Loveable Little Prussia

So somehow, despite starting World War One, welcoming the Nazis in with open arms, and doing it's best to eat the Balkan peninsula, Austria is known nowadays as the plucky little freedom loving home of the Von Trapps.

My question is, what would it take for Prussia to be a beloved republic, all memories of the Hun threat forgotten? There's also the little issue of them surviving till the present. But I think rehabilitating their image would go a long way to ensuring their survival.
 
My question is, what would it take for Prussia to be a beloved republic, all memories of the Hun threat forgotten? There's also the little issue of them surviving till the present. But I think rehabilitating their image would go a long way to ensuring their survival.
Joke answer: axis powers hetalia becoming extremely popular in the west.

Serious answer: have something besides kickass military to talk about. Vienna was a center of the culture and the arts, Berlin (and Königsberg)... not as much.
 
^This, closest Prussia has ever produced to a universally beloved figure is Immanuel Kant.

Were there any Prussians that might have fled Hitler that might have put a nobler face on it? Given how deep behind the Iron Curtain Prussia ends up, maybe the Communist equivalent of Mother Teresa?
 

Coulsdon Eagle

Monthly Donor
In 1898 the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung polled its readers on the most significant events & personalities of the last 100 years [why not wait until 1899 or 1900 I don't know!).

The peoples' choice of the 19th Century's greatest thinker was Helmuth von Moltke.

You really have to change the mindset of an entire nation - or at least the subscribers to one popular magazine. IMHO that POD can only come before the Wars of Unification.
 
"The Austrians are brilliant people. They made the world believe that Hitler was a German and Beethoven an Austrian." ~Billy Wilder

I will honestly never understand this discrepancy in reputations.

Yes, Austria is seen as a center of culture, but that's mostly just optics - one could just as easily easily portray Germany as the land of dichter und denker if they wanted to.

WWI? Austria can be blamed far more reliably than Germany, and its behavior was significantly worse overall. WWII was a different issue, but even then. Even if we choose to ignore Hitler's origin, Austria contributed a disproportionately large % of SS members and concentration camp personnel. I can't be bothered to do a thorough review of the statistics, but I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out Austria was (proportionally) more represented in these...institutions...than geographic Prussia.

Both Austria's vaguely positive reputation and Prussia's vaguely negative one seem pretty arbitrary to me. More about self-perpetuating memes than historical fact.
 
So somehow, despite starting World War One, welcoming the Nazis in with open arms, and doing it's best to eat the Balkan peninsula, Austria is known nowadays as the plucky little freedom loving home of the Von Trapps.

My question is, what would it take for Prussia to be a beloved republic, all memories of the Hun threat forgotten? There's also the little issue of them surviving till the present. But I think rehabilitating their image would go a long way to ensuring their survival.

That's easy: Make a movie that does to Prussia what the Sound of Music did to Austria.

I'm only half-joking. Movies/TV/media are responsible for many people's ideas of a place, regardless of how historically accurate those ideas are.

Most people aren't like us: they don't spend all day on a history message board, they aren't parsing through documents and writing/commenting on grand narratives of the past armed with facts and figures. Most people say "Austria? Oh yeah, Julie Andrews was in that movie about Austria and made dresses for those kids so they could run away from the Nazis. I know all about Austria!"
 
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