The topographer Nicolaus Leuthinger, author of an early description of Brandenburg, wrote in 1598 of a ‘flat land, wooded and for the most part swamp.’ ‘Sand,’ flatness, ‘bogs’ and ‘uncultivated areas’ were recurring topoi in all the early accounts, even the most panegyric…” Monotonous forests of birch and fir covered much of its surface. The rivers that cross it are sluggish meandering streams that lack the grandeur of the Rhine or Danube. Situated in the midst of the dreary plain that stretches from the Netherlands to northern Poland, the Brandenburg countryside has rarely attracted visitors. This was the heartland of the state that would later be known as Prussia. Iron Kingdom traces Prussia's involvement in the continent's foundational religious and political conflagrations: from the devastations of the Thirty Years War through centuries of political machinations to the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire, from the enlightenment of Frederick the Great to the destructive conquests of Napoleon, and from the "iron and blood" policies of Bismarck to the creation of the German Empire in 1871, and all that implied for the tumultuous twentieth century.“In the beginning there was only Brandenburg, a territory encompassing some 40,000 square kilometers and centered on the city of Berlin. With its capital in Berlin, Prussia grew from being a small, poor, disregarded medieval state into one of the most vigorous and powerful nations in Europe. What we find is a kingdom that existed nearly half a millennium ago as a patchwork of territorial fragments, with neither significant resources nor a coherent culture. But as Christopher Clark reveals in this pioneering history, Prussia's legacy is far more complex. In their eagerness to erase all traces of the Third Reich from the earth, the Allies believed that Prussia, the very embodiment of German militarism, had to be abolished.
In the aftermath of World War II, Prussia-a centuries-old state pivotal to Europe's development-ceased to exist.
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