Want to go down the rabbit hole of pre WW1 Prussia and its role in the setup of WW1. Any recommendations?

I don't have any recommendations but you might find the late Hohenzollern family and Hindenburg a bit more interesting in depth before focusing on him personally. The Prussian aristocrats/Junkers viewed the socialists/SPD as a real problem/threat.

All history is intertwined with respect to warring European statehoods/principalities, and the Prussians really go back to Andrew expelling Teutonic knights from Austria Hungary.

Proud Tower by Tuchman covers that era well but not a biography of the Kaiser. I agree with above poster the Kaiser was a shallow uninteresting guy. You might want to pick up a Kamala bio instead.

Get a Bismarck bio if you want Prussia. He built it.

Meh, I disagree about the Kaiser being uninteresting- I invariably find my occasional dives into his life to be pretty interesting. His language skills were, to my thinking, amazing, in that he could speak unaccented English & French, and he prided himself on his ability to sound like he was American whenever he met one of us. Considering this, and his fascination with architecture, history, militaria, uniforms, medals & decorations, I was surprised to learn that his appreciation of the arts was philistine. His economic policies and social programs were pioneering in many ways. Anyway, I think his legacy suffers from his having been on the losing side: he's portrayed as a sociopathic nincompoop.

His English cousin changed his families' names because of him.

12th Man said:

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Meh, I disagree about the Kaiser being uninteresting- I invariably find my occasional dives into his life to be pretty interesting. His language skills were, to my thinking, amazing, in that he could speak unaccented English & French, and he prided himself on his ability to sound like he was American whenever he met one of us. Considering this, and his fascination with architecture, history, militaria, uniforms, medals & decorations, I was surprised to learn that his appreciation of the arts was philistine. His economic policies and social programs were pioneering in many ways. Anyway, I think his legacy suffers from his having been on the losing side: he's portrayed as a sociopathic nincompoop.

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Agree in that he was pretty interesting. IMO, he just seemed to shoot from the hip too much for his position or throw out crazy ideas. However, he was a huge cause of WW1, but also had a good idea that would've likely avoided it. But, he shot from the hip and gave the blank check.

Frans Joseph and his heir Archduke Ferdinand (his nephew) are perhaps a more interesting topic (to me).

Thanks for the link. That YouTube channel, Lucasfilm, has a good number of historical documentaries.

For some reason, youtube showed this one to me today. Probably not going to listen to most of it, but anyway…

https://www.youtube.com/live/7Z3HDYygSMw

nortex97 said:

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I don't have any recommendations but you might find the late Hohenzollern family and Hindenburg a bit more interesting in depth before focusing on him personally. The Prussian aristocrats/Junkers viewed the socialists/SPD as a real problem/threat.

All history is intertwined with respect to warring European statehoods/principalities, and the Prussians really go back to Andrew expelling Teutonic knights from Austria Hungary.

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I went down a rabbit hole on this the other night, wondering why Munich was never made capital of Germany as Bavarians are what's seen as "the lederhosen, beer drinking mountain men" that we envision today.

When we think angry, war mongering Germans, we're actually thinking about Prussians. The Teutonic knights were war mongering crusaders that founded Prussia 800 years ago. The rest is sort of history.

I also found interesting that when breaking up Germany after WW2, russia explicitly kept Konigsberg, now the much maligned Kaliningrad, as it was the royal seat of the Kingdom of Prussia. To once and for all kill Prussian identity as that identity is what drove German militantism for hundreds of years.

Yep, it is a fascinating history, though the details and individual leadership/evolution of Prussian military tactics/wars is pretty fascinating to me.


More on Leuthen:


It's interesting to me but I think the various parts of Germany, culturally speaking (Bavaria, Prussia, Heidelberg, Saxony, upper plains, schleissweig holstein etc) really just were ruled/run separately and have always had pretty different aspects culturally/militarily. The Prussians ultimately won in uniting the country, but I think by WW1 there were a lot of tensions between the elitist "Vons" from Prussia in their military and the rest of the Kaiser's 'team.' The Prussians basically never really got along with the 'Western' Germans, though is how I have read it. I think practically all of their WW1 generals were Prussian, other than maybe Ludendorff, but I dunno.



As for Kaliningrad, I don't think it has even a fraction of the Germanic population it once did, but the history going back to 1914-1915 did shape some of the later German resentments/complaints and attendant brutality in WW2.

There is a great book by Miranda Carter called "George, Nicholas and Wilhelm" that deals with the three cousins before and during WWI. I highly recommend.

Bavarians are seen as the backwards rednecks of Germany. I've heard Bavaria referred to as "Germany's Texas," in that it's the most stereotypical vision of the country most outsiders think of but not really reflective of the rest of the country. I think that's been the perception for a long time. Its reputation in the late 19th century (and still today) was as a bastion of Catholicism and more socially conservative than the rest of Germany.