Iron Kingdom : The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (113 page)

The continuity between the Prussian past and the National Socialist present was asserted at many levels in the cultural policy of the regime after 1933. A famous political poster depicted Hitler as the latest in a succession of German statesmen extending from Frederick the Great via Bismarck to Hindenburg. Shortly after the ‘Day of Potsdam’, Hitler and Goebbels reinforced public awareness of these themes with the ‘Days of Tannenberg’, a propaganda spectacle centred on the inauguration of a vast national monument on 27 August 1933. Consisting of a circle of vast towers joined by massive walls, the Tannenberg monument recalled both the defeat of the German Order at the hands of a Muscovite army in 1410 and the victory of 1914 by which the Germans took ‘revenge’ on their erstwhile Russian foes. It also served to project the (utterly unhistorical) idea that East Prussia had always been the bastion of ‘Germandom’ against the Slavic east. As the ‘Victor of Tannenberg’, the 87-year-old Hindenburg was once again wheeled out to perform the liturgical honours for a now irreversibly Nazified Germany. When he died almost a year later, his body – along with that of his wife – was entombed in one of the towers of the monument. In accordance with the dead man’s wish that he should be buried ‘under a single slab of East Prussian stone’ the entrance to his tomb was surmounted with a huge lintel of solid granite, the ‘Hindenburg Stone’. This stone had been unearthed near Cojehnen in the flatlands of northern East Prussia, and was well known to German geologists as one of the largest monoliths in the region. Working to tight deadlines, a team of stonemasons and mining specialists cleared the earth from around the granite mass, cut it with explosive charges and power tools into a vast oblong and transported it to the monument on a purpose-built railway.
⁹⁶

57. The ‘Hindenburg stone’: workers rest after excavating earth from under the monolith, photograph, c.1930s

The official architecture of the Third Reich invoked a distinctively Prussian cultural heritage. We see it in the three ‘
Ordensburgen
’ constructed during the Third Reich at Crössinsee, Vogelsang and Sonthofen for the elite schooling of future party cadres. With their soaring towers and frowning eaves, these monumental structures recalled the castles of the German Order that had once conquered the ‘German east’ and established itself in the Baltic principality of Prussia. Another very different Prussian architectural legacy lived on in the neo-classical public buildings commissioned by the regime as part of the National Socialist reshaping of German urban space. Hitler’s favourite architect, Paul Ludwig Troost, was a disciple of Schinkel (1781–1841), the canonical exponent of the ‘Prussian building style’. Troost’s House of German Art, constructed in 1933–7 on the southern margin of the English Garden in Munich, was widely seen as a twentieth-century gloss on the austere neo-classicism of Schinkel’s Old Museum in Berlin.

Albert Speer, a party member from 1931 who became Hitler’s court architect after Troost’s early death in 1934, was likewise an admirer of Schinkel. Speer hailed from a family with a long architectural tradition – his grandfather had studied under Schinkel at the Berlin Academy of
Building, and his most important teacher at the Technical University Berlin-Charlottenburg was Heinrich Tessenow, who was well known for having converted Schinkel’s Neue Wache on Unter den Linden into a memorial for the fallen of the First World War. The façade and courts of Speer’s New Reich chancellery, commissioned by Hitler at the beginning of 1938 and completed after twelve months of frenzied construction on 12 January 1939, made numerous conscious references to Schinkel’s most famous buildings. The continuity message was driven home in a sumptuous official volume published in 1943 under the auspices of the Reich Chamber of Architects. Entitled
Karl Friedrich Schinkel: The Forerunner of the New German Architectural Ideology
, the book expressly set out to locate the achievements of Nazi building within the Prussian neo-classicist tradition.
⁹⁷

58. Hindenburg’s coffin is carried into his mausoleum under the battlements of the Tannenberg monument; photograph, Matthias Bräunlich, 1935

Prussian subjects also featured prominently in the ideologically harmonized cinematic output of the German film studios after the Nazi seizure of power. Drawing on trends established during the Weimar Republic, Goebbels deployed Prussian themes as instruments of ideological mobilization.
⁹⁸
The escapism and nostalgia of earlier productions made way for dramas with an unmistakable contemporary resonance.
The Old and the Young King
, for example, released in 1935, offered a grotesquely distorted account of the breakdown in the relationship
between the future Frederick the Great and his father Frederick William I. The intrigues of British diplomacy were blamed for the misunderstanding between father and son, and there is a scene where the prince’s French books are piled up and burnt on the order of his father – a contemporary reference that audiences could not have failed to recognize. The execution of Katte is presented as the legitimate expression of a sovereign will. The dialogue included such gems of anachronism as the following: ‘I want to make Prussia healthy. And anyone who tries to stop me is a scoundrel’ (Frederick William); and ‘The king does not commit murder. His will is law. And whatever does not submit to him must be annihilated’ (an officer commenting on Katte’s sentence).
⁹⁹

Other major productions dwelt on anecdotal scenes from the life of Frederick the Great, or on dramatic plots set in the context of an historic crisis, such as the Seven Years War or the aftermath of the defeat at the hands of Napoleon in 1806–7. A favoured theme – especially during the war years – was the dramatic interplay between the perfidy of betrayal (of one’s country or one’s leader) and the redemption that comes with self-sacrifice in the name of the greater good.
¹⁰⁰
Nowhere was this theme more trenchantly presented than in the last major film production of the Third Reich,
Kolberg
. This was an epic period drama set in the eponymous fortress, where Gneisenau and Schill collaborated with the civil authorities in the town to hold the numerically superior French at bay. Against all odds – and contrary to the historical record – the French are forced to fall back and the town is unexpectedly saved by a peace treaty. Here was the image of Prussia as a kingdom of the pure will, holding out by courage and fortitude alone. The film’s purpose was obvious enough; it was a call to mobilize every last resource against the enemies who were closing in around Germany. It was, as the director Veit Harlan put it, a ‘symbol of the present’ that should give viewers strength ‘for today, for the time of our own struggle’. Whether this objective was achieved may be doubted: there were very few functioning cinemas by the time the film was available for general release. Where the film did find an audience, the response was one of resignation and gloom. Amid the ruins and chaos of spring 1945, there were very few Germans who could still believe that Germany might be rescued by the efforts of a band of patriots.

