List of Illustrations and Maps Acknowledgements Introduction 1. The Hohenzollerns of Brandenburg 2. Devastation 3. An Extraordinary Light in Germany 4. Majesty 5. Protestants 6. Powers in the Land 7. Struggle for Mastery 8. Dare to Know! 9. Hubris and Nemesis: 1789-1806 10. The World the Bureaucrats Made 11. A Time of Iron 12. God's March through History 13. Escalation 14. Splendour and Misery of the Prussian Revolution 15. Four Wars 16. Merged into Germany 17. Endings Notes Index
Chris Clark's new history of Prussia trumps all existing accounts. It commands four centuries of complicated history with extraordinary assurance. Its clear and confident argumentation, illuminating concreteness of detail, and sheer richness of texture make it the ideal general history. -- Geoff Eley, author of A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society Lucid, learned, and light-touched, this comprehensive history of the Prussian state and the society it molded eclipses its rivals, both Anglo-American and German. Its well-crafted narrative form is reader-friendly, while the interpretation it offers will impress seasoned specialists with its sophistication, knowledgeability, and freedom from stereotype and ideas of predetermined destiny. It will be required reading for all students of the history of modern Germany. -- William Hagen, author of Ordinary Prussians: Brandenburg Junkers and Villagers, 1500-1840 This book is everything its subject is supposed not to be: it's sparkling, light-footed and intellectually supple at every turn. Even more refreshingly, it narrates the story of a Prussia that was itself the source of much that was socially and intellectually progressive. The history of Prussia is a history of the West: we are all Prussians one way or another. This humane book, with its unflagging narrative sweep and deftness of touch, reveals the truth of that surprising statement. -- James Simpson, author of Reform and Cultural Revolution Clark's great accomplishment is to tell the story of the Prussian state's rise and fall in a splendid and compelling way. His interpretation is a sustained critique of the still widely accepted view of Prussia's deviation from the western norm that led to the catastrophes of war and dictatorship in the twentieth century. Iron Kingdom is by far the best account of Prussia in English and as good as anything I know in German as well. -- James J. Sheehan, President of the American Historical Association Prussia was a project for state power invented by monarchs and landlords, generals and civil servants from the vulnerable provinces of north central Europe -- slowly mobilizing civic loyalties and reinvented for an age of German nationalism and encroaching democracy. In this epic volume, Christopher Clark enriches classic scholarship with the most recent findings to write Prussia's 500-year story from its unpromising Brandenburg origins through its manipulation by the Nazis and final dissolution by the postwar Allies as the byword for German aggression. -- Charles S. Maier, author of Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors
Christopher Clark is Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge and Ostrer Professorial Fellow in History at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge.
[An] enthralling, shrewd, and sparkling narrative… Clark’s
immensely learned, judicious, and entertaining book provides a
definitive general narrative of its subject for our times… Clark’s
achievement is substantial.
*New York Review of Books*
Iron Kingdom, Christopher Clark’s stately, authoritative history of
Prussia from its humble beginnings to its ignominious end, presents
a much more complicated and compelling picture of the German state,
which is too often reduced to a caricature of spiked helmets and
polished boots. Prussia and its army were inseparable, but Prussia
was also renowned for its efficient, incorruptible civil service;
its innovative system of social services; its religious tolerance;
and its unrivaled education system, a model for the rest of Germany
and the world. This too was Prussia—a tormented kingdom that, like
a tragic hero, was brought down by the very qualities that raised
it up. Mr. Clark, a senior lecturer in modern European history at
Cambridge University, does an exemplary job. A lively writer, he
organizes masses of material in orderly fashion, clearly
establishing his main themes and pausing at crucial junctures to
recapitulate and reconsider. Prussia, a self-invented artifact
right down to its name, demands the kind of careful demythologizing
that it receives from Mr. Clark, who gently but insistently exposes
the flaws in most of the received wisdom about his subject. A
result is an illuminating, profoundly satisfying work of history,
brightened by vivid character sketches of the principals in his
drama.
