Dresden burned around them, but their faces remained frozen. Porcelain, it turned out, afforded a certain immortality. Between 1904 and 1907, the Fürstenzug – procession of princes – had been erected on the northern wall of Dresden castle. It was, as it is today, the largest porcelain artwork in the world.

It had originally been a painting, but the rain had weathered it beyond recognition. Porcelain would better withstand the natural elements, it was hoped. The thousands of incendiary bombs that rained down on Dresden over the night of 13-14 February 1945 were certainly no natural elements. The hellish flames they brought forth – burning at up to 800 degrees Celsius – were perhaps closer to divine retribution.

Little would survive but blackened corpses scattered across the husk of a once-great city. Little but a procession of thirty-five porcelain princes, marching in noble silence through eight centuries of history. The Fürstenzug honours the House of Wettin, whose main line had ruled Dresden’s surrounding state of Saxony for centuries, first as dukes then as kings. Cadet branches ruled a mosaic of principalities in neighbouring Thuringia that included famed centres of culture and learning like Jena and Weimar. One of these Thuringian branches – that of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha – even ended up on the Belgian, Portuguese, and British thrones. Dresden may have been destroyed as a German city, but it had been built as something else entirely.

For centuries, it was a quintessential Residenzstadt, one of many scattered across a country divided amongst countless estates, duchies, principalities, and kingdoms within the sprawling Holy Roman Empire. It was as a Wettin city, a Saxon city, that it became a byword for Baroque splendour. The kind of cultural magnificence that many hoped would spare the city from destruction in 1945.

But by then Dresden was just another German city, forced to share in the fate of the wider nation and the crimes against peace and humanity it had committed. The Wettins and their kingdom have largely been forgotten by history, to say nothing of the Thuringian duchies and principalities. Their Habsburg and Hohenzollern neighbours outshone them. Countless famous sons – from Fichte to Wagner – abandoned their provincial homeland. Keen to avoid association with ‘the Hun’ during the First World War, the British Wettins even reinvented themselves as the Windsors.

Three times – in 1756, 1813, and 1866 – Saxony’s position sandwiched between Brandenburg-Prussia and Habsburg-ruled Bohemia (today’s Czechia) saw it occupied and nearly wiped off the map of Europe. Three times in the twentieth century it was abolished, by democratic, fascist, and communist revolutionaries.

It is difficult to think of another modern European state that has had so many close calls with oblivion. Each time it was occupied, the Wettins managed to somehow retain their throne and their sovereignty. Each time it was abolished, history conspired to resurrect it.

Saxony and Thuringia – the two historic Wettin heartlands – returned to a rare moment of public consciousness as their citizens elected new state parliaments on 1 September. Forty years ago, the exercise would have appeared stunningly abstract.

As citizens of the communist German Democratic Republic, Saxons and Thuringians had no democratic elections to speak of. There were no state parliaments. Indeed, neither state even existed. From 1952 East Germany had been organised into smaller districts, unlike the neighbouring Federal Republic of Germany to the west.

In 1990 Saxony and Thuringia re-entered the stage of German history as federal states of a liberal democratic, Atlanticist German republic. Just over thirty years later, they have become ground zero for the rise of anti-establishment parties that challenge that very postwar consensus that has defined west German politics from 1949 and those of a United Germany since 1990.

Leading the charge is the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), who harken back to a nationalist right that was totally delegitimised by the Second World War and excluded in its aftermath. But it was recently joined by the category-defying Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, a left-wing but anti-immigrant and anti-Atlanticist party recruiting even more German voters to the idea of an ‘alternative’ kind of Germany. It harkens instead to a communist past delegitimised in 1989 and marginalised in its aftermath.

Well over 40 per cent of Saxon and Thuringian voters opted for one of the two options, with Thuringia handing a far-right party their first victory in a German election since the rise of the Nazis. East Germans are voting in droves for parties that to most West Germans remain anathema. The spectre of the Berlin Wall, it seems to many, refuses to die. A United Germany no longer seems so united. But was it ever?

