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Prussia’s forgotten heritage

After the final partition of Poland in 1795, Prussia emerged not only as a territorial winner but also a multi-lingual state: Polish speakers constituted nearly half of its population and more than half of the kingdom’s territory consisted of newly annexed Polish lands. Yet this was also a missed political opportunity.

February 22, 2026 - Piotr Leszczyński - History and MemoryIssue 1-2 2026Magazine

Illustration by Andrzej Zaręba

There is a political map that can be found online. It shows a fragment of Europe from around 1800, just before the Napoleonic Wars, at the dawn of the 19th century. The marked borders of the Kingdom of Prussia cover the largest territory that this state has ever possessed in its history. It is an intriguing map – nearly all of modern Poland falls within this Prussia, even Warsaw! The 20th-century witness, German journalist and historian Sebastian Haffner (1907-1999) was therefore right when he provocatively wrote that the German Democratic Republic and Poland, united into one state, would have been Prussia at the turn of the 19th century. Astonishing, but let us start from the beginning.

Discipline, centralism and military power

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