And while Churchill was undoubtedly right in describing many Prussian soldiers as dull, over-disciplined, and docile, they, and by extension all German soldiers, were also among the most self-reliant, enterprising, and courageous troopers the world has ever known.
Yet one must admit that while far too many Prussian army officers presented themselves as the stiffest of martinets, others exhibited highly inventive military minds and aristocratic Prussian officers formed the core of the group that plotted against Hitler in 1944. Invariably, historians and the public concentrate on the bad sides, which they locate in the notorious Prussian military. In other words, according to Clark, Prussia was basically a state like any other, with good sides and bad sides. Regarding authoritarian practices, for example, Clark notes that in the years between 18 England and Wales executed sixty times as many people-mainly for crimes that we would now consider negligible-as Prussia did with approximately the same number of inhabitants. Instead, he 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.
A historian from Australia now at the University of Cambridge, he has little personal incentive to lament or to celebrate the Prussian record. The goal of Christopher Clark's valuable book is not simply to refute the stereotypes created by Heine, Churchill, and thousands of others throughout the ages. There is the source of the recurring pestilence." And in 1947, blaming Prussia for Nazism and the ravages of World War II, the Allied Control Council in Germany declared: "The Prussian State, which from early days has been a bearer of militarism and reaction in Germany, has de facto ceased to exist." Much later, it was Winston Churchill who spoke, in 1941, of the "hideous onslaught" of the Nazi "war machine with its clanking, heel-clicking dandified Prussian officers." To which he later added: "The core of Germany is Prussia.
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