To a far greater degree than most European countries, Germany has always been defined by multiplicity. It is built into German history, into its politics, even into its federal constitution. It is an aspect of the country that a whole succession of political movements have sought to overcome with their own vision of German unity to no avail. Indeed, if Saxony’s winding road through German history is anything to go by, the demise of Germany’s multiplicity has often been exaggerated.

In 1709, centuries before Dresden was reduced to rubble by Allied bombing, its resident prince established the Royal-Polish and Electoral-Saxon Porcelain Manufactory  in Meissen, a town not far from Dresden. It was the first producer of ‘fine china’ in all of Europe, the method only discovered recently by an alchemist in Wettin service.

Prince-Elector Frederick August I or King Augustus II as he was known in Poland – wanted his house to be among the most illustrious in Europe. Porcelain was but a small contribution to his grand ambitions, perhaps epitomised by his rebuilding of Dresden according to the precepts of Versailles.

The royal title so central to his pursuit of glory he found in the vast Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to the east, an elective noble republic stretching from the eastern borders of the Holy Roman Empire to distant Russia. Royal authority was weak and the country decentralised, but it was certainly a more glorious title than that of Augustus’ northern neighbour.

In 1701 the Hohenzollern elector of Brandenburg had proclaimed himself ‘King in Prussia’ with great pomp and circumstance, in no small part to conceal the fact that he had invented the title out of thin air. He was king in rather than of Prussia because the better part of Prussia (so-called Royal, as opposed to Ducal Prussia) lie in Augustus’ Poland-Lithuania.

Had the Wettin’s succeeded in turning Poland-Lithuania into a more centralised, hereditary monarchy like they had hoped, the whole course of German and European history might have been derailed. Saxony, not Prussia, may well have found itself dominating northern Germany. Wettins, not Romanovs, may have found themselves ruling huge swathes of Eastern Europe.

Fate had other things in mind for Augustus II. In the disastrous Great Northern War at the start of the century, Sweden ravaged Augustus’ kingdom. It was defeated in the end, but thanks to Russia, to whom went the spoils. Augustus ‘the Strong’ ruled Poland-Lithuania until his death in 1733 as a weak king. His son, Augustus III, managed to secure his own election, but faced a far more menacing threat to the Saxon heartland.

The young Prussian King Frederick II – known to posterity as ‘the great’ – undertook a daring conquest of Habsburg Silesia in 1740. The rich province separated Saxony from Poland, with Frederick hoping to erect a physical barrier to a prospective Saxon-Polish kingdom. Even worse, in the Seven Years’ War that broke out sixteen years later, Frederick occupied and mercilessly exploited Saxony for years.

Poland-Lithuania itself would fall victim to a three-way partition between Russia, Austria, and Prussia later in the century. In 1791 the Polish nobility had made a last-ditch effort to turn the noble republic into a modern constitutional monarchy, inviting the Wettin dynasty to found a dynasty of future Polish kings.

Frederick August II declined, already weary of his small state’s vulnerability and the stage of the Wettins’ great power ambitions disappeared from the map of Europe entirely. A strange turn of fate gave him the crown of the Napoleonic Duchy of Warsaw, unwisely leading him to stick with Napoleon to the bitter end. Saxony ended up under Prussian occupation for the second time, only saved from annexation thanks to Austria’s desire to keep a buffer between itself and Prussia.

With the Holy Roman Empire dissolved in 1806 but Napoleon defeated, Germany was reinvented as a union of sovereign princely states known as the German Confederation. With their enlarged realms and elevated titles, they were resolved to hold back the tide of revolution that they saw lurking behind any new political idea. Be it liberal or national.

The sovereignty of Wettin-ruled states like Saxony, or the Thuringian duchies of Saxe-Coburg & Gotha or Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach depended on the maintenance of this fundamentally conservative order. One based not on popular sovereignty, but on the legitimacy of princes that believed in German unity, but not German unification.

