Had a little holiday in my heart at the following article.
Unlike the regimental chapels of the British, French or Americans, Germany’s are not decked out with tattered standards once carried into battle. There are no marble plaques listing victories; the glorification of Rommel’s Afrika Korps or Guderian’s Panzer armies is out of the question. Instead, the country must somehow distil the courage and skill of the Prussian military caste as an inspiration for troops in Afghanistan, and as a way of legitimising the practice of fighting abroad in defence of the national interest. It was Prussian officers who tried and failed to blow up Hitler, Prussian commanders who defeated the French in 1871 on the bloody road to German unification. The venerated generals of the 19th century—August von Gneisenau, say, or Gerhard von Scharnhorst—are being demummified.
[…]
“Don’t ever confuse Prussians with the Germans,” a grand, cigarillo-smoking Prussian dame, Countess Maria von Maltzan, told me not long before her death in 1997. “We follow our own path.” Maria certainly did: she took a doctorate in natural sciences, bumped across Africa in a battered Chevrolet treating sick animals, fell in love with and dumped a cabaret performer, worked with the anti-Nazi resistance, hid Jewish companions during the war and then travelled the world as a circus vet.
I might also add, though many people do not know this, that Nelson Mandela cited von Clausewitz as an inspiration.
