Too much history can be bad for you. 'The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living' - that was Marx's famous comment on France in 1848. When Nietzsche elaborated on the same idea in one of his 'untimely meditations', he had Germany in mind, the Prussia-writ-large created under the auspices of Bismarck. We have become familiar with the idea that the dead weight of Prussian history deformed the development of modern Germany. Junker-ridden, archaic and feudal, the epitome of the centralised, militarist state, Prussia was the albatross that hung round the neck of unified Germany. Clement Attlee used a stronger term in 1943, arguing that history suggested the need to 'eradicate the Prussian virus'.

LRB 16 November 2006 | PDF Download