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een formed in the early modern period—limited the scope of
Schieder’s approach to produce genuine insights from the start.
Schieder’s methodology, his epistemological goals, and his overall
concept take us directly to the subject of the book under review
here, Karin �riedrich’s monograph on the ‘other Prussia’, a topic
which forces anyone working on it to deal constantly with diverse
forms of constructing the past. Even in the second half of the twentieth
century, German and Polish scholars working on the history of
Prussia were still having difficulty in divorcing themselves from the
older traditions of national history. Thus German authors still frequently
see the union of Royal Prussia with the Polish crown (from
1466) and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (from 1569), in the
tradition of the Borussian negative image of Poland, as a dark age
which came to an end only with the divisions of Poland. Thus also
the ‘subjugation of the German peoples’, which Schieder believed he
saw in all the sources, did not end until 1772: the suppression of an
identity assumed to be based on the German language and the
Lutheran religion, untouched by historical change, and attributed
mainly to the urban middle classes of Royal Prussia—whose inhabitants,
ironically, had spoken of ‘Polish Prussia’ since the beginning of
the eighteenth century. Conversely, Polish historiography tends to
minimize national awareness in Royal Prussia, or to equate it ahistorically
with Brandenburg-Prussian or even German separatism. Yet
it must be asked—and this is the cardinal question—whether
‘Prussian’ really equalled ‘German’ before the first division of
Poland?
This is precisely the point at which Karin �riedrich takes a new
approach. Like Michael G. Müller in his recent work on Danzig,
Elbing, and Thorn in the period of confessionalization, she takes the
context of the whole state into account. She investigates, over a long
period of time, the often underrated and frequently deliberately
ignored positive points of contact between the Prussia’s national
awareness and the Rzeczpospolita (Commonwealth), in particular, at
the level of political ideas, the constitution, and the motives behind
it. It does not need to be emphasized that this perspective, sympathetic
but also marked by the present, and occasionally using the mirror-image
of the arguments of the side it criticizes, is still only one
perspective. This is a large topic, for German as well as for Polish historiography.
And we are fortunate indeed that it has been taken up
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Royal Prussia, 1569–1772