*New York Times*
To account for the rise and tumultuous extinction of Prussia is to
explain how contemporary Europe came to assume its current form. It
is a vast, Zeppelin-sized historical challenge; but it is also one
to which Christopher Clark rises triumphantly, piloting his
enormous subject through the best part of four centuries,
traversing en route most of the continent of Europe, and carrying
the reader with him on a bracing and exhilarating ride… For sheer
range and intellectual horsepower, this book ranks as the best
history of Prussia currently available in any language. However,
more than that (and here it beats its German rivals hands-down), it
is written with a literary finesse and narrative elan that
establish its author as one of the finest writers of history at
work in Britain today. It is a virtuoso performance.
*Sunday Times*
This book can…be read for sheer pleasure… It is the pleasure of
discovery that Christopher Clark offers in this account of the rise
and fall of Prussia… Prussia was much more than its wars, but
without its wars it would not have been Prussia, and they and their
protagonists (Mr. Clark’s Bismarck is priceless), origins, conduct,
and consequences occupy a large part of this excellent book, which
scholars of Germany and Prussia will want to ponder very carefully,
and which many an unencumbered reader will simply enjoy.
*New York Sun*
[A] valuable book… [Clark] shows how complicated the history of
Prussia really was, and how exciting were the contrasts in its
history between religious tolerance and intolerance, enlightenment
and obscurantism, centralized power and regional particularism, the
rule of law and ruthless authoritarianism… Prussia and its army
were full of contradictions, and Clark analyzes them astutely in
his book, which is certainly the best recent history of Prussia…
[A] masterpiece in which charming anecdotes and serious
intellectual analyses mix comfortably with political and military
history and descriptions of cultural and social phenomena… Clark’s
book seldom becomes dull, owing to the elegance of its style and
the colorfulness of some of its powerful characters.
*New Republic*
You couldn’t have the triumph and the tragedy of Prussia better
told. Christopher Clark has a voracious appetite for detail and a
tart turn of phrase. His study of Prussia, from beginning to end,
vividly paints one of the big pictures of European history.
*The Observer*
From the military and agricultural innovations of Frederick the
Great to nineteenth-century high academic politics to Bismarck’s
social-security system, this magisterial and remarkably
well-written history of Prussia traces back to the eighteenth
century the region’s surprisingly tolerant and intellectually rich
culture. Clark, a Cambridge historian, suggests that the world is
poorer for Prussia’s absence.
*The Atlantic*
The story of Prussia is one that has been told many times, but
seldom as intelligently, elegantly and interestingly as it is here.
Christopher Clark has written a monumental history of a state that
started from small beginnings as the Mark of Brandenburg, grew in
size, violence and pretensions, and ended up being destroyed
forever in 1947, when the victorious Allies decided they had had
enough of this troublesome phenomenon… The bulk of a fascinating
text, littered with intriguing detail and wry observation, focuses
on this transformation in the 200 years from the bloody Thirty
Years War in the 17th century (which cost Prussia half its
population) to the creation by the Prussian nobleman Otto von
Bismarck of a German Empire in 1871… Clark has written a masterly
synthesis of [the] many disparate strands in a long and ultimately
forlorn history.
*Daily Telegraph*
A massively impressive history of Prussia that surely takes its
place as the definitive history of this much-maligned state.
Elegant, entertaining, nicely illustrated and full of arresting
characters, this is a terrific book.
*Daily Telegraph*
Iron Kingdom is not just good: it is everything a history book
ought to be. The research is scholarly but never obtrusive, the
prose sprightly but never flippant, the judgements bold but always
sound… The nemesis of Prussia has cast such a long shadow that
German historians have tiptoed around the subject. Thus it was left
to an Englishman to write what is surely the best history of
Prussia in any language.
*Sunday Telegraph*
It is only by contrary example that this book may remind us how
miserable some hastily written products of the recent ‘history
boom’ have been. Clark is not one to swagger over the dead, secure
in the knowledge that they cannot answer back. Instead, this is a
well-informed and fair-minded historical investigation, written by
a man who is plainly fascinated by the changing circumstances under
which lives are lived and decisions made. One of the pleasures of
this book is to watch Clark weighing the undeniable otherness of
the past and resisting any tendency to convert it into a costume
drama.