In the 19^th century Saxony was a quintessential representative of the ‘third Germany’. Habsburg Austria, for centuries standing atop the Holy Roman Empire, then the German Confederation from 1815 to 1866, was the first. Prussia, by the Napoleonic Wars a great power thanks to its huge standing army, was the second.

The third was a world of free cities like Hamburg or Bremen, tiny principalities like those in Thuringia, and mid-sized kingdoms whose pride perhaps outstripped their power, like that of Saxony, Bavaria, or Hanover. They numbered in the dozens rather than the thousands after 1815, but for some this was still too many Germanies.

In the early 19^th century, a rising liberal nationalist movement saw the nation’s division into over fifty sovereign states as an abomination. They derogatorily referred to this world as one of Kleinstaaterei, small-statery. These liberal Germans that felt ‘suffocated’ by princely despotism. They longed to breath ‘free air’. Saxon, Thuringian, Wettin air stunk of small-mindedness, of petty provincial princes and no less petty provincial bourgeoisie.

Their fantastical escape was a constitutional, parliamentary German nation-state. One that posited the existence of a single German nation that supposedly lurked behind the façade of the fifty-two German states, with their own dynasties, provincial identities, dialects, and histories. If there was only one German nation, there should only be one German state, they reasoned.

When liberal revolutions unexpectedly swept Europe in 1848, German liberals took their chance to conjure into being the country’s first national parliament in Frankfurt. Delegates flooded in from across Germany, electing a secondary Habsburg as regent as an ode to the House of Austria’s preeminent role in the country. They debated with vigour the constitutional makeup of the future united Germany, revealing in the process just how irreconcilable many of their loyalties were.

Those on the left wanted a unitary nation-state in which the petty princes would be marginalised into irrelevance. Those on the right, however, saw not just their princes but their whole state-based identities as an essential part of what made them German. It was a divide that predated and indeed would outlast the Frankfurt Parliament as the cowering princes re-emerged from their palaces and crushed the revolutionary wave with vigour.

Civil servants, officers, nobles, and countless ordinary people thought there was nothing more German than being a Bavarian, a Saxon, a Prussian, or an Austrian. What some historians have dubbed ‘federal nationalism’. To secure the basis of this federal nation, post-revolutionary German states embraced a kind of conservative modernisation from above in the hope that this would placate and depoliticise the middle classes.

It was a form of government epitomised by Saxony under the life-long civil servant and Dresden-native Friedrich Ferdinand Beust. He presided over what was in effect an administrative dictatorship, with the Wettin rulers leaving the day-to-day business of government to him. Free air was certainly lacking, but modernisation was not. Saxony was by the 1860s the most densely populated non-city-state in Europe. It was industrialising rapidly, swelling the ranks of the bourgeoise and industrial working class.

In many parts of Germany similar transformations were taking hold, expanding the very middle class from which liberal nationalism drew its support. Far from placating them with economic modernisation, their calls for a German nation-state only grew louder. By the 1860s many of the most ardent liberal nationalists had turned to Prussia as the state that should unite the country, showing little concern for Germany’s multiplicity. Heinrich von Treitschke, the son of a prominent Saxon general, embodied this ‘National Liberal’ outlook.

He and other national liberals – largely Protestants – saw Prussia as the main engine of progress in German history, hoping to resolve the dilemma of multiplicity by simply having Prussia absorb the whole of Germany into itself. Treitschke caused a storm when he published a pamphlet calling for the effective abolition of the Saxony and other petty north German states, even leading his father to publicly disavow him.

Most Saxons could be convinced to become Germans. But to become a Prussian was something else entirely. The same was true across Germany, where Catholics, dynastic loyalists, provincial patriots, and progressive opponents of Prussian militarism alike saw Prussian domination of Germany as something to fear for rather than hope for.

