East Prussia

“ Every year the victory of Sedan is celebrated in Königsberg with great rejoicings. Most of the great Prussian families who have given their sons to the Prussian army have estates in East Prussia, where they are lords of the soil. Their farm-servants, though supposed to be free, are really their serfs, and are kept down with a heavy hand. The Kaiser and his nobles regard East Prussia as the very citadel of their power, and to lose it would be their ruin. ”

“ There came a moment, as I have pointed out in an earlier page in this book, when the Prussian kingship and the electorate of Brandenburg coincided in one person. All men of education know, and all men whatsoever feel, what influence an historical origin will have upon national outlook. East Prussia, therefore, remains to-day something of a political fetish. Its towns may be called colonies of the Germans, the birthplaces or the residences of men famous in the German story. ”

“ East Prussia is a rural region with large estates, and this fact, added to that of its position as a sort of German frontier outpost, has made it intensely patriotic and very conservatively minded. The East Prussian population becomes mixed with people of Lithuanian speech across the Niemen, but Memel, as a town, is naturally largely German. ”

“ As will be noted by reading the chapters on the fighting on the eastern front, here, as in East Prussia, the Russians make a determined advance and actually succeed in conquering this territory from the Austrians. At one time we find them even in possession of all except one of the chief passes in the Carpathians and threatening to overrun the plains of Hungary. To hold Russian Poland it was necessary that they should have a firm grip of East Prussia and Austrian Poland, thus protecting the flanks of their center. ”

“ In Prussia, Frederick William II. (1786-1797) and his people had no feeling so strong as that of hostility to Austria, whose influence was predominant in the minor states. Prussia cared more for getting additional Polish territory than for helping the French emigrants. The Prussian people were separated by rigorous lines into three classes,—nobles, burghers, and peasants. The nobles were poor. The lawful occupations of each class were prescribed by law. "The mass of the peasantry, at least in the country east of the Elbe, were serfs attached to the soil." ”

“ As regards external policy, however, Prussia, while allowing territories on the left bank of the Rhine to go to France, eagerly saw to the increase of her own dominions in the east to the extent of nearly doubling her superficial area by her participation in the second and third partitions of Poland, which took place in 1783 and 1795 respectively. ”

“ But the eastern frontier was a question of life and death for Prussia. If Alexander kept the whole of the great Duchy of Warsaw, the Hohenzollern States would be threatened from the east as grievously as ever they were on the west by the French at Magdeburg. And the Czar seemed resolved to keep the whole of Poland. He told the Prussian envoy, Knesebeck, that, while handing over to Frederick William the whole of Saxony, Russia must retain all the Polish lands, a resolve which would have planted the Russian standards almost on the banks of the Oder. ”

“ That in East Prussia Frederick William I tolerated the Mennonites as indispensable to industry, in spite of their absolute refusal to perform military service, is only one of the numerous well-known cases which illustrates the fact, though, considering the character of that monarch, it is one of the most striking. ”

“ Of the territories by which the original Mark of Brandenburg had been augmented, two were of special importance. In 1525 East Prussia had been5 acquired. This province, which throughout this book will be called by its German name of Ost-Preussen, was richer by far than the Mark, the kernel of the Hohenzollern possessions. It had an important city, Königsberg, for its capital and a coast-line on the Baltic. It constituted the domain of the old Order of Teutonic Knights, permanent crusaders whose task had been to spread the faith and civilisation of their fatherland among the heathen Slavs. ”

“ The success of the Allies in the west was in a measure offset by Teutonic victories in the east. When the invasion of Belgium began, Russia made immediate efforts to counteract by invasion of East Prussia. ”

“ Mä-rī ́a Ter-e ́sa, Queen of Hungary and German Empress; reigned from 1741 to 1780. She was the mother of Marie Antoinette (ong-twa-net) , wife of Louis XVI. of France.
[33] Sīl-ēs ́i-a, since 1742 a province of Prussia in the extreme south-east, between Poland and Bohemia. Most of it is in the basin of the Oder. It is very rich in iron, coal, and metals, and is an important manufacturing region.
[34] Now a province of Prussia, stretching from the Netherlands east to the Elbe, and from the North Sea south to Westphalia and Hesse Nassau. ”

“ The new Prussian territories in the west were largely tinctured with progressive ideas originating in the French Revolution, while the east was dominated by reactionary feudal landowners, the notorious Junker class—a class special to East Prussian territories, including the eastern portion of the Mark of Brandenburg—whom the moderate Conservative Minister Stein himself characterized as "heartless, wooden, half-educated people, only good to turn into corporals or calculating-machines." ”

“ Austria cannot forget that its lords once ruled Germany; it refuses to see in the younger, more virile Prussia an ally, but persists in regarding it as a dangerous rival. Prussia—so it believes—must be opposed in all its aims, because whatever favors Prussia harms Austria, The old unholy jealousy has again broken out; Prussia is to be weakened, destroyed, dishonored. All treaties with Prussia are void, German lords are not only called upon, but persuaded, to sever their alliance with Prussia. Wherever we look, in Germany, we are surrounded by enemies whose war cry is—Down with Prussia! ”

“ I am sure your Excellency will agree with me. It is Prussia's mission to act towards the west. The German nation longs for unity, longs for a strong and powerful leader; Prussia's calling, Prussia's noblest ambition is and must ever be, to place this leadership in the strong hand of her king. Prussia must struggle to command the whole of Germany; she cannot rest until she has attained this high aim for herself and the whole nation. What is now gained is a step--an important step--on the great path which Prussia's German policy must pursue--but it is not its completion. ”

