For a place that influenced so much European history, Prussia should be much more interesting than this book makes it out to be: Take a few hours and repeat the following lines with variations and you will get an idea what this book is like. It's like being nibbled to death by ducks or a bedtime story from the IRS tax form instructions. I have listened a lot of books on Audible - most of them history - and I just can't take any more of this one. 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 20th century. 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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