the constituent Reichstag of the North German Confederation in 1867 were supporters of regional autonomy. These aspirations acquired a certain academic credibility by the efforts of the Schleswig-Holstein-Lauenburg Society for Patriotic History, whose lectures and publications emphasized regionalist themes.
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The point should not be overstated. Regionalist sentiments posed no direct threat to Prussian authority. The Schleswig-Holsteiners may have grumbled, but they continued to pay their taxes and perform their military service. Yet the strength of provincial identities is significant. Their importance lay less in their subversive political potential than in the synergies that could develop between regional and national attachments. The folksy modern ideology of
Heimat
(homeland) blended seamlessly into cultural or ethnic concepts of a composite German nationhood, bypassing the imposed, supposedly inorganic structures of the Prussian state.
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Prussia, as an identity, was thus eroded simultaneously from above (by nationalism) and below (by the regionalist revival). Only in the Mark Brandenburg (and to a lesser extent in Pomerania) did a regionalist identity evolve that fed directly into an allegiance to Prussia and its German mission (though not necessarily to Berlin, which some saw as an alien urban growth on the agrarian landscape of the Mark).

Yet even here, as the example of Fontane suggests, the rediscovery of the province and its claims on the sentiments of its inhabitants could entail a turning away from Prussia. Fontane, often regarded as an apologist for ‘Prussiandom’, was in fact deeply ambivalent towards the Prussian state and could on occasion be fiercely critical.
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‘Prussia was a lie,’ he declared in the opening sentence of a scathing essay he published during the revolutions of 1848. ‘The Prussia of today has no history.’
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Fontane was among those who argued – not only in 1848 but also after the foundation of the Second Empire in 1871 – that the unification of Germany must necessarily bring about the demise of Prussia.
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It went without saying that the Brandenburg whose particular history and character he had so painstakingly documented would survive the demolition of the monarchical state that had sprung up on its soil.

The strength of provincial attachments and the corresponding feebleness of Prussia as a locus of collective identity has remained one of the most striking features of the state’s afterlife since 1947. It is remarkable, for
example, how inconspicuous Prussia has been in the official rhetoric of the organizations formed in West Germany after the Second World War to represent the interests of the 10 million expellees who were forced to leave the East-Elbian provinces at the end of the Second World War. The refugees defined themselves, by and large, not as Prussians, but as East Prussians, Upper or Lower Silesians, Pomeranians; there were also organizations representing the Masurians from the Polish-speaking southern districts of East Prussia, the Salzburgers of Prussian Lithuania (descendants of the communities of Protestant refugees from Salzburg who were resettled to the Prussian east in the early 1730s) and various other sub-regional groups. But there has been little evidence of a shared ‘Prussian’ identity and surprisingly little collaboration and exchange between the different groups. In this sense the expellee movement has tended to reflect the composite, highly regionalized character of the old Prussian state.

To be sure, Prussia was the subject of great public interest in both the post-war Germanies. The official historians of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) soon abandoned the leftist anti-Prussianism of the older Communist cadres and adopted the military reformers of the Napoleonic era as the fathers of the new paramilitary People’s Police founded in 1952. In 1953, the authorities used the occasion of the 140th anniversary of the wars against Napoleon to launch a propaganda campaign in which the events of 1813 were reframed to serve the interests of the Communist polity. The theme of ‘Russo-German friendship’ naturally loomed large and 1813 now figured as a ‘people’s uprising’ against tyranny and monarchy.
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The creation of the prestigious Order of Scharnhorst in 1966 for operatives of the National People’s Army, television serials on Scharnhorst and Clausewitz in the late 1970s, the appearance of Ingrid Mittenzwei’s pathbreaking bestseller
Frederick II of Prussia
in 1979 and the relocation of Christian Daniel Rauch’s splendid equestrian statue of the king to a prominent position on Unter den Linden were just some of the milestones in the evolution of an increasingly sympathetic and differentiated approach to the history of the Prussian state. The aim – at least of the state authorities – was to deepen the public identity of the GDR by annexing to it a version of the history and traditions of Prussia. It was partly in answer to these developments that the authorities in West Berlin and their backers in the Federal Republic supported the immense Prussia exhibition that
opened in West Berlin’s Gropius Building in 1981. And yet, for all the controversy and genuine public interest on both sides of the German – German border, these remained top-down initiatives, driven by the imperatives of ‘political education’ and ‘social paedagogy’. They were about the identities of states, not of the people who live in them.

But while the emotional resonance of Prussia has faded, attachments to Brandenburg remain strong. After 1945, the GDR authorities made a concerted effort to erase the regional identities that pre-existed the socialist state. The five
Länder
in the eastern zone (including Brandenburg) were abolished in 1952 and replaced with fourteen completely new ‘districts’ (
Bezirke
). The aim was not merely to expedite the centralization of the East German administration, but also ‘to create new popular allegiances’, to supersede the traditional regional identifications with ‘new, socialist identities’.
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Yet the extirpation of regional identities proved extraordinarily difficult. Regional fairs, music, cuisine and literary cultures flourished, despite the ambivalence and intermittent hostility of the central administration. Official efforts to encourage emotional attachments to the newly minted ‘socialist homelands’ of the 1952 districts generated only superficial acknowledgement from the majority of East Germans.

How hardy the traditional affiliations were became clear in 1990, when the districts were abandoned and the old
Länder
reinstated. The county of Perleberg in the Prignitz to the north-east of Berlin had been part of the Mark Brandenburg since the fourteenth century. In 1952, it was enlarged to encompass three Mecklenburg villages and incorporated into the district of Schwerin (a name traditionally associated not with Brandenburg, but with its northern neighbour, the Duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin). In 1990, after forty years in Mecklenburg exile, the people of the county of Perleberg took the opportunity to assert their attachment to Brandenburg. Seventy-eight point five per cent of Perleberg voters opted to return and the county was duly transferred to Brandenburg administration. This caused consternation, however, among the inhabitants of the Mecklenburg villages that had been merged into Perleberg county in 1952. The men and women of Dambeck and Brunow loudly demanded a retransfer to their ancestral Mecklenburg. Late in 1991, after protests and negotiations, their wish was granted. Now everybody was happy. Everybody, that is, except the people of Klüss, population
c.
150, whose village was officially attached to Brunow
but actually lay right on the old border with Brandenburg. Since the eighteenth century, Klüss had depended for its livelihood upon cross-border transactions (including a lucrative smuggling trade), and its residents were reluctant to cut their traditional ties with the Mark.
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