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Prussia weighed heavily on the collective mind of Europe during the 19th and 20th Centuries. My history classes generally blamed the formation of Germany for throwing off the structure of international power in Europe and causing two World Wars. And at the end of WWII, the Western Allies also felt that ‘Prussia’ was behind Germany’s warlike ways and redrew the map of Germany to get rid of the name. Nearly sixty years later, ‘Prussia’ still brings up stereotypes that lie at the root of current German stereotypes.

Christopher Munro Clark’s Iron Kingdom traces the history of Prussia from about 1600 (or, of Brandenburg, just before it acquired Prussia, later known as ‘East Prussia’), though its official dissolution in 1947. Along the way, he takes a good look at the institutions as well as the events and people that shaped the Prussian state. I found the last parts of the book very interesting as he traces some very familiar events from the point of view of Prussia instead of Germany. Since the German Empire did not fully absorb its member states, but Prussia was by far the dominant member, there were some odd administrative fits.

Despite this, much of the lead up and progress of WWI is barely glossed over. It is one of several places where having some idea of the regular history is needed as Clark does not hash it out for you. But one of the most fascinating sections is the interwar years, where he shows that the Prussian administration was a bit more willing to curb the rise of the Nazi party than the German administration. Otto Braun (Prussian Prime Minister) and Albert Grzesinski (Police Chief of Berlin) nearly had Hitler arrested and ejected from the country, but would have been blocked by Heinrich Brüning (Chancellor of Germany). This sort of tension is played up throughout the entire section, before moving on to how various people (including both Hitler and Churchill) played upon the idea of ‘Prussianism’ to try and promote their idea of the character of ‘Germany’.

In all, it is a very good overview of a bit more than three centuries of history. I think it gets a little too dependent on the reader knowing some details of the Napoleonic Wars, and WWI, and so on, but the type of person interested in this book will probably already have the bare essentials needed already.

The fundamental problem with most of ancient history is that the vast bulk of everyone involved left no records behind. There are bright spots, and sometimes stories that were later written down, but sometimes even those iffy sources are missing.

We have some idea of the cultural landscape of central Europe from the first century BC on thanks to Roman records about the ‘barbarians’, but there are no native records to combat Roman bias and prejudice. The Barbarians Speak by Peter Wells is a reassessment of what central Europe was like from about 100 BC to AD 300 based on over a half-century of archaeology, and modern cultural anthropology. It is also kept to a tightly constrained scope, looking mostly at the border regions of the Empire (along the Rhine and Danube), with some study of what has been found in the interior of modern-day Germany, and into the Jutland peninsula. While the conquest of Gaul is very important in the structure of events, the bulk of provincial Gaul is not considered in the book. This isn’t polished history, but rather a first step of synthesizing general trends from a large mass of data.

A number of traditional conceits come up for reexamination. Rome did not conquer an area and then turn the inhabitants into ‘proper’ Roman citizens over the course of the next few generations. Most areas were not incorporated into any sort of Roman administration for at least a generation, and then the higher stratas of society started adopting Roman practices while more rural areas show no real change at all until much later, by which time urban native society is re-emphasizing local traditional practices and art.

The book has a nice section on a few different new styles of pottery forms and decoration that emerged during the third century. I find it interesting that most of them can be described in terms of Roman provinces for their geographic spread, and wonder if any of the more ‘nationalistic’ forces that seem to be cropping up in this period are more in the line of provincial regionalism.

A running theme of the book is settlement patterns: Settlements in Germany start out as simple single farms, and then move towards larger, more centralized patterns during the first century BC. There are signs of disruption around the time of the conquest of Gaul, but it is worth repeating that Wells points out that it can be hard to date many sites, as most rural populations had no contact with Roman goods, making early Roman period finds look just like pre-Roman ones. This difficulty is made worse by the fact that Roman and Pre-Roman archaeology are separate disciplines, who don’t talk to each other as much as is needed.

By the late first century AD there is a pattern of even larger settlements that traded luxury goods from the Romans (presumably in return for cattle, meat, hides, and other everyday goods not well recorded in Roman sources). During the fourth century, as the Roman border erodes (and it is noted that there is no sign of wide-spread destruction of Roman forts and bases that would be expected from how Roman writers talk about the invasions of the later Western Empire), settlements end up going back to the pre-empire pattern of settlement. …Which argues that there were indeed large-scale cultural dislocations, instead of the ‘society continued much as before’ model that this same author was arguing for in Barbarians to Angels.

In all, it is a good starting point for understanding where scholarship in this subject is going, and worth reading from that perspective. It may even be a good starting point for further broad discussion for those specialists. But if you’re wanting lots of substance, it isn’t here; there’s just too many unknowns.