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The rise and fall of Prussia: the soldier-state that made Germany

The soldier-state that made Germany: from the Teutonic Knights and the Soldier King through Frederick the Great, compulsory schooling and the Humboldt university, to the unification of 1871 and the Allied abolition of Prussia in 1947.

Figures Frederick IIFrederick the GreatJohn Taylor GattoWilhelm von Humboldt

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    Prussia becomes a kingdom

    Frederick III of Brandenburg crowned himself King in Prussia at Konigsberg, raising the Hohenzollern lands to a kingdom. The new royal title gave a scattered northern state the ambition to become a great power.

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    Prussia's Soldier King builds a mass conscript army

    also in Armies and navies: the machinery of war, Military and security

    King Frederick William I of Prussia introduced a cantonal conscription system requiring each district to supply and train a quota of recruits, while pouring a disproportionate share of state revenue into the army. By his death Prussia, a state with a small population, had built the fourth-largest army in Europe. This militarized administrative culture shaped the Prussian state his son Frederick the Great inherited.

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    Frederick the Great makes Prussia a great power

    Frederick II seized Silesia from Austria and fought off a coalition in the Seven Years War, doubling Prussia’s weight in Europe. An enlightened despot who codified law and welcomed philosophers, he also drilled the army that became the state’s defining institution.

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    Austro-Prussian War

    1866 military conflict between the Kingdom of Prussia and the Austrian Empire

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    Junker-industrialist tariff and navy bargain

    The alliance created by Bulow, agreed in May 1900 and consummated in December 1902, traded a high grain tariff for the industrialists' naval program. The 1902 tariff gave Germany one of the world's most protected agricultures.

    • This alliance, of which Bülow was the creator, was agreed on in May 1900, and consummated in December 1902. The tariff of 1902, which gave Germany one of the most protected agricultures in the world, was the price paid by industry for the Navy bill of 1900
      Tragedy and Hope , p. 354-356
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    The Allies abolish the state of Prussia

    The Allied Control Council formally dissolved Prussia by Law No. 46, calling it "a bearer of militarism and reaction in Germany." The state that had unified Germany was wiped from the map, its lands split among new provinces and Poland and the Soviet Union.

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