*The Guardian*
Many states have been conquered, partitioned, occupied, ‘ended’ and
even destroyed. Prussia is unique in that it was formally abolished
by decree of the British, American, French and Soviet victors in
February 1947, after it ceased to exist in any meaningful sense…
Christopher Clark begins Iron Kingdom, his history of ‘the rise and
downfall of Prussia,’ with this famous decree, but his remarkable
book is not another exorcism, nor an uncritical celebration. He
provides a sophisticated yet accessible account of how a middling
German dynasty manoeuvred its way into the European pentarchy of
powers.
*The Independent*
Iron Kingdom is a triumph of scholarship and imagination. This is a
big book in every sense—at almost 800 pages, it’s not one to slip
in your briefcase for the train—but it zips along in a manner that
belies its weight. In part this is because Clark writes so
elegantly. This is history in its ‘grand sweep,’ but his vivid
sketches of characters, places and events lighten the narrative.
Yet for all its entertainment value, Iron Kingdom is at heart an
unflinching engagement with one of Europe’s most complex and
far-reaching political and cultural entities, spanning four
centuries of history and, he suggests at the end, even beyond.
*Irish Times*
Clark’s book, a survey of Prussian history from 1600 to 1947, is
well-written, even sometimes sprightly, although it is hard to make
easy reading of matters such as Pietism or the administrative
reforms of the Baron Stein. Iron Kingdom’s triumph lies in a
narrative structure that is even more impressive than the mass of
detail that forms it; and one feels secure in the hands not only of
a scholar but of a humane and fair interpreter of history.
*The Spectator*
This beautifully written and brilliantly argued longer study will
reward scholars, students, and educated laypeople who invest the
time to read it… [A] riveting narrative.
*Choice*
Chris Clark’s new history of Prussia trumps all existing accounts.
It commands four centuries of complicated history with
extraordinary assurance. Its clear and confident argumentation,
illuminating concreteness of detail, and sheer richness of texture
make it the ideal general history.
*Geoff Eley, author of A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to
the History of Society*
Lucid, learned, and light-touched, this comprehensive history of
the Prussian state and the society it molded eclipses its rivals,
both Anglo-American and German. Its well-crafted narrative form is
reader-friendly, while the interpretation it offers will impress
seasoned specialists with its sophistication, knowledgeability, and
freedom from stereotype and ideas of predetermined destiny. It will
be required reading for all students of the history of modern
Germany.
*William Hagen, author of Ordinary Prussians: Brandenburg
Junkers and Villagers, 1500–1840*
Prussia was a project for state power invented by monarchs and
landlords, generals and civil servants from the vulnerable
provinces of north central Europe—slowly mobilizing civic loyalties
and reinvented for an age of German nationalism and encroaching
democracy. In this epic volume, Christopher Clark enriches classic
scholarship with the most recent findings to write Prussia’s
500-year story from its unpromising Brandenburg origins through its
manipulation by the Nazis and final dissolution by the postwar
Allies as the byword for German aggression.
*Charles S. Maier, author of Among Empires: American Ascendancy
and Its Predecessors*
Clark’s great accomplishment is to tell the story of the Prussian
state’s rise and fall in a splendid and compelling way. His
interpretation is a sustained critique of the still widely accepted
view of Prussia’s deviation from the western norm that led to the
catastrophes of war and dictatorship in the twentieth century. Iron
Kingdom is by far the best account of Prussia in English and as
good as anything I know in German as well.
*James J. Sheehan, President of the American Historical
Association*
This book is everything its subject is supposed not to be: it’s
sparkling, light-footed and intellectually supple at every turn.
Even more refreshingly, it narrates the story of a Prussia that was
itself the source of much that was socially and intellectually
progressive. The history of Prussia is a history of the West: we
are all Prussians one way or another. This humane book, with its
unflagging narrative sweep and deftness of touch, reveals the truth
of that surprising statement.
*James Simpson, author of Reform and Cultural Revolution*
Ask a Question About this Product More... |