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‘The story of Prussia is one that has been told many times, but seldom as intelligently, elegantly and interestingly as it is here… a monumental history’ Richard Overy, Daily Telegraph
‘Outdistances the rest of the field, not only for the importance of its subject but for the verve and skill with which it is presented’ Michael Howard, The Times Literary Supplement Books of the Year
‘Lively, thoroughly engaging… Clark’s masterly and enthusiastic narrative takes in everything from the role of women in the Junker class to 1920s Berlin cabaret’ Sunday Times Books of the Year
‘Clark’s comprehensive account superbly navigates clear paths through the complexities of Prussian history over more than three centuries… This ambitious volume, with its elegance and humour, will become a classic’ BBC History Magazine
‘An impressive piece of work. The prose is clear and graceful, the narrative sustained and engaging… he has mined a wonderful collection of anecdotes and personal portraits’ The Times Literary Supplement
‘Excellent… a well-informed and fair-minded historical investigation’ Guardian
‘Iron Kingdom is not just good: it is everything a history book ought to be’ Sunday Telegraph
‘Excellent’ Literary Review
‘Masterful… triumphant… Written with growing verve and passion, it is the compelling story of why – of course – Prussia mattered so much more than any German state’ The Times Higher Education Supplement
‘Lively and thoughtful… an excellent account… yields valuable insights’ London Review of Books
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Christopher Clark is Reader in Modern History at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge. He is the author of The Politics of Conversion: Missionary Protestantism and the Jews in Prussia, 1728–1941 (Oxford, 1995) and a biography of Kaiser Wilhelm II.
CHRISTOPHER CLARK
Iron Kingdom
The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published by Allen Lane 2006
Published in Penguin Books 2007
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Copyright © Christopher Clark, 2006
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
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EISBN: 978–0–141–90402–3
For Nina
Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Maps
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 The Hohenzollerns of Brandenburg
2 Devastation
3 An Extraordinary Light in Germany
4 Majesty
5 Protestants
6 Powers in the Land
7 Struggle for Mastery
8 Dare to Know!
9 Hubris and Nemesis: 1789–1806
10 The World the Bureaucrats Made
11 A Time of Iron
12 God’s March through History
13 Escalation
14 Splendour and Misery of the Prussian Revolution
15 Four Wars
16 Merged into Germany
17 Endings
Notes
Index
List of Illustrations
1 Lucas Cranach, Elector Joachim II, c . 1551
2 Richard Brend’amour, Elector George William
3 Illustration from Philip Vincent, The Lamentations of Germany, 1638
4 Albert van der Eeckhout (attrib.), Frederick William the Great Elector as Scipio, c . 1660
5 A view of the city of Königsberg, c . 1690
6 Samuel Theodor Gericke (attrib.), Frederick I, King in Prussia, after 1701
7 Anon., Jacob Paul von Gundling, 1729
8 Georg Lisiewski (attrib.), The Tobacco Ministry, c . 1737
9 Johann Christof Merk, Grenadier James Kirkland, c . 1714
10 Daniel Chodowiecki, Crown Prince Frederick greets Katte through the window of his cell
11 The main façade of the Orphanage in Halle
12 Anon., King Frederick William I greets the Protestant exiles from the archbishopric of Salzburg, 1732
13 Carved frieze from the epitaph of Mayor Thomas Matthias, St Gotthard’s church, Brandenburg, 1549/1576
14 Havelberg Cathedral
15 Daniel Chodowiecki, Soldier’s wife begging, 1764
16 E. Feltner, ‘The Junker’, 1906
17 Adolph Menzel, Frederick the Great visits a factory, 1856
18 Johann Gottlieb Glume, Frederick the Great before the Seven Years War
19 Battle of Kunersdorf, 12 August 1759
20 Johann Heinrich Christoph Franke (after), Frederick the Great, orig. 1764
21 Daniel Chodowiecki, Frederick the Great opens the sarcophagus of the Great Elector, 1789
22 Johann Michael Siegfried Löwe (after Daniel Chodowiecki), Moses Mendelssohn examined at Potsdam’s Berlin Gate, 1792
23 Anon., Baron Karl vom und zum Stein
24 Christian Rauch, Karl August, Prince von Hardenberg, 1816
25 Le Beau (after Nadet), Napoleon and Tsar Alexander meeting at Tilsit
26 Friederich Meyer (after Heinrich Anton Dähling), The Royal Family in the palace gardens at Charlottenburg, c. 1805
27 Johann Gottfried Schadow, The princesses Luise and Frederike of Prussia, 1795–7
28 Death mask of Queen Luise, 1810
29 Friedrich Bury, Gerhard Johann von Scharnhorst, before 1813
30 Luise Henry, Wilhelm von Humboldt, 1826
31 Anon., Major von Schill
32 Anon., Johann David Ludwig Count Yorck
33 Johann Lorenz Rugendas, The Battle of Leipzig
34 The Iron Cross
35 The Order of Luise
36 Moritz Daniel Oppenheimer, Return of the Jewish Volunteer from the Wars of Liberation to his family still living by the Old Custom, 1833–34
37 Karl Sand on his way to Mannheim
38 George French Angas, Old Lutheran settlement at Klemzig, South Australia, 1845
39 Franz Kugler, Hegel at the lectern, 1828
40 Anon., Frederick William IV as a tipsy Puss-in-Boots, 1843
41 Anon., Hunger and Desperation, 1844
42 Anon., From the club life of Berlin in 1848
43 F. G. Nordmann, The Barricade on the Krone and Friedrichstrasse, 1848, as seen by an eyewitness
44 Anon., Frederick William IV receives a delegation from the Frankfurt Parliament, 1849
45 Anon., Otto von Bismarck at the age of thirty-two, 1847
46 Anon., Prussian troops storm the Danish entrenchments at Düppel, 18April 1864
47 Anon., (after Anton von Werner), King William I of Prussia is proclaimed German Emperor in the Hall of Mirrors, 1871
48 The Avenue of Victory, Berlin
49 Anon., Advertisement for Odol mouthwash
50 Ludwig Stutz, Anti-clerical cartoon, 1900
51 Wilhelm Friedrich Georg Pape, Kaiser William II with his family in the grounds of Sans Souci, 1891
52 Olaf Gulbransson, Imperial Manoeuvres, 1909
53 Bruno Paul, Buy War Bonds!, 1917
54 George Grosz, Cheers Noske, 1919
55 Max Liebermann, Otto Braun, 1932
56 The ‘Day of Potsdam’
57 Excavation of the Hindenburg Stone, 1935
58 Hindenburg’s coffin is carried into his mausoleum at Tannenberg, 1935(photograph courtesy of Matthias Bräunlich)
59 Jewish families are deported from Memel
60 Fallen fragments of a statue of William I, East Berlin, 1950
61 The capture of Königsberg by Soviet troops, 1945
62 Statues from the Siegesallee are buried in Bellevue Palace Gardens, 1954
List of Maps
A History of Brandenburg–Prussia in six maps
The first partition of Poland, 1772
The second and third partitions of Poland, 1793, 1795
The German Confederation, in 1815
Development of the Prussian–German Customs Union
The Prussian–Austrian war of 1866
Acknowledgements
Between March 1985 and October 1987, I lived and studied in West Berlin, a place that no longer exists. It was a walled city islanded in Communist East Germany, ringed by a palisade of concrete slabs, ‘a cage,’ as one visiting Italian journalist put it, ‘in which one feels free.’ No one who lived there will forget the unique atmosphere of this marooned western citadel – a vibrant, multi-ethnic enclave, a haven for youthful refuseniks dodging West German military service, and a symbol of the Cold War in which formal sovereignty still rested with the victorious powers of 1945. There was little in West Berlin to invoke the Prussian past, which seemed as remote as antiquity.
Only when you crossed the political border at Friedrichsstrasse station, passing through turnstiles and metal corridors under the scrutiny of unsmiling guards, did you encounter the heart of the old Prussian city of Berlin–the long line of graceful buildings on Unter den Linden and the breathtaking symmetries of the Forum Fredericianum, where Frederick the Great advertised the cultural pretensions of his kingdom. To cross the border was to travel back into the past, a past only partly obscured by wartime devastation and decades of post-war neglect. A tree had sprouted in the broken dome of the eighteenth-century French Church on the Gendarmenmarkt, its roots reaching deep into the stonework. Berlin Cathedral was still a blackened hulk disfigured by the artillery and rifle fire of 1945. For an Australian from easygoing seaside Sydney, these crossings had an inexhaustible fascination.
Students of the Prussian past can draw on one of the world’s most sophisticated and varied historiographies. There is, first of all, the rich and still robust tradition of transatlantic Anglophone writing on Prussia. For readers of German, there is the extraordinary native Prussian canon, which reaches back to the beginnings of history as a modern academic discipline. The articles and monographs of the classic era of Prussian historiography are still remarkable for the depth and ambition of their scholarship and for the verve and elegance of their writing. The years since 1989 have seen a renewal of interest among younger German scholars and brought wider recognition to those East German historians whose work, notwithstanding the narrow intellectual horizons of the German Democratic Republic, did much to illuminate the evolving textures of Prussian society. One of the chief pleasures of working on this book has been the licence to browse widely in the writings of so many colleagues, alive and dead.
There are also more immediate debts. James Brophy, Karin Friedrich, Andreas Kossert, Benjamin Marschke, Jan Palmowski, Florian Schui and Gareth Stedman Jones shared with me pre-publication versions of their manuscripts. Marcus Clausius sent copies of his transcripts from the archives of the German Colonial Office. I benefited from the advice and conversation of Holger Afflerbach, Margaret Lavinia Anderson, David Barclay, Derek Beales, Stefan Berger, Tim Blanning, Richard Bosworth, Annabel Brett, Clarissa Campbell-Orr, Scott Dixon, Richard Drayton, Philip Dwyer, Richard Evans, Niall Ferguson, Bernhard Fulda, Wolfram Kaiser, Alan Kramer, Michael Ledger-Lomas, Julia Moses, Jonathan Parry, Wolfram Pyta, James Retallack, Torsten Riotte, Emma Rothschild, Ulinka Rublack, Martin Rühl, Hagen Schulze, Hamish Scott, James Sheehan, Brendan Simms, Jonathan Sperber, Thomas Stamm-Kuhlmann, Jonathan Steinberg, Adam Tooze, Maiken Umbach, Helmut Walser-Smith, Joachim Whaley, Peter Wilson, Emma Winter and Wolfgang Mommsen, a frequent visitor to Cambridge, whose unexpected death in August 2004was such a shock to his friends and colleagues here. Like many historians of Germany now working in the United Kingdom, I learned a great deal from collaborating on ‘The Struggle for Mastery in Germany’, the Cambridge Specified Subject convened by Tim Blanning and Jonathan Steinberg in the 1980s and early 1990s. I owe much to twenty-five years of spirited conversation with my father-in-law, Rainer Lübbren, a discerning reader of history.
Special thanks are due to those friends who had the generosity and stamina to read and comment on part or all of the manuscript: Chris Bayly, my father Peter Clark, James Mackenzie, Holger Nehring, Hamish Scott, James Simpson, Gareth Stedman Jones, and John A. Thompson. Patrick Higgins dispensed imaginative advice and ran a red line through passages of bombast and irrelevance. Working with the people at Penguin – Chloe Campbell, Richard Duguid and Rebecca Lee–has been another of the pleasures of this project. Simon Winder is the editor’s Platonic ideal, endowed with that second sight that sees more clearly than authors themselves the book trapped within the manuscript. Bela Cunha’s copy-editing was a vigilante rampage against error, inconsistency and syllogism. Thanks also to Cecilia Mackay for help in resourcing the pictures. With all this able support, the book ought in theory to be faultless – I take full responsibility for the fact that it is not.
How does one thank the most important people of all? Josef and Alexander grew taller during the writing of this book and distracted me in a thousand happy ways. Nina Lübbren bore my selfish obsession with humour and good grace and was the first reader and critic of every paragraph. It is to her that I dedicate this book with much love.
Introduction
On 25 February 1947, representatives of the Allied occupation authorities in Berlin signed a law abolishing the state of Prussia. From this moment onward, Prussia belonged to history.
The Prussian State, which from early days has been a bearer of militarism and reaction in Germany, has de facto ceased to exist.
Guided by the interests of preservation of peace and security of peoples, and with the desire to assure further reconstruction of the political life of Germany on a democratic basis, the Control Council enacts as follows:
ARTICLE I
The Prussian State together with its central government and all its agencies is abolished.1
Law No. 46 of the Allied Control Council was more than an administrative act. In expunging Prussia from the map of Europe, the Allied authorities also passed judgement upon it. Prussia was not just one German territory among others, on a par with Baden, Württemberg, Bavaria or Saxony; it was the very source of the German malaise that had afflicted Europe. It was the reason why Germany had turned from the path of peace and political modernity. ‘The core of Germany is Prussia,’ Churchill told the British Parliament on 21 September 1943. ‘There is the source of the recurring pestilence.’2 The excision of Prussia from the political map of Europe was thus a symbolic necessity. Its history had become a nightmare that weighed upon the minds of the living.
The burden of that ignominious termination presses on the subject matter of this book. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the history of Prussia had been painted in mainly positive tones. The Protestant historians of the Prussian School celebrated the Prussian state as a vehicle of rational administration and progress and the liberator of Protestant Germany from the toils of Habsburg Austria and Bonapartist France. They saw in the Prussian-dominated nation-state founded in 1871 the natural, inevitable and best outcome of Germany’s historical evolution since the Reformation.
This rosy view of the Prussian tradition faded after 1945, when the criminality of the Nazi regime cast its long shadows over the German past. Nazism, one prominent historian argued, was no accident, but rather ‘the acute symptom of a chronic [Prussian] infirmity’; the Austrian Adolf Hitler was an ‘elective Prussian’ in his mentality.3 The view gained ground that German history in the modern era had failed to follow the ‘normal’ (i.e. British, American or west European) route to a relatively liberal and untroubled political maturity. Whereas the power of traditional elites and political institutions had been broken in France, Britain and the Netherlands by ‘bourgeois revolutions’, so the argument ran, this had never been achieved in Germany. Instead, Germany followed a ‘special path’ (Sonderweg) that culminated in twelve years of Nazi dictatorship.
Prussia played a key role in this scenario of political malformation, for it was here that the classical manifestations of the special path seemed most clearly in evidence. Foremost among these was the unbroken power of the Junkers, the noble landowners of the districts to the east of the river Elbe, whose dominance within government, the military and rural society had survived the age of the European revolutions. The consequences for Prussia and by extension for Germany were, it appeared, disastrous: a political culture marked by illiberalism and intolerance, an inclination to revere power over legally grounded right, and an unbroken tradition of militarism. Central to nearly all diagnoses of the special path was the notion of a lopsided or ‘incomplete’ process of modernization, in which the evolution of political culture failed to keep pace with innovation and growth in the economic sphere. By this reading, Prussia was the bane of modern German and European history. Imprinting its own peculiar political culture on the nascent German nation-state, it stifled and marginalized the more liberal political cultures of the German south and thus laid the foundations for political extremism and dictatorship. Its habits of authoritarianism, servility and obedience prepared the ground for the collapse of democracy and the advent of dictatorship.4
This paradigm shift in historical perceptions met with energetic counterblasts from historians (mainly West German, and mainly of liberal or conservative political orientation) who sought to rehabilitate the reputation of the abolished state. They highlighted its positive achievements – an incorruptible civil service, a tolerant attitude to religious minorities, a law code (from 1794) admired and imitated throughout the German states, a literacy rate (in the nineteenth century) unequalled in Europe and a bureaucracy of exemplary efficiency. They drew attention to the vibrancy of the Prussian enlightenment. They noted the capacity of the Prussian state to transform and reconstitute itself in times of crisis. As a counterpart to the political servility emphasized by the special-path paradigm, they stressed notable episodes of insubordination, most importantly the role played by Prussian officers in the plot to assassinate Hitler in July 1944. The Prussia they depicted was not without flaws, but it had little in common with the racial state created by the Nazis.5
The high-water mark for this work of historical evocation was the massive Prussia Exhibition that opened in Berlin in 1981 and was seen by over half a million visitors. Room after room full of objects and tables of text prepared by an international team of scholars allowed the viewer to traverse Prussian history through a succession of scenes and moments. There were military paraphernalia, aristocratic family trees, images of life at court and historic battle paintings, but also rooms organized around the themes of ‘tolerance’, ‘emancipation’ and ‘revolution’. The aim was not to shed a nostalgic glow over the past (though it was certainly too positive for many critics on the political left), but to alternate light and shadow, and thereby to ‘draw the balance’ of Prussian history. Commentaries on the exhibition – both in the official catalogues and in the mass media – focused on the meaning of Prussia for contemporary Germans. Much of the discussion centred on the lessons that could or could not be learned from Prussia’s troubled journey into modernity. There was talk of the need to honour the ‘virtues’–disinterested public service and tolerance, for example – while disassociating oneself from the less appetizing features of the Prussian tradition, such as autocratic habits in politics or a tendency to glorify military achievement.6
Prussia remains, more than two decades later, an idea with the power to polarize. The unification of Germany after 1989 and the transfer of the capital from Catholic, ‘western’ Bonn to Protestant, ‘eastern’ Berli gave rise to misgivings about the still unmastered potency of the Prussian past. Would the spirit of ‘old Prussia’ reawaken to haunt the German Republic? Prussia was extinct, but ‘Prussia’ re-emerged as a symbolic political token. It has become a slogan for elements of the German right, who see in the ‘traditions’ of ‘old Prussia’ a virtuous counterweight to ‘disorientation’, ‘the erosion of values’, ‘political corruption’ and the decline of collective identities in contemporary Germany.7 Yet for many Germans, ‘Prussia’ remains synonymous with everything repellent in German history: militarism, conquest, arrogance and illiberality. The controversy over Prussia has tended to flicker back into life whenever the symbolic attributes of the abolished state are brought into play. The re-interment of the remains of Frederick the Great at his palace of Sans Souci in August 1991 was the subject of much fractious discussion and there have been heated public disputes over the plan to reconstruct the Hohenzollern city palace on the Schlossplatz in the heart of Berlin.8
In February 2002, Alwin Ziel, an otherwise inconspicuous Social Democratic minister in the Brandenburg state government, achieved instant notoriety when he intervened in a debate over a proposed merger of the city of Berlin with the federal state of Brandenburg. ‘Berlin-Brandenburg’, he argued, was a cumbersome word; why not name the new territory ‘Prussia’? The suggestion set off a new wave of debate. Sceptics warned of a rebirth of Prussia, the issue was discussed on television talk shows across Germany, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung ran a series of articles under the rubric ‘Should there be a Prussia?’ (Darf Preussen sein?) Among the contributors was Professor Hans-Ulrich Wehler, a leading exponent of the German special path, whose article – a vociferous rejection of Ziel’s proposal – bore the title ‘Prussia poisons us’.9
No attempt to understand the history of Prussia can entirely escape the issues raised by these debates. The question of how exactly Prussia was implicated in the disasters of Germany’s twentieth century must be a part of any appraisal of the state’s history. But this does not mean that we should read the history of Prussia (or indeed of any state) from the perspective of Hitler’s seizure of power alone. Nor does it oblige us to assess the Prussian record in binary ethical categories, dutifully praising light and deploring shadow. The polarized judgements that abound in contemporary debate (and in parts of the historical literature) are problematic, not just because they impoverish the complexity of the Prussian experience, but also because they compress its history into a national teleology of German guilt. Yet the truth is that Prussia was a European state long before it became a German one. Germany was not Prussia’s fulfilment – here I anticipate one of the central arguments of this book – but its undoing.
I have thus made no attempt to tease out the virtue and vice in the Prussian record or to weigh them in the balance. I make no claim to extrapolate ‘lessons’ or to dispense moral or political advice to present or future generations. The reader of these pages will encounter neither the bleak, warmongering termite-state of some Prussophobe treatises, nor the cosy fireside scenes of the Prussophile tradition. As an Australian historian writing in twenty-first-century Cambridge, I am happily dispensed from the obligation (or temptation) either to lament or to celebrate the Prussian record. Instead, this book aims to understand the forces that made and unmade Prussia.
It has recently become fashionable to emphasize that nations and states are not natural phenomena but contingent, artificial creations. It is said that they are ‘edifices’ that have to be constructed or invented, with collective identities that are ‘forged’ by acts of will.10 No modern state more strikingly vindicates this perspective than Prussia: it was an assemblage of disparate territorial fragments lacking natural boundaries or a distinct national culture, dialect or cuisine. This predicament was amplified by the fact that Prussia’s intermittent territorial expansion entailed the periodic incorporation of new populations whose loyalty to the Prussian state could be acquired, if at all, only through arduous processes of assimilation. Making ‘Prussians’ was a slow and faltering enterprise whose momentum had begun to wane long before Prussian history reached its formal termination. The name ‘Prussia’ itself had a contrived quality, since it derived not from the northern heartland of the Hohenzollern dynasty (the Mark Brandenburg around the city of Berlin), but from a non-adjacent Baltic duchy that formed the easternmost territory of the Hohenzollern patrimony. It was, as it were, the logo the Electors of Brandenburg adopted after their elevation to royal status in 1701. The core and essence of the Prussian tradition was an absence of tradition. How this desiccated, abstract polity acquired flesh and bones, how it evolved from a block-printed list of princely titles into something coherent and alive, and how it learned to win the voluntary allegiance of its subjects – these questions are at the centre of this book.
The word ‘Prussian’ stills stands in common parlance for a particular kind of authoritarian orderliness, and it is all too easy to imagine the history of Prussia as the unfolding of a tidy plan by which the Hohenzollerns gradually unfurl the power of the state, integrating their possessions, extending their patrimony and pushing back the provincial nobilities. In this scenario, the state rises out of the confusion and obscurity of the medieval past, severing its bonds with tradition, imposing a rational, all-embracing order. The book aims to unsettle this narrative. It attempts, firstly, to open up the Prussian record in such a way that both order and disorder have their place. The experience of war – the most terrible kind of disorder – runs through the Prussian story, accelerating and retarding the state-building process in complex ways. As for the domestic consolidation of the state, this has to be seen as a haphazard and improvised process that unfolded within a dynamic and sometimes unstable social setting. ‘Administration’ was sometimes a byword for controlled upheaval. Well into the nineteenth century there were many areas of the Prussian lands where the presence of the state was scarcely perceptible.
Yet this does not mean that we should relegate ‘the state’ to the margins of the Prussian story. Rather we should understand it as an artefact of political culture, a form of reflexive consciousness. It is one of the remarkable features of Prussia’s intellectual formation that the idea of a distinctively Prussian history has always been interwoven with claims about the legitimacy and necessity of the state. The Great Elector, for example, argued in the mid seventeenth century that the concentration of power within the executive structures of the monarchical state was the most reliable surety against external aggression. But this argument – sometimes rehearsed by historians under the rubric of an objective ‘primacy of foreign policy’–was itself a part of the story of the state’s evolution; it was one of the rhetorical instruments with which the prince underpinned his claim to sovereign power.
To put the same point a different way: the story of the Prussian state is also the story of the story of the Prussian state, for the Prussian state made up its history as it went along, developing an ever more elaborate account of its trajectory in the past and its purposes in the present. In the early nineteenth century, the need to shore up the Prussian administration in the face of the revolutionary challenge from France produced a unique discursive escalation. The Prussian state legitimated itself as the carrier of historical progress in terms so exalted that it became the model of a particular kind of modernity. Yet the authority and sublimity of the state in the minds of educated contemporaries bore little relation to its actual weight in the lives of the great majority of subjects.
There is an intriguing contrast between the modesty of Prussia’s ancestral territorial endowment and the eminence of its place in history. Visitors to Brandenburg, the historic core province of the Prussian state, have always been struck by the meagreness of its resources, the sleepy provinciality of its towns. There was little here to suggest, let alone explain, the extraordinary historical career of the Brandenburg polity. ‘Someone ought to write a little piece on what is happening at present,’ Voltaire wrote at the beginning of the Seven Years War (1756–63), as his friend King Frederick of Prussia struggled to fight off the combined forces of the French, Russians and Austrians. ‘It would be of some use to explain how the sandy country of Brandenburg came to wield such power that greater efforts have been marshalled against it than were ever mustered against Louis XIV.’11 The apparent mismatch between the force wielded by the Prussian state and the domestic resources available to sustain it helps to explain one of the most curious features of Prussia’s history as a European power, namely the alternation of moments of precocious strength with moments of perilous weakness. Prussia is bound up in public awareness with the memory of military success: Rossbach, Leuthen, Leipzig, Waterloo, Königgrätz, Sedan. But in the course of its history, Brandenburg-Prussia repeatedly stood on the brink of political extinction: during the Thirty Years War, again during the Seven Years War and once again in 1806, when Napoleon smashed the Prussian army and chased the king across northern Europe to Memel at the easternmost extremity of his kingdom. Periods of armament and military consolidation were interspersed with long periods of contraction and decline. The dark side of Prussia’s unexpected success was an abiding sense of vulnerability that left a distinctive imprint on the state’s political culture.
This book is about how Prussia was made and unmade. Only through an appreciation of both processes can we understand how a state that once loomed so large in the awareness of so many could so abruptly and comprehensively disappear, unmourned, from the political stage.
A History of Brandenburg–Prussia
in Six Maps
(pp. xxvi–xxix)
Source: Otto Büsch and Wolfang Neugebauer (eds.),, Moderne
Preusische Geschichte 1648–1947. Eine Anthologie (3 vols., Walter de
Gruyter: Berlin, 1981), vol. 3. Reproduced with kind permission.
Map 1. The Electorate of Brandenburg at the time of its acquisition by the Hohenzollerns in 1415
Map 2. Brandenburg–Prussia at the time of the Great Elector (1640–88)
Map 3. The Kingdom of Prussia at the time of Frederick the Great (1740–86)
Map 4. Prussia during the reign of Frederick William II, showing the territories taken during the second and third partitions of Poland
Map 5. Prussia following the Congress of Vienna (1815)
Map 6. Prussia at the time of the Kaiserreich 1871–1918
1
The Hohenzollerns of Brandenburg
HEARTLAND
In the beginning there was only Brandenburg, a territory encompassing some 40,000 square kilometres and centred on the city of Berlin. This was the heartland of the state that would later be known as Prussia. Situated in the midst of the dreary plain that stretches from the Netherlands to northern Poland, the Brandenburg countryside has rarely attracted visitors. It possesses no distinctive landmarks. The rivers that cross it are sluggish meandering streams that lack the grandeur of the Rhine or the Danube. Monotonous forests of birch and fir covered much of its surface. The topographer Nicolaus Leuthinger, author of an early description of Brandenburg, wrote in 1598 of a ‘flat land, wooded and for the most part swamp’. ‘Sand’, flatness, ‘bogs’ and ‘uncultivated areas’ were recurring topoi in all the early accounts, even the most panegyric.1
The soil across much of Brandenburg was of poor quality. In some areas, especially around Berlin, the ground was so sandy and light that trees would not grow on it. In this respect little had changed by the mid nineteenth century, when an English traveller approaching Berlin from the south at the height of summer described ‘vast regions of bare and burning sand; villages, few and far between, and woods of stunted firs, the ground under which is hoar with a thick carpeting of reindeer moss’.2
Metternich famously remarked that Italy was a ‘geographical expression’. The same could not be said of Brandenburg. It was landlocked and without defensible natural borders of any kind. It was a purely political entity, assembled from the lands seized from pagan Slavs during the Middle Ages and settled by immigrants from France, the Netherlands, northern Italy and England, as well as the German lands. The Slavic character of the population was gradually erased, although there remained until well into the twentieth century pockets of Slavic-language speakers – known as ‘Wends’ – in the villages of the Spreewald near Berlin. The frontier character of the region, its identity as the eastward boundary of Christian-German settlement, was semantically conserved in the term ‘Mark’, or ‘March’ (as in Welsh Marches), used both for Brandenburg as a whole and for four of its five constituent provinces: the Mittelmark around Berlin, the Altmark to the west, the Uckermark to the north and the Neumark to the east (the fifth was the Prignitz to the north-west).
Transport arrangements were primitive. As Brandenburg had no coast, there was no harbour on the sea. The rivers Elbe and Oder flowed northwards towards the North Sea and the Baltic through the western and eastern flanks of the Mark, but there was no waterway between them, so that the residential cities of Berlin and Potsdam remained without direct access to the transportation arteries of the region. Work had begun in 1548 on a canal that would link the Oder with the river Spree that ran between Berlin and its sister-city Cölln, but the project proved too costly and was abandoned. Since in this period transport was far more expensive by land routes than by water, the paucity of navigable east–west waterways was a serious structural disadvantage.
Brandenburg lay outside the main German areas of specialized crop-based manufacture (wine, madder, flax, fustian, wool and silk), and was not well endowed with the key mineral resources of the era (silver, copper, iron, zinc and tin).3 The most important centre of metallurgical activity was the ironworks established in the fortified city of Peitz in the 1550s. A contemporary depiction shows substantial buildings situated among fast-flowing artificial watercourses. A large water-wheel powered the heavy hammers that flattened and shaped the metal. Peitz was of some importance to the Elector, whose garrisons depended upon it for munitions; it was otherwise of little economic significance. The iron produced there was prone to shatter in cold weather. Brandenburg was thus in no position to compete for export custom in regional markets and its nascent metallurgical sector could not have survived without government contracts and import restrictions.4 It had nothing to compare with the flourishing foundries in the ore-rich electorate of Saxony to the south-east. It did not enjoy the self-sufficiency in armaments that enabled Sweden to assert itself as a regional power in the early seventeenth century.
Early accounts of Brandenburg’s agrarian topography convey a mixed impression. The poor quality of the soil across much of the territory meant that agricultural yields in many areas were low. In some places, the soil was so quickly exhausted that it could be sown only every six, nine or twelve years, not to mention sizeable tracts of ‘infertile sand’ or waterland where nothing could be grown at all.5 On the other hand, there were also areas – especially in the Altmark and Uckermark and the fertile Havelland to the west of Berlin – with sufficient tracts of arable land to support intensive cereal cultivation, and here there were signs of real economic vitality by 1600. Under the favourable conditions of the long European growth cycle of the sixteenth century, the landlords of the Brandenburg nobility amassed impressive fortunes by producing grain for export. Evidence of this wealth could be seen in the graceful Renaissance houses – virtually none of which survive – built by the better-off families, a growing readiness to send sons abroad for university education, and a sharp rise in the value of agricultural property. The waves of sixteenth-century German immigrants who came to Brandenburg from Franconia, the Saxon states, Silesia and the Rhineland to settle on unoccupied farms were a further sign of growing prosperity.
Yet there is little to suggest that the profits earned even by the most successful landlords were contributing to productivity gains or longer-term economic growth on a more than local scale.6 Brandenburg’s manorial system did not release enough surplus labour or generate enough purchasing power to stimulate the kind of urban development found in western Europe. The towns of the territory developed as administrative centres accommodating local manufactures and trade, but they remained modest in size. The capital city, a composite settlement then known as Berlin-Cölln, numbered only 10,000 people when the Thirty Years War broke out in 1618 – the core population of the City of London at this time was around 130,000.
DYNASTY
How did this unpromising territory become the heartland of a powerful European state? The key lies partly in the prudence and ambition of the ruling dynasty. The Hohenzollerns were a clan of south-German magnates on the make. In 1417, Frederick Hohenzollern, Burgrave of the small but wealthy territory of Nuremberg, purchased Brandenburg from its then sovereign, Emperor Sigismund, for 400,000 Hungarian gold guilders. The transaction brought prestige as well as land, for Brandenburg was one of the seven Electorates of the Holy Roman Empire, a patchwork quilt of states and statelets that extended across German Europe. In acquiring his new title, Frederick I, Elector of Brandenburg, entered a political universe that has since vanished utterly from the map of Europe. The ‘Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation’ was essentially a survival from the medieval world of universal Christian monarchy, mixed sovereignty and corporate privilege. It was not an ‘empire’ in the modern Anglophone sense of a system of rule imposed by one territory upon others, but a loose fabric of constitutional arrangements centred on the imperial court and encompassing over 300 sovereign territorial entities that varied widely in size and legal status.7 The subjects of the Empire included not only Germans but also French-speaking Walloons, Flemings in the Netherlands and Danes, Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes, Croats and Italians on the northern and eastern periphery of German Europe. Its chief political organ was the imperial diet, an assembly of envoys representing the territorial principalities, sovereign bishoprics, abbeys, counties and imperial Free Cities (independent mini-states such as Hamburg and Augsburg) that composed the ‘estates’ of the Empire.
Presiding over this variegated political landscape was the Holy Roman Emperor. His was an elective office – each new emperor had to be chosen in concert by the Electors – so that in theory the post could have been held by a candidate from any eligible dynasty. Yet, from the late Middle Ages until the formal abolition of the Empire in 1806 the choice virtually always fell in practice to the senior male member of the Habsburg family.8 By the 1520s, following a chain of advantageous marriages and fortunate successions (most importantly to Bohemia and Hungary), the Habsburgs were far and away the wealthiest and most powerful German dynasty. The Bohemian crown lands included the mineral-rich Duchy of Silesia and the margravates of Upper and Lower Lusatia, all major centres of manufacture. The Habsburg court thus controlled an impressive swathe of territories reaching from the western margins of Hungary to the southern borders of Brandenburg.
When they became Electors of Brandenburg, the Franconian Hohenzollerns joined a small elite of German princes – there were only seven in all – with the right to elect the man who would become Holy Roman Emperor of the German Nation. The Electoral title was an asset of enormous significance. It bestowed a symbolic pre-eminence that was given visible expression not only in the sovereign insignia and political rites of the dynasty but also in the elaborate ceremonials that attended all the official functions of the Empire. It placed the sovereigns of Brandenburg in a position periodically to exchange the territory’s Electoral vote for political concessions and gifts from the Emperor. Such opportunities arose not only on the occasion of an actual imperial election, but at all those times when a still reigning emperor sought to secure advance support for his successor.
The Hohenzollerns worked hard to consolidate and expand their patrimony. There were small but significant territorial acquisitions in almost every reign until the mid sixteenth century. Unlike several other German dynasties in the region, the Hohenzollerns also managed to avoid a partition of their lands. The law of succession known as the Dispositio Achillea (1473) secured the hereditary unity of Brandenburg. Joachim I (r. 1499–1535) flouted this law when he ordered that his lands be divided at his death between his two sons, but the younger son died without issue in 1571 and the unity of the Mark was restored. In his political testament of 1596, Elector John George (r. 1571–98) once again proposed to partition the Mark among his sons from various marriages. His successor, Elector Joachim Frederick, succeeded in holding the Brandenburg inheritance together, but only thanks to the extinction of the southern, Franconian line of the family, which allowed him to compensate his younger brothers with lands from outside the Brandenburg patrimony. As these examples suggest, the sixteenth-century Hohenzollerns still thought and behaved as clan chiefs rather than as heads of state. Yet, although the temptation to put the family first continued to be felt after 1596, it was never strong enough to prevail against the integrity of the territory. Other dynastic territories of this era fractured over the generations into ever smaller statelets, but Brandenburg remained intact.9
The Habsburg Emperor loomed large on the political horizons of the Hohenzollern Electors in Berlin. He was not just a potent European prince, but also the symbolic keystone and guarantor of the Empire itself, whose ancient constitution was the foundation of all sovereignty in German Europe. Respect for his power was intermingled with a deep attachment to the political order he personified. Yet none of this meant that the Habsburg Emperor could control or single-handedly direct affairs within the Empire. There was no imperial central government, no imperial right of taxation and no permanent imperial army or police force. Bending the Empire to his will was always a matter of negotiation, bargaining and manoeuvre. For all its continuities with the medieval past, the Holy Roman Empire was a highly fluid and dynamic system characterized by an unstable balance of power.
REFORMATION
In the 1520s and 1530s, the energies released by the German Reformation agitated this complex system, generating a process of galloping polarization. An influential group of territorial princes adopted the Lutheran confession, along with about two-fifths of the imperial Free Cities. The Habsburg Emperor Charles V, determined both to safeguard the Catholic character of the Roman Empire and to consolidate his own imperial dominion, mustered an anti-Lutheran alliance. These forces won some notable victories in the Schmalkaldic War of 1546–7, but the prospect of further Habsburg advancement sufficed to bring together the dynasty’s opponents and rivals within and outside the Empire. By the early 1550s, France, ever anxious to block the machinations of Vienna, had begun to provide military support for the Protestant German territories. The consequence of the resulting stalemate was the compromise settlement agreed at the 1555 Diet of Augsburg. The Peace of Augsburg formally acknowledged the existence of Lutheran territories within the Empire and conceded the right of Lutheran sovereigns to impose confessional conformity upon their own subjects.
Throughout these upheavals, the Hohenzollerns of Brandenburg pursued a policy of neutrality and circumspection. Anxious not to alienate the Emperor, they were slow to commit themselves formally to the Lutheran faith; having done so, they instituted a territorial reformation so cautious and so gradual that it took most of the sixteenth century to accomplish. Elector Joachim I of Brandenburg (1499–1535) wished his sons to remain within the Catholic church, but in 1527 his wife Elizabeth of Denmark took matters into her own hands and converted to Lutheranism before fleeing to Saxony, where she placed herself under the protection of the Lutheran Elector John.10 The new Elector was still a Catholic when he acceded to the Brandenburg throne as Joachim II (r. 1535–71), but he soon followed his mother’s example and converted to the Lutheran faith. Here, as on so many later occasions, dynastic women played a crucial role in the development of Brandenburg’s confessional policy.
For all his personal sympathy with the cause of religious reform, Joachim II was slow to attach his territory formally to the new faith. He still loved the old liturgy and the pomp of the Catholic ritual. He was also anxious not to take any step that might damage Brandenburg’s standing within the fabric of the still predominantly Catholic Empire. A portrait from around 1551 by Lucas Cranach the Younger captures these two sides of the man. We see an imposing figure who stands with fists clenched before a spreading belly, decked in the bulging, bejewelled court garb of the day. There is watchfulness in the features. Wary eyes look out obliquely from the square face.
1. Lucas Cranach, Elector Joachim II (1535–71), painted c. 1551
In the great political struggles of the Empire, Brandenburg aspired to the role of conciliator and honest broker. The Elector’s envoys were involved in various failed attempts to engineer a compromise between the Protestant and Catholic camps. Joachim II kept his distance from the more hawkish Protestant princes and even sent a small contingent of mounted troops to support the Emperor during the Schmalkaldic War. It was not until 1563, in the relative calm that followed the Peace of Augsburg, that Joachim formalized his personal attachment to the new religion through a public confession of faith.
Only in the reign of Elector John George (1571–98), Joachim II’s son, did the lands of Brandenburg begin to develop a more firmly Lutheran character: orthodox Lutherans were appointed to professorial posts at the University of Frankfurt/Oder, the Church Regulation of 1540 was thoroughly revised to conform more faithfully with Lutheran principles and two territorial church inspections (1573–81 and 1594) were carried out to ensure that the transition to Lutheranism was accomplished at the provincial and local level. Yet in the sphere of imperial politics, John George remained a loyal supporter of the Habsburg court. Even Elector Joachim Frederick (r. 1598–1608), who as a young man had antagonized the Catholic camp by his open support for the Protestant cause, mellowed when he came to the throne, and kept his distance from the various Protestant combinations attempting to extract religious concessions from the imperial court.11
If the Electors of Brandenburg were prudent, they were not without ambition. Marriage was the preferred instrument of policy for a state that lacked defensible frontiers or the resources to achieve its objectives by coercive means. Surveying the Hohenzollern marital alliances of the sixteenth century, one is struck by the scatter-gun approach: in 1502 and again in 1523, there were marriages with the House of Denmark, by which the reigning Elector hoped (in vain) to acquire a claim to parts of the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein and a harbour on the Baltic. In 1530, his daughter was married off to Duke Georg I of Pomerania, in the hope that Brandenburg might one day succeed to the duchy and acquire a stretch of Baltic coast. The King of Poland was another important player in Brandenburg’s calculations. He was the feudal overlord of the Duchy of Prussia, a Baltic principality that had been controlled by the Teutonic Order until its secularization in 1525, and was ruled thereafter by Duke Albrecht von Hohenzollern, a cousin of the Elector of Brandenburg.
It was partly in order to get his hands on this attractive territory that Elector Joachim II married Princess Hedwig of Poland in 1535. In 1564, when his wife’s brother was on the Polish throne, Joachim succeeded in having his two sons named as secondary heirs to the duchy. Following Duke Albrecht’s death four years later, this status was confirmed at the Polish Reichstag in Lublin, opening up the prospect of a Brandenburg succession to the duchy if the new duke, the sixteen-year-old Albrecht Frederick, were to die without male issue. As it happened, the wager paid off: Albrecht Frederick lived, in poor mental but good physical health, for a further fifty years until 1618, when he died, having sired two daughters, but no sons.
In the meanwhile, the Hohenzollerns lost no time in reinforcing their claim to the Duchy of Prussia by every means available. The sons took up where the fathers had left off. In 1603, Elector Joachim Frederick persuaded the Polish king to grant him the powers of regent over the duchy (necessary because of the reigning duke’s mental infirmity). His son John Sigismund had further reinforced the link with Ducal Prussia by marrying Duke Albrecht Friedrich’s eldest daughter, Anna of Prussia, in 1594, overlooking her mother’s candid warning that she was ‘not the prettiest’.12 Then, presumably in order to prevent another family from muscling in on the inheritance, the father, Joachim Frederick, whose first wife had died, married the younger sister of his son’s wife. The father was now the brother-in-law of the son, while Anna’s younger sister doubled as her mother-in-law.
A direct succession to the Duchy of Prussia thus seemed certain. But the marriage between John Sigismund and Anna also opened up the prospect of a new and rich inheritance in the west. Anna was not only the daughter of the Duke of Prussia, but also the niece of yet another insane German duke, John William of Jülich-Kleve, whose territories encompassed the Rhenish duchies of Jülich, Kleve (Cleves) and Berg and the counties of Mark and Ravensberg. Anna’s mother, Maria Eleonora, was the eldest sister of John William. The relationship on her mother’s side would have counted for little, had it not been for a pact within the house of Jülich-Kleve that allowed the family’s properties and titles to pass down the female line. This unusual arrangement made Anna of Prussia her uncle’s heiress, and thus established her husband, John Sigismund of Brandenburg, as a claimant to the lands of Jülich-Kleve.13 Nothing could better illustrate the serendipitous quality of the marriage market in early modern Europe, with its ruthless trans-generational plotting, and its role in this formative phase of Brandenburg’s history.
GREAT EXPECTATIONS
By the turn of the seventeenth century, the Electors of Brandenburg stood on the brink of possibilities that were exhilarating, but also troubling. Neither the Duchy of Prussia nor the scattered duchies and counties of the Jülich-Kleve inheritance adjoined the Mark Brandenburg. The latter lay on the western edge of the Holy Roman Empire, cheek by jowl with the Spanish Netherlands and the Dutch Republic. It was a congeries of confessionally mixed territories in one of the most urban and industrialized regions of German Europe. Lutheran Ducal Prussia – roughly as large as Brandenburg itself – lay outside the Holy Roman Empire to the east on the Baltic coast, surrounded by the lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. It was a place of windswept beaches and inlets, cereal-bearing plains, placid lakes, marshes and sombre forests. It was not unusual in Early Modern Europe for geographically scattered territories to fall under the authority of a single sovereign, but the distances involved in this case were unusually great. Over 700 kilometres of roads and tracks – many of which were virtually impassable in wet weather – lay between Berlin and Königsberg.
It was clear that Brandenburg’s claims would not go unchallenged. An influential party within the Polish diet was opposed to the Brandenburg succession, and there were at least seven prominent rival claimants to the Jülich-Kleve inheritance, of which the strongest on paper (after Brandenburg) was the Duke of Pfalz-Neuburg in western Germany. Both Ducal Prussia and Jülich-Kleve lay, moreover, in areas of heightened international tension. Jülich-Kleve fell within the orbit of the Dutch struggle for independence from Spain that had been raging intermittently since the 1560s; Ducal Prussia lay in the conflict zone between expansionist Sweden and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Electorate’s military establishment was based on an archaic system of feudal levies that had been in steep decline for over a century by 1600. There was no standing army, beyond a few companies of life-guards and some insignificant fortress garrisons. Even supposing Brandenburg were able to acquire them in the first place, keeping the new territories would require the commitment of considerable resources.
But where would these resources come from? Any attempt to expand the Elector’s fiscal base in order to finance the acquisition of new territories was sure to meet entrenched domestic opposition. Like many European princes, the Electors of Brandenburg shared power with an array of regional elites organized in representative bodies called Estates. The Estates approved (or not) taxes levied by the Elector and (from 1549) administered their collection. In return they possessed far-reaching powers and privileges. The Elector was forbidden, for example, to enter into alliances without first seeking the approval of the Estates.14 In a declaration published in 1540 and reiterated on various occasions until 1653, the Elector even promised that he would not ‘decide or undertake any important things upon which the flourishing or decline of the lands may depend, without the foreknowledge and consultation of all our estates’.15 His hands were therefore tied. The provincial nobilities owned the lion’s share of the landed wealth in the Electorate; they were also the Elector’s most important creditors. But their outlook was vehemently parochial; they had no interest in helping the Elector to acquire far-flung territories of which they knew nothing and they were opposed to any action that might undermine the security of the Mark.
Elector Joachim Frederick recognized the scale of the problem. On 13 December 1604, he announced the establishment of a Privy Council (Geheimer Rat), a body consisting of nine councillors whose task was to oversee ‘the high and weighty matters that press upon Us’, especially in connection with the claims to Prussia and Jülich.16 The Privy Council was supposed to function collegially, so that issues could be weighed up from a range of angles with a greater consistency of approach. It never became the core of a state bureaucracy – the schedule of regular meetings envisaged in the original order was never observed and its function remained primarily consultative.17 But the breadth and diversity of its responsibilities signalled a new determination to concentrate the decision-making process at the highest level.
There was also a new westward orientation in marital policy. In February 1605, the Elector’s ten-year-old grandson George William was betrothed to the eight-year-old daughter of Frederick IV, the Elector Palatine. The Palatinate, a substantial and wealthy territory on the Rhine, was the foremost German centre of Calvinism, a rigorous form of Protestantism that broke more radically with Catholicism than the Lutherans. During the second half of the sixteenth century, the Calvinist, or Reformed, faith had secured a foothold in parts of western and southern Germany. Heidelberg, capital city of the Palatinate, was the hub of a network of military and political relationships that embraced many of the German Calvinist cities and principalities, but also extended to foreign Calvinist powers, most importantly the Dutch Republic. Frederick IV possessed one of the most formidable military establishments in western Germany, and the Elector hoped that closer relations would bring him strategic support for Brandenburg’s claims in the west. Sure enough, in April 1605 an alliance was formalized between Brandenburg, the Palatinate and the Dutch Republic, by which the Dutch agreed, in return for military subsidies, to maintain 5,000 men in readiness to occupy Jülich for the Elector.
This was a departure. In allying themselves with the militant Calvinist interest, the Hohenzollerns had placed themselves beyond the pale of the settlement reached at Augsburg in 1555, which had recognized the right to tolerance of the Lutherans, but not of the Calvinists. Brandenburg was now consorting with some of the Habsburg Emperor’s most determined enemies. A division opened among the decision-makers in Berlin. The Elector and most of his councillors favoured a policy of caution and restraint. But a group of influential figures around the Elector’s hard-drinking eldest son, John Sigismund (r. 1608–19), took a firmer line. One of these was the Calvinist Privy Councillor Ottheinrich Bylandt zu Rheydt, himself a native of Jülich. Another was John Sigismund’s wife, Anna of Prussia, the carrier of the Jülich-Kleve claim. Backed by his supporters – or perhaps driven by them – John Sigismund pressed for closer relations with the Palatinate; he even argued that Brandenburg should pre-empt any dispute over the succession to Jülich-Kleve by invading and occupying it in advance.18 Not for the last time in the history of the Hohenzollern state, the political elite polarized around opposed foreign policy options.
In 1609 the mad old Duke of Jülich-Kleve finally died, activating the Brandenburg claim to his territories. The timing could hardly have been less propitious. The regional conflict between Habsburg Spain and the Dutch Republic was still simmering, and the inheritance lay in the strategically vital military corridor to the Low Countries. To make matters worse, there had been a dramatic escalation in confessional tensions across the Empire. Following a sequence of bitter religious disputes, two opposed confessional alliances emerged: the Protestant Union of 1608 led by the Calvinist Palatinate, and the Catholic League of 1609, led by Duke Maximilian of Bavaria under the protection of the Emperor. In less troubled times, the Elector of Brandenburg and the Duke of Pfalz-Neuburg would doubtless have looked to the Emperor to resolve the dispute over Jülich-Kleve. But in the partisan climate of 1609, there could be no confidence in the Emperor’s neutrality. Instead, the Elector decided to circumvent the machinery of imperial arbitration and sign a separate agreement with his rival: the two princes would jointly occupy the contested territories, pending a later resolution of their claims.
Their action provoked a major crisis. Imperial troops were despatched from the Spanish Netherlands to oversee the defence of Jülich. John Sigismund joined the Protestant Union, which duly declared its support for the two claimants and mobilized an army of 5,000 men. Henri IV of France took an interest and decided to intervene on the Protestant side. Only the French king’s assassination in May 1610 prevented a major war from breaking out. A composite force of Dutch, French, English and Protestant Union troops entered Jülich and besieged the Catholic garrison there. In the meanwhile, new states flocked to join the Catholic League and the Emperor, in his fury at the claimants, bestowed the entire Jülich-Kleve complex upon the Elector of Saxony, prompting fears that a joint Saxon–imperial invasion of Brandenburg might be imminent. In 1614, after further quarrels, the Jülich-Kleve legacy was divided – pending a final settlement – between the two claimants: the Duke of Pfalz-Neuburg received Jülich and Berg, while Brandenburg secured Kleve, Mark, Ravensberg and Ravenstein (see p. 11).
These were acquisitions of considerable importance. The Duchy of Kleve straddled the River Rhine, jutting into the territory of the Dutch Republic. In the late Middle Ages, the construction of a system of dykes had reclaimed the fertile soil of the Rhine floodplain, transforming the territory into the bread basket of the Low Countries. The County of Mark was less fertile and less populous, but here there were significant pockets of mining and metallurgical activity. The little County of Ravensberg dominated a strategically important transport route linking the Rhineland with north-eastern Germany and possessed a flourishing linen industry concentrated mainly around Bielefeld, the capital city. The tiny Lordship of Ravenstein, situated on the River Maas, was an enclave within the Dutch Republic.
At some point it must have become clear to the Elector that he had overreached himself. His meagre revenues had prevented him from playing more than a minor supporting role in the conflict over his inheritance claim.19 Yet his territory was now more exposed than ever. There was a further complication: in 1613, John Sigismund announced his conversion to Calvinism, thereby placing his house outside the religious settlement of 1555. The momentous long-term significance of this step is discussed in chapter 5; in the short term, the Elector’s conversion excited outrage among the Lutheran population without providing any tangible short-term benefits for the territory’s foreign policy. In 1617, the Protestant Union, whose commitment to Brandenburg’s cause had always been fragile, withdrew its earlier support for the Brandenburg claim20John Sigismund responded by resigning from the Union. As one of his advisers pointed out, he had joined it only in the hope of securing his inheritance; his own territory was ‘so far away that [the Union] could be of no other use to him’.21 Brandenburg stood alone.
Perhaps a sharpening awareness of these predicaments accelerated the Elector’s personal decline after 1609. The man who had displayed such vigour and enterprise as crown prince seemed used up. His drinking, which had always been enthusiastic, was now out of control. The story later recalled by Schiller that John Sigismund ruined the chance of a marriage alliance between his daughter and the son of the Duke of Pfalz-Neuburg by punching his prospective son-in-law on the ear in a fit of intoxication may well be apocryphal.22 But similar accounts of violent and irrational drunken behaviour in the 1610s can probably be believed. John Sigismund grew obese and lethargic, and was intermittently incapable of conducting the business of government. A stroke in 1616 left his speech seriously impaired. By the summer of 1618, when the Duke of Prussia died in Königsberg, activating another Hohenzollern claim to another far-flung territory, John Sigismund seemed, according to one visitor, ‘lebendigtot’, suspended between life and death.23
The careful work of three generations of Hohenzollern Electors had transformed the prospects of Brandenburg. For the first time, we can discern the embryonic outlines of the sprawling territorial structure with its remote eastern and western dependencies that would shape the future of what would one day be known as Prussia. But there remained a gross discrepancy between commitments and resources. How would the House of Brandenburg defend its claims against its many rivals? How would it secure fiscal and political compliance within its new territories? These were difficult questions to answer, even in peacetime. But by 1618, despite efforts from many quarters to broker a compromise, the Holy Roman Empire was entering an era of bitter religious and dynastic war.
2
Devastation
During the Thirty Years War (1618–48) the German lands became the theatre of a European catastrophe. A confrontation between the Habsburg Emperor Ferdinand II (r. 1619–37) and Protestant forces within the Holy Roman Empire expanded to involve Denmark, Sweden, Spain, the Dutch Republic and France. Conflicts that were continental in scope played themselves out on the territories of the German states: the struggle between Spain and the breakaway Dutch Republic, acompetition among the northern powers for control of the Baltic, and the traditional great-power rivalry between Bourbon France and the Habsburgs.1 Although there were battles, sieges and military occupations elsewhere, the bulk of the fighting took place in the German lands. For unprotected, landlocked Brandenburg, the war was a disaster that exposed every weakness of the Electoral state. At crucial moments during the conflict, Brandenburg faced impossible choices. Its fate hung entirely on the will of others. The Elector was unable to guard his borders, command or defend his subjects or even secure the continued existence of his title. As armies rolled across the provinces of the Mark, the rule of law was suspended, local economies were disrupted and the continuities of work, domicile and memory were irreversibly ruptured. The lands of the Elector, Frederick the Great wrote over a century and a half later, ‘were desolated during the Thirty Years’ War, whose deadly imprint was so profound that its traces can still be discerned as I write’.2
BETWEEN THE FRONTS (1618–40)
Brandenburg entered this dangerous era utterly unprepared for the challenges it would face. Since its striking power was negligible, it had no means of bargaining for rewards or concessions from friend or foe. To the south, directly abutting the borders of the Electorate, were Lusatia and Silesia, both hereditary lands of the Habsburg Bohemian Crown (though Lusatia was under a Saxon leasehold). To the west of these two, also sharing a border with Brandenburg, was Electoral Saxony, whose policy during the early war years was to operate in close harmony with the Emperor. On Brandenburg’s northern flank, its undefended borders lay open to the troops of the Protestant Baltic powers, Denmark and Sweden. Nothing stood between Brandenburg and the sea but the enfeebled Duchy of Pomerania, ruled by the ageing Boguslav XIV. Neither in the west nor in remote Ducal Prussia did the Elector of Brandenburg possess the means to defend his newly acquired territories against invasion. There was thus every reason for caution, a preference underscored by the still ingrained habit of deferring to the Emperor.
Elector George William (r. 1619–40), a timid, indecisive man ill equipped to master the extreme predicaments of his era, spent the early war years avoiding alliance commitments that would consume his meagre resources or expose his territory to reprisals. He gave moral support to the insurgency of the Protestant Bohemian Estates against the Habsburg Emperor, but when his brother-in-law the Elector Palatine marched off to Bohemia to fight for the cause, George William stayed out of the fray. During the mid-1620s, as anti-Habsburg coalition plans were hatched between the courts of Denmark, Sweden, France and England, Brandenburg manoeuvred anxiously on the margins of great-power diplomacy. There were efforts to persuade Sweden, whose king had married George William’s sister in 1620, to mount a campaign against the Emperor. In 1626, another of George William’s sisters was married off to the Prince of Transylvania, a Calvinist nobleman whose repeated wars on the Habsburgs – with Turkish assistance – had established him as one of the Emperor’s most formidable enemies. Yet at the same time there were warm assurances of fealty to the Catholic Emperor, and Brandenburg steered clear of the anti-imperial Hague Alliance of 1624–6 between England and Denmark.
None of this could protect the Electorate against pressure and military incursions from both sides. After the armies of the Catholic League under General Tilly had defeated Protestant forces at Stadlohn in 1623, the Westphalian territories of Mark and Ravensberg became quartering areas for Leaguist troops. George William understood that he would be able to stay out of trouble only if his territory were in a position to defend itself against all comers. But the money was lacking for an effective policy of armed neutrality. The overwhelmingly Lutheran Estates were suspicious of his Calvinist allegiances and unwilling to finance them. In 1618–20, their sympathies were largely with the Catholic Emperor and they feared that their Calvinist Elector would drag Brandenburg into dangerous international commitments. The best policy, as they saw it, was to wait out the storm and avoid attracting hostile notice from any of the belligerents.
2. Portrait of George William (1619–40); woodcut by Richard Brend’amour based on a contemporary portrait
In 1626, as George William struggled to extract money from his Estates, the Palatine General Count Mansfeld overran the Altmark and Prignitz, with his Danish allies close behind. Mayhem broke out. Churches were smashed open and robbed, the town of Nauen was razed to the ground, villages were burned as troops attempted to extort hidden money and goods from the inhabitants. When he was taken to task for this by a senior Brandenburg minister, the Danish envoy Mitzlaff responded with breathtaking arrogance: ‘Whether the Elector likes it or not, the [Danish] King will go ahead all the same. Whoever is not with him is against him.’3 Scarcely had the Danes made themselves at home in the Mark, however, but they were pushed back by their enemies. In the late summer of 1626, after the imperial and Leaguist victory near Lutter-am-Barenberg in the Duchy of Brunswick (27 August), imperial troops occupied the Altmark, while the Danes withdrew into the Prignitz and the Uckermark to the north and north-west of Berlin. At around the same time, King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden landed in Ducal Prussia, where he established a base of operations against Poland, completely disregarding the claims of the Elector. The Neumark, too, was overrun and plundered by Cossack mercenaries in the service of the Emperor. The scale of the threat facing Brandenburg was made clear by the fate of the dukes of neighbouring Mecklenburg. As punishment for supporting the Danes, the Emperor deposed the ducal family and bestowed Mecklenburg as booty upon his powerful commander, the military entrepreneur Count Wallenstein.
The time seemed ripe for a shift towards closer collaboration with the Habsburg camp. ‘If this business continues,’ George William told a confidant in a moment of desperation, ‘I shall become mad, for I am much grieved. [… ] I shall have to join the Emperor, I have no alternative; I have only one son; if the Emperor remains, then I suppose I and my son will be able to remain Elector.’4 On 22 May 1626, despite protests from his councillors and the Estates, who would have preferred a rigorous policy of neutrality, the Elector signed a treaty with the Emperor. Under the terms of this agreement, the entire Electorate was opened to imperial troops. Hard times followed, because the imperial supreme commander, Count Wallenstein, was in the habit of extracting provisions, lodgings and payment for his troops from the population of the occupied area.
Brandenburg thus gained no relief from its alliance with the Emperor. Indeed, as the imperial forces rolled back their opponents and approached the zenith of their power in the late 1620s, Emperor Ferdinand II seemed to disregard George William entirely. In the Edict of Restitution of 1629, the Emperor announced that he intended to ‘reclaim’, by force if necessary, ‘all the archbishoprics, bishoprics, prelatecies, monasteries, hospitals and endowments’ which the Catholics had possessed in the year 1552 – a programme with profoundly damaging implications for Brandenburg, where numerous ecclesiastical establishments had been placed under Protestant administration. The Edict confirmed the settlement of 1555, in that it also excluded Calvinists from the religious peace in the Empire; only the Catholic and Lutheran faiths enjoyed official standing –‘all other doctrines and sects are forbidden and cannot be tolerated.’5
Sweden’s dramatic entry into the German war in 1630 brought relief for the Protestant states, but also raised the political pressure on Brandenburg.6 In 1620, George William’s sister Maria Eleonora had been married off to King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, a larger-than-life figure whose appetite for war and conquest was twinned with a missionary zeal for the Protestant cause in Europe. As his involvement in the German conflict deepened, the Swedish king, who had no other German allies, resolved to secure an alliance with his brother-in-law George William. The Elector was reluctant, and it is easy to see why. Gustavus Adolphus had spent the past decade and a half waging a war of conquest in the eastern Baltic. A series of campaigns against Russia had left Sweden in possession of a continuous swathe of territory stretching from Finland to Estonia. In 1621, Gustavus Adolphus had renewed his war against Poland, occupying Ducal Prussia and conquering Livonia (present-day Latvia and Estonia). The Swedish king had even pushed the elderly Duke of Mecklenburg into an agreement that the duchy would pass to Sweden when the duke died, a deal that directly undercut Brandenburg’s longstanding inheritance treaty with its northern neighbour.
All of this suggested that the Swedes would be no less dangerous as friends than as enemies. George William returned to the idea of neutrality. He planned to work with Saxony in forming a Protestant bloc that would oppose the implementation of the Edict of Restitution while at the same time providing a buffer between the Emperor and his enemies in the north, a policy that bore fruit in the Convention of Leipzig of February 1631. But this manoeuvring did little to repel the threat facing Brandenburg from north and south. Furious warnings and threats issued from Vienna. In the meanwhile, there were clashes between Swedish and imperial troops across the Neumark, in the course of which the Swedes chased the imperials out of the province and occupied the fortified cities of Frankfurt/Oder, Landsberg and Küstrin.
Emboldened by the success of his troops in the field, the King of Sweden demanded an outright alliance with Brandenburg. George William’s protests that he wished to remain neutral fell on deaf ears. As Gustavus Adolphus explained to a Brandenburg envoy:
I don’t want to know or hear anything about neutrality. [The Elector] has to be friend or foe. When I come to his borders, he must declare himself cold or hot. This is a fight between God and the devil. If My Cousin wants to side with God, then he has to join me; if he prefers to side with the devil, then indeed he must fight me; there is no third way.7
While George William prevaricated, the Swedish king drew close to Berlin with his troops behind him. Panicking, the Elector sent the women of his family out to parley with the invader at Köpenick, a few kilometres to the south-east of the capital. It was eventually agreed that the king should come into the city with 1,000 men to continue negotiations as the guest of the Elector. Over the following days of wining and dining, the Swedes talked beguilingly of ceding parts of Pomerania to Brandenburg, hinted at a marriage between the king’s daughter and the Elector’s son, and pressed for an alliance. George William decided to throw in his lot with the Swedes.
The reason for this policy reversal lay partly in the intimidating demeanour of the Swedish troops, who at one point drew up before the walls of Berlin with their guns trained on the royal palace in order to concentrate the mind of the beleaguered Elector. But an important predisposing factor was the fall, on 20 May 1631, of the Protestant city of Magdeburg to Tilly’s imperial troops. The taking of Magdeburg was followed not only by the sacking and plundering that usually attended such events, but also by a massacre of the town’s inhabitants that would become a fixture in German literary memory. In a passage of classically measured rhetoric, Frederick II later described the scene:
Everything that the unfettered license of the soldier can devise when nothing restrains his fury; all that the most ferocious cruelty inspires in men when a blind rage takes possession of their senses, was committed by the Imperials in this unhappy city: the troops ran in packs, weapons in hand, through the streets, and massacred indiscriminately the elderly, the women and the children, those who defended themselves and those who made no move to resist them [… ] one saw nothing but corpses still flexing, piled or stretched out naked; the cries of those whose throats were being cut mingled with the furious shouts of their assassins…8
For contemporaries too, the annihilation of Magdeburg, a community of some 20,000 citizens and one of the capitals of German Protestantism, was an existential shock. Pamphlets, newspapers and broadsheets circulated across Europe, with verbal renderings of the various atrocities committed.9 Nothing could more have damaged the prestige of the Habsburg Emperor in the German Protestant territories than the news of this wanton extermination of his Protestant subjects. The impact was especially pronounced for the Elector of Brandenburg, whose uncle, Margrave Christian William, was the episcopal administrator of Magdeburg. In June 1631, George William reluctantly signed a pact with Sweden, under which he agreed to open the fortresses of Spandau (just north of Berlin) and Küstrin (in the Neumark) to the Swedish troops, and to pay the Swedes a monthly contribution of 30,000 thalers.10
The pact with Sweden proved as shortlived as the earlier alliance with the Emperor. In 1631–2 the balance of power was tilting back in favour of the Protestant forces, as the Swedes and their Saxon allies swept deep into the south and west of Germany, inflicting heavy defeats on the imperial side. But the momentum of their onslaught slowed after Gustavus Adolphus’s death in a cavalry mêlée at the Battle of Luätzen on 6 November 1632. By the end of 1634, after a serious defeat at Nördlingen, Sweden’s ascendancy was broken. Exhausted by the war and desperate to drive a wedge between Sweden and the German Protestant princes, Emperor Ferdinand II seized the moment to offer moderate peace terms. This move worked: the Lutheran Elector of Saxony, who had joined forces with Sweden in September 1631, now came running back to the Emperor. The Elector of Brandenburg faced a more difficult choice. The draft articles of the Peace of Prague offered an amnesty and withdrew the more extreme demands of the earlier Edict of Restitution, but they still made no reference to the toleration of Calvinism. The Swedes, for their part, were still pestering Brandenburg for a treaty; this time they promised that Pomerania would be transferred in its entirety to Brandenburg after the cessation of hostilities in the Empire.
After some agonized prevarication, George William elected to seek his fortune at the Emperor’s side. In May 1635, Brandenburg, along with Saxony, Bavaria and many other German territories, signed up to the Peace of Prague. In return, the Emperor promised to see to it that Brandenburg’s claim to the Duchy of Pomerania would be honoured. A detachment of imperial regiments was sent to assist in protecting the Mark and George William was honoured – somewhat incongruously, given his utter lack of military aptitude – with the title of Generalissimus in the imperial army. The Elector, for his part, undertook to raise 25,000 troops in support of the imperial war effort. Unfortunately for Brandenburg, this mending of fences with the Habsburg Emperor coincided with another shift in the balance of power in northern Germany. After their victory over the Saxon army at Wittstock on 4 October 1636 the Swedes were once again ‘lords in the Mark’.11
George William spent the last four years of his reign trying to drive the Swedes out of Brandenburg and to take control of Pomerania, whose duke died in March 1637. His attempts to raise a Brandenburg army against Sweden produced a small and poorly equipped force and the Electorate was ravaged by both the Swedes and the imperials, as well as by the less disciplined units of its own forces. After a Swedish invasion of the Mark, the Elector was forced to flee – not for the last time in the history of the Brandenburg Hohenzollerns – to the relative safety of Ducal Prussia, where he died in 1640.
POLITICS
Frederick the Great later described Elector George William as ‘incapable of governing’, and one history of Prussia noted unkindly that this Elector’s worst defect was not so much ‘indecision of mind’ as ‘the absence of a mind to make up’. Two such Electors, it added, and Brandenburg would have ‘ceased to provide anything but parochial history’. Judgements of this kind abound in the secondary literature.12 George William certainly cut an unheroic figure, and he was conscious of the fact. He had been seriously injured as a young man in a hunting accident. A deep wound on his thigh became chronically inflamed, confining him to a sedan chair and depressing his vitality. At a time when the destiny of Germany seemed to rest in the hands of physically imposing warlords, the spectacle of the Elector fleeing hither and thither in his sedan chair to avoid the various armed forces passing without leave across his territory hardly inspired confidence. ‘It pains me greatly,’ he wrote in July 1626, ‘that my lands have been wasted in this way and that I have been so disregarded and mocked. The whole world must take me for a cowardly weakling…’13
Yet the hesitation and wavering of these years had less to do with the personal characteristics of the ruler than with the intrinsic difficulty of the choices that confronted him. There was something irreducible, something structural in his predicament. This is worth emphasizing, because it draws our attention to one of the continuities of Brandenburg (later Prussian) history. Again and again, the decision-makers in Berlin would find themselves stranded between the fronts, forced to oscillate between options. And on each of these occasions the monarch would be vulnerable to the charge that he had hesitated, prevaricated, failed to decide. This was not a consequence of ‘geography’ in any simplistic sense, but rather of Brandenburg’s place on the mental map of European power politics. If we visualize the main lines of conflict between the continental power blocs of the early seventeenth century – Sweden-Denmark, Poland-Lithuania, Austria-Spain, and France – then it is clear that Brandenburg, with its virtually undefended appanages to the west and the east, was in the zone where these lines intersected. Sweden’s power would later decline, followed by that of Poland, but the rise of Russia to great-power status would pose the same problem anew, and successive governments in Berlin would have to choose between alliance, armed neutrality and independent action.
As Brandenburg’s military and diplomatic predicament deepened, competing factions emerged in Berlin with opposed foreign-political objectives. Should Brandenburg abide by its traditional allegiance to the Holy Roman Emperor and seek safety at the side of the Habsburgs? This was the view espoused by Count Adam Schwarzenberg, a Catholic native of the County of Mark who had supported the Brandenburg claim to Jülich-Berg. From the mid-1620s onwards, Schwarzenberg was the leader of a Habsburg faction in Berlin. By contrast, two of the most powerful privy councillors, Levin von Knesebeck and Samuel von Winterfeld, were strong supporters of the Protestant cause. The two camps fought bitterly for control of Brandenburg’s policy. In 1626, as the Elector was forced into closer collaboration with the Habsburg camp, Schwarzenberg succeeded in having Winterfeld tried for treason and driven out of the country, despite protests from the Estates. In the autumn of 1630, on the other hand, when Sweden was in the ascendant, a pro-Swedish faction emerged, led by the Calvinist Chancellor Sigismund von Götzen, and Schwarzenberg was forced to retire to Kleve, only to return to Berlin after the initiative passed back to the imperial side in 1634 and 1635.
The women at court also had strong views on foreign policy. The Elector’s young wife was the sister of the Calvinist ruler Frederick V, whose Palatine homeland had been overrun and devastated by Spanish and Catholic League troops. She naturally took an anti-imperial view, as did her mother, who had joined her in exile from Heidelberg, and the Elector’s aunt, who had married the brother of Frederick V. The Elector’s Lutheran mother, Anna of Prussia, was another outspoken opponent of the Habsburgs. It was she who had engineered the marriage of her daughter Maria Eleonora to the Lutheran King of Sweden in 1620, disregarding the objections of her son, Elector George William.14 Her intention was to bolster Brandenburg’s position in Ducal Prussia, but it was a highly provocative move at the time, since Sweden was at war with Poland, whose king was still formally the sovereign of Ducal Prussia. As these initiatives suggest, dynastic politics still functioned in a way that gave an important voice to consorts and female relatives of the monarch. The women in dynastic families were not just living securities for inheritance claims; they also maintained relationships with foreign courts that could be of great importance and they did not necessarily see themselves as bound by the monarch’s policy.
Beyond the narrow circle of the Elector’s court were the holders of power in the land, the provincial Estates, representatives of the Lutheran nobilities. These were deeply sceptical of foreign political adventures of any kind, particularly when they suspected that these were motivated by an attachment to the Calvinist interest. As early as 1623, a delegation of Estates representatives warned the Elector against the enthusiasms of ‘hot-headed councillors’ and reminded him that their military obligations extended only to ‘what was absolutely necessary for the preservation of the land in the case of an emergency’. Even after repeated incursions by Protestant and imperial troops, the Estates remained impassive in the face of entreaties from the sovereign.15 As they saw it, their function was to forestall unwarranted adventures and to preserve the fabric of provincial privilege against incursions from the centre.16
Such passive resistance was difficult to overcome in peacetime. After 1618, the problem was compounded by the fact that the war, in its early phases, deepened the Elector’s dependence on the corporate local structures of his territory. George William had no administration of his own with which to collect military contributions, grain or other provisions – all this had to be done by agents of the Estates. The provincial organs of tax collection remained under Estate control. With their local knowledge and authority, the Estates also played an indispensable role in coordinating the billeting and through-marches of troops.17 On occasion they even negotiated independently with invading commanders over the payment of contributions.18
Nevertheless, as the war dragged on, the fiscal privileges of the provincial nobilities began to look fragile.19 Foreign princes and generals had no compunction in extorting contributions from the provinces of Brandenburg; why should the Elector not take his share? This would involve rolling back the ancient ‘liberties’ of the Estates. For this task, the Elector turned to Schwarzenberg, a Catholic and a foreigner with no ties to the provincial nobility. Schwarzenberg lost no time in imposing a new tax without any recourse to the usual provincial organs. He curtailed the power of the Estates to oversee state expenditures and suspended the Privy Council, transferring its responsibilities to the Council of War, whose members were chosen for their complete independence from the Estates. In short, Schwarzenberg installed a fiscal autocracy that broke decisively with the corporate traditions of the Mark.20 During the last two years of George William’s reign, Schwarzenberg virtually ran the war against Sweden, pulling the tattered remains of the Brandenburg regiments together and mounting a desperate guerrilla campaign against Swedish troop units. Requests for tax exemptions from impoverished, war-damaged towns were unceremoniously rejected and those who entered into negotiations with the invaders – over billets, for example – were branded as traitors.21
Schwarzenberg was a controversial figure among his contemporaries. The Estates had initially supported his cautious, pro-imperial foreign policy, but they later came to loathe him for his assault on their corporate liberties. His prosecutions and intrigues earned him the hatred of his opponents in the Privy Council. His Catholic faith was a further spur to their rage. In 1638–9, when Schwarzenberg’s power was in its zenith, flysheets circulated in Berlin decrying the ‘Hispanic servitude’ of his rule.22 In retrospect, however, it is clear that this powerful minister set a number of important precedents. What survived his military dictatorship was the notion that the state, in times of need, might be justified in sweeping aside the cumbersome machinery of Estate privilege and corporate fiscal co-regency. Seen from this perspective, the Schwarzenberg years were a first indecisive experiment in ‘absolutist’ rule.
