The rise of Prussia and subsequent unification of Germany under Prussia was one of the most important events in modern European history.However, the fact that this unification was brought about as a result of the Prussian military has led to many misconceptions about the nature of Prussia, and consequently of Germany, which persist to this day. This collection sets out to correct them. Beginning in 1830, and finishing with the official dissolution of Prussia by the Allies in 1947, the book takes a broad approach: chapters cover the conservatives and the monarchy, industrialisation, the transformation of the rural and urban environment, the labour movement, the tensions between Catholics and Protestants within the state, and the debate about the links between Prussian militarism and the final tragedy of Nazi Germany. By focusing on the social, religious and political tensions that helped define the course of Prussian history, the book also throws light on the development of modern German history.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century Prussia was but one in a mosaic of German states, but it rose to be the unchallenged leader of German-speaking Europe after the fall of Napoleon. The book goes beyond the political, military and diplomatic concerns of the Prussian elite, whose record of events is the one upon which most histories of Prussia are based, and explains its rise in relation to Prussian society as a whole. Political analysis is integrated with material on such areas as agrarian society, urban life and religion, which are not fully examined in existing histories.

Beyond the Barricades is an original study of government after the 1848 revolutions. It focuses on the state of Prussia, where a number of conservative ministers sought to learn lessons from their experiences of upheaval and introduce a wave of reform in the 1850s. Using extensive archival research, the work explores Prussia's entry into the constitutional age, charting initiatives to transform criminal justice, agriculture, industry, communications, urban life, and the press. Reform strengthened contact with the Prussian population, making this a classic episode of state-building, but Beyond the Barricades seeks to go further. It makes a case for taking notice of government activity at this particular juncture because the measures endorsed by conservative statesmen in the 1850s sought to remove the feudal intermediaries that had lingered long into the nineteenth century and replace them with an array of government institutions, legal regimes, and official practices. In sum, this book recasts the post-revolutionary decade as a period which saw the transition from an old to a new world, pivotal to the making of modern Prussia and ultimately, modern Germany.

This history of German-speaking central Europe presents the different eras of German history as successive worlds of German life, thought and mentality.

This is the first comprehensive, multi-author survey of German history that features cutting-edge syntheses of major topics by an international team of leading scholars. Emphasizing demographic, economic, and political history, this Handbook places German history in a denser transnational context than any other general history of Germany. It underscores the centrality of war to the unfolding of German history, and shows how it dramatically affected the development of German nationalism and the structure of German politics. It also reaches out to scholars and students beyond the field of history with detailed and cutting-edge chapters on religious history and on literary history, as well as to contemporary observers, with reflections on Germany and the European Union, and on 'multi-cultural Germany'. Covering the period from around 1760 to the present, this Handbook represents a remarkable achievement of synthesis based on current scholarship. It constitutes the starting point for anyone trying to understand the complexities of German history as well as the state of scholarly reflection on Germany's dramatic, often destructive, integration into the community of modern nations. As it brings this story to the present, it also places the current post-unification Federal Republic of Germany into a multifaceted historical context. It will be an indispensable resource for scholars, students, and anyone interested in modern Germany.

From the eighteenth century until 1945, German children were taught to model themselves on the young of an Ancient Greek city-state: Sparta. From older children, from teachers in the classroom, and from higher authority first in Prussia, then in Imperial and National Socialist Germany, came images of Sparta designed to inculcate ideals of endurance, discipline and of military self-sacrifice. Identification with Sparta could also be used to justify ideas of domination over Germany's eastern neighbours. Helen Roche is the first to examine this still sensitive topic systematically and in depth. She collects and analyses official and published German evocations of Sparta but also, and remarkably, reconstructs the experiences of German children taught to be 'little Spartans' in the Prussian Cadet Corps and National Socialist elite schools, the Napolas. In treating the final, and gravest, period of this process, the author has personally collected testimony from numerous surviving German witnesses who attended the Napolas as children in the early 1940s. That testimony is presented here, in a work which is likely to proof definitive, not only for its treasury of new information, but for its elegant - and humane - analysis.