What Alternate History Books Reimagine The Kingdom Of Prussia?

My brain always lights up when I think about period shoots, and recreating the kingdom of Prussia is one of those delicious puzzles. On a recent set I visited, the day began with the production designer pointing out façades, cobbles and shutters while we sipped terrible craft coffee. The first step is decisions: which Prussia are you trying to show? Frederick the Great’s 18th century court looks very different from the militarized 19th-century kingdom under the Kaisers, so that choice drives everything from color palettes to props. From there it becomes a layering process. Location scouts hunt for palaces, baroque towns or workable ruins—often in Germany, Poland or the Czech Republic—while set dressers add street signs, church icons, and horse troughs. Costumes are painstaking: tailors source linen weaves, dye fabrics to the right faded tones, and embroider regimental details onto coats. For large scenes, the crew blends real locations with temporary builds and matte work; sometimes a courtyard is physically built and the surrounding skyline is extended later with VFX. Little details sell it: authentic buttons, period boots scuffed just so, aged maps on a war room table, the peculiar way candles smoke under windy skies. Sound designers add hoofbeats, carriage wheels, and the specific crack of period muskets. Historians or military advisors often sit near the director, whispering about rank insignia or how a royal would enter a room. Watching all these small choices come together is like assembling a living museum, and when the camera finally moves through those streets I get that same kidlike thrill I had reading historic novels as a teen.

As someone who spends too many weekends lost in old maps and nineteenth-century salons, I keep coming back to Theodor Fontane when I want a realistically textured Prussia. Read 'Effi Briest' for the social code of provincial Prussian aristocracy — its quiet cruelty, duty, and the way honor operates in small towns. Then try 'Der Stechlin' and 'Irrungen, Wirrungen' for broader slices of the same world: landed gentry, bureaucrats, and the shifting social orders of the Wilhelmine era. Fontane writes like he’s walking you down the paved streets of Brandenburg, pointing out gossip and gravestones. If you want the Prussian military habit and its cultural echoes, 'Im Westen nichts Neues' ('All Quiet on the Western Front') is indispensable — it isn’t a book about the monarchy, but it shows how Prussian military training and mentality persisted into WWI. For the Baltic-Prussian experience, Günter Grass’s 'Die Blechtrommel' ('The Tin Drum') dramatizes Danzig’s (Gdańsk) complicated identity; it’s not literal history, but it captures atmosphere and memory. Pair these novels with a solid history like Christopher Clark’s 'Iron Kingdom' to separate what fiction amplifies from what actually happened. That combo kept me glued to footnotes and novels in equal measure.

Growing up, I got hooked on those sweeping, old-school historical epics and Prussia kept popping up in surprising places. If you want drama about the rise of Prussia, start with the films centered on Frederick II — the ones often titled 'Fridericus' or 'Der große König' (English: 'The Great King'). These are stagey, sometimes propagandistic, older German films that treat Frederick the Great as the engine of Prussia's emergence in the 18th century. They lean into battlefield spectacle, palace intrigue, and the image of a disciplined, efficient state being forged. Beyond Frederick, the mid-19th-century unification under Bismarck shows up in biopics and TV miniseries often labeled 'Bismarck' or 'Bismarck: The Iron Chancellor'. Those dramatizations focus on diplomacy, Realpolitik, and wars that consolidated Prussian power. And don’t skip 'Waterloo' — it’s a Napoleonic epic, but Prussia’s comeback under Blücher in 1815 is a key turning point dramatized there, showing how Prussian military resilience helped shape European balance. If you care about balance, pair these films with history reads like 'Iron Kingdom' by Christopher Clark to see where cinema stretches the truth versus where Prussia actually made its mark.

Walking through Potsdam's gardens one spring, I got obsessed with tracing bits of the old Kingdom of Prussia scattered across modern museums — it turned out to be a delightful rabbit hole. A few institutions are absolute must-visits: the Prussian palaces themselves (run by the Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gärten) like Sanssouci and the Neues Palais in Potsdam, plus Schloss Charlottenburg in Berlin, all display royal state rooms, portraits, furniture and personal objects connected to Prussian kings. In central Berlin the Deutsches Historisches Museum (housed in the old Zeughaus on Unter den Linden) brings together military uniforms, flags, official documents and broader political context. For serious document hunting, the Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz holds administrative records, decrees and archival material that researchers love. If you’re planning a trip, check each institution’s online catalogue and look for special exhibitions — items move around between palaces and state museums, so the collection you see can vary. I found booking guided tours of the palaces made the objects feel alive, like stepping into a story rather than a display case.

