In a baroque palace in Potsdam, on the leafy outskirts of Berlin, those industrious Germans are throwing a spectacular birthday party. The Neues Palais is a flamboyant folly, built by Frederick the Great to celebrate Prussia’s victory in the Seven Years War, and this summer it’s become the forum for a huge exhibition celebrating the 300th birthday of Prussia’s greatest monarch. But this lush retrospective isn’t just a slice of historical nostalgia. It signals a change in that complex creature the German psyche. For the first time since 1945, when Prussia was erased from the map, Germans are becoming proud of being Prussians once again.
Throughout the Cold War, Prussia was a dirty word on both sides of the Iron Curtain. In western and eastern Europe, it became a byword for German militarism, Nazism by another name. This was hardly surprising. Frederick the Great built his Prussian empire on invasion and conquest; Bismarck united Germany under a Prussian emperor.
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