It would be a mistake to see all this purely as cynical manipulation. Goebbels had a remarkable propensity to believe his own lies. And
Hitler’s subjective identification with Frederick the Great was so intense that the only decoration in the Reich Chancellery bunker, in which Hitler spent the last days of his life sixteen metres below the streets of Berlin, was Graff’s portrait of Frederick the Great. Throughout the war years, Hitler repeatedly compared himself to Frederick, the man to whose ‘heroism’ Prussia owed its historical ascendancy.
¹⁰¹
‘From this picture,’ he told the tank commander Guderian at the end of February 1945, ‘I always draw new strength when the bad news threatens to crush me.’ In the unreal, detached atmosphere of the bunker, it was easy to imagine that the history of Prussia was re-enacting itself in the epic drama of the Third Reich. Goebbels bolstered Hitler’s morale during the early months of 1945 with readings from Carlyle’s
Life of Frederick the Great
, especially those passages that described how in the darkest hour of the Seven Years War, when all seemed lost, Prussia was saved from destruction by the death of Tsarina Elisabeth in February 1762.
¹⁰²
Hitler drew on the same historical themes when he spent four days in early April 1945 trying to stiffen Mussolini’s resolve. The monologues he delivered at the war-weary
Duce
included long disquisitions on the history of Prussia.
¹⁰³
So tight was the grip of this historical romance on the mind of Goebbels that the propaganda minister responded with elation and a sense of triumph to the news of the death of President Franklin Roosevelt on 12 April 1945. He believed 1945 was to be the
annus mirabilis
of the Third Reich. He ordered that champagne be served in his office and immediately put a call through to Hitler’s apartment: ‘My Führer, I congratulate you. Roosevelt is dead! Fate has struck down your greatest enemy. God has not abandoned us.’
¹⁰⁴

None of this should be read as evidence of the continuing vitality of the ‘Prussian tradition’. Those who seek to legitimate a claim to power in the present often have recourse to the idea of tradition. They decorate themselves with its cultural authority. But the encounter between the self-proclaimed inheritors of tradition and the historical record rarely takes place on equal terms. The National Socialist reading of the Prussian past was opportunistic, distorted and selective. The entire historical career of the Prussian state was shoehorned into the paradigm of a national German history conceived in racist terms. The Nazis admired the military state-building of the ‘soldier king’ but had little sympathy for or understanding of the Pietist spirituality that provided an ethical framework for all the king’s endeavours and left such a deep imprint
on his reign – hence, for example, the almost complete evacuation of Christianity from the ceremony in the Garrison Church in March 1933. The Frederick the Great of National Socialist propaganda was a heavily truncated version of the original – the monarch’s insistence on French as the medium of civilized discourse, his disdain for German culture and his ambiguous sexuality were simply airbrushed away. There was little interest in the other Hohenzollern monarchs, with the exception of Wilhelm I, founder of the German Empire of 1871. Frederick William II and Frederick William IV, the sensitive and artistically gifted ‘romantic on the throne’ disappeared almost entirely from view.

Two periods were singled out for their mythopoeic power: the Seven Years War and the Wars of Liberation, but there was no interest in the Prussian enlightenment. The Nazis prized the Prussian reformer Stein for his nationalist commitment; Hardenberg, by contrast, the Francophile
Realpolitiker
and emancipator of the Prussian Jews, languished in obscurity. There was some enthusiasm for Fichte and Schleiermacher, but little official interest in Hegel, whose emphasis on the transcendent dignity of the state was uncongenial to the
völkisch
racism of the National Socialists. In short, Nazi-Prussia was a glittering fetish assembled from fragments of a legendary past. It was a manufactured memory, a talismanic adornment to the pretensions of the regime.

In any case, none of this official enthusiasm for ‘Prussiandom’ (
Preussentum
) could revive the fortunes of the real Prussia. In 1933, the Prussian Landtag was dissolved after new elections had failed to yield a Nazi absolute majority. The Law on the Reorganization of the Reich of January 1934 placed regional governments and the new imperial commissars under the direct authority of the Reich ministry of the interior. The Prussian ministries were gradually merged with their Reich counterparts (with the exception, for technical reasons, of finance) and plans were drawn up (though they remained unrealized in 1945) to partition the state into its constituent provinces. Prussia was still an official designation and a name on the map, indeed it was the only German state not to be formally absorbed into the Reich. But it ceased de facto to exist as a state of any kind. There was no inconsistency here with the regime’sofficial celebrations of the Prussian legacy. The diffuse abstraction ‘Prussiandom’ did not denote a specific form of state, or a particular social constellation, but a disembodied catalogue of virtues, a ‘spirit’ that transcended history and would thrive at least as well in the
‘Führer-democracy’ of the Third Reich asit had under the absolutistrule of Frederick the Great. Hermann Goering, who replaced Papen as commissary minister-president of Prussia in April 1933, invoked this distinction when he addressed the Prussian Council of State in June 1934. ‘The concept of the Prussian state’, he declared, had been ‘subsumed into the Reich’. ‘What remains is the eternal spirit of Prussiandom.’
¹⁰⁵