WHOLESALE RUIN
For the people of Brandenburg, the war meant lawlessness, misery, poverty, deprivation, uncertainty, forced migration and death. The Elector’s decision not to risk a pro-Protestant commitment after 1618 initially kept Brandenburg out of trouble. The first major incursions came in 1626, with the Danish campaign in northern Germany. During the fifteen years that followed, Danish, Swedish, Palatine, imperial and Leaguist troops overran the provinces of Brandenburg in rapid succession.
The towns in the path of advancing armies faced a choice between surrendering and admitting the enemy, defending the walls and suffering the consequences if the enemy broke through, or abandoning them altogether. The town of Plaue in the Havelland district of western Brandenburg, for example, successfully defended itself against attack by a small imperial force on 10 April 1627, but was abandoned by its population on the following day, when the enemy returned in greater numbers to renew the assault. No sooner had the imperials established themselves in the town, but it was attacked, captured and plundered by advancing Danish troops. In the city of Brandenburg, the mayor and corporation of the Old City on the right bank of the river Havel agreed to open their walls to the imperials, but the councillors of the New City on the other bank opted to seal themselves off by burning the bridges between the two precincts, barring their gates and firing on the invaders as they approached. A fierce battle followed, the defences of the New City were breached by imperial artillery, and the troops stormed through the city plundering in all quarters.23
The hardest-hit provinces tended to be those, like the Havelland or the Prignitz, where river passes commanding the main military transit routes repeatedly changed hands throughout the war. During the summer of 1627, Danish forces played a game of cat-and-mouse with the imperial strongholds in the Havelland, plundering and laying waste to a string of quaintly named villages: Möthlow, Retzow, Selbelang, Gross Behnitz, Stölln, Wassersuppe.24 Most commanders regarded their armies as personal property and were thus reluctant to commit men to battle unless it was absolutely necessary. Pitched battles were thus relatively rare and armies spent most of the war years engaged in marches, manoeuvres and occupations. It was an arrangement that spared the troops, but weighed heavily on host populations.25
War brought a drastic rise in taxation and other obligatory payments. First there was the regular ‘contribution’, a combined land and poll tax levied by the Brandenburg government upon its own population to support the Elector’s army. Then there were the numerous legal and illegal levies raised by foreign and home troops. These were sometimes agreed between the occupying commander and government officials or the mayors or councillors of cities and towns.26 But there were also countless episodes of outright extortion. In the winter of 1629, for example, officers commanding troops quartered in the New City of Brandenburg demanded that the burghers pay subsistence costs for the next nine months in advance. When the latter refused, punishment billets were quartered on the locals. ‘And whatever they didn’t quaff or squander themselves, they smashed in two; they poured away the beer, stove in the barrels, smashed windows, doors and ovens and destroyed everything.’27 In Strausberg, just north of Berlin, the troops of Count Mansfeld required two pounds of bread, two pounds of meat and two quarts of beer per man per day; many soldiers refused to content themselves with their allotted ration and ‘scoffed and quaffed as much as they could get’. The result was a steep decline in nutritional standards among the inhabitants, a dramatic rise in mortality rates, a pronounced fall in fertility among women of childbearing age, and even the occasional incident of cannibalism.28 Many simply fled the town, leaving their household goods behind.29 In the tense intimacy of protracted billets, there were endless opportunities, as many of the eyewitness accounts confirm, for one-off acts of extortion and theft.
All this meant that the people in many parts of Brandenburg were slowly crushed under successive layers of extortion. A report compiled in 1634 gives us some sense of what this meant for the district of Oberbarnim to the north of Berlin, whose population numbered some 13,000 in 1618, but had fallen to fewer than 9,000 by 1631. The inhabitants of Oberbarnim paid 185,000 thalers to imperial commanders in 1627–30,26,000 thalers in contributions to the Swedish-Brandenburg allied forces in 1631–4, a further 50,000 thalers in provisioning costs to the Swedes in 1631–4,30,000 thalers in provisioning costs to the Saxon cavalry regiments, 54,000 thalers to various Brandenburg commanders, plus sundry other taxes and one-off levies, not counting many other informal extortions, seizures and confiscations. This at a time when a horse cost 20 thalers and a bushel of corn less than one thaler, when a third of the peasant-owned land had been abandoned or lay uncultivated, when the disruptions of war had ruined many branches of skilled manufacture, when the ripening grain around the town was regularly trampled into the ground by passing cavalrymen.30
Atrocity stories – narratives of extreme violence and cruelty by armed men against civilians – loom so large in the literary depictions of the Thirty Years War that some historians have been tempted to dismiss them as the accoutrements of a ‘myth of all-destructive fury’ or a ‘fable of wholesale ruin and misery’.31 There is no doubt that atrocity stories became a genre in their own right in contemporary reporting of this war; a good example is Philip Vincent’s book The Lamentations of Germany, which listed the horrors suffered by the innocent, featuring graphic plates entitled: ‘Croats eat Children’, ‘Noses and eares cut of to make hatbandes’, and so on.32 The sensationalist character of many atrocity stories should not obscure the fact that they were rooted, at least indirectly, in the lived experience of real people.33
Official reports from the Havelland record numerous beatings, houseburnings, rapes and wanton destruction of property. People living on the outskirts of Plaue, just a few kilometres to the east of Brandenburg city, described a through-march by imperial troops on their way to Saxony on New Year’s Day 1639 during which ‘many old people were tortured to death, shot dead, various women and girls raped to death, children hanged, sometimes even burnt, or stripped naked, so that they perished in the extreme cold.’34
In one of the most evocative memoirs that survives from Brandenburg, Peter Thiele, customs officer and town clerk at Beelitz near Potsdam, described the conduct of the imperial army that passed through his town in 1637. In order to force a certain Jürgen Weber, a baker in the town, to reveal where he had concealed his money, the imperials ‘stabbed a piece of wood half a finger long into his [penis], if you will excuse me’.35 Thiele described the ‘Swedish draught’, said to have been invented by the Swedes, but widely reported of all armies and a fixture in later literary representations of the war:
The robbers and murderers took a piece of wood and stuck it down the poor wretches’ throats, stirred it and poured in water, adding sand or even human faeces, and pitifully tortured the people for money, as transpired with a citizen of Beelitz called David Örttel, who died of it soon after.36
3. Atrocities against women in the German lands during the Thirty Years War, woodcut from Philip Vincent’s The Lamentations of Germany (London, 1638)
Another man, by the name of Krüger Möller was caught by imperial soldiers, bound hand and foot and roasted over a fire until he revealed the whereabouts of his money. But no sooner had his tormentors taken the money and gone, than another raiding party of imperials arrived in the town. Hearing that their colleagues had already roasted 100 thalers out of Möller, they carried him back to the fire and held him with his face in the flames, roasting him ‘for so long that he died of it and his skin even came off like that of a slaughtered goose’. The cattle merchant Jürgen Möller was likewise ‘roasted to death’ for his money.37
In 1638, the imperial and Saxon armies passed through the little town of Lenzen in the Prignitz to the north-west of Berlin, where they tore all the wood and equipment from the houses before putting them to the torch. Whatever householders rescued from the flames, the soldiers took from them by force. Hardly had the imperials departed, but the Swedes attacked and plundered the town, treating the ‘citizens, women and children so gruesomely that such things were never told of the Turks’. An official report compiled by the Lenzen authorities in January 1640 sketched a grim picture: ‘They tied our honest burgher Hans Betke to a wooden pole and roasted him at the fire from seven in the morning until four in the afternoon, so that he gave up the spirit amidst much shrieking and pains.’ The Swedes cut the calves of an elderly man to stop him from walking, scalded a matron to death with boiling water, hanged children naked in the cold and forced people into the freezing water. About fifty people, ‘old and young, big and small, were martyred in this way’.38
The men raised by the Elector himself were not much better than the invaders. They too were ill clothed, underfed and demoralized. Officers brutalized their men with a regime of draconian punishments. The soldiers of Colonel von Rochow’s regiment were ‘beaten and stabbed on trivial pretexts, made to run the gauntlet, branded’, and in some cases had their noses and ears cut off.39 Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the troops were equally merciless in their dealings with local civilians, prompting bitter protests against their ‘frequent extortions, plundering, murder and robbery’. So frequent were these complaints that Count Schwarzenberg convened a special meeting with the commanders in 1640 and dressed them down for vexing the civilian population with acts of insolence and violence.40 But the effect of his admonitions soon wore off: a report filed two years later from the district of Teltow near Berlin stated that the troops of the Brandenburg commander von Goldacker had been plundering the area, threshing the corn they found and treating the local people ‘in a manner as inhumane as, indeed worse than, the enemy could have done’.41
It is impossible to establish with any precision how frequently atrocities took place. The regularity with which such accounts crop up across a wide range of contemporary sources, from individual ego-narratives to local government reports, petitions and literary representations certainly suggests that they were widespread. What is beyond doubt is their significance in contemporary perception.42 Atrocities defined the meaning of this war. They captured something about it that left a profound impression: the total suspension of order, the utter vulnerability of men, women and children in the face of a violence that raged unmastered, out of control.
Perhaps the most eloquent testimony to the harshness of the tribulations visited upon the people of Brandenburg between 1618 and 1648 is simply the demographic record. Diseases such as typhus, bubonic plague, dysentery and smallpox raged unchecked through civilian populations whose physical resistance had often been undermined by years of high prices and poor nutrition.43 Across the Mark Brandenburg as a whole, about one half of the population died. The figures vary from district to district; those areas that were protected from military occupation or through-marches by water or swampland tended to be less seriously affected. In the marshy floodplains of the river Oder, known as the Oderbruch, for example, a survey conducted in 1652 found that only 15 per cent of the farms in operation at the beginning of the war were still deserted. In the Havelland, by contrast, which saw nearly fifteen years of virtually uninterrupted disruption, the figure was 52 per cent. In the Barnim district, where the population was heavily burdened with contributions and billets, 58.4 per cent of the farms were still deserted in 1652. On the lands of the district of Löcknitz in the Uckermark, on the northern margins of Brandenburg, the figure was 85 per cent! In the Altmark, to the west of Berlin, the mortality rate rose from the west to the east. Between 50 and 60 per cent are reckoned to have perished in the areas bordering on the river Elbe in the east, which were important military transit zones; the death rate sank to 25–30 per cent in the middle and 15–20 per cent in the west.
Some of the most important towns were very hard hit: Brandenburg and Frankfurt/Oder, both in key transit areas, lost over two-thirds of theirpopulations. Potsdam and Spandau, satellite towns of Berlin-Cölln, both lost over 40 per cent. In the Prignitz, another transit zone, only ten of the forty noble families who had been running the major estates in the province were still in residence in 1641, and there were some towns – Wittenberge, Putlitz, Meyenburg, Freyenstein – where no one could be found at all.44
We can really only guess at the impact of these disasters on popular culture. Many of the families that repopulated the most devastated districts after the war were immigrants from outside Brandenburg: Dutch, East Frisians, Holsteiners. In some places the shock was sufficient to sever the thread of collective memory. It has been observed of Germany as a whole that the ‘great war’ of 1618–48 obliterated the folk memory of earlier onflicts, so that medieval, ancient or prehistoric walls and earthworks lost their earlier names and came to be known as ‘Swedish ramparts’. In some areas, it seems that the war broke the chain of personal recollection that was essential to the authority and continuity of village-based customary law – no one was left of an age to remember how things were ‘before the Swedes came’.45 Perhaps this is one of the reasons for the paucity of folk traditions in the Mark Brandenburg. In the 1840s, when the craze for collecting and publishing myths and other folklore was at its height, enthusiasts inspired by the brothers Grimm found lean pickings in the Mark.46
The all-destructive fury of the Thirty Years War was mythical not in the sense that it bore no relation to reality, but in the sense that it established itself within collective memories and became a tool for thinking about the world. It was the fury of religious civil war – not only in his native England, but also on the continent – that moved Thomas Hobbes to celebrate the Leviathan state, with its monopoly of legitimate force, as the redemption of society. Surely it was better, he proposed, to concede authority to the monarchical state in return for the security of persons and property than to see order and justice drowned in civil strife.
One of the most brilliant German readers of Hobbes was Samuel Pufendorf, a jurist from Saxony who likewise grounded his arguments for the necessity of the state in a dystopian vision of ambient violence and disorder. The law of nature alone did not suffice to preserve the social life of man, Pufendorf argued in his Elements of Universal Jurisprudence. Unless ‘sovereignties’ were established men would seek their welfare by force alone; ‘all places would reverberate with wars between those who are inflicting and those who are repelling injuries.’47 Hence the supreme importance of states, whose chief purpose was ‘that men, by means of mutual cooperation and assistance, be safe against the harms and injuries they can and commonly do inflict on one another’.48 The trauma of the Thirty Years War reverberates in these sentences.
The argument that the state’s legitimacy derived from the need to forestall disorder through the concentration of authority was widely employed in early modern Europe, but it had a special resonance in Brandenburg. Here was an eloquent philosophical answer to the resistance that George William had encountered from the provincial Estates. Since it was impossible in peace or war to conduct the affairs of a state without incurring expenses, Pufendorf wrote in 1672, the sovereign had the right to ‘force individual citizens to contribute so much of their own goods as the assumption of those expenses is deemed to require’.49
Pufendorf thus distilled from the memory of civil war a powerful rationale for the extension of state authority. Against the ‘libertas’ of the Estates, Pufendorf asserted the ‘necessitas’ of the state. Late in his life, when he was employed as historiographer at the Berlin court, Pufendorf wove these convictions into a chronicle of Brandenburg’s recent history.50 At the centre of his story was the emergence of the monarchical executive: ‘the measure and focal point of all his reflections was the state, upon which all initiatives converge like lines towards a central point.’51 Unlike the crude chronicles of Brandenburg that had begun to appear in the late sixteenth century, Pufendorf’s history was driven by a theory of historical change that focused on the creative, transformative power of the state. In this way, he engineered a narrative of great power and elegance that has – for better or for worse – shaped our understanding of Prussian history ever since.
3
An Extraordinary Light in Germany
RECOVERY
Viewed against the background of the misery and hopelessness of 1640, Brandenburg’s resurgence in the second half of the seventeenth century appears remarkable. By the 1680s, Brandenburg possessed an army with an international reputation whose numbers fluctuated between 20,000 and 30,000.1 It had acquired a small Baltic fleet and even a modest colony on the west coast of Africa. A land bridge across Eastern Pomerania linked the Electorate to the Baltic coast. Brandenburg was a substantial regional power on a par with Bavaria and Saxony, a sought-after ally and a significant element in major peace settlements.
The man who presided over this transformation was Frederick William, known as the ‘Great Elector’ (r. 1640–88). Frederick William is the first Brandenburg Elector of whom numerous portraits survive, most of them commissioned by the sitter himself. They document the changing appearance of a man who spent forty-eight years – longer than any other member of his dynasty – in sovereign office. Depictions from the early years of the reign show a commanding, upright figure with a long face framed by flowing dark hair; in the later images, the body has swollen, the face is bloated and the hair has been replaced by cascades of artificial curls. And yet one thing is common to all the portraits painted from life: intelligent, dark eyes that fix the viewer in a sharp stare.2
When he succeeded his father at the age of twenty, Frederick William had virtually no training or experience in the art of government. He had spent most of his childhood cloistered away in the fortress of Küstrin enclosed by sombre forests, where he was safe from enemy troops. Lessons in modern languages and technical skills such as drawing, geometry and the construction of fortifications were interspersed with the regular hunting of stag, boar and wildfowl. Unlike his father and grandfather, Frederick William was taught Polish from the age of seven to assist him in conducting relations with the Polish king, feudal overlord of Ducal Prussia. At the age of fourteen, as the military crisis deepened and a wave of epidemics spread across the Mark, he was sent to the relative safety of the Dutch Republic, where he would spend the next four years of his life.
4. Frederick William the Great Elector as Scipio, painted c. 1660, attrib. to Albert van der Eeckhout
The impact on the prince of these teenage years in the Republic is difficult to ascertain precisely, since he did not keep a diary or write personal memoirs of any kind. His correspondence with his parents confined itself to the exchange of compliments in an extremely distanced and formal diction.3 Yet it is clear that the prince’s Dutch education did reinforce his sense of allegiance to the Calvinist cause. Frederick William was the first Brandenburg Elector to be born of two Calvinist parents, and the composite name Frederick William, a novelty in the history of the House of Hohenzollern, was devised precisely in order to symbolize the bond between Berlin (William was his father’s second name) and the Calvinist Palatinate of his uncle, Frederick V. Only with this generation of the Hohenzollern family did the reorientation launched by the conversion of his grandfather John Sigismund in 1613 come fully into effect. Frederick William consolidated the bond in 1646 by marrying the Dutch Calvinist Louise Henriette, nineteen-year-old daughter of Stadtholder Frederick Henry of Orange.
Frederick Williams’s long sojourn in the Dutch Republic was also influential in other ways. The prince received instruction from professors in law, history and politics at the University of Leiden, a renowned centre of the then fashionable neo-stoical state theory. The prince’s lessons emphasized the majesty of the law, the venerability of the state as the guarantor of order and the centrality of duty and obligation to the office of sovereign. A particular concern of the neo-stoics was the need to subordinate the military to the authority and discipline of the state.4 But it was outside the classroom, in the streets, docks, markets and parade-squares of the Dutch towns that Frederick William learned his most important lessons. In the early seventeenth century, the Republic was at the height of its power and prosperity. Over more than sixty years, this tiny Calvinist country had fought successfully to assert its independence against the military might of Catholic Spain and establish itself as the foremost European headquarters of global trade and colonization. In the process, it had developed a robust fiscal regime and a distinctive military culture with recognizably modern features: the regular and systematic drilling of troops in battleground manoeuvres, a high level of functional differentiation and a disciplined professional officer corps. Frederick William had ample opportunity to observe the military prowess of the Republic at close hand – he visited his host and relative, Viceroy Prince Frederick Henry of Orange, in the Dutch encampment at Breda in 1637, where the Dutch recaptured a stronghold that had been lost to the Spaniards twelve years before.
Throughout his reign Frederick William strove to remodel his own patrimony in the image of what he had observed in the Netherlands. The training regime adopted by his army in 1654 was based on the drill-book of Prince Maurice of Orange.5 Frederick William remained convinced throughout his reign that ‘navigation and trade are the principal pillars of a state, through which subjects, by sea and by manufactures on land, earn their food and keep.’6 He became obsessed with the idea that the link to the Baltic would enliven and commercialize Brandenburg, bringing the wealth and power that were so conspicuously on display in Amsterdam. In the 1650s and 1660s, he even negotiated international commercial treaties to secure privileged terms of trade for a merchant marine he did not yet possess. In the later 1670s, with the assistance of a Dutch merchant by the name of Benjamin Raule, he acquired a small fleet of ships and became involved in a string of privateering and colonial schemes. In 1680, Raule secured for Brandenburg a share in the west African trade in gold, ivory and slaves by establishing the small colonial fort of Friedrichsburg on the coast of modern-day Ghana.7
It could be said that Frederick William reinvented the Electoral office. Whereas John Sigismund and George William had addressed themselves only sporadically to the business of government, Frederick William worked ‘harder than a secretary’. Contemporaries recognized this as something new and noteworthy. His ministers marvelled at his memory for detail, his sobriety and his ability to sit for an entire day in council dealing with affairs of state.8 Even the imperial ambassador Lisola, no uncritical observer, was struck by the Elector’s conscientiousness: ‘I admire this Elector, who takes delight in long and exceedingly detailed reports and who expressly demands these of his ministers; he reads everything, he resolves and orders everything [… ] and neglects nothing.’9 ‘I shall manage my responsibility as prince,’ Frederick William declared, ‘in the knowledge that it is the affair of the people and not mine personally.’10 The words were those of the Roman Emperor Hadrian, but in the mouth of the Elector they signalled a new understanding of the sovereign’s role. It was more than a prestigious title or a bundle of rights and revenues; it was a vocation that should rightly consume the personality of the ruler. The early histories of the reign established an image of this Elector as the model of an absolute and unstinting dedication to office. His example became a potent icon within the Hohenzollern tradition, a standard that the Elector’s reigning descendants would either emulate or be measured against.
EXPANSION
In December 1640, when Frederick William acceded to the throne, Brandenburg was still under foreign occupation. A two-year truce was agreed with the Swedes in July 1641, but the looting, burning and general misbehaviour continued.11 In a letter of spring 1641, the Elector’s viceroy, Margrave Ernest, who carried the responsibility for administering the ruined Mark, offered a grim synopsis:
The country is in such a miserable and impoverished condition that mere words can scarcely convey the sympathy one feels with the innocent inhabitants. In general, We think that the cart has been driven so deep into the muck, as they say, that it cannot be extricated without the special help of the Almighty.12
The strain of overseeing the anarchy unfolding in Brandenburg ultimately proved too much for the margrave, who succumbed to panic attacks, sleeplessness and paranoid delusions. By the autumn of 1642, he had taken to pacing about in his palace muttering to himself, shrieking and throwing himself to the floor. His death on 26 September was ascribed to ‘melancholy’.13
Only in March 1643 did Frederick William return from the relative safety of Königsberg to the ruined city of Berlin, a city he scarcely recognized. Here he found a population depleted and malnourished, and buildings destroyed by fire or in a parlous state of repair.14 The predicament that had bedevilled his father’s reign remained unsolved: Brandenburg had no military force with which to establish its independence. The small army created by Schwarzenberg was already falling apart and there was no money to pay for a replacement. Johann Friedrich von Leuchtmar, a privy councillor and the Elector’s former tutor, summarized Brandenburg’s predicament in a report of 1644: Poland, he predicted, would seize Prussia as soon as it was strong enough; Pomerania was under Swedish occupation and likely to remain so; Kleve in the west was under the control of the Dutch Republic. Brandenburg stood ‘on the edge of the abyss’.15
In order to restore the independence of his territory and press home his claims, the Elector needed a flexible, disciplined fighting force. The creation of such an instrument became one of the consuming preoccupations of his reign. The Brandenburg campaign army grew dramatically, if somewhat unsteadily, from 3,000 men in 1641–2, to 8,000 in 1643–6, to 25,000 during the Northern War of 1655–60, to 38,000 during the Dutch wars of the 1670s. During the final decade of the Elector’s reign, its size fluctuated between 20,000 and 30,000.16 Improvements in tactical training and armaments modelled on French, Dutch, Swedish and imperial best practice placed the Brandenburg army close to the cutting edge of European military innovation. Pikes and pikemen were phased out and the cumbersome matchlock guns carried by the infantry were replaced by lighter, faster-firing flintlocks. Artillery calibres were standardized to allow for the more flexible and efficient use of field guns, in the style pioneered by the Swedes. The foundation of a cadet school for officer recruits introduced an element of standardized professional formation. Better conditions of employment – including provision for maimed or retired officers – improved the stability of the command structure. These changes in turn improved the cohesion and morale of the non-commissioned ranks, who distinguished themselves in the 1680s by their excellent discipline and low rates of desertion.17
The improvised forces assembled for specific campaigns during the early years of the reign gradually evolved into what one could call a standing army. In April 1655, a General War Commissioner (General-kriegskommissar) was appointed to oversee the handling of financial and other resources for the army, on the model of the military administration recently introduced in France under Le Tellier and Louvois. This innovation was initially conceived as a temporary wartime measure and only later established as a permanent feature of the territorial administration. After 1679, under the direction of the Pomeranian nobleman Joachim von Grumbkow, the General War Commissariat extended its reach throughout the Hohenzollern territories, gradually usurping the function of the Estate officials who had traditionally overseen military taxation and discipline at a local level. The General War Commissariat and the Office for the Domains were still relatively small institutions in 1688 when the Elector died, but under his successors they would play a crucial role in toughening the sinews of central authority in the Brandenburg-Prussian state. This synergy between war-making and the development of state-like central organs was something new; it became possible only when the war-making apparatus was separated from its traditional provincial-aristocratic foundations.
The acquisition of such a formidable military instrument was important, because the decades that followed the end of the Thirty Years War were a period of intense conflict in northern Europe. Two foreign titans overshadowed Brandenburg foreign policy during the Elector’s reign. The first was King Charles X of Sweden, a restless, obsessive figure with expansionist dreams who seemed bent on trumping the record of his illustrious predecessor Gustavus Adolphus. It was Charles X’s invasion of Poland that started the Northern War of 1655–60. His plan was to subdue the Danes and the Poles, occupy Ducal Prussia and then march south at the head of a vast army to sack Rome in the manner of the ancient Goths. Instead, the Swedes became bogged down in a bitter five-year struggle for control of the Baltic littoral.
After the death of Charles X in 1660 and the ebbing of Swedish power, it was Louis XIV of France who dominated Brandenburg’s political horizons. Having assumed sole regency after the death of Cardinal Mazarin in 1661, Louis expanded his combined wartime armed forces from 70,000 to 320,000 men (by 1693) and launched a sequence of assaults to secure hegemony in western Europe; there were campaigns against the Spanish Netherlands in 1667–8, the United Provinces in 1672–8 and the Palatinate in 1688.
In this dangerous environment, the Elector’s growing army proved an indispensable asset. In the summer of 1656, Frederick William’s 8,500 troops joined forces with Charles X to defeat a massive Polish-Tartar army in the battle of Warsaw (28–30 July).18 In 1658, he changed sides and campaigned as an ally of Poland and Austria against the Swedes. It was a sign of Frederick William’s growing weight in regional politics that he was appointed commander of the Brandenburg-Polish-imperial allied army raised to fight the Swedes in 1658–9. A chain of successful military assaults followed, first in Schleswig-Holstein and Jutland and later in Pomerania.
The most dramatic military exploit of the reign was Frederick William’s single-handed victory over the Swedes at Fehrbellin in 1675. In the winter of 1674–5, the Elector was campaigning with an Austrian army in the Rhineland as part of the coalition that had formed to contain Louis XIV during the Dutch wars. In the hope of securing French subsidies, the Swedes, allies of the French, invaded Brandenburg with an army of 14,000 men under the command of General Karl Gustav Wrangel. It was a scenario that awakened memories of the Thirty Years War: the Swedes unleashed the usual ravages on the hapless population of the Uckermark, to the north-east of Berlin. Frederick William reacted to news of the invasion with undisguised rage. ‘I can be brought to no other resolution,’ the Elector told Otto von Schwerin on 10 February, ‘than to avenge myself on the Swedes.’ In a series of furious despatches, the Elector, who was bedridden with gout, urged his subjects, ‘both noble and non-noble’, to ‘cut down all Swedes, wherever they can lay their hands upon them and to break their necks [… ] and to give no quarter’.19
Frederick William joined his army in Franconia at the end of May. Covering over one hundred kilometres per week, his forces reached Magdeburg on 22 June, just over ninety kilometres from the Swedish headquarters in the city of Havelberg. From here, the Brandenburg command could establish through local informants that the Swedes were strung out behind the river Havel, with concentrations in the fortified cities of Havelberg, Rathenow and Brandenburg. Since the Swedes had failed to register the arrival of the Brandenburg army, the Elector and his commander Georg Derfflinger had the advantage of surprise, and they resolved to attack the Swedish strongpoint at Rathenow with only 7,000 cavalry; a further 1,000 musketeers were loaded on to carts so that they could keep pace with the advance. Heavy rain and muddy conditions impeded their progress but also concealed them from the unsuspecting Swedish regiment at Rathenow. In the early morning of 25 June, the Brandenburgers attacked and destroyed the Swedish force with only minimal casualties on their own side.
The collapse of the Swedish line at Rathenow set the scene for the Battle of Fehrbellin, the most celebrated military engagement of the Elector’s reign. In order to restore cohesion to their position, the Swedish regiment in Brandenburg City pulled back deep into the countryside with the intention of sweeping to the north-west to join up with the main force at Havelberg. This proved more difficult than they had expected, because the heavy spring and summer rains had transformed the marshes of the area into a treacherous waterland broken only by islands of sodden grass or sand and criss-crossed by narrow causeways. Guided by locals, advance parties of the Electoral army blocked the main exits from the area, and forced the Swedes to fall back on the little town of Fehrbellin on the river Rhin. Here their commander, General Wrangel, deployed his 11,000 men in defensive fashion, setting the 7,000 Swedish infantry in the centre and his cavalry on the wings.
Against 11,000 Swedes the Elector could muster only around 6,000 men (a substantial part of his army, including most of his infantry, had not yet arrived in the area). The Swedes disposed of about three times as many field guns as the Brandenburgers. But this numerical disadvantage was offset by a tactical opportunity. Wrangel had neglected to occupy a low sandhill that overlooked his right flank. The Elector lost no time in positioning his thirteen field guns there and opening fire on the Swedish lines. Seeing his error, Wrangel ordered the cavalry on his right wing, supported by infantry, to take the hill. For the next few hours the battle was dominated by the ebb and surge of cavalry charge and counter-charge as the Swedes attempted to seize the enemy guns and were thrown back by the Brandenburg horse. A metaphorical fog of war shrouds all such encounters; it was thickened on this occasion by a literal summer mist of the kind that often gathers in the marshes of the Havelland. Both sides found it difficult to coordinate their forces, but it was the Swedish cavalry that gave way first, fleeing from the field and leaving their infantry – the Dalwig Guards – exposed to the sabres of the Brandenburg horse. Of 1,200 Guards, twenty managed to escape and about seventy were taken prisoner; the rest were killed.20 On the following day, the town of Fehrbellin itself was seized from a small Swedish occupation force. There was now a great fleeing of Swedes across the Mark Brandenburg. Considerable numbers of them, more perhaps than fell on the field of battle, were hacked to death in opportunist attacks by peasants as they made their way northwards. A contemporary report noted that peasants in the area around the town of Wittstock, not far from the border with Pomerania, had slain 300 Swedes, including a number of officers: ‘although several of the latter offered 2000 thalers for their lives, they were decapitated by the vengeful peasants.’21 Memories of the ‘Swedish terror’ still vivid in the older generation played a role here. By 2 July, every last Swede who had not been captured or killed had left the territory of the Electorate.
Victories of the kind achieved at Warsaw and Fehrbellin were of enormous symbolic importance to the Elector and his entourage. In an era that glorified successful warlords, the victories of Brandenburg’s army magnified the prestige and reputation of its founder. At Warsaw, Frederick William had stood in the thick of the fighting, repeatedly exposing himself to enemy fire. He wrote an account of the event and had it published in The Hague. His notes on the battle formed the basis for the relevant passages in Samuel Pufendorf’s history of the reign – a comprehensive and sophisticated work that marked a new departure in Brandenburg historiography.22 All this bore witness to a heightened historical self-consciousness, a sense that Brandenburg had begun to make – and to narrate – its own history. In his ‘royal memoirs’, a text intended for the eyes of his successor, Louis XIV observed that kings owe an account of their actions ‘to all ages’.23 The Great Elector never unfolded a cult of historicized self-memorialization to rival that of his French contemporary, but he too began consciously to perceive himself and his achievements through the eyes of an imagined posterity.
At Warsaw in 1656 the Brandenburgers had shown their mettle as coalition partners; at Fehrbellin nineteen years later the Elector’s army, though outnumbered and forced to advance at lightning speed, prevailed without aid over an enemy with an intimidating European reputation. Here too the Elector, now a stout man of fifty-five, stayed at the centre of the action. He joined his riders in assaults on the Swedish lines until he was encircled by enemy troops and had to be cut free by nine of his own dragoons. It was after the victory at Fehrbellin that the soubriquet ‘the Great Elector’first appeared in print. There was nothing particularly remarkable in that, since broadsheets extolling the greatness of rulers were commonplace in seventeenth-century Europe. But unlike so many other early-modern ‘greats’ (including the abortive ‘Louis the Great’, propagated by the sycophantic pamphleteers of the sun-king; ‘Leopold the Great’ of Austria; and ‘Maximilian the Great’, usage of which is now confined to die-hard Bavarian monarchist circles) this one survived, making Elector Frederick William the only non-royal early-modern European sovereign who is still widely accorded this epithet.
With Fehrbellin, moreover, a bond was forged between history and legend. The battle became a fixture in memory. The dramatist Heinrich von Kleist chose it as the setting for his play Der Prinz von Homburg, a fanciful variation on the historical record, in which an impulsive military commander faces a death sentence for having led a victorious charge against the Swedes despite orders to hold back, but is pardoned by the Elector once he has accepted his culpability. To the Brandenburgers and Prussians of posterity, Frederick William’s predecessors would remain shadowy, antique figures imprisoned within a remote past. By contrast, the ‘Great Elector’ would be elevated to the status of a three-dimensional founding father, a transcendent personality who both symbolized and bestowed meaning upon the history of a state.
ALLIANCES
‘Alliances are certainly good,’ Frederick William wrote in 1667, ‘but a force of one’s own, that one can confidently rely on, is better. A ruler is not treated with respect unless he has his own troops and resources. It is these, thank God, that have made me important since I have had them.’24 There was much truth in these reflections, composed for the edification of the Elector’s son and successor. By the end of the Second Northern War, Frederick William was a man to be reckoned with. He was an attractive alliance partner who could command substantial subsidies. He also participated as a principal in major regional peace treaties – a distinction that had been denied to his predecessors.
But the army was just one factor in Brandenburg’s recovery and expansion after 1640. Even before he possessed an armed force capable of tipping the scales in regional conflicts, Frederick William was able to secure major territorial gains simply by playing the international system. It was only thanks to French backing that Brandenburg emerged in such a strong position from the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. The French, who were looking for a German client state to support their designs against Austria, helped Frederick William thrash out a compromise agreement with Sweden (a French ally), under which Brandenburg received the eastern portion of Pomerania (excluding the river Oder). Then France and Sweden joined forces in pressing the Emperor to compensate Brandenburg for the still Swedish portion of Pomerania by granting it lands from the former bishoprics of Halberstadt, Minden and Magdeburg. These were by far the most significant acquisitions of Frederick William’s long reign. After 1648, a swathe of Hohenzollern territory swept in a broad curve from the western borders of the Altmark up to the eastern end of the Pomeranian coastline – the gap between the central agglomeration of territories and Ducal Prussia narrowed to less than 120 kilometres. For the first time in its history, Brandenburg was bigger than neighbouring Saxony. It was now the second largest German territory after the Habsburg monarchy. And all this was achieved without discharging a single musket, at a time when Brandenburg’s tiny armed force still counted for little.
The same point can be made in connection with the acquisition of full sovereignty over Ducal Prussia in 1657. To be sure: the Elector’s army expanded to 25,000 men in the course of the Northern War of 1655–60. By fighting first on the Swedish and then on the Polish-imperial side, the Elector was able to prevent the powers engaged in the conflict from shutting him out of his exposed eastern duchy. After the victory at Warsaw in 1656, Charles X abandoned his plan to occupy Ducal Prussia as a Swedish fief and agreed to concede full sovereignty to Brandenburg. But once the Swedes had been driven back into Denmark, this promise became meaningless – Ducal Prussia was no longer theirs to give. The trick now was to get the Poles to follow suit and grant full sovereignty in their turn. Here again, the Elector was the beneficiary of international developments beyond his control. A crisis in relations between the Polish Crown and the Russian Tsar meant that the lands of the Commonwealth were exposed to Russian assaults. The King of Poland, John Casimir, was thus eager to separate Brandenburg from Sweden and to neutralize it as a military threat.
By a further coincidence, Emperor Ferdinand III died in April 1657, meaning that Frederick William could trade his Electoral vote for concessions over Ducal Prussia. The Habsburgs duly pressed the Polish king to grant the Elector’s demand for sovereignty over Ducal Prussia, urgings that carried considerable weight, since the Poles were counting on Austrian assistance in the event of a renewed Swedish or Russian attack. In a secret treaty signed at Wehlau on 1 September 1657, the Poles agreed to cede Ducal Prussia to the Elector ‘with absolute power and without the previous impositions’. The Elector promised in turn to help John Casimir against Sweden.25 Nothing could better illustrate the intricacy and geographical scope of the mechanisms that shaped Brandenburg’s opportunities. The fact that Frederick William had by now assembled sufficient troops under his command to be a useful ally was an important enabling factor in this outcome, but it was the international system rather than the Elector’s own efforts that settled the question of sovereignty in his favour.
Conversely, the unilateral application of military force – even when it was successful in military terms – was of little avail in cases where Brandenburg’s objectives were not underwritten by the broader dynamics of the international system. In 1658–9, Frederick William commanded an extremely successful joint Austrian-Polish-Brandenburg campaign against the Swedes. There was a long chain of successful military assaults, first in Schleswig-Holstein and Jutland and later in Pomerania. By the time the campaign of 1659 was over, Brandenburg troops controlled virtually all of Swedish Pomerania, excluding only the coastal cities of Stralsund and Stettin. But these successes did not suffice to secure the Elector a permanent foothold in the disputed portion of his Pomeranian inheritance. France intervened in support of Sweden, and the Peace of Oliva (3 May 1660) largely confirmed the concessions agreed at Wehlau three years before. Brandenburg thus gained nothing from the Elector’s involvement in the alliance against Sweden, apart from broader international recognition of his sovereign status in Prussia. Here was a further lesson, if any were needed, in the primacy of the system over the forces at the disposal of one of its lesser members.
Exactly the same thing happened after the victory over Sweden at Fehrbellin in 1675. In the course of an exhausting four-year campaign, the Elector succeeded in driving every last Swede out of Western Pomerania. But even this was not enough to place him in possession of his claim, for Louis XIV had no intention of leaving his Swedish ally at Brandenburg’s mercy. France, whose powers were waxing as the Dutch Wars came to an end, insisted that the conquered Pomeranian territories should be restored in their entirety to Sweden. Vienna agreed: the Habsburg Emperor had no desire to see ‘the rise of a new king of the Vandals on the Baltic’; he preferred a weak Sweden to a strong Brandenburg.26 In June 1679, after much impotent raging, the Elector finally renounced the claim he had fought so hard for and authorized his envoy to sign the Peace of St Germain with France.
This dispiriting conclusion to a long struggle was yet another reminder that Brandenburg was still, for all its efforts and accomplishments, a small player in a world where the big players decided the important outcomes. Frederick William had been able with some success to exploit the shifting balance of power in a regional conflict between Poland and Sweden, but he was out of his depth in a struggle in which great-power interests were more directly engaged.
Playing the system effectively meant being on the right side at the right moment, and this in turn implied a readiness to switch allegiances when an existing commitment became burdensome or inopportune. Throughout the late 1660s and early 1670s, the Elector oscillated frantically between France and Austria. In January 1670, a three-year train of negotiations and agreements culminated in a ten-year treaty with France. In the summer of 1672, however, when the French attacked the Dutch Republic, invading and plundering Kleve in the process, the Elector turned instead to Emperor Leopold in Vienna. A treaty was signed in late June 1672, by which it was agreed that Brandenburg and the Emperor would conduct a joint campaign to safeguard the western borders of the Holy Roman Empire against French aggression. In the summer of 1673, however, the Elector was once again in alliance discussions with France; by the autumn of the same year he was already gravitating back towards a new anti-French coalition centred on a triple alliance between Emperor Leopold, the Dutch and the Spaniards. The same pattern of rapid alternation can be observed during the last years of Frederick William’s reign. There was a succession of alliances with France (October 1679, January 1682, January 1684), yet at the same time a Brandenburg contingent was sent to assist in the relief of the Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683. In August 1685, moreover, Frederick William signed a treaty with the Dutch Republic whose terms were largely directed against France (while at the same time assuring the French of his loyalty and pressing them to keep up with their subsidy payments).
‘[It is] in the nature of alliances,’ the Austrian military strategist Count Montecuccoli sagely observed, ‘that they are dissolved at the slightest inconvenience.’27 But even in an era that saw alliances as short-term fixes, the ‘feverish inconstancy’ (Wechselfieber) of the Elector seemed remarkable. There was method in the madness, however. In order to pay for his growing army, Frederick William needed foreign subsidies. Frequent alliance-switching forced would-be partners into a bidding war and thereby pushed up the going price for an alliance. The rapid alternation of alliances also reflected the complexity of Brandenburg’s security needs. The integrity of the western territories depended on good relations with France and the United Provinces. The integrity of Ducal Prussia depended on good relations with Poland. The safety of Brandenburg’s entire Baltic littoral depended on holding the Swedes at bay. The maintenance of the Elector’s status and the pursuit of his inheritance claims within the Empire depended upon good (or at least functional) relations with the Emperor. All these threads crossed at various points to form a neural net generating unpredictable and rapidly shifting outcomes.
Although this problem was particularly acute in the reign of the Great Elector, it did not go away after his death. Again and again, Prussian sovereigns and statesmen would face agonizing choices between conflicting alliance commitments. It was a predicament that placed considerable strain on the decision-making networks close to the throne. During the winter of 1655–6, for example, as the Elector pondered which side to back in the opening phase of the Northern War, ‘Swedish’ and ‘Polish’ factions formed among the ministers and advisers and even the Elector’s own family. The resulting mood of uncertainty and indecision prompted one of the Elector’s most powerful councillors to the observation that the Elector and his advisers ‘want what they didn’t want and do what they didn’t think they would do’28 – a charge that had also been laid at the feet of George William and would be made against various later Brandenburg sovereigns. The periodic disintegration of the policy-making establishment into factions supporting rival options would remain one of the structural constants of Prussian politics.
In switching thus from partner to partner, the Elector followed the advice of the Pomeranian Calvinist Privy Councillor Paul von Fuchs, who urged the Elector not to commit himself permanently to any one partner but always to follow a ‘pendulum policy’ (Schaukelpolitik).29 Here was an important break with the previous reign: George William, too, had alternated between Vienna and Stockholm, but only under duress. By contrast, the word Schaukelpolitik implied a conscious policy of oscillation. And this in turn implied an attenuation of the Elector’s sense of obligation to the Emperor. Successive efforts to mount a joint Brandenburg-Habsburg response to the threat from France in the 1670s had revealed that the two powers had widely divergent geopolitical interests (this problem was to dog Austro-Prussian relations well into the nineteenth century). And the Austrian Habsburg court showed on more than one occasion that it was happy to see the Elector thwarted in his ambition. Frederick William boiled with resentment at these slights: ‘You know how the Emperor and the Empire have treated us,’ he told the chief minister of his Privy Council, Otto von Schwerin, in August 1679, when Vienna supported the return of Western Pomerania to Sweden. ‘And since they were the first to leave us defenceless before our enemies, we need no longer consider their interests unless they agree with ours.’30
Yet it is also striking how reluctant the Elector was to burn his bridges with Vienna. He remained a loyal prince of the Empire, supporting the Habsburg candidate Leopold I in the imperial election of 1657 and its various preliminaries.31 The Hohenzollern eagle shown on the ensigns of seventeenth-century Brandenburg always wore a shield proudly adorned with the golden sceptre of the Imperial Hereditary Chamberlain, a mark of the Elector’s prominent ceremonial standing within the Empire. Frederick William saw the Empire as indispensable to the future well-being of his lands. The interests of the Empire were not, of course, identical with those of the Habsburg Emperor, and the Elector was perfectly aware that it might at times be necessary to defend the institutions of the former against the latter. But the Emperor remained a fixed star in the Brandenburg firmament. It was essential, the Elector warned his successor in the ‘Fatherly Instruction’ of 1667, ‘that You bear in mind the respect that You must have for the Emperor and the Empire’.32 This curious combination of a rebellious resentment of the Emperor with an ingrained respect for the ancient institutions of the Empire (or at the very least a reluctance to do away with them) was another feature of Prussian foreign policy that would endure into the late eighteenth century.
SOVEREIGNTY
On 18 October 1663, a colourful assembly of Estates representatives gathered before Königsberg castle. They were there to swear an oath of fealty to the Elector of Brandenburg. The occasion was a solemn one. The Elector stood on a raised platform draped in scarlet cloth. Near him were four senior officials of the ducal administration, each bearing one of the insignia of his office: the ducal crown, a sword, a sceptre and a field marshal’s baton. After the ceremony, the gates of the castle courtyard were opened for the traditional display of sovereign largesse. As the people of the city crowded in to join the celebrations, chamberlains tossed gold and silver commemorative medals into the crowd. Wine – red and white from two different spouts – splashed all day from a fountain fashioned in the likeness of the Hohenzollern eagle. In the reception rooms of the palace, the Estates were entertained at twenty large tables.33
The choreography of this occasion invoked a tradition of great antiquity. The oath of fealty had been an accoutrement of sovereignty in western Europe since the twelfth century. It was a legal act by which the constitutional relationship between sovereign and subject was ‘actualised, renewed and perpetuated’.34 In time-honoured fashion, the Estates representatives swore that they would never ‘under any circumstances imaginable to man’ break their bond with the new sovereign, all the while kneeling before the Elector with the left hand laid across the chest and the right hand raised above the head with the thumb and two fingers extended. It was said that the thumb signified God the Father, the index finger God the Son and the middle finger the Holy Spirit; ‘of the other two fingers, folded down into the hand, the fourth signifies the precious soul, which is hidden among mankind, while the fifth signifies the body, which is a smaller thing than the soul’.35 A specific act of political subordination was thus merged into the permanence of man’s submission before God.
These invocations of timelessness and tradition belied the fragility of Hohenzollern authority in Ducal Prussia. In 1663, when the oath was sworn in Königsberg, the Elector’s legal sovereignty in the Duchy of Prussia was of recent vintage. It had been formally confirmed at the Peace of Oliva only three years before and had since been vigorously contested by the inhabitants. In the city of Königsberg, a popular movement emerged to resist the efforts of the Electoral administration to impose its authority. Only after a leading city politician had been arrested and Electoral cannon trained on the heart of the city could peace be restored, making way for the settlement that was solemnized in the palace courtyard on 18 October 1663. And yet, within a decade, the Electoral authorities once again faced open resistance and were forced to invest the city with troops. Not only in Ducal Prussia, but also in Kleve and even in Brandenburg itself, the decades that followed the Thirty Years War were marked by strife between the Electoral authorities and the guardians of local privilege.
There was nothing inevitable about the conflict between monarchs and estates. The relationship between the sovereign and the nobilities was essentially one of interdependence. The nobilities administered the localities and collected the taxes. They lent money to the sovereign – in 1631, for example, George William owed the Brandenburg nobleman Johann von Arnim 50,000 thalers, for which he pawned two domains to him as security.36 Noble wealth provided the collateral for crown loans and in times of war noblemen were expected to provide the prince with horses and armed men to defend the territory. During the seventeenth century, however, the relationship between the two came under increasing pressure. It seemed that conflicts between the sovereign and the Estates had become the norm rather than the exception.37
The issue was essentially one of perspective. Again and again, Frederick William had to make the case that the Estates and the regions they represented should see themselves as parts of a single whole and thus as bound to collaborate in the maintenance and defence of all the sovereign’s lands and the pursuit of his legitimate territorial claims.38 But this way of seeing things was completely alien to the Estates, who viewed the respective territories as discrete constitutional parcels, bound vertically to the person of the Elector, but not horizontally to each other. For the Estates of the Mark Brandenburg, Kleve and Ducal Prussia were ‘foreign provinces’ with no claim on Brandenberg’s resources.39 Frederick William’s wars for Pomerania, by the same token, were merely private princely ‘feuds’, for which he had – in their view – no right to sequester the wealth of his hard-working subjects.
The Estates expected from the Elector the continuation and solemn observance of their ‘especial and particular privileges, freedoms, treaties, princely exemptions, marital agreements, territorial contracts, ancient traditions, law and justice’.40 They inhabited a mental world of mixed and overlapping sovereignties. The Estates of Kleve maintained a diplomatic representative in The Hague until 1660 and looked to the Dutch Republic, the imperial diet and on occasions even to Vienna, for support against illicit interventions from Berlin.41 They frequently conferred with the Estates of Mark, Jülich and Berg on how best to respond to (and resist) the Elector’s demands.42 The Estates of Ducal Prussia, for their part, tended to see neighbouring Poland as the guarantor of their ancient privileges. As one senior Electoral official irritably remarked, the leaders of the Prussian Estates were ‘true neighbours of the Poles’ and ‘indifferent to the defence of [their own] country’.43
It was not long before the widening scope of the Elector’s ambitions put him on a collision course with the Estates. The introduction of foreigners, mostly of Calvinist confession, into the most powerful administrative offices of the territories was an affront to the largely Lutheran nobility. It contravened the cherished Indigenat, a longstanding constitutional tradition in all the provinces, according to which only ‘natives’ could serve in the administration. Another sensitive question was the standing army. The Estates objected to it not just because it was expensive, but also because it displaced the old system of provincial militias, which had been under Estates control. This was of particular importance in Ducal Prussia, where the militia system was a cherished symbol of the duchy’s ancient liberties. In 1655, when the Electoral administration put forward a proposal for the abolition of the militias and their replacement by a permanent force answering directly to Berlin, the Estates responded with bitter protests, declaring that if the traditional means did not suffice for an effective defence, the sovereign should order days of ‘general atonement and prayer’ and ‘seek refuge in God’.44 There are interesting parallels here with those outspoken ‘Country Whigs’ who opposed the expansion of the standing army in England, pleading for the retention of local militias under gentry control and arguing that a country’s foreign policy should be determined by its armed forces, not the other way around.45 In England, as in Ducal Prussia, the ‘country ideology’ of the rural elites encompassed a potent blend of provincial patriotism, the defence of ‘liberty’ and resistance to the expansion of state power.46 Many Prussian noblemen would have agreed enthusiastically with the view expressed in an English anti-army pamphlet of 1675 that ‘the power of Peerage and a Standing Army are like two Buckets, the proportion that one goes down, the other exactly goes up…’47
The most contentious issue of all was taxation. The Estates insisted that monetary and other levies could not legally be raised without prior agreement with their representatives. Yet the increasingly deep involvement of Brandenburg in regional power politics after 1643 meant that the administration’s financial needs could not be satisfied using the traditional fiscal mechanisms.48 During the years 1655–88 the Great Elector’s military expenditures totalled some 54 million thalers. Some of this was covered by foreign subsidies under a succession of alliance compacts. Some derived from the exploitation of the Elector’s own domains, or other sovereign revenues, such as the postal services, coinage and customs. But these sources together accounted for no more than 10 million thalers. The remainder had to be raised in the form of taxes from the population of the Elector’s territories.49
In Kleve, Ducal Prussia and even in Brandenburg, the heartland of the Hohenzollern patrimony, the Estates resisted the Elector’s efforts to secure new revenues for the army. In 1649, the Brandenburg Estates refused to approve funds for a campaign against the Swedes in Pomerania, despite the Elector’s earnest reminder that all his territories were now ‘limbs of one head’ (membra unius capitis) and that Pomerania ought thus to be supported as if it were ‘part of the Electorate’.50 In Kleve, where the wealthy urban patriciate still regarded the Elector as a foreign interloper, the Estates revived the traditional ‘alliance’ with Mark, Jülich and Berg; leading spokesmen even drew parallels with the contemporary upheavals in England and threatened to treat the Elector as the parliamentary party were treating King Charles. Frederick William’s threats to apply ‘military executive actions’ were largely futile, since the Estates were supported by the Dutch garrisons still occupying the duchy.51 In Ducal Prussia, too, the Elector encountered determined resistance. Here the Estates had traditionally ruled the roost, meeting regularly in full session and keeping a tight grip on central and local government, the militia and the territorial finances. The traditional Prussian right of appeal to the Polish Crown meant that they could not easily be bullied into cooperating.52
It was the outbreak of the Northern War of 1655–60 that brought the confrontation over revenues to a head. First, coercion and force were used to break resistance. Annual levies were raised unilaterally and extracted by military ‘executive action’ – especially in Kleve, where the annual contribution rose more sharply during the war years than anywhere else in the Elector’s lands. Leading Estates activists were intimidated or arrested.53 Protests were ignored. In the struggle over revenues, the Elector benefited from changes in the broader legal environment that helped to undermine the pretensions of the provincial elites. In 1654, under pressure from the German Electors, most of whom were locked in conflicts of one kind or another with their Estates, the Emperor decreed that the subjects of sovereigns within the Holy Roman Empire were ‘obliged obediently to give the necessary assistance to their Princes [… ] for the support and occupation of fortified places and garrisons’. While it is perhaps an exaggeration to describe this document as the ‘Magna Carta of absolutism’, the decree of 1654 was an important point of departure. It signalled the advent across the Holy Roman Empire of a political climate unfavourable to the assertion of corporate rights.54
Of all the conflicts over Estates’ rights, the one in Ducal Prussia was the most bitter. Here too, the outbreak of the Northern War was the catalyst for confrontation. The Elector summoned the Prussian Diet in April 1655 but even in August, when the threat posed by Sweden was evident, the Estates refused to promise more than 70,000 thalers – a small sum if one bears in mind that poorer and less populous Brandenburg was at this time providing an annual military contribution of 360,000 thalers.55 The situation changed dramatically in the winter of 1655 when Frederick William and his army arrived in Königsberg. Forced payments soon became the rule and the annual military contribution rose sharply to an average of 600,000 thalers over the years 1655–9. A string of administrative reforms was put in place that allowed the Elector to circumvent the Estates. The most important were the foundation of the War Commissariat, with extensive fiscal and confisca-tory powers, and the installation of an Electoral viceroy, Prince Boguslav Radziwill, whose task was to oversee the powerful and independent Supreme Councillors (Oberraäte), who had traditionally ruled Prussia on behalf of the Estates.
With the issue of his full sovereignty resolved by the Treaty of Wehlau (1657) and the Peace of Oliva (1660), the Elector was determined to achieve a lasting settlement with the Prussian Estates. But the Estates contested the validity of the treaties, arguing that changes to the constitutional machinery of the province could only be made on the basis of trilateral negotiations between the Elector, the Ducal Prussian Estates and the Polish Crown.56 During the year-long Great Diet convened in Königsberg in May 1661, the Estates unfolded a far-reaching programme of demands including a permanent right of appeal to the Polish Crown, the removal of all Electoral troops except for a few coastal garrisons, the exclusion of non-Prussians from official posts, regular diets, and automatic Polish mediation in all disputes between the Estates and the Elector. It proved extremely difficult to reach an agreement over these issues, the more so as the mood among the citizenry of Königsberg grew steadily more restless and intransigent. In order to insulate the negotiations from the turbulence in the ducal capital, the Elector’s minister, Otto von Schwerin, ordered that the diet be moved southwards to the more tranquil setting of Bartenstein in October 1661. Only after March 1662, when a mission to Warsaw failed to secure concrete assistance from Poland, did the corporate nobility begin to back down.
5. A view of the city of Königsberg (c. 1690)
In the meanwhile, the mood of the city had grown more radical, following a pattern that can also be observed in other parts of Europe. There were daily protest meetings. One of the foremost activists for urban corporate rights was Hieronymus Roth, a merchant and president of the court of aldermen of Kneiphof, one of the three ‘cities’ of old Königsberg. Hoping to persuade Roth to adopt a more moderate position, Otto von Schwerin invited him to a private meeting at the ducal castle in Königsberg on 26 May 1661. But the encounter went horribly wrong. According to a report by Schwerin, Roth adopted a seditious and confrontational tone, declaring among other things that ‘every prince, be he ever so pious, bears a tyrant in his breast’ – words that would later be cited in the alderman’s indictment. Roth for his part recalled that he had defended the ancient liberties of Königsberg in a polite and reasonable way – it was Schwerin who had flown into a rage and threatened him with raised arm.57
Despite a sustained campaign of harassment, Roth continued to agitate against the Electoral administration, protected by a city government that refused to arrest him or limit his activities. He travelled to Warsaw, where he met with the King of Poland, presumably in order to discuss the possibility of Polish support for the Estates. In the last week of October 1661, the Elector ran out of patience and entered Königsberg with 2,000 troops. Roth was arrested, tried, summarily convicted by an Electoral Commission and imprisoned in the fortress of Peitz, far away in Cottbus, a Hohenzollern enclave in Electoral Saxony. The prison regime was not particularly arduous in the early years – Roth was served six-course lunches, had comfortably appointed rooms and was allowed to take walks along the upper walls of the fortress.
New restrictions were imposed in 1668, however, when it was discovered that he had been carrying on a secret correspondence with his stepson in Königsberg, in which he railed against the ‘arrogant Calvinists’ who now governed his city on behalf of the Elector. The go-between who had conveyed his letters, a Königsberg-born soldier serving on the fortress garrison, was also punished. Frederick William had initially declared that he would release Roth if the latter would acknowledge his ‘guilt’, show true remorse and beg for mercy. But Roth stuck to his guns, objecting that he had acted not from any ill will but out of duty to his ‘Fatherland’. After the scandal of the intercepted letters, the Elector resolved that the turbulent alderman should never be released. Only some years later, at the age of seventy, did Roth write to Frederick William begging for his liberation and commending himself as the Elector’s ‘loyal and obedient subject’.58 But there was no pardon and the alderman died in his fortress in the summer of 1678, after seventeen years in confinement.
The imprisonment of Hieronymus Roth cleared the way for an interim settlement with the Prussian Estates. There were further clashes over taxation in the early 1670s, during which troops were called in to enforce payment. In January 1672 there was even a political execution in Ducal Prussia – the only one of the Elector’s reign.59 But the Prussians did eventually come to accept the Elector’s sovereignty and the fiscal regime that came with it. By the 1680s, the political rule of the Prussian Estates had come to an end, leaving nothing but nostalgic dreams of the ‘still unforgotten blissfulness, liberty and peaceful tranquillity’ they had enjoyed under the mild overlordship of the kings of Poland.60
COURT AND COUNTRY
The Electoral administration gradually extended its independence from the provincial elites. Since the Elector owned nearly one-third of Brandenburg and about half of Ducal Prussia, he could greatly expand his revenue base simply by improving the administration of the crown domains. During the Second Northern War, the management of these properties was streamlined under the oversight of the new Office for the Domains (Amtskammer). A further important step was the excise tax, an indirect duty on goods and services introduced piecemeal in the towns of Brandenburg during the late 1660s and later extended to Pomerania, Magdeburg, Halberstadt and Ducal Prussia. After local disputes over the mode of its collection, the excise was placed under the control of centrally directed tax commissioners (Steuerraäte), who soon began to accumulate other administrative functions. The excise was an important tactical asset because it divided the different corporate elements within the Estates against each other and thus weakened them vis-à-vis the central administration. Since the excise applied only to the towns, it placed rural enterprises at a competitive advantage over their urban rivals and enabled the Elector to milk the commercial wealth of the regions without alienating the powerful landed families.
Frederick William also reinforced his authority by appointing Calvinists to key administrative offices. This was not just a matter of religious preference – it was a policy consciously directed against the pretensions of the Lutheran Estates. Several of Frederick William’s most senior officials were foreign Calvinist princes. The long-serving viceroy of Kleve, John Moritz von Nassau-Siegen, fell into this category, as did Count (later Prince) George Frederick von Waldeck, the flamboyant ruler of a minor Westphalian principality who had served in the Dutch army and became the most influential minister of the first half of the reign. Another was John George II of Anhalt, commander of the 1672 campaign and sometime viceroy of Brandenburg. The Polish-Lithuanian Prince Boguslav Radziwill, appointed as viceroy in Ducal Prussia during the Second Northern War, was another imperial Calvinist grandee. The Brandenburg minister Otto von Schwerin, leading office-holder at the Berlin court after 1658, was a Pomeranian nobleman who had converted to Calvinism and whose activities on the Elector’s behalf included the buying up of noble estates and their incorporation into the crown domains. In all, some two-thirds of senior office-holders appointed during the Great Elector’s reign were of the Reformed faith.61
The use of foreign officials was another important development; in Brandenburg, scarcely any of the leading ministers appointed after 1660 was actually a native of the Electorate. The employment of gifted commoners (mainly lawyers) in the upper echelons of the civilian and military administrations widened the gap between government organs and the provincial elites. By the end of the seventeenth century, the Junker nobility of the Brandenburg hinterland had become a marginal presence within the nascent Hohenzollern bureaucracy, a trend accelerated by the deteriorating financial condition of an elite that was slow to recover from the disruptions of the Thirty Years War. Of all the appointments made to senior court, diplomatic and military posts between the accession of Elector Frederick William in 1640 and that of his grandson Frederick the Great one hundred years later, only 10 per cent went to members of the Brandenburg noble landowning class.62 What emerged as they retreated was a new office-holding type, less bound to the provincial nobilities than to the monarch and his administration.
This was not a struggle for the unconditional surrender of one party to the other. The central authority did not seek direct dominance over the provincial elites as such, but control over particular mechanisms within the traditional power-holding structures.63 The Elector never set out to abolish the Estates or to subject them entirely to his authority. The objectives of his administration were always limited and pragmatic. The most senior officials often urged the government to be flexible and indulgent in its dealings with the Estates.64 Prince Moritz von Nassau Siegen, viceroy in Kleve, was by temperament a conciliatory figure who spent much of his time in office mediating between the sovereign and the local elites.65 Frederick William’s chief agents in Ducal Prussia, Prince Radziwill and Otto von Schwerin, were both moderate figures with considerable sympathy for the Estates’ cause. A close examination of the protocols of the Privy Council reveals a veritable flood of individual complaints and requests from particular Estates, most of which were approved on the spot by the sovereign.66
The Estates, or at least the corporate nobilities, soon found ways of reconciling their interests with the Elector’s pretensions. They acted tactically, breaking with their corporate colleagues when it furthered their interests. Their opposition to the standing army was muted by the realization that military service in a command role offered an attractive and honourable road to status and a regular income.67 They did not contest in principle the Elector’s right to formulate foreign policy in consultation with his councillors. What they envisaged was a complementary relationship between the organs of central authority and the provincial grandees. As the Kleve Estates explained in a memorandum of 1684, the Elector could not be expected to know what was going on in all of his lands and was thus dependent upon his officials. But these, being human, were prey to the usual weaknesses and temptations. The role of the Estates was thus to provide a corrective and balance to the organs of provincial governance.68 Things had come a long way since the confrontational exchanges of the 1640s.
Force and coercion played a role in securing the acquiescence of local elites, but protracted negotiations, mediation and the convergence of interests, though less spectacular, were far more important.69 The Brandenburg administration pursued a flexible two-track approach, with the Elector pushing hard at intervals for key concessions and his officials working to restore consensus in between. Towns too, could benefit from this pragmatic approach. In return for rendering a formal declaration of fealty to the Elector in 1665, the little Westphalian city of Soest in the County of Mark was allowed to retain its ancient ‘constitution’, incorporating a unique system of self-government and municipal justice run by elected functionaries recruited from the corporate elites70
If we survey the situation at the end of the century from the vantage point of the rural localities, then it is clear that the nobility had conserved much of its jurisdictional autonomy and socio-economic power and remained the dominant force in the land. They retained the right to assemble at their own behest in order to deliberate on issues affecting the welfare of their regions. They controlled the collection and allocation of taxes in the countryside. More importantly, Estate bodies at district level (Kreisstaände) retained the right to elect the district governor (Landrat), ensuring that this crucial figure in the administration remained – into the late eighteenth century – an intermediary who answered not only to the sovereign, but also to local corporate interests.71
If, however, we focus instead on the political power structures of the Hohenzollern territories, it becomes plain that the relationship between the central administration and the provincial estates had been irreversibly transformed. Plenary assemblies of the corporate representatives of the provincial nobilities became increasingly rare – the last such meeting of the Altmark and Mittelmark nobilities took place in 1683. Thereafter the business of the Estates and their dealings with government were managed through small deputations of permanent delegates known as ‘lesser committees’ (engere Ausschüsse). The corporate nobility had retreated from the high ground of the state, focusing its collective attention on the locality and relinquishing its territorial political ambitions. Court and country had grown apart.
LEGACY
At the close of the seventeenth century, Brandenburg-Prussia was the largest German principality after Austria. Its long scatter of territories stretched like an uneven line of stepping-stones from the Rhineland to the eastern Baltic. Much of what had been promised in the marriage and inheritance contracts of the sixteenth century had now been made real. As the Elector told a tearful bedside gathering on 7 May two days before his death, his reign had been, by God’s grace, a long and happy one, though difficult and ‘full of war and trouble’. ‘Everyone knows the sad disorder the country was in when I began my reign; through God’s help I have improved it, am respected by my friends and feared by my enemies.’72 His celebrated great-grandson, Frederick the Great, would later declare that the history of Prussia’s ascent began with the reign of the Great Elector, for it was he who had established ‘the solid foundations’ of its later greatness. Echoes of this argument resound in the great nineteenth-century narratives of the Prussian school.
It is clear that the military and foreign-political exploits of this reign did define, in formal terms, a new point of departure for Brandenburg. From 1660, Frederick William was the sovereign ruler of Ducal Prussia, a territory outside the Holy Roman Empire. He had superseded his ancestral political condition. He was no longer merely an imperial potentate, but a European prince. It is a mark of his attachment to this new status that he sought from the court of Louis XIV the official denomination ‘Mon Frère’ traditionally accorded only to sovereign princes.73 During the reign of his successor Elector Frederick III, the Ducal Prussian sovereignty would be used to acquire the title of king for the House of Hohenzollern. In due course, even the ancient and venerable name of Brandenburg would be overshadowed by ‘Kingdom of Prussia’, the name increasingly used in the eighteenth century for the totality of the northern Hohenzollern lands.
The Elector himself was alert to the import of the changes that had been wrought during his reign. In 1667, he composed a ‘Fatherly Instruction’ for his heir. The document began, in the manner of the traditional princely testament, with exhortations to lead a pious and God-fearing life, but it soon broadened into a political tract of a type without precedent in the history of the Hohenzollern dynasty. Sharp contrasts were drawn between past and present: the Elector reminded his son of how the acquisition of sovereignty over Ducal Prussia had annulled the ‘intolerable condition’ of vassalage to the Crown of Poland that had oppressed his forebears. ‘All this cannot be described; the Archive and the accounts will bear witness to it.’74 The future Elector was also urged to develop an historical perspective on the problems that beset him in the present. Industrious consultation of the archive would reveal not only how important it was to maintain good relations with France, but also how these should be balanced with ‘the respect that You, as an Elector, must have for the Reich and Emperor’. There was also a strong sense of the new order established by the Peace of Westphalia and the importance of defending it if necessary against any power or powers that should set out to overturn it.75 In short, this was a document acutely sensitive to its own location in history and charged with an awareness of the tension between historical continuity and the forces of change.
Closely linked to the Elector’s alertness to historical contingency was an acute sensitivity to the vulnerability of his achievement: what had been made could always be unmade. The Swedes would always be waiting for the next chance ‘by cunning or by force’ to wrest control of the Baltic coast from Brandenburg. The Poles, together with the Prussians themselves, would take the first opportunity to return Ducal Prussia to its ‘prior condition’.76 It followed that the task of his successors would not be to extend further the territories of the House of Brandenburg, but to safeguard what was already rightfully theirs:
Be sure at all times that you live as far as possible in mutual trust, friendship and correspondence with all the Electors, princes and Estates of the Empire, and that you give them no cause for ill-will, and keep the good peace. And because God had blessed our House with many lands, you should look only to their conservation, and be sure that you do not awaken great envy and enmity through the quest for further lands or jeopardize thereby what you already possess.77
It is worth emphasizing this note of edginess. It articulates one of the abiding themes of Brandenburg-Prussian foreign policy. Underlying Berlin’s view of the world there was always a sharp undertone of vulnerability. The restless activism that would become a hallmark of Prussian foreign policy began with the remembered trauma of the Thirty Years War. We hear it resounding in the doleful phrases of the ‘Fatherly Instruction’: ‘For one thing is quite certain, if You simply sit still, in the belief that the fire is still far from Your borders: then Your lands will become the theatre on which the tragedy is played out.’78 We hear it again in Frederick William’s words of 1671 to the chief minister Otto von Schwerin: ‘I have experienced neutrality before; even under the most favourable conditions, you are treated badly. I have vowed never to be neutral again until I die.’79 It is one of the central problems of Brandenburg-Prussian history that this sense of vulnerability proved so inescapable.
4
Majesty
CORONATION
On 18 January 1701, Elector Frederick III of Brandenburg was crowned ‘King in Prussia’ in the city of Königsberg. The splendour of the event was unprecedented in the history of the House of Hohenzollern. According to one contemporary report, 30,000 horses were required to relay the Electoral family, their retainers and their luggage, all packed into 1,800 carriages, eastwards along the road from Berlin to the place of coronation. On their way, they passed villages hung with decorations, their main thoroughfares lined with burning torches, or even draped with fine cloth. The celebrations began on 15 January in Königsberg, when heralds wearing blue velvet livery emblazoned with the new royal coat of arms passed through the city, proclaiming the Duchy of Prussia a sovereign kingdom.
The coronation itself began on the morning of 18 January in the audience chamber of the Elector, where a throne had been erected specially for the occasion. Dressed in a scarlet and gold coat glittering with diamond buttons and a crimson mantle with an ermine lining and attended by a small gathering of male family members, courtiers and senior local officials, the Elector placed the crown on his own head, took his sceptre in hand and received the homage of those present. He then passed into the chambers of his wife, whom he crowned as his queen in the presence of their household. After representatives of the Estates had rendered homage, the royal couple processed to the castle church in order to be anointed. Here they were greeted at the entrance by two bishops, one Lutheran and one Reformed (Calvinist), both of whom had been appointed to their offices specifically for this purpose, in deference to the bi-confessional character of the Brandenburg-Prussian state. After some hymns and a sermon, a royal fanfare of drums and trumpets announced the high point of the service: the king rose from his throne and knelt at the altar while the Calvinist Bishop Ursinus wet two fingers of his right hand in the oil and anointed the forehead and the right and left wrists (above the pulse) of the king. The same ritual was then performed upon the queen. To the accompaniment of a musical acclamation, the clergymen involved in the service gathered before the throne and rendered homage. After further hymns and prayers, a senior court official stood up to announce a general pardon for all offenders, excluding blasphemers, murderers, debtors and those guilty of lèsemajesté.1
In terms of the proportion of territorial wealth consumed, the coronation of 1701 must surely be the most expensive single event in the history of Brandenburg-Prussia. Even by the standards of an age that revelled in courtly ceremonial as an expression of power, the Prussian coronation was unusually splendid. The government levied a special crown tax to cover its expenditures, but this brought in a total of only 500,000 thalers – three-fifths of this amount were paid out for the queen’s crown alone, and the royal crown, fashioned of precious metal and studded over its entire surface with diamonds, accounted for the rest and more besides. Reconstructing the total cost of the festivities is difficult, since no integrated account survives, but it has been estimated that around 6 million thalers were spent in all for the ceremony and attendant festivities, about twice the annual revenues of the Hohenzollern administration.
The coronation was singular in another sense too. It was entirely custom-made: an invention designed to serve the purposes of a specific historical moment. The designer was Frederick I himself, who was responsible for every detail, not only of the new royal insignia, the secular rituals and the liturgy in the castle church, but also for the style and colour of the garments worn by the chief participants. There was a staff of experts to advise on monarchical ceremonial. Foremost among these was the poet Johann von Besser who served as master of ceremonies at Frederick’s court from 1690 until the end of the reign and possessed a wide-ranging knowledge of English, French, German, Italian and Scandinavian courtly traditions. But the key decisions always fell to the Elector.
The ceremony that resulted was a unique and highly self-conscious amalgam of borrowings from historical European coronations, some recent, others of older vintage. Frederick designed his coronation not only with a view to its aesthetic impact, but also in order to broadcast what he regarded as the defining features of his kingly status. The form of the crown, which was not an open band, but a domed metal structure closed at the top, symbolized the all-embracing power of a monarch who encompassed in his own person both secular and spiritual sovereignty. The fact, moreover, that the king, in contrast to the prevailing European practice, crowned himself in a separate ceremony before being anointed at the hands of his clergy, pointed up the autonomous character of his office, its independence from any worldly or spiritual authority (save that of God himself). A description of the coronation by Johann Christian Lünig, a renowned contemporary expert on the courtly ‘science of ceremony’, explained the significance of this step.
Kings who accept their kingdom and sovereignty from the Estates usually only take up the purple mantle, the crown and sceptre and mount the throne after they have been anointed: [… ] but His Majesty [Friedrich I], who has not received His Kingdom through the assistance of the Estates or of any other [party], had no need whatever of such a handing-over, but rather received his crown after the manner of the ancient kings from his own foundation.2
Given the recent history of Brandenburg and Ducal Prussia, the importance of these symbolic gestures is obvious enough. The Great Elector’s struggle with the Prussian Estates and particularly the city of Königsberg was still a memory with the power to disturb – it is a telling detail that the Prussian Estates were never consulted over the coronation and were informed of the forthcoming festivity only in December 1700. Equally important was the independence of the new kingdom from any kind of Polish or imperial claim. Everyone knows, the British envoy George Stepney had reported to James Vernon, Secretary of State for the Northern Department, in 1698,
the value this Elector sets upon [… ] the absolute soveraignety wherewith he possesses the Ducal Prussia, for in that respect he exceeds in Power all other Electors and Princes of the Empire, who are not so independent but derive their grandeur by investiture from the Emperor, for which reasons, the Elector affects to be distinguished by some more extraordinary title than what is common to the rest of his colleagues.3
6. Frederick I, King in Prussia (Elector 1688–1701; king 1701–13), painted after his coronation, attributed to Samuel Theodor Gericke
One of the reasons for adopting the title ‘King in Prussia’ – an unusual title that occasioned some amusement at the European courts – was that it freed the new crown from any Polish claims pertaining to ‘royal’ Prussia, which was still within the Polish Commonwealth. In negotiations with Vienna, particular care was expended to ensure that the wording of any agreement would make it clear that the Emperor was not ‘creating’ (creieren) the new royal title, but merely ‘acknowledging’ (agnoszieren) it. A much disputed passage of the final agreement between Berlin and Vienna paid lip service to the special primacy of the Emperor as the senior monarch of Christendom, but also made it clear that the Prussian Crown was an entirely independent foundation, for which the Emperor’s approval was a courtesy rather than an obligation.
