Brandenburg and Prussia- A holiday -Part 1- The History Copyright- Robert Fullarton 2017

Brandenburg and Prussia- A holiday

-Part 1- The History

Copyright- Robert Fullarton 2017

I was recently on holiday in the German state of Brandenburg. It is a beautiful land, with the floodplains of the rivers Havel and the Spree, where the rivers create lakes of great beauty. I went to Potsdam, former haunt of the Prussian kings, the Hohenzollern dynasty that abdicated, under Kaiser Wilhelm II and came to its finality in November 1918 at the end of ww1.

Even on the train ride south west, out of Berlin, you are surrounded by forests, the great “green lungs” of the Grosser Tiergarten, Grunewald Forest, the Duppler Forst by the Wannsee, there are these impressive stretches of pine and birch by the river Havel. This is a land of great aesthetic beauty, in the former GDR, and where sinister Nazi planning took place in a Wannsee villa for the “final solution” of the Jewish people.

This is the land of Frederick the Great (Fredrick II of Prussia) that gave rise to the Hohenzollern dynasty, home to its fine palaces that rivalled the Habsburg Court and the fine chateaux’s of Bourbon France. One man's egomania, vision for architectural perfection and precision, for philosophy and military ideal echoed through the centuries that followed. Frederick II was militarily a gambler against the odds, facing enemies beyond his own numerical strength, taking on the European powers of France, Russia and Austria. He played a diplomatic game of chess with Maria Theresa’s Austria, striking her armies with speed, taking the Polish region of Silesia, while maintaining a pivotal and precious alliance with Great Britain.

His goal was to make Prussia the strongest of the German states and downgrade the status and power of Habsburg Austria. During his reign the state of Brandenburg was joined with the duchy of East Prussia, West Prussia (Royal Prussia) after the first partition of Poland and the conquest of Polish Silesia. Berlin became the royal city of Prussia that slowly began to flourish eventually under the architectural genius of Fredrick Schinkle.

Fredrick the Great was called an enlightened despot (an autocratic monarch) who effectively reformed and strengthened the Prussian army (known for being an army with a country!) he welcomed thousands of Huguenot expellees, who brought with them the linen industry along with German colonists from the Palatine of the Rhine. Frederick was an art connoisseur, having acquired Caravaggio, Rubens and Van Dyck paintings for his private collection, he was also a prolific composer of flute sonatas and lover of Ancient Greek Literature.

His palace Sans Soucci (built by the Prussian architect Georg Wenslaus Von Knobblesdorf) stands ostentatiously like as if it were meant to be a throne above the stairs to heaven, above a fine water feature, fountain and sculpture work, this palace was meant to be his own private summer retreat. Its citron lemon facade, French formal gardens, and sculptures (meant to represent nature and pleasure) reflected the Kings vivacious passion for the arts and yet his own egotistical vanity at times seems to speak in the sheer volume of palatial designs his architects had to contest with, as he was according to local sources meticulous with the construction of both the Sans Soucci and the Neues Palais (New Palace) which had to be built according to his ideals. These buildings were built in the architectural style that was known as Frederican Rocco.

Brandenburg had previously been a backwater off the world stage, having been largely devastated by the armies of the Catholic League during the 30 years war which ended in 1648. The electors of Brandenburg grew in stature and Elector Frederick III of Brandenburg succeeded to becoming king of the Dukedom of Prussia (which was the Baltic territories around Konigsburg where the Teutonic Knights had previously ruled). 

Prussia was in reality a political phenomenon, a consequence of the Germanic conquest and the colonisation of the Baltic coast, whose armies were living the legacy of the Teutonic Knights of the 12th to 14th centuries who were an elite warrior, monastic order, whose greed for land and wealth, faced the antagonism of the powerful Lithuanian-Polish Commonwealth and the Papal States. The 26th Grand master of the Teutonic Order Ulrich Von Jungingen, who commanded the Teutonic knight armies was badly defeated by the joint Lithuanian-Polish army at the battle of Tannenburg at 1410. The order’s expansionist ambition was cut short and its long decline began to set in after this defeat.

However this order, with its warlike ambition, duty to discipline, rank, file and conquest, gave the new Prussia of Frederick the Great and the Hohenzollern Dynasty an identity to thrive upon. The Iron Cross and the Order of the Black Eagle all emerged as old Teutonic symbols to become the laurels, medals and orders of the new dynasty, that like its predecessor, loved the art of war (shown by the likes of Von Clausewitz, Von Blucher and even Otto Von Bismarck) and likewise subjected the Slavic peoples (Sorbs, Poles, Kashubians and even Lithuanians) into the new state of Prussia, that would recover from its atrocious defeats under Napoleon at Jena and Auerstedt in 1806 and the Occupation of Berlin. When the French army marched through the Brandenburg gate in triumph that was when the Prussian people had determined not to rest until the French had been expelled from German soil.

The Hohenzollern dynasty rose from its territorial gains at the conference of Vienna 1815, after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo to double in size, in population and in resources as the occupants of the Rhineland, Westphalia and the Ruhr valley. The Prussian monopoly over Germany- with its rulling dynasty and nobility of power hungry land owners (Junkers)- along with its triumphant army (having beaten Denmark, Austria and France all by 1871) appealed for German unification and so there came a common German people and an empire declared at the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles, at the high water mark of Prussian power in Europe.

Today the state of Prussia (or Borussia as it was also called) has been wiped off the map, after two world wars, after the murderous campaigns of Adolf Hitler and the revenge killings of a wrathful Russian army, of rapes, mass killings, tit-for tat murders, some 14 million Germans were expelled along with east Prussians to head west. Stalin pressed the western Allies at the Potsdam conference for the new German border to be drawn up along the Oder line west of Stettin and south to the border of Saxony. Many marched west with their belongings in desperation carrying their barrows during the coldest winter of 100 years, many died of disease, others were crushed under T34 tanks and many more went hungry. 

The war in the east, to understand it was like something from St. John’s Apocalypse, one of utter destruction, inflammable hatred, where the Wehrmacht had sowed such destruction and reaped the Soviet fire, in a time of horrific cruelty, barbarity and hardship. The only memory of Prussia alive today can be seen in the palaces of the Hohenzollern Dynasty and in the Prussian parks and castle society that keeps the history alive for all people to enjoy wonderful architecture and art and to learn from the mistakes of former rulers and from the softening of the Iron Kingdom that had been broken in time.