According to the journalist and publisher Wolf Jobst Siedler, the best connoisseur of the region’s culture and history, „The Mark has produced everything: first the Brandenburg Electorate, then the Kingdom of Prussia, and finally the short-lived German Reich. It is as though it consumed itself in the process. In the meantime it has lost everything that gave it significance, splendour – and, it must be said, a certain sinisterness. Now the old Mark has been thrown back on itself; Brandenburg is all that has remained of Prussia. If you place the map of present-day Germany next to a map from Staufic times, you again stop where you would have stood three-quarters of a millennium ago, before people crossed the Oder and won land from the heathens and the wilderness."

Today the region has little more than this history, because 40 years of socialism did more damage here than elsewhere. And before that the war was also crueller, since the Mark was directly on the road to Berlin: the last major battles of the Second World War – Seelow and Halbe – were fought here. The destruction was more complete than in Saxony and Thuringia. Thereafter, socialism rejected not only the traditional regimes, but also history itself. Many buildings were left to rot; indeed, trees are all that is left of many a manor house. The bourgeoisie, who had been affiliated with the court and the army, were the first people to leave the countryside; they were then followed by the craftsmen and finally the farmers, who feared collectivization.

„Today,“ says Wolf Jobst Siedler, „the world between the Barnim and the Uckermark strikes you as being strangely lacking in history: what had made it important for so long is now missing: the middle classes, farmers, noblemen.“ Yet it is now gradually dawning on everyone that the past is the future. The Mark will not become an industrial region, but it could become the garden of a renewed Berlin. This is one reason why the best chances for the future lie in a merger of Berlin and Brandenburg to form a single state: to create not a new Prussia, but a state that can give the historical tradition an economic basis. To this extent, the aristocrats who have returned, like the Marwitzens and Hardenbergs, are a sign of future prospects of the cradle of Prussia. And everyone, whether returned aristocrats, start-up farmers or CDU, SPD or PDS, can unite in one call: „Into the dust with all the enemies of Brandenburg!“ (Heinrich von Kleist, „Prince Frederick of Homburg“).