In 1701, as so often before, Berlin owed its good fortune to international developments. The Emperor would probably not have cooperated in the Elector’s elevation had it not been for the fact that he stood in urgent need of Brandenburg’s support. The epochal struggle between Habsburg and Bourbon was about to enter a new and bloody phase, as a coalition of European powers gathered to oppose French designs to place a grandson of Louis XIV on the vacant Spanish throne. Anticipating a major conflagration, the Emperor saw that he would have to make concessions in order to win Frederick’s support. Wooed with attractive offers from both sides, the Elector hesitated, swinging from one option to the other, but eventually decided to align himself with the Emperor in return for the Crown Treaty (Krontraktat) of 16 November 1700. Under this agreement, Frederick undertook to supply a contingent of 8,000 men to the Emperor and made various more general assurances of support for the House of Habsburg. The Viennese court agreed, for its part, not only to recognize the foundation of the new title, but also to work towards its general acceptance, both within the Holy Roman Empire and among the European powers.
The establishment of the royal title brought a massive expansion of the courtly establishment and a great unfurling of elaborate ceremonies. Many of these had an overtly historical dimension. There were splendid festivities to mark the anniversary of the coronation, the birthday of the queen, the birthday of the king, the conferral of the Order of the Black Eagle, the unveiling of a statue of the Great Elector. In this respect Frederick’s reign institutionalized the heightened historical consciousness that had been a feature of his predecessor’s understanding of his office and that had been percolating through the courts of western Europe since the late sixteenth century.4 It was Frederick who appointed Samuel Pufendorf Court Historiographer in 1688. Pufendorf’s remarkable history of the Great Elector’s reign was the first to make systematic use of archived government papers.
While other courts were preoccupied with the battles and sieges of the war currently waging over the Spanish succession, one contemporary English observer remarked with a note of exasperation, life in Berlin was an unceasing round of ‘shows, dancing and other such like devertions’.5 For the foreign envoys posted in Berlin, this quantum leap in courtly splendour meant that life became more expensive. In a report filed in the summer of 1703, the British envoy extraordinary (later ambassador) Lord Raby, noted that his ‘equipage, which in London was thought very fine, is nothing to those that are here’. The British despatches of this period are filled with complaints at the inordinate expense involved in maintaining appearances at what had suddenly become one of Europe’s most splendid courts. Apartments had to be refurnished, servants, carriages and horses kitted out to a more exacting and costly standard. ‘I find I shall be no gainer by my embassy,’ Raby dolefully commented in one of many veiled pleas for a more generous allowance.6
Perhaps the most dramatic expression of the new taste for elaborate ceremonial was the regime of mourning that followed the death of the king’s second wife, Sophie Charlotte of Hanover, in February 1705. The queen had been visiting her relatives in Hanover at the time of her death. A senior court official was ordered to take two battalions of Brandenburg troops to Hanover and bear the corpse back to Berlin, where it was to lie exposed on a bed of state for six months. Strictest orders were given that the ‘deepest mourning that is possible’ should be observed throughout the king’s dominions. All who came to court were ordered to cover themselves in long black cloaks and all apartments, coaches and equipages, including those of the foreign envoys, were to be ‘put into deep mourning’.
The court was in deeper mourning than ever I saw in my life, for the women all had black head clothes and Black veils that cover’d them all over, so no face was to be seen. The men all in long black cloakes and the rooms all hung with cloath the top as well as the bottom, and but four candles in each room, so that one could hardly distinguish the king from the rest but by the height of his cloake, which was held up by a gentleman of the bedchamber.7
Hand in hand with the ratcheting up of courtly splendour and ceremonial went a boom in cultural investment that was unprecedented in the history of the dynasty. The last decades of the Great Elector’s reign had seen a growth in representative building in the capital city, but this paled into insignificance beside the projects launched during the reign of his successor. A huge palace complex with an extensive pleasure garden was constructed in Charlottenburg under the direction of the Swedish master builder Johann Friedrich Eosander, and there was a proliferation of representative sculpture across the city, the most notable example being the striking equestrian statue of the Great Elector designed by Andreas Schlüter. The old war-scarred town of Berlin began to disappear beneath the broad paved streets and stately buildings of a graceful residential city.
In July 1700, as his quest for the royal title approached a successful conclusion, Frederick founded a Royal Scientific Society, later renamed the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences, and thus acquired one of the most prized contemporary attributes of dynastic distinction.8 A medallion designed by the philosopher Leibniz to commemorate the inauguration of the society (which was officially established on 11 July, the sovereign’s birthday) displayed on one side a portrait of the Elector, on the other an image of the Brandenburg eagle flying upwards towards the constellation known as the Eagle and bearing the motto: ‘he strives for the stars he knows’.9
Was the Prussian royal title, with all the pomp and circumstance that attended it, worth the money and effort spent acquiring and living up to it? The most famous answer to this question was a scathing negative. For Frederick’s grandson Frederick II the entire exercise amounted to little more than an indulgence of the Elector’s vanity, as he explained in a remarkably spiteful portrait of the first Prussian king:
He was small and misshapen, his expression was proud, his physiognomy vulgar. His soul was like a mirror that throws back every object. [… ] He mistook vanities for true greatness. He was more concerned with appearances than with useful things that are soundly made. [… ] He only desired the crown so hotly because he needed a superficial pretext to justify his weakness for ceremony and his wasteful extravagance. [… ] All in all: he was great in small things and small in great things. And it was his misfortune to find a place in history between a father and a son whose superior talents cast him in shadow.10
It is certainly the case that Frederick’s court establishment incurred costs that were unsustainable in the longer term, and it is true that the first king took great pleasure in magnificent festivities and elaborately choreographed ceremonies. But the emphasis on personal foibles is in some respects misplaced. Frederick I was not the only European ruler to seek elevation to kingly status at this time – the Grand Duke of Tuscany had acquired the right to be addressed as ‘Royal Highness’ in 1691; the same right was acquired during the following years by the dukes of Savoy and Lorraine. More importantly from Berlin’s perspective, a number of rival German dynasties were angling for a royal title during the 1690s. The Elector of Saxony converted to Catholicism in order to get himself elected King of Poland in 1697, and negotiations began at around the same time over the possible succession of the Electoral House of Hanover to the British royal throne. The Bavarians and the Palatine Wittelsbachs were likewise engaged with (ultimately futile) plans to capture a royal title, either by elevation or, in the latter case, by securing a claim to the ‘royal throne of Armenia’. In other words, the coronation of 1701 was no isolated personal caprice, but part of a wave of regalization that was sweeping across the still largely non-regal territories of the Holy Roman Empire and the Italian states at the end of the seventeenth century. Royal title mattered because it still entailed privileged status within the international community. Since the precedence accorded to crowned heads was also observed at the great peace treaties of the era, it was a matter of potentially grave practical importance.
The recent growth of interest in the early modern European courts as political and cultural institutions has heightened our awareness of the functionality of courtly ritual. Courtly festivities had a crucial communicative and legitimating function. As the philosopher Christian Wolff observed in 1721, the ‘common man’, who depended upon his senses rather than his reason, was quite incapable of grasping ‘what the majesty of a king is’. Yet it was possible to convey to him a sense of the power of the monarch by confronting him with ‘things that catch his eye and stir his other senses’. A considerable court and court ceremonies, he concluded, were thus ‘by no means superfluous or reprehensible’.11 Courts were also densely interlinked with each other through family diplomatic and cultural ties; they were not only focal points for elite social and political life within each respective territory, but also nodes in an international courtly network. The magnificent celebrations of the coronation anniversary, for example, were observed by numerous foreign visitors, not to speak of the various dynastic relatives and envoys who could always be found at court during the season.
The international resonance of such events within the European court system was further amplified by published official or semi-official accounts, in which scrupulous attention was paid to details of precedence, dress, ceremony and the splendour of the spectacle. The same applied to the elaborately ritualized observances associated with mourning. The orders issued following the death of Queen Sophie Charlotte were not primarily intended to lend expression to the private grief of the bereaved, but rather to send out signals about the weight and importance of the court where the death had occurred. These signals were directed not only to a domestic audience of subjects, but also to other courts, which were expected to mark their acknowledgement of the event by entering into various degrees of mourning. So implicit were these expectations that Frederick I was furious when he discovered that Louis XIV had decided not to put the court at Versailles into mourning on Sophie Charlotte’s account, presumably as a means of conveying his displeasure at Berlin’s pro-Austrian policy in the War of the Spanish Succession.12 Like the other ceremonies that punctuated life at court, mourning was part of a system of political communication. Seen in this context, the court was an instrument whose purpose was to document the rank of the prince before an international ‘courtly public’.13
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the coronation ritual of 1701 is the fact that it did not become the foundation stone of a tradition of sacral coronations in Prussia. Frederick’s immediate successor, Frederick William, had developed during his youth a deep antipathy to the refinement and playfulness cultivated by his mother and showed no taste as an adult for the kinds of ritual display that were a defining feature of his father’s reign. Upon his accession, he not only dispensed entirely with a coronation ritual of any kind, but substantially dismantled the court establishment his father had created. Frederick II inherited his father’s dislike of dynastic ostentation and did not restore the ceremony. As a consequence, Brandenburg-Prussia became a kingdom without coronations. The defining ritual of the accession remained, as in earlier times, the oath of homage in Königsberg of the Prussian estates and in Berlin of the other estates of the Hohenzollern dominions.
It is clear none the less in retrospect that the acquisition of the kingly title inaugurated a new phase in the history of the Brandenburg polity. First, it is worth noting that the rituals associated with the coronation remained dormant within the collective memory of the dynasty. The Order of the Black Eagle, for example, founded by Frederick I on the eve of the coronation to reward the kingdom’s most distinguished friends and servants, was gradually alienated from its courtly function, but it enjoyed a revival in the 1840s during the reign of Frederick William IV, when a number of the original conferral ceremonies were reconstructed from the archives and reintroduced. King William I chose upon his accession in 1861 to dispense with the homage (which many contemporaries judged to be obsolete) and instead to revive the practice of self-coronation in Königsberg.14 It was this same monarch who scheduled the proclamation of the German Empire in 1871 in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles to fall on 18 January, the anniversary of the first coronation. The cultural resonance of the coronation ritual within the life of the dynasty was thus more enduring than its sudden abandonment after 1713 might suggest.
The coronation of 1701 also signalled a subtle shift in the relationship between the monarch and his spouse. Of the seventeenth-century wives and mothers of the Brandenburg Electors, several had been powerful independent figures at court. The most outstanding in this respect had been Anna of Prussia, wife of John Sigismund, a spirited, iron-willed woman who responded to her husband’s intermittent drunken rages by throwing plates and glasses at his head. Anna was an important player in the labile confessional politics of Brandenburg after her husband’s conversion to Calvinism; she also maintained her own diplomatic network and virtually ran a separate foreign policy. This continued even after the death of her husband and the accession of her son George William in 1619. In the summer of 1620, Anna entered into separate negotiations with the King of Sweden over the latter’s marriage to her daughter, Maria Eleonora, without so much as consulting her son, the head of state. In 1631, as Brandenburg’s greatest wartime crisis came to a head, it was the Elector’s Palatine wife Elisabeth Charlotte and her mother Louise Juliane, rather than George William himself, who managed the delicate diplomatic relationship between Brandenburg and Sweden.15 In other words: women at court continued to pursue interests informed by their own family networks and quite distinct from those of their husbands. The same can be said of Sophie Charlotte, the intelligent Hanoverian princess who married Frederick III/I in 1684, but who spent long sojourns at her mother’s court in Hanover (she was staying there when she died in 1705) and remained an advocate of Hanoverian policy.16 She was an opponent of the coronation project, which she saw as damaging to Hanoverian interests. (She is reported to have found the coronation itself so tedious that she took pinches of snuff during the proceedings in order to provide herselfwith ‘some pleasant distraction’.)17
Against this background, it is clear that the coronation set the relationship between the Elector and his spouse within a new framework. It was the Elector who crowned his wife, having first crowned himself, and thereby made her his queen. This was, of course, a mere symbolic detail without practical consequences and, since there were no further coronations in the eighteenth century, it was not re-enacted. But the ceremony none the less signalled the beginning of a process by which the dynastic identity of the wife would be partially merged into that of her husband, the crowned head of a royal household. The concomitant masculinization of the monarchy, coupled with the fact that the House of Hohenzollern now enjoyed a clear pre-eminence among the Protestant German dynasties from which spouses were recruited, narrowed the freedom of movement available to the ‘first ladies’ of Brandenburg-Prussia. Their eighteenth-century successors were not without personal gifts and political insight, but they would not develop the kind of autonomous weight in politics that had been such a striking feature of the previous century.
The independent, extra-imperial sovereignty secured by the Great Elector had been solemnized in the most dramatic possible way. The special prominence that Brandenburg had acquired among the lesser European powers after 1640 by virtue of its military prowess and the determination of its leadership was now reflected in its formal standing within the international order of precedence.18 The Viennese court recognized this and soon came to regret the role it had played in facilitating the Elector of Brandenburg’s elevation. The new title also had a psychologically integrating effect: the Baltic territory formerly known as Ducal Prussia was no longer a mere outlying possession of the Brandenburg heartland, but a constitutive element in a new royal-electoral amalgam that would first be known as Brandenburg-Prussia, later simply as Prussia. The words ‘kingdom of Prussia’ were incorporated into the official denomination of every Hohenzollern province. It may have been true, as opponents of the coronation project were quick to point out, that the sovereign of Brandenburg already possessed the fullness of royal power and thus had no need to adorn himself with new titles. But to accept this view would be to overlook the fact that things are ultimately transformed by the names we give them.
CULTURAL REVOLUTION
It is difficult to imagine two more contrasting individuals than the first and the second Prussian kings. Frederick was urbane, genial, courteous, mild mannered and gregarious. He spoke several modern languages, including French and Polish, and had done much to cultivate the arts and intellectual enquiry at his court. He was, by the judgement of the Earl of Strafford, who had spent many years (under his earlier title, Lord Raby) as ambassador in Berlin, ‘good natured, affable [… ] generous and just [… ] magnificent and charitable’.19 Frederick William I, by contrast, was brusque to the point of brutality, distrustful in the extreme and given to violent rages and attacks of acute melancholy. Although possessed of a quick and powerful intelligence, he barely managed to master written German (he may well have been dyslexic). He was profoundly sceptical of any sort of cultural or intellectual endeavour that was not of immediate practical (by which he mainly meant military) utility. The sometimes harsh, contemptuous tone of his speech is conveyed in the following marginalia to incoming government papers:
10 November 1731: Ivatyhoff, the Brandenburg Agent in Copenhagen, requests an increase in his allowance. [Frederick William: ‘The rasckal wants an increase – I’ll count it out on his back’]
27 January 1733: Letter proposing that von Holtzendorff be sent to Denmark [Frederick William: ‘To gallows with Hotzedorff [sic ] how dare you sujest me this rogue but as he’s a curr he’s good enough for the gallows go tell hym that’]
5 November 1735: Report from Kuhlwein [Frederick William: ‘Kuhlwein is an idiott he can kis my arss’]
19 November 1735: Order to Kuhlwein [Frederick William: ‘You filth don’t interfeer in my family or youll find there’s a barrow waiting for you in Spandau fortress’]20
Within days of his accession in February 1713, Frederick William laid an axe to the tree of his father’s court establishment. There was, as we have seen, no follow-up to the coronation of 1701. Having scrutinized the financial accounts of the royal household, the new king embarked on a drastic cost-cutting campaign. Two-thirds of the servants employed at the court – including the chocolatier, a brace of castrato singers, the cellists, composers and organ-builders – were sacked without notice; the rest had to accept salary reductions of up to 75 per cent. A substantial quantity of the jewels, gold and silver plate, fine wines, furniture and coaches accumulated during his father’s reign was sold off. The lions of the royal menagerie were presented as gifts to the King of Poland. Most of the sculptors engaged during Frederick’s reign promptly left Berlin when they were informed of their revised conditions of employment. A sense of panic gripped the court. In a report filed on 28 February 1713, the British envoy William Breton observed that the king was ‘very busye cutting off pensions and making great retrenchments in his civill list, to the great grief of many fine gentlemen’. The queen dowager’s household had been especially hard hit and ‘the poore maids [had] gone home to their friends with heavy hearts.’21
The weeks following the accession must have been particularly traumatic for Johann von Besser, who had served Frederick III/I as his master of ceremonies since 1690. Besser had helped to shape the ritual culture of the royal court and was the author of a detailed official account of the coronation. As his life’s work collapsed around him, he was unceremoniously struck from the state list. A letter he sent to the new king requesting consideration for another post was tossed into the fire on receipt. Besser fled Berlin and subsequently found employment as an adviser and master of ceremonies at the still sumptuous Saxon court in Dresden.
The court established under Frederick quickly withered away. What took its place was a leaner, cheaper, rougher and more masculine social scene. ‘As the late King of Prussia was scrupulous in the ceremonies of the greatest nicety, his present Majesty, on the contrary, has scarce left the least footsteps of it,’ the new British envoy Charles Whitworth reported in the summer of 1716.22 At the centre of the monarch’s social life was the ‘Tabakskollegium’ or ‘Tobacco Ministry’, a group of between eight and twelve councillors, senior officials, army officers and assorted visiting adventurers, envoys or men of letters who gathered in the evenings with the monarch for general conversation over strong drink and pipes of tobacco. The tone was informal, often crude, and non-hierarchical – one of the rules of the Tobacco Ministry was that one did not stand to honour the arrival of the king. The subjects of discussion ranged from Bible passages, newspaper reports, political gossip, hunting anecdotes to more risqué matters such as the natural aromas given off by women. Participants were expected to speak their minds, and hefty arguments sometimes broke out; indeed, these appear on occasion to have been encouraged by the monarch himself. In the autumn of 1728, for example, a theological dispute between a Friedrich August Hackemann, a visiting professor from the University of Helmstedt, and the Berlin-based popular writer David Fassmann degenerated into a mud-slinging match, to the great amusement of the other guests. According to a contemporary report by an envoy resident in Berlin, Hackemann was eventually goaded into calling Fassmann a liar, whereupon the latter
solidly responded with the flat of his hand so promptly! and in such a manner! that [Hackemann] almost tumbled onto the king; at this point he [Hackemann] asked His Majesty whether it was [… ] not a most punishable thing to behave in such a way and to attack someone thus in the presence of the all-highest?
Frederick William, who clearly took pleasure in such raucousness, merely commented that a scoundrel deserves the blows he receives.23
Emblematic for the tone and values that prevailed in the monarch’s milieu after 1713 was the fate of Jacob Paul von Gundling. Born near Nuremberg and educated at the universities of Altdorf, Halle and Helmstedt, Gundling was one of the many academically trained men who were drawn to Berlin during the expansion of intellectual life that took place in the city under Frederick I. In addition to a professorial teaching post at a new school for sons of the nobility in Berlin, Gundling occupied an honorary court post as official historiographer for the Oberheroldsamt (Chief Herald’s Office), an institution founded in 1706 to establish the genealogical credentials of noble applicants for public office. But disaster struck in 1713, when both of these institutions were swept away in the weeks following Frederick William’s accession. Gundling managed to secure a place in the new system by adapting himself to the king’s views and working freelance for a few years as an adviser on economic policy, a role in which he became known as an opponent of noble fiscal and economic privilege. He was rewarded for his services with various honorary titles (including ‘Commercial Councillor’ and the presidency of the Academy of Sciences) and became a frequent guest at the Tobacco Ministry. Indeed Gundling remained a courtier of sorts, dependent on the royal purse, until his death in 1731.
7. Satirical portrait of Jacob Paul von Gundling (anon. engraving from The Learned Fool (Der Gelehrte Narr) by the Gundling-baiter David F. Fassmann (Berlin, 1729)
But neither his record of service as an educator and courtier, nor his presidency of the academy, nor his steadily growing list of scholarly publications could save Gundling from degenerating into a figure of ridicule at the court of Frederick William I. In February 1714, the king demanded that he deliver a lecture before the assembled guests on the existence (or not) of ghosts while taking regular draughts of strong drink. After much raucous hilarity, two grenadiers escorted the inebriated commercial councillor back to his room, where he shrieked with terror at the sight of a figure draped in a white sheet emerging from a corner. Provocations of this kind soon became the norm. Gundling was confined in a chamber where the king kept a number of young bears while fireworks were rained down into the room from above; he was forced to wear outlandish courtly attire modelled loosely on French fashions, including a towering wig in an outdated style that had belonged to the previous king; he was force-fed laxatives and locked in a cell overnight; he was pressed into a pistol duel with one of his chief tormentors, the joke being that everyone but Gundling knew that the weapons contained no shot. When Gundling refused to grasp or fire his gun, his opponent discharged a spray of burning powder into his face, setting fire to his wig, to the huge hilarity of all present. He was prevented by his debts from leaving Berlin and constrained by the pleasure of the king his master to return daily to the scene of his humiliations, where his honour and reputation were martyred for the amusement of the royal court. Under these pressures, Gundling’s liking for drink soon developed into fully fledged alcoholism, a weakness that, in the eyes of his detractors, merely enhanced his suitability for the role of court fool. And yet Gundling continued to generate a flow of learned publications on such subjects as the history of Tuscany, imperial and German law, and the topography of the Electorate of Brandenburg.
Gundling even had to to lerate the presence in his bed chamber of a coffin in the form of a varnished wine barrel inscribed with a mocking verse:
Here there lies within his skin
Half-pig, half-man, a wondrous thing
Clever in his youth, in old age not so bright
Full of wit at morning, full of drink at night
Let the voice of Bacchus sing:
This, my child, is Gundeling.
[…]
Reader, say, can you divine
Whether he was man or swine?24
After his death in Potsdam on 11 April 1731, Gundling’s corpse was publicly displayed propped up in the barrel in a room lined with candles, dressed in a wig hanging down to the thighs, brocaded breeches and black stockings with red stripes – all clear references to the baroque culture of the court of Frederick I. Among those who came to ogle at this macabre spectacle were commercial travellers on their way to the great fair at Leipzig. Gundling and his barrel were buried soon afterwards under the altar of the village church outside the city. The funeral address was given by the writer (and sometime Gundling-baiter) Fassmann, the local Lutheran and Reformed clergy having conscientiously refused to take part.
8. The Tobacco Ministry. Attributed to Georg Lisiewski, c. 1737.
Gundling’s ‘martyrdom’ was the flip-side of the raucous masculine camaraderie of the new monarchy. The masculinization that had tentatively announced itself in the ceremony of the coronation had by now transformed the social life of the court. Under Frederick William I, women, who had played such a prominent role at the court of Frederick I, were pushed to the margins of public life. A visitor from Saxony who resided in Berlin for several months during 1723 recalled that the great festivities of the courtly season were held ‘according to the Jewish manner’ with the women separated from the men, and observed with surprise that there were many dinners at court at which no women appeared at all.25
Reflecting on the regime-change that occurred in 1713, one is tempted to describe it as a cultural revolution. There were continuities in the sphere of administration and finance, to be sure, but in the sphere of representation and culture we can speak of a comprehensive reversal of values and styles. Between them, the first two Prussian kings marked out the extremes between and by which their successors would position themselves. At one end of the spectrum we find the type-A Hohenzollern monarch: expansive and expensive, ostentatious, detached from the regular work of state, focused on image; at the other end his type-B antipode: austere, thrifty, workaholic.26 The ‘baroque’ style of monarchy inaugurated by Frederick I retained, as we have seen, a certain resonance within the collective memory of the dynasty, and the epochal alternation of tastes and fashions ensured that there would be periodic revivals of courtly largesse – under Frederick William II, court expenditure exploded once again to around 2 million thalers per annum, about one-eighth of the total state budget (the figure for his predecessor, Frederick the Great, had been 220,000).27 The last decades of the nineteenth century would witness, after a period of relative austerity, a remarkable late blooming of courtly culture around the person of the last Kaiser, William II. But the type-B kingship of Frederick William I also had a vigorous afterlife in the history of the dynasty. The harsh marginal jottings of Frederick William I were imitated (with more wit) by his illustrious son Frederick II and (at greater length and with less wit) by his more distant descendant Kaiser William II. Frederick William I’s habit of wearing military uniform rather than the more expensive civilian alternative was taken up by Frederick II and remained a striking feature of Hohenzollern dynastic representation until the fall of the Prussian monarchy at the end of the First World War. The historical power of the type-B model lay not merely in its association with Prussia’s later ascendancy in Germany but also in its affinity with the values and preferences of an emergent Prussian public, for whom the image of a just and thrifty monarch dedicated to the service of the state came to embody a specifically Prussian vision of kingship.
ADMINISTRATION
It has often been noted that the reigns of Frederick William the Great Elector and his grandson King Frederick William I stand in a complementary relation to each other. The Great Elector’s achievement was centred on the outward projection of power. Frederick William, by contrast, has been called Prussia’s greatest ‘inner king’, in honour of his role as the founding father of the Prussian administrative state. The opposition between the two can, of course, be overstated. There was no epochal rupture in administrative practices to match the cultural revolution at court. It is probably more accurate to speak of a process of administrative consolidation spanning the century between 1650 and 1750. This process was at first most pronounced in the spheres of revenue extraction and military administration. It was the Great Elector who began simplifying and centralizing the previously haphazard arrangements in place for the collection of the Electoral revenues – i.e. those from crown land, tolls, mines (which were the property of the crown) and monopolies. A first step was taken in this direction with the creation of an Electoral administration for the collection of the royal revenues in Brandenburg in the 1650s. Yet it was not until 1683 that the central revenues office, under the energetic East Prussian nobleman Dodo von Knyphausen, succeeded in acquiring direct control over Electoral revenues from the entirety of the Hohenzollern territories. Knyphausen’s work of consolidation continued after the Great Elector’s death: in 1689 he oversaw the establishment of a central Brandenburg-Prussian revenue office with a stable institutional structure. As a result of this innovation, it proved possible to draw up for the year 1689 – 90 the first complete balance sheet of income and expenditure in the history of Brandenburg-Prussia.28 A further important centralizing step was undertaken in 1696 with the foundation of a unified central administration for the management of the royal domains.29
A parallel process of concentration can be observed in those areas responsible for the maintenance of the army and the waging of warfare. A General War Commissariat (Generalkriegskommissariat) was established in April 1655 to organize the army and its financial and logistical support. Under a series of capable administrators it grew into one of the key agencies of the Electoral administration, controlling all the revenues (contribution tax, excise tax and foreign subsidies) destined for military expenditures and gradually undermining the tax-collecting powers of the Estates by drawing their local officials into the sphere of its authority. By the 1680s, the commissariat had begun to arrogate to itself a more general responsibility for the health of the domestic manufacturing economy, launching a programme to establish Brandenburg as self-sufficient in wool-based textiles and mediating in local conflicts between the trade guilds and new businesses. There was nothing uniquely Prussian about this merging of financial, economic and military administration; it was undertaken in emulation of Louis XIV’s powerful contrôleur-général, Jean-Baptiste Colbert.
With the accession of Frederick William I to the throne in 1713, the process of reform acquired a new momentum. For all his dysfunctionality as a social being, Frederick William was an inspired institution-builder with an architectonic vision of administration. The roots of this passion can be traced back to the comprehensive princely training provided by his father. At the age of only nine, Frederick William was entrusted with the management of his own personal estate at Wusterhausen to the south-east of Berlin, a task he performed with prodigious energy and conscientiousness. By this means, he acquired a first-hand familiarity with the day-to-day responsibilities of managing an estate – still the fundamental operational unit of the Brandenburg-Prussian economy. He was only thirteen when he began attending meetings of the Privy Council in 1701; his induction into other departments of the administration followed soon after.
Frederick William was therefore already well versed in the inner workings of the administration when an outbreak of plague and famine in East Prussia plunged the monarchy into crisis in 1709–10. The epidemic, which was probably brought into the region by the movement of Saxon, Swedish and Russian troops during the Great Northern War of 1700–1721, killed around 250,000 people, more than a third of the East Prussian population. In a chronicle of the small city of Johannisburg, in the south of the kingdom not far from the Polish border, one contemporary recalled that the plague had spared the city in 1709, but had returned with all the more ferocity in 1710 taking ‘both the preachers, both the school teachers and most of the town councillors to their graves. The city was so emptied of people that the market place was overgrown with grass and only fourteen citizens remained alive.’30 The impact of the disease was compounded by a famine that weakened resistance and decimated communities of survivors. Thousands of farms and hundreds of villages were abandoned; in many of the worst affected areas, social and economic life came to a complete halt. Since the areas of highest mortality were in the eastern areas of East Prussia, where the crown was the main landowner, there was an instantaneous collapse in crown revenues. Neither the central nor the provincial administration proved capable of responding effectively to the disaster as it unfolded; indeed a number of the chief ministers reacted by trying to conceal from the monarch the seriousness of the crisis.
The disaster in East Prussia highlighted the inefficiency and corruption of the ministers and senior officials, many of whom were personal favourites of the king. A party – including crown prince Frederick William – formed at court to bring down the leading minister, Kolbe von Wartenberg, and his cronies. After an official enquiry revealed misappropriations and embezzlement on an epic scale, Wartenberg was forced into retirement; his close associate Wittgenstein was incarcerated in Spandau fortress, fined 70,000 thalers and subsequently banished. The episode was a formative one for Frederick William. This was the first time he had become actively involved in politics. It was also a turning point in the reign of his father, who now began to let power pass gradually into the hands of his son. Most importantly, the East Prussian débâcle left the crown prince with a burning zeal for institutional reform and a visceral hatred of corruption, wastage and inefficiency.31
Within a few years of his accession to the throne, Frederick William had transformed the administrative landscape of Brandenburg-Prussia. The organizational concentration that had begun under the Great Elector was now resumed and intensified. The management of all non-tax revenues across the territories of Brandenburg-Prussia was centralized; on 27 March 1713 the Chief Domains Directory (Ober-Domaänen-Direktorium), which managed the crown lands, and the Central Revenues Office (Hofkammer) were merged to form a new General Finance Directory (Generalfinanzdirektorium). Control over the finances of the territory now rested in the hands of only two institutions, the General Finance Directory, which dealt above all with lease income from the royal domains, and the General Commissariat (Generalkommissariat), whose task was to collect the excise tax levied in the towns and the contribution tax paid by people in the countryside. But this state of affairs in turn generated new tensions, for the two authorities, whose responsibilities overlapped at various points, soon became bitter rivals. The General Finance Directory and its subordinate provincial offices regularly complained that the exactions of the Commissariat were preventing their leaseholders from keeping up with their rents. When the General Finance Directory, for its part, tried to raise its rental income by encouraging its leaseholders to establish small rural businesses such as breweries and manufacturies, the Commissariat protested that these enterprises placed urban taxpayers at a competitive disadvantage, since they were outside the towns and therefore not liable to excise. In 1723, after much deliberation, Frederick William decided that the solution was to merge the two rivals into an omnicompetent super-ministry that bore the unwieldy title ‘General Chief Directory for Finance, War and Domains’, but was known simply as the General Directory (Generaldirektorium). Within two weeks, the merger had been extended to cover all the subordinate provincial and local offices of both bodies.32
At the apex of the General Directory, Frederick William installed what was known as a ‘collegial’ decision-making structure. Whenever an issue had to be resolved, all the ministers were required to come together at the main table in the relevant department. Along one side sat the ministers, facing them on the other were the privy councillors of the relevant department. At one end of the table there was a chair left empty for the king – a pro forma observance, since the king scarcely ever attended meetings. The collegial system delivered several advantages: it brought the decision-making process out into the open and thereby prevented (in theory) the empire-building by individual ministers that had been such a prominent feature of the previous reign; it ensured that provincial and personal interests and prejudices were balanced out against each other; it maximized the relevant information available to the decision-makers; most importantly, it encouraged officials to take a holistic view. Frederick William sought to reinforce this tendency by urging the former employees of the General Finance Directory not to be shy in learning from their colleagues of the General Commissariat, and vice versa. He even threatened to use internal examinations in order to test whether knowledge was being transferred efficiently between the officials of what had previously been rival administrations. The ultimate objective was to forge an organic, pan-territorial body of expertise out of a plurality of separate specialist knowledges.33
The General Directory was still in many respects quite different from a modern ministerial bureaucracy: business was not primarily organized according to spheres of activity, but, as in most executive governmental organs in Europe at this time, by a mixed system in which provincial portfolios were supplemented with responsibility for specific policy areas. Department II of the General Directory, for example, dealt with the Kurmark, Magdeburg and the provisioning and quartering of troops; Department III combined responsibility for Kleve, Mark and various other exclaves with management of the salt monopoly and the postal services. Moreover, the lines of demarcation separating distinct spheres of competence within the new organization remained unclear, so that serious internal conflicts over jurisdiction continued well into the 1730s – the institutional rivalries that had given rise to the General Directory in the first place were thus internalized rather than resolved, and they were cross-cut with new structural tensions between locality, province and central government.34
On the other hand, the conditions of employment and the general ethos of the General Directory do sound a familiar note from a present-day perspective. The ministers were expected to convene at seven in the morning in summer and eight in winter. They were expected to remain at their desks until the day’s work was accounted for. They were required to come into the office on Saturdays in order to check the week’s accounts. If they spent more than a certain number of hours at work on any particular day, a warm meal was to be provided at the expense of the administration, but served in two sittings, so that half the ministers could keep working while their colleagues ate. These were the beginnings of that world of supervision, regulation and routine that is common to all modern bureaucracies. By comparison with ministerial posts in the era of the Great Elector and Frederick I, service in the General Directory offered fewer opportunities for illicit self-enrichment: a system of concealed supervision and reporting that ran through every tier of the organization ensured – in theory at least – that irregularities were immediately notified to the king. Serious offences met with punishments ranging from dismissal to fines and restitutions, to exemplary execution at the place of work. A notorious case was that of the East Prussian War and Domains Councillor von Schlubhut, who was hanged for embezzlement before the main meeting room of the Königsberg Chamber.
*
After the disaster of 1709–10, Frederick William was especially concerned for the condition of East Prussia. His father’s administration had already succeeded in occupying some of the vacated farms with foreign settlers and migrants from the other Hohenzollern provinces. In 1715, Frederick William appointed a nobleman from one of the leading families of the province, Karl Heinrich Truchsess von Waldburg, to oversee reforms to the provincial administration. Waldburg focused above all on the iniquities of the existing tax system, which tended to operate to the disadvantage of the smallholding peasants. Under the traditional arrangements in the province, every landowner paid a flat rate of tax for every Hufe of land in his possession (the Hufe was one of the basic contemporary units of land; the English equivalent was ‘hide’). But since the tax-collecting agencies of the administration were still largely in the hands of the corporate nobility, the authorities tended to turn a blind eye when noble landowners understated their taxable landholdings. The returns of peasant households, by contrast, were subjected to the most pedantic scrutiny, so that not a single hide was missed. Further iniquities arose from the fact that no account was taken of the quality and yield of the land in question, so that smallholders, who tended in general to occupy the less fertile land, were subject to proportionally greater burdens than the major landowners. The problem, in Frederick William’s eyes, was not the fact of inequality as such, which was accepted as inherent in all social order, but the depression of revenues that resulted from the operation of this particular system. Underlying his concern was the presumption, which the king shared with some of the best-known German and Austrian economic theorists of the era, that excessive taxation reduced productivity and that the ‘conservation’ of his subjects was one of the foremost tasks of the sovereign.35 The king’s concern for peasant households in particular represented a shift from the previous generation of mercantilist theory and practice (embodied in the career of Louis XIV’s minister of finance Jean-Baptiste Colbert), which had tended to focus on the stimulation of commerce and manufacturing at the expense of agrarian producers.
The East Prussian reform programme began with the compilation of a survey of landholdings. The process revealed some 35,000 hides of previously undeclared taxable land, amounting to an area of nearly 6,000 square kilometres. In order to correct for variations in yield, the provincial domains administration then drew up a comprehensive classification of all holdings according to soil quality. Once these measures were in place, a new General Hide Tax, calibrated for soil quality, was imposed on the entire province. In conjunction with new, more transparent and standardized leasing arrangements for farms on crown land, Waldburg’s East Prussian reforms produced a dramatic rise in agrarian productivity and crown revenues.36
While arrangements for the General Hide Tax were still being put in place, Frederick William launched the long and difficult process known as the ‘allodification of the fiefs’ (Allodifikation der Lehen). The term referred to removing various bits of legal red tape left over from the feudal era, when noblemen had ‘held’ their lands as ‘vassals’ of the monarch and the sale and transfer of property were encumbered by the need to acknowledge residual claims vested in the heirs and descendants of previous owners. The sale of a noble estate was henceforth final, a state of affairs that provided new incentives for investment and agricultural improvement. In return for the reclassification of their land as ‘allodial’ (i.e. independently owned and unbound by any feudal obligations), the nobilities were to accept a permanent tax. The measure was legally complex, because the legacy of feudal law and custom was different in every province. It was also very unpopular, because the attachment of the nobilities to their traditional tax-exempt status was far greater than their resentment of their now largely obsolete and theoretical feudal obligations. They saw ‘allodification’ – not without justification – as a cunning pretext for undermining their ancient fiscal privileges. In many provinces, years of negotiation were required before the new tax could be introduced; in Kleve and Mark no agreement was reached and the tax had to be extracted through ‘forced execution’. Opposition was also strong in the recently acquired and still independently minded Duchy of Magdeburg; in 1718 and 1725, delegations of noblemen from this province were successful in securing judgements supporting their case from the imperial court in Vienna.37
These fiscal initiatives were flanked by numerous other revenue-raising measures. The marshes of the Havelland, where the Swedish army had floundered in 1675, were drained so energetically that 15,000 hectares of excellent arable and pasture were won back within ten years. Work began on the draining of the delta region around the rivers Oder, Warthe and Netze, an epic project that would be completed only during the next reign, when the Oder River Commission established by Frederick William’s successor oversaw the reclamation of some 500 square kilometres of marshland from the Oder floodplains. Reflecting the fashionable contemporary concern with population size as the chief index of prosperity, Frederick William launched settlement programmes to raise productivity and stimulate manufacturing in particular regions. Protestant immigrants from Salzburg, for example, were settled on farms in the far east of East Prussia, and Huguenot textile manufacturers were installed in the city of Halle in the hope of mounting a challenge to the dominance of Saxon imports in the Hohenzollern Duchy of Magdeburg.38 A series of regulations issued in the 1720s and 1730s dismantled many of the localized guild powers and privileges to create a more unified labour market in the manufacturing sector.39
One area of particularly sustained government activity was the grain economy. Grain was the most fundamental of all products – it accounted for the lion’s share of economic transactions and for the greater part of what most people bought and consumed in their daily lives. The king’s policy on grain was based on two objectives. The first was to protect Brandenburg-Prussia’s grain growers and traders from foreign imports – the main concern here was the grain produced on Polish estates, which was of excellent quality and less expensive.40 The means adopted to achieve this were high tariffs and the prevention of smuggling. How successful the authorities were in stemming the flow of illegal grain is difficult to say. The records indicate numerous prosecutions, some of small dealers, such as groups of Polish peasants attempting to pass as subjects of the Mark and carrying a few bushels of contraband grain, as well as of more sophisticated operators, like the team of Mecklenburg smugglers who tried to sneak thirteen wagonloads of grain into the Uckermark in 1740.41
In order to prevent poor harvests from driving grain prices up to the point where they undermined the viability of the urban manufacturing and commercial economies, Frederick William also expanded the network of grain magazines that the Great Elector had used to provision his standing army. These magazines had been retained during the reign of Frederick I, but they were poorly managed and far too small to cope with the needs of the civilian economy, as the disaster of 1709–10 revealed. Starting in the early 1720s, Frederick William set about establishing a system of large dual-purpose magazines (twenty-one in all) that would serve the needs of his army but also perform an important role in stabilizing the domestic grain market. The provincial commissariats and chambers were instructed to hold the price of grain as steady as possible, by purchasing stocks when prices were low and selling them off in times of dearth. The new system was to prove its worth in 1734–7 and again in 1739, when the social and economic impact of a succession of poor harvests was buffered by the sale of low-priced government grain. One of the last orders issued by the king was an instruction to the General Directory dated 31 May 1740, the day of his death, stipulating that the grain magazines of Berlin, Wesel, Stettin and Minden were to be filled again before the onset of the coming winter.42
There were, of course, limits to Frederick William’s economic achievement and blind spots in his vision. He shared the widespread contemporary mercantilist preference for regulation and control. There is a clear contrast with the more trade-oriented policies of the Great Elector, who had acquired the colony of Gross Friedrichsburg on the west coast of Africa in the hope that this would open the door to an expansion of colonial commerce. Frederick I had kept up the ailing colony for sentimental reasons, but Frederick William sold it off to the Dutch in 1721, saying he had ‘always regarded this trading nonsense as a chimera’.43 On the domestic front there was a similar disregard for the importance of exchange and infrastructure. Frederick William never seriously tackled the problem of market integration within his territories. Work on the construction of a canal between the Oder and the Elbe accelerated during his reign, a more uniform system of grain measurement was introduced, and there was some reduction – against local protests – of internal tolls. Yet numerous obstacles remained to hinder the movement of goods across the Hohenzollern lands. Even within Brandenburg, tolls continued to be levied on the inner provincial borders. Little effort was made to integrate the outlying territories to the east and west, which were treated in economic terms as if they were foreign principalities. Brandenburg-Prussia was still worlds away from constituting an integrated domestic market when the king died in 1740.44
Under Frederick William, the confrontation between an increasingly confident monarchy and the holders of traditional power entered its administrative phase. By contrast with his predecessors, Frederick William refused at the time of his accession to sign the traditional ‘concessions’ to the provincial nobilities. There were no theatrical set-tos in the diets (which in any case became much rarer in most areas during his reign). Instead the traditional privileges of the nobilities were whittled away by successive incremental measures. The time-honoured tax immunities of the landed nobility were curtailed, as we have seen; organs that had previously answered to local interests were gradually subordinated to the authority of the central administration; the freedom of noblemen to travel for leisure or study was cut back so that the provincial elites in Brandenburg-Prussia were slowly detached from the cosmopolitan networks of the Holy Roman Empire.
This was not merely a by-product of the process of centralization; the king was quite explicit about the need to diminish the standing of the nobility and clearly saw himself as furthering the historical project inaugurated by his grandfather, the Great Elector. ‘As far as the nobility is concerned,’ he once remarked in relation to East Prussia, ‘it previously had great privileges, which the Elector Frederick William broke through his sovereignty, and I have now brought them entirely into subordination [Gehorsahm ] through the General Hide Tax of 1715.’45 The central administration he built up to achieve his objectives was deliberately stocked with commoners (who were generally ennobled for their services), so that there would never be any question of corporate solidarity with the noble interest.46 Yet, oddly enough, Frederick William always succeeded in finding talented noblemen – like Truchsess von Waldburg – willing to assist him in implementing his policies, even at the cost of their corporate comrades. The motivations behind such collaboration are not always clear; some were simply won over to the monarch’s administrative vision, others may have been motivated by disaffection with the corporate provincial milieu, or joined the administration because they needed the salary. The provincial nobilities were far from monolithic; factional and family rivalries were common and local interest conflicts often overrode more general concerns. Recognizing this, Frederick William avoided categorical judgements. ‘You must be obliging and gracious with the entire nobility from all provinces,’ he advised his successor in the Instruction of 1722, ‘and give preference to the good ones over the bad and reward the loyal ones.’47
THE ARMY
Your Excellency will already know [… ] of the Resolution the new King has taken of increasing his army to 50,000 men. [… ] When the state of war [i.e. military budget] was laid before him, he writt in the margen these words, I will augment my Forces to the number of 50,000 men which ought not to allarme any person whatsoever, since my only pleasure is my Army.48
When Frederick William came to the throne, the Prussian army numbered 40,000 men. By 1740, when he died, it had increased in size to over 80,000, so that Brandenburg-Prussia boasted a military establishment that seemed to contemporaries quite out of proportion to its population and economic capabilities. The king justified the immense costs involved by arguing that only a well-trained and independently financed fighting force would provide him with the autonomy in international affairs that had been denied to his father and grandfather.
Yet there is also a sense in which the army was an end in itself, an intuition reinforced by the fact that Frederick William remained reluctant throughout his reign to deploy his army in support of any foreign-political objective. Frederick William was powerfully attracted to the orderliness of the military; he himself regularly wore the uniform of a Prussian lieutenant or captain from the mid-1720s onward and he could conceive of nothing more pleasing to the eye than the sight of uniformed men moving in ever changing symmetries across a parade square (indeed he flattened a number of royal pleasure gardens in order to convert them for this purpose and tried where possible to work in rooms from which drilling exercises could be viewed). One of the few indulgences in wasteful ostentation he allowed himself was the creation of a regiment of exceptionally tall soldiers (affectionately known as ‘lange Kerls’ or ‘tall lads’) at Potsdam. Immense sums were squandered on the recruitment from all over Europe of these abnormally tall men, some of whom were partially disabled by their condition and thus physically unfit for real military service. Their likenesses were memorialized in individual full-length oil portraits commissioned by the king; executed in a primitive realist style, they show towering men with hands like dinner plates plinthed on black leather shoes the size of plough shares. The army was, of course, an instrument of policy, but it was also the human and institutional expression of this monarch’s view of the world. As an orderly, hierarchical, masculine system in which individual interests and identities were subordinated to those of the collective, the king’s authority was unchallenged, and differences in rank were functional rather than corporate or decorative, it came close to actualizing his vision of an ideal society.
9. Portrait of Grenadier James Kirkland, soldier in the Royal Guard of King Frederick William I, painted by Johann Christof Merk, c. 1714
Frederick William’s interest in military reform predated his accession to the throne. We see it in a set of guidelines that the nineteen-year-old crown prince proposed to the Council of War in 1707. The calibres of all infantry guns should be the same, he argued, so that standard-issue shot could be used for all types; all units should employ the same design of bayonet; the men in each regiment should wear identical daggers on a model to be determined by the commanding officer; even the cartridge pouches were to be furnished according to a single design, with identical straps.49 One of his important early innovations as a military commander was the introduction within his own regiment of a new and more rigorous form of parade drill intended to heighten the manoeuvrability of unwieldy masses of troops across difficult terrain and to ensure that firepower could be delivered consistently and to the greatest effect. After 1709, when Frederick William witnessed Prussian troops in action at the Battle of Malplaquet during the War of the Spanish Succession, the new drill was gradually extended through the Brandenburg-Prussian forces as a whole.50
The king’s chief preoccupation during the early years of the reign was simply to increase the number of troops in service as fast as possible. At first, this was accomplished largely through forced recruitments. The responsibility for raising troops was transferred from the civil authorities to the local regimental commanders. Operating virtually without restraint, the recruiting officer became a figure of fear and hatred, especially among the rural and small-town population, where he prowled in search of tall peasants and burly journeymen. Forced recruitments often involved bloodshed. In some cases, prospective recruits even died at the hands of their captors. Complaints poured in from the localities.51 In fact so dramatic was the first phase of forced recruitments that it prompted a wave of panic. ‘[His Majesty] makes use of such hasty means in levying of [his troops] as if he was in some very great danger,’ wrote William Breton, the British envoy, on 18 March 1713, scarcely three weeks after the new king’s accession, ‘that the peasants are forced into the service and tradesmen’s sons taken out of their shops very frequently. If this method continues, we shall not long have any market here, and many people will save themselves out of his Dominions…’52
Faced with the mayhem generated by forced recruiting, the king changed tack and put an end to the practice inside his territories.53 In its place he established the sophisticated conscription mechanism that would come to be known as the ‘canton system’. An order of May 1714 declared that the obligation to serve in the king’s army was incumbent upon all men of serving age and that anyone fleeing the country in order to avoid this duty would be punished as a deserter. Further orders assigned a specific district (canton) to each regiment, within which all the unmarried young men of serving age were enrolled (enrolliert) on the regimental lists. Voluntary enlistments to each regiment could then be supplemented from enrolled local conscripts. Finally, a system of furloughs was developed that allowed the enlisted men to be released back into their communities after completion of their basic training. They could then be kept on until retiring age as reservists who were obliged to complete a stint of refresher training for two to three months each year, but were otherwise free (except in time of war) to return to their peacetime professions. In order to soften further the impact of conscription on the economy, various classes of individual were exempted from service, including peasants who owned and ran their own farms, artisans and workers in various trades and industries thought to be of value to the state, government employees and various others.54
The cumulative result of these innovations was an entirely new military system that could provide the Brandenburg-Prussian Crown with a large and well-trained territorial force without seriously disrupting the civilian economy. This meant that at a time when most European armies still relied heavily on foreign conscripts and mercenaries, Brandenburg-Prussia could raise two-thirds of its troops from territorial subjects. This was the system that enabled the state to muster the fourth largest army in Europe, although it ranked only tenth and thirteenth in terms of territory and population respectively. It is no exaggeration to say that the power-political exploits of Frederick the Great would have been inconceivable without the military instrument fashioned by his father.
If the canton system provided the state with a greatly enhanced external striking power, it also had far-reaching social and cultural consequences. No organization did more to bring the nobility into subordination than the reorganized Brandenburg-Prussian army. Early in the reign, Frederick William had prohibited members of the provincial nobilities from entering foreign service, or indeed even from leaving his lands without prior permission, and had a list drawn up of all the sons of noble families aged between twelve and eighteen years. From this list a cohort of boys was selected for training in the cadet school recently established in Berlin (in the premises of the academy where Gundling had once worked as professor). The king persevered with this policy of elite conscription despite bitter protests and attempts at evasion by some noble families. It was not unknown for young noblemen from recalcitrant households to be rounded up and marched off to Berlin under guard. In 1738, Frederick William inaugurated an annual survey of all young noblemen who were not yet in his service; in the following year he instructed the district commissioners to inspect the noble sons of their districts, identify those who were ‘good looking, healthy and possess straight limbs’ and send an appropriate annual contingent for enlistment in the Berlin cadet corps.55 By the mid-1720s there were virtually no noble families in the Hohenzollern lands without at least one son in the officer corps.56
We should not see this process simply as something that was unilaterally forced upon the nobility – the policy succeeded because it offered something of value, the prospect of a salary that would assure a higher standard of living than many noble households could otherwise afford, an intimate association with the majesty and authority of the throne, and the status attaching to an honourable calling with aristocratic historical connotations. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that the establishment of the canton system represented a caesura in the relationship between the crown and the nobilities. The human potential locked within the noble landed estate was now placed even more securely within the state’s reach and the nobility began its gradual transformation into a service caste. Samuel Benedikt Carsted, pastor of Atzendorf in the Duchy of Magdeburg and sometime field chaplain in the Brandenburg-Prussian army, was thus right when he observed that the canton system constituted ‘the final proof that King Frederick William had acquired the most comprehensive sovereignty’.57
An influential view has it that the cantonal regime created a sociomilitary system in which the hierarchical structures of the conscript army and those of the noble landed estate merged seamlessly to become one all-powerful instrument of domination. According to this view, the regiment became a kind of armed version of the estate, in which the noble lord served as the commanding officer and his subject peasants as the troops. The result was a far-reaching militarization of Brandenburg-Prussian society, as the traditional rural structures of social domination and disciplining were permeated with military values.58
Reality was more complex. Examples of noble landlords who were also local commanders are very rare; they were the exception rather than the rule. Military service was not popular among peasant families, who resented the loss of labour that occurred when young men were taken away for basic training.59 Local records from the Prignitz (to the north-east of Berlin) suggest that the evasion of military service by flight across Brandenburg’s borders into neighbouring Mecklenburg was commonplace. In order to escape service, men were prepared to resort to desperate measures – even professing their willingness to marry the women in their villages upon whom they had fathered illegitimate children – and they were sometimes supported in these efforts by noble landowners. Moreover, far from bringing a mood of submission and obedience to the estate community, the active and inactive duty soldiers were often a disruptive element, prone to exploit their military exemption from local jurisdiction against the village authorities.60
Relations between local communities and the military were beset with tension. There were numerous complaints about the tyrannical behaviour of regimental officers: exemptions were sometimes disregarded by the officers who came to ‘collect’ recruits, reservists were called up during the harvest season despite regulations to the contrary, and money was extorted in bribes from peasants seeking marriage permits from their local commanders (in some areas this latter problem was so pronounced that there was an appreciable rise in the rate of illegitimate births).61 There were also complaints from the landlords of noble estates, who naturally resented any unwarranted meddling in the affairs of the peasants who constituted their workforce.
Despite these problems, a kind of symbiosis developed between regiments and communities. Although only a fraction of the eligible male population (about one-seventh) was actually called up, nearly all the men in rural communities were listed on the regimental rolls; in this sense, the cantonal system was based upon the principle (though not the practice) of universal conscription. Exemptions came into play only once the enrolments had taken place. All reservists were required to wear their full uniforms in church and they were thus an ever-present reminder of the proximity of the military; it was not unknown for enlisted men to gather voluntarily in town and village squares in order to practise their drilling. The pride that many men felt in their military status may have been sharpened by the fact that the exemption system tended to concentrate enrolments among the less well-off, so that there was a tendency for the sons of landless rural labourers to serve while those of the prosperous peasants did not. Soldiers and reservists thus gradually came to constitute a highly visible social group within the village, not only because the uniform and a certain (affected) military bearing became crucial to their sense of importance and personal worth, but also because the conscripts tended to be drawn from among the tallest of each age group. Boys shorter than 169 cm were sometimes called up for service as porters and baggage handlers, but, for most, diminutive stature was a free ticket out of military service.62
Did the canton system heighten morale and cohesion within serving regiments? Frederick the Great, who knew the Prussian army as well as anyone and observed the canton system at work during three exhausting wars, believed that it did. In his History of My Own Times, completed in the summer of 1775, he wrote that the native Prussian cantonists serving in each company of the army ‘come from the same region. Many in fact know or are related with one another. [… ] The cantons spur on competition and bravery, and relatives and friends are not apt to abandon each other in battle.’63
FATHER VS SON
If we survey the inner history of the Hohenzollern dynasty after the Thirty Years War, two contradictory features attract our attention. The first is the remarkable consistency of political will from each generation to the next. Between 1640 and 1797, there was not a single reign in which territorial gains were not realized. As the political testaments of the Great Elector, Frederick I, Frederick William I and Frederick the Great show, these monarchs saw themselves as involved in a cumulative historical project, each new ruler accepting as his own the unfulfilled objectives of his predecessors. Hence the consistency of intention that can be observed in the pattern of Brandenburg’s expansion and the long memory of this dynasty, its capacity to recall and reactivate old claims whenever the time seemed right.
Yet this apparently seamless continuity between generations belied a reality of recurrent conflict between fathers and sons. This problem arose in the 1630s towards the end of Elector George William’s reign, when the crown prince, Frederick William (the future Great Elector), refused to return from the Dutch Republic, for fear that his father was planning to marry him off to an Austrian princess. He even came to believe that Count Schwarzenberg, George William’s most powerful minister, was plotting his death. The crown prince did eventually rejoin his father at Königsberg in 1638, but the damage done to their relationship was never repaired and George William made no effort to involve his son in affairs of state, treating him instead as a complete stranger. In his Political Testament for his successor the Great Elector later wrote that his own government ‘would not have been so difficult at the beginning’, if he had not been frozen out in this way by his father.64
The wisdom of experience did not suffice to prevent similar tensions arising at the end of the Great Elector’s reign. The Great Elector had never been very impressed by Crown Prince Frederick – his favourite was the older brother Charles Emmanuel, who died of dysentery during the French campaign of 1674–5. Whereas Charles Emmanuel was a talented and charismatic figure with a natural aptitude for the military life, Frederick was highly strung, sensitive and partially disabled by a childhood injury. ‘My son is good for nothing,’ the Elector told a foreign envoy in 1681, when Frederick was a married man of twenty-four.65 The relationship was further complicated by the coldness and mutual distrust between Frederick and the Elector’s second wife, Dorothea of Holstein. Frederick had been his own mother’s favourite child, but, after her death, his stepmother had borne the Elector another seven children and naturally tended to favour these over the offspring of her husband’s first marriage. It was under pressure from Dorothea that the Great Elector agreed to provide for his younger sons through the testamentary partition of his lands, a decision that was concealed from Frederick and that he successfully countermanded after his accession.
The last decade of the Great Elector’s life was thus soured by an increasingly tense family situation. A low point was reached in 1687, when Frederick’s younger brother died unexpectedly after a bout of scarlet fever. Suspicion now deepened into outright paranoia: Frederick believed that his brother had been poisoned as part of a plot to open the way to the throne for the eldest son of the second marriage, and that he himself would be the next victim. He was suffering from frequent stomach pains at this time, probably because of the many dubious powders and potions he was taking to ward off the effects of poison. As the court seethed with rumour and counter-rumour, he fled to the home of his wife’s family in Hanover and refused to return to Berlin, saying that ‘it was not safe for him to be there, since it plainly appeared that his brother had been poisoned.’ The Great Elector was furious and announced that he would cut the crown prince out of the succession. Not until Emperor Leopold and William III of England intervened did it prove possible to reconcile the two men, only months before the father’s death.66 Needless to say, it was quite impossible under these conditions to provide the crown prince with a proper induction into the affairs of state.
Frederick III, later crowned King Frederick I, was determined not to repeat the errors of his predecessors and went to great pains to provide his heir both with the fullest possible training in government and with a quasi-independent sphere of action in which to develop his capacities. As a teenager, he was thoroughly inducted into all the main branches of government. The youthful Frederick William was a difficult, obstreperous child who drove his teachers to distraction (it was said of his long-suffering tutor, Jean Philippe Rebeur, that he would have been happier as a galley slave than as Frederick William’s tutor), but he was always fastidiously respectful in his bearing towards his father. In this case, it was the crisis of 1709–10 that placed the relationship under strain, by bringing the crown prince into open opposition to the ineptitude and mismanagement of his father’s ministerial favourites. Frederick, amiable to the last, avoided an irreparable break by backing down and allowing power to pass to his son. In the last few years of his reign we can speak of a co-regency of father and son. Yet this conciliatory approach did not weaken Frederick William’s resolve after his accession to erase every last trace of the exuberant baroque political culture his father had created. Many of the great administrative enterprises of Frederick William’s reign – from the re-establishment of East Prussia to the purging of corruption and the expansion of the magazine system – can be understood as a reply to the perceived shortcomings of his father’s rule.
The cold war that seethed between Frederick William and his own teenage son, the future Frederick the Great, puts all these earlier conflicts in the shade. Never had the struggle between father and son been waged with such emotional and psychological intensity. The roots of the conflict can be traced in part to Frederick William’s profoundly authoritarian temperament. Since he himself had always been scrupulously respectful in his dealings with his father, even when he was forced by circumstance to join the opposition party, he was completely unable to understand any form of insubordination from his heir. Coupled with this was a conceptual and emotional inability to detach his own person from the administrative achievements of his reign, so that any failure of deference appeared to place his historical accomplishment, and the very state itself, in jeopardy. It seemed to him that the work he had laboured so hard to complete must collapse if the successor did not share ‘his belief, his thoughts, his likes and dislikes, in short, if the successor were not his mirror-image’.67 It became clear early in Frederick’s life that he would not fulfil these exacting designs. He showed little in the way of soldierly aptitude – he often fell from his horse and was frightened of shooting. His posture and comportment were languid, his hair messy, he slept late, enjoyed being alone and was often to be found reading novels in the rooms of his mother and sister. Whereas Frederick William had been frank, even brutally honest, even as a small boy, Frederick was oblique, ironic, as if he had already learned to hide his true nature from the hostile eyes of his father. ‘I would like to know what is going on in this little head,’ the king remarked in 1724, when Frederick was twelve years old. ‘I know for sure that he does not think as I do.’68
Frederick William’s solution was to step up the pressure on the crown prince by subjecting him to a gruelling routine of daily chores – military reviews, inspection tours, council meetings – all timetabled to the very last minute. In a letter written when Frederick was in his fourteenth year, the imperial ambassador, Count Friedrich Heinrich von Seckendorff, observed that ‘the crown prince, despite his young years, looks as elderly and stiff as if he had already served on many campaigns.’69 But as even Seckendorff could tell, these measures were unlikely to have the desired effect. Instead they merely hardened and deepened Frederick’s opposition. He became an adept at resisting his father’s will by a kind of sly civility. When the king asked him at a review of the Magdeburg regiments in the summer of 1725 why he was so often late in arriving, Frederick, who had slept in, replied that he needed time to pray after he had dressed. The king answered that the prince could just as well say his morning prayers while he was being dressed, to which the boy replied: ‘His Majesty will surely allow that one cannot pray properly if one is not alone, and that one must set aside a time specifically for praying. In such matters one must obey God rather than men.’70
By the time he was sixteen (in 1728), the prince was leading a double life. He conformed outwardly to the hard regime imposed by his father and fulfilled his duties, adopting a cold, impenetrable countenance whenever he was not among intimates. In secret, he began playing the flute, composing verse and accumulating debts. Through the good offices of his Huguenot instructor Duhan, he acquired a library of works in French reflecting a secular, enlightened, philosophical literary taste that was the diametrical antipode of his father’s world. Sensing that his son was drifting away from him, Frederick William became increasingly violent. He frequently slapped, cuffed and humiliated the prince in public; after one particularly savage beating he is reported to have shouted at the crown prince that he would have shot himself if his father had mistreated him thus.71
In the late 1720s, the deepening antipathy between father and son acquired a political dimension. In 1725–7, Frederick William and his Hanoverian wife Sophie Dorothea had been involved in negotiations over the possible double marriage of Frederick and his sister Wilhelmine to the English Princess Amalia and the Prince of Wales respectively. Fearing that this alliance would create a western bloc that could threaten Habsburg interests, the imperial court pressured Berlin to withdraw from the double marriage. An imperial faction formed in Berlin, centred on the imperial ambassador Seckendorff and the king’s trusted minister General Friedrich Wilhelm von Grumbkow, who appears to have been taking hefty bribes from Vienna.
Opposing the machinations of this faction was the queen, Sophie Dorothea, who saw in the double marriage a chance to pursue the interests both of her children and of her dynasty, the Guelph House of Hanover and Great Britain. The passion, bordering on desperation, with which she pursued this project doubtless reflected years of accumulated frustration at a court where the room for political action by women had been radically curtailed.
As the web of intrigues spun by English, Austrian, Prussian and Hanoverian diplomacy thickened, the Berlin court polarized around the two factions. The king, fearing a break with Vienna, withdrew his support for his son’s marriage and sided with Grumbkow and Seckendorff against his own wife, while the crown prince was drawn ever more deeply into his mother’s designs and became an active supporter of the English marriage. Predictably, it was the will of the king that prevailed and the double marriage was abandoned. There were parallels here with the last years of Elector George William in the 1630s, when the crown prince (and future Great Elector) had refused to return to Berlin for fear that his father and his chief minister (Count Schwarzenberg) would marry him off to an Austrian princess.
The struggle over the ‘English marriage’ set the context for Frederick’s attempted flight from Brandenburg-Prussia in August 1730, one of the most dramatic and memorable episodes in the history of the dynasty. The crown prince was not motivated by political outrage or by personal disappointment at the evaporation of his marriage to Princess Amalia, whom he had never met. It was rather that the struggles and intrigues of 1729–30 brought to boiling point his frustration and resentment at the treatment his father had meted out to him over the past years. Frederick planned his escape during the spring and early summer of 1730. His chief collaborator was a twenty-six-year-old officer by the name of Hans Hermann von Katte from the Royal Gensdarmes Regiment, a clever, cultivated man who took an interest in painting and music and had become Frederick’s closest friend – a contemporary memoir reports that they ‘carried on’ together ‘like a lover with his mistress’.72 It was Katte who helped Frederick make most of the practical preparations for departure. The flight itself was a non-starter. Frederick and Katte went about their business with a carelessness that soon aroused suspicion. The king put the prince’s tutors and servants on alert and had him watched day and night. Katte had planned to use recruitment leave from his regiment in order to flee with the prince, but his permission was withdrawn at the last minute, possibly because the king had become aware of his involvement. Frederick, who was accompanying his father on a journey into southern Germany, chose at the last minute to go ahead with the plan none the less – a decision whose recklessness conveys something of the extremity of his predicament. In the small hours of the night of 4 – 5 August, he slipped away from his encampment near the village of Steinsfurt. A servant who had seen him leave raised the alarm and he was easily captured. His father was informed on the following morning.
Frederick William ordered that his son be carted to the fortress at Küstrin, the stronghold where the Great Elector had spent his childhood during the bleakest years of the Thirty Years War. Here he was confined to a dungeon cell and forced to wear the brown habit of a convict; the guards appointed to watch over him were forbidden to answer any questions from the prisoner and the little tallow light he was given to read his Bible by was extinguished each evening at seven.73 In the course of the investigation that followed, the prince was subjected to a detailed inquisition. Christian Otto Mylius, Auditor-General and the official entrusted with conducting the proceedings, was given a list of more than 180 questions to put to the prince. They included the following:
179: What does he consider to be a fit punishment for his action?
180: What does a person who brings dishonour upon himself and plots desertion deserve?
183: Does he consider that he still deserves to become king?
184: Does he wish his life to be spared or not?
185: Since, in saving his life, he would ipso facto lose his honour, and, in effect, be disqualified from succeeding [to the throne], would he thus stand down in order to save his life, and renounce his right to the throne in such a manner that this could be confirmed by the entire Holy Roman Empire?74
The haranguing, anguished, obsessive tone of these questions and the implicit references to the death penalty convey a clear sense of the king’s state of mind. To a man obsessed with control, such direct insubordination seemed the greatest abomination. There is no reason to doubt that at times the execution of his son appeared to the king to be the only possible course of action. Frederick’s answers to his inquisitors were entirely in character. To question 184 he replied only that he submitted himself to the king’s will and mercy. To question 185 he answered that ‘his life was not so dear to him, but His Royal Highness would surely not be so harsh in his treatment of him.’75 What is remarkable here is the level of self-restraint that the prince’s deft answers display, despite the terror that he must have been feeling at this time, when his future was still so uncertain.
While Frederick’s fate remained undecided, the king vented his rage on the prince’s friends and collaborators. Two of his closest military companions, the subalterns Spaen and Ingersleben, were thrown into gaol. Doris Ritter, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a Potsdam burgher with whom Frederick had engaged in some tentative adolescent flirtation, was whipped through the streets of Potsdam by the hangman and incarcerated in the workhouse at Spandau, where she remained until her release in 1733. But it was Hans Hermann von Katte who bore the brunt of the king’s fury. His fate entered the realm of legend and came to occupy a unique place in the historical imagination of Brandenburg. The special military court convened to try the conspirators found it difficult to agree on an appropriate sentence for Katte and eventually decided by a majority of one to impose life imprisonment. Frederick William overturned this verdict and demanded the death sentence. He set out his reasons in an order of 1 November 1730. As he saw it, Katte, in planning to desert from a royal elite regiment and assisting the heir to the throne in an act of high treason, had committed the worst possible kind of lèse-majesté . He thus deserved the cruellest form of execution, namely tearing of the limbs with hot irons followed by hanging. In consideration of his family, however, the king was willing to commute this sentence to simple decapitation – to be carried out on 6 November in the fortress of Küstrin, in view of the crown prince’s cell.
Katte appears to have believed that the king would ultimately show mercy. He composed a letter to Frederick William acknowledging his misdeeds, promising to dedicate the rest of his life to loyal service, and begging for clemency. The letter remained unanswered. On 3 November, a detachment of guards under the command of a Major von Schack arrived to transfer the delinquent in thirty-kilometre relays to Küstrin. During this journey, von Schack recalled that Katte expressed the desire to write to his father (also serving in the king’s army), ‘upon whom he had brought such misery’. Permission was given and Katte was left alone to begin writing. But when Schack entered the chamber some time later, he found the prisoner pacing up and down and lamenting that ‘it was so difficult and he could make no beginning for sorrow.’ After some calming words from the major, Katte composed a letter that opened with the following words:
I could dissolve in tears, my father, when I think that this letter will cause you the greatest sorrow that the heart of a father can feel; that your hopes for my well-being in this world and your comfort in old age must vanish for ever, [… ] that I must fall in the springtime of my years, without having borne the fruits of your efforts…76
Katte spent the night before the execution in the fortress at Küstrin, attended by preachers and friends from among his fellow officers, singing hymns and praying. His cheerful demeanour gave way at around three o’clock, when a witness reported that one could see that ‘a hard struggle of the flesh and the blood was underway.’ But after sleeping for two hours he awoke refreshed and strengthened. At seven o’clock on the morning of 6 November, he was led by a detachment of guards from his room to the place of execution, where a small mound of sand had been prepared. According to the garrison preacher Besser, who was entrusted with supporting Katte on his way to execution, there was a brief last-minute exchange between the condemned man and the prince, who could be seen watching the proceedings from his cell window:
At last, after much searching and looking about, he caught sight of his beloved [companion], His Royal Highness and Crown Prince, at the window of the castle, from whom he took leave with some courteous and friendly words spoken in French, with not a little sorrow. [After hearing the sentence read aloud and removing his jacket, wig and necktie] he knelt on the mound of sand and cried: ‘Jesus accept my spirit!’ And as he commended his soul in this manner to the hands of his Father, the redeemed head was severed from the body by a well-aimed blow from the hand and sword of the executioner Coblentz [… ]. There was nothing further to see but some quivering caused by the fresh blood and life in the body.77
In executing Katte, Frederick William had also found an exquisitely potent punishment for his son. On learning of Katte’s impending fate, Frederick begged the king to allow him to renounce the throne or even to substitute his life for that of the condemned man. The prince was sentenced to watch the execution from the window of his cell; his guards were ordered to hold his face to the bars so that nothing would be missed. Katte’s body, with the separated head, were to be left where they fell until two o’clock in the afternoon.78
Katte’s death was the turning point in Frederick’s fortunes. His father’s rage began to cool and he turned his mind to the question of his son’s rehabilitation. Over the months and years that followed, the constraints on Frederick’s freedom were gradually removed, and he was allowed to leave the fortress and take up residence in the town of Küstrin, where he attended meetings of the city’s Wars and Domains Chamber, the local branch office, as it were, of the General Directory. For Frederick there now began a period of outward reconciliation with the hard regime of his father. He took on the subdued comportment of the sincere penitent, endured the monotony of life in the garrison town of Küstrin without complaint and conscientiously performed his administrative duties, acquiring useful knowledge in the process. Most importantly, he resigned himself to accepting the marriage proposed for him by his father with Princess Elisabeth Christina of Brunswick-Bevern, a cousin of the Habsburg Empress. Her choice as bride represented a clear victory for the imperial interest over the party that had favoured the English marriage.
10. Crown Prince Frederick greets Katte through the window of his cell. Engraving by Daniel Chodowiecki.
Was this episode in Frederick’s life a trauma that transformed the prince’s personality? He had fainted into the arms of his guards before the moment of Katte’s decapitation in Küstrin and remained in a state of extreme terror and mental anguish for some days, partly because he initially believed that his own execution was still imminent. Did the events of 1730 forge a new and artificial persona, acerbic and hard, remote from others, locked within the nautilus shell of a convoluted nature? Or did they merely deepen and confirm a tendency towards self-concealment and dissimulation that was already well developed in the adolescent prince? The question is ultimately unanswerable.
What does seem certain is that the crisis had important implications for the prince’s developing conception of foreign policy. The Austrians were closely involved not only in masterminding the collapse of the English marriage, but also in managing the crisis that broke out following Frederick’s attempted flight. It is an indication of how deeply imperial and Brandenburg-Prussian court politics were interwoven during the reign of Frederick William I that the first draft of the document setting out a ‘policy’ for disciplining and rehabilitating the errant prince was submitted to the king by the imperial envoy, Count Seckendorff. The woman Frederick was ultimately forced to marry was effectively the Austrian candidate. ‘If I am forced into marriage with her,’ he warned the minister Friedrich Wilhelm von Grumbkow in 1732, ‘she will be rejected [elle sera repudiée ].’79 Frederick would hold to this resolution after his accession in 1740, consigning Elisabeth Christina of Brunswick-Bevern to a twilight existence on the margins of public life.
Austria’s imperial tutelage over the Brandenburg-Prussian court was thus both a political and a personal reality for Frederick. The crisis of 1730 and its aftermath amplified the prince’s distrust of the Austrians and reinforced his cultural and political attachment to France, Vienna’s traditional enemy in the west. Indeed, it was Frederick William’s own growing frustration with Austrian policy during the 1730s (to which we shall later return) that opened the door to a fuller reconciliation between father and son.80
THE LIMITS OF THE STATE
The Prussian historian Otto Hintze observed in his classic chronicle of the Hohenzollern dynasty that the reign of Frederick William I marked ‘the perfection of absolutism’.81 By this he meant that it was Frederick William who succeeded in neutralizing the power of the provincial and local elites and welding the diverse lands of the Hohenzollern patrimony into the centralized structures of a single state ruled from Berlin. As we have seen, there is something to be said for this view. Frederick William endeavoured to concentrate power in the central administration. He aimed at the subordination of the nobilities through military service, the equalization of tax burdens, the purchase of formerly noble land and the imposition of new provincial administrative bodies answerable to the officials in Berlin. He enhanced the capacity of the administration to intervene in the velleities of the grain market.
It is important, however, not to assign disproportionate significance to these developments. The ‘state’, such as it was, remained small. The central administration – including royal officials in the provinces – counted in total no more than a few hundred men.82 A governmental infrastructure had scarcely begun to emerge. Communications between the government and many local communities remained slow and unpredictable. Official documents passed to their destinations through the hands of pastors, vergers, innkeepers and school children who happened by. An investigation of 1760 in the principality of Minden revealed that it took up to ten days for official circulars and other important documents to cover the few kilometres between neighbouring districts. Government communications were often sent in the first instance to taverns, where they were opened, passed around and read out over a glass of brandy, as a result of which they arrived at their ultimate destinations ‘so dirtied with grease, butter or tar that one shudders to touch them’.83 The days when an army of trained and disciplined postal and other local officials would penetrate the provincial districts of the Hohenzollern lands were still far in the future.
It was one thing to issue an edict from Berlin and another to implement it in the localities. An instructive case is the Schools Edict of 1717, a famous decree because it has often been seen as inaugurating a regime of universal elementary education in the Hohenzollern lands. This edict was not published in Magdeburg or Halberstadt, because the government agreed to defer to existing school regulations in these territories. Nor was it fully effective in the territories where it was published. In a ‘renewed edict’ of 1736, Frederick William I complained that ‘our salutary [earlier] edict has not been observed’, and a thorough survey of the relevant local records suggests that the edicts of 1717 and 1736 may have been completely unknown in many parts of the Hohenzollern lands.84
Brandenburg-Prussian ‘absolutism’ was thus no well-oiled machine capable of translating the monarch’s will into action at every tier of social organization. Nor had the instruments of local authority wielded by the local and provincial elites simply disappeared into the woodwork. A study of East Prussia, for example, has shown that local nobilities waged a ‘guerrilla war’ against encroachments by the central administration.85 The provincial Regierung in Königsberg continued to exercise independent authority in the territory and remained under the control of the local aristocracy. Only gradually did the king come to play a significant role in appointments to key local offices, such as the district captaincies (Amthauptleute). Nepotism and the sale of offices – both practices that tended to consolidate the influence of local elites – remained commonplace.86 A study of local appointments in East Prussia from the years 1713–23 showed that of those posts whose recruitment could be reconstructed from the records, only about one-fifth involved intervention by the king; the rest were recruited directly by the Regierung, although the proportion rose to nearly one-third in the following decade.87
So pervasive were the less conspicuous, in formal structures of elite influence in East Prussia that one scholar has written of the persistence of a ‘latent form of Estates government’.88 Indeed, there is much evidence to suggest that the power of local elites over key administrative offices actually increased in some territories during the middle decades of the eighteenth century. The Brandenburg nobility may have been largely excluded from an active role in the central administration during Frederick William’s reign, but in the longer term they more than made up for this lost ground by consolidating their control over local government. They retained the power, for example, to elect the local Landrat or district commissioner, a post of great importance, since it was he who negotiated taxation arrangements with the central authorities and oversaw the local allocation of tax burdens. Whereas Frederick William I had often rejected the candidates presented by the district assemblies of the nobility, Frederick II conceded their right to present a list of favoured candidates, from which the king would select his preferred incumbent.89 Efforts by Berlin officials to interfere in elections or to manipulate the behaviour of incumbents became increasingly rare.90 The government thus conceded a measure of control in order to secure the cooperation of local mediators enjoying the trust and support of the district elites.
The concentration of provincial authority achieved through this process of negotiated power-sharing was durable precisely because it was latent, informal. The persistence of provincial corporate power and solidarity helps in turn to explain why, after a long period of relative quiescence, the provincial nobilities were in such a strong position to challenge and resist government initiatives during the upheavals of the Napoleonic era. The emergent core bureaucracy of the Hohenzollern lands did not displace or neutralize the structures of local and provincial authority. Rather, it entered into a kind of cohabitation, confronting and disciplining local institutions when the fiscal and military prerogatives of the state were at stake, but otherwise letting well enough alone. This helps to explain the curious and apparently paradoxical fact that what is sometimes called the ‘rise of absolutism’ in Brandenburg-Prussia was accompanied by the consolidation of the traditional nobilities.91 In the eighteenth century, as in the era of the Great Elector, absolutism was not a zero-sum contest pitting the centre against the periphery, but rather the gradual and complementary concentration of different power structures.
5
Protestants
On Christmas Day 1613, Elector John Sigismund took communion according to the Calvinist rite in Berlin Cathedral. The candles and crucifix that usually adorned the altar for Lutheran worship had been removed. There was no kneeling or genuflection before the Eucharist and no communion wafer, just a long piece of bread that was broken and distributed among the worshippers. For the Elector, the occasion was the public culmination of a private journey. His doubts about Lutheranism dated back to his teenage years, when he came under the influence of the Rhenish Calvinists circulating at his father’s court; it is thought that he embraced the Reformed faith in 1606 during a visit to Heidelberg, capital city of the Palatinate, the powerhouse of early seventeenth-century German Calvinism.
John Sigismund’s conversion placed the House of Hohenzollern on a new trajectory. It reinforced the dynasty’s association with the combative Calvinist interest in early seventeenth-century imperial politics. It augmented the status of the Calvinist officials who were beginning to play an influential role in the central government. Yet there is no reason to suppose that political calculations were decisive, for the conversion brought more risks than benefits. It placed the Elector in a religious camp for which no provision had been made in the Peace of Augsburg. Not until the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 would the right of the Calvinists to toleration within the confessional patchwork of the Holy Roman Empire be enshrined in a binding treaty. The conversion of the monarch also drove a deep confessional trench between dynasty and people. Inasmuch as there existed a sense of territorial ‘identity’ in late sixteenth-century Brandenburg, this was intimately bound up with the Lutheran church, whose clergy spanned the length and breadth of the Mark. It is no coincidence that the earliest historical chronicles of Brandenburg were the work of Lutheran parochial clergymen. Andreas Engel, a pastor from Strausberg in the Mittelmark, opened his Annales Marchiae Brandenburgicae of 1598 with a long disquisition on the virtue and naturalness of love for one’s fatherland.1 After 1613, the dynasty ceased to be a beneficiary of this embryonic territorial patriotism. A ruling family that had succeeded, during the middle decades of the sixteenth century, in shepherding its subjects with great circumspection through one of the most gradual, moderate and peaceful Reformations in Europe now cut itself off in one fell swoop from the bulk of the population, and this at a moment in European history when confessional tensions could ignite revolutions and overturn thrones.
CALVINIST MONARCH – LUTHERAN PEOPLE
Bizarrely enough, the Elector and his advisers failed to foresee the difficulties his conversion would create. John Sigismund believed that his own conversion would give the signal for a generalized – and largely voluntary –‘second Reformation’ in Brandenburg. In February 1614, the Elector’s Calvinist officials and advisers even drew up a proposal outlining the steps by which Brandenburg could be transformed into a Calvinist territory. The universities were to be stocked with Calvinist appointees so that they could serve as centres for the Calvinization of clergy and officialdom. Liturgical and other religious usages were to be purged from Lutheran services through a stepped process of reform. A Calvinist Church Council would oversee and coordinate all reforming measures.2 An edict issued in the same month ordered that the clergy of the Mark Brandenburg were henceforth to preach the word of God ‘pure and undefiled, [… ] without any distortion and without the self-devised glosses and doctrinal formulae of certain idle, ingenious and presumptuous theologians’. The list of authoritative texts that followed omitted the Augsburg Confession and the Formula of Concord, the two foundational documents of Brandenburg Lutheranism. Pastors who found it impossible to comply with these injunctions, the edict declared, were free to leave the country. The Elector and his advisers assumed that the inherent superiority and clarity of Calvinist doctrine, when cogently and accessibly presented, would suffice to recommend it to the great majority of subjects.
They could hardly have been more mistaken. The tampering of the Calvinists with the traditional Lutheran church settlement of Brandenburg aroused resistance at every level of society. The most serious single confessional tumult took place in the residential city of Cölln (sister-city of Berlin across the river Spree) in April 1615. The Elector happened to be away in Königsberg seeing to the future handover arrangements for Ducal Prussia, and Cölln-Berlin was under the authority of his Calvinist brother, Margrave John George of Brandenburg-Jägerndorf. It was the margrave who triggered unrest when he ordered the removal of ‘idolatrous’ images and liturgical paraphernalia from the ornately decorated Berlin Cathedral. On 30 March 1615, the altars, baptismal font, a large wooden crucifix and numerous artworks, including a celebrated sequence of panels on the passion of Christ whose foundation drawings were the work of Lucas Cranach the Younger, were stripped from the cathedral. To add insult to injury, the Calvinist court preacher Martin Füssel used the occasion of his Palm Sunday sermon in the cathedral a few days later to thank God ‘for cleansing His house of worship of the dirt of papal idolatry’.
Within hours of this address (which was given at nine o’clock in the morning), the Lutheran deacon of the nearby church of St Peter’s was delivering a furious counter-volley from the pulpit, in which he charged that ‘the Calvinists call our place of worship a whorehouse [… ]; they strip our churches of pictures and now wish to tear the Lord Jesus Christ from us as well.’ So stirring was the effect of his oratory that an assembly of more than one hundred Berlin burghers met on the same evening to pledge that they would ‘strangle the Reformed priests and all other Calvinists’. On the following day, a Monday, a full-scale riot broke out in the city, in the course of which shots were fired and a crowd of over 700 people raged through the town centre, sacking the houses of two prominent Calvinist preachers, including Füssel, who was forced to escape by climbing over a neighbour’s roof in his underwear.3 At one point, the Elector’s brother was caught up in a confrontation with the crowd and only narrowly escaped serious injury. A chain of similar (if generally less spectacular) conflicts broke out in other towns across the Mark. So serious was the sense of emergency that a number of the Calvinist councillors in Berlin considered leaving the territory. At the end of the year, as he made to retire to his estates in the county of Jägerndorf (in Silesia), Margrave John George lugubriously advised his brother the Elector to expand his bodyguard.
In addition to this pressure from the street, John Sigismund faced concerted resistance from the Estates. Dominated by the Lutheran provincial nobilities, the Estates exploited their control over taxation to extract concessions from the deeply indebted Elector. In January 1615, they informed him that the approval of further funds would be dependent upon his granting certain religious guarantees. The status of the Lutheran church establishment must be confirmed; the church patronage rights that placed the power of clerical appointment in the hands of local elites must be respected, and the Elector must promise not to use his own patronage rights to appoint teachers or clergymen who appeared suspect in the eyes of the Lutheran populace. John Sigismund responded with outraged blustering – he would rather shed the last drop of his blood, he declared, than yield to such blackmail. But he backed down. In an edict of 5 February 1615 he conceded that subjects who were attached to the doctrine of Luther and the key texts of the Lutheran tradition were entitled to remain so and must not be in any way pressed or compelled to relinquish them. ‘For His Electoral Highness,’ the edict continued, ‘in no way arrogates to himself dominion over consciences and therefore does not wish to impose any suspect or unwelcome preachers on anyone, even in places where he enjoys the right of patronage…’4 This was a serious setback. At this point, at the very latest, it must have dawned on the Elector that the ‘second Reformation’ might have to be postponed or even deferred indefinitely.
What exactly was at stake in these struggles? Clearly there was a power-political dimension. Even before 1613, the Electors’ use of ‘foreign’ Calvinist officials had been controversial, not just on religious grounds but also because it contravened the ‘ius indigenatus’ by which appointments to senior offices were reserved to the native-born elites. There was also, as we have seen, a widespread reluctance to accept the costs incurred by a Calvinist foreign policy. Townsfolk clearly resented Calvinist officials and clergy as intruders into an urban space whose key cultic monuments were also focal points of urban identity. But it would be wrong to reduce the Calvinist-Lutheran quarrels to a ‘politics of interest’, in which denunciations and complaints are seen as encoded bids for advantage.5 For on both sides in the confrontation, powerful emotions were engaged. At the heart of the most committed forms of Calvinism was a fastidious shudder of disgust at the strands of papalism that survived within Lutheran observance.
This was in part an aesthetic issue: to the colourful extravagance of a Lutheran church interior, with its candles and images graven and painted glowing with reflected fire, the Calvinists opposed the white space of a purified church, suffused with natural light. There was also an authentic apprehension that Catholicism remained a latent force within Lutheranism. A particular focus of concern was the Lutheran communion rite; Elector John Sigismund objected to Luther’s doctrine of the real presence in the Lord’s Supper, calling it a ‘false, divisive and highly controversial teaching’. In the words of the Calvinist theologian Simon Pistoris, author of a controversial tract published in Berlin in 1613, Luther ‘derived his views from the darkness of papacy, and thus inherited the errors and false opinions of transubstantiation, whereby the bread is changed into the body of Christ’. As a consequence, the Lutheran faith had become ‘a pillar and a prop to the papacy’.6 In other words, the Reformation remained incomplete. If a complete break with the darkness of the Catholic past were not accomplished, then the danger of re-Catholicization loomed. The Calvinists felt implicitly that the forward progress of time itself was at stake: if the confessional accomplishments of the recent past were not consolidated and expanded, they would be reversed and expunged from history.
The Lutherans, for their part, were motivated by a powerful attachment to their festal ceremonies and the paraphernalia, visual and liturgical, of their worship. There was a rich historical irony here. It was the achievement of the sixteenth-century Hohenzollern Electors of Brandenburg to have slowed and moderated the spread of reform within Brandenburg, with the result that the territory’s Lutheran Reformation was one of the most conservative in the Empire. Brandenburg Lutheranism was marked by doctrinal orthodoxy and a powerful attachment to traditional ceremony, tendencies that were reinforced by the Electoral administration throughout the last decades of the sixteenth century. A widespread fear of Calvinism and sporadic bursts of anti-Calvinist polemic towards the end of the century helped to focus Lutheran allegiances on the foundational documents of the territorial church, such as the Augsburg Confession of 1530 and the Formula of Concord of 1577, which defined its doctrinal substance. It could thus be argued that the dynasty itself had helped to create a brand of Lutheranism uniquely resistant to the Calvinist appeal.
The strength of this resistance forced the Elector and his Calvinist advisers to abandon their hopes of a Second Brandenburg Reformation. They settled instead for a ‘court reformation’ (Hofreformation), whose religious energies petered out on the fringes of the political elite.7 Yet even within the confines of court society Calvinism did not enjoy unchallenged hegemony. John Sigismund’s wife, the redoubtable Anna of Prussia, upon whose blood lines depended the claims to Ducal Prussia and the Jülich succession, remained a staunch Lutheran and continued to oppose the new order. The fact that Lutheran services were held for her in the palace chapel provided an encouragement and a focal point for popular resistance. She also maintained close contacts with neighbouring Saxony, the chief engine-house of Lutheran orthodoxy and the source of unending Lutheran polemics against the godless Calvinists in Berlin. In 1619, when John Sigismund died, she invited a prominent Saxon Lutheran controversialist, Balthasar Meisner, to Berlin to offer her spiritual consolation. Meisner, whose sermons in the palace chapel were open to the public, used the opportunity to stir up Lutheran passions against the Calvinists. The mood in Berlin became so tense that the viceroy of Brandenburg made an official complaint to Anna and insisted that he leave the country. But Meisner continued in his efforts (as he himself put it) to ‘blow away the Calvinist locusts’. In a pointed symbolic gesture, Anna had the corpse of her husband laid out in the Lutheran style with a crucifix in one hand, a detail that predictably lent credibility to rumours that the Elector had repudiated Calvinism and undergone a deathbed reconversion to Lutheranism.8 Only with Anna’s death in 1625 did the Electoral family achieve a measure of confessional harmony. Born in 1620, Frederick William (the future Great Elector) became the first Hohenzollern prince to grow up within an entirely Calvinist nuclear family.
It took a long time for the emotion to drain out of the Lutheran-Calvinist confrontation. Tension levels fluctuated with the ebb and flow of confessional polemic. During the years 1614–17, the controversy over John Sigismund’s conversion generated no fewer than 200 books and pamphlets circulating in Berlin, and the dissemination of Lutheran tracts condemning Calvinism remained a problem throughout the century.9Care had to be taken to ensure that the dynastic ceremonies were designed to accommodate the expectations of both faiths. In terms of its public ceremony and symbolism, Brandenburg-Prussia evolved into a bi-confessional state.
The new Elector’s view of these matters was equivocal. On the one hand, he repeatedly assured his Lutheran subjects that he had no intention of forcing the conscience of any subject.10 On the other hand, he appears to have cherished the hope that the two camps would set aside their differences once they developed a fuller and truer understanding of each other’s positions (by which he really meant: if only the Lutherans could be brought to a fuller understanding of the Calvinist position). Frederick William hoped that a bi-confessional conference would facilitate ‘friendly and peaceful discussion’. The Lutherans were sceptical. They saw discussions of this kind as opening the door to a godless syncretism. ‘Spiritual war and conflict’, the Lutheran clergy of Königsberg observed sullenly in a joint letter of April 1642, were preferable to ‘a union of true doctrine with error and unbelief’.11 Predictably enough, a conference of Lutheran and Calvinist theologians which did actually meet at the Electoral palace in Berlin in 1663 merely sharpened the differences between the two camps and led to a new wave of mutual denunciations.
Throughout the reign, and especially from the early 1660s, the Electoral administration sought to keep the peace by forbidding theological polemic. Under an ‘edict of tolerance’ issued in September 1664, Calvinist and Lutheran clergymen were ordered to abstain from mutual disparagements; all preachers were required to signal their acceptance of this order by signing and returning a pre-circulated reply. In Berlin, two preachers who refused to do so were summarily dismissed from their livings; conversely, one preacher who did comply encountered such ill-will from his parishioners that his sermons remained unattended until his death shortly thereafter. Among those who were suspended for refusing to sign was Paul Gerhardt, greatest of the Lutheran hymnists.12 The most spectacular single incident was the arrest and incarceration of David Gigas, a Lutheran preacher at the Church of St Nikolai in Berlin. Gigas initially signed and returned the government questionnaire. Faced with a mutiny by his own parishioners, however, he reneged on his compliance and gave a rousing sermon on New Year’s Day 1667, in which he warned that religious coercion provoked ‘rebellions and unhappy wars’. Gigas was arrested and carted off to the fortress at Spandau.13
If the confessional divide remained a live issue in the Hohenzollern lands, this was in part because it became entwined with the political struggle between the central administration and the holders of provincial power. In his battle against entrenched local privilege, the sovereign found himself face to face with Lutheran elites jealous of their rights and hostile to the unfamiliar confessional culture of the central government. Under these conditions Lutheranism, sustained institutionally by the network of local church patronage, became the ideology of provincial autonomy and resistance to central power. The Elector, for his part, never gave up working to reinforce the position of the Calvinist minority in the Hohenzollern lands – the great majority of around 18,000 Protestant immigrants who entered the Hohenzollern lands from France, the Palatinate and the Swiss cantons were adherents of the Reformed faith. Their presence helped to spread the influence of the Elector’s religion beyond the narrow confines of the court, but also provoked protests and complaints from the Lutheran elites. The conflict between centre and periphery that we associate with the ‘age of absolutism’ thus acquired a distinctive confessional flavour in Brandenburg-Prussia.
It has often been observed that the minority status of the dynasty and its Calvinist agents forced the political authorities in the Electorate to adopt a policy of tolerance in religious affairs. Tolerance was thereby ‘objectively’ built into the practice of government.14 It was also imposed as a principle of governance, where this was possible, on the provincial authorities. In 1668, for example, five years after the Estates of Ducal Prussia had formally accepted his sovereignty in the territory, Frederick William at last succeeded in forcing the three cities of Königsberg to allow Calvinists to acquire property and become citizens.15 This was tolerance in a very narrow sense, of course. It was more a matter of historical contingency and practical politics than of principle. Since it had nothing to do with the notion of minority rights in a present-day sense, it was not necessarily transferable to other minorities. Frederick William was opposed, for example, to the toleration of Catholics in the core territories of Brandenburg and Eastern Pomerania, but he accepted it in Ducal Prussia and the Hohenzollern territories of the Rhineland, where Catholics enjoyed the protection of historic treaties. The famous Edict of Potsdam (1685), by which Frederick William threw open the doors of his lands to Huguenot (Calvinist) refugees fleeing from France, struck a blow for tolerance against persecution. But the same edict also included an article forbidding Brandenburg Catholics to attend mass in the chapels of the French and imperial ambassadors’ homes. In 1641, when Margrave Ernest, viceroy of Brandenburg, proposed that Frederick William might consider readmitting the Jews (expelled from the Electorate in 1571) as a means of alleviating the financial strains of the war, the latter replied that it was best to leave well enough alone – his ancestors must have had ‘sure and weighty reasons for extirpating the Jews from our Electorate’.16
Yet there are signs that the peculiar confessional geography of his lands did gradually propel the Elector towards a more principled commitment to tolerance. He repeatedly renounced any intention of compelling the consciences of his subjects and enjoined his successor in the Political Testament of 1667 to love all his subjects equally, regardless of their religion. He supported the admission into Ducal Prussia of nonconformist Protestant sectaries fleeing from persecution in neighbouring Catholic Poland and was prepared to tolerate the private practice of their religion. He even, in later years, encouraged the immigration of Jews. There was a small Jewish community in the territories of Kleve and Mark, but the Jews were prohibited from settling in Brandenburg or Prussia. In 1671, when Emperor Leopold expelled the Jews from most of the Habsburg lands, Frederick William offered the fifty wealthiest families a domicile in Brandenburg. Over the following years, he supported them against the bitter complaints of the Estates and other local interests.
This policy was of course motivated by economic calculation, but the Elector’s justification for it also reveals a striking absence of prejudice. ‘It is known that cheating in trade takes place among Christians as well as Jews and with more impunity,’ he told a group of delegates from the district of Havelland who had demanded that the Jews be expelled.17 In 1669, when a Christian mob destroyed the synagogue in Halberstadt, he admonished the local Estates and ordered his officials to pay for its reconstruction.18 It is difficult to know precisely why the Elector adopted these untypical views, but plausible to suppose that they may date back to his upbringing in the Dutch Republic, home to a flourishing and respected Jewish community. A letter he had drafted by his secretary in 1686 suggests that he may also in his own mind have connected the imperative of tolerance with the remembered strife of the Thirty Years War. ‘Differences between religious communities certainly produce violent hatreds,’ he wrote. ‘But older and holier is the law of nature, which obliges men to support, tolerate and help one another.’19
THE THIRD WAY: PIETISM IN BRANDENBURG-PRUSSIA
On 21 March 1691, Philipp Jakob Spener, the Lutheran Head Chaplain to the Saxon court in Dresden, took up a senior church post in Berlin. It was a provocative appointment, to say the least: Spener was already well known as one of the leading lights in a highly controversial movement for religious reform. In 1675, he had achieved instant notoriety with the publication of a short tract called Pious Hopes that decried various deficiencies in contemporary Lutheran religious life. The orthodox ecclesiastical establishment, he argued, had become so absorbed in the defence of doctrinal correctness that it was neglecting the pastoral needs of ordinary Christians. The religious life of the Lutheran parish had become desiccated and stale. In a pithy and accessible German, Spener proposed various remedies. Christians might try revitalizing the spiritual life of their communities by founding groups for pious discussion – Spener called them ‘colleges of piety’ (collegia pietatis). The spiritual intensity of these intimate circles, he suggested, would transform nominal believers into reborn Christians with a powerful sense of God’s agency in their lives. The idea proved enormously appealing and colleges of piety began to pop up across the parishes of the Lutheran states. The Lutheran establishment responded with alarm to what they saw as a subversive campaign to dilute the spiritual authority of the ordained pastorate.
By 1690, the Spenerite reformers – dubbed ‘Pietists’ by their detractors – were under attack from the orthodox authorities at the Lutheran universities. August Hermann Francke, a graduate student in theology at the University of Leipzig and a follower of Spener, caused a huge stir in 1689 when he encouraged the formation of colleges of piety under student supervision, and denounced the traditional Lutheran theological curriculum, prompting some students to burn their textbooks and lecture notes.20 The academic authorities soon found themselves faced with a formidable student movement, and the Saxon government intervened in March 1690 to prohibit all ‘conventicles’ (a term widely used by contemporaries for non-official religious gatherings) and to stipulate that ‘Pietist’ students – it was in the course of this conflict that the term entered general usage – be excluded from admission to clerical office. Francke himself was hounded out of the university and subsequently took up a minor clerical post in Erfurt. Wherever recognizable Pietist groups emerged there were bitter – sometimes violent – conflicts with the Lutherans.21
Pietism was controversial because it represented a critical counterculture within German Lutheranism. It was one of that broad palette of seventeenth-century European religious movements that challenged the authority of ecclesiastical establishments by calling for a more intense, committed and practical form of Christian observance than was usual within the formal church structures. Pietism was about living to the full Luther’s ‘priesthood of all believers’; Pietists cherished the experience of faith; they developed a refined vocabulary to describe the extreme psychic states that attended the transition from a merely nominal to a truly heartfelt belief in redemption through reconciliation with God. Perhaps because it was driven by such explosive emotions, Pietism was also dynamic and unstable. Once elements of the movement began to distance themselves from the established Lutheran churches, it proved difficult to arrest the process of disintegration. In many places, newly formed conventicles spiralled out of control, falling under the influence of radicals who ultimately severed themselves entirely from the established churches.22 Spener himself had never intended the conventicles to function as vehicles for separatism.23 He was a devout Lutheran who respected the institutional structures of the official church; he insisted that religious meetings take place under clerical supervision and be disbanded with good grace if they incurred the disapproval of the church authorities.24
The movement developed a momentum of its own. In Dresden, where Spener had occupied the position of Senior Court Chaplain since 1686, the escalating conflict with the Orthodox Lutherans – exacerbated by the reformer’s stern rantings against the moral laxity of the Saxon court – soured relations with his employer, Elector John George. In March 1691, the Elector, whose own sexual morality was rather relaxed, ran out of patience and asked his privy councillors to ‘have Spener quit his post without further ado, since we do not want to see nor hear this man any more’.25 In the following year, the Lutheran theological faculty at the University of Wittenberg officially confirmed Spener’s heterodoxy, identifying no fewer than 284 doctrinal ‘errors’ in his writings.26
Help was at hand. Just as Spener wore out his welcome in Dresden, Frederick III of Brandenburg offered him a senior ecclesiastical and pastoral post in Berlin. Frederick also allowed him to recruit numerous beleaguered Pietist activists to clerical and academic offices in Brandenburg-Prussia. One of these was August Hermann Francke, who, having left Leipzig, had been forced only one year later to leave his post as deacon in Erfurt. In 1692, Francke was appointed to a vicarage in Glaucha, a satellite town of Halle, and professor of Oriental languages at the new University of Halle. The theologian Joachim Justus Breithaupt, who had fallen from favour in Erfurt for defending Francke against the Orthodox, became the University’s first professor of theology in 1691. A further veteran of the Leipzig quarrels, Paul Anton, was also appointed to a professorship. At the same time, Spener gathered and instructed a new generation of Pietist leaders in a college of piety that met twice weekly in Berlin.27 This deliberate state sponsorship of the movement was at variance with the policies adopted in most other territories and it represented an important point of departure, both in the history of the Pietist movement and in the cultural history of the Brandenburg-Prussian polity.
The reason for Brandenburg’s co-option of Pietism lay in the peculiar confessional predicament of the Calvinist ruling house. Repeated efforts to stifle Lutheran polemic had failed utterly and the prospect of a voluntary union of the two confessions remained as remote as ever. Spener’s outspoken condemnations of inter-confessional squabbling were therefore music to the ears of the Elector and his family. The fourth of the six proposals in Pious Hopes was that theological polemics should be curtailed: it was ‘the holy love of God’ rather than disputation, Spener argued, that anchored the truth in each individual; exchanges with those whose beliefs differed from one’s own should therefore be undertaken in a pastoral, not a polemical, spirit.28 Throughout Spener’s theological and pastoral writing dogmatic issues were marginalized by an overwhelming concern for the practical, experiential dimension of faith and observance. Christians were urged to practise ‘spiritual priesthood’ in their own lives by tending actively to the well-being of their fellows, observing, edifying and ‘converting’ them.29‘If we awaken in our Christians an ardent love, for each other in the first instance and thereafter for all mankind [… ] then we have achieved virtually everything we desire.’30
Spener always remained respectful of the established Protestant churches and their liturgical and doctrinal traditions, and he was never a supporter of unionist projects.31 Nevertheless, it was possible to see in his writings – as in the individualized, experience-oriented devotional culture of the Pietist movement as a whole – the outlines of a confessionally impartial Christianity that transcended the boundaries between Calvinist and Lutheran Protestantism. By playing down the significance of dogma and the sacraments, and by emphasizing the indivisibility of the apostolic true church, pietism promised to cement the ‘inner basis’ for the Prussian monarchy’s claim to supreme episcopacy over the two Protestant confessions.32
There were also good reasons why the Elector should have chosen Halle as the place in which to furnish the Pietist movement with a provincial stronghold. Halle was one of the largest cities in the Duchy of Magdeburg. Brandenburg had acquired the inheritance rights to Magdeburg as part of the peace settlement of 1648, but the territory changed hands only in 1680. Magdeburg was a bastion of Lutheran orthodoxy, where the Lutheran Estates had traditionally ruled without hindrance from the nominal sovereign, the archbishop of Magdeburg. Until 1680, Calvinists were forbidden to own land in the duchy and possessed no civil rights. The takeover was followed by a period of tense confrontation between the government in Berlin and the local Estates. Against the wishes of the Lutherans, a Calvinist chancellor was installed to administer the duchy.
In this context, the significance of state support for the local Pietist movement becomes clear. The Pietists were to function as a kind of fifth column, whose task was to assist in the cultural integration of an ultra-Lutheran province. Throughout the 1690s, the Electoral government intervened to protect the Pietists against attacks and obstruction from the local Lutherans – municipal authorities, guildsmen and local landowners.33 The keystone of the government’s cultural policy in the region was the foundation of the University of Halle in 1691 as the leading university of the Hohenzollern lands. With Pietists and distinguished secular thinkers in key administrative and academic positions, the University of Halle would mellow the combative Lutheranism of the province. As a training institute for future pastors and church officials, it would offer a congenial alternative to the combative and anti-Calvinist theological faculties of neighbouring Saxony, where much of the Lutheran pastorate of Brandenburg had hitherto been educated.
The Pietists also became involved in the provision of social services. Spener had long believed that poverty and its concomitant evils, idleness, beggary and crime could and should be eliminated from Christian society by judicious reforms involving the forced or voluntary participation of the indigent in work programmes.34 In this respect, as in his conciliatory confessional outlook, he found himself in tune with the aspirations and policies of the Brandenburg state. At the Elector’s request, Spener submitted a memorandum recommending the suppression and policing of beggary in Berlin and the centralization of charitable provision for persons requiring temporary or permanent care. The necessary funds, he argued, could be raised through a combination of church poor-boxes, donations and state subsidies. The consequence was a general prohibition of beggary, the creation of a permanent Poor Commission and the establishment in Berlin of the Friedrich-Hospital for the Sick, the Elderly and Orphans (1702).35
In Halle, too, the local Pietists battled poverty and indigence. Around the charismatic figure of August Hermann Francke there was an extraordinary flowering of Christian voluntarism. In 1695, Francke opened a poor-school financed by pious donations. Such was the scale of public generosity that he was soon able to expand the school into an ‘orphanage’ offering accommodation and maintenance as well as free elementary tuition. The daily routine within this institution was structured around practical and useful tasks, and the ‘orphans’ (many of whom were in fact the children of local poor families) were regularly taken to visit the workshops of artisans, so that they might form a clear idea of their prospective professions. In the early years, Francke experimented with plans to finance the orphanage through the sale of items produced using child labour, but even after this idea had been abandoned as impracticable, skilled manual crafts remained a crucial component of the orphanage’s pedagogical programme.36 It was above all this striking combination of education, socialization through labour and charitable provision that aroused the interest and admiration of contemporaries in Brandenburg-Prussia and beyond.
With the revenues generated by the new school, Francke built the broad and graceful stone building that today still dominates the Franckeplatz in central Halle. New fee-paying schools were founded to accommodate children from specific social and occupational backgrounds, with a system of bursaries and ‘free tables’ to shield the less prosperous students from the impact of economic fluctuations.37 The Pädagogium, founded in 1695, specialized in the education of children whose parents – many of whom were of noble estate – could afford the most costly education and care. One of its alumni was Hans Hermann von Katte, the intimate of Crown Prince Frederick who would later be decapitated for his role in the prince’s attempted flight from Brandenburg. The ‘Latin School’, founded two years later, offered instruction in the ‘foundations of learning’ (fundamentis studiorum); the curriculum included Latin, Greek, Hebrew, history, geography, geometry, music and botany, all of which were taught by specialist teachers, a significant departure from contemporary educational practice. Among its distinguished alumni was the Berlin publisher Friedrich Nicolai, one of the luminaries of the Prussian enlightenment.
The Halle Pietists understood the importance of publicity. Francke supported his establishments with oceans of printed propaganda in which evangelical sermonizing blended seamlessly with appeals to the generosity of readers. The most widely known and influential publication disseminating news of the Pietist enterprises in Halle was Footsteps of the still living and reigning benevolent and true GOD / for the shaming of unbelief and the strengthening of faith, published from 1701 in numerous new editions and reprintings.38 With their exalted rhetoric and air of unshakeable self-confidence, these publications, distributed along a network of Pietist sympathizers spanning the breadth of Europe, conveyed a sense of the breathtaking ambition behind the Halle institutes. Halle Pietist publications interspersed reports on the good works and expansion of the Halle foundations with news of the flow of donations and material recycled from correspondence. They awakened a sense of immediacy and involvement among those who supported the work of the Halle foundations. Indeed, they anticipated in many respects the fund-raising development campaigns of our own day. They also created a sense of belonging that was at least partly independent of place. Lutheran networks were densely woven around specific localities; they were quickened by a sense of intimacy with a particular setting. By contrast, the Pietists created a decentred epistolary network of agents, helpers and friends that could be infinitely extended – across Central Europe into Russia and across the Atlantic to the North American colonies, where Halle Pietists made an important contribution to the evolution of new world Protestantism.39
Francke’s intention was that the entire Halle complex should ultimately be autonomous and self-funding; it should be a ‘City of God’, a microcosmic emblem of the capacity of faithful labour to achieve a comprehensive transformation of society.40 In order to achieve a degree of self-sufficiency in practice, Francke encouraged commercial operations within the orphanage. The most financially important were the publishing house and the pharmacy. In 1699, the orphanage began selling its books (printed on its own presses) at the Leipzig autumn fair. In 1702, an orphanage branch store opened in Berlin, followed by branches in Leipzig and Frankfurt/Main. Working closely with faculty staff at the University of Halle, the orphanage press secured an uninterrupted flow of saleable manuscripts, including works of religious interest and secular treatises of high quality. The house catalogue of 1717 listed 200 titles by seventy authors. Between 1717 and 1723, the orphanage printed and sold no fewer than 35,000 tracts containing sermons by Francke.
Even more lucrative was the mail order trade in pharmaceuticals (from 1702), for which the orphanage employed a sophisticated system of commissioned agents spanning central and eastern Europe. Only with the growth of this business did the commercial value of Pietism’s far-flung networks become apparent. With annual profits of around 15,000 thalers in the 1720s, the Medikamentenexpedition was to become the most substantial single contributor to the orphanage coffers. Further income accrued from brewing, newspaper and trading operations run from within the Halle complex. By 1710, the original orphanage building had become the centrepiece of a large self-contained compound of commercial and pedagogical establishments stretching southwards into the vacant land away from the centre of the city.
Success on this scale would have been unthinkable without the concerted support of the government in Berlin and its servants in the province.41 Francke was acutely aware of the movement’s dependence on the patronage of its powerful friends and he was as assiduous as Spener had been in cultivating court and government contacts, a task to which he brought all the charisma and intense sincerity that had moved his student audiences at the University of Leipzig. After a meeting with Francke in 1711, Frederick granted the orphanage a privilege that placed it directly under the authority of the new Prussian Crown. Further privileges followed, securing revenues from a variety of official sources.
11. The Orphanage complex in Halle. A portrait of its founder, August Hermann Francke, is borne aloft by a Prussian eagle, with the assistance of cherubs.
The accession of Frederick William I, whom Francke had cultivated as crown prince, inaugurated an era of even deeper cooperation. The new monarch was a restless, driven, unstable personality prone to bouts of extreme melancholy and mental anguish. At the age of twenty, after the death of his first son, he had passed through a ‘conversion’ that introduced an intensely personal dimension to his faith. There was an affinity here with Francke, whose dynamism was powered in part by a sense of the existential fragility of faith and a desire to evade the despair and fear of meaninglessness that had tormented him before his ‘conversion’. In both men, inner conflicts were channelled outwards into ‘constant work and limitless sacrifice’, characteristics that were reflected both in the extraordinary colonizing energy of Halle Pietism and in the indefatigable zeal of the ‘soldier king’.42
The collaboration between the monarchy and the Pietist movement steadily deepened.43 The establishment of Halle-style educational foundations continued. Frederick William I employed Halle-trained Pietists to run the new military orphanage at Potsdam and the new Cadet School in Berlin. In 1717, when the king issued legislation for compulsory schooling in Brandenburg-Prussia, 2,000 schools were planned (not all of which were actually built) on the Halle model.44 By the late 1720s, training for at least two semesters at the Pietist-dominated University of Halle (four semesters from 1729 onwards) had become a prerequisite for state service in Brandenburg-Prussia.45 Pietist appointments to the University of Königsberg created a parallel power base in East Prussia; here, as in Halle, Pietist patronage networks ensured that like-minded students found their way to parishes and ecclesiastical offices.46 After 1730, the education, not only of civil servants and clergymen but also of the greater part of the Prussian officer corps, took place in schools based on the Halle model and run by Pietists.47
Field chaplains were the most important propagators of Pietist values within the Prussian military.48 In 1718, Elector Frederick William separated the administration of the military clergy from that of the orthodox-controlled civilian church and appointed a Halle graduate, Lampertus Gedike, as its director. Gedike acquired new powers over the appointment and supervision of army chaplains and used them energetically in favour of Halle candidates. Of all the army chaplains appointed to posts in Ducal Prussia between 1714 and 1736, for example, over one-half were former theology students from Halle.49 The education of cadets, war orphans destined for army service, and the children of serving soldiers also fell increasingly into Pietist hands.
How far-reaching were the effects of this impressive record? It is difficult to isolate the impact of the Pietists within the training and pastoral structure from the effects of other changes in organization and administration of the military under Frederick William I (such as better training or the introduction of the cantonal system of recruitment). Not all Pietist field chaplains managed to make a mark in the raw world of the Prussian army. One chaplain was victimized by his officers because he had preached against dancing and powdering the hair; another was reduced to tears by the mockery and abuse of his regiment. The field chaplains were not recruited through the canton system and they sometimes found it difficult to secure the respect of soldiers who regarded them as ‘foreigners’ because they hailed from a different province.50 Nevertheless, there seems little doubt that the ideals and attitudes propagated by the movement did help to shape the corporate ethos of the Prussian army. It is at least plausible that the relatively low rates of desertion – by western European standards – among the Prussian common soldiery during the three Silesian wars of 1740–42, 1744–5 and 1756–63 reflected the heightened discipline and morale instilled in generations of recruits by Pietist chaplains and instructors.51
Among the officer corps, where the Pietist movement had a number of influential friends, it is likely that the Pietists, with their moral rigour and sacralized sense of vocation, helped to discredit an older image of the officer as a swashbuckling, rakish gambler and to establish in its place a code of officerly conduct based on sobriety, self-discipline and serious dutifulness that came to be recognized as characteristically ‘Prussian’.52 With its at once worldly and sacralized concept of vocation, its focus on public needs and its emphasis on self-denial, Franckean Pietism may also have contributed to the emergence of a new ‘ethics of profession’ that helped to shape the distinctive identity and corporate ethos of the Prussian civil servant.53
The innovations in schooling introduced by Francke and his successors also had a transformative impact on pedagogical practice in Prussia. The close alliance between the Halle Pietists and the monarch contributed to the emergence of schooling as a ‘discrete object of state action’.54 It was the Pietists who introduced professional training and standardized certification procedures for teachers and general-issue elementary textbooks for pupils. The orphanage schools also created a new kind of learning environment characterized by the close psychological observation of pupils, an emphasis on self-discipline and an acute awareness of time (Francke installed hourglasses in every classroom). The day was sharply subdivided into periods of coordinated study in a range of subjects and periods of free time; in this respect, the Halle regime anticipated the polarization of work and leisure characteristic of modern industrial society. Under these conditions, the classroom became the sealed-off, purpose-dedicated space we associate with modern schooling.
The transformation of schooling in Prussia along these lines was, of course, incomplete when Frederick William I died in 1740 and the movement lost its powerful sponsor. But the Halle model remained influential; in the 1740s and 1750s, the educationalist Johann Hecker, a former teacher at the Pädagogium who had been trained at Francke’s Teachers’ College in Halle, founded a network of ‘pauper schools’ in Berlin catering to the neglected and potentially delinquent offspring of the town’s numerous soldiers. In order to ensure an adequate supply of properly trained and motivated teachers, Hecker established a teachers’ college on the Franckean model; he was one of several graduates of the Halle college to set up such institutes in Prussian cities. He also founded a Realschule in Berlin, the first to offer children of the middle and lower-middle classes tuition in a range of vocational subjects, as an alternative to the Latin-based, humanistic curriculum of the traditional secondary school. It was Hecker who popularized the practice of teaching pupils of like ability collectively, so as to maximize the efficiency of the teaching process; this was a crucial and lasting innovation.
As well as contributing to the standardization of education and public service, the Pietists directed their attention to the education of the Lithuanian and Masurian (Polish-speaking Protestant) minorities. In 1717, when the Pietist Heinrich Lysius became Inspector of Schools and Churches for East Prussia, he called for the specialized training of clergymen for missionary and teaching work among the non-German-speaking communities in the East Prussian dioceses. As a result, after some initial disagreements, Lithuanian and Polish seminars were established at the University of Königsberg.55 The aim was to train Pietist aspirants for work in the Lithuanian and Masurian parishes. The Pietists also helped to establish the minority languages of the province as serious objects of study. Major dictionaries of the Lithuanian language were published in Königsberg in 1747(Ruhig) and 1800(Mielcke), both with the sponsorship of the Prussian authorities.56
The Pietists also provided support in the integration of the 20,000-odd Lutherans who entered Prussia as refugees from the archbishopric of Salzburg in 1731–2, most of whom were sent by Frederick William I to live as farmers in the depopulated region of Prussian Lithuania (see below). Pietists accompanied the Salzburgers on their trek through Prussia, organized fund-raising campaigns and financial support, supplied the new arrivals with devotional texts printed at the orphanage and provided their communities in the east with pastors.57
A further – often overlooked – area of evangelizing activity was the Pietist mission to the Jews. From 1728, there existed a Judaic Institute in the city of Halle, under the management of the Pietist theologian Johann Heinrich Callenberg, which ran a well-organized mission – the first of its kind – to the Jews of German-speaking Europe. The missionaries, who received language training in Halle at the first academic Yiddish seminar in Europe, travelled far and wide across Brandenburg-Prussia, buttonholing travelling Jews and trying without much success to persuade them that Jesus Christ was their messiah. Closely intertwined with the orphanage complex, the institute was sustained by the eschatological hope for a prophesied mass conversion of Jewry articulated in the writings of Philipp Jakob Spener. In practice, however, its missionary efforts were focused largely on the conversion and occupational retraining of impoverished itinerants known as ‘beggar Jews’ (Betteljuden) whose numbers were on the increase in early eighteenth-century Germany.58 The mission to the Jews thus embodied a characteristically Pietist blend of social awareness and evangelizing zeal. In their missionary endeavours, as in the other spheres of their activity, the Pietists earned official approval by contributing to the tasks of religious, social and cultural integration that faced the administration of the Brandenburg-Prussian state, helping to bring about the ‘domestication’, as one historian has called it, of ‘wild elements’.59
By the 1720s and 1730s, Pietism had become respectable. As often happens in such cases, it had changed in the process. It had begun as a controversial movement with a precarious foothold in the established Lutheran churches. As Pietism gathered new adherents during the 1690s and into the new century, it continued to be burdened by a reputation for excessive zeal.60 By the 1730s, however, the moderate wing of the movement enjoyed unchallenged dominance, thanks to the groundwork laid by Spener and the tireless work of Francke and his Halle collaborators in channelling the surplus spiritual energies of Lutheran nonconformism into a range of institutional projects. A variety of radical Pietisms, some of them overtly separatist, continued to flourish in the other German states, but the Prussian variant shed its embarrassing extremist fringe and became an orthodoxy in its own right. Infused with confidence, the second generation of Pietists used their positions within key institutions to silence or remove opponents, much as the Lutheran Orthodox had done in an earlier era. The Pietist movement became a patronage network in its own right.61
This position of dominance could not be sustained in the longer term. By the mid-1730s, the most influential and talented members of the founding generation of Halle theologians were dead: Francke (1727), Paul Anton (1730) and Joachim Justus Breithaupt (1732); the succeeding generation did not produce theologians of comparable quality or public profile. The movement was further weakened in the 1730s by internal controversy over a campaign launched by Frederick William I to purge ‘Catholic’ elements in Lutheran ceremonial. Some leading Pietists supported the initiative, but most remained respectful of Lutheran tradition and opposed the king’s liturgical tampering. In this, they found themselves at one with the orthodox leadership of the Lutheran church, a fact that did much to repair the damage done by decades of feuding.62
The allegiance to the state that had won the movement such prominence thus threatened to sunder it. There were signs that the traditional Pietist tolerance of confessional difference was being supplanted, from within the movement itself, by a proto-enlightened enthusiasm for confessional convergence. Then there was the problem that the policy of favouring Pietists for civil service and pastoral posts encouraged ambitious candidates to employ adaptive mimicry in the service of their careers. Many succumbed to the temptation to manufacture narratives of conversion to a truer and more heartfelt faith, or even to counterfeit the grave countenance and demeanour (one source speaks of Pietist ‘eye-rolling’) associated with the more zealous adherents of the movement. This phenomenon – a consequence of the movement’s success – was to leave the term ‘Pietist’ enduringly tainted with the connotation of religious imposture.63
After 1740, Pietism quickly declined in the theological faculties of the universities and within the clerical networks of Brandenburg Prussia. This was in part the result of a withdrawal of royal support. Frederick the Great was personally antipathetic to the ‘Protestant Jesuits’ who had enjoyed his father’s protection, and consistently favoured enlightened candidates for posts in church administration, with the consequence that Berlin became a renowned centre of the Protestant enlightenment.64 The University of Halle, once the bastion of the movement, became a leading centre of rationalism, and was to remain so well into the following century. There was a gradual fall in the number of persons attending the orphanage complex in Halle, and a corresponding decline in the circle of donors willing to support its activities. All this was reflected in the waning fortunes of the Pietist mission to the Jews in Halle, whose final annual report, published in 1790, opened with the observation that ‘if we compare the earlier days of our institute with the present, then the two are as body and shadow…’65
How far-reaching was the impact of the Pietist movement on Prussian society and institutions? Pietists valued restraint and understatement and despised courtly luxury and wastefulness. At court and in the organs of military and civilian education they systematically extolled the virtues of modesty, austerity and self-discipline. In this way they amplified the impact of the cultural change wrought by Frederick William I after 1713, when towering wigs and richly embroidered jackets became the despised trifles of a bygone era. Through their role in the cadet schools, they helped to shape attitudes and comportment within the provincial nobilities, more and more of whose sons were passing through the cadet system by the middle decades of the eighteenth century. This may in turn account for the dislike of ostentation that came to be seen as a hallmark of the Prussian Junker caste. If the fabled modesty of the Junker was in many individual cases pure affectation and posturing, this merely testifies to the power of the persona popularized by the Pietist movement.
Pietism also helped to prepare the ground for the Prussian enlightenment.66 The movement’s optimism and its future-oriented focus bore an affinity with the enlightened idea of progress, just as its preoccupation with education as a means of shaping personality ‘gave rise to that comprehensive pedagogization of human existence that was an essential characteristic of the enlightenment’.67 The development of the natural sciences at the University of Halle reveals how closely Pietism and enlightenment, despite their many differences, were intertwined; the ‘field of force’ between them shaped the assumptions guiding scientific enquiry.68 The Pietist emphasis on ethics over dogma and the commitment to tolerance in dealing with confessional difference likewise prefigured the fashions of the later eighteenth century – witness Kant’s conception of morality as the highest sphere of rationally accessible truth, and his tendency to subordinate religious to moral intuitions.69
Some of the most influential Prussian exponents of enlightened and romantic philosophy were reared within a Pietist milieu. The cult of introspection associated with the romantic movement had a Pietist antecedent in the Pietist ‘spiritual biography’, of which Francke’s own widely read narrative of his conversion became an archetype. Its secular successor, the ‘autobiography’, emerged as an influential literary genre in the mid to late eighteenth century.70 The romantic philosopher Johann Georg Hamann was educated at the Kneiphof School in Königsberg, a stronghold of moderate Pietism, and subsequently attended the city’s university, where he came under the influence of the Pietist-inspired philosophy professor Martin Knutzen; the introspective and ascetic quality of the Pietist outlook can be traced in his writings. Hamann even underwent a conversion experience of sorts, brought on by a period of close Bible-reading and penitential self-observation.71 The influence of Württemberg Pietism can be discerned in the writings of G. W. F. Hegel, who came to exercise a profound influence on the development of philosophy and political thought at the University of Berlin; Hegel’s conception of teleology as a process of self-realization was underpinned by a Christian theology of history with recognizably Pietist features.72
And what of the Brandenburg-Prussian state? Moulded on to the frieze that dominates the fac#231;ade of Francke’s orphanage building in Halle are two black Prussian eagles, their wings outspread, a vivid reminder to all who passed by of the movement’s proximity to state power. The positive contribution rendered by the Pietists to the consolidation of dynastic authority in Brandenburg-Prussia offers a striking contrast with the political neutrality of the contemporaneous Pietist movement in Württemburg and the subversive impact of Puritanism in England.73 As a fifth column within Brandenburg-Prussian Lutheranism, the Pietists were a much more effective ideological instrument than the Calvinist confessional prescriptions and censorship measures of the Electors and kings could ever have been. But the Pietists did more than merely assist the sovereign; they fed the energy from a broadly based movement of Protestant voluntarism into the public enterprise of Brandenburg-Prussia’s newly elevated dynasty. Above all, they propagated the idea that the objectives of the state might also be those of conscientious citizens, that service to the state could be motivated not just by obligation or self-interest, but also by an encompassing sense of ethical responsibility. A community of solidarity emerged that extended beyond the networks of patron–client relationships. Pietism created the beginnings of a broad-based activist constituency for the monarchical project in Brandenburg-Prussia.
PIETY AND POLICY
Does it make sense to speak of Brandenburg-Prussia’s external relations in terms of a ‘Protestant foreign policy’? Historians of power politics and international relations have often been sceptical about such claims. Even in the era of ‘religious war’, they point out, the imperatives of territorial security overrode the demands of confessional solidarity. Catholic France supported the Protestant Union against Catholic Austria; Lutheran Saxony sided with Catholic Austria against Lutheran Sweden. Confessional allegiances were only very rarely strong enough to prevail against all other considerations – the readiness of the Calvinist Palatinate under Frederick V to risk everything for the sake of the Protestant interest in 1618 – 20 was rare, perhaps even exceptional.
Yet it would be misleading to conclude that foreign policy was formulated on the basis of an entirely secular calculus of interest or that confession was an unimportant factor. It played an important role in structuring dynastic marital alliances, for one thing, and these in turn had important consequences for external policy, not least because they often entailed new territorial claims. It is clear, moreover, that many Protestant rulers perceived themselves as members of a Protestant community of states. This was certainly true of the Great Elector, who advised his successor in the Political Testament of 1667 to work wherever possible in concert with the other Protestant territories and to be vigilant in defending Protestant liberties against the Emperor.74 Confessional factors featured prominently in policy debates within the executive. Arguing against an alliance with France in 1648, the privy councillor Sebastian Striepe pointed out that Cardinal Mazarin was hostile to the reformed faith and was likely to press forward with the Catholicization of France.75 In the 1660s, as the mistreatments of French Calvinists intensified, the Elector wrote to Louis XIV to express his concern.76 In the 1670s, Frederick William switched to the anti-French coalition in order to prevent the subjugation of the Dutch Republic, the centre of northern European Calvinism. Geopolitics and the promise of subsidies drew him back to France in the early 1680s, but his return to the Brandenburg-imperial alliance of 1686 was motivated in part by disquiet over the brutal persecution of the Calvinist Huguenots in France.77
One way of demonstrating confessional solidarity without risking armed conflict was to offer asylum and other forms of assistance to persecuted co-religionists in another state. The most celebrated example of this type of gesture politics was the Edict of Potsdam of 1685, by which the Elector invited persecuted French Calvinists to settle in the lands of Brandenburg-Prussia. It was Frederick William’s answer to the French king’s quashing of the rights granted to the Huguenots under the Edict of Nantes (1598). In all, some 20,000 French Calvinist refugees settled in the lands of the Elector. They tended to come from the poorer strata of the Reformed population – the wealthiest had generally chosen economically more attractive destinations such as England and Holland. Their resettlement was supported (by contrast with Holland and Britain) with state-subsidized assistance, cheap dwellings, tax exemptions, discounted loans and so on. Since Brandenburg, whose population had still not recovered from the mortalities of the Thirty Years War, stood in sore need of skilled and industrious immigrants, this was a self-interested but highly effective gesture. It irritated Louis XIV profoundly78 (which, of course, was a part of its purpose) and earned the approbation of Protestants across the German lands. There was an intriguing disproportionality in this: of the 200,000-odd Huguenots who fled France in the face of persecution, only about one-tenth fetched up in the Prussian lands, yet it was the Elector, more than any other sovereign, who succeeded in capturing the moment for his reputation. Pitched in a lofty, universalizing moral register, the edict has (somewhat misleadingly) been celebrated ever since as one of the great monuments to the Prussian tradition of tolerance.
So successful was the ‘politics of religious rights’ inaugurated at Potsdam that it became a sort of fixture in Hohenzollern statecraft. In a proclamation of April 1704, Frederick I broadcast in similar terms his determination to assist persecuted French Calvinists in the Principality of Orange, a Protestant territorial enclave in the south of France to which the Hohenzollerns had a strong inheritance claim:79
Whereas the zeal that we harbour for the glory of God and for the good of His Church has made Us take to heart the sad state to which Our poor brothers in faith have seen themselves reduced by the rough persecution that providence allowed to rage in France some years ago, and has engaged Us to receive them charitably and at great cost in our States, Therefore We find Ourselves under an even greater obligation to exert the same charity towards Our own subjects, who have been forced to abandon Our Principality of Orange and all the goods that they possessed there [… ] so that they might find a refuge under Our protection…80
Here was a characteristic combination of high-minded rhetoric with cool self-interest. The charitable offer in the proclamation was coupled with a claim to disputed territory. In an instruction to the councillors entrusted with receiving the refugees, moreover, the king urged that they were not to be maintained in idleness but set up as quickly as possible in an appropriate occupation, ‘so that the King may profit from their establishment’.81
If the logic of confessional solidarity could occasionally provide a useful diplomatic instrument on the European scene, it was far more potent within the context of the Holy Roman Empire, for here the effect of confessional quarrels was amplified by the dualist structure of the imperial diet. The articles of the Peace of Westphalia stipulated that when confessional issues came up for debate at the diet, these must be discussed in separate session by two permanent caucuses of Protestant and Catholic representatives, the corpus evangelicorum and the corpus catholicorum. The purpose of this mechanism, known as the itio in partes or ‘going into parts’, was to ensure that potentially delicate confessional issues could be debated on both sides without unwelcome interference from the other party. Its practical effect, however, was to create a trans-territorial public forum for the airing of confessional grievances, particularly for the Protestants, who stood in greater need of corporate mobilization than the structurally dominant Catholics.
Frederick William I’s spectacular intervention in a conflict over the fate of the Protestant minority in Salzburg demonstrated how useful this mechanism could be. In 1731, the discovery that there were nearly 20,000 persons living in the steep valleys of the Pinzgau and Pongau districts of Salzburg who called themselves Protestants unsettled the Catholic authorities and revealed the profound cultural gulf that separated the city of Salzburg from its Alpine hinterland. When missionary expeditions failed to wean the farmers from their heresy, Archbishop Anton Firmian resolved to enforce their expulsion. This confrontation between a wealthy archiepiscopal administration and a semi-literate population of hardy Protestant hill-farmers caught the imagination of the Protestant caucus of the imperial diet. Pamphlets and broadsheets appeared arguing the farmers’ cause. The Catholic authorities in Salzburg responded with vehement counter-attacks. Both sides published selected documents relating to the case and the Salzburgers became a cause célèbre in the German Protestant lands.
One of the first to recognize the potential in this conflict was King Frederick William I of Prussia. He desperately needed farmers for the under-exploited terrain of Prussian Lithuania on the eastern marches of Ducal Prussia – an area that had scarcely begun to recover from the famine and pestilence of 1709–10. At the same time, he was keen to establish Brandenburg-Prussia as a universal guarantor of Protestant rights, a role that implicitly challenged the Habsburg Emperor’s claim to be the neutral ombudsman in confessional disputes between and within member states. Frederick William therefore offered to re-establish the Salzburg Protestants in his own lands.
The Elector’s plan seemed at first unlikely to succeed. The archbishop had no intention of letting his farmers go; he intended to crush the agitation in the Alps by military means – indeed he had already appealed to the Bavarians and the Emperor for troops to carry out the task. But the constitutional machinery of the Empire came once again to the Elector’s aid. Emperor Charles VI was hoping to secure the support of the Reichstag for a ‘pragmatic sanction’ that would confirm the succession of his daughter Maria Theresa to the Habsburg throne after his death. He needed the vote of the Elector in Berlin. The scene was set for a mutually beneficial transaction: in return for Frederick William’s support for the pragmatic sanction, the Emperor agreed to pressure the Archbishop of Salzburg into allowing a mass transfer of his protestant subjects to eastern Ducal Prussia.
Between April and July 1732, twenty-six columns of Salzburger families – each containing about 800 people – left for the long march through Franconia and Saxony to Prussia, exchanging the grassy slopes of their Alpine home for the flatlands of Prussian Lithuania. The emigration in itself was a sensation. The long lines of Salzburgers trudging steadfastly northward through Protestant towns and cities in their outlandish Alpine gear had an electrifying effect on spectators. Peasants and townsfolk brought food, clothes or gifts for the children, others threw coins from open windows. Many were reminded of the children of Israel on their way out of Egypt. There was a flood of confessional propaganda; books and prints depicted the expulsion, praised the obdurate faith of the emigrants and lauded the pious Prussian king whose country had become a promised land for the oppressed. Over 300 independent titles (not counting periodicals) were published in sixty-seven different German cities during the years 1732 and 1733 alone. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the legend of the emigration was endlessly recycled in sermons, pamphlets, novels and plays.
12. King Frederick William I of Prussia greets the Protestant exiles from the archbishopric of Salzburg; illustration from a contemporary pamphlet.
The emigration was thus a propaganda coup of incalculable value to the Hohenzollern dynasty and the Brandenburg-Prussia state. It marked, moreover, an important point of departure, for the Salzburgers were not Calvinists (like the Huguenots and Orange refugees), but Lutherans. The claim to trans-confessional Protestant authority that the Pietists had helped to realize within Brandenburg-Prussia now reverberated across the Empire.
6
Power in the Land
TOWNS
Just off the Mühlentorstrasse in the Old City of Brandenburg is the shaded yard of St Gotthard’s church. Like many of the medieval churches in the Electorate of Brandenburg, St Gotthard’s is a huge barn of dark-red brick. The buttresses that support the soaring vaults of the interior are concealed beneath a vast roof of ochre tiles whose frowning eaves convey a sense of impregnability. At the western entrance, a graceful baroque tower has been incongruously grafted on to the trunk of its Romanesque predecessor. At the height of summer, spreading trees shade the churchyard. The place has a dreamy peripheral feel, yet this is the ancient core of the city. From here the medieval German settlement spread out to the south along three streets, following the curve of the river Havel.
A traveller who walks into the coolness of St Gotthard’s church will be surprised by the height and breadth of the interior. The inner walls are lined with ornately carved memorials. These epitaphs are grandiose things, carved tablets of stone up to two metres high and elaborately inscribed. One of them commemorates the life and death of Thomas Matthias, a sixteenth-century mayor of Brandenburg and descendant of a distinguished family of clothiers, who rose to high political office under Elector Joachim II but fell swiftly from favour when his successor John George held him responsible for the debts accumulated during the previous reign, and died of the plague in his home town in 1576. The relief on the memorial depicts the children of Israel mounting the far bank of the Red Sea as they flee from Egyptian captivity. On the left-hand side we see a surging crowd of men and women in lavishly rendered urban clothing, clutching their children and belongings and turning only to look back at the disaster unfolding behind them, where men in armour founder and are submerged in curled scrolls of thick grey water. Another memorial inscription, dated 1583, is surmounted by a beautifully carved relief, in which scenes from the passion of Christ take place between the columns of a two-storeyed neo-classical fa#231;ade. In the upper storey Christ hangs naked, his hands bound tight to a lintel above his head, his body bending and twisting under the kicks and blows of three men with clubs and whips. This astonishingly dynamic and naturalistic sculpture commemorates Joachim Damstorff, a mayor of the city of Brandenburg, and his wife, Anna Durings; their names and dates are seen engraved in the stepped frieze at the base of the epitaph. Portraits of Damstorff and his wife, both dressed in the ornate attire of the urban oligarchy, peep out from circular niches at the bottom left and right of the sculpture, looking almost as if they were trying to catch each other’s eye across the crowded scene between them.
13. Carved frieze from the epitaph of Mayor Thomas Matthias, 1549/1576, St Gotthard’s Church, Brandenburg
A large epitaph, surmounted by a finely carved allegorical relief depicting Lazarus and the rich man, commemorates two generations of the Trebaw family, another mayoral lineage. These stepping stones of memory run well into the eighteenth century – a richly decorated two-metre tablet to the right of the altar commends the ‘distinguished councillor and celebrated merchant and trader of the Old City of Brandenburg’ Christoph Strahle, who died at the age of eighty-one in 1738. What is striking about these objects, apart from their artistic virtuosity, is the powerful sense of civic identity that they project. They are not simply memorials to individuals but expressions of the pride and corporate identity of an oligarchy. Many of the tablets commemorate several generations of the same family and provide detailed information about children and marriages. The most impressive monument in St Gotthard’s is the pulpit itself, an extraordinary composite sculpture in sandstone in which scenes from the Old and New Testaments follow the spiral stairs up to the chancel, and the whole structure rests upon a large and superbly worked bearded figure in white stone whose head is bowed over an open book. This remarkable ensemble, executed by Georg Zimmermann and dated 1623, was sponsored by the Clothiers’ Guild of the Old City, and we find their memorial tablet fixed to the column adjoining the pulpit. In addition to ten individual portraits of prominent clothiers – all of them formidable figures wearing the austere dark costume and white ruffs of the early seventeenth-century bourgeoisie – the tablet shows the house marks and names of a hundred individual master clothiers. It is hard to imagine a more emphatic and dignified advertisement of corporate bourgeois self-importance.
This is by no means a phenomenon unique to St Gotthard’s church. We find similar seventeeth-and eighteenth-century bourgeois urban memorials in the churches of other Brandenburg towns. St Laurence’s of Havelberg, for example, nestled in the historic city centre on an island in the middle of the river Havel, offers a similar array of stone memorials, though these are executed in a somewhat less exalted register. Here too, the dedications are mainly to tradesmen – merchants, lumber-dealers, brewers – as well as to prominent mayoral families. The memorial to the ‘respected merchant and trader’ Joachim Friedrich Pein (d. 1744) is especially noteworthy for its affecting simplicity:
Unter diesem Leichen-Stein | Beneath this burial-stone |
Ruh ich Pein ohn’ alle Pein | I, Payne, lie free of pain |
Und erwarte mit den meinen | And wait before God to appear |
Selig für Gott zu erscheinen | Saved with my near and dear |
In Havelberg, as in Brandenburg, the significance of the city church as a forum for the collective self-expression of an urban congregation is heightened by the fact that both cities are cathedral seats. There is thus an implicit dichotomy between the urban church at the medieval core of the city, whose congregation is dominated by the guilds and urban officials – and the cathedral, whose chapter was traditionally recruited from members of the imperial aristocracy. This is very clearly expressed in the geography of Havelberg, where the cathedral, an imposing structure that resembles a fortified castle, looks down from the heights of the northern riverbank over the little island of the Old City with its shops and stalls and narrow streets. Well into the nineteenth century, the social character of the two congregations was correspondingly polarized: St Laurence remained the church of the townsfolk (as well as of enlisted men stationed in the local garrison), while the nobility patronized the socially and geographically more elevated cathedral.
14. Havelberg Cathedral
The church memorials of Havelberg and Brandenburg remind us of a world that is often overlooked in general accounts of the history of the Prussian lands. This is the world of the towns, a social milieu dominated by master artisans and patrician family networks, whose identity derived from an entrenched sense of autonomy and privilege, both political and cultural, vis-à-vis the surrounding countryside. If towns have traditionally occupied a marginal place in the history of Brandenburg-Prussia, this is partly because the urban sector was never especially strong in this part of German Europe – of the thirty German cities with populations of 10,000 or more in 1700, only two (Berlin and Königsberg) were in Brandenburg-Prussia. In any case, it is widely believed that the towns and, more importantly, the spirit of self-administration, civic responsibility and political autonomy that they nurtured, were among the casualties of Hohenzollern absolutism. Indeed, one historian has written of the deliberate ‘destruction’ of the Brandenburg bourgeoisie by the centralizing monarchical state.1 The consequence was a political culture that was strong on obedience, but weak on civil courage and civic virtue. Here again, we sense the powerful negative attraction of the ‘special path’.
There is certainly something to be said for the idea that the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were an era of urban decline, especially if by this we mean the decline of urban political autonomy. Königsberg is perhaps the most dramatic example of a city struggling unsuccessfully to retain its traditional political and economic independence in the face of an aggressive monarchical power. In 1640, when the Great Elector came to the throne, Königsberg was still a wealthy Baltic trading city with a corporate representation in the diet that placed it on a par with the provincial nobility. By 1688, Königsberg’s political autonomy, its influence within the diet and much of its prosperity had been broken. Here, the struggle between the urban authorities and the Berlin administration was especially bitter. Königsberg was a special case, of course, but developments in other towns across the Prussian lands followed a broadly analogous course.
In many towns, the downgrading or removal of political privileges coincided with the introduction of the new excise, a tax on goods and services introduced in stages during the 1660s. Since it was raised directly on goods and services (i.e. at point of sale) the excise did away with the need for fiscal negotiations with urban Estate representatives. The towns thus disappeared as a corporate presence both from the provincial diets and from the ‘permanent committees’ of senior provincial delegates that increasingly managed negotiations between the Estates and the crown. This process of gradual disenfranchisement was reinforced by the imposition, first in Berlin in 1667, and later in all towns, of royally appointed tax commissioners, who soon began to extend the scope of their authority.2 The pace of centralization slackened during the reign of Frederick III/I, but picked up again under his successor, Frederick William I, whose Council Regulation (Rathäusliches Reglement) of 1714 transferred urban budgeting authority to royal officials and curtailed the powers of urban magistrates. Further laws were issued during the reign of Frederick II, who transferred all remaining policing powers from magistrates to royal officials and imposed a system of state authorizations on all sales of urban property.3 In the western provinces, too, the communal independence of the towns was largely abolished during the reigns of Frederick William I and Frederick II. The unique constitutions and privileges of towns such as Soest in the Westphalian county of Mark or Emden in East Friesland, were dismantled.4
For most towns, the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were also a period of economic stagnation or decline. In much of Brandenburg and Eastern Pomerania, the poor quality of the soils and the weakness of regional trade meant that the towns were poorly endowed to start with. The impact on the towns of the excise tax is difficult to assess. Initially, some towns were keen on the new tax, since they saw it as a way of rebalancing the fiscal load in their favour (the towns had previously paid a higher rate in contribution tax than the countryside); in some cases the municipal authorities were even pressured by urban taxpayers into begging the government to introduce it. There is some fragmentary evidence suggesting that the excise had a stimulating effect on urban economies. In Berlin, for example, the early excise years saw a boom in construction that began to make good the appalling damage done during the war, a consequence of the fact that the excise redistributed the tax burden within the cities away from land and property towards commercial activities of all kinds.
The worst drawback of the excise was simply the fact that only the towns paid it; rural areas still paid the old contribution. This was not how things had been planned. The Great Elector had initially intended to levy the excise on town and countryside alike, but pressure from the provincial nobilities persuaded him to restrict it to the cities. What this meant was that urban manufacturers now faced competition from rural producers whose goods were duty-free as long as they were not sold within the excise towns. Many noble estate owners exploited this state of affairs by having merchandise carted direct to the major regional markets, where they could undercut urban competitors in their own region. The problem was reinforced in areas dependent upon trade by the fact that the excise undermined the regional competitiveness of manufacturers and traders trying to shift goods across the border – this complaint was often heard in Kleve, for example, where it was felt that the excise had cut the volume and profitability of the Rhine river trade, and in Geldern where the excise was seen as having depressed trading activity on the Maas.5
The impact of the growing Prussian army – and in particular of garrisons – on the towns of Brandenburg-Prussia was ambivalent. On the one hand, the soldiers and their wives and children stationed in garrison towns represented both consumers and a supplementary workforce. Since military service was not a full-time occupation, soldiers in garrisons augmented their meagre military wage by working for townsfolk. In a garrison town like Prenzlau in the Uckermark to the north of Berlin, or Wesel in the Rhenish Duchy of Kleve, many soldiers chose, when not on duty, to work in the workshops and manufacturies of the masters in whose houses they were billeted. In this way they could earn several times their basic military wage. If they were married, their wives might seek employment in the town’s textile manufactury. The presence of soldiers thus contributed to the consolidation of a textiles manufacturing sector that was partly dependent upon cheap unguilded labour. Military service may also have helped to stabilize urban social structures by providing the most vulnerable strata of the community with a small but tolerable income.6 Since wealthier burghers who preferred not to billet a soldier could pay poorer householders to take him instead, the billeting system had a small redistributive effect.
But there was a downside. Although the highly flexible billeting system used in the garrison towns worked astonishingly well, there were also many incidents of tension between householders and billeted servicemen. The presence in the city of substantial numbers of men who were subject to the authority of the military courts generated jurisdictional disputes. Military commanders sometimes succumbed to the temptation to flaunt the municipal authorities by requisitioning supplies from civilian sources or forcing local burghers to serve in the guards. The low-wage labour provided by off-duty soldiers undercut craft apprentices in workshops where troops were not employed, sowing tension within the ranks of the city’s incorporated professions.7 In lean times, when additional work was hard to come by, the dependants of garrison soldiers might be seen begging on the streets.8 Soldiers, with their privileged knowledge of the fortifications surrounding the city, were also involved in the smuggling of goods across the excise boundaries.9 More ominously, one scholar has suggested that the ‘militarisation of civic society led to an arbitrary and little-regulated domination of garrison cities by the army, fostering an atmosphere of passivity among the burgher population and magistracies’.10
This argument should not be pushed too far. Soldiers were certainly a familiar sight on the streets of garrison towns and a crucial ingredient in the social scene at all levels – from the tavern to the patrician salon. But there is little evidence that this involved the permeation of urban civil society with militarist values or patterns of comportment. The conscription system established in Prussia allowed for a wide range of exemptions freeing young men of the burgher classes from the legal obligation to serve. These included not only the sons of upper-middleclass fathers, who were expected to pursue an academic degree or a career in trade or economic management, but also the sons of master artisans in various privileged trades, who were trained to work in their father’s trade. It has been estimated that across the Hohenzollern lands, some 1.7 million men benefited from such exemptions.11
The eighteenth-century peacetime Brandenburg-Prussian military was not, in any case, an institution capable of transforming the outlook and sensibility of its own recruits through systematic socialization and indoctrination. The military in the eighteenth-century towns was porous and loosely organized. Basic training lasted for less than a year (its duration was locally determined and varied widely from place to place), and even during this phase, soldiers were not ‘de-civilianized’ through isolation from the society around them. On the contrary: if they were married, they lived in barracks with their wives and other dependants – the military was not yet the exclusively masculine domain it would later become. (Indeed, marriage was encouraged for foreign recruits as a way of binding them more firmly to the Prussian service.12) If they were unmarried, they were expected to find lodgings with burghers. As for those soldiers who wished to remain in service after completion of their basic training, we have seen that their military duties consumed so little of their time that they were able to supplement their income through various forms of casual labour. Some soldiers picked up extra pocket money by standing guard duty in lieu of others who were off working for wages. It is clear that a symbiosis did evolve between military personnel and town populations,13 just as large numbers of student lodgers made a distinctive contribution to the social mix and local economy of university towns. But the soldiers no more ‘militarized’ their garrison towns than the students ‘academicized’ theirs. There were, of course, disputes between town councils and military authorities (just as there were between burghers and students), but these mostly demonstrate the readiness of ‘civilian’ authorities to protest when they saw local commanders overstepping the boundaries of their authority.
