“Many products of Western European societies, from coins to castles, moved eastward in medieval times. So did more advanced agricultural methods, such as improved plows, the horse collar, and new systems of crop rotation. Germans living in Eastern Europe became in effect enclaves of Western European culture there. The landed nobility of Eastern Europe often deliberately attracted German farmers by allowing them to settle in towns and villages under German laws. Hundreds of villages in Silesia were under German law at the end of the thirteenth century and more than a thousand by the middle of the fourteenth century, when more than a hundred towns were also under German law.” — Thomas Sowell, Black Rednecks and White Liberals, pp. 174-175
While there are some errors concerning Thomas Sowell’s treatment of German history, there is undeniably a lot of history about the Germans in which much of post-1945 history attempted to “decolonize” national histories—be it the downplaying of German history in Eastern Europe and former German lands via destruction of German heritage there, and the expulsion and genocide of Germans in lost Eastern German lands (the Ostgebiete) and Eastern Europe. The irony is rather real: much like how Jews were caricatured in medieval Europe and, later, in the Islamic world, Germans are, to this day, mostly defined by both world wars, the Holocaust, and Prussia.
Most people exposed to popular historiography of Prussia will always repeat something along the lines of militarism and the Junker-manorial exploitation. Perhaps the only thing true here is the latter—the post-Reformation and pre-Frederician Junker system was punitive, similar to Eastern European manorial systems like the Polish szlachta or Russian boyardom, and the Junkers’ powers were curtailed after the promulgation of Frederician laws (Allgemeines Landrecht) and post-1807 Stein-Hardenberg reforms that abolished serfdom.
The real history of Prussia (and to a large extent, Germany) is that of the chicken or the egg question. While Prussia had a strong military, thanks to the legacy of the Teutonic Order and lists of brilliant commanders like Moltke the Elder or Scharnhorst, it was mostly an economic backwater until Friedrich the Great and then the reforms. The comicality of the narrative of “Prussian militarism” doesn’t hold firm—for most of its existence, Prussia didn’t initiate wars but often responded to religious (such as the Thirty Years’ War), political (Napoleonic, South Schleswig Wars), and also avoided ones like the Crimean War, though it certainly had its own expansionist tendencies. But, notwithstanding that, all European powers maintained vaster empires than Prussia, before and after 1945.
And wars are costly, whether medieval or modern warfare. Prussia’s explosive rise to power in the mid-late 18th century and emergence as an industrialized economic powerhouse in Europe in the 19th century isn’t due to constant warfare, but the aforementioned reforms (especially the post-1807 Stein-Hardenberg reforms) that abolished guild restrictions and serfdom, created a free market system, at first under a silver thaler before transitioning to the Goldmark in 1873 (two years after the German Unification).
The Forgotten Legacy of Prussian Industriousness
The reforms themselves weren’t initially smooth—they were done when the devastation of the Napoleonic Wars onto Prussia was at its height and the Hohenzollerns had retreated deep in the Memel area (modern Klaipeda), and were received by a society that was deeply accustomed to manorial paternalism. When Prussia abolished serfdom, roughly 80 percent of the Prussian population were serfs, compared to 3 percent elsewhere in what is now Western Germany.
But growth and development were never always immediate as we’d imagine, for the consequences often arrive at a faster and slower pace than what political and historical narratives preferred. Mainstream German history often emphasizes and, to some extent, idolizes Bismarck and the 1871 Unification as triumphant nation-building that established a Great Power—power by fiat decree, much like other political mythologies throughout the world. Yet, the period before the 1871 Unification is often downplayed or minimized as a period of a lost path towards democracy (the 1848 Revolutions) and later takeover by the “reactionary” Prussian monarchy. The masterminds behind the 1807 reforms, Karl August von Hardenberg and Heinrich Friedrich Karl vom und zum Stein, were never given the same treatment as Konrad Adenauer or Ludwig Erhard, owing to the politically contentious legacy of Prussia—which is partly motivated by the historical tensions between cultural and religious differences between predominantly Protestant Prussia and Catholic Southwestern Germany.
