In some ways I think Bismarck turned his back on Prussia. Why is that? The Hohenzollern kings ruled first Prussia, then Germany from 1701 to 1918 Image: Burgverwaltung Hohenzollern He plays less of a role in your book than in most works of Prussian history. But that was something they failed to do. It was only during the unstable period of the 1850s, 60s and 70s that Prussian statesmen, particularly Prussian Prime Minister and German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, began to imagine that they could tame nationalism. Prussia responded very hostilely to early German nationalism because the Hohenzollern rulers rightly recognized that it would act like a kind of corrosive acid eating away at everything the Prussian state stood for. These were ideas that had nothing to do with the uprising of a national movement. Throughout its history Prussia had been the most un-national state you can imagine, partly because it contained such large numbers of non-Germans, but also because the whole idea of its existence was that of the sovereign, monarchical state, interwoven with the idea of the sovereignty of law. That, in my view, is completely and utterly wrong.

The emergence of the German nation is the thing that gives meaning to the whole history of Prussia. And the answer was that Prussia was the steering, shaping and sometimes manipulative power that would bring the German nation into existence. Just as we today tend to see the rise of the Third Reich in 1933 as the end of an era and explain how Germany got to that point, previous generations tried to explain how German history had got to 1871 and the creation of the German Empire. Prussia's task in history had been to create the German nation. In older historical literature, nationalism was seen as the culmination of Prussian history. Prussian culture, including architecture, blossomed in the 19th century Image: picture-alliance/ ZB Prussia was a relatively enlightened, progressive state that inadvertently destroyed itself when it enlisted the force of German nationalism. That and the opening up of archives of the former East Germany prompted a rethink. With the re-unification of Germany, it all became visible and got reconnected to the larger German national entity. So much of what was left of the old Prussian state was in former Communist East Germany, so it was kind of locked away.

The fall of the Berlin Wall and German re-unification have triggered a process of re-imagining the German past in general and Prussia in particular. DW-WORLD.DE: Are you surprised that an academic book on Prussia could make the German bestseller lists?Ĭhristopher Clark: I certainly didn't expect success on that level.

Prussia iron kingdom