15. Soldier’s wife begging. Engraving by Daniel Chodowiecki, 1764.
There is little reason to believe that the administrative penetration of the towns by a rudimentary state officialdom had the effect of suppressing the spirit of local initiative. The royal officials appointed to administrative posts in the larger towns did not function as the imperious agents of a central policy bent on disempowering the urban elites. On the contrary, many of them ‘went native’, socializing or even intermarrying with the town elite and siding with the town authorities in disputes with local military commanders or other central government organs. The continuation of corruption and nepotism in many city governments – a sure sign that local patronage networks were alive and kicking – suggests that the oligarchies who held a controlling interest in the affairs of the cities were not displaced by state penetration. The oligarchies, for their part, assiduously cultivated newly arriving government officials and succeeded in many cases in suborning them to local interests.14
There were, moreover, dynamic and innovative elements within the urban bourgeoisie well before 1800. During the last third of the eighteenth century, changes in the structure of town-based manufacture and commerce produced a new elite composed mainly of merchants, entrepreneurs and manufacturers (rather than the guildsmen who had dominated the traditional scene).15 Members of this elite were involved in many ways – on a voluntary or honorary basis – in local urban administration. They sat on the municipal governing bodies (Magistratskollegien), on the councils of guilds and corporations, on the administrative boards of schools, churches and local charitable organizations.
This tendency was particularly pronounced in the small and middle-sized towns, because here the local administration was absolutely dependent upon the help of volunteer notables. The wool manufacturer Christian H. Böttcher, for example, sat on the town senate in Osterwieck in the province of Halberstadt; in Prenzlau (Uckermark), the merchant Johann Granze was also assistant judge in the city court. The mayors of the cities of Burg and Aschersleben were both local businessmen.16 One could list a hundred such cases from across the Prussian lands. The governance of the Prussian towns did not, in other words, lie exclusively in the hands of salaried state servants but rather depended on formidable reserves of local voluntarism among the more enterprising and innovative elements of the bourgeoisie. What had ‘declined’ in the towns of the Prussian lands – and indeed across much of western Europe – were the privileges and local autonomy of the traditional corporate system sustained by the ancient customs and honour codes of the skilled crafts. What was replacing them was a new and dynamic elite whose ambition expressed itself in entrepreneurial expansion and the assumption of informal leadership in urban affairs.
The voluntary societies founded in some middle-sized towns during the last third of the eighteenth century are a further indication of growing cultural and civic vitality among the burgher classes. There was a highly active Literary Society in Halberstadt from 1778, for example, which served as a meeting place for the educated burghers of the city and whose considerable printed output reflected a blend of regionalist pride and Prussian patriotism. In Westphalian Soest, a local judge founded a Society of Patriotic Friends and Enthusiasts of Regional History whose purpose – advertised in a regional journal, Das Westphälische Magazin – was to collate the first comprehensive and archivally researched history of the town. In the university town of Frankfurt/Oder, a German Society founded in the 1740s concerned itself with the cultivation of language and literature; it was later joined by a Learned Society and a Masonic lodge.17 In these cities, but also in many smaller country towns, education was becoming the crucial marker of a new social status. From around the middle of the century in particular, the educated bourgeoisie (consisting of lawyers, school teachers, pastors, judges, doctors and others) began to separate itself from the traditional craft-based elites, forming its own social networks within and between towns.18
It was often the leading burghers of individual towns who achieved improvements in local schooling, an area where, for all its repeated edicts, the state had in many places failed utterly. From the 1770s, a wave of new or improved schools testifies to the rising demand, even in the most modest towns, for better and broader educational provision.19 In Neuruppin, idyllically situated on the edge of a long narrow lake to the north-west of Berlin, a group of enlightened pastors, city officials and school teachers formed in the 1770s an association whose sworn objectives were to enact a major educational reform for the town and to improve its economic standing.20 Thanks to their efforts along with donations from the city magistrate and leading burghers, the Neuruppin teacher Philipp Julius Lieberkühn was able to develop an innovative anti-authoritarian pedagogical programme that would become a model for educational reformers across Germany. ‘The teacher strives,’ Lieberkühn wrote in a general outline of his educational philosophy, ‘to let all the natural faculties and strengths of his pupils develop freely and have sway, because this is a fundamental law of rational education.’21 It was a formulation that breathed the spirit not only of enlightenment, but also of bourgeois civic pride.
THE LANDED NOBILITY
The ownership and management of land was the defining collective experience of the Brandenburg-Prussian nobilities. The proportion of land in noble hands varied considerably from territory to territory, but it was high by European standards. The averages for Brandenburg and Pomerania (according to figures from around 1800) were about 60 and 62 per cent respectively, while thee quivalent figure for East Prussia (where the crown was the dominant landowner) was 40 per cent. By contrast, the French nobility owned only about 20 per cent of the cultivable land in France, while the figure for the nobility of European Russia was as low as 14 per cent. On the other hand, Brandenburg-Prussia looks less anomalous if we compare it with late eighteenth-century England, where the nobility controlled about 55 per cent of the land.22
The landed nobility of the East-Elbian regions of Germany were and are known collectively as ‘Junkers’. Deriving from ‘jung Herr’, the term originally meant ‘young lord’ and referred to those German noblemen – often second and younger sons – who helped to conquer or settle and defend the lands taken from the Slavs during the waves of German eastward expansion and settlement in the middle ages. In return for their military services they were granted land and perpetual tax exemptions. There were substantial disparities in wealth. In East Prussia, there was a small minority of true magnate families descended from mercenary commanders who had fought in the employ of the Teutonic Order during the Thirteen Years War against Poland (1453–66). In Brandenburg, where most noble families descended from settler-landowners, the average Junker estate was quite modest by European standards.
Since it was in the interest of the colonizing sovereigns of the Middle Ages to settle as many warrior-nobles as possible in areas vulnerable to Slav reprisals, noble land concessions were often small and close together, so that a single village might be partitioned among several families. The statistically dominant group, accounting for around half of the nobility, was that of noble families whose possessions encompassed between one and several estates and villages.23 But even within this group, there were wide disparities. A gulf separated families such as the Quitzows (later the Kleists), for example, whose lordship at Stavenow in the Prignitz encompassed 2,400 acres of demesne arable, from the general run of Junker families in the district, who had to get by with less than 500. In such a setting it was natural that the lesser noble families should concede leadership in local and provincial politics to a small circle of wealthy and often intermarried elite families. It was from this ‘dress-circle’ of landed families that the key mediators in negotiations with the crown tended to be drawn.
The localized political structures of the seventeenth-century Hohenzollern territories militated against a shared political identity centred on Berlin. The Junkers – especially in Brandenburg – were largely shut out of senior state offices during the later decades of the Great Elector’s reign and made only slow inroads into this area during the eighteenth century. Their political ambitions focused above all on Estate-controlled offices at district and provincial level and their horizons thus tended to be rather narrow, a condition reinforced by the fact that many of the less well-off families could not afford to educate their children away from home. The regional specificities of the various Hohenzollern territories were reflected in patterns of kinship and intermarriage. In Pomerania and East Prussia there were strong kinship links with Sweden and Poland, while houses in Brandenburg frequently intermarried with families in neighbouring Saxony and Magdeburg.
The eighteenth-century Hohenzollern monarchs, for their part, never spoke of a ‘Prussian’ nobility but always of a plurality of provincial elites possessing distinct personalities. In his Instruction of 1722, Frederick William I declared of the Pomeranian nobles that they were ‘as loyal as gold’; though they might argue a little, they would never opposethe orders of the sovereign. The same was true of the Neumark, the Uckermark and the Mittelmark. By contrast, the nobles of the Altmark were ‘bad, disobedient people’ and ‘impertinent in their dealings with their sovereign’. Almost as bad were the Magdeburg and Halberstadt nobilities, who, he urged, should be kept away from official posts in their own or neighbouring provinces. As for the nobles of the western provinces, Kleve, the county of Mark and Lingen, these were ‘stupid and opinionated’.24
Nearly half a century later, in his Political Testament of 1768, Frederick the Great spoke along similar lines of the territorial nobilities within his monarchy, declaring that the East Prussians were spirited and refined, but still too attached to their separatist traditions and thus of dubious loyalty to the state, while the Pomeranians were obstinate but upstanding and made excellent officers. As for the Upper Silesians, whose homeland had only recently been conquered and annexed to the Hohenzollern lands, these were lazy and uneducated and remained attached to their former Habsburg masters.25
It was only very gradually that a more homogeneous Prussian elite emerged. Intermarriage played a role in this process. Whereas virtually all Brandenburg families married within their own provincial elite until the end of the seventeenth century, things had changed by the 1750s and 1760s, when there were signs of an increasingly enmeshed kinship structure. Almost one-half of the marriages contracted by leading families in Brandenburg, Pomerania and East Prussia were to lineages based in another Hohenzollern territory. The most important institutional driver of homogenization was the Prussian army. The rapid expansion of the eighteenth-century officer corps forced the administration to recruit energetically among the provincial elites. New state-subsidized academies were established at the beginning of the eighteenth century in Berlin, Kolberg and Magdeburg; shortly after his accession, Frederick William I integrated these into the central Cadet Corps School in Berlin.
Although there were certainly efforts to pressure noble families into forwarding their sons for military training, many leapt at the chance created by the cadet system. It was particularly attractive to those numerous families who could not afford to educate their sons in the privately run academies frequented by the monied nobility. Promotion to the rank of captain and above brought the opportunity to earn a better income than many lesser landed estates could sustain.26 A characteristic example of the new generation of career officer was Ernst von Barsewisch, the son of a small estate-owner in the Altmark, who was sent to the Berlin Cadet Corps School in 1750, because his father could not afford to send him to university to be trained for state service. In his memoirs, Barsewisch recalled that the cadets (of whom there were 350 when he attended the school) were taught writing, French, logic, history and geography, engineering, dancing, fencing and ‘military draughtsmanship’ (militärische Zeichenkunst) .27
The shared experience of military training and, more importantly, of active military service doubtless fostered a strong sense of esprit de corps, though this was achieved at appalling cost. Some families in particular became specialist suppliers of boys for sacrifice on the field of battle – the Wedels notably, a Pomeranian family, lost seventy-two (!) of their young men during the wars of 1740–63. Fifty-three male Kleists perished in the same battles. Of the twenty-three men in the Belling family of Brandenburg, twenty were killed during the Seven Years War.
The association between noble status and officer rank was reinforced during the reign of Frederick the Great by the practice of obstructing the promotion of non-nobles. Although the king was forced to admit commoners to senior military posts during the Seven Years War when noble candidates were in short supply, many of them were later purged or marginalized. By 1806, when the officer corps numbered 7,000 men, only 695 were of non-noble descent and most of these were concentrated in the less prestigious artillery and technical arms of the service.28
Yet this increasingly close identity of interest with the crown could not inure the nobility against the effects of social and economic change. During the second half of the eighteenth century, the landed nobility entered a period of crisis. The wars and economic disruption of the 1740s and 1750s–60s, aggravated by government manipulation of the grain market through the magazine system and demographic overload through the natural expansion of estate-owning families placed the landowning class under increasing strain. There was a dramatic growth in the indebtedness of Junker estates, leading in many cases to bankruptcies or forced sales, often to commoners with cash in hand. The growing frequency with which estates changed hands raised questions about the cohesion of the traditional rural social fabric.29
This was not a matter the king took lightly. Frederick II was more socially conservative than his father had been. The nobilities were the only corporate group (in Frederick’s view) capable of serving as officers in the military. From this it followed that the stability and continuity of noble property were crucial to the viability of the Frederician military state. Whereas Frederick William I had deliberately set out to dilute the social pre-eminence of the nobility, therefore, Frederick adopted a policy of conservation. The crucial objective was to prevent the transfer of noble land into non-noble ownership. There were generous tax concessions, ad hoc cash gifts to families in financial straits, and efforts – largely futile – to prevent landowners from over-mortgaging their estates.30 When these measures failed, Frederick’s instinctive response was to tighten state control of land sales, but this proved counterproductive. Transfer controls involved an aggressive curtailment of the freedom to dispose of property. The administration thus had to reconcile conflicting priorities. It wished to restore and preserve the dignity and economic stability of the noble caste, yet it sought to achieve this by curtailing the fundamental liberties of the estate-owning class.
The quest for a less interventionist and controversial method of supporting the noble interest ultimately led to the foundation of state-capitalized agricultural credit unions (Landschaften) for the exclusive use of the established Junker families. These institutions issued mortgages at subsidized interest rates to ailing or indebted landowning families. Separate credit unions were established for each province (Kurmark and Neumark in 1777, Magdeburg and Halberstadt in 1780, and Pomerania in 1781). Interestingly enough, the idea of using such institutions to consolidate noble landholdings seems to have come from a commoner, the wealthy Berlin merchant Büring, who presented his ideas to the king during an audience of 23 February 1767, although there were also longstanding traditions of noble corporate financial self-help in a number of provinces.
The credit unions were at first very successful, if this can be measured by the rapid increase in the value of their letters of credit, which soon became an important medium of financial speculation. Credit union loans certainly helped some ailing estates to make productivity improvements. But the legal requirement that loans be tied to ‘useful improvements on the estate’ was often very loosely interpreted, so that the government’s subsidized credit was tapped for purposes that did little to consolidate noble landownership. The credit unions did not in any case suffice to tackle the looming problem of indebtedness across the entire rural sector, since landowners who ran out of cheap credit with the Landschaften simply went to other lenders. By 1807, while the combined credit unions held 54 million thalers of mortgage debt in all, a further 307 million thalers of estate-based debt were held by bourgeois lenders.31
As these developments suggest, the relationship between the Junkers and the sovereign house had now turned full circle. In the sixteenth century, it was the Junkers who had kept the Electors afloat; by the last third of the eighteenth century, the polarities of their interdependency had been reversed. Some historians have spoken of a ‘power compromise’ (Herrschaftskompromiss) between the crown and the Junkers whose effect was to consolidate the domination of the state and the traditional elites at the expense of other forces in society. The problem with this metaphor is firstly that it implies that at some point both ‘parties’ agreed on a kind of steady-state power-sharing arrangement. But the opposite was true. The relationship between the crown (and its ministers) and the various provincial nobilities was one of never-ending friction, confrontations and renegotiation. A second problem with the ‘power compromise’ thesis is that it overstates the stabilizing potential of collaboration between the state and the traditional elites. The truth is that, despite their best efforts, the crown and its ministers proved completely unable to arrest the processes of social and economic change that were transforming the face of rural society in the Prussian lands.
LANDLORDS AND PEASANTS
To work the soil was the destiny of most inhabitants of German Europe in the eighteenth century. Cultivated land accounted for about one-third of total land surface and about four-fifths of the population depended on agriculture for survival.32 The power relations governing the ownership and exploitation of land were thus of overwhelming importance, not only for the generation of nutrition and wealth, but also for the political culture of the state and society more generally. The collective power of the nobility over Brandenburg-Prussian rural society was rooted only partly in its controlling share of landed wealth. There was also a crucial legal and political dimension. From the middle decades of the fifteenth century, the Junkers succeeded not only in restructuring their landholdings so that the best arable land fell to the lordship, but also in supplementing their economic advantage with political powers enabling them to exert direct authority over the peasants on their estates. They acquired, for example, the right to prevent peasants from leaving their farms without prior permission, or to bring back (if necessary by force) peasants who had absconded and taken up domicile either in a town or on another estate. They also demanded, and gradually secured, the right to impose labour services on their peasant ‘subjects’.
It is still not entirely clear why these changes came about, especially as they ran counter to prevailing developments in contemporary western Europe, where the trend was towards the legal emancipation of formerly subject peasants and the commutation of compulsory labour services into money rents. It may be that because the lands east of the river Elbe were zones of comparatively recent German settlement, traditional rights among the peasantry were relatively weak. The population decline and widespread desertion of cultivable land during the long agrarian depression of the late Middle Ages certainly placed noble landlords under pressure to maximize revenues and cut cash costs. The contraction of the urban economy undermined one potential source of resistance, since it was the towns that had most energetically contested the right of landlords to retrieve peasant absconders. Another important factor was the weakness of state authority. Deeply indebted and heavily dependent upon the provincial nobilities, the Electors of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Brandenburg had neither the power nor the inclination to resist the consolidation of noble legal and political power in the localities.
Whatever the causes, the result was the emergence of a new form of landlordship. It was not a system of ‘serfdom’, properly speaking, since the peasants themselves were not the property of their masters. But it did involve a measure of subjection to the personal authority of the lord. The noble estate became an integrated legal and political space. The landlord was not only the employer of his peasants and the owner of their land; he also held jurisdiction over them through the manorial court, which was empowered to issue punishments ranging from small fines for minor misdemeanours to corporal punishments, including whippings and imprisonment.
Historians have long been preoccupied with the authoritarian features of the Prussian agrarian system. The émigré German scholar Hans Rosenberg described a regime of miniature autocracies in which
Local dominance was complete, for, in the course of time, the Junker had become not only an exacting landlord, hereditary serf master, vigorous entrepreneur, assiduous estate manager, and nonprofessional trader, but also the local church patron, police chief, prosecutor, and judge. […] Many of these experts in local tyranny were experienced in whipping the backs, hitting the faces and breaking the bones of ‘disrespectful’ and ‘disobedient’ peasant serfs.33
For the bulk of Prussian subjects the consequence of this aristocratic tyranny was ‘abject poverty’ and ‘helpless apathy’; peasants in particular suffered ‘legal and social degradation, political emasculation, moral crippling and destruction of [their] chances of self-determination’. But they were, in the words of another study, ‘too down-trodden to revolt’.34 This view is widely echoed in the literature on the German special path, where it is presumed that the Junker-dominated agrarian system, by instilling habits of deference and obedience, had deleterious and lasting effects on Prussian – and by extension German – political culture. The historiographical black legend of Junker tyranny has been remarkably tenacious, partly because it chimes with a broader cultural tradition of anti-Junker sentiment.35
In recent years, a rather different picture has emerged. Not all peasants in the East-Elbian lands were the subjects of lords. A substantial proportion were free tenant farmers, or non-subject employees. In East Prussia in particular, free peasants – the descendants of free settler-colonists – ran 13,000 out of 61,000 peasant farms across the province by the end of the eighteenth century. In many areas, the settlement of immigrants on crown and noble land created new concentrations of non-subject farmers.36 Even traditional lordships in the Brandenburg heartland incorporated a substantial contingent of persons who were paid wages for their labour or operated as specialist subcontractors managing particular resources, such as dairy herds, on an entrepreneurial basis. The Junker estates, in other words, were not lazily run cereal monocultures, in which labour was free and incentives for innovation non-existent. They were complex businesses that involved substantial operating costs and high levels of investment. Waged labour of various kinds played a crucial role in sustaining the manorial economy, both at the level of the lordship itself and among the ranks of the better-off subject villagers, who themselves frequently employed labour in order to maximize the productivity of their own holdings.
There was, to be sure, an extensive regime of compulsory labour services. In eighteenth-century Brandenburg, labour services were generally limited to between two and four days a week; they were heavier in the Neumark, where peasants rendered labour service for four days a week in winter and six in summer and autumn.37 Services also varied within individual lordships. On the estate of Stavenow in the Prignitz, for example, the inhabitants of the village of Karstädt were required to ‘come to the manor at six in the morning on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays with a horse team, or if horses are not needed, with another person on foot, and to stay until they are told they can come in from the fields with the cowherder’. By contrast, the smallholders of the little fishing village of Mesekow on the same estate were liable to ‘serve with the hand as often as they were told’.38
Yet these burdens were balanced to some extent by the strong hereditary property rights enjoyed by many subject peasants. In the light of these rights, it seems plausible to describe labour services not simply as feudal impositions, but as rents. While most fullholding peasants would dearly have loved to commute their hated labour services to money rents, it does not seem that the services were so burdensome as to prevent them from making a reasonable living out of their plots, or to prevent settler-farmers from other parts of Germany from accepting subject status in return for hereditary land titles. A study of the Stavenow estate in the Prignitz suggests that, far from being condemned to ‘abject poverty’, the average Brandenburg village peasant may actually have been better off than his southern and western European counterparts. In any case, seigneurial labour burdens were not engraved in stone; they could be, and sometimes were, renegotiated. This happened, for example, in the years following the devastation of the Thirty Years War, which left a huge number of farms deserted. Faced with a desperate labour shortage, landlords on many estates caved in to the demands of peasants for reductions in their services. Indeed, many landlords conspired in pushing labour rents down by outbidding their neighbours for incoming settlers looking to establish themselves on farmsteads.39
The state authorities, moreover, intervened to protect peasants against high-handed action by landlords. Laws and edicts issued by successive sovereigns after 1648 gradually subjected the patrimonial courts of the Junker lordships to the norms of territorial law. Whereas the consultation of lawyers in patrimonial cases had been a rarity in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, landlords tended after the Thirty Years War to employ legally qualified court administrators. In 1717, Frederick William I ordered under the threat of severe penalties that every court was to acquire a copy of the newly published Criminal Code (Criminal-Ordnung) and to operate in conformity with its guidelines in all criminal cases. Patrimonial courts were also required to render a full quarterly report of trials conducted. This trend continued under Frederick II.
From 1747–8 onwards, all patrimonial courts were obliged to employ government-certified, university-trained jurists as judges. The giving of law was thereby de-privatized and drawn back into the sphere of state authority. The result was a gradual standardization of procedures and practices across different patrimonial jurisdictions.40 These trends were reinforced by the activity of the Berlin Chamber Court, Brandenburg’s highest tribunal and court of appeal. The role of the Chamber Court in adjudicating conflicts between villagers and landlords across Brandenburg over an extended period has yet to be comprehensively analysed. But among those individual cases that have received close attention, there are many that demonstrate the court’s willingness to support the complaints of villagers or stay the hand of over-zealous Junkers.41 Moreover, access to this court became easier during the reign of Frederick II, when the reforms initiated by Justice Minister Samuel von Cocceji established faster and cheaper appellate justice.
The history of disputes between landlords and subjects suggests an impressive capacity for concerted action, as well as a strong sense, among landed and landless agrarian workers alike, of their customary entitlements and dignity. We see this in the disputes over labour services that became increasingly common towards the end of the seventeenth century, as the population began to recover from the Thirty Years War and the balance of bargaining power between rural subjects and landowners began to tilt back in the latter’s favour. In the face of demands for increased labour rents, peasants showed an elephantine memory of the customary limits to their labour obligations and a rock-hard determination not to permit the imposition of new and ‘illegitimate’ services.
In 1656, for example, it was reported that peasants in the Prignitz were refusing to pay their taxes or perform their labour services. The ringleaders had passed notes from village to village threatening that anyone who refused to join the protest would be fined three thalers.42 In 1683, when a dispute over labour services broke out on an estate in the district of Löcknitz in the Uckermark to the north-east of Berlin, twelve peasant communes joined in a labour strike against the lordship and even formulated a joint petition to the Elector complaining grandiloquently of the administrator’s ‘great illegitimate procedures’ (‘grosser unverandtwordtlicher Proceduren’).43 In a letter countering these complaints, the administrator reported to the authorities that the peasants of his lordship had refused to perform their services, stayed away from the demesne whenever they felt like it, arrived only at 10.30 in winter, and brought only tired animals and the smallest wagons to the lordship’s farm. When the lordship’s stewards pressed them to get on with their work, the peasants beat them or threatened to kill them, laying their scythes about their necks. Since the dispute remained unresolved, joint representations by the peasants continued over the following years, supported, it seems, by the local pastor. Attempts by the authorities to divide the resistance by offering each commune a different deal failed. Despite the appearance of troops and the infliction of corporal penalties on some of the ringleaders, the resistance ‘movement’ rumbled on for over a decade as the peasants thwarted the lordship’s attempts to extract more value out of the subject villagers. There was little sign here of the emasculated serf whose will has been abolished by habits of deference and obedience. When an administrator on the same estate made to hurry a labourer along with his whip during the harvest of 1697, another worker nearby threatened him with his scythe, saying: ‘Master, hold back, that does no good and will make you no friends, we don’t let ourselves be beaten.’44
This was no isolated stand. In the Prignitz, to the north-west of Berlin, a regional protest movement broke out among the peasants in 1700, again triggered by demands for increased labour rents. The peasants showed an impressive ability to organize themselves. A letter of complaint from the local nobility observed that ‘the common peasantry’ had ‘joined together most punishably’ in order to free themselves from dues and services, and had ‘duly collected money from house to house in all villages [of the Prignitz]’. To the chagrin of the noble signatories, the government, instead of simply arresting and punishing the ringleaders, had forwarded the peasants’ supplications to the Berlin Chamber Court for consideration. In the meanwhile, no fewer than 130 villages drew up petitions listing their grievances. These documents focused on the efforts of the Junker landlord to reintroduce defunct and illegitimate labour services, such as the cartage of demesne produce to Berlin, without offsetting this against other obligations; there were also complaints about a hidden rise in grain rents through the introduction of larger grain unit measures and the mistreatment of some peasants who had been manacled in the lordship’s newly built jail.45
What is striking about this and other similar protests (there were major conflicts at around the same time in the Mittelmark and parts of the Uckermark46) is the capacity for concerted action and the confidence in higher justice that many peasant protests demonstrate. Events of this kind were ordered by a latent collective memory of the techniques of protest – participants ‘knew’ how to proceed without being told. The few detailed studies we have of such upheavals also show that peasants found it easy to secure the help and guidance of persons outside their own narrower social milieu. In the protests of the Löcknitz district, the local pastor helped formulate the grievances of villagers in a language that would make sense to the higher authorities of the lordship and the appeal court. In the Prignitz uprising, a local estate administrator, an educated man, took a considerable personal risk in helping to draw up supplications and write letters for the insurgents.47
Even in cases where peasant protests did not achieve their immediate end and new labour services were exacted against their will, there were ways of getting around the landlord by stealth. The easiest was simply to sabotage the system by performing labour services to the minimum standard of competence and effort. In a letter of January 1670, the local administrator Friedrich Otto von der Gröben complained to the Elector that the winter services performed by the peasants of Babitz in the Zechlin district were of poor quality – the local people often sent their children to perform services, or arrived for work at ten or eleven in the morning and left again at two, so that a whole week (three days) of services scarcely amounted to one full day’s work.48 In 1728, Major von Kleist, whose family had bought the Stavenow estate in 1717, complained to his peasants that ‘many disorders have been observed in the performance of manorial services, since some people bring such poor horse-teams that they can’t finish the job, while others work so unconscientiously and disobediently that nothing gets done.’ An announcement to this effect was read out to the subjects before the manorial court, but a number of them failed to turn up for the reading and it had little effect.49 The evidence available suggests that this was a widespread problem in the East-Elbian lands. On estates where rental arrangements were not perceived as legitimate, open protests were merely isolated peaks of resistance in a broader landscape of noncompliance.50
The impact of such resistance on the landlords as an economic elite is difficult to assess with any precision. It does seem clear, however, that the readiness of peasants to protest at unilateral hikes in labour rents and to undermine their long-term effectiveness through under-performance or sabotage placed landlords under constraint. When one of the von Arnims inherited part of an estate complex at Böckenberg in the Uckermark in 1752, he found that the fields were full of thorns and ‘had been reduced to the poorest condition by peasant labour services’. Von Arnim decided instead to build dwellings with his own capital and settle the land with families of waged labourers working directly for him.51 Here was one clear example of how peasant recalcitrance depressed the value of labour services, encouraged the use of waged labour, and hastened the transition to a fully wage-based system that would gradually hollow out the ‘feudal’ constitution of the East-Elbian estates.
GENDER, AUTHORITY AND ESTATE SOCIETY
A very obvious and yet little-remarked feature of the image of the ‘Prussian Junker’ is its emphatically masculine character. One of the crystallization points for the corporate noble ideology that emerged in the Prussian lands during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was the concept of the ‘integral household’ (ganzes Haus) under the authority of a benign paterfamilias or Hausvater, whose authority and stewardship extended beyond his nuclear family to the peasants, half-holders, domestic servants and others who inhabited the estate. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a flourishing genre of non-fiction works dedicated itself to the notion of the ideal estate, well ordered and self-sufficient, held together by bonds of mutual dependence and obligation and guided by the leadership of a patriarchal family head.52
Distant echoes of this ideal type can be discerned in Theodor Fontane’s remarkable elegy to the old nobility, Der Stechlin, in which the humane virtues of an idealized social elite whose time is passing are embodied in the gruff but lovable country squire Dubslav von Stechlin. The archetype of the paterfamilias is still recognizable in the elderly Stechlin, but the broader appurtenances, male and female, of the household have faded into the background; the head of the house has been lifted out of his setting in order that he might represent the predicaments and subjectivity of his class as a whole (Fontane makes this possible by having Stechlin’s wife die young before the novel’s action begins). In this sense, Fontane masculinizes the world of the estate in a way that seems alien even to the patriarchal world invoked by the Hausvaterliteratur of the previous century. So powerful was Fontane’s nostalgic evocation of the Junker caste that it became a kind of virtual memory for the literary classes of late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Prussia. It was the world of Fontane that the historian Veit Valentin invoked when he described the Prussian Junkers as ‘quiet phlegmatic men, arrogant and amiable, splendid and impossible, who rejected anything different from their ilk, were too elevated to boast, called their country seat “house” and their park “garden”’.53
The tendency to conceive of the Junker as an emphatically masculine type was reinforced by the association with military service, which left an indelible imprint on the visual imaginings of the Junker class that still shape our perception of who they were. The caricatures that proliferated in the satirical journals of the 1890s and 1900s focused above all on officers in uniform. In the pages of the Munich journal Simplicissimus, ‘the Junker’ is a vain, feckless young man buttoned into grotesquely tight military dress and bent on squandering his inherited wealth at the gaming tables, or a ruthless womanizer and ignoramus who thinks ‘Charles Dickens’ is the name of a racehorse and mistakes ‘matriculation’ for a Jewish holiday. The physical type immortalized by Erich von Stroheim in Jean Renoir’s 1937 film La Grande Illusion is still entirely recognizable as one of the canonical modern European types: a slim narrow-waisted body held ramrod-straight, cropped hair, strict moustaches, a posed, unexpressive countenance and the glittering monocle (which can be allowed to drop at intervals for theatrical effect).54
16. ‘The Junker’. Caricature by E. Feltner from the satirical journal Simplicissimus.
The point of this brief digression is not to denounce such constructions as false (for they certainly captured important aspects of what ‘the Junker class’ meant to their bourgeois admirers and detractors and were, furthermore, internalized to some extent by the Junkers themselves). The point is rather that one of their effects has been to efface from view the women who made estates function in the classic era of commercial manorialism, not only by sustaining the sociability and communicative networks that made life in the Prussian provinces bearable, but by their contributions to financial and personnel management. If we return to the Kleist estate at Stavenow, we find that, during the two decades between 1738 and 1758, the entire estate was managed by Maria Elisabeth von Kleist, the widow of Colonel Andreas Joachim, who had died in 1738. Frau von Kleist pursued outstanding debts with great energy, both through her own manorial court and through suits filed with the Chamber Court in Berlin; she supervised the workings of patrimonial justice on the estate, lent a substantial sum on 5 per cent interest to a neighbour, accepted small savings deposits from various locals (including an apothecary, a fisherman, her carriage-driver, an innkeeper), invested in war bonds and an interest-bearing deposit with the local credit institute of the corporate nobility, and generally oversaw and managed the family estate as a business.55
Another striking case is that of Helene Charlotte von Lestwitz, who in 1788 inherited the lordship of Alt-Friedland about seventy kilometres east of Berlin on the edge of the Oder floodplain. Having acquired the estate, she adopted the name ‘von Friedland’, presumably in order to reinforce her identification with the locality and its people. In the early 1790s, a dispute broke out over use-rights to a lake known as the Kietzer See that lay between her estate and the neighbouring town of Alt-Quilitz. The villagers of Alt-Quilitz claimed the right to cut rushes and grass on the margins of the lake during late autumn when fodder was becoming scarce and winter stores were needed for the cattle. They also claimed the right to dye hemp and flax on the small sandy beaches that dotted the lakeshore on the Alt-Quilitz side. These claims were energetically disputed by Frau von Friedland, who claimed that rush-cutting rights for the entire lake belonged to her lordship – she even conducted a survey of her own subjects with a view to establishing the oral history, as it were, of usage rights to the Kietzer See.
In January 1793, after repeated complaints to the lordship of Alt-Quilitz had failed to provide satisfaction, Frau von Friedland filed a suit with the Berlin Chamber Court. She also authorized her subjects and administrators to arm themselves with clubs, arrest rush-cutting Quilitzer and confiscate their ill-gotten rushes. Her subjects set about this task with zeal and evident enjoyment. When the Berlin Chamber Court finally concluded its deliberations, the outcome was a compromise that aimed to save face for both parties and apportion usage rights to the lake between them. But this was not good enough for Frau von Friedland, who promptly launched an appeal against the verdict. She now shifted the burden of her argument from the scandalous rush-cutting of her neighbours to the deleterious effects of their hemp-dyeing on the fish population of the lake. Guards were posted along the shores by the Friedland lordship to prevent hemp-dyeing, but these were summarily arrested and carried off by a numerically superior force of Quilitz townsfolk. In a subsequent sortie, the hunter (Jäger) of the Friedland estate managed to chase off a gang of hemp-dyers by menacing them with his gun; in the confusion that followed, however, the Quilitzer succeeded in seizing and making away with the punt of a Friedland fisherman by the name of Schmah. During the two years while the appeal case ran, Frau von Friedland continued to lead her subjects in their struggle for control of the lake and its resources.
Surveying this case, one is struck not only by the remarkable solidarity between subjects and lordship and the use of ecological arguments, but also by the prominence of the energetic and quarrelsome Frau von Friedland, who was clearly something of a local titan. She was also an ‘improving landlord’ of a kind that was becoming fashionable in later eighteenth-century Brandenburg. She pioneered the rent-free loan of cattle from her own stud to her subjects (to keep them in manure), she introduced new plants and she restocked depleted woodland – her picturesque forests of oaks, lindens and beeches are today still one of the most attractive features of the area. She also improved schooling on the estates and trained villagers to take on positions as administrators and dairy farmers.56
How frequently such matriarchs make an appearance in the annals of the landowning classes and how the conditions for such rural female activism changed over time are difficult to establish. But there is nothing in the sources on the Kietzer See conflict to suggest that contemporaries perceived Frau von Friedland as a bizarre anomaly. Moreover, there are other cases sprinkled across the literature in which we find women zealously engaged as the owners and lords of their estates.57 These examples suggest, at the very least, that the image promulgated in the prescriptive eighteenth-century literature of manners of the ‘Junkerin’ knitting, darning, minding the kitchen garden and tending to ‘all manner of women’s work’58 did not apply to all households, and that the normative power of such wishful image-making may have been less than we suppose. There is certainly much to suggest that the roles of men and women were less polarized in the noble rural household of the ancien régime than they would later become in the bourgeois household of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The capacity of eighteenth-century female estate-owners to operate as autonomous agents was underpinned by strong female property rights under law that would be downgraded in the course of the following century.59
To a certain extent, these observations about the noble household can be extended to the social milieu of the peasants, villagers and servants, subject and free, who lived on the Junker estates. Here too, although there can be no doubt about the profound structural inequalities between the genders, women were in a stronger position than one might suppose: they co-managed their households (including, in many cases, the control and management of money and accumulation of savings). Women who had brought substantial dowries into a marriage might be co-owners of the household’s assets. Women also featured as semi-independent village entrepreneurs, especially in the role of tavern mistress; it was not unusual for blacksmiths or other lesser village notables to lease taverns from the lordship and run them under the management of their wives, who thereby acquired a certain status and social prominence within the village. Women frequently performed agricultural labour, especially when male labour was scarce – the sexual division of labour was less rigid in rural communities than in the towns, where male-dominated guilds made it difficult for women to break into industry.60 Marrying into the family of her husband did not sever a woman’s ties with her own kinship network, so that wives locked in disputes with their husbands could often count on support from members of their own lineage. The importance of such ties was symbolized in the retention by peasant women of the paternal (rather than the marital) surname.61
As a factor in determining power relations, gender interacted with the many other social gradations that structured rural society. Whereas the dowried wife of a fullholding peasant was in a relatively strong position to protect her own livelihood against other claimants to income from her household, even after her husband’s death or retirement, a less well-off woman who married an already retired peasant was in a far more vulnerable position, since there was no way of ensuring that the household of her husband would continue to finance her upkeep after his death. The question of a woman’s retirement benefits after the death of her husband was so sensitive that it was sometimes the subject of special stipulations in the farm occupancy deeds that were signed when a woman married into a new household. In other cases, benefits were settled at the moment of retirement, when the older generation yielded management of the holding to their heirs. Where there was good will, widowed older women could count on certain customary local assumptions about what was a fitting level of provision; where good will was lacking, they might have to seek enforcement of their rights through the manorial court.62
The study of disputes arising over illegitimate births has also shed light on how gender roles operated and were defined within rural society. Some parts of Prussia, such as the Altmark, had a surprisingly high rate of illegitimate births. One sample count in the parish of Stapen on the lordship of the Schulenburg family revealed that for ninety-one marriages solemnized in the parish over the period 1708–1800, there were twenty-eight illegitimate births.63 In such cases, the court authorities were mainly concerned to establish paternity and to define the mother’s right to claim support from the male. Court records reveal widely divergent assumptions about male and female sexuality; whereas women were viewed as naturally passive and defensive in sexual transactions, men were seen as driven by an unequivocal will for intercourse. This meant that the burden of the investigation into illegitimate births generally rested on establishing why the woman had complied with the man’s wish for sex. If it could be shown that he had won her over with a promise of marriage, her claim to child support might be strengthened. If, conversely, it could be shown that she had a reputation for promiscuity, this might weaken her position. By contrast, the sexual history of the man in question was regarded as irrelevant. In these ways, such investigations were tilted in favour of men. And yet, court proceedings were less discriminatory than one might suppose. Considerable effort was invested to establish the precise circumstances of the impregnation as securely as possible and although fathers were only rarely forced to marry, if they could be clearly identified they were generally made to share in rearing costs.64
In any case, gender was only one of several variables that could influence judicial outcomes. Women from high-status peasant families were far better placed than poor ones. They were more likely to receive support from the village elite, which could be decisive in determining the verdict. The men impugned were also more likely to agree to marry them.65 Poorer women were less well placed in both these respects, but even for them there were ways of getting by as an unmarried mother. Women in this position could make ends meet by performing domestic labour, such as spinning and sewing in other peasant households. They might sometimes succeed in marrying later down the line – the stigma associated with illegitimate birth largely dissipated (even without marriage) if a father could be identified and acknowledged his responsibilities. There is even evidence to suggest that poor women bringing up children on their own, assuming they kept their good health, were in a better position to generate income than married women of the same social status who were bound to a specific household.66
One of the most interesting things that emerge from court proceedings of this kind is the self-policing character of village society on the East-Elbian estates. The peasants and other villagers were not helpless, cowering subjects exposed to the arbitrary blows of an alien seigneurial justice. The manorial court was for much of the time the enforcer of the village’s own social and moral norms. This is particularly clear in cases where family disputes threatened to leave old or otherwise fragile people without adequate means of support; here the function of the manorial court was often to see to it that the village’s own moral economy was enforced in favour of its most vulnerable members.67 In many cases involving sexual misdemeanours, the proceedings began with a preliminary investigation by the village itself. It was the village that informed the court that there was a case to be answered. The village also oversaw the payments of alimony that followed successful paternity suits. The manorial court thus operated in partial symbiosis with the self-governing structures of the village.68
INDUSTRIOUS PRUSSIA
‘The power of Prussia,’ Frederick II noted in the Political Testament of 1752, ‘is not founded on any intrinsic wealth, but uniquely on the efforts of industry’ (gewerblichen Fleiss) .69 From the reign of the Great Elector onwards, the development of domestic industry was one of the central objectives of the Hohenzollern administrations. Successive Electors and kings sought to achieve this by encouraging immigration to expand the native workforce and by fostering the foundation and expansion of native enterprises. Some existing industries were protected with import bans and tariffs. In certain cases, where the product in question was deemed to be of strategic significance or promised to yield very substantial revenues, the government itself operated a monopoly, appointing managers, investing funds, controlling quality and collecting income. An effort was made to ensure – in accordance with mercantilist principle – that raw materials did not leave the territory for processing elsewhere. One of Frederick’s first decisions as king was to found a new administrative organ, the Fifth Department of the General Directory, whose task was to oversee ‘commerce and manufacturing’. In an instruction to its founding director, the king declared that the department’s objectives were to improve existing factories, to introduce new manufacturing industries and to attract as many foreigners as possible to take up places in manufacturing enterprises.
Prussian colonization agencies opened in Hamburg, Frankfurt/Main, Regensburg, Amsterdam and Geneva. Wool spinners were recruited from neighbouring Saxony to provide the wool manufacturers of the Prussian lands with much needed labour. Skilled labourers came from Lyon and Geneva to work in the Prussian silk factories, though many of these later returned to their homelands. Immigrants from the German territories of the Empire founded factories manufacturing knives and scissors. Immigrants from France (including Catholics now, in addition to the Protestants of an earlier generation) helped to build up the Prussian hat and leather industries.
Frederick’s ‘economic policy’ took the form of one-off interventions in specific sectors that he judged to be of special importance to the state. Particular attention was paid to the Prussian silk industry, partly because silk was a product for which the raw materials could theoretically be generated within the Prussian lands (provided one found a way of protecting young mulberry tree plantations against the frosts of the winter), partly because the purchase of luxury items made of foreign silk was seen as a major drain on the state’s income, and partly because silk was a prestigious commodity associated with elegance and an advanced state of civilization and technical knowledge.70
The techniques adopted to stimulate production employed a characteristic mix of incentives and controls. Garrison towns were ordered to plant mulberry trees within their walls. A royal order of 1742 stated that anyone proposing to establish a mulberry plantation was to be provided with the necessary land. Growers who maintained plantations of 1,000 trees or more from their own funds were to be offered a state subsidy to cover the wages of a gardener until the business started to generate a profit. Once the trees were sufficiently mature, growers would be entitled to grants of Italian silkworm eggs free of charge from the government. The government undertook, moreover, to purchase any silk produced on such plantations from their owners. The nascent silk sector was hedged about with special export subsidies, tariff protection and tax exemptions. From 1756, the importation of foreign silk was forbidden altogether for the Prussian territories east of the river Elbe. It is estimated that in all some 1.6 million thalers of government money was invested in the production of silk, most of it dispensed by a special government department with responsibility for silk manufacture alone. This determined nurturing of a favoured industry undoubtedly produced an increase in overall capacity, but there was controversy, even among contemporaries, as to whether this heavily interventionist approach was really the best way to stimulate productivity growth across the manufacturing sector.71
In the case of the silk industry, the state was the chief investor and the foremost entrepreneur. The same pattern could be observed across a range of other industries deemed to be of strategic or fiscal importance. There was a royal shipyard at Stettin, for example, and state monopolies in tobacco, timber, coffee and salt, managed by businessmen under the supervision of state officials. There were also a number of private – public partnerships, like that with Splitgerber and Daum, a Berlin firm specializing in war-related industries, including the purchase and resale of foreign munitions, which operated as a private enterprise but was protected by the state from competition and provided with a regular flow of government orders. A much celebrated example of state-driven entrepreneurship was the consolidation of the Upper Silesian iron ore industry. In 1753, the Malapane Hütte in Silesia became the first German ironworks to operate a modern blast furnace. The government also assisted in the expansion of the Silesian linen industry, attracting new workers and technicians through special settlement schemes offering various incentives (such as free looms for newly arriving immigrant weavers).72 All of these enterprises were protected by a regime of protective tariffs and import bans.
Intervention, at this level of depth, involved the state, and indeed the sovereign himself, in the time-consuming micro-management of specific sectoral problems. We can see this in the government’s handling of the ailing salt industry in Halle, Stassfurt and Gross Salze towards the end of Frederick’s reign. The salt-works of these towns had lost their traditional markets in Electoral Saxony and repeatedly petitioned the king for help. In 1783 Frederick entrusted one of his ministers, Friedrich Anton von Heinitz, with the task of finding out ‘whether it would be possible to process some other product from the salt-pit, such as a saltpetre or whatever, so that these people can help themselves to some extent and then sell this product’.73 Heinitz hit upon the idea of manufacturing blocks of mineral salt and selling them on to the domains administration in Silesia as saltlicks for grazing cattle. He persuaded the local salt-miners’ corporation (Pfännerschaft) of Gross Salze to conduct the necessary experiments and provided them with a royal subsidy of 2,000 thalers to cover costs. The first experiment failed because the ovens in which the mineral salt was to be extracted were of inadequate quality and collapsed during firing. A substantially larger subsidy from ministerial discretionary funds was required to finance the construction of higher-quality ovens. Heinitz also requested Carl Georg Heinrich Count von Hoym, the Minister for Silesia and a particular favourite of the king, to purchase 8,000 hundredweight of his product in the summer of 1786. Hoym acceded in the first instance but refused to renew the order in the following year because the salt from the new works at Gross Salze was of poor quality and far too expensive. Here we see a readiness to improvise and innovate combined with an ultimately counterproductive preference for government-(as opposed to market-) driven solutions.74
As his heavily interventionist and controlling approach revealed, Frederick II was out of touch with those contemporary trends in (especially French and British) economic thought that had begun to conceptualize the economy as operating under its own autonomous laws and saw individual enterprise and the deregulation of production as the key to growth. There was growing controversy – especially after the Seven Years War – as businessmen began to chafe under the government’s economic restrictions. During the 1760s, independent merchants and manufacturers in the Brandenburg-Prussian cities protested against the restrictive and discriminatory practices of the government. They found some support from within the king’s own bureaucracy. In September 1766, Erhard Ursinus, Privy Finance Secretary of the Fifth Department, submitted a memorandum criticizing government policy and focusing in particular on what he saw as the over-subsidization of the velvet and silk industries, both of which produced material of inferior quality at much higher prices than imported foreign equivalents. The network of government monopolies, Ursinus went on to argue, created an environment hostile to the flourishing of trade.75 Ursinus was not rewarded for his candour. After revelations that he had been accepting bribes from powerful figures in the business community, he was imprisoned in the fortress at Spandau for one year.
17. Frederick the Great visits a factory. Engraving by Adolph Menzel, 1856.
A more historiographically influential critique was that of HonoréGabriel Riquetti, Count Mirabeau, author of a widely discussed eight-volume treatise on the agricultural, economic and military organization of the Prussian monarchy. A passionate partisan of physiocratic free trade economics, Mirabeau found little to commend in the elaborate system of economic controls employed by the Prussian administration to sustain domestic productivity. There were, he declared, many ‘true and useful ways’ of encouraging the growth of industry, but these did not include the monopolies, import restrictions, and state subsidies that were the norm in the Kingdom of Prussia.76 Instead of allowing manufacturies to ‘establish themselves of their own accord’ on the basis of the capital naturally accumulated in agriculture and trade, Mirabeau argued, the king had wasted his resources on ill-advised investment schemes:
The King of Prussia recently gave six thousand écus for the establishment of a watch factory at Friedrichswalde. Such a small project was not worthy of this gift. It is easy to foresee that if this factory is not continually fed with further benefits, it will not sustain itself. Of all useless accoutrements, there is none more useless than a bad watch.77
The legacy of nearly half a century of Frederician rule, Mirabeau concluded, was a grim landscape of economic stagnation in which production chronically exceeded demand and the spirit of enterprise was stifled by regulation and monopoly.78
This was an overly negative assessment, whose ultimate purposes were polemical (Mirabeau’s real target was the French ancien régime, which he helped to overturn in June 1789). In defence of the Frederician experiment, one could point out that a number of the state projects launched during this era established the foundations for longer-term growth. The Silesian iron industry, for example, continued to flourish after Frederick’s death under the supervision of Count von Reden, Special Industrial Commissar for Silesia. Between 1780 and 1800, its workforce and output increased by 500 per cent. By the mid nineteenth century, Silesia possessed one of the most efficient metallurgical industries in continental Europe. Here was an example of successful state-induced long-term growth and development.79 The same point can be made for the state-sponsored wool industry established in the Luckenwalde district in the Mittelmark to the south of Berlin. The state may not in the first instance have created a congenial climate for free competition and entrepreneurship, but it did successfully substitute for the absence of a local entrepreneurial elite. No merchant, however wealthy or enterprising, would have seized upon the idea of settling artisans in an area such as Luckenwalde, where there was as yet no industry to speak of. The fructifying activity of the entrepreneurs could begin only at a later point, when a settlement, together with the necessary concentration of local resources and expertise, had already been established with the encouragement of the state. In other words, state-induced development and entrepreneurship were not mutually exclusive – they could be successive stages of the process of growth. As one nineteenth-century social and economic historian, Gustav Schmoller, put it: the regime of protectionism and state-induced growth ‘had to fall in order that the seeds it had sown could bloom under the sun of [nineteenth-century] industrial liberalism’.80
In any case, mid eighteenth-century Brandenburg-Prussia was not an economic wasteland in which the state was the only innovator and the only entrepreneur. The importance of the royal administration as the manager of large-scale manufacturies should not be exaggerated.81 In the Berlin-Potsdam residential city complex, the dominant centre of economic growth in the Prussian central provinces, only one in every fifty factories (Fabriquen) belonged to the state or to a public corporation. To be sure, these included some of the biggest concerns, such as the Lagerhaus founded by Frederick William I to supply the army, and the porcelain, gold and silver manufacturies. However, a number of these enterprises were not controlled directly by the state, but leased out to wealthy businessmen. The role of the state was less prominent in the western provinces, where there were major independent centres of metallurgy (in the county of Mark), silk manufacture (in and around Krefeld) and textiles (around the city of Bielefeld). In these areas, the dominant force in economic life was a confident mercantile and manufacturing bourgeoisie whose wealth derived not from state contracts but from regional trade, especially with the Netherlands. In this sense, the western territories were an ‘object lesson in the limits of state influence on economic developments’.82
Even in the central provinces of the Prussian conglomerate, growth in the state sector was dramatically outstripped by the expansion of private sector enterprise. Especially after the Seven Years War, the rapid growth of privately funded and managed middle-sized manufacturing enterprises (employing between fifty and ninety-nine workers) bore witness to the declining importance of government-steered production. Particularly striking was the growth of the cotton sector, which unlike those of wool and silk, received little governmental assistance. Although Berlin-Potsdam and Magdeburg were the only two production centres of supra-regional importance to compare with Hamburg, Leipzig or Frankfurt/Main, there were many lesser centres of production in the middle provinces of the kingdom. Even in quite small towns, where the chief source of income was agriculture, there could be substantial local concentrations of craft-based manufacturing activity. Stendal in the Altmark to the west of Berlin, for example, boasted no fewer than 109 master artisans in the textile sector. In many such locations, the second half of the eighteenth century saw considerable structural change, as individual workshops were gradually integrated into dispersed manufacturies. Even small craft towns could be important ‘islands of progress’ capable of laying the foundations of later industrial development.83
Overseeing this accelerated growth outside the state sector was a diverse entrepreneurial elite whose relationship with the government’s economic agencies was more complex than the mercantilist model allows. The decades after 1763 saw the rapid consolidation of a new economic elite of manufacturers, bankers, wholesalers and subcontractors. Although they remained closely tied to the old town oligarchies, their economic activities gradually dissolved the structures of the traditional corporate social order. These were not craven ‘subjects’ whose highest ambition was to capture a few crumbs from the table of the state enterprises, but independent entrepreneurs with a strong sense of their individual and collective interests. They frequently sought to influence the behaviour of the government, sometimes through open protest (such as during the depression of the 1760s, when there was collective protest against government trade restrictions) but more often through personal contacts. This could occur at many levels, from petitions to the monarch himself, to letters to senior central or provincial bureaucrats, to contacts with state agents in the locality, such as tax commissioners and factory inspectors (Gewerksassessoren) . The investigation into the alleged corruption of Privy Councillor Ursinus of the Fifth Department threw up abundant evidence of private and official contacts with the most respected merchants and manufacturers of Berlin – Wegely, Lange, Schmitz, Schütze, van Asten, Ephraim, Schickler. Such contacts between businessmen and officials were commonplace. We find evidence of them, for example, in the correspondence of Privy Finance Councillor Johann Rudolf Fäsch, Director of the Fifth Department after the departure of Marschall. In Frankfurt/Oder, local officials and businessmen even held regular conferences at which they debated the government’s measures to stimulate trade. In 1779, for example, a posse of cotton entrepreneurs – de Titre, Oehmigke, Ermeler, Sieburg, Wulff, Jüterbock and Simon – marched down to the Fifth Department to deliver a stiff protest against recent government measures.84
The state, for its part, was more open to influence from this sphere than Frederick’s famed contempt for merchants might suggest. The king counted at least a dozen renowned entrepreneurs and manufacturers among his closest personal advisers. The textile entrepreneur Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky, for example, and the Magdeburg merchant Christoph Gossler were sometimes asked for formal reports on matters of state policy, as were the powerful Krefeld silk manufacturers Johann and Friedrich von der Leyen, who were awarded the title ‘Royal Commercial Councillor’ (ko niglicher Kommerzienrat) in 1755 for their services to the king.
If the monarch himself and the officials of the central bureaucracy were open to influences from the business community, the same applied to an even greater degree to the local agents of the state in the towns. Many tax commissioners saw themselves less as the executor of the state’s will in the locality than as conduits for information and influence from the periphery to the centre. They were easily pressed into the service of local entrepreneurs – in 1768, for example, we find Tax Commissioner Canitz of Calbe on the river Saale demanding that trade restrictions with Saxony be lifted so that local wool manufacturers can sell their wares at the Leipzig trade fair. The candour (even brusqueness) of the reports filed by some provincial officials suggests that they saw their input, based on familiarity with local conditions, as a crucial corrective to the misconceptions of the central bureaucracy.85
7
Struggle for Mastery
On 16 December 1740, Frederick II of Prussia led an army of 27,000 men out of Brandenburg across the lightly defended frontier of Habsburg Silesia. Despite the wintry conditions, the Prussians swept through the province meeting only light resistance from Austrian forces. By the end of January, only six weeks later, virtually all of Silesia, including the capital Breslau, was in Frederick’s hands. The invasion was the most important single political action of Frederick’s life. It was a decision taken by the king alone, against the advice of his most senior diplomatic and military advisers.1 The acquisition of Silesia changed permanently the political balance within the Holy Roman Empire and thrust Prussia into a dangerous new world of great-power politics. Frederick was fully aware of the shock effect his assault would have on international opinion, but he could hardly have foreseen the European transformations that would unfold from that easy winter campaign.
‘FREDERICK THE UNIQUE’
It is worth pausing to reflect on the man who single-handedly launched the Silesian wars and remained the custodian of the Hohenzollern territories for forty-six years – nearly as long as his illustrious predecessor the Great Elector. The persona of this gifted and spirited monarch enthralled contemporaries and has fascinated historians since. Getting a sense of who the king was is no simple matter, however, for Frederick was enormously loquacious (his posthumously published oeuvres run to thirty volumes), but rarely self-revealing. His writing and speech reflected a quintessentially eighteenth-century esteem for esprit – the style was aphoristic, light and economical, the tone always detached: encyclopaedic, amused, ironic or even mocking. But behind the laboured gags of the satirical verses and the cool, reasoning prose of the historical memoirs and the political memoranda, the man himself remains elusive.
About the superiority of his intellect there can be no doubt. Throughout his life, Frederick devoured books: Fénelon, Descartes, Molière, Bayle, Boileau, Bossuet, Corneille, Racine, Voltaire, Locke, Wolff, Leibniz, Cicero, Caesar, Lucian, Horace, Gresset, Jean-Baptiste Rousseau, Montesquieu, Tacitus, Livy, Plutarch, Sallust, Lucretius, Cornelius Nepos and hundreds more. He was always reading new books, but he also regularly reread the texts that were most important to him. German literature was a cultural blind spot. In one of the eighteenth century’s funniest effusions of literary bile, Frederick, a grumpy old man of sixty-eight, denounced the German language as a ‘semi-barbarian’ idiom in which it was ‘physically impossible’, even for an author of genius, to achieve superior aesthetic effects. German writers, the king wrote, ‘take pleasure in a diffuse style, they pile parenthesis upon parenthesis, and often you don’t find until you reach the end of the page the verb on which the meaning of the entire sentence depends’.2
So visceral was Frederick’s need for the company and stimulation of books that he had a mobile ‘field library’fitted up for use during campaigns. Writing (always in French) was also important, not just as a means of communicating his thoughts to others, but also as a psychological refuge. It was always his aspiration to combine the daring and resilience of the man of action with the critical detachment of the philosophe. His coupling of the two species, encapsulated in the youthful self-description ‘roi philosophe’, meant that neither of his roles had an absolute claim over him: he passed as a philosopher among kings and a king among philosophers. His letters from the battlefield at the lowest points in his military fortunes pretend to the true stoic’s fatalism and immunity from care. The essays on practical and theoretical matters, conversely, breathe the confidence and authority of one who wields real power.
Frederick was also an accomplished musician. His preference for the flute was entirely in character, for this instrument more than any other was associated with the cultural prestige of France. The transverse flutes that Frederick played were a recent invention of the French instrument makers who had transformed the old cylindrical, six-holed flute into the subtle and chromatically versatile conically bored instrument of the baroque era. The most renowned players of the early eighteenth century were all French. French composers – Philidor, de la Barre, Dornel, Monteclaire – also dominated the flute repertoire. This instrument thus carried a strong note of that cultural superiority that Frederick and many of his German contemporaries associated with France. The king took his flute-playing seriously. His tutor, the virtuoso flautist and composer Quantz, was paid a salary of 2,000 thalers a year, which placed him on a par with some of the most senior civil servants in the kingdom – by contrast, Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach, a composer of infinitely greater historical significance who worked for Frederick as a keyboard player, was paid only a fraction of this sum.3 Frederick practised and performed on the flute incessantly, with a perfectionism verging on the obsessive. Even during campaigns, his tuneful warbling could be heard at evening across the Prussian encampments. He was also a gifted composer, though his works were competent and graceful rather than brilliant.
18. Johann Gottlieb Glume, Frederick the Great before the Seven Years War
The relationship between Frederick’s political writing and his practice as ruler was remarkably straightforward. At the centre of his thinking was the maintenance and extension of the state’s power. Notwithstanding its rather misleading title, Frederick’s famous early essay The Anti-Machiavel set out quite clearly his position on the permissibility of the pre-emptive strike and the ‘war of interest’, in which rights are in dispute, the prince’s cause is just and he is obliged to resort to force in order to prosecute the interests of his people.4 A clearer blueprint for the seizure of Silesia in 1740 and the Saxon invasion of 1756 could hardly be asked for. He was even more outspoken in the two Political Testaments (1752 and 1768) he penned for the private edification of his successor. The Second Testament spoke with remarkable sang froid about how ‘useful’ it would be for Prussia to absorb Saxony and Polish Prussia (the territory dividing East Prussia from Brandenburg and Eastern Pomerania), thus ‘rounding out’ its borders and rendering the eastern extremity of the kingdom defensible. There was no reference to the liberation of coreligionists or the defence of ancient right, just uninhibited fantasizing about the state’s expansion.5 It is here that Frederick comes closest to the ‘foreign-political nihilism’ of which one historian has accused him.6
Frederick was also a formidable and highly original historian. Taken as a whole, the History of the House of Brandenburg (completed in February 1748), the History of My Own Times (completed in a first draft in 1746), the History of the Seven Years War (completed in 1764) and his memoir on events during the decade between the Peace of Hubertusburg and the first Polish partition (completed in 1775) amount to the first comprehensive historical reflection on the evolution of the Prussian lands, despite a tendency to superficial judgements.7 So attractive and cogent are Frederick’s historical notes and memoirs that they have shaped perceptions of his reign – and those of his predecessors – ever since. In Frederick II, the sharp awareness of historical change that one senses in the political testaments of the Great Elector and Frederick William I is raised to the level of self-consciousness. Perhaps this was because the absence of a divine providence from Frederick’s universe made it impossible for him to embed himself and his work within a timeless order of truth and prophecy. Whereas his father Frederick William I closed his Political Testament of February 1722 with the pious wish that his son and his successors might prosper until the ‘end of the world’ with ‘the help of God through Jesus Christ’, the opening passage of Frederick’s Testament of 1752 confronted the contingent and fleeting character of all historical achievement: ‘I know that the moment of death destroys men and their projects and that everything in the cosmos is subject to the laws of change.’8
Throughout his life, Frederick displayed a remarkable disregard for the conventional pieties of his era. He was vehemently irreligious: in the Political Testament of 1768, he described Christianity as ‘an old metaphysical fiction, stuffed with miracles, contradictions and absurdities, which was spawned in the fevered imaginations of the Orientals and then spread to our Europe, where some fanatics espoused it, some intriguers pretended to be convinced by it and some imbeciles actually believed it.’9 He was also unusually relaxed on questions of sexual morality. Voltaire’s memoirs recall the case of a man who was sentenced to death for engaging in sexual intercourse with a she-donkey. The sentence was personally annulled by Frederick on the grounds that ‘in his lands one enjoyed freedom of both conscience and penis’.10 Whether or not this story is true (and Voltaire is not always to be trusted on such matters), it conveys an authentic sense of the libertinism that prevailed in Frederick’s milieu. Jules Offray de la Mettrie was a sometime star of Frederick’s court and author of the materialist treatise Man as Machine (l’Homme Machine) in which he expounded the view that man is merely a digestive tract with a sphincter at both ends. Mettrie found time during his sojourn in Berlin to write two essays on scurrilous themes: The Art of Orgasm (l’Art de jouir) and The Little Man with a Big Prick (Le Petit Homme è grande queue). Baculard d’Arnaud, another of Frederick’s French guests, was the author of a study on The Art of Fucking (l’Art de foutre); Frederick himself is believed to have written a verse (now sadly lost) exploring the pleasures of the orgasm.
Was Frederick homosexual? A contemporary mémoire secrète published pseudonymously in London alleged that the Prussian king presided over a court of catamites, enjoying sex with courtiers, stable hands and passing boys at regular intervals during the day. The thankless Voltaire – who had himself once professed his love for Frederick in openly erotic terms – later alleged in his memoirs that the king was in the habit after his lever of enjoying a quarter-hour of ‘schoolboy amusements’ with a chosen lackey or ‘young cadet’, though he added bitchily that ‘things didn’t go all the way’ because Frederick had never recovered from his father’s ill-treatment and was ‘unable to play the leading role’.11 German memoirists responded with dutiful counterblasts stressing the young Frederick’s vigorous heterosexuality. It is difficult to say which of these views comes closer to the truth. Voltaire was writing after his estrangement from the king with an eye to the lubricious tastes of the Paris reading public. The tales of early ‘mistresses’ all come from the world of court rumour, gossip and hearsay. Frederick certainly confided to Grumbkow, one of the most influential ministers at his father’s court, that he felt too little attracted to the female sex to be able to imagine marriage.12 It is impossible – and unnecessary – to reconstruct the king’s sexual history; he may well have abstained from sexual acts with anyone of either sex after his accession to the throne, and possibly even before.13 But if he did not do it, he certainly talked about it; the conversation of the inner court circle around him was peppered with homoerotic banter. Frederick’s satirical poem Le Palladion (1749), which was read out to great amusement at the king’s petits soupers, offered reflections on the pleasures of ‘sex from the left’ and painted a lurid scene in which Darget, one of the Potsdam favourites, was sodomized by a band of lecherous Jesuits.14
This was men-only, locker-room stuff and indeed one of the enduring features of Frederick’s narrower social milieu was its pungently masculine tone. In this sense, the Frederician court was an elaboration of the Tobacco College he had contemplated with such disgust during his father’s reign. The masculinization that had transformed court life after 1713 was not reversed, indeed in some respects it was reinforced. Only during the Rheinsberg years, when Frederick was still crown prince, were women integrated into the social life of his court. Clearly there was not much room within this constellation for a functioning heterosexual marriage. Whether the union between Frederick and his wife, Elisabeth of Brunswick-Bevern, was ever consummated is unclear. What is certain is that from the time of his accession to the throne, Frederick severed social relations with his wife, consigning her to a twilight zone in which she retained her formal rights and attributes as consort and occupied a modest residence of her own (on a very tight budget), but was not encouraged to seek contact with the king.
This was an unusual course of action: Frederick took none of the more obvious contemporary options – he did not divorce her, nor did he banish her from the country or replace her with mistresses. Instead he condemned her to a kind of suspended animation, in which she was scarcely more than a ‘representative automaton’.15 From 1745, she was persona non grata at Sans Souci; other women were invited to the king’s elegant summer refuge (mostly to Sunday lunch), but not his wife. During the twenty-two years from 1741 to 1762, Frederick was only twice present to celebrate her birthday. Although she continued to preside over what remained of the Berlin court, the horizons of her life gradually narrowed to the perimeter of her suburban residence at Schönhausen. In a letter written in 1747, when she was thirty-one years old, she talked of ‘peacefully waiting for death, when God will be pleased to take me from this world in which I have nothing more to do [… ].’16 Frederick’s correspondence with her was conducted for the most part in a tone of icy formality and there were occasions on which he treated her with a remarkable lack of feeling. Best known of these is the unforgettable greeting ‘Madame has grown fatter’, with which he saluted his wife, after years of separation, on his return from the wars in 1763.17
Whether all this gets us any further in the quest for the ‘real Frederick’ is a moot question. Frederick’s persona was fashioned around a rejection of authenticity as a virtue in its own right. To the injunction of his brutish father: ‘be an honest fellow, just be honest’, the teen-age Frederick had responded with a sly, foppish civility, striking the pose of the wry, dissembling, morally agnostic outsider. In a letter of 1734 to his former tutor, the Huguenot Duhan de Jandun, he compared himself to a mirror that, being obliged to reflect its surroundings, ‘does not dare to be what nature made it’.18 A tendency to efface himself as a subject, as an individual, runs like a red thread through his writings. It can be found in the affected stoicism of his wartime correspondence, in the sarcasm and pastiche with which he kept even close associates at a distance, and in his inclination, when reflecting on matters of political principle, to merge the person of the king into the abstract structure of the state. Even Frederick’s lust for work, which was immense and never-ending, could be construed as a flight from the introversion that idleness brings. The protective screen Frederick threw up against the cruel regime imposed by his father was never dismantled. Frederick remained the self-styled misanthrope, lamenting the turpitude of humanity and despairing of happiness in this life. In the meanwhile he continued, with astonishing energy, to consolidate his cultural capital. He endlessly practised and played his flute until his teeth fell out, leaving his embouchure in ruins. He read and reread the Roman classics (in French) and honed his French prose-writing skills, devouring the latest works of philosophy and recruiting new conversation partners to fill the places vacated by friends who had died or betrayed him by taking wives.
THREE SILESIAN WARS
Why did Frederick invade Silesia and why did he do so in 1740? A banal answer to this question would be: because he could. The international setting was highly favourable. In Russia, the death of the Tsarina Anna in October 1740 had paralysed the political executive, as court factions struggled to dominate the regency of the infant successor Ivan VI. Britain, though a friend of Austria, had been at war with Spain since 1739 and was thus unlikely to intervene. Frederick also calculated (correctly) that the French would be generally supportive. He possessed the means to carry it off. His father had left to him an army of some 80,000 men, rigorously trained and well supported and equipped, but untested in battle. Frederick had also inherited a substantial war chest of 8 million thalers in gold, bagged in hessian sacks and piled in the cellars of the royal palace in Berlin. By contrast, the Habsburg monarchy, having suffered a sequence of disastrous setbacks in the War of the Polish Succession (1733–8) and the Turkish war (1737–9), was close to exhaustion.
The new Habsburg monarch, Maria Theresa, was a woman. This was problematic, because the laws governing inheritance within the House of Habsburg did not provide for female succession. Foreseeing this difficulty, Emperor Charles VI, the father of three daughters, had invested much effort and money in securing domestic and international approval for the ‘Pragmatic Sanction’, a technical device that would allow the dynasty to bend the rules. By the time of his death, most of the key states (including Prussia) had signalled their acceptance of the Pragmatic Sanction. But it was doubtful that these undertakings would actually be honoured. Two German dynasties in particular, the Saxon and the Bavarian, had married their eldest sons to nieces of the Emperor in 1719 and 1722 respectively; they later argued that these compacts entitled them, in the absence of a male Habsburg heir, to parts of the monarchy’s hereditary lands. During the early 1720s, the Saxons and the Bavarians signed various treaties by which they promised to work together in making good these dubious claims. The Elector of Bavaria even went so far as to forge a sixteenth-century Austro-Bavarian marriage treaty that supposedly awarded most of the Austrian hereditary lands to Bavaria in the absence of a direct male line of succession. There were thus clear indications even before 1740 that trouble would break out when the Emperor died.
Prussia was among those German states that had ratified the Pragmatic Sanction, partly in order to expedite negotiations over the transfer of the Salzburg Protestants to the eastern borderlands of the Kingdom of Prussia in 1731–2. But relations between Prussia and the House of Austria had been deteriorating for some time. The Habsburgs had long regretted their support for Prussia’s acquisition of a royal crown in 1701, and from around 1705, when Emperor Joseph I came to the throne, they pursued a policy of containment that aimed at preventing any further consolidation of the Hohenzollern dynasty in Germany. Prussia and Austria fought on the same side, broadly speaking, during the War of the Spanish Succession, but the reports of the British envoys in Berlin reveal frequent tensions and resentments over issues ranging from the acknowledgement of titles to the deployment of coalition troops and delays in the payment of subsidies.19 Although Frederick William I (who acceded in 1713) was something of an imperial patriot who had no wish to contest the Emperor’s primacy, there was periodic friction over Protestant rights within the Empire and fury in Berlin over the Emperor’s willingness to have the complaints of the Estates of the Hohenzollern lands aired before the Imperial Aulic Council in Vienna, as if the King in Prussia were just a minor imperial potentate, a ‘Prince of Zipfel-Zerbst’, as Frederick William himself put it.
The breaking point for Frederick William I was the Emperor’s failure in 1738 to support the still outstanding Brandenburg claim to the Rhenish Duchy of Berg. Frederick William’s foreign policy was almost exclusively focused on securing the Berg title, and the Emperor had promised, as a quid pro quo for Berlin’s approval of the Pragmatic Sanction, to support Brandenburg against the other claimants in the region. In 1738, however, Austria broke this commitment and supported a rival claim. This came as a bitter blow to Frederick William, who is said to have pointed to his son, saying: ‘There is the man who will avenge me!’20 A shared rage over Austrian ‘betrayal’ did much to bridge the divide between father and son during the last years of the reign, and a secret treaty of April 1739, by which France acknowledged Brandenburg’s ‘ownership’ of the Duchy of Berg, foreshadowed the orientation away from Austria and towards France that would be a feature of his son’s early reign. In his ‘last address’ to his son, delivered when the old king was dying on 28 May 1740, Frederick William warned the crown prince that the House of Austria should not be trusted and would always strive to diminish the standing of Brandenburg-Prussia: ‘Vienna will never forsake this invariable maxim.’21
Why Silesia? There was an outstanding Hohenzollern territorial claim to various parts of the province, based on the Habsburgs’ earlier appropriation of the Hohenzollern fief of Jaägerndorf (1621), and the Silesian Piast territories of Liegnitz, Brieg and Wohlau (1675), to which the Hohenzollerns claimed the right of succession. Frederick himself made light of these moth-eaten titles and historians have generally followed him in this, seeing the legal briefs drawn up in support of the Silesian claim as a mere fig-leaf for an act of naked aggression. Whether they should be dismissed altogether is questionable, given the elephantine memory of the Hohenzollern dynasty – and indeed of early-modern European dynasties in general – for unfulfilled inheritance claims.22 But a more pressing reason for the choice of Silesia was simply that this was the only Habsburg province that shared a frontier with Brandenburg. It happened also to be very lightly defended – there were only 8,000 Austrian troops stationed in the province in 1740. It was a long, thumb-shaped territory that extended to the north-west from the borders of Habsburg Bohemia to the southern margin of the Neumark. Through its length ran the river Oder, whose stream rises in the mountains of Upper Silesia and meanders to the north-west, bisecting Brandenburg and entering the sea at Stettin in Pomerania. Silesia yielded more income in tax to Vienna than any other of the hereditary Austrian lands. It was one of the most densely industrialized areas of early modern German Europe, with a substantial textiles sector specializing in linen manufacture, and its annexation would bring to the Prussian lands an element of productive intensity that they had hitherto lacked.
Yet there is little evidence to suggest that economic factors weighed heavily in Frederick’s calculations – the habit of assessing the value of territories in terms of their productive potential had not yet established itself. Strategic considerations were more important. Of these the foremost was probably the apprehension that the Saxons, who also had claims to make against the Austrians, would themselves attempt to take the province, or part of it, if the King of Prussia did not act first. Like Britain and Hanover, Saxony and Poland were at this time in personal union, Elector Frederick Augustus II of Saxony doubling as King Augustus III of Poland. The lands of the Saxon dynasty thus lay on either side of Silesia and it seemed highly likely that the Saxons would attempt to close the gap in some way. Sure enough, when Charles VI died, the Saxons offered Maria Theresa their support in return for the cession of a land corridor across Silesia between Saxony and Poland. Had this project been realized, the Saxon monarchy would have controlled a vast swathe of contiguous territory completely enclosing Brandenburg to the south and the east. It might well have eclipsed Prussia permanently, with long-term consequences that are difficult to imagine.
Frederick’s behaviour around the time of the attack on Silesia suggests a spontaneity verging on recklessness. He acted with breathtaking speed. He appears to have reached his decision to invade within a few days – perhaps in one day – of receiving the news of Charles VI’s unexpected death.23 His contemporary utterances convey a tone of youthful machismo and a thirst for renown. ‘Depart for your appointment with glory!’, he called to officers of the Berlin regiment about to leave for Silesia. References to his ‘rendez-vous with fame’ and his desire to ‘see his name in the gazettes’ recur frequently in the correspondence.24 To this we should add the personal animus that Frederick had harboured against the House of Habsburg since their involvement in the crisis precipitated by his attempted flight in the summer of 1730. Frederick had experienced in the most intimate way the meaning of Brandenburg-Prussia’s subordinate position within the Empire, and though he bore his tribulations with an outward show of equanimity, a smouldering resentment of his lot made itself felt in his refusal to be reconciled to the marriage arranged for him – with Austrian approval – to Elisabeth of Brunswick-Bevern. The emphasis on emotional motivation may run against the grain of Frederick’s later historical chronicles, in which he presents himself as the hyper-rational executor of a bloodless raison d’état, but it is fully in accordance with his more fundamental beliefs about the motive forces behind historical change: ‘It is the lot of human affairs to be guided by the passions of men,’ he wrote in his History of the House of Brandenburg, ‘and reasons which were originally childish can ultimately lead to great upheavals.’25
Whatever the relative weight of the motives behind it, the invasion of Silesia committed Frederick to a long, hard struggle over the newly won province. The Austrians counter-attacked in the spring of 1741, but the momentum of their campaign was broken on 10 April by a Prussian victory at Mollwitz to the south-east of Breslau, which gave the signal for a general war of partition, known as the War of the Austrian Succession. By the end of May, France and Spain had pledged in the Treaty of Nymphenburg to support the Bavarian Elector Charles Albert’s candidacy for the imperial throne and his dubious claim to most of the Habsburg hereditary lands (France and Spain were to be awarded Belgium and Lombardy for their pains). The League of Nymphenburg eventually included not only France, Spain and Bavaria, but also Saxony, Savoy-Piedmont and Prussia. Had the plans hatched by this coalition been realized, Maria Theresa would ultimately have been left with only Hungary and Inner Austria. Hyena-like, the states of western Europe gathered for the kill, each warily watching the others.
Although the emergence of the Nymphenburg coalition served Frederick’s interests in 1741, his commitment to it was half-hearted. He did not wish to see Austria dismembered and he certainly had no desire to see Saxony or Bavaria aggrandized at Austria’s expense. After the spring campaign, his money was running out fast and he had no intention of being dragged into further adventures by a coalition whose objectives he did not share. In the summer of 1742, Frederick abandoned his coalition partners and signed a separate peace with Austria. Under the terms of the Treaty of Breslau and a supplementary agreement signed in Berlin, Brandenburg-Prussia agreed to abstain from further campaigning in return for formally acknowledged possession of Silesia.
During the following twenty-four months, Frederick stayed outside the fight, monitoring its progress and making various military improvements. In August 1744, when the balance tipped back in Austria’s favour and a renewed counter-offensive against Silesia seemed likely, he re-entered the fray, scoring two further impressive victories at Hohenfriedeberg (June 1745) and Soor (September 1745). In December 1745, following a further Prussian victory at Kesselsdorf, Frederick once again left the Nymphenburg allies in the lurch to sign a separate peace with Austria. Under the terms of the Peace of Dresden, he agreed to withdraw once again from the war in return for a renewed ratification of his possession of Silesia. Having won two Silesian wars (1740–42 and 1744–5), Prussia would remain a non-combatant throughout the remainder of the War of the Austrian Succession. The Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, signed in October 1748, formally ended the war and reconfirmed Prussian ownership of Silesia with an international guarantee signed by Britain and France.
Frederick had pulled off an extraordinary coup. For the first time, a lesser German principality had successfully challenged Habsburg primacy within the Empire to place itself on an equal footing with Vienna. In this, the army created by Frederick’s father played a crucial role. The Prussian victories of the first two Silesian wars were due above all to the discipline and striking power of Frederick William’s infantry. At the battle of Mollwitz (10 April 1741) in southern Silesia, for example, the Prussians initially lost control of the field after an Austrian cavalry charge against the Prussian right-flank cavalry. So great was the panic and confusion among the Prussian horsemen that Frederick was prevailed upon by his experienced commander General Kurt Christoph von Schwerin to flee the field – an incident that would often be retold and embellished by his enemies. But in the meanwhile, the infantry, packed in their lines between the two Prussian flanks, unaware that the king had left the field, moved forward in perfect order, ‘like moving walls’, according to an Austrian observer, using their coordinated weapon drill to concentrate firepower against the Austrian infantry lines and sweeping all before them. By evening, it was clear that the Prussians, despite heavy casualties, controlled the field.
This was hardly a triumph of resolute leadership, but it demonstrated the potency of the weapon fashioned by Frederick William I. The battle of Chotusitz on the Bohemian-Moravian border (17 May 1742) exhibited some analogous features: on this occasion the Prussian cavalry was worsted by the Austrian horse early on in the action; it was the infantry, deploying with rigour and flexibility on uneven terrain, that broke the Austrian lines with tightly focused enfilade fire. Frederick’s rather inept dispositions on the eve of the battle gave as yet little hint of the strategic talent for which he would later be celebrated. At Hohenfriedeberg, perhaps the most decisive of the battles fought during the Second Silesian War, Frederick was more securely in control of events and showed an impressive ability to tailor his plans to changing conditions on the field. Here too, the decisive strokes were delivered by the infantry, advancing three ranks deep towards the Austrian and Saxon lines, shoulder to shoulder with sword bayonets fixed, at the regulation speed of ninety paces a minute, slowing to seventy as they closed with the enemy – relentless, unstoppable.26
Frederick had opened hostilities in December 1740 with a spontaneous and unprovoked attack, and historians of the later twentieth century viewing these events through the lenses of two world wars have sometimes seen Frederick’s invasion as an unexampled act of criminal aggression.27 Yet there was nothing exceptional in the context of contemporary power politics about an attack of this kind on another’s territory – one need point only to the long history of French aggressions in Belgium and the western German lands, or the seizure of the island of Gibraltar by an Anglo-Dutch raiding force in 1704 during the War of the Spanish Succession, or, closer to home, to the bold partition plans of Saxony and Bavaria. One impressive feature of Frederick’s war planning was his capacity to stay focused on a specific, circumscribed objective (in this case the acquisition of Silesia) and not to be seduced by allies or good fortune into gambling for higher stakes. This helps to explain why Prussia spent fewer years at war during Frederick’s reign than any major European power.28
What amazed contemporaries about Frederick’s Silesian adventure was the combination of its speed and success with the apparent mismatch between the two opponents – Prussia, a third-rank player in the European system, and Austria, the leading dynasty of the Holy Roman Empire and an established member of the great-power club. Prussia’s achievement seemed all the more striking for the fact that it contrasted so sharply with the contemporary fortunes of Bavaria and Saxony. The Bavarians suffered a chain of defeats, in the course of which the Elector Charles Albert was forced to seek refuge outside his country. The Saxons fared little better; having found that there was nothing to gain through their collaboration with the League of Nymphenburg, they changed sides to fight with the Austrians in 1743, in time to stand against Prussia on the losing side at Hohenfriedeberg. This unimpressive record cast the Prussian success in sharp relief. In 1740, Prussia had been just one – and certainly not the wealthiest – of a group of German territorial states with the potential to transcend their status within the Holy Roman Empire. But by 1748, Prussia had pulled ahead, eclipsing its closest German rivals.
It was by no means clear, however, that Frederick would succeed in holding on to his booty. The taking of Silesia had created a new and potentially very dangerous situation. The Austrians absolutely refused to be reconciled to the loss of the monarchy’s richest province, and declined to sign the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, because it formalized Prussian possession of the stolen province. The creation of an anti-Prussian coalition capable of prising Silesia out of Frederick’s hands and thrusting Prussia back into the ranks of the lesser German territories now became the leitmotif of Habsburg policy. Russia could already be counted on: alarmed at Prussia’s unexpected military success, Tsaritsa Elisabeth and her chief minister, Chancellor Alexis P. Bestuzhev-Riumin, came to see Brandenburg-Prussia as a rival for influence in the eastern Baltic and a potential block to Russian westward expansion. In 1746, the Russians signed an alliance with Vienna; one of its secret clauses foresaw the partition of the Hohenzollern monarchy.29
So powerful was the Habsburg fixation with Silesia that it brought about a fundamental reorientation of Austrian foreign policy. In the spring of 1749, Maria Theresa convened a meeting of the Privy Conference (Geheime Konferenz) whose purpose was to sort out the implications of the Silesian disaster. Present at the meeting was a brilliant young minister, the 37-year-old Count Wenzel Anton von Kaunitz. Kaunitz argued for a fundamental policy rethink. Austria’s traditional dynastic ally was Britain and her traditional foe was France. But a detached look at the history of the British alliance, Kaunitz argued, showed that it had yielded little of real use to the Habsburg monarchy. Only the year before, the British had played an ignominious role in the negotiations at Aix-la-Chapelle, pressing the Austrians to accept its loss as irreversible and hurrying to guarantee Prussian possession of Silesia. The root of the problem, Kaunitz argued, lay in the fact that the geopolitical interests of a maritime power such as Britain and those of a continental power such as Austria were objectively too divergent to sustain an alliance. The interests of the monarchy thus demanded that Vienna abandon her unreliable British ally and sue instead for the friendship of France.
This was a radical stance in the Austrian setting, not only because it involved a transformation of the traditional alliance structure, but also because it was grounded in a new kind of reasoning framed not in terms of dynastic authority and tradition, but of the ‘natural interests’ of a state, as defined by its geopolitical position and the immediate security needs of its territory.30 Kaunitz was the only participant at the Privy Conference debate of 1749 to take this position; the others, all of whom were older than he, shrank from his extreme conclusions. Yet it was Kaunitz’s view that Maria Theresa chose to adopt, and he was duly sent off to work towards a French alliance as ambassador to the court at Versailles. In 1753 he was appointed state chancellor with responsibility for the Habsburg monarchy’s foreign policy. The Silesian shock thus dislodged Habsburg foreign policy from the web of assumptions in which it had traditionally been embedded.
The Seven Years War (1756–63) that followed happened because these Austrian and Russian calculations became entangled with the escalating global conflict between Britain and France. During 1755, there were skirmishes between British and French troops in the remote watery plains of the Ohio river valley. As London and Paris drifted back into open war, King George II of Britain looked to prevent Prussia, an ally of France, from falling upon Hanover, the king’s German homeland. Just as the French had used the Swedes to menace the Brandenburgers in Pomerania in the early 1670s, the British now offered to finance Russian troop and naval deployments along the borders of East Prussia. The details were set out in the Convention of St Petersburg, which was agreed (though not yet ratified) in September 1755.
Frederick II was deeply alarmed at this threat on his eastern frontier – he was well aware of Russian designs on East Prussia and always tended to overestimate Russian power. Desperate to alleviate the pressure on his eastern frontier, he entered into a curiously open-ended agreement with Britain, the Convention of Westminster of 16 January 1756. The British agreed to withdraw their offer of subsidies from the Russians and the two states decided to undertake joint defensive action in Germany in the event that France should attack Hanover. This was a hasty and ill-judged move on Frederick’s part. He did not take the trouble to consult his French allies, although he ought to have guessed that this unforeseen pact with France’s traditional enemy would infuriate the court at Versailles and drive the French into the arms of the Habsburgs. Frederick’s panic reflex of January 1756 exposed the weakness of a decision-making system that depended exclusively on the moods and perceptions of one man.
Prussia’s position now unravelled with perilous speed. The news of the Convention of Westminster sparked fury at the French court, and Louis XV responded by accepting the Austrian offer of a defensive alliance (the First Treaty of Versailles, 1 May 1756), under which each of the two parties was obliged to provide 24,000 troops to the other in the event of its coming under attack. The withdrawal of the British subsidy offer also enraged Elisabeth of Russia, who agreed in April 1756 to join in an anti-Prussian coalition. Over the next few months, it was the Russians who were the driving force towards war; while Maria Theresa took care to confine her preparations to relatively inconspicuous measures, the Russians made no effort to conceal their military build-up. Frederick now found himself encircled by a coalition of three powerful enemies whose joint offensive, he believed, would be launched in the spring of 1757. When the king demanded categorical assurances from Maria Theresa to the effect that she was not combining against him and had no intention of starting an offensive, her answers were ominously equivocal. Frederick now resolved to strike first, rather than waiting for his enemies to take the initiative. On 29 August 1756, Prussian troops invaded the Electorate of Saxony.
Here was another totally unexpected and profoundly shocking Prussian initiative, and the king was alone in deciding upon it. To a certain extent, the invasion was based upon a misapprehension of Saxon policy. Frederick believed (wrongly) that Saxony had joined the coalition against him and had his officers search the Saxon state papers (in vain) for documentary proof. But his action also served broader strategic objectives. In his Anti-Machiavel, published shortly after his accession to the throne, Frederick had delineated three types of ethically permissible war: the defensive war, the war to pursue just rights, and the ‘war of precaution’, in which a prince discovers that his enemies are preparing military action and decides to launch a pre-emptive strike so as not to forgo the advantages of opening hostilities on his own terms.31 The invasion of Saxony clearly fell into the third category. It allowed Frederick to start the war before his opponents had amassed the full strength of their forces. It provided him with control of a strategically sensitive area that would otherwise almost certainly have been used as a forward base – only eighty kilometres from Berlin – for enemy offensives. Saxony was also of considerable economic value; it was ruthlessly milked during the war, supplying more than one-third of Prussia’s entire military expenditure, though it is difficult to establish how heavily the issue of finance and resources weighed in Frederick’s calculations.
The invasion of Saxony might have been defensible in purely strategic terms, but its political impact was nothing short of disastrous. The anti-Prussian coalition acquired the momentum of self-righteous outrage. Russia had already put an offensive construction upon the alliance, but the French had not. They might well have remained neutral if Frederick had bided his time and become the victim of an unprovoked attack by either the Austrians or the Russians. Instead, France and Austria now contracted a Second Treaty of Versailles (1 May 1757) with an openly offensive character, in which France promised to supply 129,000 troops and 12 million livres each year until the recovery of Silesia had been accomplished (France was to be rewarded with control of Austrian Belgium). The Russians joined the offensive alliance with a further 80,000 troops (they planned to annex Polish Courland to Russia and compensate a Russian-controlled Poland with East Prussia); the territories of the Holy Roman Empire put forward an imperial army of 40,000 men; even the Swedes joined in, in the hope of grabbing back some or all of Pomerania.
This was not, in other words, just a war to decide the fate of Silesia. It was a war of partition, a war to decide the future of Prussia. Had the allies succeeded in their objectives, the Kingdom of Prussia would have ceased to exist. Shorn of Silesia, Pomerania and East Prussia, along with the lesser territories claimed by various members of the imperial contingent, the Hohenzollern composite state would have returned to its primordial condition: that of a landlocked north German Electorate. This would have been in precise accordance with the plans of the key Austrian policy-makers, whose objective was, as Kaunitz crisply put it, ‘la réduction de la Maison de Brandebourg à son état primitif de petite puissance très secondaire’.32
That Frederick should have prevailed against such a massive preponderance of forces appeared miraculous to contemporaries and still seems remarkable to us. How can it be explained? Clearly the Prussians enjoyed certain geographical advantages. Frederick’s control of Saxony gave him a compact territorial base (excluding East Prussia and the Westphalian principalities, of course) from which to launch operations. He was sheltered on the southern fringes of Silesia by the Sudeten mountains of northern Bohemia. His western flank was covered by the British-financed Army of Observation in Hanover; this sufficed to keep the French at bay for a time in that sector. For the four years 1758–61, Prussia received a hefty annual subsidy of £670,000(roughly 3,350,000 thalers) from the British government, a sufficient sum to cover about one-fifth of Prussian war expenditures. Frederick (who decided early on not to defend either East Prussia or the Westphalian territories) also enjoyed the advantage of internal defensive lines, while his enemies were operating (with the exception of Austria) at a great distance from home. Dispersed around the periphery of the main theatre of operations, the allies found it difficult to coordinate their movements effectively.
There was also, as in virtually all instances of coalition warfare, a problem of motivation and trust: Maria Theresa’s obsession with the destruction of the Prussian ‘monster’ was not shared by most of the other partners, who had more limited objectives. France’s concerns were focused primarily on the Atlantic conflict and French interest in the struggle with Prussia dwindled fast after the devastating Prussian victory at Rossbach (5 November 1757). Under a renegotiated Third Treaty of Versailles, signed in March 1759, the French cut their military and financial commitments to the coalition. As for the Swedes and the assorted German territories represented in the imperial army, they were in it for easy pickings and had little inclination to persevere with an exhausting war of attrition. The strongest link in the coalition was the Austro-Russian alliance, but here too there were problems. Neither wished to see the other benefit disproportionately from the conflict and, on at least one crucial occasion, this distrust translated into Austrian reluctance to commit forces to the consolidation of a Russian victory.
But this should not be taken to imply that Prussia’s ultimate success was in any sense a foregone conclusion. The Third Silesian War dragged on for seven years precisely because the issue proved so difficult to resolve militarily. There was no uninterrupted string of Prussian victories. This was a bitter struggle, in which success, for Prussia, meant surviving to fight another day. Many of the Prussian victories were narrowly won, costly in casualties and insufficiently decisive to shift the balance of forces engaged in the conflict definitively in Prussia’s favour. At the battle of Lobositz (1 October 1756), for example, the Prussians managed to gain tactical control of the battlefield, at heavy cost in men, but left the main body of the Austrian army unbroken. Much the same can be said of the battle of Liegnitz (15 August 1760) against the Austrians in Silesia; here Frederick accurately assessed enemy positions and moved quickly to strike at one of the two separated Austrian armies and disable it before the other could respond effectively. This initiative was successful, but left the Austrian forces in the area largely intact.
There were a number of battles in which Frederick’s intelligence and originality as a field commander were brilliantly in evidence. The single most impressive victory was at the battle of Rossbach (5 November 1757) against the French. Here 20,000 Prussians found themselves outnumbered two to one by a combined French-imperial force. As the French-imperials wheeled around the Prussian position, hoping to outflank them on their left, Frederick redeployed with impressive speed, despatching cavalry to sweep away the regiments of horse at the front of the allied advance and repositioning his infantry in a lethal scissors formation from which they could subject the French and imperial columns to heavy fire and attack. Prussian losses totalled 500 men to the enemy’s 10,000.
One of the central traits of Frederick’s battle-craft was a preference for oblique over frontal orders of attack. Rather than approach in parallel frontal array, Frederick tried where possible to twist his attacking lines so that one end, often reinforced by cavalry, cut into the enemy position before the other. The idea was to roll the enemy up along his own lines rather than assault him head on. It was a mode of manoeuvre that required especially skilled and steady infantry work, particularly where the terrain was uneven. In a number of battles, Prussian attacks from the flank using complex infantry deployments worked with devastating effect. At Prague (6 May 1757), for example, where Prussian and Austrian numbers were roughly matched, Frederick managed to wheel the Prussians around on to the right flank of the Austrians. When the latter redeployed in haste to meet his advance, local Prussian commanders recognized and exploited a gap in the ‘hinge’ between the old and the new positions and drove a salient through it, irreparably shattering the Austrian force. The classic example of the oblique marching order in action was the battle of Leuthen (5 December 1757), where the Prussians were outnumbered by the Austrians nearly two to one; here a Prussian feint attack gave the impression of a frontal approach while the mass of the Prussian infantry swept around to the south to scoop up the Austrian left wing. In this extraordinary set piece, the ‘moving walls’ of the Prussian infantry were flanked by coordinated artillery fire as the Prussian guns moved from firing position to firing position along the line of attack.
However, the very same tactics could also fail if they found the enemy prepared, were not supported by sufficient troop numbers or were based on a faulty understanding of the situation in the field. At Kolin (18 June 1757), for example, Frederick tried as usual to wheel around the Austrian right flank and roll the enemy up from the wing, but found that the Austrians, in anticipation of this, had extended their lines across his route of approach, committing him to a disastrous uphill frontal assault against heavily defended and numerically superior positions – here it was the Austrians who won the field, at a cost of 8,000 men to Prussia’s 14,000.33
19. Battle of Kunersdorf, 12 August 1759. Contemporary engraving.
In the battle of Zorndorf (25 August 1758) against the Russians, Frederick completely misread the Russian deployment and, wheeling around from the north to roll up the Russian left wing, found that the enemy was in fact facing him head-on; the fighting was savage and losses were very high – 13,000 Prussian and 18,000 Russian casualties. It is still unclear whether we should regard Zorndorf as a Prussian victory, a defeat or simply a brutal stalemate. Frederick’s next major encounter with the Russians exhibited some similar features. The battle of Kunersdorf (12 August 1759) opened promisingly with accurate Prussian artillery and infantry fire on the Russian right flank, but soon became a disaster as the Russians turned to construct a solid local front against the Prussian advance and the Prussian infantry got themselves jammed into a narrow depression where they were exposed to the Russian guns. Here again, Frederick showed a flawed awareness of how the battle was unfolding; the unevenness of the terrain made cavalry reconnaissance difficult and he seems to have failed to take adequate account of the poor quality of his intelligence. The cost was hair-raising: 19,000 Prussian casualties of which 6,000 were dead on the field.
Frederick was not, then, infallible as a military commander. Of the sixteen battles he fought during the Seven Years War, he won only eight (even if we give him the benefit of the doubt and count Zorndorf as a victory).34 Yet it is clear that in most respects he had the edge over his opponents. His isolation was also a kind of advantage – he had no allies to consult. By comparison with Russia, France and Austria, the Prussian military decision-making process was fantastically simple, since the commander-in-chief in the field was also the sovereign and (effectively) the foreign minister. There was no need for the kind of elaborate discussion that slowed the reflexes of the Habsburg monarchy. This advantage was reinforced by the king’s personal indefatigability, talent and daring, and by his readiness to recognize where mistakes had been made (including by himself). If one contemplates the course of the Third Silesian War as a whole, it is surprising how often Frederick succeeded in throwing his enemies on to the tactical defensive, how often it was he who defined the terms on which battle would be joined. This was partly due to the by now widely acknowledged superiority of Prussian drill training, which allowed the walls of blue uniforms to turn at will as if on invisible pivots, and to redeploy at twice the speed of most European armies at this time.35 With these assets Frederick combined the ability to keep a cool head at times of crisis. Nowhere was this more evident than after the catastrophe at Hochkirch (1758), where the king, drenched in the blood of his horse, which had been hit under him by a musket ball, commanded and oversaw a calm and effective withdrawal under fire from the killing ground to a safe defensive position, and thereby prevented the Austrians from driving home their advantage.
Frederick’s ability to keep recovering from defeats and inflicting new and painful blows on his enemies was not enough to win the war on its own, but it sufficed to keep Prussia above water for as long as it took for the allied coalition to fall apart. Once it became clear that Tsaritsa Elisabeth was terminally ill, Russia’s days in the coalition were numbered. Elisabeth’s death in 1762 led to the succession of Grand Duke Peter, an ardent admirer of Frederick, who lost no time in negotiating an alliance with him. Peter did not survive for long – he was thrust from the throne by his wife, Catherine II, and murdered shortly afterwards by one of her lovers. Catherine withdrew the offer of an alliance, but there was no resumption of the Austro-Russian compact. The Swedes, who had little hope of securing their objectives in Pomerania without great-power support, soon defected. After a string of shattering defeats in India and Canada, the French, too, lost interest in pursuing further a war whose objectives now seemed strangely irrelevant. The peace they signed with Britain at the Treaty of Paris (10 February 1763) left the Austrians high and dry. Their treasury was exhausted. At the Peace of Hubertusburg (15 February 1763), after seven years of bitter struggle and prodigious sacrifice in money and lives, Maria Theresa confirmed the status quo ante bellum. In return, Frederick promised that in the next imperial election, he would vote for her son, the future Joseph II.
20. Portrait of Frederick the Great by Johann Heinrich Christoph Franke (copy)
There is a tendency, when we reflect on the European wars of the mid eighteenth century, to visualize them as diagrams with rectangles and sweeping arrows, or as compact arrays of brightly painted soldiers on the green baize of the war-gamer’s table. When we focus on ‘moving walls’, ‘oblique marching orders’ and the ‘rolling up’ of enemy flanks it is easy to lose sight of the terror and confusion that reigned on most battlefields as soon as the serious fighting began. For the troops on an exposed front or flank, coming under fire meant maintaining formation and discipline while projectiles ranging from musket balls to canister shot and cannon balls scythed through closely packed rows of standing men. Opportunities to display individual dash and daring were limited – it was more a matter of mastering an overwhelming instinct to flee and take cover. Officers stood in especially exposed positions and were expected to display absolute calm before their men and each other. It was a question not just of personal bravado, but of the collective ethos of an emergent military-noble caste.
Ernst von Barsewisch, the son of a modest Junker landowner in the Altmark, had been educated at the Berlin Cadet School and later served as a Prussian officer in many of the battles of the Seven Years War. His memoirs, based on diary entries sketched while on campaign, capture the mixture of samurai fatalism and schoolboy camaraderie that could sometimes be observed among officers in action. At the battle of Hochkirch, Barsewisch happened to be positioned near the king on a section of the Prussian wing that came under Austrian attack. There was a thick hail of musket balls, most of which were aimed at the chests and faces of the standing men. Just next to the king, a Major von Haugwitz was shot through the arm and shortly afterwards another ball buried itself in the neck of the king’s horse. Not far from where Barsewisch was standing, Field Marshal von Keith (a favourite of the king’s) was torn from his horse by a shell and died on the spot. The next commander to fall was Prince William of Brunswick, brigadier of Barsewisch’s regiment, who was drilled through by a musket ball and fell dead to the ground. His terrified horse, an immaculate white stallion, galloped riderless back and forth between the lines for nearly half an hour. To help master their nerves, Barsewisch and the young noblemen around him engaged in light-hearted banter:
Early in the action I had had the honour that a musket ball had drilled through the peak of my hat at the front just above my head; not long afterwards, a second ball shot through the large upturned rim on the left side of the hat, so that it fell from my head. I said to the von Hertzbergs, who were standing not far from me: ‘Gentlemen, should I put this hat back on my head, if the Imperials want it so badly?’‘Yes, do,’ they said –‘the hat does you honour.’ The eldest von Hertzberg took his snuff box in his hand and said: ‘Gentlemen, take a pinch of courage!’ I stepped up to him, took a pinch and said: ‘Yes, courage is what we need.’ Von Unruh followed me and the brother of von Hertzberg, the youngest, took the last pinch. Just as the eldest von Hertzberg had taken his pinch of snuff from the box and was raising it to his nose, a musket ball came and flew straight into the top of his forehead. I was standing right beside him, I looked at him – he cried out ‘Lord Jesus’ – turned around and fell dead to the ground.36
It was through this collective sacrifice of its young men – note the presence of three von Hertzberg brothers on one section of the Prussian line! – that the Junker nobility earned its special place within the Frederician state.
The great majority of first-person battle narratives stem from officers, mostly of noble birth, but this should not be allowed to overshadow the phenomenal sacrifice of humbler men in the field. For every officer killed at the battle of Lobositz, more than eighty private soldiers were slain. In a letter to his family, the cavalryman Nikolaus Binn from Erxleben near Osterburg in the Altmark reported twelve deaths among the men from his home district, including an Andreas Garlip and a Nicolaus Garlip who must have been brothers or cousins, and added reassuringly: ‘all those who are not named as dead are in good health.’37 On 6 October, five days after the battle, Franz Reiss, a soldier of the Hülsen Regiment, described his arrival at the battlefield. As soon as he and his fellows had formed up in line, he wrote, they had come under heavy Austrian cannon fire:
So the battle began at six o’clock in the morning and dragged on amidst thundering and firing until four in the afternoon, and all the while I stood in such danger that I cannot thank God enough for [preserving] my health. In the very first cannon shots our Krumpholtz took a cannon ball through his head and the half of it was blown away, he was standing just beside me, and the brains and skull of Krumpholtz sprayed into my face and the gun was blown to pieces from my shoulder, but I, praise God, was uninjured. Now, dear wife, I cannot possibly describe what happened, for the shooting on both sides was so great, that no-one could hear a word of what anyone was saying, and we didn’t see and hear just a thousand bullets, but many thousands. But as we got into the afternoon, the enemy took flight and God gave us the victory. And as we came forward into the field, we saw men lying, not just one, but 3 or 4 lying on top of each other, some dead with their heads gone, others short of both legs, or their arms missing, in short, it was an amazing sight. Now, dear child, just think how we must have felt, we who had been led meekly to the slaughterhouse without the faintest inkling of what was to come.38
In the aftermath of an action the battlefield descended into chaos. To remain wounded on the field could be a miserable fate. In the nights that followed the battles of Zorndorf and Kunersdorf, the battlefield echoed with the shrieks of the Prussian wounded being killed by Cossack light troops of the Russian army. Even if they escaped deliberate brutality, wounded soldiers needed determination and good luck to survive. The Prussian army had a relatively large and well-organized surgical support service by the standards of the day, but in the disorder following an action (especially a lost one), the chances of finding one’s way in time to proper care might be very slim. The quality of treatment varied enormously from surgeon to surgeon and the facilities for handling infected wounds were very rudimentary.
After Leuthen, where a musket ball bored through his neck and lodged itself between his shoulder blades, Ernst von Barsewisch had the good fortune to run into a captured Austrian soldier who happened to be a Belgian graduate of the surgical school at the University of Lyon. Sadly, the Belgian no longer had his fine surgical tools to work with – his Prussian captor had snatched them as booty. Using the ‘very bad and blunt knife’ of a shoemaker, however, he was able to hack the ball out of Barsewisch’s back with ‘ten or twelve cuts’. Less fortunate was Barsewisch’s comrade Baron Gans Edler von Puttlitz, whose foot had been shattered by canister shot and had grown infected while he lay out in the cold untended for two nights and a day. The captured surgeon told him that an amputation of the leg below the knee was his only hope, but Puttlitz was too confused or too terrified to consent. The infection gradually spread and he died a few days later. Shortly before he died, he told Barsewisch that he was his parents’ only child and begged him to be sure that they were informed of the place of his burial. ‘This death affected me greatly,’ wrote Barsewisch, ‘because this was a young person of about seventeen years, and from his wound he had watched his death draw nearer, creeping slowly, hour by hour.’39
The Seven Years War, unlike the Thirty Years War of the previous century, was a ‘cabinet war’ fought by relatively disciplined bodies of troops equipped and supplied by their own governments through relatively sophisticated logistical organizations. It was thus not marked by the kind of pervasive anarchy and violence that had traumatized the populations of the German territories in the 1630s and 1640s. But this did not mean that the civilians in occupied areas or theatres of combat were not subject to arbitrary exactions, reprisals and even atrocities. Following their invasion of Pomerania, for example, the Swedes demanded from the neighbouring Uckermark in northern Brandenburg contributions totalling 200,000 thalers, double the amount of contribution raised annually by the king from that province.40 The Hohenzollern provinces of Westphalia were under French and Austrian occupation for much of the war; here the military authorities imposed an intricate system of contributions and extortions, often supported by the kidnapping of local notables as hostages.41 French soldiers from the defeat at Rossbach committed numerous excesses as they passed through Thuringia and Hessen. ‘If one wished to relate all of these disorders, one would never get to the end of it,’ one French general reported. ‘Over a forty-league compass, the ground was swarming with our soldiers: they pillaged, killed, raped, sacked, and committed every possible horror…’42
Particularly problematic were the ‘light troops’ used by most armies at this time. These units were recruited on a voluntary basis, operated semi-autonomously from the regular army, were not provided with the standard logistical support, and were expected to support themselves entirely through exactions and the acquisition of booty. The best-known examples of such troops were the Russian Cossacks and the exotically clothed Austrian ‘Panduren’, but the French too retained the services of such units. During the first phase of the Russian occupation of East Prussia, some 12,000 light troops made up of Cossacks and Kalmucks rampaged through the country with fire and sword: in the words of one contemporary, they ‘murdered or mangled unarmed and defenceless people, they hanged them from trees or cut off their noses or ears; others were hacked in pieces in the most cruel and disgusting manner…’43 During 1761, the Fischer Free Corps, a light unit in French service, broke into East Frisia – a small territory in the north-west of Germany that had fallen to Prussia in 1744 – and terrorized the civilian population with a week of rape, murder and other atrocities. The peasants, drawing on a local tradition of collective protest and resistance, responded with an uprising that reminded some contemporaries of the Peasants’ War of 1525. Only through the deployment of French regular army units stationed nearby could peace be restored in the area.44
Conflict at this level of intensity was the exception, not the rule, but in all provinces touched by the war, there were substantially raised mortalities, mainly through the so-called ‘camp epidemics’ that spread from overcrowded troop hospitals. In Kleve and Mark, the mortality for the war years amounted to 15 per cent of the population. In the city of Emmerich, situated on the bank of the Rhine in Kleve, 10 per cent of the townsfolk died during 1758 alone, mainly of diseases contracted from French soldiers fleeing out of north-west Germany. The demographic losses for nearly all of the Prussian lands were breathtaking: 45,000 in Silesia, 70,000 in Pomerania, 114,000 in the Neumark and the Kurmark combined, 90,000 in East Prussia. In all it seems that the war took the lives of about 400,000 Prussians, amounting to roughly 10 per cent of the population.
THE LEGACY OF HUBERTUSBURG
The diplomatic reorientation of 1756, in which the Austrians and the French overcame their ancestral antipathies to form a coalition, was so out of tune with the traditional pattern of inter-dynastic partnerships that it came to be known as the ‘diplomatic revolution’.45 And yet, as we have seen, the events of that year were in large part the working out of a process of change that had been set in train in December 1740. The Prussian invasion of Silesia was the real revolution. Without this powerful stimulus, the Austrians would not have abandoned their British allies to embrace their French enemies. From here unfolded a sequence of shocks and realignments that runs like a long fuse through the history of modern Europe.
In France, the alliance with Austria, and especially the abject defeat at Rossbach, played disastrously with the home public, raising doubts about the competence of the Bourbon regime that would persevere until the revolutionary crisis of the 1780s. ‘More than ever before,’ the French Foreign Minister Cardinal de Bernis observed in the spring of 1758, ‘our nation is outraged against the war. Our enemy, the king of Prussia, is loved to the point of distraction… but the court of Vienna is hated because it is seen as the bloodsucker of the state.’46 In the eyes of critical French contemporaries, the treaties with Austria of 1756 and 1757 were ‘the disgrace of Louis XV’, ‘monstrous in principle and disastrous for France in practice’. The defeats of this war, the Comte de Ségur recalled, ‘both wounded and aroused French national pride. From one end of the kingdom to the other, to oppose the Court became a point of honour.’ The first partition of Poland in 1772, in which Prussia, Austria and Russia joined in despoiling one of France’s traditional clients, deepened such apprehensions by demonstrating that the new alliance system operated to the benefit of Austria and the detriment of France.47 To make matters worse, the French monarchy chose to cement the Austrian alliance by marrying the future Louis XVI to the Habsburg princess Marie Antoinette in 1771. She later came to personify the political malaise of Bourbon absolutism in its terminal phase.48 In short, we can follow at least one strand of the crisis that culminated in the fall of the French monarchy back to the consequences of Frederick’s invasion of Silesia.
For Russia, too, the end of the Seven Years War inaugurated a new era. Russia did not achieve the territorial objective Elisabeth had set herself, but it emerged from the conflict with its reputation substantially enhanced. This was the first time Russia had played a sustained role in a major European conflict. Its place among the European great powers was confirmed in 1772, when Russia joined Austria and Prussia in the synchronized annexation of territories on the periphery of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and again in 1779, when Russia acted as guarantor of the Treaty of Teschen, signed between Prussia and Austria. The long journey towards full membership of the European concert of powers that had begun with the reign of Peter the Great was now complete.49
Russia’s combination of expansionism, power and invulnerability eclipsed the threat once posed by the Swedes and the Turks. Russia would henceforth play a crucial role in the power struggle within German Europe – in 1812–13,1848–50,1866, 1870–71,1914–17,1939–45,1945–89 and 1990, Russian interventions determined or helped to determine power-political outcomes in Germany. From this moment onwards, the history of Prussia and the history of Russia would remain intertwined. Frederick was no clairvoyant, but he could sense Russia’s arrival and was intuitively aware of its irreversibility. After the slaughter at Zorndorf and Kunersdorf, he could never contemplate the spectacle of Russian power without a frisson of dread. The Empire of Catherine II, he told his brother Prince Henry in 1769, was ‘a terrible power, which will make all Europe tremble’.50
In Austria, the protracted struggle with Prussia prompted, as we have seen, a radical rethinking of external policy. Kaunitz, the mastermind behind the realignment of 1748–56, remained in office until 1792, although his authority declined after the death of Joseph II in 1790. The Prussian challenge also had profound domestic implications. The raft of initiatives launched in 1749–56 and known as the First Theresian Reform focused exclusively on tightening the administration of the Habsburg monarchy in ways that would enable it to strike back effectively at Prussia. The central executive was substantially recast so as to centralize and simplify the most important administrative organs. A new tax regime was introduced, indirectly inspired by the new Prussian administration in Silesia, which was closely watched by the Austrians. The architect of these changes was Count Friedrich Wilhelm von Haugwitz, a convert to Catholicism who had fled his native Silesia when the Prussians invaded. No one was more determined to learn from the example set by Frederick II than Maria Theresa’s eldest son and successor, Joseph II. It was partly from contemplating Frederick’s achievement that Joseph derived his passionately held view that the Habsburg monarchy must become more like a unitary state if it were to master the challenges it faced in a competitive European environment. His attempts to bring this about in the 1780s would bring the Habsburg monarchy close to internal collapse.51
Prussia too bore the marks of the three wars it had fought for Silesia. The Prussian lands had been extensively devastated and the tasks of reconstruction consumed the lion’s share of domestic investment during the last two decades of Frederick’s reign. The population of deserted areas and the draining of marshes for new arable land and pasture remained a high priority. In largely agrarian Polish-speaking Masuria, for example, colonists were lured in from Württemberg, the Palatinate and Hessen-Nassau to live and work in a host of new settlements: Lipniak (1779), Czayken (1781), Powalczyn (1782), Wessolowen (1783), Ittowken (1785) and Schodmak (1786). These settlements advanced in parallel with the construction of an extensive canal network designed to drain the waterlands of southern Masuria, hitherto one of the most isolated and underdeveloped regions of the kingdom. The excess water was drawn away into the rivers Omulef and Waldpusch and new villages sprang up on what had once been a vast impassable marsh.52
It was above all in the aftermath of 1763 that Frederick began to show an expanded sense of the state’s social obligations – especially to those who had risked life and limb in the service of his armies. ‘A soldier who sacrifices for the general good his limbs, his health, his strength and his life,’ Frederick declared in 1768, ‘has a right to claim benefits from those for whom he risked everything.’ An institute was established in Berlin to house and care for 600 war invalids and a fund was set up in the war chest from which payments were made to poverty-stricken soldiers who had returned to their rural homes. Low-wage jobs with the excise, customs and the tobacco monopoly and other minor government-paid posts were reserved for soldiers who had fallen on hard times.53 Perhaps the most dramatic expression of the king’s heightened willingness to use the apparatus of the state for the purposes of social provision in the broadest sense was the intensified use of the grain excise and magazine system to counter the effects of food shortages, price rises and famines. In 1766, for example, Frederick suspended the excise on grains in order to ease the flow of cheap imports into Prussia; three years later the excise was reintroduced, but only for wheat, so that the burden of the bread tax fell exclusively on the better-off consumers who chose to purchase white bread. The high point of Prussia’s post-war food policy came in the winters of 1771 and 1772, when the administration kept a Europe-wide famine at bay through the controlled release of large amounts of grain from the magazine stocks. The needs of the civilian population were allowed to override the military imperatives for which the magazine system had originally been fashioned. We can thus speak of these massive subsidies in kind as an exercise in social welfare policy.54
The war also slowed the pace of administrative integration. In the early years of his reign, Frederick had furthered this process through the creation of new administrative organs such as the Fifth Department, responsible for industrial policy throughout the territories, or the Sixth Department for Military Affairs, another authority with all-Prussian responsibility.55 Yet the momentum of integration was not maintained after 1763, mainly because the experience of war had taught Frederick that he would never be able to defend his peripheral possessions against attack – it was characteristic that he should allow this geostrategic consideration to determine his economic priorities in peacetime. East Prussia was thus never fully integrated into the grain magazine system, and after the Seven Years War grain transfers from East Prussia to the core provinces were gradually scaled down to make way for cheaper Polish imports.56 The effort to integrate the western provinces into the fiscal structure of the core provinces also flagged from 1766, when the project of a unitary excise regime was abandoned and the grip of Berlin on the local administrations loosened tangibly thereafter.57 It is worth emphasizing these retardatory effects, since it is often assumed that war was the crucial driver of state-building in the Prussian lands.
Frederick had greatly increased the international standing of his kingdom through the acquisition of Silesia, yet it would be wrong to presume that this imbued him with confidence and a sense of strength. Indeed, quite the opposite was the case. Frederick remained acutely aware of the fragility of his achievement. In the Political Testament of 1768, he observed that the European continental ‘system’ comprised only ‘four great powers, which overshadow all the others’; Prussia was not among them.58 In 1776, after a spell of serious illness, the king became preoccupied with the idea that the state he had worked so hard to consolidate would disintegrate after his death.59 Frederick recognized that there was a fundamental mismatch between Prussia’s international reputation and its meagre domestic resources.60 There was thus, in his eyes, no excuse for complacency. Prussia stood in desperate need of measures to compensate for its power-political weakness. The years after 1763 thus witnessed, as we have seen, a programme of intensified domestic reconstruction. In the diplomatic sphere, Frederick’s first priority was to neutralize the threat from Catherine the Great’s expanding Russia. In keeping with his own doctrine that a prince should always ally himself with the power best placed to strike at him, Frederick focused his efforts on securing a non-aggression pact with Russia. The high point of this diplomacy was the Prussian-Russian alliance of 1764, which cancelled at one stroke the threat from Russia and the danger of an Austrian revanche.61
Since alliances are flimsy things whose duration depends upon the good will of individuals – the treaty of 1764, for example, collapsed in 1781 with the fall from power of the Russian Foreign Minister Nikita Panin – Frederick’s ultimate security was still the deterrent effect of his army. Prussia remained heavily armed after the Peace of Hubertusburg. In 1786, it was the thirteenth largest European state in population and the tenth largest in area, yet boasted the third largest army. With a population of 5.8 million, Prussia sustained an army of 195,000. In other words, there was a soldier for every twenty-nine subjects. The size of the army, expressed as a percentage of the total population, was thus 3.38 per cent, a figure that compares with the highly militarized states of the Soviet bloc during the Cold War (the figure for the German Democratic Republic in 1980, for example, was 3. 9 per cent). It was the size of this army that moved Georg Heinrich Berenhorst, an adjutant to Frederick II during the Seven Years War, to make the memorable observation that ‘the Prussian monarchy is not a country which has an army, but an army which has a country, in which – as it were – it is just stationed.’62
Yet the percentage figure is somewhat misleading, since only 81,000 of these soldiers were native-born Prussians. Expressed as a percentage of total population this yields a figure of only 1. 42 per cent, which is comparable with the western European states of the late twentieth century (the figure for the German Federal Republic in 1980, for example, was 1. 3 per cent). Prussia was thus a highly militarized state (i.e. one in which the military consumed the lion’s share of resources), but not necessarily a highly militarized society. There was no universal conscription. Peacetime training was still short and perfunctory by present-day standards, the social structure of the army still porous. The hiving off of the military into barracks, where troops could be concentrated and indoctrinated over years of training, was still in the distant future.
And what of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation? Observing the progress of the Seven Years War, the Danish minister Johann Hartwig Count Bernstorff noted that the issue at stake in this great conflict was not simply the ownership of a province here or there, but the question of whether the Holy Roman Empire should have one head, or two.63 We have seen that the relationship between Brandenburg and Austria had always been troubled by intermittent tension. As Brandenburg began to operate with a degree of autonomy within imperial politics, the potential for conflict grew. Yet for a long line of successive Electors, the pre-eminence of the Emperor and, by extension, of the House of Habsburg, was beyond question. With the invasion of 1740, all this changed. The annexation of Silesia provided Prussia not only with money, produce and subjects, but also with a broad corridor of land extending from the Brandenburg heartland straight to the margins of Habsburg Bohemia, Moravia and the Austrian hereditary lands. It was a dagger poised over the heart of the Habsburg monarchy. (This would prove decisive in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, when two of the four Prussian army groups entered Bohemia from assembly points in Silesia to crush the Austrian army at Königgraätz.) ‘Never will Austria get over the pain of Silesia’s loss,’ Frederick wrote in his Political Testament of 1752. ‘Never will it forget that it must now share its authority in Germany with us.’64
For the first time, the political life of the Empire began to orient itself around a bipolar balance of power. The era of Austro-Prussian ‘dualism’ had begun. Henceforth, Prussian foreign policy would focus first and foremost on safeguarding its place in the new order and containing Vienna’s efforts to redress the balance in its own favour. The most prominent example of such power-political sparring was the conflict that broke out over the Bavarian succession in 1778. In December 1777, the Bavarian Elector Maximilian III Joseph died, leaving no direct heirs. His successor, Charles Theodore, agreed with Vienna to exchange his prospective Bavarian inheritance for the Austrian Netherlands (Belgium), and a small contingent of Austrian troops entered Bavaria in mid-January 1778. Prussia’s first response was to demand territorial compensation – in the form of inheritance rights to the Franconian duchies of Ansbach and Bayreuth – for Austria’s acquisition of Bavaria. But Kaunitz was having none of it and refused to heed Berlin’s threats of armed intervention.
In the summer of 1778, Frederick decided to take action and entered Bohemia, aged sixty-six, at the head of a Prussian army. He now claimed to be acting on behalf of a rival heir to Bavaria, Duke Charles of Zweibrücken. In northern Bohemia Frederick found his progress blocked by a large and well-managed Austrian force. There followed long months of manoeuvring without a serious engagement, in increasingly cold and wet conditions. Frederick was eventually forced to winter his troops in the Sudeten mountains. In withering cold, Austrian and Prussian foraging parties skirmished over patches of frozen potatoes. Although the ‘Potato War’ produced no decisive engagement, Maria Theresa was keen to bring it to a swift end, even if this meant making concessions. Under the terms of the Treaty of Teschen (13 May 1779), negotiated through Russian and French mediation, she agreed not only to relinquish all of Bavaria, but also to accept Prussia’s eventual succession to the duchies of Ansbach and Bayreuth. The episode revealed the extent of Austrian unwillingness to stand alone against Frederick, a symptom of the enduring trauma inflicted by the Silesian wars and a mark of the respect in which his armed forces were now held. Equally significant was the response of the other German states. Many of these sided with Prussia, seeing Frederick as the defender of the Empire’s integrity against a predatory power play by the House of Habsburg. In 1785, when Joseph made a second attempt to trade the Austrian Netherlands for Bavaria, Frederick emerged once again as the defender of the Empire against the designs of the Emperor. In the summer of that year, he joined with Saxony and Hanover and a handful of lesser territories in a League of Princes (Fürstenbund) whose objective was to defend the Empire against the designs of the Emperor. Within eighteen months, the league counted eighteen members, including the Catholic Archbishop of Mainz, vice-chancellor of the Holy Roman Empire and traditionally a Vienna loyalist.65
The poacher had become the gamekeeper. It was a role that Frederick learned to play with great panache. Nowhere is this more evident than in his exploitation of the complex confessional machinery of the Empire. The balance between the Catholic and Protestant camps within the Empire remained a live issue in the mid and later eighteenth century. In the reigns of the Great Elector, Frederick III/I and Frederick William I, Prussia had gradually emerged as a champion of the Protestant cause within the Empire. Although his personal interest in confessional squabbles was minimal, Frederick II was an astute executor of this tradition, successfully intervening, for example, in support of the Protestant Estates in territories whose ruling houses had converted to Catholicism (there were thirty-one such conversions between 1648 and 1769). In Hessen-Kassel (1749), Württemberg (1752), Baden-Baden (1765) and Baden-Durlach (1765), Frederick became a co-signatory and guarantor of contracts securing the rights of Protestant Estates against Catholic-convert monarchs. In such cases, he acted, with the enthusiastic support of the Protestant caucus of the imperial diet, as the supposed champion and enforcer of the rights enshrined in the Peace of Westphalia.
What better way for a Protestant power like Prussia to use the structures of the Empire to its own advantage than to define itself as the protector of all Protestants in the German territories? Such a posture vindicated the Protestant view of the Empire, namely that it was not a form of Christian universal monarchy, but rather a power-sharing arrangement between two separate confessional parties who were obliged to practise solidarity and self-help. At the same time, it undermined the standing of the Habsburg Emperor, who was in theory supposed to be the guarantor of the rights of all imperial subjects adhering to a tolerated confession. The Catholic Emperor in Vienna now faced a Protestant anti-emperor in Berlin.66
The Seven Years War marked a high point in the confessional polarization of the Empire. By allying with France and continuing to discriminate against her Protestant subjects, Maria Theresa swelled the sails of Frederick’s pretensions. So did her husband, Emperor Francis Stephen I, who unwittingly played the Prussians’ game, repeatedly urging the Catholic princes to take united action against the ‘ligue protestante’ and thereby further accelerating the bifurcation of the Empire into two confessional warring parties. Enormous use was made on both sides of printed propaganda with a confessional bent. Prussian wartime propaganda consistently played up the confessional element in the conflict, arguing that the Habsburg court, in allying with Catholic France, was attempting to inflict a new war of religion on the Holy Roman Empire. In the face of this threat, Prussia represented the only hope for the integrity of the constitutional order established in 1648, indeed its interests were identical with those of ‘Germany’ itself. Prussian propaganda thus played on the traditional strengths of Hohenzollern confessional policy, pushing Prussia’s claim to represent a larger ‘Protestant interest’. What was perhaps less familiar was the tendency to equate this community of interest with the German fatherland tout court, an argument that anticipated in some points the idea of a Prussian-and Protestant-dominated ‘lesser Germany’ that would come to the fore during the dualist struggles of the nineteenth century.67 These efforts yielded results. A French envoy observed at the end of the Seven Years War that the Peace of Hubertusburg found the Prussians in a stronger position at the imperial diet than ever before, because the Prussians had succeeded in placing themselves at the head of a largely Protestant anti-imperial (for which read anti-Austrian) party in the diet.68
PATRIOTS
On 11 December 1757, Karl Wilhelm Ramler attended a service of thanksgiving in the Cathedral of Berlin for the recent Prussian victory at Rossbach. Returning to his apartments, he dashed off a letter to the poet Johann Wilhelm Gleim:
My dearest friend, [… ] I have just come out from hearing the victory sermon of our incomparable [Court Chaplain] Sack. Almost all eyes were weeping for love, for gratitude. [… ] If you would like to read some of our victory sermons, I can send them to you. The one on the victory at Prague and the one he gave today are without doubt the best that Mr Sack has held. Our young men have not stopped firing off victory shots and there is shooting all around me as I write these lines. Our merchants have produced every sort of silk ribbon in honour of both victories and we have festooned our vests, hats and swords with them.69
The upsurge of patriotic sentiment in the Prussian lands during the Seven Years War is one of the most remarkable features of the conflict. Today it seems natural to assume that wars will reinforce patriotic allegiances, but this had not always been the case in Prussia. The devastating conflicts of the Thirty Years War had rather the opposite effect. In the 1630s, the Elector’s subjects did not for the most part identify with him or the territorial composite over which he reigned. Indeed, many felt stronger ties of sympathy with Brandenburg’s Lutheran Swedish enemies than with the Calvinist Elector in Berlin. The Brandenburg army of the later 1630s was hated and feared almost as vividly as the occupying forces of the enemy. Even after the notable victory of the Great Elector against the Swedes at Fehrbellin in 1675, there was little sign of popular enthusiasm for Brandenburg’s cause, or of popular identification with the struggles of its head of state. The exalted sense of history in the making that attended the events at Fehrbellin remained confined for the most part to a tiny court-centred elite. Nor was there much popular interest in Prussia’s contribution to the Wars of the Spanish Succession (1701–14); these were complex coalition campaigns fought for arcane political objectives in which Prussian troops served far from home.
By contrast, the defeats and victories of the Prussian armies in the Seven Years War generated a widespread sense of solidarity with the objectives and person of the monarch. Johann Wilhelm Archenholtz, an officer who had served in the Prussian army for the greater part of the war and later wrote an epic narrative of its course, recalled the wave of enthusiasm that had animated his fellow Prussians during the darkest years of the conflict. Prussian subjects, he wrote, ‘looked upon the king’s ruin as their own’ and ‘took part in the fame of his great deeds’. The Estates of Pomerania had come together of their own accord to raise 5,000 men for the king’s service; their example was emulated in Brandenburg, Magdeburg and Halberstadt. ‘This war,’ Archenholtz concluded, ‘generated a love of fatherland that had until then been unknown in the German lands.’70
The churches played a crucial role in stirring public enthusiasm for the wartime exploits of the monarch, encouraging the faithful to see Frederick as the instrument of a divine providence. After the – in fact rather marginal – Prussian victory at the battle of Prague in 1757, Court Chaplain Sack delivered a thundering sermon from the pulpit of Berlin Cathedral:
The king has won a victory and lives! Give honour to our God! [… ] For what would all our victories and conquests be worth, if we had already lost our father? But the providence that protects us was once again his guard and an angel of God shielded him in the hour of greatest danger from all the darts fired down on him by death.71
Another preacher celebrating the victory declared that God himself had chosen to distinguish Prussia above all lands and had chosen the Prussians as ‘his particular people’, ‘so that we may walk before him in the light as his chosen people’.72 The impact of such performances reverberated far beyond the congregations who heard them. Sack’s sermons in particular appeared in various printed editions and were widely reread at private gatherings across the central provinces of the Prussian lands.73
These efforts to mobilize the population from the pulpit were supplemented by agitation from Prussian literary patriots. There was a striking contrast here: in 1742, Prussia’s acquisition of most of Silesia in the Peace of Breslau was greeted by the publication of a small number of Prussian panegyrical texts. Composed in Latin and published in expensive folio or quarto editions, these were clearly intended for a circumscribed and highly educated audience. By the 1750s, however, propagandist scribes and freelance patriots were churning out large numbers of texts in cheap, German-language octavo editions.74 One highly influential example was the tract On Death for the Fatherland, published in 1761 at the nadir of Prussia’s military fortunes by Thomas Abbt, a professor of philosophy at the University of Frankfurt/Oder. Abbt’s lively and accessible essay argued that the classical values of patriotism, conventionally associated with the ancient republics, were actually better suited to monarchical states, where the monarch personified the abstract power of the state and provided a focus for the loyalty and sacrifice of his subjects. In a ‘well-established’ monarchy, Abbt suggested, the attachment of the subject to the homeland was reinforced by a love for the person of the monarch, a love so intense that it abolished fear and sanctified death in battle.
[When I behold the king surrounded by his brave soldiers, living and dead,] I am overcome with the thought that it is noble to die fighting for one’s fatherland. Now this new beauty that I am reaching for comes more sharply into focus: it delights me; I hasten to take possession of it, tear myself away from anything that could hold me back in an effeminate tranquillity; I do not hear the call of my relatives, but only that of the fatherland, not the din of the fearful weapons, but only the thanks that the fatherland sends me. I join the others who form a wall around the defenceless [king]. Perhaps I will be torn down, satisfied that I have given another the chance to take my place. I follow the principle that the part must, when necessary, be lost in order to preserve the whole.75
Death in battle was also an important theme for Christian Ewald von Kleist, a poet, dramatist and melancholic who also served as an officer in the Prussian army. In 1757 he composed a poem in the form of an inscription for the grave of Major von Blumenthal, a friend who was killed during a skirmish with Austrian troops near the town of Ostritz in Upper Lusatia. His verses for the fallen major acquired a certain poignancy in retrospect, because they seemed to foretell Kleist’s own death only eighteen months later as a result of a wound received at the battle of Kunersdorf:
Death for the fatherland is worthy
Of eternal veneration!
And how gladly will I die
This noble death –
When my fate summons me.76
Kleist subsequently became an early prototype of the fallen patriot poet – his poetry and his death merged to become part of the same oeuvre. The verses bestowed unique meaning upon the death by transforming it into a voluntary and conscious act, while the death wove a glimmering halo of sacrifice around the writings and the narrative of his life.
Among the most vociferous of the patriot publicists was the Halberstadt poet and dramatist Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim. Gleim followed the campaigns of the Prussian armies with passionate interest, relying on reports sent to him from the field by his old friend Kleist. Before the outbreak of war, Gleim was best known as the author of esoteric, classically inspired poems on the themes of love, wine and the pleasures of sociability, but after 1756 he became a military balladeer and cheerleader for the Prussian troops in the field. His Prussian War Songs in the Campaigns of 1756 and 1757 by a Grenadier, published in 1758 with a supportive foreword by the dramatist Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, represented an innovative attempt to achieve immediacy and emotional impact by adapting the idiom and tone of the marching song. Gleim evoked the movement and confusion of battle; his imaginary protagonist, the Prussian grenadier, provided him with a hinge on which to swivel the perspective of the battle narrative – the grenadier looks to his commander, then to the flag, then to the king, then to his fellow soldiers, then to the enemy. The result was a succession of scenes delivered with a disorienting immediacy, as if through a hand-held camera. This technique seems hackneyed to us, but to contemporaries it was fresh and arresting. It took the reader into the theatre of battle in a way that was new for the Prussian reading public.
The impact of this kind of patriotic literary production was broader than one might imagine. Abbt’s On Death for the Fatherland quickly sold out in its first edition and appears to have had a powerful mobilizing effect upon readers. Johann Georg Scheffner, a former volunteer who served in the years 1761–3, later recalled that as young men he and his friends in his native city of Königsberg had walked with copies of Abbt’s tract in their pockets to the recruitment offices of the Prussian army.77 In a novel published over a decade after the war, the Berlin publicist Friedrich Nicolai described the wife of a pastor – the main protagonist – who had fallen under the spell of Abbt’s rhetoric and demanded that her husband preach the gospel of patriotic sacrifice from his pulpit.78 Gleim’s ‘Grenadier Songs’ sold out in individual editions and were subsequently reprinted as an anthology.
For the first time, there was widespread interest in the contours of specific battles, not only among academically trained literati, but also within the artisan classes of the towns. The Berlin master baker Johann Friedrich Heyde is a case in point: his diary interspersed notes on the price of rye and other grains (a matter of existential interest for a master baker) with often detailed descriptions of the movements of the Prussian army and of its deployments in key battles. Heyde’s involvement in these often distant events is testimony not only to the expansion of patriotic commitments, but also to the rapid popularization of military knowledge. For Heyde there was also a personal dimension; like many Prussian subjects, he had sons serving in the field. The symbiotic relationship between the Prussian garrisons and the towns in which they were stationed and the deep roots that the canton system had put down within the villages ensured a wider and deeper form of sympathetic engagement with the Prussian military enterprise than had ever been witnessed in the Hohenzollern lands before.79
In the western provinces, too, there were expressions of sentimental attachment to Prussia, or at least to its ruling dynasty. In Kleve and Mark, for example, there were many who provoked the Austrian occupation authorities by demonstratively wearing black to mark the death of Frederick’s brother, August William, heir to the Prussian throne, in 1758. In 1761 there were newspaper reports of a ‘patriotic soirée’ on the occasion of the king’s name day, but the Austrians never succeeded in finding out where it had been held. These manifestations of solidarity with the dynasty were confined to an elite consisting of officials, academics and Protestant clergy, but patriotic images and messages were also transmitted through more popular media. The most striking example must be the famous tobacco tins manufactured for the mass market in Iserlohn (Kleve) during the war. These enamelled containers, decorated with images depicting the victories of the Prussian and allied armies or idealized portraits of the Hohenzollern king and his generals, were enormously popular, not only in the Hohenzollern territories, but across north-western Germany and the Protestant Netherlands. In silk-producing Krefeld, the manufacturies churned out silken ‘long-live the-king sashes’ (Vivatbaänder) bearing patriotic slogans and emblems.80 Patriotism was good business.
Prussian patriotism was a complex, polyvalent phenomenon that expressed much more than a straightforward love for homeland. It reflected a contemporary esteem for extreme affective states – this was, after all, an age of the sentimental, in which a capacity for empathetic emotional response was regarded as a mark of superior character. Tied in with the patriot wave was also the idea that love of fatherland might form the basis for a new kind of political community. As Thomas Abbt argued in his tract on death for the fatherland, patriotism was a force that could overcome the boundaries between the different estates of society. ‘Seen from this perspective, the difference between peasant, burgher, soldier and nobleman disappears. For every burgher is a soldier, every soldier a burgher and every nobleman a burgher and a soldier…’81 In this sense, patriotism expressed a yearning for that ‘universal society of burghers’ that would become the political ideal of generations of nineteenth-century liberals. There was also much enthusiasm for the idea that the bond honoured by the patriot was founded not on compulsion or obligation, but on an entirely voluntary allegiance. As she read Abbt’s lines, the pastor’s wife in Nicolai’s novel experienced ‘rapture at the thought that even the subject of a monarchy was not a mere machine, but rather had his own particular value as a person, that love for the fatherland of a nation could vouchsafe a great and new way of thinking…’82
In other words, patriotism resonated because it bundled together various contemporary preoccupations. Not all the ingredients in the mix were positive or emancipatory. The flip-side of a heightened allegiance to the beleaguered Prussian polity was an intensified derision or even hatred for its foes. The Russians in particular (and especially the Cossacks) figured in most patriotic narratives as bestial, cruel, brutal, bloodthirsty, wretched and so on. Such stylizations drew to some extent on the actual behaviour of Cossack light troops, but they were also rooted in an older set of stereotypes about ‘Asiatic’ and ‘barbarian’ Russia that would resonate in Prussian and German culture over the next two centuries. The French were mocked as cowards and braggadocios who talked big but turned tail when the going got tough. Even the German territories fighting in alliance with Austria came in for a drubbing. Gleim’s victory hymn after Rossbach includes a long list of strophes lampooning the German contingents; they feature (among others) a Palatine trooper who stands wailing on the field because he has burned his finger; a soldier from Trier who falls while fleeing and mistakes his bleeding nose for a war-wound; a Franconian who squeals ‘like a cat in a trap’; a soldier from Bruchsal who tries to evade capture by donning a woman’s bonnet; a Paderborner who dies of sheer fright when he sees the Prussians, and many more.83
Perhaps the most striking feature of the patriot wave of the 1750s was its fixation on Frederick II. For Abbt, it was above all the flesh-and-blood person of the monarch – rather than the political order that he represented, or the character of the homeland – that commanded the love of the patriot.84 Throughout the war years there was a flood of poems, engravings, biographies, pamphlets and books celebrating the achievements of the Prussian king, ‘Frederick the Great’, or in another widely used contemporary epithet, ‘Frederick the Unique’. The victories of the Prussian armies were universally celebrated – reasonably enough – as victories of the king. The king’s birthdays – formerly rather down-beat events – served as occasions for demonstrative celebrations involving the firing of rifles and the wearing of various royalist memorabilia. In many representations, the king appeared as a towering, almost supernatural figure, as in this dreamlike, almost cinematic passage from Gleim’s Ode to the Muse of War, written after the slaughter at Zorndorf:
From a stream of black murderer’s blood
I trod with timid foot upon a hill
Of corpses, saw about me far and wide
That none was left to kill, stood up
And peered, and searched with craning neck
Through pitch-black clouds of battle-smoke
For the Anointed One, fixed upon him
And the envoy of God, his guard,
My eyes and thoughts…
The reference to Frederick as ‘the Anointed’ (der Gesalbte) is noteworthy – Frederick I had been anointed as part of his coronation ceremony, but as there were no further coronations, this ritual was not performed upon his successors. Here we discern muted echoes of the exalted conception of monarchy inaugurated by the first king.85 Frederick was frequently apostrophized, moreover, with the familiar form ‘du’, a usage that suggested a utopian intimacy with the person of the monarch while awakening associations with the language of prayer and liturgy. In a verse composed for the occasion of Frederick’s return from the Seven Years War, the celebrated poet Anna Louise Karsch blended panegyric with the private intensity of prayer, invoking the intimate mode of address no fewer than twenty-five times over forty-four lines.86 In other contexts, the king could appear pitiable, suffering, self-sacrificial, masked in perspiration and dust, trembling for his men, drenched in tears for the slain, a man of pains in need of comfort and protection. It was one of the central themes of Abbt’s tract that the subject’s love for the king arises not from the fear of his power, but from the desire to shield him against the overwhelming might of his enemies.
There was a sharp irony here, for the king, though sensitive to public opinion in a general way and aware of the need to impress (especially when it came to foreign potentates and envoys) appears to have found this adulation deeply distasteful. He refused, for example, to play any part in the celebrations organized by the city of Berlin to mark his return to the capital at the end of the Seven Years War. On 30 March 1763, a delegation of worthies gathered at the Frankfurt Gate and guards of honour of mounted burghers and liveried torchbearers formed up to accompany the royal carriage as it re-entered the city and made its way to the palace. Appalled by the prospect of this welcome, Frederick delayed his arrival until dusk, slipped away from his hosts and drove unaccompanied to the palace by an alternative route.87
This epic display of diffidence set the tone for the rest of his reign. Frederick had spent much of his year away from the Berlin court since the late 1740s, but after 1763 he withdrew almost entirely from the capital and retreated to the residential complex in Potsdam, spending his winters in the Potsdam city palace and the summers in Sans Souci.88 The king was content to project the majesty of the state with representative buildings, such as the Neues Palais (which was built at great expense after the Seven Years War but reserved solely for official purposes), but hostile to efforts to focus adulation on his own person.89 Frederick refused, for example, to sit for official portraits after his accession to the throne. When the renowned engraver Daniel Chodowiecki produced an elaborate image showing the king returning in triumph from the Seven Years War, Frederick rejected it as excessively theatrical.
With the exception of coins such as the Friedrich-d’or and various medallions displaying the king crowned in the laurels of victory,90 the only image of himself that Frederick deliberately propagated was a likeness of 1764 by the painter Johann Heinrich Christoph Franke (see p. 205). In this painting, the king appears as an old man with sunken lips, sagging face and bent back. He is presented in casual pose, as if captured unawares, raising his trademark three-cornered hat and turning to glance at the viewer as he passes a stone plinth behind him. It is not known whether Franke’s painting was commissioned or not, but it was not in any case painted from life. Frederick took to it, sending engraved versions as a mark of his good will to favoured subjects. What precisely he liked about the picture is not known. The modesty of the pose and the sketchiness of the execution may have appealed to him. He may also have seen in the tired old man depicted by Franke a faithful reflection of his own self-image.91
The concentration of interest in Frederick’s person proved the most lasting legacy of the patriot wave in Prussia. After 1786, when the king died, the Frederician cult roared back into life with a redoubled intensity. There was a massive proliferation of objects commemorating the dead king, from sculpted mugs, tobacco tins, ribbons, sashes and calendars to ornamental chains, newspapers and books.92 There was a wave of new publications celebrating Frederick. Of these, the most famous and successful was a two-volume compendium edited by Friedrich Nicolai, the most important publisher of the Berlin enlightenment. Nicolai was one of the great majority of Prussian subjects alive in the late 1780s to whom Frederick seemed always to have been on the throne. As Nicolai himself observed, his recollections of the king’s life and achievements were intertwined with memories of ‘the happy years of my youth and the flowering of my manhood’. He had been an ‘eyewitness’ to the ‘indescribable enthusiasm’ that had taken hold of his fellow subjects during the Seven Years War, and the extraordinary efforts the king had invested in the reconstruction of war-torn Prussia after 1763. The anecdote collection (which took Nicolai four years to complete) was thus a project that connected the passions of a private identity with the public work of patriotic memory. To contemplate the king, Nicolai declared, was ‘to study the true character of one’s fatherland’.93
21. Frederick the Great opens the sarcophagus of the Great Elector in 1750, saying: ‘Messieurs, this man accomplished so much!’ Engraving of 1789 by Daniel Chodowiecki. By the reign of Frederick the Great, Prussian kingship was marked by an intense awareness of historical legacy.
Nicolai’s was only one – though perhaps the most authoritative – of many such volumes of anecdotes. Anecdote became the most important vehicle for the remembrance and mythologization of the dead king. In these apparently random tatters of memory, the king appeared falling from his horse, responding to impertinence with an indulgent witticism, forgetting someone’s name, prevailing over adversity through sheer nerve.94 He is sometimes the hero, but the majority of anecdotes accentuate his physical presence, his mortality, his modesty, the ordinary trappings of an extraordinary individual. We are presented with a king who commands our respect precisely because he refuses to adopt royal airs.
Being compact and memorable, anecdotes circulated as swiftly in oral as in literary culture, much as jokes do today. Like today’s celebrity magazines they catered to an appetite for intimate glimpses of the revered personality. Charged with the humanity of the king, they appeared innocent of politics. Their apparently random quality concealed the artificiality of the image being offered up for consumption. Anecdotes could also take pictorial form. The supplier of the most sophisticated visual anecdotes was the Berlin engraver Daniel Chodowiecki, who provided illustrations for some anecdotal collections, but whose images also circulated independently. Many of these depict poignant unguarded moments in the life of the king, creating an energetic tension between the modesty of his person and the singularity of his status. Like verbal anecdotes, Chodowiecki’s images were concise enough to be memorable in their entirety, concentrated enough to reproduce themselves in the mind of the observer. Adolph Menzel’s remarkable mid-nineteenth-century series of history paintings, which fixed the image of the king for generations of modern Prussians, also preserved the kaleidoscopic quality of the anecdotal tradition, as did the cinematic narratives of his life produced by the film studios of the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich.
Not everyone was inundated by the patriot wave. There was much less enthusiasm for the Prussian cause in the Catholic than in the Protestant areas of the western provinces during the Seven Years War.95 It is probably safe to assume that Prussian patriotism was a phenomenon above all of the Protestant core areas (including East Prussia), much as it was in late eighteenth-century Great Britain.96 Here we can speak of a process by which literate Prussian subjects ‘discovered’ themselves as members of a common polity. Prussianness acquired the ‘critical mass’ it required to sustain a stable collective identity.97 By the last decades of the century, the composite term ‘Brandenburg-Prussia’ was scarcely heard. Frederick was no longer (as of 1772) King in, but King of Prussia.98 Contemporaries spoke of ‘the Prussian lands’ or simply ‘Prussia’ (although the latter was officially adopted only in 1807 as the collective term for the Hohenzollern territories).
We can thus speak of a thickening of collective allegiances in late eighteenth-century Prussia. It was the visible face of a sedimentary formation whose deeper layers recalled earlier phases of mobilization – the confessional solidarities of the early-modern era, the service ethic, at once dutiful and egalitarian, of Pietism, the remembered trauma of warfare and invasion. And yet there was something fragile about the perfervid patriotism of the Prussians. While British, French and American patriots died – in theory at least – for their country or for the nation, Prussian patriotic discourses focused above all on the person of Frederick the Great. When Thomas Abbt talked about death for the fatherland, it is difficult to escape the impression that he really meant death for the king. The highly textured stereotypes of national self-identification that we see emerging in the literary and print culture of late eighteenth-century Britain had no counterpart in Prussia. Prussian patriotism was intense, but also rather narrowly focused. With the death of ‘Frederick the Unique’, Prussian patriotism acquired a flavour of retrospection and nostalgia that it would never quite shake off.
PRUSSIAN POLAND
During the last third of the eighteenth century, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a country larger than France, disappeared from the political map of Europe. In the first partition of 1772, Prussia, Austria and Russia joined in slicing off and annexing large pieces of Polish territory on the western, southern and eastern peripheries of the Commonwealth. The second partition of Poland, formalized in the Treaty of St Petersburg in January 1793, saw Prussia and Russia carry off further spoils, leaving to the Poles a grotesquely depleted rump of land stretching from northern Galicia to a narrow stretch of Baltic coast. In the third partition two years later, all three powers joined in gobbling up what remained of the once-mighty Commonwealth.
The roots of this unprecedented erasure of a great and ancient polity lay partly in the deteriorating condition of the Commonwealth. The Polish monarchy was elective, a fact that opened the system to chronic international manipulation as rival powers fought to establish their clients on the throne. The vagaries of the Polish constitution paralysed the system and obstructed efforts to reform and strengthen the state. Particularly problematic were the ‘liberum veto’, according to which each individual member of the Polish diet, or Sejm, had the right to obstruct the will of the majority, and the right to form ‘confederations’ – armed associations of nobles who convened their own diets – to support or oppose the crown. Recourse to this form of ‘legalized civil war’ was especially common in the eighteenth century, when major confederations formed in 1704, 1715, 1733, 1767, 1768 and 1792, more frequently, indeed, than the diets of the Commonwealth itself.99
Poland’s inner turmoil was exacerbated by the interventions of its neighbours, and of Russia and Prussia in particular. The policy-makers in St Petersburg viewed Poland as a Russian protectorate and westward salient from which to project Russian influence into Central Europe. Prussia had longstanding designs on the Polish territory between East Prussia and Brandenburg. Neither state had any interest in allowing the Commonwealth to reform itself to the point where it might regain the autonomy and influence it had once enjoyed in European affairs. In 1764, Prussia and Russia collaborated in excluding the Saxon Wettin candidate from the Polish election and installing the Russian client Stanisław-August Poniatowski on the Warsaw throne. When Poniatowski emerged, to everyone’s surprise, as a Polish reformer and patriot, Prussia and Russia intervened to thwart his plans. His efforts to establish a unified Polish customs zone met with reprisals from the Prussians. In the meanwhile, the Russians intervened with armed force, extending their patronage networks and supporting the opponents of reform. By 1767, the commonwealth had polarized into two armed camps.
It was against this background of deepening anarchy in Poland that Frederick II produced a first Polish partition proposal in September 1768. The acquisition of a chunk of Poland was one of Frederick’s long-cherished dreams – he had mused on this theme in the Political Testament of 1752 – where he famously described Poland as an ‘artichoke, ready to be consumed leaf by leaf’ – and he periodically returned to it in later years.100 Of particular interest to him was the area known as ‘Royal Prussia’, which had been subject to the authority of the Polish Crown since 1454. Royal Prussia was the western half of the ancient principality of Prussia, whose name the Brandenburg Electors and kings had adopted for themselves after 1701. A small part of Royal Prussia was already under Prussian administration, thanks to a complex system of leases that dated back to the beginning of the eighteenth century.101 Yet it would be overstating the case to call Frederick the sole or chief architect of the partition.102 It was the Austrians who took a small first bite from the Polish pie, by invading and occupying first Spisz, an archipelago of Polish enclaves in northern Hungary, and then the adjoining territories of Nowy Targ and Nowy Sącz in 1769–70. And it was Russia whose increasingly aggressive involvement in Polish affairs had done most to undermine the autonomy and peace of the Commonwealth. This in turn provoked legitimate concern over the westward extension of Russian power and fed fears that Poland’s disorder might eventually draw the three regional powers into a major conflict.103
As turmoil spread across the kingdom of Poland in 1771, Russia and Prussia agreed a partition in principle; Austria joined in the following year. The Convention of Partition of 5 August 1772 justified this act of cold-blooded predation with an almost comically cynical preamble:
In the Name of the Most Holy Trinity! The spirit of faction, the troubles of intestine war which had shaken the Kingdom of Poland for so many years, and the Anarchy that acquires new strength with each passing day [… ] give just grounds for expecting with apprehension the total decomposition of the state…104
The smallest share went to Prussia, which acquired 5 per cent of the Commonwealth’s territory (the Russians took 12. 7 per cent and the Austrians 11. 8 per cent). In addition to Royal Prussia itself, the Prussians annexed two adjacent territories, namely the Netze district, a long river valley adjoining the southern border of West Prussia, and the bishopric of Ermland to the east. This regional agglomerate covered the territory that still divided East Prussia from the core provinces of the Hohenzollern monarchy; its acquisition was thus of immense strategic value. The area was also of considerable economic importance to the region, since whoever controlled it could exert a stranglehold on the Polish trade routes via Danzig and Thorn (both of which remained Polish) into the Baltic.
The legal justification for the invasion of Silesia had been slender enough; in the case of Royal Prussia there was no question of any authentic rationale for the annexation beyond the security interests of the Prussian state. The Prussians advanced various fanciful claims along the lines that Brandenburg’s inheritance rights to the annexed territories had been usurped in times of yore by the Teutonic Knights and the Polish Commonwealth, and that they were thus merely reclaiming a long-lost heritage.105 These claims were solemnly reiterated in various official documents, but it is hard to believe that anyone within the Prussian administration took them seriously. It is also worth noting that Frederick made no use – even in internal communications – of ethnic arguments in staking his claim for Royal Prussia. This may appear surprising in retrospect, given that the annexed territories included substantial areas of predominantly German (i.e. German-speaking Protestant) settlement. Germanophone Protestants accounted for about three-quarters of the urban population of Royal Prussia and the Netze district combined, and for about 54 per cent of the population as a whole. In the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries, German nationalist historians cited this German ethnic presence in Royal Prussia as grounds for its rightful annexation.106 Yet this is a profoundly anachronistic view. The notion that Brandenburg-Prussia had a ‘national’ mission to unite the German nation under German rule was utterly alien to the Francophone Frederick the Great, who was famously dismissive of contemporary German culture and believed in the primacy of the state, not that of the nation.
Far more important in reinforcing the self-righteousness of the usurpers was a generalized (and characteristically enlightened) assumption that their rule would establish a fairer and more prosperous and efficient administration than had hitherto been known in the region. Prussian views of Polish governance were in general extremely negative – the proverbial expression ‘polnische Wirtschaft’ (‘Polish management’) was used – and still is in some quarters – to describe a chaotic or disordered state of affairs. The Polish nobility (szlachta) was widely viewed as wasteful, lazy and negligent in its custodianship of the land. The Polish towns were denounced for their dilapidated condition. The Polish peasantry was held to be languishing in the deepest servitude and misery under the yoke of the imperious szlachta. Prussian rule would thus mean the abolition of personal serfdom and liberation from ‘Polish slavery’.107 These were all, needless to say, tendentious and self-interested justifications. The notion that a record of negligent custodianship might attenuate ownership rights, and that acts of usurpation and annexation might be legitimated through an enlightened appeal to the idea of ‘improvement’ was already a commonplace in the imperialist political cultures of Britain and France, and it served the Prussians well in their new Polish lands.
Frederick renamed his new province ‘West Prussia’ and throughout the last fourteen years of his reign he intervened more intensively in its domestic affairs than in those of any other province of his kingdom. It was a reflection of his low regard for the native Polish administration
that he adopted a relatively centralized approach, sweeping aside the traditional organs of local governance and imposing an alien cohort of officials drawn mainly from the Berlin and East Prussian bureaucracies. Of all the district commissioners appointed to posts in West Prussia following the annexation, only one hailed from the province; most of the rest were East Prussians. There were clear contrasts here with the handling of Silesia thirty years earlier.
In Silesia, too, there was a major administrative restructuring, but an effort was made wherever possible to preserve continuity at the level of the local elites; the reformed judiciary in particular was staffed almost entirely by native-born Silesians.108 The office of the Silesian provincial minister also ensured Silesia a distinctive place within Berlin’s quasi-federal governmental system. The provincial minister, a kind of viceroy with wide-ranging powers who reported only to the king himself, was in a position to resolve key conflicts of interest in a way that was sensitive to the special conditions of the province. By contrast, there was no authoritative centre in West Prussia that was capable of ensuring even a minimal degree of self-administration. The most senior West Prussian official after 1772 was the Chamber President Johann Friedrich Domhardt, but he had no control over the fiscal administration in the province, and the judiciary and military both reported directly to Berlin.109
The Catholic church was handled with particular caution. During the preliminary negotiations for the first partition, Frederick had expressed concern that the news of an impending Prussian annexation of exclusively Catholic areas such as the bishopric of Ermland on the eastern periphery of Royal Prussia would provoke public outrage. After 1772, as in Silesia thirty years before, the Prussians went to great pains to preserve the appearance of Catholic institutional continuity in the annexed areas. There was thus no outright expropriation of episcopal properties. Instead ecclesiastical properties were placed under the control of the chamber administrations in East and West Prussia. They thus remained church property in a formal sense; thanks to heavy taxation and other costs, however, only about 38 per cent of the church’s gross domain income actually made its way back into the coffers of the clergy.110 The West Prussian clergy were even worse off; it seems that the state paid only about one-fifth of ecclesiastical estate income back to the church. One might therefore speak of a process of secularization by stealth. Here again, there were contrasts with the rather more generous arrangements made for the Silesian clergy after 1740.
The mainly Polish nobility of West Prussia did not, by and large, offer any resistance to the Prussian annexation. In some areas, such as the Netze district, local landed families boycotted the homage ceremonies to the new monarch, but there were virtually no acts of outright opposition.111 Yet this did not suffice to endear the Polish nobles to Frederick, who spoke of them with contempt in numerous internal government documents. They were taxed at a higher rate in contribution than their Protestant (German) counterparts; they were forbidden to meet in county diets; they were not permitted to form a provincial credit society.112 The policies adopted by the king in his other lands to consolidate noble land ownership were inverted in the new province: Frederick actively encouraged Polish noblemen to sell up their lands and urged the provincial administration to find Protestant buyers, whether or not these were of noble stock. As a result, the proportion of noble land in bourgeois hands in West Prussia rose at almost twice the average rate across the Hohenzollern lands.113 The reason for these measures, Frederick declared, was that the Polish magnates were sucking wealth out of the country by drawing income from their West Prussian estates and spending it in Warsaw. In June 1777 he issued an ultimatum demanding that landowners with properties on both sides of the Polish border take up sole residence within West Prussia or lose their West Prussian estates.
The impact of these policies is difficult to establish with any precision. There was often more bark than bite in Frederick’s orders; little seems to have been done, for example, to implement the ultimatum of 1777. The king’s anti-nobiliary policies were in any case directed mainly at the small elite of true magnate nobles, such as the Czapskis, Potockis, Skorzowskis, Prebendows and Dabskis, who remained attached to the Warsaw court and social scene; Frederick was far less hostile to the minor Polish nobility in West Prussia and actually took steps to conserve it.114
West Prussia became a focus of energetic administrative intervention: money was set aside for the improvement of the towns, especially Bromberg and Kulm; marshes were drained; forests were cut back to open up new arable and pasture land; a new canal was built linking the river Netze with the Brahe, thereby permitting ships to transfer from the Oder to the Vistula. Frederick threw himself into countless matters of detail, ordering, for example, that fruit trees be planted, schools founded, potatoes introduced, dikes built and cheap seed grain made available to the peasantry.115 The impact of the new regime on the peasants who made up the bulk of the population in the annexed areas was mixed. The talk of ‘liberating’ them from their former ‘Polish servitude’ was largely propaganda, since peasants in Polish Royal Prussia had already enjoyed extensive freedom of movement. On the other hand, the installation of independent judicial organs within the domains administration did provide peasants with enhanced legal protection against the caprice of landlords.116 As the rigorous fiscal regime of the Brandenburg-Prussian state was imposed, taxes naturally went up for everyone, just as they had in Silesia, though they were now more transparent and more evenly distributed. By the mid-1770s, the new province was contributing 10 per cent of Brandenburg-Prussian state revenues, a share that was fully proportional to its size and population. The major capital investments made in the province could thus largely be funded without recourse to external income.
The impact of the annexation on the regional economy is difficult to assess in the absence of precise statistics. Population growth in the urban sector was very slow; this may suggest that heavy taxation drew money away from local investment. The effort to maintain a substantial war chest ensured that much local wealth was taken permanently out of circulation. The introduction of tariffs on the Polish border inevitably caused serious disruption, since they blocked the north–south trade routes that had traditionally been the bread and butter of the towns. On the other hand, the agrarian sector benefited from the boom conditions driven by the opening up of the real estate markets and Britain’s enormous appetite for imported grain, a state of affairs reflected in the rapidly rising cash value of landed estates.
The success of the royal administration in winning the trust and loyalty of its new subjects varied from region to region. The ethnically German Protestants who formed the majority in the towns were quickly assimilated into the new system, despite some early cries of protest. Feelings among the Catholics were less favourable, despite Frederick’s repeated promises that he would respect the liberty of all Catholics to worship in the accustomed fashion. Among the Polish nobility there was, with good reason, a general feeling of distrust towards the new masters. ‘After the sovereign became Prussian,’ one observer of conditions in the Netze district noted in 1793, ‘the Polish nobility was no longer what it had been; an element of bitterness entered its character and a distrust of Germans that will long endure.’117 Yet much depended upon one’s precise location within the social structure of the province: the new Cadet School at Kulm, for example, was popular with families of the lesser Polish nobility and after the turn of the century, we encounter many double-barrelled surnames in which the original Polish names have been paired with adopted German equivalents – Rosenberg-Gruszcyński, Hoike-Truszczyński and so on.118 Among the Kashubian peasants and landlords who farmed the poor sandy soils in the north of the province, there is even some indirect evidence – in the form of Polish-language anecdote collections – for participation in the fashionable cult of Frederick the Great.
Perhaps the people most completely won over to the promises and propaganda of the new regime were the Prussian administrators themselves. Again and again in the documents relating to the administration of West Prussia, we find references to the need to set local institutional and economic life on a ‘Prussian footing’.119 The term ‘Prussian’ occurs as an antonym to the allegedly Polish vices of servitude, disorder, lassitude. The idea that Prussianness stood for certain abstract virtues acquired a sharper focus in this protracted encounter with subjects from outside the ambit of the Holy Roman Empire. It has often been observed that the experience of colonial government in India and elsewhere gave rise to a ritualized enactment of Britishness that found full articulation only as part of a discourse of moral and cultural superiority. In the same way, an overwhelmingly negative perception of native Polish traditions blended with the sanguine ameliorism of the enlightenment to heighten confidence in the distinctive merits of the ‘Prussian way’.
THE KING AND THE STATE
What kind of state did Frederick II bequeath to his successors? ‘The state’ was one of the central themes in Frederick’s political writings. His father, Frederick William I, tended, as we saw in chapter 5, to legitimate his policies in terms of the need to consolidate his own ‘sovereignty’. By contrast, Frederick insisted upon the primacy of the state as an abstract structure quite separate from his own person. ‘I have held it to be my duty,’ he wrote in the Political Testament of 1752, ‘to work for the good of the state and to do this in all domains.’120 ‘I have devoted my life to the state,’ he told his brother Henry in February 1776. The state represented, in a subjective sense, a vicarious form of immortality: whereas the death of the king would extinguish his consciousness, rendering his hopes for the future meaningless, the state would endure. ‘I am thinking only of the state,’ Frederick wrote, ‘for I know only too well that everything – even if the sky should crash in upon the earth – will be a matter of absolute indifference to me from the moment of my death.’121 Taken to its logical conclusion, the primacy of the state implied a relativization, a demotion, of the ruler’s status. Nowhere is this more pointedly expressed than in the Political Testament of 1752, where Frederick observed that ‘the ruler is the first servant of the state. He is paid well so that he can maintain the dignity of his office. But he is required in return to work effectively for the well-being of the state.’122
This idea was not new – the idea of the sovereign as the ‘premier domestique’ of the state can be found in the writings of Fénelon, Bossuet and Bayle.123 Samuel Pufendorf, biographer of the Great Elector and the most influential German student of Hobbes, defined the sovereign in functional terms as the guarantor of the state’s collective interest. The same line of argument runs through the works of the sometime professor of philosophy at Halle Christian Wolff, whose works Frederick read with admiration as crown prince. Wolff celebrated the ascendancy of an abstract legal and bureaucratic state with wide-ranging responsibilities for health, education, labour protection and security.124 But no Prussian dynast had ever made this concept so central to his understanding of the sovereign office. It explains (or at least rationalizes) his distaste for the Frederician personality cult and his renunciation of the conventional trappings of dynastic kingship. His insistence on wearing a worn blue officer’s coat, stained at the front with long streaks of Spanish snuff, signified the self-subordination of the monarch to the political and social order he represented.
So completely did Frederick personify the idea of the state, that prominent officials came to see serving the monarch and serving the state as one and the same thing. In his inaugural address to the new chamber in Glogau (Silesia), the Provincial President Ludwig Wilhelm Count von Münchow declared that the highest aim of the Prussian administration must be ‘to serve the best interest of the King and the country without any ulterior motive’; ‘no day – indeed, if possible, not even an hour – should pass without our having rendered some service to the king.’125 The king was thus more than an employer; he was a model whose values and way of life were internalized by senior civil servants. We get a sense of what this could mean for an individual official from the service diary of Friedrich Anton von Heinitz, head of the Mines and Foundries Department of the General Directory. Heinitz was not a Prussian but a Saxon who had entered Frederick’s service in 1776 at the age of fifty-two. In a diary entry dated 2 June 1782, Heinitz noted that one should view hard work in the public cause as an act of divine worship. ‘You have as your example the King; who can match him? He is industrious, places obligation before recreation, sees first to his business [… ]. There is no other monarch like him, none so abstemious, so consistent, none who is so adept at dividing his time…’126
Frederick also projected the abstract authority of the state through architecture. Nowhere is this idea more eloquently realized than in the ensemble of public buildings that bordered the Forum Fridericianum (now the Bebelplatz) at the beginning of Unter den Linden in the centre of Berlin. One of Frederick’s first acts as king was to order the court architect Georg Wenceslaus von Knobelsdorff to build an opera house on the eastern side of the square. The resulting theatre was one of the largest in Europe, capable of seating 2,000 people. Flanking the opera house on the southern side was St Hedwig’s Cathedral, built in honour of the king’s Catholic subjects – a remarkable monument to inter-confessional tolerance in the heart of a Lutheran city. To drive the message home, the portico of the church was modelled on the syncretic Pantheon of ancient Rome. In the 1770s, a new and capacious royal library was erected on the western side.
There were, to be sure, elements of traditional monarchical self-representation in these projects. But the Forum was also a highly conscious articulation of the cultural purposes of the state.127 Plans and elevations of the new buildings and of the square as a whole were widely circulated; they were the subject of sometimes controversial discussion in the Berlin journals and salons. Both the opera and the library remained open to the general public after their completion.128 Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the whole ensemble was the absence of a royal palace. Frederick had originally intended to include one, but he lost interest in the idea after the Second Silesian War. The opera house was thus the first building of its kind north of the Alps not to be physically joined to a royal palace. The royal library was likewise a freestanding structure, highly unusual for the period. The Forum was, in other words, a Residenzplatz without a Residenz (palace); the contrast with virtually every European square of this kind was not lost on visitors.129 In architecture, as in the person of the king, the representation of the Prussian state was uncoupled from that of the Prussian dynasty.
If the state were to wean itself from the need for constant dictatorial interventions by the sovereign, it needed to have a coherent fabric of law; here too Frederick practised what he preached, rationalizing the court system and setting the leading jurists of the day to the work of constructing a general law code for the Prussian lands. Though unfinished at his death, the Prussian General Code of Law (1794) would later serve as a kind of constitution for the kingdom of Prussia.130 In his work towards the post-war reconstruction of Prussia, Frederick was a conscientious servant of the general interest – villages devastated during the wars were rebuilt in accordance with the principle later set out in the General Code that the state is obliged to ‘compensate’ those who have been ‘forced to sacrifice their special rights and advantages to the welfare of the generality’.131 By the same token, as we have seen, Frederick accepted that the state had an obligation to war-orphans and invalids, and institutional care for these groups was expanded during his reign.
The doctrine of the primacy of the state also framed Frederick’s attitude to the international context. It implied, firstly, a fairly cavalier attitude to treaties and other such obligations, since these could at any time be cast aside if they no longer served the state’s interest. Frederick applied this idea in practice when he abandoned the Nymphenburg coalition in 1742 and 1745, leaving his allies in the lurch while he settled a separate peace with the Austrians. It can also be seen at work in the invasion of Silesia, which tore holes in the international legal order of the Holy Roman Empire. Yet this was of no concern to Frederick, who, unlike his father, regarded the Empire with contempt. Its mode of governance, he observed in the Political Testament of 1752, was ‘bizarre and outdated’.132 From Frederick’s standpoint (and that of Pufendorf and many eighteenth-century German critics of the Reich), the Holy Roman Empire, with its overlapping jurisdictions and its multiple, interpenetrating layers of sovereignty, represented the antithesis of the state principle. There were still angry memories of 1718 and 1725, when delegations of noblemen from the province of Magdeburg had succeeded in winning an appeal against a new Prussian tax before the imperial court in Vienna. One of the important steps by which Frederick consolidated the constitutional autonomy of his kingdom was the agreement of 1746, by which the Habsburg Emperor formally renounced imperial jurisdiction over the territories of Prussia. Frederick could now instruct Samuel von Cocceji, a brilliant jurist who had already served under his father, to draw up a general law code based ‘solely upon reason and the legal practices in the [Prussian] territories’. This was an important moment, because it signalled the beginning of the end for the old imperial system. The struggle between Prussia and Austria represented in this sense a conflict between the ‘state principle’, based on the primacy of the state over all domestic and supra-territorial authorities, and the ‘imperial principle’ of diffused authority and mixed sovereignty that had been a defining feature of the Holy Roman Empire since the Middle Ages.
For all the sincerity of Frederick’s commitment to the abstract authority of the state, however, there were some glaring discrepancies between theory and practice. Although Frederick acknowledged in principle the inviolability of the published laws and rules of procedure, he was prepared, when he deemed it necessary, to override the kingdom’s judicial authorities. The most famous example of such unilateral intervention was the ‘Miller Arnold Affair’ of 1779–80. A miller by the name of Christian Arnold had refused to pay lease-rent to his landlord, Count Schmettau, because the local district commissioner, Baron von Gersdorff, had excavated a system of carp-ponds that had cut off the stream to his mill-wheel and thus deprived him of his livelihood. Having been condemned to eviction by the local court, Arnold and his wife sought the help of the king himself. Despite an irritable cabinet order from the king to the effect that the judgement against Arnold was to be suspended, the Justice Department in Küstrin confirmed the original verdict. Furious at what he saw as the manipulations of a provincial oligarchy, Frederick ordered that the case be transferred to the Chamber Court in Berlin. When the Chamber Court in its turn confirmed the verdict against Arnold, Frederick ordered that the three judges responsible be arrested and detained for one year in a fortress. The commissioner’s carp-ponds were to be demolished, the water-course to Arnold’s mill-race restored, and all his costs and losses made good. The case scandalized the senior administration, but it was also a public sensation. In a cabinet order published in newspapers and gazettes across the kingdom, the king justified his actions, stating that his intention was to ensure that ‘every man, be he of high or low estate, rich or poor’ should receive ‘prompt justice’ at the hands of an ‘impartial law’. In short: a gross breach in legal procedure was justified in terms of a higher ethical principle.133
Frederick’s concept of the state was also less inclusive in a territorial sense than his father’s had been. He was much less concerned with the integration of the outlying territories. Many of the mercantilist economic regulations applied to the Brandenburg heartland were not extended to the western provinces, whose goods were treated for taxation purposes like foreign merchandise. The government’s efforts to integrate East Prussia into the grain economy of the entire kingdom through the magazine system slackened during Frederick’s reign. The canton system was not extended throughout the western provinces. The three regiments of the city of Wesel, he noted in 1768, have no cantons, ‘because the population of these provinces is not suitable for military service; it is limp and soft, and when the man of Kleve is transferred far from his home, he suffers from homesickness, like the Swiss’.134 Little attempt was made to integrate the small outlying principality of Neuenburg-Neuchâtel, a French-speaking canton of Switzerland acquired in personal union by Frederick I in 1707. The Prussian governor was absent during long periods of the reign of Frederick the Great, so that the influence of Berlin was scarcely felt.135
Frederick assigned clear priority to the central provinces of the kingdom. In a revealing passage of the Political Testament of 1768, he even declared that only Brandenburg, Magdeburg, Halberstadt and Silesia ‘constituted the actual body of the state’. This was in part a matter of military logic. What distinguished the central lands was the fact that they could ‘defend themselves, as long as the whole of Europe [did] not unite against their sovereign’.136 East Prussia and the western possessions, by contrast, would have to be given up as soon as hostilities began. Perhaps this helps to explain why Frederick discontinued the momentous East Prussian reconstruction programme his father had launched.137 The conduct of his subjects under foreign occupation during the Seven Years War also seems to have given him pause. He was particularly resentful of the fact that the Estates of East Prussia had sworn an oath of fealty to his nemesis Tsaritsa Elisabeth in 1758. After 1763, Frederick, the indefatigable chief inspector of his realm, never made a single visit to East Prussia. He simply ordered the East Prussian chamber presidents to report to him in Potsdam or to attend him at his headquarters during the annual manoeuvres in West Prussia.138 This reflected a significant demotion in the importance of this province, which had been something of a fetish to Frederick William I and his grandfather the Great Elector.
If we read them literally, Frederick’s comments on the state sometimes seem to imply that the functions of the sovereign have been partly absorbed into the impersonal collective structures of an administration working in accordance with transparent rules and regulations. Yet the reality could hardly have been more different, for the governance of Prussia during Frederick’s reign was an intensely personal affair; indeed, in some respects the political process was even more concentrated on the person of the king than it had been under his father, Frederick William I. His father had created a collegial system of ministerial government in which the monarch often took his cue from the recommendations of a powerful council of ministers. But this system fell into disuse after Frederick’s accession to the throne. His personal contacts with ministers became ever more rare after 1763, as their functions were duplicated and partly displaced through the king’s growing reliance on cabinet secretaries attached directly to his own person.
The political process thus came to centre more and more around the small team of secretaries who controlled access to the king, oversaw his correspondence, kept him up to date on developments and advised him on policy issues. Whereas the secretaries travelled around with the monarch, the ministers generally remained in Berlin. While the ministers tended to be aristocratic grandees such as Karl Abraham Freiherr von Zedlitz (the minister charged with educational affairs), the secretaries were mostly commoners. A characteristic example was the reclusive but enormously influential August Friedrich Eichel, the son of a Prussian army sergeant who usually began work at four o’clock in the morning. Under Frederick William I, responsibility and influence had been tied to the function of the individual within the administrative system; under Frederick, by contrast, proximity to the sovereign was the decisive determinant of power and influence.
Paradoxically, this concentration of power and responsibility in the king reversed the centralizing impetus of the reforms introduced by Frederick William I. By communing directly with the chamber officials in the provinces, Frederick undermined the authority of the General Directory, whose purpose was to act as the supervisory authority overseeing the various provincial officialdoms. On many occasions, Frederick even issued orders to the provincial chambers without informing the central administration, thus enhancing the authority of the provincial administrators, shifting power away from the centre and loosening the sinews of the territorial state structure.139
Frederick saw no reason to doubt the efficacy of this highly personalized system. As he pointed out in the Political Testament of 1752, it was necessary ‘in a state like this one that the prince conducts his affairs himself, because if he is clever he merely pursues the interest of the state, whereas a minister always follows ulterior motives that touch upon his own interests…’140 In other words, the interests of the state and those of the monarch were quite simply identical in a way that did not apply to any other living person. The hitch with this arrangement lay in the conditional clause ‘if he is clever’. The Frederician system worked well with the indefatigable, far-sighted Frederick at the helm, applying his quick and capacious intellect, not to mention his courage and decisiveness, to the problems that came to his desk. But what if the king were not a genius-statesman? What if he found it difficult to resolve dilemmas? What if he were hesitant and risk-averse? What, in short, if he were an ordinary man? With a monarch like that in the driving seat, how would this system function under pressure? Frederick, we should remember, was the last of a freakish run of abnormally gifted Hohenzollern rulers. Their like would not be seen again in the history of the Hohenzollern dynasty. Without the discipline and focus of a powerful figure at the centre, there was the danger that the Frederician system might splinter into warring factions, as ministers and cabinet secretaries competed for control of their overlapping jurisdictions.
8
Dare to know!
CONVERSATION
The Prussian enlightenment was about conversation. It was about a critical, respectful, open-ended dialogue between free and autonomous subjects. Conversation was important because it permitted the sharpening and refinement of judgement. In a famous essay on the nature of enlightenment, the Königsberg philosopher Immanuel Kant declared that
Enlightenment refers to man’s departure from his self-imposed tutelage. Tutelage means the inability to make use of one’s own reason without the guidance of another. This tutelage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in intellectual insufficiency, but in a lack of will and courage [… ]. Dare to know! [Sapere aude!] Have the courage to use your own reason! This is the motto of the Enlightenment.1
Read in isolation, this passage makes enlightenment seem a solitary business, encapsulated in the struggle of an individual consciousness to make sense of the world. But at a later point in the same essay, Kant observes that this process of self-liberation through reason has an unstoppable social dynamic.
It is possible that a public may enlighten itself; indeed if its freedom is not constrained this is virtually inevitable. For there will always be a few individuals who are capable of thinking for themselves despite the established authorities that claim to exercise this right in their name, and who, as soon as they have cast off the yoke of tutelage, will spread about them the spirit of a reasoned appreciation of one’s own worth and the duty of every person to think for himself.2
In the percolation through society of this spirit of critical, confident independence, conversation played an indispensable role. It flourished in the clubs and societies that proliferated in the Prussian lands – and more broadly in the German states – during the second half of the eighteenth century. The statutes of the ‘German societies’, a supra-territorial enterprise whose network included a society founded in Königsberg in 1741, explicitly defined the formal conditions for fruitful conversation among the members. During the discussion that followed readings or lectures, members were to avoid arbitrary or ill-considered comments. Critiques should engage in a structured way with the style, method and content of the lecture. They should employ, in Kant’s phrase, ‘the cautious language of reason’. Digressions and interruptions were strictly prohibited. All members were ultimately guaranteed the right to have their say, but they must wait their turn and make their comments as concise as possible. Satirical or mocking remarks and suggestive wordplay were unacceptable.3
We find the same preoccupation with civility among the Freemasons, whose movement had grown to encompass between 250 and 300 German lodges with 15–18,000 members by the end of the eighteenth century. Here too, there were injunctions to avoid immoderate speech, frivolous or vulgar commentary and the discussion of topics (such as religion) that would stir divisive passions among the brothers.4 This may all sound stiflingly prim from a present-day perspective, but the purpose of such rules and norms was serious enough. They were designed to ensure that what mattered in discussion was not the individual but the issue, that the passions of personal relationships and local politics were left behind when members joined the meeting. The art of polite public debate had still to be learned; these statutes were the blueprints of a new communicative technology.
Civility was important, too, because it helped to iron out the asymmetries of status that otherwise threatened to cramp discussion. Freemasonry was not, as one historian of the movement has claimed, an ‘organisation of the emergent German middle classes’.5 It attracted a mixed elite constituency that included members of the nobility and educated or propertied commoners in almost equal measure. Although some German lodges began life by opening their doors exclusively to one or the other of these two groups, most of these soon merged. In such mixed society, the observance of transparent and egalitarian rules of engagement was essential if status differences were not to cripple debate from the outset.
The conversation that powered the Prussian enlightenment also took place in print. One of the distinctive features of the periodical literature of this era was its discursive, dialogical character. Many of the articles printed in the Berlin Monthly (Berlinische Monatsschrift), for example, the most distinguished press organ of the German late enlightenment, were in fact letters to the editor from members of the public. Readers were also treated to extensive reviews of recent publications, and sometimes also to lengthy replies by authors with a bone to pick with their reviewers. Occasionally the journal would call for views on a specific question – this was the case, for example, with the famous discussion on the theme ‘What is enlightenment?’ that began with a query posted by the theologian Johann Friedrich Zöllner in the pages of the Berlin Monthly in December 1783.6 There was no permanent staff of journalists, nor were most of the articles in each issue directly commissioned by the journal. As the editors, Gedike and Biester, made clear in the foreword to the first edition, they depended upon interested members of the public to ‘enrich’ the journal with unsolicited contributions.7 The Berlin Monthly was thus above all a forum in print that operated along similar lines to the associational networks of the towns and cities. It was not conceived as fodder for an essentially passive constituency of cultural consumers. It aimed to provide the public with the means of reflecting upon itself and its foremost preoccupations.
The resonance of the Berlin Monthly and other journals like it was greatly enhanced by the proliferation across northern Germany of reading societies.8 The purpose of these groups was to pool money for the purchase of subscriptions and books in a society where public libraries were as yet unknown. Some were relatively informal gatherings with no permanent home that met in the house of one of the better-off members. Others were reading circles specializing in the dissemination of specific journals. In some towns, local book dealers ran a library service that allowed readers to gain temporary access to new publications without paying the full purchase price. Associations of this kind multiplied at a remarkable rate during the last decades of the eighteenth century. Whereas there were only about fifty of them in the German states in 1780, the number increased to around 200 during the next ten years. They tended increasingly to meet in premises rented or bought for their own use that provided a congenial setting for discussion and debate. Statutes ensured that every member joined the meeting on equal terms and that the imperatives of politeness and reciprocal respect were observed. Parlour games and gambling were prohibited. In all, the German reading societies encompassed a membership of between fifteen and twenty thousand.
Bookshops were another important venue for enlightened sociability. The main room of Johann Jakob Kanter’s bookshop in Königsberg, founded in 1764, was a large, attractive, bright space that served as the city’s ‘intellectual stock exchange’. It was a café littéraire in which men and women, young and old, professors and students could leaf through catalogues, read newspapers and buy, order or borrow books. (Since Kant owned only 450 books when he died in 1804, it is likely that, like other intellectuals in the city, he borrowed many of his books from Kanter.) Here, too, patrons were expected to cultivate a respectful and civil tone in their dealings with each other. Kanter not only sold books, he also produced a compendious catalogue of publications (which ran to 488 pages in 1771), a bi-weekly newspaper and various political tracts – including a blistering essay attacking Frederick the Great by the young Königsberg philosopher Johann Georg Hamann.9
Beyond the reading societies, lodges and patriotic associations was a network of other gatherings: literary and philosophical associations and learned groups specializing in natural science, medicine or languages. There were also more informal circles, such as the group of writers and aspirant poets around the Berlin Cadet School master Karl Wilhelm Ramler, whose close associates included the publisher Friedrich Nicolai, the dramatist Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the patriot poet Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim, the biblical scholar Moses Mendelssohn, the jurist Johann Georg Sulzer and many other prominent figures in the Berlin enlightenment. Ramler belonged to at least one of the many Masonic lodges in Berlin and was a member of several clubs; he was also a poet in his own right – albeit of third-rate verse. What contemporaries cherished in him was above all his gift for friendship and his lively, courteous sociability. After his death in April 1798, an obituary recalled that Ramler, who remained unmarried until his death, had lived ‘only for his art and his friends, whom he loved dearly without making a show of it. He had many [friends] in all walks of life, especially among scholars and businessmen.’10
Another analogous figure was the patriot activist Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim. He too was unmarried, entertained literary aspirations and used his financially secure position as an ecclesiastical official in the city of Halberstadt to support a circle of aspiring young writers and poets in the city. Like Ramler, Gleim maintained an extensive correspondence with many of the luminaries of contemporary Prussian letters. The sociable conversation that drove the enlightenment in Prussia was not sustained by statutes and subscriptions alone; it owed much of its intensity and inclusiveness to men like Ramler and Gleim, for whom the unselfish cultivation of a wide circle of friends was a life’s work. Writers, poets, editors, club, society and lodge members, readers and subscribers, these were the ‘practitioners of civil society’ whose engagement with the great questions of the day, literary, scientific and political, helped to create a lively and diverse public sphere in the Prussian lands.11
It would be a mistake to think of this emergent public sphere either as a supine, passive mass of apolitical burghers, or as a seething force of opposition and latent rebellion. One of the most striking things about the social networks that sustained the Prussian enlightenment was their proximity to, and indeed partial identity with, the state. This was in part a matter of the intellectual tradition out of which the Prussian enlightenment grew. The links with cameralism, the ‘science’ of state administration established at the Prussian universities during the reign of Frederick III/I, and further consolidated under Frederick William I, were only gradually severed. Then there was the social location of the Prussian intelligentsia. Whereas men of independent means or free-lance writers played an important role in contemporary French letters, the dominant group within the Prussian enlightenment was that of the civil servants. A study of the Berlin Monthly has shown that of all contributors to the journal over the thirteen years of its existence (1783–96), 15 per cent were noblemen, 27 per cent were professors and school teachers, 20 per cent were senior officials, 17 per cent were clergy, and 3.3 per cent were army officers. In other words, more than half of the contributors were in paid state employment.12
A striking example of the convergence between the state and elements of civil society was the Berlin Wednesday Club, a ‘private society of friends of learning’ that met regularly during the years 1783 to 1797 (virtually the same years as the Berlin Monthly was in existence). The members of this group, which numbered first twelve and later twenty-four participants, included senior officials such as the minister of state Johann Friedrich Count von Struensee and the legal officials Karl Gottlieb Svarez and Ernst Klein; among other members were Johann Biester, who was both editor of the Berlin Monthly and secretary of the Wednesday Club, and the publisher and sometime patriot activist Friedrich Nicolai. Nicolai’s old friend Moses Mendelssohn, the by now renowned Jewish scholar and philosopher, was an honorary member. Meetings were held in the home of one of the group. Although discussions sometimes focused on scientific topics of general interest, most meetings were concerned with contemporary political issues. Debates were often heated, but an effort was made to observe the forms of civilized discussion, namely mutual respect and reciprocity, impartiality, and a commitment to eschewing opinion and vacuous generalizations in favour of rigorous fact-based interpretation. Preparation for a meeting began with the pre-circulation of a treatise on some matter of government administration, finance or legislation. This served as the basis for debate. Comments could also be submitted in writing. Essays that had been debated by the society sometimes later appeared in the Berlin Monthly.
It is difficult to imagine a better illustration of the fundamentally conversational character of enlightened literary culture. The Wednesday Club could hardly be described as an institution of the ‘public sphere’, since its meetings were shrouded in the strictest secrecy – an essential measure, given that several of the group were serving ministers. Yet it does demonstrate the kinds of synergy that were becoming possible between the informal networks of civil society and the state during the last years of Frederick II’s reign.
It was easy for progressive scholars, writers and thinkers to see the state as a partner in the enlightened project, because the sovereign himself was a renowned champion of its values. Immanuel Kant’s suggestion that the phrases ‘age of enlightenment’ and ‘age of Frederick’ were synonymous was no pious platitude.13 Of all the monarchs of eighteenth-century Europe, Frederick came closest to personifying the values and outlook of enlightenment. He joined a Masonic lodge in 1738, while he was still crown prince. He was, as we have seen, a sceptic in religious questions and an exponent of religious tolerance. When asked in June 1740 whether a Catholic subject should be permitted to enjoy civic rights in the city of Frankfurt an der Oder, he replied that ‘all religions are just as good as each other, as long as the people who practise them are honest, and even if Turks and heathens came and wanted to populate this country, then we would build mosques and temples for them.’14 He gathered about him some of the leading figures of the French enlightenment. Voltaire in particular, with whom Frederick sustained a long if intermittently fractious conversation, was for many years the foremost literary star of the enlightenment and his close association with the Prussian king was famous throughout the continent. Frederick’s own writings were composed in imitation of the sparkling but cool and detached tone of the contemporary French masters.
Then there were those early sovereign acts by which Frederick revealed his readiness to translate ideas and convictions into practice. On his accession to the throne, he ordered that the journal Die Berlinischen Nachrichten was no longer to be subject to censorship, and that the rationalist philosopher Christian Wolff, who had been driven away from the University of Halle by the Pietists in the 1720s, should be recalled forthwith.15 Even more striking was his decision, against the advice of the leading Prussian jurist of the era, Samuel von Cocceji, to suspend the use of judicial torture in his lands. Torture was still widely used by the European judicial systems to secure confessions from suspects. In 1745, Zedler’s Universallexikon, one of the canonical encyclopaedias of the German enlightenment, defended the use of torture as an investigative tool, and the practice was retained in the Theresiana, the great codex of Austrian law published in 1768.16
But on 3 June 1740, only three days after his father’s death, Frederick ordered that torture was no longer to be used, except in a small range of extreme cases involving crimes against king or country, or instances of multiple murder where robust interrogation was required to secure the identity of unknown accomplices. In a further order of 1754, Frederick extended this ban into a blanket prohibition, on the grounds that torture was not only ‘cruel’ (grausam) but also unreliable as a means of getting at the truth, since there was always the danger that suspects would implicate themselves in order to avoid further torture.17 This radical measure left many judges and legal officials complaining that there now existed no means of extracting a confession – the queen of proofs under all the ancien régime legal systems – from recalcitrant offenders. A new evidential doctrine had to be improvised to cover cases where there was a plenitude of evidence, but no confession.
Frederick also reduced the number of crimes punishable by death and made a small but significant change to the arrangements for execution by the wheel. This gruesome practice involved breaking the body of the offender on the scaffold with blows from a cartwheel and expressed a characteristically early-modern understanding of public executions as a quasi-religious ritual centred on the scourging of the malefactor in preparation for his or her departure into the afterlife. Frederick ordered that in future executions of this kind, the offender was to be strangled by the executioner out of view of the crowd before the application of the wheel. His intention was to preserve the deterrent effect of the punishment while doing away with the infliction of unnecessary pain.18 Here, as in the case of torture, a rational assessment of the utility of the practice was coupled with an enlightened distaste for acts of cruelty (for, if you strip the religious dimension from the torments meted out to the offender, nothing remains but cruelty). These achievements should not be downplayed – in 1766, it was still possible in France for a youth found guilty of blasphemy and the desecration of a wayside shrine to have his right arm hacked off and his tongue torn out before being burned at the stake.19
Frederick even granted refuge in Berlin to the radical Spinozist Johann Christian Edelmann. Edelmann was the author of various tracts arguing, among other things, that only a deism purged of all idolatry could redeem and unite humanity, that there was no need for the institution or sacrament of marriage, that sexual freedom was legitimate, and that Christ was a man like any other. Edelmann had been driven out of some of the most tolerant states of the German lands by hostile Lutheran and Calvinist establishments. During a brief visit by Edelmann to Berlin in 1747, the local Calvinist and Lutheran clergy attacked him as a dangerous and offensive sectary. He even attracted the hostile notice of Frederick for his principled opposition to royal absolutism and his dismissive (printed) remarks about Voltaire’s eulogy celebrating the king’s accession. Yet he was permitted to make his home in Berlin – even as his works were being furiously condemned across the length and breadth of the German lands – on the condition that he ceased to publish. In May 1750, as Edelmann whiled away his time in Berlin (under a false name to protect him against reprisals by Christian fanatics), there was a massive burning of his books in the city of Frankfurt/Main under the auspices of the Imperial Book Commission. With the entire magistracy and municipal government in attendance and seventy guards to hold back the crowds, nearly 1,000 copies of Edelmann’s books were tossed on to a tower of flaming birch wood. The contrast in tone and policy with Berlin could hardly have been more conspicuous. Frederick had no objections to Edelmann’s religious scepticism, his deism or his moral libertinism. The Prussian capital, he observed in a characteristically back-handed quip, already contained a great many fools and could surely accommodate one more.20
Frederick was thus – unlike his French counterpart Louis XVI – a plausible partner in the project of enlightenment in the Prussian lands. Indeed for many within the literary and political elite, the monarch’s legitimate personal claim to enlightenment bestowed a unique meaning upon the relationship between civil society and the state in Prussia. We saw in chapter 7 how the personal reputation of the king suffused political discourses in Prussia during and after the Seven Years War. At that time, patriot publicists argued that love of the king could transform mere subjects into active participants in the public life of the fatherland.
In his landmark essay of 1784, Immanuel Kant argued that the convergence of authority and enlightenment in the same sovereign person utterly transformed the relationship between political and civil liberties, for, where the monarch was enlightened, his power constituted an asset, rather than a threat to the interests vested in civil society. The result, Kant argued, was a paradox: under a truly enlightened sovereign, moderate constraints on the degree of political liberty might actually ‘create a space in which the people may expand to the fullness of its powers’. The famous formula Kant placed in the mouth of Frederick: ‘Argue as much as you will about whatever you choose; but obey!’ was not presented as the slogan of a despot. Rather it encapsulated the self-transforming potential within an enlightened monarchy. In such a polity, public argument and public criticism – a conversation, in short, between civil society and the state – ensured that the values and objectives of the state itself would ultimately merge harmoniously with those of the people, so that the duty to obey ceased to be a burden upon the subject.
For once the [… ] inclination and commitment to free thinking has germinated and taken root, this gradually exerts its influence upon the outlook of the people (steadily reinforcing its freedom of action) and ultimately upon the principles of the government itself…21
This vision of a virtuous political convection, in which the ideas of enlightened luminaries first leavened the dough of civil society before communicating themselves to the organs of government, was not entirely detached from reality. Government in Prussia was in general far more consultative than we are inclined to think. Virtually all major legislative initiatives were the result of extensive negotiations or discussion with local interests. Sometimes this was conducted through the medium of the Estates, as in the protracted consultations over restrictions on the sale of noble landed property, sometimes through local town or district officials who were themselves in consultation with a wide range of locals, and sometimes through informal networks of experts, such as jurists, for example, or businessmen. None of this was especially ‘enlightened’; it was an essential, though underemphasized, part of the gathering of opinions and information that made government possible. What changed in the later eighteenth century was the emergence of a network of enlightened activists who claimed to be trustees of the public interest, as well as partners and critics of the sovereign power.22 It was a claim that the government came largely to accept. In 1784, when Frederick II embarked on a thoroughgoing legal reform that would culminate in a new and comprehensive law code for the Prussian lands, he chose to submit early drafts of the new code to the judgement of public opinion. Initially this denoted a fairly narrow circle of leading jurists and constitutional lawyers, as well as various ‘men of practical wisdom’. But the net was later greatly widened through the institution of a public essay competition, a technique that the government borrowed from the older generation of patriotic-beneficial voluntary societies.23 This remarkable step revealed a surprising confidence in the virtue of intellectual competition and demonstrated the king’s tacit acknowledgement that public opinion was now, as one of his senior officials later put it, ‘a mighty tribunal’ judging each act of government.24
There may not have been freedom of the press in Prussia – in the sense of a generalized legal right to the public expression of opinions – but censorship was sufficiently mild to permit lively and robust political debate, both in print and in speech. The Scottish travel writer John Moore, who visited Berlin in 1775, later recorded his impressions of Prussia’s capital city:
Nothing surprised me more, when I first came to Berlin, than the freedom with which many people speak of the measures of government, and the conduct of the King. I have heard political topics, and others which I should have thought still more ticklish, discussed here with as little ceremony as at a London coffee-house. The same freedom appears in the booksellers’ shops, where literary productions of all kinds are sold openly. The pamphlet lately published on the division of Poland, wherein the King is very roughly treated, is to be had without difficulty, as well as other performances, which attack some of the most conspicuous characters with all the bitterness of satire.25
PRUSSIA’S JEWISH ENLIGHTENMENT
In the 1770s, the Jewish community of Berlin was the wealthiest and most acculturated of the German states. At its core was an elite of military contractors, bankers, merchants and manufacturers. The houses of the wealthiest families were located in the most fashionable areas of the city – Berlin was the only court city in the German lands where Jewish residents were not confined to a ghetto. In 1762, the banker Daniel Itzig bought a small palace in the Burgstrasse, right on the bank of the river Spree, and converted it into an elegant two-winged residence. Here he assembled a superb collection of art treasures, including Rubens’s Ganymede, works by Terborch, Watteau, Joseph Roos and Antoine Pesne, and a ‘large view with many figures by Canaletto’.26 Nearby, on the corner of Poststrasse and Mühlendamm, was the three-storeyed palace of the court jeweller and mintmaster, Veitel Heine Ephraim. Designed by the master builder Friedrich Wilhelm Diterichs and decorated in the rococo style with columns, pilasters and elegant balconies with gilded railings, the Ephraimpalais is still a landmark in today’s Berlin.
Itzig and Ephraim, like most other members of the Jewish financial elite, were men who had made their fortunes through collaboration with the Prussian state. Both were members of the business partnership entrusted by Frederick II with managing Prussia’s coin supply during the Seven Years War. When war broke out in 1756, the king resolved to fund his campaigns with a coin inflation. Prussia had no native silver to speak of and thus had to import all its coin bullion – a business that had traditionally been in the hands of Jewish agents. By reducing the proportion of silver in the Prussian coinage, he would be able to extract a ‘mint charge’ in the form of the unused silver. Frederick had always made more intensive use of Jewish financial managers than his predecessors and he obliged a consortium of Jewish bankers and bullion merchants – including Ephraim and Itzig – to accept responsibility for minting the debased coins. The profits generated by this enterprise – amounting to about 29 million thalers – made a significant contribution to the king’s war costs.27 By the end of the hostilities, the Jewish mint managers – together with an array of other Jewish businessmen specializing in the supply of war provisions – were among the wealthiest men in Prussia.
These were the most prominent members of the Jewish minority in Prussia, but they were hardly typical. Jewish life in Prussia was a study in contrasts. While a small minority enjoyed great wealth and legal privilege, the majority were weighed down by onerous restrictions. In 1730, Frederick William I issued a General Jewry Regulation that restricted Jewish trade, forbade Jews to practise in guild-controlled artisan crafts or to peddle wares in the cities, and prohibited them from purchasing houses. The trend towards ever-tighter state regulation continued during the reign of Frederick II. The elaborate Revised General Code of 1750 divided the Jews of Prussia into six discrete classes. At the top was a tiny minority of ‘generally privileged’ Jews who could purchase houses and land and operate commercially on the same footing as their Christian fellows. In special cases, members of this class might even be granted hereditary citizenship rights. The ‘privileged protected Jews’ of the next class, however, could not choose their place of residence and could pass their status only to one of their children. The third class of ‘unprivileged protected Jews’ comprised practitioners of specific professions – opticians, engravers, painters, physicians – deemed useful enough to justify conditional residence permits. Class four encompassed community employees, such as rabbis, cantors and kosher slaughterers, and entailed no hereditary rights. The fifth class comprised ‘tolerated Jews’ enjoying the patronage of a Jew in the upper three classes, as well as the non-inheriting children of Jews of the second and third classes. Class six, the least of them all, covered the private employees of Jewish businesses and households; residence permits in this class were dependent upon contracts of employment.
Confronted with the Jews, the king’s famed enlightenment narrowed to a purely instrumental rationale. Frederick was determined to use them as revenue-generators and was prepared for that purpose to grant extremely wide-ranging freedoms to the most useful of his Jewish subjects. Indeed he pressed Jews into those sectors of the economy where entrepreneurial ventures were most sorely needed – the bullion trade, iron foundries, cross-border commercial operations in peripheral regions and various branches of manufacture. He also raised special taxes and levies on Jewish subjects and required them to purchase surplus figurines from the Royal Porcelain Manufacturies – these items, reluctantly accepted in the 1770s, became the cherished heirlooms of later generations.
Underlying the superficially utilitarian measures of the state were social tensions and a lively vein of prejudice. Part of the pressure for state regulation came from the Christian corporate oligarchies of the Prussian towns, who pelted the central and provincial administrations with endless complaints and petitions against the commercial activities of the Jews.28 Jews in Prussia, as in all the German lands, were caught in the crossfire between the state and the local communities. In seeking to settle new Jewish residents or to protect their enterprises, the state ran into concerted resistance from town guildsmen and shopkeepers who feared Jewish competition and were hostile to the economic innovations pioneered by the newcomers. Here, as in other spheres of action, the authorities had to tread a careful line between grassroots opinion and the larger interests of the state.
This is not to suggest that the king himself was free of prejudice. On the contrary, Frederick was almost as hostile to the Jews as his father – who described them as ‘locusts’ – had been.29 In his Political Testament of 1752, he denounced them as the most dangerous of all sects, declaring that they harmed Christian trade, and arguing somewhat hypocritically that the state should make no use of their services. These views were reiterated in the Testament of 1768, despite the close and productive collaboration of the war years.30 Jewry regulations consequently carried a discriminatory symbolic charge. Jews were subject to a ‘body tax’ otherwise levied on cattle; they were constrained to enter and leave the capital city by one of two gates. Unlike any other minority group in Prussia, they could be punished on the basis of collective liability. A cabinet order of 1747 stated that the elders of each Jewish community were co-responsible for any robbery involving a member; the same applied to losses incurred through bankruptcies and penalties imposed for receiving or concealing stolen goods.31
Although the wealthy Jewish entrepreneurs have tended to dominate the historical record, the great majority of Jews in the Prussian lands were very modest individuals. Large-scale commerce of the sort practised by Ephraim and Itzig was the domain of a tiny elite. The small Jewish trader or Hausierer working from door to door was a far more frequent and familiar figure. Those Jews who did not possess letters of protection allowing them to trade in an open shop or stall were restricted to itinerant dealing in second-hand goods. The proportion of Prussian Jewry in this position rose steadily as the successive trade restrictions of the early and mid eighteenth century pushed many formerly prosperous merchants into marginal sectors of the economy.32 Their ranks were continuously swollen by the illegal immigration of Jews from Poland, many of whom were poor and obliged to live from very marginal forms of itinerant employment. Attempts to close the eastern borders to these economic refugees failed to have any appreciable effect. Repeated ordinances against ‘beggar Jews’, issued in 1780, 1785, 1788 and 1791, indicate that this migration, doubtless aggravated by the partitions of Poland, remained unchecked at the end of the century.33 The Pietist missionary agents who worked from the Institutum Judaicum in Halle from the 1730s onwards often encountered gaggles of ‘poor travelling Jews’ who were unable to pay the gate tax and gathered before the walls, trading in small portable items such as prayer books or calendars.34
By the middle decades of the eighteenth century, a process of cultural change was under way among the Prussian Jews that would ultimately transform Judaism. The Jewish enlightenment or Haskalah (from the Hebrew le-haskil, ‘enlighten, clarify with the aid of the intellect’) first took hold in Berlin. One of its earliest and most emblematic exponents was the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, who lived and worked in the city from 1743 until his death in 1786. Mendelssohn hailed from a humble family in the Saxon city of Dessau. His father struggled to support the family as a Schulklopfer, a synagogue door knocker, whose task was to instruct young children in the Torah and run from house to house rousing the congregation to prayer in the mornings. At the age of six, Moses began studying with rabbi David Fraänkel, a distinguished scholar of the Talmud and its commentaries. When Fraänkel moved to Berlin to accept the post of chief rabbi in 1743, his fourteen-year-old student followed. The penniless Mendelssohn would have been turned back at the Rosenthal Gate, had his mentor not found him a place in the household of one of Berlin’s ‘protected Jews’.
It was the beginning of a brilliant career. A train of publications soon established Mendelssohn’s reputation as a commentator on themes drawn from Plato, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, Shaftesbury, Pope and Wolff. Mendelssohn wrote in an elegant lively German, but he also kept up a stream of publications in Hebrew. He launched the first-ever Hebrew periodical, Kohelet Musar (The Moralist), in 1755. Modelled on the ‘moral weeklies’ of early eighteenth-century England, Kohelet Musar aimed to disseminate enlightened ideas within the educated stratum of Jewry. In 1784, Mendelssohn joined the debate on the meaning of ‘enlightenment’ in the pages of the Berlin Monthly. Here he argued that enlightenment denoted not a state of affairs, but a process of maturation in which individuals learned gradually to apply their ‘reason’ to the problems before them.
This was an utterly new and distinctive voice. Here was a Jewish scholar who, while continuing to avow his attachment to Jewish tradition, reached out to a mixed audience of Jews and Christians, speaking of reason, sentiment and beauty in a captivating, undogmatic idiom. In using Hebrew for Kohelet Musar, Mendelssohn brought the sacred language of the synagogue out into the open air of an enlightened public sphere. For some of his Jewish readers, there was an almost giddy sense of displacement and liberation. Young Jews from across the Prussian lands and beyond came to gather at his home, where there were lively debates on matters of enlightenment. It was here that a specifically Jewish enlightenment began to take shape. The luminaries of the early Berlin Haskalah – Naphtali Herz Wessely, Herz Homberg, Solomon Maimon, Isaac Euchel and others – were all formed in this exciting milieu. In 1778, the Mendelssohn disciple David Friedlaänder, son of a Königsberg banker, joined with Isaac Daniel Itzig (son of Daniel) to found a Jewish Free School in Berlin – Mendelssohn had a hand in designing the curriculum. By the early 1780s, Mendelssohn had established a genuinely Prussian literary network; a list of the 515 subscribers to his German translation of the Pentateuch (1781–3) includes names from across the kingdom, with major concentrations in Breslau, Königsberg and Berlin.35
For enlightened Christian readers too, Mendelssohn was an object of fascination, a modern Jewish sage, a ‘German Socrates’, a man who symbolized the ferment and potential of enlightenment. More than any other individual, he exemplified the type of the wise Jew that proliferated in German fiction and drama during the second half of the eighteenth century.36 The eminent dramatist Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, a close friend and collaborator, erected a literary monument to his friend in Nathan the Wise (1779), a play whose hero was a benign and virtuous Jewish merchant. Mendelssohn became a cultural icon, a talisman to conjure against the darkness of intolerance and prejudice. His house was a popular stopping-place for visitors to Berlin with literary pretensions.37
22. Moses Mendelssohn examined at Potsdam’s Berlin Gate. Engraving by Johann Michael Siegfried Löwe, after Daniel Chodowiecki, Physiognomischer Almanach (Berlin, 1792).
There are many contemporary portraits of Mendelssohn, but one of the most memorable, an engraving based on a drawing by Daniel Chodowiecki, shows him presenting his papers for inspection at the Berlin Gate to the city of Potsdam in 1771. Mendelssohn stands in the centre of the scene, a short, stooped figure in modest dark dress flanked by two towering Prussian guards, one of whom raises his hat in acknowledgement. The engraving referred to a contemporary anecdote in which Mendelssohn was asked to produce a letter of commendation from the king and was quizzed on its content. The emotional tone of this image remains difficult to read – is the wry expression on Mendelssohn’s lean, upturned face intended to imply an ironic gloss on this routine encounter between a Prussian officer and Prussia’s most famous Jew?
The Haskalah that flowed out from Mendelssohn and his circle was no bolt out of the blue. Its roots lay in a broad process of social change. The early Jewish enlighteners were deeply indebted to a parental generation that had begun to take an interest in modern languages, philosophy and the sciences. The pressure of Prussia’s interventionist state had (unwittingly) undermined the authority of the traditional rabbinate, hollowing out the space for an intellectual counter-elite. Even more important was the acculturated milieu of the great Berlin families. The patronage of the commercial elite provided the maskilim (exponents of Haskalah), a number of whom were impoverished itinerant scholars from far afield, with work as household tutors and opportunities to test new theories on their young charges. Mendelssohn could never have pursued his career as a thinker and writer without the financial stability provided by his relationship with the wealthy silk manufacturer Isaac Bernhard, for whom he worked first as a private tutor, later as a bookkeeper and ultimately as a business partner. The homes of the wealthy bankers – especially Daniel Itzig – were meeting places and watering-holes for the young generation of scholars – it was here that Mendelssohn received his first instruction in philosophy shortly after his arrival in the city.
But the Haskalah was also part of a distinctive moment in the history of German and Jewish-German sociability. In the mid-1750s, Moses Mendelssohn wrote to the dramatist Gotthold Ephraim Lessing to report on his deepening friendship with the Berlin publisher Friedrich Nicolai:
I visit Herr Nicolai often in his garden. (I truly love him, my dearest friend! And I believe that our own friendship can only gain by this because I cherish in him your true friend as well.) We read poetry, Herr Nicolai recites his own compositions too, and I sit on my bench, a critical judge, complimenting, laughing, approving, finding fault, until evening comes.38
Mendelssohn’s conversation with Nicolai was a spontaneous, unstructured affair, yet it carried real symbolic weight. Here were a Jew and a Christian in a garden, meeting on equal terms, delighting in each other’s company and oblivious to the passing hours – for how long had such an encounter been conceivable? In the later 1750s, Mendelssohn frequented the ‘Learned Coffeehouse’, a society dedicated to the dissemination of enlightenment, in which members – there were about one hundred in all – presented and discussed papers on topical themes.
This interstitial sphere of enlightened trans-confessional conviviality steadily expanded in the later decades of the eighteenth century. It reached its high point in the literary salons frequented by the Berlin cultural elite during the later 1780s and 1790s. These were loosely organized gatherings in which persons of every social station and religious creed came together for conversation and the exchange of ideas. Men and women, Jews and Christians, noblemen and commoners, professors, poets, scientists and merchants mingled in private houses to discuss art, politics, literature and the sciences, but also to cultivate friendships and love affairs. Jewish women were central to the creation of this new milieu because, as members of a socially marginal group, they were in a sense equidistant from all social strata within the mainstream society – their houses provided an ideal space for the suspension of conventional boundaries. Women from the wealthier Jewish families also disposed of the considerable means required to cater to the hungry and thirsty intellectuals of Berlin – a few salonnières were driven to the brink of bankruptcy by the expense of keeping open house.
The two most celebrated Berlin hostesses were Henriette Herz, daughter of the first Jewish physician to practise in Berlin, and Rahel Levin, whose father was a wealthy jewel merchant. Both women were products of the assimilated Berlin elite – they had no qualms about appearing bare-headed in public and Rahel was notorious for breaking the Sabbath with Saturday-morning rides in an open carriage. Henriette’s salon, which flourished in the 1790s, was for a time the epicentre of literary and scientific culture in Berlin – its guests included the celebrated theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt, and the dramatist Heinrich von Kleist. Rahel Levin was at first a regular attendant at Henriette’s salon, but she later formed her own literary circle. The Levin salon brought literary and academic stars into contact with members of the old Prussian elites. Rahel maintained numerous friendships among noblewomen she had met during her sojourns at the spas of Bohemia. Scions of the old Junker families – Schlabrendorffs, Finckensteins and even members of the royal family – shared sofas and tables with scientists, writers, critics and literary hopefuls. Friedrich Schlegel, Jean Paul and Johann Gottlob Fichte were among the intellectual celebrities who passed through the Levin salon. Regular attendants, whatever their social status, were expected to address each other with the familiar du.39
On whose terms did this exuberant rapprochement take place? In the minds of most educated Christian contemporaries, there was still the strong presumption that acculturation must ultimately culminate in conversion. The Zürich theologian Johann Caspar Lavater, who socialized with the enlightened elite and was a frequent visitor to Mendelssohn’s home in 1763–4, surprised his former host in 1769 with an open letter in which he demanded that Mendelssohn either convert to Christianity or justify his continued attachment to the Jewish faith. Lavater’s impertinent challenge and Mendelssohn’s gentle rejection were a literary sensation. The episode was a signal reminder of the limits of tolerance, even within the republic of letters.
The enlightened Prussian civil servant Christian Wilhelm Dohm was another case in point. Dohm was a close friend of Mendelssohn and a frequent guest in the house of Marcus Herz (husband of Henriette). He was also one of the first great champions of Jewish legal emancipation. In 1781 he published a landmark essay entitled On the Civic Improvement of the Jews, which attacked Christian prejudice and called for the removal of traditional legal disabilities. The Jews, he wrote, ‘have been endowed with the same capacity to become happier, better persons, more useful members of society’; it was only oppression, ‘so unworthy of our age’, that corrupted them. It was thus congruent with ‘humaneness, justice and enlightened policy to banish this oppression and improve the condition of the Jews’.40 But even Dohm assumed that the process of emancipation must lead to a far-reaching dilution of Jewish identity, if not to conversion. Once the pressure of legal discrimination were removed, he argued, it would be possible to woo the Jews away from the ‘sophistic sayings of [their] rabbis’ and divest them of their ‘clannish religious opinions’, inspiring them instead with patriotism and love for the state.41
But what if the Jews failed to honour their part of this one-sided bargain? What if, despite acculturating outwardly to the forms of the Christian mainstream, they remained in some sense Jewish and different? Scepticism on this point continued to dog the enterprise of Jewish societal assimilation. In 1803, the Berlin lawyer Karl Wilhelm Grattenauer published a mordant pamphlet in which he mounted a direct attack on the Jews of the salon-going elite. Entitled Against the Jews, this text focused its venom specifically on the young Jewish women who
read many books, speak many languages, play many instruments, sketch in a variety of styles, paint in all colours, dance in all fashions, embroider in all patterns and possess every single thing that could give them a claim to charm, except the art of uniting all the particulars into a beautiful femininity.42
This was a missile aimed right at the heart of that social milieu that had done more than any other to open channels of communication between the Jewish and the Christian elites. Against the Jews was widely read and discussed in Berlin and across Prussia – the conservative publicist Friedrich Gentz recalled reading it, despite initial misgivings, ‘with exceptional pleasure’.43
One of the sourest fruits of this new critique of Jewish acculturation was the satirical farce The Company We Keep (Unser Verkehr) by the Breslau doctor Karl Borromaäus Sessa. Written in 1813, Sessa’s play failed to arouse much interest in Breslau, but it was an instant hit in Berlin, where it opened at the Opera House on 2 September 1815. Audiences were invited to laugh at a grotesque gallery of Jewish stereotypes. Abraham, representing the older generation of shtetl-Jews, is a dealer in second-hand goods who expresses himself in a hilariously contorted Yiddish jargon. But his son Jacob aims for higher things; he wants to dance, speak French, teach himself aesthetics and write theatre reviews. Yet he finds it hard to shake off the Yiddishness of his speech: ‘I vant to trow away de Jew in me; I’m enlightened, no? Don’t have nothin’ Jewish in me.’ The most assimilated character of all is the affected and well-spoken Lydia, an unmistakeable caricature of the sharp-witted salonnières of the Herz-Levin era, who fails despite her best efforts to conceal her essential Jewishness.44 There was nothing gentle or affectionate about Sessa’s parody. It was an outright attack on the idea that acculturation would or should suffice to close the social and political gap between Jews and their Christian fellow-Prussians.
In the meanwhile, the Haskalah and intensified contact with the Christian social environment had begun to generate profound cultural changes within Prussian Jewry. We can discern a clear break between the first generation of enlighteners, personified in the figure of Mendelssohn, who wrote eloquently in Hebrew and remained deeply rooted in Jewish tradition, and the later more radical reformers of the revolutionary era who wrote in German and ultimately sought to break the mould of traditional observance altogether. The journey away from Jewish tradition towards the periphery of the community and its world of observance led to a variety of destinations: some sought to resculpt Judaism along the lines of natural religion; others hoped – like Mendelssohn’s quixotic disciple David Friedlaänder – to merge a rationalized Judaic faith with a Christianity purged of Trinitarian elements; and for a number, including many of the well-born young Jewish women of the salons and four of Moses Mendelssohn’s six children, the road ended in the most radical assimilation of all – conversion to Christianity.45
The Berlin Haskalah did not lead to the dissolution of traditional Judaism – the pragmatic, flexible communal culture of western Ashkenaz was far too resilient for that – but it did produce a lasting transformation. It made possible, firstly, the emergence of a secular Jewish intelligentsia that could thrive alongside the old elite of the rabbis and Talmud scholars. In so doing, it created the foundations for a critical Jewish public sphere capable of engaging in an open-ended way with its own traditions. Religion was privatized, relegated to the synagogue, while everyday life was – though only gradually – freed from the trappings of religious authority. This was at first a phenomenon of the urban elites and their social satellites, but the shock-waves generated by Haskalah gradually penetrated the fabric of traditional Judaism, broadening the intellectual horizons of the rabbinate and encouraging the faithful to seek a secular education (especially in medicine) at the German universities. It fed into the Reform movement that modernized nineteenth-century synagogue liturgy and religious observance. But it also stimulated far-reaching change within the world of traditional rabbinical Judaism. It was due in large part to the invigorating challenge posed by Mendelssohn and his successors that the Judaisms of the nineteenth century – Reform, Conservative, Orthodox – succeeded in capturing and feeding the spiritual and intellectual commitments of new generations.
COUNTER-ENLIGHTENMENT?
‘Everything has collapsed into smallness,’ Count Mirabeau wrote, reflecting on the death of Frederick the Great in 1786, ‘just as once everything had expanded into greatness.’46 Certainly the transition from Frederick II to his successor and nephew,47 Frederick William II, was attended by the usual Hohenzollern family contrasts. The uncle was misanthropic, aloof and utterly uninterested in women. The nephew was genial, gregarious and recklessly heterosexual. His first marriage, with Elisabeth of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, was dissolved after infidelities on both sides; the second marriage, with Frederike Luise of Hessen-Darmstadt, bore seven children; a further seven offspring were born of his life-long relationship with his mistress Wilhelmine Encke (later raised to the peerage as Princess Liegnitz) and two further (bigamous) marriages ‘under the left hand’. The uncle had remained loyal to the values of the high enlightenment, espousing a rigorously sceptical rationalism that seemed old-fashioned by the 1780s. The nephew was a man of his era who took an interest in spiritism, clairvoyance, astrology and other pursuits that would have disgusted his predecessor. The uncle had demonstrated his personal attachment to the ideals of the Enlightenment by joining the Freemasons when he was still crown prince. The nephew, by contrast, joined the Rosicrucians, an esoteric and secretive offshoot of Freemasonry dedicated to mystical and occult pursuits. Frederick the Great had managed, through rigorous economies in all domains of state activity, to leave behind a treasury of 51 million thalers; this staggering sum was squandered by his successor in only eleven years.48 And there were important differences in management styles. Whereas the uncle had constantly controlled and monitored the central executive, imposing his will on secretaries and ministers alike, the nephew was an impulsive, uncertain figure who was easily steered by his advisers.
In a sense, Prussia had returned to the European dynastic norm. Frederick William was not an especially stupid man, and he was certainly a person of deep and wide-ranging cultural interests – his importance as a patron of the arts and architecture is beyond dispute.49 But he was incapable of providing the Prussian governmental system with a strong commanding centre. One consequence of this weakening of the sovereign’s grip on policy was the re-emergence of the ‘antechamber of power’, that space within which advisers, ministers and would-be friends of the king competed for influence on the monarch. Among Frederick William’s advisers there was one in particular whose influence over domestic affairs was unrivalled. Johann Christoph Wöllner was an intelligent and ambitious commoner who had worked his way up from humble origins to become a pastor and later, through a highly advantageous marriage to the daughter of his patron, the master of a landed estate. Wöllner held an exalted position within the inner circle of the Rosicrucian order in Berlin and established contact with Frederick William while he was still crown prince. Frederick the Great was un-impressed by this connection, describing the crown prince’s upwardly mobile companion as a ‘scheming, swindling parson’. But with the accession of Frederick William II to the throne, Wöllner’s day had come. In 1788, he was appointed minister of culture in place of the Baron von Zedlitz, one of the most distinguished and progressive figures in the Frederician administration. In this post, Wöllner dedicated himself to an authoritarian cultural policy whose objective was to curb the supposedly corrosive effects of scepticism on the moral fabric of school, church and university. The centrepiece of Wöllner’s campaign to restabilize the ideological substance of public life in the kingdom was the famed Edict on Religion of 9 August 1788, a law designed to arrest and reverse the corrosive effect of rationalist speculation on the integrity of Christian doctrine.
It was no accident that Wöllner’s strictures were directed specifically at religious speculation, for it was in the sphere of religion (and especially Protestant religion) that debate over the implications of philosophical rationalism had done most to unsettle conventional certainties. The impact of enlightenment on the Prussian clergy in particular had been reinforced by Frederick II’s practice of favouring rationalist candidates for appointments to clerical office. The preamble to the edict stated baldly that ‘enlightenment’ – the word was printed in bold letters on a line of its own – had gone too far. The integrity and coherence of the Christian church was in danger. Faith was being sacrificed on the altar of fashion.
The edict introduced new censorship mechanisms to impose doctrinal conformity on all texts used for school and university study. The disciplinary powers of the Lutheran and Calvinist consistories – the most senior confessional administrative organs – were reinforced. Monitoring procedures were introduced to ensure that candidates appointed to clerical posts actually subscribed to the articles of faith of their respective confessions. Further measures followed. A censorship edict was published in December 1788 in an effort to stem the flow of pamphlets and articles criticizing the new measures. A Royal Examining Commission was established to flush out the rationalists in church and teaching offices. Among those subjected to investigation was pastor Johannes Heinrich Schulz of Gelsdorf, who was notorious for preaching that Jesus was a man like any other, that he was never resurrected, that the doctrine of a general resurrection was nonsense and that hell did not exist.50 Another who came to the attention of the authorities was Immanuel Kant himself: in the autumn of 1794, he received a stiff warning in the form of a royal order stating that the essay collection published as Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone ‘abused [… ] philosophy for the purpose of distorting and disparaging several principal and fundamental doctrines of Holy Scripture’.51
Wöllner’s edict has often been seen as a reactionary backlash against the Prussian enlightenment.52 This is certainly how some of its contemporary critics saw it. Yet in many respects, Wöllner’s religious policy was deeply rooted in the traditions of the Prussian enlightenment. Wöllner had himself been a Freemason before he joined the Rosicrucians (who were in any case an outgrowth of the Masonic movement), had been educated at the rationalist University of Halle and was the author of various enlightened tracts urging agricultural improvement, land reform and the abolition of serfdom.53 The central purpose of the edict was not – as some of its more polemical contemporary critics claimed – to impose a new religious ‘orthodoxy’, but rather to consolidate the existing confessional structures and thereby safeguard the pluralist compromise struck at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. In this sense it accorded with Prussia’s tradition of multi-confessional religious co-existence. Thus the edict forbade not only the public propagation of heterodox rationalist views, but also proselytizing by Catholics among members of the two Protestant faiths. It even extended the state’s guardianship (in article 2) to the various ‘sects previously publicly tolerated in our states’, including the Jews, the Herrnhut brethren, the Mennonites and the Bohemian brethren.54
The edict was also notable for its essentially instrumental view of religion. Underpinning it was the – characteristically enlightened – belief that religion had an important role to play in securing public order. What mattered was not the existence of theological speculation as such, but the fact that the ‘poor masses of the population’ were being led away from their accustomed faith in scriptural, clerical and – by extension – sovereign authority.55 The need for stabilizing measures seemed all the more urgent for the fact that the absorption of large tracts of Polish territory (see chapter 10 below) had greatly increased the number of Prussia’s Catholic subjects and raised questions about the confessional balance of power within the kingdom. For these and other reasons, many of the most prominent enlightened theologians were happy to support the edict as a policy for the maintenance of religious peace.56
It thus makes little sense to see the controversy that broke out over the edict as a conflict between ‘enlightenment’ and a political ‘reaction’ bent on turning the clock back. The real struggle was between different visions of enlightenment. On the one hand, there were those enlightened defenders of the edict who saw in it a rational exercise of the state’s authority in the interests of religious peace and the liberty of individuals to be ‘left undisturbed in their chosen public confession’.57 On the other, there were those radical critics who argued that the edict oppressed individual consciences; one of these, the Kantian law professor Gottfried Hufeland, even argued that public institutions should reflect the rational convictions of the individuals composing them, even though this implied that ‘there must be as many churches as there are personal convictions’.58 From one perspective, the confessional identities bequeathed by history to the present were parcels of religious liberty to be safeguarded against the anarchic individualism of the radical critics; from the other, they were a stifling legacy of the past whose continued existence was a burden upon individual consciences. The real issue turned on the locus of rational action. Should this reside in the state, as Pufendorf had proposed, or should it be vested in the unfolding reasoned enquiry of individuals, as the more radical disciples of Kant appeared to be suggesting? Was the state better placed to uphold a rational public order grounded in the principles of natural law, or should this be left to the increasingly dynamic political forces within an emergent civil society?
