![]() 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 many disparate strands in a long and ultimately forlorn history., Many states have been conquered, partitioned, occupied, "ended" and even destroyed. 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., The story of Prussia is one that has been told many times, but seldom as intelligently, elegantly and interestingly as it is here. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |