Marx talks about this actually fairly in depth, primarily in ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’ and ‘The Class Struggles in France, 1848-1850’. He talks about great power politics during the Springtime of Peoples and how various actions empowered various classes. Engels also discussed Prussia a lot, particularly in ‘Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany’ and ‘The Prussian Military Question and the German Workers’ Party’.

The tldr is the military was propped up by state planning and purposefully squashed liberal-bourgeoisie parties under Bismark, even going so far as to dismantling the Landtag to disenfranchise these groups. The military can therefore be seen as a pivot point for reactionary forces, and even centralized planning can be used to perpetuate, say, Junkerdom. A lot of German industry was made in spite of the aristocratic red tape, as part of the centralized mechanisms the army created, or as a solution to new contradictions in great power politics.

This relation was largely abolished by the Nazi revolution during the Weimar republic, they drew a lot of their support from the ‘middle classes’ re: the petite bourgeoisie and stocked the army with people from similar backgrounds. They also practiced Mussolini-style corporatism and gave the bourgeoisie direct political power with zero intermediaries. Many of these titans of industry piloted the Nazi war machine and were allowed to continue operations in West Germany. Check out their family histories, its interesting and can help paint a more clear picture of the rise of the bourgeoisie (some of the richest had fathers who were merely petite bourgeoisie artisans and small shop owners, and most got rich by catering to the Junker-centralized military-industrial complex).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Flick

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Günther_Quandt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_von_Finck_Sr.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freundeskreis_der_Wirtschaft

Germany didn’t really overthrow its feudal leaders until the Nazis, who the Junkers were largely opposed to, outmaneuvered them and appointed a new cadre of leaders. For most of Prussian and German history they were a very well organized and powerful social class that defended privileges they acquired riding the coattails of the Hohenzollern dynasty and being in the room when the new Prussian state needed staff for its institutions and bureaucracy. They shared a religious affiliation against Bavarian Catholicism and an interest in controlling agriculture and the power their concentrated estates gave them near the seat of Prussian and later German government.

It’s important to note that they were not the entire aristocracy. They didn’t protect the entire feudal order. They were a powerful subset that recognized their shared interest and entirely dominated a specific region that they could leverage to their collective advantage. You might compare them to the southern slave aristocracy in this way, their power came from their ability to control politics using levers at hand in the system they were in. It’s just that their levers were military and government offices rather than the federated system the southerners used.

I’d love to see book recs though, usually I feel like they get bundled into other larger topics rather than treated on their own.

I got no fucking idea but I’d love to know. @ me if you get a good answer

Germany was not a single country back then, so feudal transitions were varied along the territory, but we can more or less make a distinction between east and west of the elbe. This is due to ecological reasons, east has a more continental climate with longer winters, shorter growing seasons, and more importantly shorter harvest seasons. This later factor raises the would be free market wages during this period with respect to the rest of the year, this imposes an economic incentive to restrict said free market mechanisms, a key one is to restrict peasant mobility. This along with lower agricultural productivity means less cities.

Trade reasons, Atlantic trade in particular, but also traditional European trade routes across the ring and Danube were mostly concentrated, on west Germany or Austria. Again this meant low urbanization in ostland relative to west Germany.

Prussia was never an strictly feudal regime, it evolved from the teutonic order, so it started as a more or less centralized military organization Wich managed plantations in a more systematic way, with the goal of extraction for export, than normal feudal landlords who were mostly interested in self sufficiency. Junkers were relatively small land owners, and this had less of a say on how to run things.

There are also political factors, Napoleonic invasions broke down feudal institutions such as guilds in west Germany but not in the east.

All this are the reasons why the Prussian regime preserved feudal characteristics, why it industrialized relatively late, and why there has been a 20% or so productivity(measured through wages) gap between east and west Germany since at least Napoleonic times.