Some of it was ceded to Germany after the dissolution of the monarchy, and some was taken over the course of the country’s tumultuous 20th-century path from democracy to the Third Reich to division to reunification. Georg Friedrich is in the midst of a suddenly high-profile fight with the German government over property once owned by the former royal family.
Technically, the title has effectively become his last name, but for Georg Friedrich Prinz von Preußen, the great-great-grandson of Germany’s last monarch and the current head of the Prussian noble family the House of Hohenzollern, the trappings of royalty still have an attraction. 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.It has been a full century since the abdication of the last emperor of Germany, Kaiser Wilhelm II, but the would-be heir to his throne is still known as a prince. 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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