“ As one Principality after another attached itself to the Prussian system, the products of the various regions of Germany, hitherto blocked by the frontier dues of each petty State, moved freely through the land, while the costs attending the taxation of foreign imports, now concentrated upon the external line of frontier, were enormously diminished. Patient, sagacious, and even liberal in its negotiations with its weaker neighbours, Prussia silently connected with itself through the ties of financial union States which had hitherto looked to Austria as their natural head. ”

“ A great part of the Slavic possessions gained in the last two partitions of Poland had been lost, but as an indemnity Prussia had received half of the kingdom of Saxony, in the very center of Germany, and also the Rhine provinces, where the people were thoroughly imbued with the revolutionary doctrines that had prevailed in France. Prussia now embraced all the various types of people included in the German nation and was comparatively free from the presence of non-German races. In this respect it offered a marked contrast to the heterogeneous and mongrel population of its great rival Austria. ”

“ It has evidently grown at the expense of its neighbors, as several of the lesser German states of 1815,—Hanover, Nassau, and Hesse-Cassel,—no longer appear on the map, and Schleswig Holstein, which then belonged to Denmark, is now Prussian. It will be noted that the present German empire does not include any part of the Austrian countries, as did the Confederation of 1815, and that, on the other hand, it does include all of Prussia. The kingdom of Poland has become an integral part of the Russian dominions. ”

“ There was no tact in scoffing at the King’s “North German sound practical sense” by saying, “Had such language fallen from the King of Hanover or of Saxony, I would have understood it,” and there was more weakness and sentimentality than firmness and statecraft in the hand that added, “But up to the present hour I have regarded Prussia as one of the five great Powers which, since the Peace of 1815, have been the guarantors of treaties, the guardians of civilisation, the champions of right, and ultimate arbitrators of the nations ”

“ Austria, it was rumored, was faltering in her fealty; but the military preparations of Prussia were no longer a secret, and to many it seemed as if, as in the days of the Republic, France was about to contend single-handed against the whole of Europe.
In Prussia the warlike enthusiasm of the people was carried to the very highest pitch. The Court, the aristocracy, but more powerful than either, the press, stimulated national courage by recalling to their minds the famous deeds of the Great Frederick, and bidding them remember that Rossbach was won against an army of Frenchmen. ”

“ Delenda est Prussia, understanding thereby not, of course, the inhabitants of Prussian territory as such, but Prussia as a State-system and as an independent Power in Europe, must be the watchword in the present crisis of every well-wisher of Humanity, Germany included. A united Germany, if that be insisted upon, by all means let there be—a federation of all the German peoples with its capital, for that matter, as of old, at Frankfurt-on-the-Main, but with no dominant State and, if possible, excluding Prussia altogether, but certainly as constituted at present. ”

“ Suppress the Hohenzollern dynasty, the Prussian bureaucracy, and the Junker Army, and the Prussian structure crumbles to pieces.
Nature has been niggardly to Prussia. Everything has had to be made with the hands of man. Brandenburg, Pomerania, Western and Eastern Prussia are dreary wastes; Berlin is an oasis of brick and stone amidst a Sahara of sand. The provinces of old Prussia have few industrial resources. The very soil had to be made by intensive agricultural methods. The very population had to be imported. Modern Prussia is neither the gift of Nature nor the outcome of history. ”

“ It was Bismarck’s design to restore the German Empire—not the old, moth-eaten fiction of the past, but an entirely new one—and give Prussia the position it had earned, that of the great center of German racial unity. In this project Austria, long at the head of the old empire, was to have no part, the imperial dignity being conferred upon the venerable King William of Prussia, a monarch whose birth dated back to the eighteenth century, and who had lived throughout the Napoleonic wars. ”

“ In the first place, your majesty, the position of the house of Hapsburg and of Austria in Germany would be deeply compromised by a French alliance. Should your majesty obtain success, half success at the best, public opinion would always regard Prussia as a national martyr, sacrificed to the hereditary enemy of the German nation. This would give Prussia great additional strength, and it would be a fair ground upon which to renew the struggle under more favourable circumstances. ”

“ In fact, it seems now a mere commonplace to assert that Prussia has prospered most when, as under Frederick the Great and William the Great, her policy has been truly German, and that she has fallen back most in the years 1795-1806 and 1848-1852, when the subservience of her Frederick Williams to France and Austria has lost them the respect and support of the rest of the Fatherland. A State that would attract other fragments of the same nation must be attractive, and it must be broadly national if it is to attract. ”

“ Prussia, which has imposed its will, as well as its methods of thought and life on all the rest of Germany, is undoubtedly a military nation.
More than one hundred and twenty-five years ago Mirabeau, the great French orator at the commencement of the Revolution, said, "War is the national industry of Prussia." Later, Napoleon remarked that Prussia "was hatched from a cannon ball," and shortly before the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 the French military attaché, in reporting to his government, wrote that "other countries possessed an army, but in Prussia the army possessed the country." ”

“ Divisions of the Prussian army, numbering nearly 130,000 men, were concentrated in the neighbourhood of Jena, on the Saale. The bolder spirits in the military council pressed for an immediate advance through the Thuringian Forest, and for an attack upon what were supposed to be the scattered detachments of the French in Bavaria. Military pride and all the traditions of the Great Frederick impelled Prussia to take the offensive rather than to wait for the enemy upon the strong line of the Elbe. ”

“ It was sad enough that Austria, in her inimical action, also reckoned upon the internal conflict in Prussia, which was the more zealously stimulated, in proportion as it became clear to the party of progress that the heart of the nation was more and more turning to the statesman who fought his victories, to the greater fame of Prussia and happiness of Germany, upon a field whither they were unable to follow him—upon the field of honor and of deeds. ”