Mobile Prussia

Book excerpt: Prussia as a nation-state, as a cultural state, as a military power: beyond these one-dimensional ideas, Ottmar Ette's new book unfolds the picture of a multi-perspective Prussia. From Anton Wilhelm Amo, the first black philosopher to matriculate at a Prussian university, to Frederick the Great's projection of the Prussian polity onto New Spain and the reign of Moctezuma, to the Dutch philosopher Cornelius de Pauw, who published his works in French in Berlin and fueled the worldwide Berlin debate about the New World, from the Jewish salon of Rahel Varnhagen to Heinrich von Kleist's imagination of the Haitian Revolution to Adelbert von Chamisso and Alexander von Humboldt, who was not considered a "true" Prussian: Buried traditions of a history that have been expatriated from the common image of Prussia come to life. Ottmar Ette tells of mobile Prussians whose relationships arrange themselves into Prussia as a mobile. This book is a translation of the original German 1st edition Mobile Preußen by Ottmar Ette, published by J.B. Metzler, imprint of Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature in 2019. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). The author (with the friendly support of Patricia Gwozdz) has subsequently revised the text further in an endeavour to refine the work stylistically.