The hopes and tensions of the two visions of Germany exploded in 1866 into a war between Austria and Prussia. The First and Second Germanies fought over the fate of the Third and their own claim to leadership over all three. Austria’s victory would have meant the triumph of Kleinstaaterei, enforced ironically by the largest German state of all. Enlarged kingdoms of Hanover, Saxony, and Bavaria showing that if German unification would ever be achieved it would be thanks to the good grace of Guelphs, Wettins, Wittelsbachs, and Habsburgs rather than Prussian delusions of grandeur.

It wasn’t to be. Most of the Third Germany sided with Austria, but Prussia won the war in a matter of weeks. Par for the course in Austro-Prussian confrontations, Saxony was quickly occupied and the Wettins left fearing for the future of their realm. In the end it was spared but forced to join a North German Confederation totally dominated by Prussia. Saxons experienced it not as liberation, but as a Prussian conquest.

August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht took advantage of this anti-Prussian feeling when they founded the particularist Saxon People’s Party in 1866, a radical, left-liberal party that rejected the process of German unification. Three years later it was transformed into the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany. Taking advantage of Saxony’s advanced industrialisation and dissatisfaction with Prussia, they turned the Wettin state into the heartland of the socialist movement in Germany.

In 1871 a German Empire was proclaimed in Versailles, turning Saxony into an even smaller part of a much greater German whole. The Saxon king refused to attend. Saxon papers took little note of the Prussian ruler’s new title. Troops welcomed back from France were celebrated as Saxon, not German heroes.

Nonetheless, the Wettin kingdom based in Dresden slowly became something of a curiosity. For democrats, socialists, and nationalists of the early 20^th century alike, the residue of Kleinstaaterei was something they hoped to ignore if not overcome on the way to a more perfect Germany. The future of German social democracy would not remain in provincial Saxony. Nor would that of German liberalism. A powerful, confident German Empire had become one of the most powerful countries in the world, something Germans from every corner of the country could take pride in. History had passed the Wettins by.

When the German Empire collapsed in 1918, democratic revolutions swept every prince from their throne. Saxon revolutionaries went even further, proclaiming their state completely abolished. In the end, it was preserved as part of the Weimar constitution – unlike the Thuringian states amalgamated into a single one – but only temporarily. The Nazi seizure of power eventually resulted in a de facto abolition of Germany’s states, even if they continued to exist as legal ghosts of a bygone era.

After the Allied victory in the Second World War, the Allied powers reconjured these ghosts of the past, using the old states to administer their occupation. But they were not entirely sure how to put the pieces back together. Austria was to be excluded from Germany altogether, fictionalised as the Nazis’ ‘first victim’ and allowed to retreat into its own kind of Kleinstaaterei. Prussia was wiped from the face of the earth, its old heartlands partitioned between Poland and the USSR.

Whatever form the new Germany took, it would clearly give the Third Germany its first shot at power. ‘Austria’ was apparently never German at all, while ‘Prussianism’ had been cast as the bogeyman of German history, with one of its fiercest critics brought forth to lead Germany out of the darkness. His name was Konrad Adenauer, a democratic Rhenish Catholic and doyen of the old Centre Party that once acted as the political face of a whole Catholic counterculture that rejected the Prussian-inflected thrust of imperial German identity.

As mayor of Cologne in 1918, many Rhenish separatists hoped that Adenauer would lead them to a long-sought-after separation from Prussia. Thirty years later, this hoped-for ‘West German Republic’ finally came to fruition. The Federal Republic of Germany was a country ultimately founded not to combat the Kleinstaaterei so many German nationalists had abhorred, but to protect Germans from the delusions of Großstaaterei that had led them into the abysses of 1918 and 1945.

For Saxony, this triumph of the Third Germany had come too late. As West Germany became a new First Germany, Saxons and Thuringians instead became citizens of a new Second Germany. A second-class status that – even decades after unification – many East Germans feel they cannot escape.