Louise of Mecklenburg-Strelitz - Legacy

Legacy

Queen Louise was revered by her subjects as the "soul of national virtue", and some historians have written that Louise was "Prussian nationalism personified." According to Christopher Clark, Louise was "a female celebrity who in the mind of the public combined virtue, modesty, and sovereign grace with kindness and sex appeal, and whose early death in 1810 at the age of only thirty-four preserved her youth in the memory of posterity." Her reputation as a loving and loyal supporter of her husband became crucial to her enduring legacy; the cult that eventually surrounded Louise became associated with the "ideal" feminine attributes: prettiness, sweet nature, maternal kindness, and wifely virtue.

On the anniversary of her birth, in 1814, the widowed King Frederick William instituted the Order of Louise (Luisenorden) as a complementary decoration for the Iron Cross. Its purpose was to be given to those women who had made a significant contribution to the war effort against Napoleon, though it was subsequently awarded to future members of the House of Hohenzollern unrelated to the French emperor, such as her granddaughter-in-law Princess Victoria of the United Kingdom, and her great-granddaughter Sophia, Queen of Greece. In 1880 a statue of Queen Louise was erected in the Tiergarten in Berlin.

Louise inspired the establishment of a conservative women's organization known as Königin-Luise-Bund, often shortened to Luisenbund ("Queen Louise League") in which her person achieved an almost cult-like status. The group's main purpose was to promote patriotic feelings among German women, and it emphasized the family and German morality. The Königin-Luise-Bund was active during the time of the Weimar Republic and the first years of the Third Reich. Despite having actively supported the National Socialist movement since its early stages all through their accession to power in 1933, the Queen Louise League was nonetheless disbanded by the Nazis in 1934, as they viewed it as a hostile organization.

Significantly, Louise and Maria Theresa of Austria were the only two historical women used in Nazi propaganda, as the regime felt Louise was the "personification of womanly qualities," which the government was trying to integrate into German schools. While the queen's resistance and defiance of the French kept the "Prussian spirit" alive, her husband was cast as a "pathetically embarrassing" king who would rather have lived in peace than revenge himself on Napoleon.