Myths of Germany and Protestantism

Professor Nicholas Boyle provided an indulgent review of James Hawes’ The Shortest History of Germany (“The good Germans”, Books, 29 April). It is unacceptable to stigmatise Prussia and, especially, Protestantism as “the two demonic forces” that led Germany into disaster.

Prussian militarism developed from the need to defend a state that had no natural frontiers and had suffered much in the Thirty Years War; and Prussia eventually played a major role in freeing Germany from Napoleon’s grip.

In fact, from the 1640s until 1815 the main problem was French militarism, exploiting Germany’s weakness and divisions – including Louis XIV’s seizure of the historic German Protestant city of Strassburg/Strasbourg in 1681.
Prussia was given the Rhineland at the Congress of Vienna (1815) to defend Germany against any renewed French aggression.

Anyway Prussia represented more than just militarism, notably a relatively diligent bureaucracy, an education system that was good for its time, and religious toleration. In this it contrasted (until the 1780s) with the other major German state, Austria, whose ruler in the early seventeenth century, Ferdinand II, sought brutally to impose Counter-Reformation Catholicism in a way that developed into the devastating Thirty Years War.