There's a recurring image I keep bumping into whenever I read historical fiction or play grand strategy games: Prussia as a kind of well-oiled machine. Authors usually lean into its military discipline, the rigid social hierarchies of the Junkers, and the almost mythic figure of Frederick the Great. In novels set around the Napoleonic era or the 19th century you’ll often find Prussia painted as efficient, stern, and unapologetically orderly — sometimes admired, sometimes feared. That image pops up in different registers: courtroom dramas that show a relentless bureaucracy, romances that highlight social repression, or battlefield scenes that emphasize drilling and iron will. I first noticed how flexible that shorthand is when a family friend lent me a German novel and then later I saw the same stereotypes recycled in strategy games like 'Europa Universalis' and 'Hearts of Iron'. Authors will either humanize Prussian characters — giving the officers doubts, wives who chafe under etiquette — or they’ll reduce the kingdom to a symbol: cold, militaristic, dangerously efficient. What I like most is when writers refuse the cliché and show the messy contradictions: enlightened reforms next to brutal discipline, intellectual salons tucked into a state obsessed with rank. Those moments make Prussia feel like a lived place, not just a trope, and they stick with me longer than any parade of uniforms.

I get excited whenever someone asks about Prussian-era shows—it's one of those niche corners of history TV that rewards digging. From what I've watched and hunted down, the clearest hit is 'Charité' (season 1) which is set in 1888 Berlin—still very much under the shadow of the Kingdom of Prussia even though the German Empire had been formed. Another common type of program are biographical TV films and miniseries about big personalities: look for productions titled 'Bismarck' (documentaries and dramatisations pop up from time to time) and for dramas that focus on Frederick the Great under titles like 'Friedrich' or 'Friedrich II'. These are often produced as TV movies or short miniseries rather than long-running serials. If you're hunting for more, I usually search German broadcasters' archives (ARD/ZDF) and use keywords like 'Preußen', 'König von Preußen', 'Frederick the Great', or 'Bismarck'. Streaming services sometimes bundle these under historical dramas or European period pieces, so patience and the right search terms pay off—happy treasure-hunting!

I get excited whenever people ask about European history showing up in anime, because there are a few different flavors of how Prussia shows up on-screen. The most obvious and literal one is 'Hetalia: Axis Powers' — Prussia is literally a character (loud, arrogant, and dripping with historical in-jokes). If you want a pretty direct, comedic personification, that's the go-to. Beyond that, a lot of series show Prussian influence without naming it explicitly. For example, 'Fullmetal Alchemist' has the nation of Amestris, which borrows a lot from 19th-century Prussian/German military culture: rigid hierarchy, parade uniforms, and a state that emphasizes military strength. Similarly, 'Youjo Senki' (the 'Empire' in its alternate-Europe) pulls from Imperial Germany/Prussian models for uniforms, bureaucracy, and tactics. If you prefer deeper, more political takes, 'Legend of the Galactic Heroes' isn’t a documentary but borrows heavily from Prussian and German military tradition when designing the Galactic Empire’s command structure and ethos. For real-world historical coverage of German history in manga form, works like Osamu Tezuka’s 'Adolf' touch on German identity and the lead-up to WWII, which resonates with the later legacy of Prussia. If you want, I can point you to specific episodes or chapters that highlight those influences.

There’s a whole little cluster of composers who were directly connected to the Prussian court or wrote music that came out of Prussian life, and I love tracing those threads. First off, Frederick II himself (Frederick the Great) wrote a fair bit for the flute — he was an amateur composer and flautist and his chamber pieces shaped the sound of the court. Johann Joachim Quantz was his flute teacher and composer-in-residence; Quantz’s treatise 'On Playing the Flute' and his concertos were practically written for that Prussian salon vibe. Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach spent years in Berlin under Frederick’s patronage and wrote keyboard works and chamber music that reflect the court’s taste, while Carl Heinrich Graun served as Kapellmeister and produced operas and oratorios like 'Der Tod Jesu' for Berlin’s religious and royal occasions. The Benda family (Franz Benda especially) and Johann Gottlieb Janitsch are other names I find fascinating — they provided violin and chamber repertoire for those Friday academies at the king’s court. On a different note, later 19th-century Prussian nationalism had its own musical face: Johann Gottfried Piefke wrote unmistakable marches such as the 'Königgrätzer Marsch' and 'Preußens Gloria', and Giacomo Meyerbeer, born in Berlin, carried that Prussian-born sensibility into his grand operas like 'Les Huguenots'. So whether you’re digging Baroque court music or martial 19th-century marches, Prussia left a clear imprint on several composers’ output.