When the devastation of the Napoleonic Wars subsided, the Prussian economy simply boomed. While mainstream narratives often promote innovators and entrepreneurs like Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, or Carl Benz (the man who founded what would be Mercedes Benz and wasn’t easily associated with Prussia), names like Werner von Siemens and August Borsig are often forgotten. Siemens, though born in Lower Saxony, served for a period in the Prussian Army and later built his career in Berlin and invented the first electric tram and electric elevator, and his company effectively built telegraph communication lines across not only Germany but also across Europe, Africa, North America, and Asia. Borsig was born in Breslau (now lost to Poland), and reversed the Prussian and German dependency on British locomotives.
Borsig and Siemens are far from the only individuals and firms that helped build a gigantic German economy, be it during the Kaiserreich period or after 1948. Of course, the German economy was far from perfect; avid readers of Rothbard would recall that Germany, particularly under the chancellorship of Bismarck, was incredibly protectionist towards wheat and agricultural imports from America (thanks to the continued influence of the Junker estates and their vested political powers in the Herrenhaus, equivalent to the British House of Lords).
The “Immigrants” Who Rebuilt Post-War West Germany
And Prussia certainly didn’t disappear after 1947, despite the arrogance and cruelty of the Allies and the Soviets in engineering the erasure of the Prussian people by genocidal killings, expulsions, and a permanent tarring of Prussia as this otherworldly evil that must be abolished. When roughly 10 million Prussians from what were Silesia, Pomerania, West Prussia, and East Prussia arrived in a bombed-out and starving West Germany, with nothing other than the clothes on their back, these same people later became part of a wealthy West Germany through sheer determination.
And I mean every word of that. Contrary to romanticized mainstream German narratives of “our fellow countrymen suffered terribly, but the entire German nation recovered as a whole,” these Prussians, upon their arrival into West Germany, were far from being treated with decency. Thanks to Allied cruelty, the forced sharing of homes with West Germans (through the Zwangseinquartierung law), as well as historical religious animosity between the more Protestant Prussians and Catholic Westphalians, Bavarians, and Rhenish, they were often discriminated against—towards the point that the Prussians had to call for “equal rights as citizens. . .but also in everyday life” and “reasonable integration of all professional groups of expellees.”
But there’s another assets they carried, aside from the memories of Breslau, Danzig, and Königsberg were the skills and a very German tradition of specialization and adaptation. They were often direct competitors to the native West Germans during the initial years of West Germany and provided an educated workforce for a re-industrializing West Germany. Of course, their integration was far from smooth, and to this very day, that historical injustice done towards them by Western Germans and the Allies still remains deep within the minds of some 25 percent of the German population. But, despite current woes with recession, the Prussian people are, by all metrics, richer, healthier, and live under a freer market than those who now live in their stolen homes in Poland or Russia.
A Word about Prussia
It is wholly understandable why many libertarians have an aversion to Prussia—be it with Bismarck, the Hohenzollerns, or the Nazis. But I must interject a couple of things: the protectionism and cronyism of the late Bismarck era, the Wilhelmine era expansionism are and remain universal things practiced by everyone at the time and today, with similar or even greater degrees than that of Prussia or the Kaiserreich. As for Nazi ideology, most people typically skipped over the French and Anglo-American roots of its eugenicism and the Soviet/Stalinist roots of its totalitarian legal system that liquidated the “enemies of the people” and the racial “undesirables.”
Of course, the Nazi ideology should remain condemned for eternity, but to argue that Prussia was a bastion of German reactionarism or militarism and that there exists a lineage from Prussian identity to Nazism is absurd. Nazism was a modern ideology with far more diverse roots and inspirations than just “reactionarism”—many of the men who partook in the attempts on Hitler’s life or opposed him fiercely identified themselves as Prussian. The Prussian people—though many prefer to rest Prussian identity—remain identifiable not just by surnames, but also their business ethics and straightforwardness.
I still fondly recall a general practitioner who identified himself as Prussian, who ran a clinic that was the only one within several towns in Brandenburg. His grandmother was expelled from Königsberg, and he didn’t know how to wrestle with that memory, despite calling himself a proud Prussian. Perhaps he wanted to reconcile Prussian identity and the expellee memory with modern Germany. If anything, the Prussian people and their values still provide immensely valuable lessons; their resilience and ability to thrive in the market are testament to that, and all they have to do is to remember Goldmark and Stein-Hardenberg.