The public furore provoked by the edict and its flanking measures revealed the extent to which enlightened critical debate had already politicized the Prussian public. There was a new sharpness in the tone of printed comment that prompted the king to observe with alarm in September 1788 that ‘freedom of the press’ (Presse-Freyheit) had mutated into ‘impudence of the press’ (Presse-Frechheit).59 There were also institutional frictions between the makeshift organs established by Wöllner to police the edict through censorship and the existing bodies of ecclesiastical self-governance, many of which were dominated by theological liberals. The disciplinary proceedings against the flagrantly heterodox pastor Schulz collapsed when the senior judicial and consistorial officials appointed to investigate him came to the conclusion that since he was a Christian (though not a Lutheran as such), he should be permitted to remain in office.60 As this and many other cases revealed, there was now a network of officials at the apex of the administrative system who had passed through the crucible of the Berlin enlightenment and were prepared to defend their understanding of an enlightened political order against the authoritarian prescriptions of Wöllner and Frederick William II.61 It was surely no coincidence that Johann Friedrich Zöllner, the consistorial official who had passed the tract for publication, Johann Georg Gebhard, the tract’s Calvinist author, and Ernst Ferdinand Klein, the judge entrusted with finding a verdict for the Supreme Court, were all sometime members of Berlin’s Wednesday Club.
In the face of such resistance, Wöllner’s efforts to silence debate and purge the administrative structures of rationalist critics were bound to enjoy at best a limited success. In the spring of 1794, Hermann Daniel Hermes and Gottlob Friedrich Hillmer, members of the Royal Examining Commission, travelled to Halle to conduct an inspection of the city’s university and high school. The University of Halle had once been the headquarters of Pietism, but it was now a bastion of radical theology whose governing body had formally protested the recent censorship measures. When Hermes and Hillmer reached the city on the evening of 29 May and made their way to their quarters in the Golden Lion Hotel, they were besieged by a crowd of masked students who stood before their windows until the small hours of the morning chanting rationalist slogans. On the following night an even larger and louder crowd of students gathered to hear one of their number deliver a speech seething, in the ears of an unsympathetic onlooker, with ‘blasphemies and irreligious expressions’, before bombarding the windows of the examiners’ rooms with tiles, bricks and cobblestones.
To make matters worse, the academic authorities of the university refused to implement Wöllner’s policy within the faculties – partly because they were hostile to the spirit of the edict, and partly because they saw the imposition of such measures from above as incompatible with academic freedom and the autonomy of their institution. ‘What is our power?’ Hermes exclaimed in despair during a difficult meeting with senior university officials. ‘We have not yet succeeded in dislodging one single neological preacher. Everybody is against us.’62
By 1795, with the failure to implement the new measures in Prussia’s most important university, it was clear that the Wöllner authoritarian project had run out of steam. There was, to be sure, a generalized tightening of censorship, especially as the unfolding of the French Revolution revealed the scale of the threat posed to traditional authority by political radicalism. One prominent contemporary witness to these developments was the publisher and patriot Friedrich Nicolai, who moved his own journal, the Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek, to Altona (a town adjoining Hamburg but under Danish rule) in 1792 to avoid the scrutiny of the Prussian censors. In a letter to Frederick William II of 1794, Nicolai protested against the recent measures, observing that the number of independent printing presses operating in Berlin had fallen from 181 to sixty-one as a consequence of the regime imposed after 1788, and suggesting slyly that this was damaging to royal tax revenues.63 Whether this contraction was exclusively the result of censorship (as opposed to market forces) is doubtful. Yet there clearly was a heightened impatience with government censorship among members of the Prussian intelligentsia. This was partly a function of real constraints, but it also expressed the expansion of expectations that had occurred during the intellectual and political ferment of the 1780s. ‘Freedom of speech’ was defined in far more radical terms by the mid-1790s in Prussia than it had been in the previous decade, and the warm glow in which the charisma of ‘Frederick the Unique’ had bathed the wheels of the state machine gradually faded after 1786.
Despite this souring of the public mood, it is important not to overstate the oppressiveness of the post-Frederician administration. A recent study of the Berlin press during the French Revolution has shown that Prussian subjects had access to extremely detailed and reliable press coverage of contemporaneous events in France, not only during the liberal revolution of 1789–92, but also during the Jacobin Terror and thereafter. Reports in the Berlin press incorporated sophisticated political commentaries, which were by no means always hostile to the cause of the revolutionaries. The Haudesche und Spenersche Zeitung in particular was remarkable for the sympathy with which the positions and policies of the various parties (including even Robespierre and the Jacobins) were set out and explained. At no time did the Prussian government seriously attempt to prevent the dissemination of information about the French events, even at the time of the trial and execution of the king in 1792–3, or to ensure that the regicides and their allies were cast in an especially hostile light. Nor did the authorities prevent the widespread use of such contemporary reportage for educational purposes, not only in the Gymnasien (grammar schools) but also in village and elementary schools. Nowhere in the German states, with the possible exception of Hamburg, do we find press coverage of comparable quality and candour. Despite the pervasive fear of revolution and all the vexations of censorship, Axel Schumann writes,
the fact remains that between 1789 and 1806, four journals appeared under Prussian censorship in the capital and residential city of Berlin, in which the French Revolution was celebrated as a historic necessity and as the victory of reason over aristocratic arrogance and monarchical mismanagement.64
TWO-HEADED STATE
In the summer of 1796, crowds of Berliners swarmed to see the latest theatrical sensation orchestrated by the famous Swabian illusionist Karl Enslen. The show opened with a trio of beautifully fashioned automatons: a Spaniard with a flute, a woman playing the glass-organ and a trumpeter who could also speak. There followed an ‘aerial hunt’ involving floating animal figures filled with gas, and an android gymnast whose movements were so life-like that one would have taken him for a man, were it not for the muted creaking of the neck-joint. Towards the end of the performance, the lights were extinguished and a loud clap of thunder announced a series of ghostly apparitions culminating in a spectacular trompe-l’oeil.
Then there is seen far off in the distance a bright star; the star widens; and out of it there comes the very exact likeness of Frederick the second, in his usual clothing and posture [… ]. The image grows bigger and bigger, comes nearer and nearer, until it seems to stand as large as life just before the orchestra. The effect of this apparition on the floor and in the boxes was remarkable. The clapping and jubilation was endless. When Frederick seemed about to retreat to his star many called ‘Oh stay with us!’ He returned into his star, but after loud cries of encore he had to come back twice.65
Here was a theatre of the modern type, where darkness was used to heighten the impact of illusion (a recent innovation), where tickets and seats were set at different prices for different pockets. Men and women, minor officials, craftsmen and clerks mingled in the audience, but people of noble estate were there too, and even members of the royal family – albeit only as paying customers. And here was the figure of the resurrected king summoned back to life to satisfy a crowd hungry for entertainment and prepared to pay for it. Did those royals who watched this remarkable projection feel a certain unease at the spectacle of the dead king, hailed by his people, but also at their beck and call? It is hard to think of a scene that better exemplifies the ambivalence and modernity of nostalgia.
By 1800, Berlin was – in terms of its intellectual and social life – the most vibrant city of German Europe. Its population was approaching 200,000. There was a dense network of clubs and societies, of which we know thirty-eight by name, and sixteen Masonic lodges.66 Beyond the circles of the better-known organizations there was a further array of now-forgotten clubs catering to the lower social strata. Berlin’s clubland was not just large, it was also highly textured and diverse. The Monday Club, the Wednesday Society and the Thursday Circle were small and exclusive gatherings that met the needs of intellectuals and enlightened members of the upper bourgeoisie. The city also offered a wide range of societies focused on specific interests: the Society of Naturalist Friends, for example, or the Pedagogical Society that met on the first Monday every month in a suburban council chamber at Werder, or the Economic Heating Society that discussed ways of reducing the consumption of wood, a scarce and expensive commodity at this time. The Philomatic Society, with a membership of thirty-five, catered to people with an interest in the sciences, including the Jewish Kantian philosopher Lazarus Bendavid, the sculptor Johann Gottfried Schadow and the senior official Ernst Ferdinand Klein. Then there were the Medical Club – a forerunner of the later professional organizations – and the Pharmaceutical Society, which maintained a herbarium and a small library for the use of its members. The Military Society concerned itself with the need for military reform and encompassed some 200 members – it was an early focal point for the reforming energies of those activists who would come to the fore after 1806. For those who wished to keep abreast of the latest developments in politics, science and culture, there was a wide range of reading societies and other commercial reading facilities, such as lending libraries. Newspapers and journals could also be had in the coffee houses; and the lodges often maintained considerable libraries.
As the clubs grew more numerous, their functions became ever more specialized and diverse. One popular new form of organized social activity in Berlin was the amateur theatrical society. Theatrical societies proliferated quickly in the 1780s and 1790s, catering to a wide range of social constituencies. While the Urania (founded in 1792) catered to members of the enlightened social elite, the Polyhymnia (founded in 1800) included plumbers, instrument makers, cobblers and brush makers. The theatrical clubs admitted both men and women, although the selection of works for performance was generally reserved to the men alone. It was only a matter of time before clubs sprang up combining private venues for members and their guests with a range of leisure activities and entertainments. The ‘Resources’ (Ressourcen), as they were called, were clubs that rented premises in which a wide range of services was on offer, from meals to billiards, reading rooms, concerts, balls, theatrical performances, or even, in one case, fireworks. These were large enterprises, often encompassing a membership of more than 200, and reflecting in their clientele and tone the social diversity of the capital city.
This densely textured and swiftly changing topography of voluntary organizations tells us something of the forces at work in Prussian society by the end of the eighteenth century. Berlin was a centre of royal and governmental authority, but it was also a theatre of autonomous social action where citizens could deliberate on the high matters of state, acquire scientific and other esoteric knowledge, enjoy the pleasures of a sociability that was neither private nor entirely public, consume culture and take pleasure in congenial surroundings. None of this was in any sense rebellious or revolutionary, yet it did reflect a seismic shift in the balance of power within society. Christians and Jews, men and women, nobles, burghers and artisans rubbed shoulders in this sociable urbane milieu. It was a world that had made itself out of the talents, communicative energies and ready cash of the city’s population. It was courteous rather than courtly. Controlling it, censoring it, even overseeing it, were tasks beyond the resources of Berlin’s modest police and censorship organs. Its very existence posed a subtle challenge to the structures and habits of traditional authority.
Within the ranks of the administration, too, there were signs of a paradigm shift. A new generation of civil servants began to orient Prussian administrative practice towards new objectives. In 1780, a young nobleman from the city of Nassau on the river Lahn joined the Prussian civil service. Reichsfreiherr Karl vom und zum Stein hailed from an ancient imperial family and was, like so many Germans of his generation, an admirer of Frederick II. As an official within the War and Domains Chamber, Stein was made responsible for improving the efficiency and productivity of the mining sector in the Westphalian territories. The lucrative mines of the county of Mark were at this time largely under the control of the Gewerke, corporate, trade union-like bodies that managed the local labour market. On Stein’s initiative, the powers of these unions were cut back to make way for a new unified system of wage regulations and an expanded regime of state inspection. Yet at the same time, Stein, who approved of corporate organizations as long as they did not get in the way of efficiency, achieved reconciliation with the mining unions by conceding them a greater measure of self-government, including the appointment by election of their own officers.67
23. Baron Karl vom und zum Stein
Stein’s originality and brilliance were quickly recognized and by 1788 he held two senior posts within the chamber administration in Kleve and the county of Mark. He purged outmoded regulations and privileges from the fiscal system; he also suspended guild controls in the countryside, in order to stimulate rural manufacture and eliminate smuggling. The panoply of internal tolls collected by private individuals and corporations was swept away and replaced by a state-administered border tariff set at a moderate level.68 As provincial president of Minden-Ravensberg from 1796, Stein again targeted the traditional levies and privileges that muted the vitality of the local economy. He even attempted (without success) to get to grips with the problem of servile peasant status in the Westphalian lands (and particularly in Minden-Ravensberg, where many peasants were still personally unfree). As a member of the old imperial corporate nobility, Stein was reluctant to ride roughshod over local tradition and opted for a policy of negotiation with the provincial Estates. The aim was to introduce a compensation package that would reconcile the landed families to the curtailment of their seigneurial rights. These latter initiatives foundered on the bitter resistance of the nobility, but they signalled the advent of a bold new style in Prussian administration.69
Another rising civil servant with reformist ideas was Karl August von Hardenberg, who joined the Prussian administration in 1790. Like Stein, Hardenberg was a ‘foreigner’ with a deep admiration of Frederick II. Born on his maternal grandfather’s estate at Essenrode in 1750, Hardenberg hailed from a Hanoverian family of progressive reputation.70 As a civil servant in his native Hanover, the young Hardenberg became known as an outspoken reformer – a memorandum he composed in 1780 called for the abolition of servile peasant tenures, deregulation of the economy and the creation of a more streamlined executive based upon thematic ministries and clear lines of command and responsibility.71 After his transfer to Prussia, Hardenberg was entrusted, from January 1792, with the administrative integration of the newly acquired Franconian territories of Ansbach and Bayreuth.72 This was a task of great complexity, for they were criss-crossed with enclaves, exclaves and overlapping sovereignties.
Hardenberg attacked the problem with extraordinary determination and ruthlessness. The imperial nobles were shorn of their baroque privileges and constitutional rights, in flagrant breach of imperial law. Exchange agreements and jurisdictional settlements were put in place to eliminate enclaves and establish the borders as the impermeable frontiers of a homogeneous Prussian political sovereignty. The right of subjects to bring suits before the imperial courts was abolished, thus preventing the corporate nobility in the provinces from taking their grievances to the Emperor. Where there was resistance to his orders, Hardenberg was quick to send in troops and enforce compliance. These measures were supported by an innovative approach to public opinion – Hardenberg maintained contacts with several important journals in the region and discreetly cultivated friendly writers who could be depended upon to publish articles and editorials supporting his policy.73
24. Karl August, Prince von Hardenberg. Marble bust by Christian Rauch, 1816.
Hardenberg had made it a condition of taking office that he would report directly to the king. He was thus a kind of viceroy in Ansbach and Bayreuth, with powers denied to his colleagues in the capital. This enabled him to push through far-reaching reforms without fear of their being sabotaged by jealous superiors. The new Franconian administration he established was structured (unlike the central government in Berlin) along modern lines: there were four thematic ministries (justice, interior, war and finance). Under Hardenberg’s leadership, the Franconian principalities became a hothouse of administrative reform in the old Prussia. Among those officials who moved sideways from the core administration to take up vacant posts in Ansbach and Bayreuth we find many of the names that later appear at the apex of the Prussian state: Schuckmann, Koch, Kircheisen, Humboldt, Bülow. Around Hardenberg himself there gathered an eager pack of ambitious younger bureaucrats from the region. Men of the ‘Franconian clique’ would come to occupy senior administrative posts, not only in Prussia, but also in Bavaria, which later took over the principalities as a result of the Napoleonic Wars.74
Even Prussia’s time-honoured grain-management system was under growing pressure to change. The first four years of the reign of Frederick William II (r. 1786–97) saw a dramatic liberalization of the grain trade. It was a short-lived experiment – controls were gradually reimposed from 1788 onwards, to the great disappointment of liberals within the administration.75 But a chain of subsistence riots in 1800–1805 persuaded some senior officials that productivity would rise and distribution occur more efficiently if the state abandoned its controls and allowed the grain markets to function without state interference. One influential supporter of this view was the East Prussian nobleman Friedrich Leopold Freiherr von Schroetter, Prussian State Minister for East and West Prussia and vice-president of the General Directory. Schroetter was a sometime student and family friend of Immanuel Kant and a decided exponent of the agrarian liberalism that was fashionable among the East Prussian elite at the turn of the century. On 11 July 1805, he set out his views in a memorandum to the king. If subsistence riots were possible in peacetime because of failures and inefficiencies in the state system, Schroetter argued, then what could be expected if a war were to break out, and the state barges used to transport grain were needed by the army? In place of the existing regulations, Schroetter proposed a radical deregulation of the grain economy. No one, he suggested, should be obliged to sell grain against his will or at prices imposed by the government; instead of protecting the grain supply from the traders, the state should protect the traders and uphold their right to dispose freely of their property. The General Directory rejected Schroetter’s proposals in August 1805. But this was a temporary setback. In the not-so-long term, it was Schroetter’s liberalism – not the protectionism of the Directory – that would win the day.76
We can therefore speak of a process of change diffusing inwards from various points on the Prussian periphery.77 In the 1790s, the decade of revolution in Europe, Prussia seemed to be poised between two worlds. The expansion of critical print that had taken place during the last third of the century presented the administration with a phenomenon that it could neither repress nor fully accept. The flowering of Prussian monarchical patriotism expressed an ambition among the emergent urban intelligentsia to participate in the great matters of the state for which there was as yet no outlet in Prussia’s governmental system. Debate and critical discussion within and outside the administration had raised questions about virtually every domain of the political system – from the power structures of agrarian society, to the organization and tactics of the military, to the state’s management of the economy.
No single text better documents the transitional condition of Prussia at the end of the eighteenth century than the General Law Code published in 1794. With its almost 20,000 paragraphs that seem to spy into the foundations of every conceivable transaction between one Prussian and another, the General Code was the greatest civilian achievement of the Frederician enlightenment. Drawn up by a team of brilliant jurists following a long process of public debate and consultation, it was without parallel at the time of its publication; only in 1804 and 1811 did France and Austria follow with similar, if less comprehensive, codices. It was also exemplary for the clarity and elegance of its language, which articulated key axioms with such lucidity and precision that many rhetorical fragments of the Prussian code survive in the civil law of today’s Germany.78
The fascination of the General Code lies in the curiously unresolved portrait it offers of Prussian society at the end of the eighteenth century. Peering at Prussia through its paragraphs is like using a pair of binoculars with different focal lengths. On the one hand, there are glimpses of an egalitarian socio-legal order. The very first paragraph announced that ‘the General Law Code contains the rules by which the rights and obligations of the residents of the state [… ] are to be assessed.’79 The reader is immediately struck by the choice of the latently egalitarian term ‘residents’ (Einwohner) in place of the more traditional ‘subjects’ (Untertanen), and this impression is reinforced by §22, which declares that ‘the laws of the state bind all members thereof, without regard to their Estate, rank or gender.’80 Here, the notion of ‘membership’ of the state is substituted for subjecthood and the egalitarian intention is made more explicit. At §82 of the Introduction, however, we are told that ‘the rights of the individual’ are a function, all else being equal, of ‘his birth [and] his Estate’; in a later section dealing with the ‘obligations and rights of the noble Estate’ the code states baldly that ‘the nobility is the first Estate in the State’ whose chief vocation and task is the defence thereof. Further paragraphs in the same section stipulate that members of the noble Estate are to be tried only by the highest courts in the land, that nobles enjoy privileged access (assuming adequate qualifications) to the ‘places of honour in the State’ and that ‘only the nobility is entitled to the ownership of noble landed estates.’81
These discrepancies seemed less mysterious to contemporaries than they do to us. For Frederick II, who gave the order to begin this great work of codification, the primacy of the nobility was an axiom of the social order and he ordered his jurists to consider not only the ‘general good’ but also the specific entitlements of the Estates – this element was further strengthened after his death.82 The ambivalence that resulted can be discerned in the paragraphs covering the rights and obligations of peasant subjects on the noble landed estates. Amazingly, the law characterizes these persons as ‘free citizens of the State’ (freye Bürger des Staates) – indeed the subject peasants are the only group to enjoy this distinction. Yet the bulk of the paragraphs on this topic reinforce the existing structures of corporate domination and inequality in the countryside. Subjects must gain the permission of the lordship before marrying (though, on the other hand, this cannot be refused without good legal reason); their children must offer domestic service; they must suffer (moderate) punishments for misdemeanours; they must render their services as required under law, and so on.83 The corporate structures of Prussian society were seen as so fundamental to the social order that they structured the law, rather than being defined by it; indeed they were ‘sources of the law’, as one of the titles in the preamble to the code puts it.84
What is really interesting about the General Code is not that these disparate perspectives exist within it, but that neither seems reducible to the other. The code looks backwards to a world already of the past, a world where each order has its place in relation to the state, a world that seemed rooted in the Middle Ages but had in fact been invented by Frederick the Great and was already dissolving when the work of codification drew to a close. But it also anticipates a world where all citizens are ‘free’, the state is sovereign, and kings and governments are bound by the law; indeed some historians have seen the code as a kind of proto-constitution guaranteeing the rule of law.85 The nineteenth century historian Heinrich Treitschke highlighted these inner tensions when he observed that the code captured ‘the Janus-headedness’ of the Frederician state.86 He borrowed the idea from Madame de Staël, who observed that ‘the image of Prussia offers a double face, like that of Janus, one of which is military, the other philosophical.’87 The metaphor of the two-faced Roman god of thresholds caught on, metastasizing wildly across the historiography of Prussia until the point (in the 1970s and 1980s), when it seemed impossible to write anything at all about Prussia without pouring a libation to Janus. It was as if the divided gaze of the two-faced god captured something fundamental about the Prussian experience, a polarity between tradition and innovation that defined the historical trajectory of the Hohenzollern state.
9
Hubris and Nemesis: 1789–1806
The years between the French Revolution of 1789 and Napoleon’s defeat of Prussia in 1806 are among the most eventful and least impressive epochs in the history of the Prussian monarchy. Confronted by a bewildering profusion of threats and opportunities, Prussian foreign policy embarked on a course of febrile oscillation: the traditional dualist rivalry with Austria, the consolidation of Prussia’s pre-eminence in northern Germany, and the tantalizing prospect of vast territorial annexations in Poland all competed for the attention of the policy-makers in Berlin. Sly double-diplomacy, fearful wavering and spasms of rapacity alternated in rapid succession. The ascendancy of Napoleon Bonaparte brought a new and existential threat. His inability to tolerate any limit to the expansion of French hegemony on the continent and his utter disregard of international treaties and agreements tested the Prussian executive almost to breaking point. In 1806, after numerous provocations, Prussia made the momentous error of offering battle to Napoleon without first securing the military support of a major power. The result was a catastrophe that challenged the legitimacy of the traditional monarchical order.
PRUSSIAN FOREIGN POLICY IN AN ERA OF REVOLUTION
The Prussian government looked with favourable interest on the Paris events of 1789. Far from shunning the rebels, the Prussian envoy in Paris spent the autumn and winter of 1789–90 establishing friendly contacts with the various factions. The idea – so familiar to later generations – that the Revolution hinged on a fundamental choice between obedience and rebellion, between the ‘providence of God’ and the ‘will of man’, played as yet no part in Berlin’s interpretation of events.
There were essentially two reasons for this indulgent response to the French upheaval. The first was simply that, from Berlin’s perspective, the Revolution represented an opportunity, not a threat. The Prussians were concerned above all with diminishing Austrian power and influence in Germany. Tensions between the two German rivals had risen steadily during the 1780s. In 1785, Frederick II had taken charge of a coalition of German princes opposed to the annexation of Bavaria by the Habsburg Emperor Joseph II. In 1788, the Emperor had gone to war against the Turks, prompting fears that massive Habsburg acquisitions in the Balkans would give Austria the upper hand over her Prussian rival. But in the summer and autumn of 1789, as Austrian forces pushed back the armies of Sultan Selim III, a chain of revolts broke out across the peripheral territories of the Habsburg crown – Belgium, Tyrol, Galicia, Lombardy and Hungary. Frederick William II, a vain and impulsive man who was determined to live up to the reputation of his illustrious uncle, did his best to exploit the discomfort of the Austrians. The Belgians were encouraged to secede from Habsburg rule and the Hungarian dissidents were urged to rise up against Vienna – there was even talk of an independent Hungarian monarchy to be ruled by a Prussian prince.1
Seen against this background, the revolution in France was welcome news, for there was good reason to hope that a new, ‘revolutionary’ French administration would put an end to the Franco-Austrian alliance. As the Prussians well knew, the alliance – along with its dynastic personification, Queen Marie Antoinette – was deeply unpopular with the Austrophobe patriots of the revolutionary movement. Berlin therefore courted the various revolutionary parties in the hope of building an anti-Habsburg ‘party’ in Paris. The aim was to reverse the diplomatic realignment of 1756, isolate Austria, and put an end to the expansionist plans of Joseph II. When a fully fledged revolution broke out in the prince-bishopric of Liège, a strip of territory right in the middle of Belgium, the Prussians supported the rebels there too, in the hope that the upheaval would spread to the adjacent Austrian-controlled areas.
There was also an ideological dimension to this tentative support for revolutionary upheaval. In 1789, a number of the leading Prussian policy-makers, including the minister responsible for foreign affairs, Count Hertzberg – were personally sympathetic to the aspirations of the revolutionaries. Hertzberg was a man of the enlightenment who deplored the incompetent despotism of the Bourbons in France. He saw Prussian support for the insurrection in Liège as entirely in keeping with the kingdom’s ‘liberal principles’. The envoy entrusted with handling Prussia’s affairs in the prince-bishopric, Christian Wilhelm von Dohm, was an enlightened official and intellectual (not to mention author of the famous tract supporting the emancipation of the Jews); he was a critic of the episcopal regime in Liège and favoured a progressive, constitutional solution to the dispute between the prince-bishop and the insurrectionists of the Third Estate.2
It was above all the threat of a Prussian-backed revolution in Hungary that persuaded Joseph’s successor, Leopold II, to seek an understanding with Prussia.3 Leopold, a wise and temperate figure, saw at once the folly of pursuing new conquests in the Ottoman Balkans while his hereditary possessions disintegrated behind his back. In March 1790, he despatched a friendly letter to Berlin, opening the door for the negotiations that culminated in the Convention of Reichenbach of 27 July 1790. The two German powers agreed – after tense discussions – to pull back from the brink of war and put their differences behind them. The Austrians undertook to end their costly Turkish war on moderate terms (i.e. without annexations) and the Prussians promised to stop fomenting rebellions within the Habsburg monarchy.
The Convention looked innocuous, but it was more significant than it seemed.4 The era of bitter Prusso-Austrian antagonism that had structured the political affairs of the Holy Roman Empire since the invasion of Silesia in 1740 was now over, at least for a time, and the two German powers could pursue their interests in concert, rather than at each other’s expense. Following an oscillatory pattern that recalled the days of the Great Elector, Frederick William II abandoned his secret efforts to secure an alliance with Paris and switched to a policy of war against revolutionary France. Foreign Minister Hertzberg and his liberal views fell into disfavour; he was later dismissed. An important role in the new diplomacy went to Frederick William’s trusted adviser and confidant, Johann Rudolf von Bischoffwerder, an exponent of war against the revolution, who was despatched to Vienna in February and June–July 1791. The resulting Vienna Convention of 25 July 1791 laid the foundations for an Austro-Prussian alliance.
The first fruit of the Austro-Prussian rapprochement was a remarkable piece of gesture politics. The Declaration of Pillnitz, issued jointly by the Austrian Emperor and the Prussian king on 27 August 1791, was not a plan of action as such, but rather a statement of principled opposition to the Revolution. It opened by stating that the sovereigns of Prussia and Austria took the fate of their ‘brother’ the King of France to be ‘an object of common interest to all the sovereigns of Europe’, and demanded that the French king be placed as soon as possible ‘in a position to affirm, in the most perfect liberty, the basis of a monarchical government’. It closed with the promise that Austria and Prussia would ‘act promptly’ with ‘the necessary forces’ to obtain ‘the proposed and common goal’.5 For all the fuzziness of its formulations, this was an unequivocal statement of monarchical counter-revolutionary solidarity. Yet the additional secret articles attached to the Declaration revealed that the dark waters of power politics were still running in their accustomed courses. Article 2 stated that the contracting parties reserved for themselves the power to ‘exchange for their benefit several of their present and future acquisitions’, always in mutual consultation, and article 6 promised that the Emperor would ‘employ willingly his good offices towards the Court of Petersburg and the Court of Poland in order to obtain the cities of Thorn and Danzig [for Prussia]…’6
The Declaration fanned the flames of political extremism in the French Assembly, strengthening the hand of the Brissotin faction, who favoured war as a means of restoring French fortunes and furthering the Revolution. During late 1791 and early 1792, the pressure for war accumulated in Paris.7 In the meanwhile, the Prussians and Austrians defined and agreed their objectives. The plan – under the terms of an alliance concluded on 7 February 1792 – was to launch a chain of enforced territorial transfers on the western periphery of the Holy Roman Empire. The allies would first conquer Alsace, handing one part of it to Austria and the other to the Elector Palatine, who would in turn be forced to yield Jülich and Berg to Prussia.
Whether and from what precise moment the allies seriously intended an invasion of France is unclear, but a military conflict became inevitable on 20 April 1792, when the French government formally declared war on the Austrian Emperor. As they prepared for an invasion, the Prussians and the Austrians assumed the mantle of ideological counter-revolution. On 25 July, the Prussian commander and joint commander of the allied forces, Charles William Ferdinand Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, issued the declaration that came to be known as the Brunswick Manifesto. This inflammatory document, based on a draft composed by vengeful French émigrés, claimed (somewhat mendaciously) that the two allied courts ‘had no intention of enriching themselves by conquest’, promised that all those who submitted to the authority of the French king would be protected, and threatened captured revolutionary guards with draconian punishments. The declaration closed with a note of menace that further radicalized the mood in Paris:
Their said Majesties declare, on their word of honour as emperor and king, that if the Chateau of the Tuileries [where the captive king and his family were housed] is entered by force or attacked, if the least violence be offered to their Majesties the king, queen and royal family, and if their safety and their liberty be not immediately assured, they will inflict an ever memorable vengeance by delivering over the city of Paris to military execution and complete destruction, and the rebels guilty of the said outrages to the punishment that they merit.8
Accompanying the Austro-Prussian force as it lumbered into France in the late summer of 1792 was a small army of émigrés led by Louis XVI’s brother, the Count of Artois. These proved to be more trouble than they were worth: they were deeply unpopular with the French population and ineffective as a fighting force. Their chief function was to reinforce the counter-revolutionary credentials of the invaders. French peasants and townsfolk from whom food and livestock were requisitioned received promissory notes in the name of Louis XVI together with haughty assurances that the restored king would ‘pay them back’ once the war was over.
In the event, the allied campaign was a fiasco. Prussians and Austrians had never found it easy to coordinate forces on the western periphery of the Empire; the French campaign of 1792 was no exception. Confusion and conflicting priorities dogged the planning of the invasion from the start and the allied advance was stopped in its tracks at the battle of Valmy on 20 September. Here the invading troops found themselves confronted by an impregnably positioned enemy deployed in a broad arc on raised ground. Both sides let fly with their artillery, but it was the French who had the better of it, scoring hit after hit in the allied ranks, until some 1,200 soldiers had been cut down by cannon balls without their units having been able to make any headway at all against the enemy positions. It was the first time that the army of the Revolution had stood to face its enemies. Discouraged by this unexpected display of resolve, the allied forces withdrew from their exposed positions, leaving the French in control of the field.
The Prussians remained formal members of the coalition after Valmy and even fought with some success against the French in Alsace and the Saar. But they never committed more than a small fraction of their resources to these campaigns, because their attention was focused elsewhere. What distracted the men in Berlin were the prospects opening up in Poland. The pattern of internal turmoil and external interference and obstruction that had produced the first partition continued throughout the 1780s. In 1788–91, while the Russians were bogged down in a costly war with the Ottoman Empire, King Stanislaw August and a party of Polish reformers had taken the opportunity to press ahead with changes to the political system. The new Polish constitution of 3 May 1791 created, for the first time, a hereditary monarchy and the outlines of a functioning central government. ‘Our country is saved,’ its authors announced. ‘Our freedoms are assured; we are a free and independent nation; we have shaken off the bonds of slavery and misrule.’9
Neither the Prussians nor the Russians welcomed these developments. The creation of an independent Poland ran against the grain of nearly a century of Russian foreign policy. Frederick William II officially congratulated the Poles on their new constitution, but behind the scenes there was alarm at the prospect of a Polish revival. ‘I foresee that sooner or later Poland will take West Prussia from us…’ Hertzberg told a senior Prussian diplomat. ‘How can we defend our state against a numerous and well-ruled nation?’10 On 18 May 1792, Catherine II sent 100,000 Russian troops into the kingdom. Having played with the idea of supporting the Polish opposition to the invasion (in the hope of preventing or limiting Russian annexations), the Prussians decided instead to accept a partition offer from St Petersburg. Under the terms of the Treaty of St Petersburg of 23 January 1793, the Prussians received the commercially important cities of Danzig and Thorn and a substantial triangle of territory that plugged the cleft between Silesia and East Prussia and also happened to encompass the wealthiest areas of the Polish commonwealth. The Russians helped themselves to a gigantic terrain comprising almost one half of Poland’s entire remaining surface area. The agreement was manifestly unequal (in the sense that Russia’s
portion was four times the size of Prussia’s) but it gave the Prussians more than they had traditionally aspired to and it freed Berlin from any obligation to compensate Austria in the west.11
In March 1794, the uprising launched against the partition powers by the Polish patriot Tadeusz Kosciuszko set the stage for a further and final partition. Although the revolt was directed primarily against Russia, it was the Prussians who first tried to take advantage of it. They hoped, by suppressing the uprising, to stake a claim for further Polish territory on an equal footing with Russia. But with substantial troop deployments still in the west, the Prussians were already seriously over-stretched; after some early successes against the revolt they were forced to pull back and call for Russian help. Seeing their chance, the Austrians, too, joined the fray. After a desperate campaign of mass recruitment, Kosciuszko held off the armies of Russia, Prussia and Austria for nearly eight months, but on 10 October 1794, a Russian victory at Maciejowice to the south-east of Warsaw brought the uprising to an end. The way was now open to the third and last partition of Poland. After bitter quarrels among the three powers, a tripartite division was agreed on 24 October 1795, by which Prussia gained a further tranche of territory encompassing about 55,000 square kilometres of land in central Poland, including the ancient capital of Warsaw, and some 1,000,000 inhabitants. Poland was no more.
THE PERILS OF NEUTRALITY
Something extraordinary had happened: in the course of the second and third Polish partitions, Frederick William II, perhaps the least impressive figure to have mounted the Prussian throne over the last century and a half, secured more territory for his kingdom than any other sovereign in his dynasty’s history. Prussia grew in size by about one third to cover over 300,000 square kilometres; its population swelled from 5.5 to around 8.7 million. With its objectives in the east more than fulfilled, Prussia lost no time in extracting itself from the anti-French coalition in the west, and signing a separate peace with France at Basle on 5 April 1795.
Once again, the Prussians had left their allies in the lurch. The scribes and pamphleteers employed to produce Austrian propaganda dutifully thundered against this foul retreat from the common cause against France. Historians have often taken a similar line, denouncing the separate peace and the neutrality that followed as contemptible, ‘cowardly’, ‘suicidal’ and ‘pernicious’.12 The problem with such assessments is that they are founded on the anachronistic presumption that late-eighteenth-century Prussia had a German ‘national’ mission that it failed in 1795 to fulfil. But if we focus our attention firmly on the Prussian state and its interests, then the separate peace appears the best option. Prussia was financially exhausted, its domestic administration was struggling to digest vast swathes of newly acquired Polish territory and it could ill afford to continue campaigning in the west. A ‘peace party’ emerged at the Berlin court with powerful economic arguments for a withdrawal from the coalition against France.13
The terms of the Treaty of Basle were in any case – at least on paper – highly advantageous to Prussia. Among them was an agreement by which France and Prussia undertook to uphold the neutrality of northern Germany. The neutrality zone provided Berlin with the opportunity to extend its influence over the lesser German states within the zone. Foreign Minister Haugwitz was quick to capitalize on this by persuading a string of north German territories (including Hanover) to join the Prussian neutrality system and thereby abscond from their obligations to the defence of the Holy Roman Empire.14 Finally, the neutrality zone left Prussia’s hands free in the east and ensured that French aggression would be focused on the Austrians – to this extent it was in line with the traditional dualist policy. There was more, in other words, to neutrality than simply the avoidance of war with France. With the peace signed and Prussia safe behind the north German ‘demarcation line’, the king could afford to look upon what had been accomplished with a certain satisfaction.
His achievement was more flimsy, however, than it looked. Prussia was now isolated. Over the past six years, it had allied itself with – and then abandoned – virtually every European power. The king’s known predilection for secret diplomacy and chaotic double-dealing left him a lonely and distrusted figure on the diplomatic scene. Experience would soon show that unless Prussia could count on the assistance of a great power in defending the German demarcation line, the neutrality zone was indefensible and therefore largely meaningless. An issue of longer-term significance was the disappearance of Poland from the European map. Even if we set aside the moral outrage committed against Poland by the partitioning powers, the fact remains that independent Poland had played a crucial role as a buffer and intermediary between the three eastern powers.15 Now that it no longer existed, Prussia shared, for the first time in its history, a long and indefensible border with Russia.16 From now on, the fortunes of Prussia would be inseparable from those of its vast and increasingly powerful eastern neighbour.
By taking refuge in the north German neutrality zone agreed with the French at Basle in 1795, Berlin also signalled its utter indifference to the fate of the Holy Roman Empire: the demarcation line split Germany across the middle, abandoning the south to France and the tender mercies of the Austrians. Moreover, a secret agreement appended to the Treaty of Basle in 1795 stated that if France should ultimately retain the Prussian territories she had occupied in the Rhineland, the Prussians would be compensated with territorial indemnities to the east of the Rhine – an ominous foretaste of the rush for annexations that would consume Germany at the end of the decade. The Austrians, too, abandoned any pretence of accommodating the imperial sensibilities of the lesser and least states. The Austrian forces engaged in the war with France behaved more like an army of occupation than an ally in the southern German states, and Baron Johann von Thugut, the intelligent, unscrupulous minister appointed to run Austrian foreign policy in March 1793, focused his plans for Germany around a revived version of the old Bavarian exchange project. In October 1797, Vienna concluded an agreement with Napoleon Bonaparte to trade the Austrian Netherlands for Venetia and Salzburg, one of the most prominent ecclesiastical principalities of the old Empire.17 It seemed that the fate of Poland was about to be visited upon the Holy Roman Empire. Hans Christoph von Gagern, chief minister of the little County of Nassau, made this connection explicit when he observed in 1797: ‘The German princes have so far found themselves in the double misfortune of wishing for a rapprochement between Prussia and Austria when they think of France and of fearing one when they think of Poland.’18
The chief objective of French policy vis-à-vis Germany during these years was the ‘restoration’ to France of her ‘natural frontiers’, a wholly bogus concept invented by the Assembly and fathered upon Louis XIV. In practice, this meant the wholesale annexation of the German territories along the left bank of the river Rhine. The area was a dense patchwork of imperial principalities, encompassing territories belonging to the Hohenzollern king of Prussia, the Electorates of Cologne, Trier and Mainz, the Elector Palatine, the Duke of Pfalz-Zweibrücken, various imperial cities and numerous other lesser sovereignties. Its absorption into the French unitary state was thus bound to have a catastrophic impact on the Empire. Yet the German territories were in no position to contest France’s acquisitions in the west. The larger states – Baden, Württemberg and Bavaria – had already been forced out of the war and were looking to build bridges with France. At the Peace of Campo Formio, signed in October 1797 after Bonaparte’s victorious campaign against the Austrians in northern Italy, Vienna extended formal recognition to the French conquests in the German Rhineland. It was also agreed that the consequences of the French annexations for the Empire as a whole should be decided by direct bargaining between France and representatives of the imperial territories. The scene was thus set for the protracted negotiations that would culminate in the repartitioning of German Europe. These began in November 1797 in the picturesque Badenese city of Rastatt, and ended, after various stops and starts, with the Report of the Imperial Delegation (known in German by the gargantuan term Reichsdeputationshauptschluss) published in Regensburg on 27 April 1803.
The report announced a geopolitical revolution. All but six of the imperial cities were swept away; of the panoply of ecclesiastical principalities, from Cologne and Trier to the imperial abbeys of Corvey, Ellwangen and Guttenzell, only three remained on the map. The main winners were the greater and middle-sized principalities. The French, pursuing their time-honoured policy of creating German client states, were especially generous to Baden, Württemberg and Bavaria, whose geographical position between France and Austria made them useful allies. Baden was the biggest winner in proportional terms: it had lost 440 square kilometres through the French annexations but was compensated with over 3,237 square kilometres of land torn from the bishoprics of Speyer, Strassburg, Constance and Basle. Another winner was Prussia, which received the Bishopric of Hildesheim, Paderborn, the greater part of Münster, Erfurt and the Eichsfeld, the abbeys of Essen, Werden and Quedlinburg, the imperial city of Nordhausen, Mühlhausen and Goslar. Prussia had lost about 2,642 square kilometres of Rhenish lands with 127,000 inhabitants, but gained almost 13,000 square kilometres of territory with a population of around half a million.
The Holy Roman Empire was on its last legs. With the ecclesiastical principalities gone, the Catholic majorities in the diet were no more and the Catholicity of the Empire was a thing of the past. Its raison d’e^tre as the protective incubator for the political and constitutional diversity of traditional central Europe was exhausted. The ancient association between the imperial crown and the House of Habsburg now seemed largely meaningless, even to Leopold II’s successor, Francis II, who accordingly declared himself to be the hereditary Emperor of Austria in 1804 in order to secure an independent footing for his imperial title. The formal end of the Empire, announced by the imperial herald after the usual trumpet fanfare in Vienna on 6 August 1806, seemed a mere formality and provoked remarkably little contemporary comment.
There would be further territorial reorganizations before the Napoleonic Wars were over, but the basic outlines of a simplified nineteenth-century Germany were already visible. Prussia’s new territories reinforced its dominance in the north. The consolidation of Baden, Württemberg and Bavaria in the south created the core of a compact block of intermediary states that would confront the hegemonial ambitions of both Austria and Prussia in the post-war era. The disappearance of the ecclesiastical states also meant that millions of German Catholics now found themselves living as diasporal communities within Protestant polities, a state of affairs with far-reaching implications for the political and religious life of modern Germany. Amid the ruins of the imperial past, a German future was taking shape.
FROM NEUTRALITY TO DEFEAT
On 14 October 1806, the 26-year-old Lieutenant Johann von Borcke was posted with an army corps of 22,000 men under the command of General Ernst Wilhelm Friedrich von Rüchel to the west of the city of Jena. It was still dark when news arrived that Napoleon’s troops had engaged the main Prussian army on a plateau near the city. The noise of cannon fire could already be heard from the east. The men were cold and stiff from a night spent huddled on damp ground, but morale improved when the rising sun dispelled the fog and began to warm shoulders and limbs. ‘Hardship and hunger were forgotten,’ Borcke recalled. ‘Schiller’s Song of the Riders rang from a thousand throats.’ By ten o’clock, Borcke and his men were finally on the move towards Jena. As they marched eastward along the highway, they saw many walking wounded making their way back from the battlefield. ‘Everything bore the stamp of dissolution and wild flight.’ At about noon, however, an adjutant came galloping up to the column with a note from Prince Hohenlohe, commander of the main Prussian army fighting the French outside Jena: ‘Hurry, General Rüchel, to share with me the half-won victory; I am beating the French at all points.’ It was ordered that this message should be relayed down the column and a loud cheer went up from the ranks.
The approach to the battlefield took the corps through the little village of Kapellendorf; streets clogged with cannon, carriages, wounded men and dead horses slowed their progress. Emerging from the village, the corps came up on to a line of low hills, where the men had their first sight of the field of battle. To their horror, only ‘weak lines and remnants’ of Hohenlohe’s corps could still be seen resisting French attack. Moving forward to prepare for an attack, Borcke’s men found themselves in a hail of balls fired by French sharp-shooters who were so well positioned and so skilfully concealed that the shot seemed to fly in from nowhere. ‘To be shot at in this way,’ Borcke later recalled, ‘without seeing the enemy, made a dreadful impression upon our soldiers, for they were not used to that style of fighting, lost faith in their weapons and immediately sensed the enemy’s superiority.’
Flustered by the ferocity of the fire, commanders and troops alike became anxious to press ahead to a resolution. An attack was launched against French units drawn up near the village of Vierzehnheiligen. But as the Prussians advanced, the enemy artillery and rifle fire became steadily more intense. Against this, the corps had only a few regimental cannon, which soon broke down and had to be abandoned. The order ‘Left shoulder forward!’ was shouted down the line and the advancing Prussian columns veered to the right, twisting the angle of attack. In the process, the battalions on the left began to drift apart and the French, bringing up more and more cannon, cut larger and larger holes in the advancing columns. Borcke and his fellow officers galloped back and forth, trying to repair the broken lines. But there was little they could do to allay the confusion on the left wing, because the commander, Major von Pannwitz, was wounded and no longer on his horse, and the adjutant, Lieutenant von Jagow, had been killed. The Regimental Colonel von Walter was the next commander to fall, followed by General Rüchel himself and several staff officers.
Without awaiting orders, the men of Borcke’s corps began to fire at will in the direction of the French. Some, having expended their ammunition, ran with fixed bayonets at the enemy positions, only to be cut down by cartridge shot or ‘friendly fire’. Terror and chaos took hold, reinforced by the arrival of the French cavalry, who hoed into the surging mass of Prussians, slashing with their sabres at every head or arm that came within reach. Borcke found himself drawn along irresistibly with the masses fleeing the field westwards along the road to Weimar. ‘I had saved nothing,’ Borcke wrote, ‘but my worthless life. My mental anguish was extreme; physically I was in a state of complete exhaustion and I was being dragged along among thousands in the most horrific chaos…’19
The battle of Jena was over. The Prussians had been defeated by a better-managed force of about the same size (there were 53,000 Prussians and 54,000 French deployed). Even worse was the news from Auerstedt a few kilometres to the north, where on the same day a Prussian army numbering some 50,000 men under the command of the Duke of Brunswick was routed by a French force half that size under Marshal Davout. Over the following fortnight, the French broke up a smaller Prussian force near Halle and occupied the cities of Halberstadt and Berlin. Further victories and capitulations followed. The Prussian army had not merely been defeated; it had been ruined. In the words of one officer who was at Jena: ‘The carefully assembled and apparently unshakeable military structure was suddenly shattered to its foundations.’20 This was precisely the disaster that the Prussian neutrality pact of 1795 had been designed to avoid. How did it come about? Why did the Prussians abandon the relative security of the neutrality pact to wage war against a French Emperor at the height of his powers?
After 1797, with the accession of Frederick William III, a hesitant, cautious individual, the neutrality adopted as an expedient by his predecessor settled into a kind of system, in the sense that the Prussians clung to it, even when there was considerable pressure – as in 1799, during preparations for the second coalition against France – to join one of the warring parties. To some extent this reflected the preferences of the monarch. Unlike his father, Frederick William III had no interest in the pursuit of renown: ‘Everybody knows,’ he told his uncle in October 1798, ‘that I abhor war and that I know of nothing greater on earth than the preservation of peace and tranquillity as the only system suited to the happiness of human kind…’21 But the neutrality policy also prevailed because so many good arguments could be cited in its support. As the king himself rather casuistically pointed out, remaining neutral left open the possibility of war later and was thus the most flexible option. His wife, Luise of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, a forceful figure with many contacts among the senior ministers, warned that war on the side of the coalition powers would bring dependency on Russia. This line of argument was based on the correct insight that Prussia remained, by a considerable margin, the least of the great powers. As such, it lacked the means to ensure that its interests would be met through a partnership with either of the warring parties. The state treasury, moreover, was still deeply in deficit; without the shelter of neutrality, it would be impossible to repair the kingdom’s finances in preparation for a future conflict. Lastly, neutrality was attractive because it held out the prospect of territorial aggrandizement in northern Germany. This promise was partly realized in the secret convention signed between Prussia and France on 23 May 1802, when a handsome swathe of former imperial cities and secularized ecclesiastical principalities were promised to Prussia in pre-emption of the final Report of the Imperial Deputation published in the following year. So persuasive did the benefits of neutrality seem to the Prussian ministers and cabinet secretaries entrusted with advising the king on policy that there was virtually no serious opposition to it before 1805.22
The fundamental problem for Prussia during the years of neutrality was simply the kingdom’s exposed location between France and Russia, which threatened to make a nonsense of the neutrality zone and Prussia’s supposedly dominant place within it. Here was a geopolitical predicament that had preoccupied the Hohenzollerns since the days of the Great Elector.23 But the threat was now even more pronounced, thanks to the French annexations in Germany and the removal of the Polish buffer zone that had once separated Prussia and Russia.24 A case in point is the brief Prussian occupation of Hanover in March–October 1801. Joined to the British Crown by personal union, Hanover was the second largest territory within the neutrality zone and an obvious target for any state wishing to apply diplomatic pressure to Britain. In the winter and spring of 1800–1801, Tsar Paul I engineered a rapprochement with France in the hope of weakening Britain’s maritime supremacy in the Baltic and the North Sea and pressured Berlin into mounting an occupation of the Electorate of Hanover, in the hope that this would persuade Britain to back down. The Prussian king was hesitant, but agreed once it became clear that France would occupy Hanover if Prussia did not – an action that would have demolished the remaining shreds of credibility left in Prussia’s role as guarantor of the neutrality zone. The Prussians withdrew again at the earliest opportunity, but the episode illustrates how little room for autonomous manoeuvre they enjoyed, even within the neutrality zone they had carved out at the Peace of Basle. It also soured relations between Berlin and London, where there were many who believed that the ultimate aim of the Prussians was ‘to possess the [British] king’s Electoral dominions’.25
The hollowness of Berlin’s claim to hegemony within the neutrality zone was further exposed by the compensation of the lesser and middling German states for territories lost to France; rather than looking to Berlin, these states negotiated directly with Paris, bypassing the Prussians altogether.26 In July 1803, Napoleon demonstrated his complete disregard for Prussian sensibilities by ordering the French occupation of Hanover. A further blow to Prussia’s prestige followed in the autumn of 1804, when French troops broke into Hamburg and kidnapped the British envoy in the city, Sir George Rumbold. The kidnapping triggered outrage in Berlin: Rumbold had been accredited to Frederick William’s court and performed his duties, as it were, under the Prussian king’s protection. Moreover, the action had involved a flagrant breach of the neutrality pact and of international law. Frederick William fired off a bitter protest to Napoleon and a crisis with France was averted only when Napoleon unexpectedly backed down and released Rumbold.27
A further breach occurred in October 1805, when French troops marched through the Hohenzollern enclaves of Ansbach and Bayreuth on their way south to the confrontation with the Austro-Russian army at Austerlitz. In the face of such provocations, the arguments for Prussian neutrality looked increasingly threadbare. It is not known whether Frederick William III pondered on the Great Elector’s troubled experience of neutrality, or whether he was reminded of Leibniz’s comment, made at the height of the Northern War: ‘To be neutral is rather like someone who lives in the middle of a house and is smoked out from below and drenched with urine from above.’28
The difficulty lay in determining what was the best alternative to neutrality. Should Prussia align itself with France or with Russia and the coalition powers? Opinions were divided. Controversy mounted within the antechamber of power as ministers, cabinet secretaries and informal advisers competed for influence over the monarch. This struggle was sanctioned by the king, who was anxious not to fall under the control of any one interest and thus continued to consult state ministers, cabinet ministers, cabinet secretaries, his wife and various friends for advice on key issues. The leading figures in the struggle to control foreign policy were the recently retired foreign minister, Count Christian von Haugwitz, and Karl August von Hardenberg, formerly of Ansbach-Bayreuth, who succeeded Haugwitz after the latter’s retirement on grounds of ill-health in 1804.
During the Rumbold crisis, Hardenberg began pressing for a Russian alignment and an open breach with France, partly in the hope of exploiting the débâcle of Haugwitz’s neutrality policy in order to advance his career. Haugwitz, recalled from his retirement to advise the monarch, counselled caution, while at the same time manoeuvring to push Hardenberg aside and regain control over foreign policy. Hardenberg fought his corner with the usual energy and ruthlessness, taking care to curry favour with the monarch, upon whom everything depended.29 As their struggle shows, divergences of opinion were amplified by adversarial relationships within the political elite. This was possible precisely because the Prussian security predicament in 1805–6 was such that it admitted of no easy resolution. Both options, alliance with France and alliance with the coalition powers, appeared equally plausible – and equally daunting.
International developments tipped the balance of Prussian policy first one way then the other. After October 1805, following the French breach of neutrality in Ansbach and Bayreuth, interest in a Russian alliance intensified. Late in November, Haugwitz was sent to deliver a stiff ultimatum to the French. Hardly had he left, however, but events tipped the balance back towards France. Upon arriving at Napoleon’s headquarters, Haugwitz learned of the shattering defeat the Emperor’s armies had just inflicted on the combined Austro-Russian forces at Austerlitz (2 December 1805). Sensing that his ultimatum was no longer opportune, the Prussian emissary offered Napoleon an alliance instead. The Treaty of Schönbrunn (15 December 1805), together with various follow-up agreements imposed by France, committed Prussia not only to a comprehensive alliance with Napoleon, but also to the annexation of Hanover and the closure of the northern sea ports to British shipping. Frederick William saw that this would mean war with Britain, but viewed such an outcome as a lesser evil than destruction at the hands of France. It looked very much as if Haugwitz had won out over his rival; in March 1806, he succeeded in forcing Hardenberg’s resignation. ‘France is all-powerful and Napoleon is the man of the century,’ Haugwitz wrote to the Prussian envoy Lucchesini in the summer of 1806. ‘What have we to fear if united with him?’30
Anxious to avoid a conflict with Russia and determined to keep his options open, Frederick William continued to pursue a secret policy aimed at rapprochment with St Petersburg. This was a welcome reprieve for Hardenberg, who now became the agent of an elaborate covert diplomacy: having seemed to withdraw in high dudgeon from public life in March, he was entrusted with responsibility for the secret relationship with Russia, which in turn made a nonsense of Haugwitz’s ostensible policy of collaboration with France.31 Never had the irresolvable complexities of the two-front dilemma produced such extravagant contortions in Berlin.
A determined political opposition now emerged within the uppermost echelons of the bureaucracy. Among the most influential dissenters was the temperamental Freiherr vom Stein, a minister in Berlin. Stein had never approved of the post-1795 neutrality, seeing in it (as indeed we might expect of a Rhenish nobleman and imperial patriot) a reprehensible abandonment of Germany. During the winter of 1805–6, as Count Haugwitz committed Prussia to an alliance with Napoleon, the annexation of Hanover and war with Britain, the Anglophile Stein found himself unable to support the government’s course. He came to believe that only a thoroughgoing structural reform of the supreme executive would enable the state to formulate a more effective foreign policy. In an act that radically overstepped the boundaries of his official responsibility, he composed a memorandum dated 27 April 1806 whose title alone was a manifesto: ‘Presentation of the mistaken organization of the cabinet and of the necessity of forming a ministerial conference’. Stein’s document was remarkable for the strength of its language: in it the men of the king’s cabinet were accused of ‘arrogance, dogmatism, ignorance, physical and moral enfeeblement, shallowness, brutal sensuality, treacherous betrayal, shameless lying, narrow-mindedness and mischievous gossiping’.32 The answer to the monarchy’s current predicament, Stein argued, lay not merely in the removal of these reprobates, but also in the establishment of clearer lines of responsibility. Under the current arrangements, he argued, the king’s personal advisers have ‘all the power, while the real ministers have all the responsibility’. It was therefore necessary to replace the arbitrary rule of cronies and favourites with a system of responsible ministerial government.
If his Majesty will not agree to the suggested change, if he persists in ruling under the influence of a Cabinet deficient in its organisation and condemned in its personnel, it is to be expected that the state will either be dissolved or lose its independence, and the love and respect of its subjects will fail it completely. […] nothing will be left for the upright official but to abandon it, covered with unmerited shame, without being able to help or take part against the wickedness that will ensue.33
Few documents illustrate more dramatically how rebellious the atmosphere had grown within the uppermost echelons of the Prussian administration. Fortunately, perhaps, for Stein, his remarkably forthright letter was never shown to the king. Stein passed it to General Rüchel (soon to take up his ill-fated command at Jena), asking that it be forwarded to the monarch, but the old general was reluctant. In May, Stein presented it to Queen Luise, who expressed her approval of its sentiments but thought it too ‘violent and passionate’ for submission to her husband. The letter did its work none the less; it circulated among the dissident senior figures within the administration, helping to sharpen the focus of their opposition. By October 1806, Stein had emerged as one of the leaders of the bureaucratic opposition.
In the meanwhile, Prussia’s foreign policy dilemma remained unsolved. ‘Your Majesty,’ Hardenberg warned in a memorandum of June 1806, ‘has been placed in the singular position of being simultaneously allied with both Russia and France [… ] This situation cannot last.’34 In July and August feelers were put out to the other north German states with a view to establishing an inter-territorial union; the most important fruit of these efforts was an alliance with Saxony. But the negotiations with Russia advanced more slowly, partly because of the sobering effect of the still-recent disaster at Austerlitz and partly because it took time for the confusion generated by the months of secret diplomacy to clear. Little had thus been done to build a solid coalition when news reached Berlin of a further French provocation. In August 1806, intercepts revealed that Napoleon was engaged in alliance negotiations with Britain, and had unilaterally offered the return of Hanover as an inducement to London. This was an outrage too far. Nothing could better have demonstrated Napoleon’s contempt for the north German neutrality zone and the place of Prussia within it.
By this point, Frederick William III was under immense pressure from elements within his own entourage to opt for war with France. On 2 September, a memorandum was passed to the king criticizing his policy thus far and pressing for war. Among the signatories were Prince Louis Ferdinand, popular military commander and a nephew of Frederick the Great, two of the king’s brothers, Prince Henry and Prince William, a cousin and the Prince of Orange. Composed for the signatories by the court historiographer Johannes von Müller, the memorandum pulled few punches. In it, the king was accused of having abandoned the Holy Roman Empire and sacrificed his subjects and the credibility of his word of honour for the sake of the policy of ill-conceived self-interest pursued by the pro-French party among his ministers. Now he was further endangering the honour of his kingdom and his house by refusing to take a stand. The king saw in this document a calculated challenge to his authority and responded with rage and alarm. In a gesture evocative of an earlier era when brothers wrestled for thrones, the princes were ordered to leave the capital city and return to their regiments. As this episode reveals, the factional strife over foreign policy had begun to drift out of control. A determined ‘war party’ had emerged that included members of the king’s family, but was centred on the two ministers Karl August von Hardenberg and Karl vom Stein. Its objective was to put an end to the fudges and compromises of the neutrality policy. But its means implied the demand for a more broadly based decision-making process that would bind the king to a collegial deliberative mechanism of some kind.35
Although the king resented deeply the impertinence, as he saw it, of the memorandum of 2 September, the charge of prevarication unsettled him deeply, sweeping aside his instinctive preference for caution and delay. And so it was that the Berlin decision-makers allowed themselves to be goaded into precipitate action, although the preparations for a coalition with Russia and Austria had scarcely begun to take concrete shape. On 26 September Frederick William III addressed a letter full of bitter recriminations to the French Emperor, insisting that the neutrality pact be honoured, demanding the return of various Prussian territories on the lower Rhine and closing with the words: ‘May heaven grant that we can reach an understanding on a basis that leaves you in possession of your full renown, but also leaves room for the honour of other peoples, [an understanding] that will put an end to this fever of fear and expectation, in which no one can count on the future.’36 Napoleon’s reply, signed in the imperial headquarters at Gera on 12 October, reverberated with a breathtaking blend of arrogance, aggression, sarcasm and false solicitude.
Only on 7 October did I receive Your Majesty’s letter. I am extraordinarily sorry that You have been made to sign such a pamphlet. I write only to assure You that I will never attribute the insults contained within it to Yourself personally, because they are contrary to Your character and merely dishonour us both. I despise and pity at once the makers of such a work. Shortly thereafter I received a note from Your minister asking me to attend a rendezvous. Well, as a gentleman, I have kept to my appointment and am now standing in the heart of Saxony. Believe me, I have such powerful forces that all of Yours will not suffice to deny me victory for long! But why shed so much blood? For what purpose? I speak to Your Majesty just as I spoke to Emperor Alexander shortly before the Battle of Austerlitz. [… ] Sire, Your Majesty will be vanquished! You will throw away the peace of Your old age, the life of Your subjects, without being able to produce the slightest excuse in mitigation! Today You stand there with your reputation untarnished and can negotiate with me in a manner worthy of Your rank, but before a month is passed, Your situation will be a different one!37
Thus spoke the ‘man of the century’, the ‘world soul on horseback’ to the King of Prussia in the autumn of 1806. The course was now set for the trial of arms at Jena and Auerstedt.
For Prussia, the timing could hardly have been worse. Since the army corps promised by Tsar Alexander had not yet materialized, the coalition with Russia remained largely theoretical. Prussia faced the might of the French armies alone, save for its Saxon ally. Ironically, the habit of delay that the war party so deplored in the king was now the one thing that could have saved Prussia. The Prussian and Saxon commanders had expected to give battle to Napoleon somewhere to the west of the Thuringian forest, but he advanced much faster than they had anticipated. On 10 October 1806, the Prussian vanguard made contact with French forces and was defeated at Saalfeld. The French then pushed past the flank of the Prussian armies and formed up with their backs to Berlin and the Oder, denying the Prussians access to their supply lines and routes of withdrawal. This is one reason why the subsequent breakdown of order on the battlefield proved so irreversible.
The relative prowess of the Prussian army had declined since the end of the Seven Years War. One reason for this was the emphasis placed upon increasingly elaborate forms of parade drill. These were not a cosmetic indulgence – they were underwritten by a genuine military rationale, namely the integration of each soldier into a fighting machine answering to one will and capable of maintaining cohesion under conditions of extreme stress. While this approach certainly had strengths (among other things, it heightened the deterrent effect upon foreign visitors of the annual parade manoeuvres in Berlin), it did not show up particularly well against the flexible and fast-moving forces deployed by the French under Napoleon’s command. A further problem was the Prussian army’s dependence upon large numbers of foreign troops – by 1786, when Frederick died, 110,000 of the 195,000 men in Prussian service were foreigners. There were very good reasons for retaining foreign troops; their deaths in service were easier to bear and they reduced the disruption caused by military service to the domestic economy. However, their presence in such large numbers also brought problems. They tended to be less disciplined, less motivated and more inclined to desert.
To be sure, the decades between the War of the Bavarian Succession (1778–9) and the campaign of 1806 also saw important improvements.38 Mobile light units and contingents of riflemen (Jäger) were expanded and the field requisition system was simplified and overhauled. None of this sufficed to make good the gap that swiftly opened up between the Prussian army and the armed forces of revolutionary and Napoleonic France. In part, this was simply a question of numbers – as soon as the French Republic began scouring the French working classes for domestic recruits under the auspices of the levée en masse, there was no way the Prussians would be able to keep pace. The key to Prussian policy ought therefore to have been to avoid at all costs having to fight France without the aid of allies.
From the beginning of the Revolutionary Wars, moreover, the French had integrated infantry, cavalry and artillery in permanent divisions supported by independent logistic services and capable of sustaining autonomous mixed operations. Under Napoleon, these units were grouped together into army corps with unparalleled flexibility and striking power. By contrast, the Prussian army had scarcely begun to explore the possibilities of combined-arms divisions by the time they faced the French at Jena and Auerstedt. The Prussians were also a long way behind the French in the use of sharp-shooters. Although, as we have seen, efforts had been made to expand this element of the armed forces, overall numbers remained low, the weaponry was not of the highest standard and insufficient thought was given to how the deployment of riflemen could be integrated with the deployment of large troop masses. Lieutenant Johann Borcke and his fellow infantrymen paid dearly for this gap in tactical flexibility and striking power as they stumbled on to the killing field at Jena.
Frederick William III had initially intended to open peace negotiations with Napoleon after Jena and Auerstedt, but his approaches were rebuffed. Berlin was occupied on 24 October and three days later Bonaparte entered the capital. During a brief sojourn in nearby Potsdam, he made a famous visit to the tomb of Frederick the Great, where he is said to have stood deep in thought before the coffin. According to one account, he turned to the generals who were with him and remarked: ‘Gentlemen, if this man were still alive, I would not be here.’ This was partly imperial kitsch and partly a genuine tribute to the extraordinary reputation Frederick enjoyed among the French, especially the patriot networks that had helped to revitalize French foreign policy and had always seen the Austrian alliance of 1756 as the greatest error of the French ancien régime . Napoleon had long been an admirer of the Prussian king: he had pored through Frederick’s campaign narratives and had a statuette of him placed in his personal cabinet. The young Alfred de Vigny even claimed with a certain amusement to have observed Napoleon affecting Frederician poses, ostentatiously taking snuff, making flourishes with his hat ‘and other similar gestures’ – eloquent testimony to the continuing resonance of the cult. By the time the French Emperor stood in Berlin paying his respects to the dead Frederick, his living successor had fled to the easternmost corner of the kingdom, evoking parallels with the dark days of the 1630s and 1640s. The state treasure, too, was saved in the nick of time and transported away to the east.39
Napoleon was now ready to offer peace terms. He demanded that Prussia renounce all its territories to the west of the river Elbe. After some agonized wavering, Frederick William III signed an agreement to this effect at the Charlottenburg palace on 30 October, whereupon Napoleon changed his mind and insisted that he would agree to an armistice only if Prussia consented to serve as the operational base for a French attack upon Russia. Although the majority of his ministers supported this option, Frederick William sided with the minority who preferred to continue the war at Russia’s side. Everything now depended upon whether the Russians would be able to put sufficient forces in the field to halt the momentum of the French advance.
During the months from late October 1806 to January 1807, French forces had steadily advanced through the Prussian lands, forcing or accepting the capitulation of key fortresses. On 7 and 8 February 1807, however, they were repulsed at Preussisch-Eylau by a Russian force with a small Prussian contingent. Sobered by this experience, Napoleon returned to the armistice offer of October 1806, under which Prussia would merely give up its West-Elbian territories. Now it was Frederick William’s turn to refuse, in the hope that renewed Russian attacks would push the balance further to Prussia’s advantage. These were not forthcoming. The Russians failed to capitalize on the advantage gained at Preussisch-Eylau and the French continued throughout January and February to subdue the Prussian fortresses in Silesia. In the meanwhile, Hardenberg, who was still operating the pro-Russian policy with which he had triumphed in 1806, negotiated an alliance with St Petersburg that was signed on 26 April 1807. The new alliance was short lived; after a French victory over the Russians at Friedland on 14 June 1807, Tsar Alexander asked Napoleon for an armistice.
On 25 June 1807, Emperor Napoleon and Tsar Alexander met to begin peace negotiations. The setting was unusual. A splendid raft was built on Napoleon’s orders and tethered in the middle of the river Niemen at Piktupönen, near the East Prussian town of Tilsit. Since the Niemen was the official demarcation line of the ceasefire and the Russian and French armies were drawn up on opposite banks of the river, the raft was an ingenious solution to the need for neutral ground where the two emperors could meet on an equal footing. Frederick William of Prussia was not invited. Instead he stood miserably on the bank for several hours, surrounded by the Tsar’s officers and wrapped in a Russian overcoat. This was just one of the many ways in which Napoleon advertised to the world the inferior status of the defeated King of Prussia. The rafts on the Memel were adorned with garlands and wreaths bearing the letters ‘A’ and ‘N’ – the letters FW were nowhere to be seen, although the entire ceremony was taking place on Prussian territory. Whereas French and Russian flags could be seen everywhere fluttering in the mild breeze, the Prussian flag was conspicuous by its absence. Even when, on the following day, Napoleon invited Frederick William into his presence on the raft, the resulting conversation had the flavour of an audience rather than a meeting between two monarchs. Frederick William was made to wait in an antechamber while the Emperor saw to some overdue paperwork. Napoleon refused to inform the king of his plans for Prussia and hectored him about the many military and administrative errors he had made during the war.
25. Napoleon and Tsar Alexander meet on board a raft on the River Niemen at Tilsit. Contemporary etching by Le Beau, after Nadet.
Under pressure from the Tsar, Napoleon agreed that Prussia would continue to exist as a state. But by the terms of the Peace of Tilsit (9 July 1807), it was stripped down to the rump: Brandenburg, Pomerania (excluding the Swedish part), Silesia and East Prussia, plus the corridor of land acquired by Frederick the Great in the course of the first partition of Poland. The Polish provinces acquired through the second and third partitions were taken away to form the basis for a Franco-Polish satellite state in the east; the western territories, some of which dated back to the beginning of the seventeenth century, were also swept away to be annexed to France or incorporated into a range of Napoleonic client entities. Frederick William tried sending his wife Luise to beg the Emperor for a more generous settlement – unwittingly evoking parallels with the 1630s, when the unhappy Elector George William had sent his womenfolk out of Berlin to parley with the approaching Gustavus Adolphus. Napoleon was impressed by the determination and grace of the Prussian queen, but he made no concessions.
The dream of a Prussian custodial role in northern Germany – briefly sustained by the neutrality zone – seemed to have vanished without a trace. Gone, too, was the vision of Prussia as an eastern great power, dealing on equal terms with Russia and Austria. A large indemnity was demanded, with the precise amount to be announced in due course. The French would remain in occupation until this was settled. A small but bitter detail: having signed a separate peace with the French at Posen in December 1806 and joined the Confederation of the Rhine, an association of French satellite states in Germany, the Elector of Saxony accepted a royal crown from Napoleon’s hands to become King Frederick August I of Saxony. In the following year, the Saxons were rewarded with Cottbus, a former Prussian possession. It almost looked as if Saxony’s fortunes might revive to the point where Dresden could once again challenge Berlin for the captaincy of northern Germany. Napoleon encouraged these hopes. In an address to the officers of the defeated Saxon army in Jena castle on the day after the battle, the Emperor announced himself as a liberator and even claimed that he had waged war on Prussia only in order to maintain Saxony’s independence.40 This was a new twist in the long history of rivalry between Prussia and Saxony, in which the alliance of 1806 had been only a momentary interruption.
All regimes are tarnished by defeat – this is one of history’s few rules. There have been many worse defeats than the Prussian disasters of 1806–7, but for a political culture so centred on military prowess the defeats at Jena and Auerstedt and the surrenders that followed were definitive none the less. They signified a failure at the centre of the system. The king himself was a commanding officer (though not an especially talented one) who had been in regimental service since childhood and made it his business to be seen riding about in uniform before his advancing regiments. The adult princes of the royal family were all well-known commanders. The officer corps was the agrarian ruling class in uniform. A question mark hung over the political order of old Prussia.
10
The World the Bureaucrats Made
THE NEW MONARCHY
In December 1806, as Frederick William III and Luise of Prussia fled eastwards from the advancing French armies, they stopped overnight in the small East Prussian town of Ortelsburg. There was no food or clean water to be had. The king and his wife were forced to share the same sleeping quarters in ‘one of the wretched barns that they call houses’, according to the British envoy George Jackson, who was travelling with them.1 Here, Frederick William found time to reflect at length on the meaning of the Prussian defeat. In the aftermath of the disasters at Jena and Auerstedt, numerous Prussian fortresses had collapsed under circumstances in which they should have been able to hold out. Stettin, for example, which possessed a garrison of around 5,000 men and was fully provisioned, had surrendered to a small regiment of enemy hussars numbering only 800. The fortress at Küstrin – that shrine of Prussian memory – had surrendered only days after the king himself had left it to move eastward. The collapse of Prussia, it seemed, was as much a question of political will and motivation as of technical inferiority.
The king’s rage over this chain of capitulations found expression in the Declaration of Ortelsburg, a statement composed by Frederick William on 12 December 1806 and written in his own hand. It was still too early, he observed, to draw conclusions about who or what was responsible for the ‘almost total dissolution’ of the Prussian forces in the field, but the fortress capitulations were a scandal ‘without precedent’ in the history of the Prussian army. In future, he wrote, every governor or commander who surrendered his fortress ‘simply for fear of bombardment’ or ‘for any other worthless reason, whatever it might be’, would be ‘shot without mercy’. Any soldier who ‘threw away his weapons out of fear’ would likewise face the firing squad. Prussian subjects who entered the service of the enemy and were found with a weapon in their hand would be ‘shot without mercy’.2 Much of the document reads like a cathartic explosion of anger, but tucked away at the end was a passage that announced a revolution. In future, Frederick William wrote, any fighting man who performed with distinction should be promoted into the officer corps, regardless of whether he was a private, a warrant officer or a prince.3 Amid the chaos of defeat and flight, a process of reform and self-renewal had begun.
In the aftermath of the defeats and humiliations of 1806–7, a new leadership cadre of ministers and officials launched a salvo of government edicts that transformed the structure of the Prussian political executive, deregulated the economy, redrew the ground rules of rural society and reformulated the relationship between the state and civil society. It was the very scale of the defeat that opened the door to reform. The collapse of trust in traditional structures and procedures created opportunities for those who had long been striving to improve the system from within, and silenced their former opponents. The war also imposed fiscal burdens that were insoluble within the parameters of established practice. There was a substantial indemnity to pay (120 million francs), but the real cost of the French occupation, which lasted from August 1807 until December 1808, was estimated by one contemporary at around 216.9 million thalers – a huge sum if we consider that in 1816 total government revenues were just over 31 million thalers.4 The resulting sense of emergency favoured those with forceful and coherent programmes of action and the ability to communicate them persuasively. In all these ways, the exogenous shock of Napoleon’s victory focused and amplified forces already at work within the Prussian state.5
At the centre of the reform process that began in 1807 (though his role has sometimes been under-appreciated) was the King of Prussia, Frederick William III. Important as the reforming bureaucrats were, they could not have carried out their plans without the support of the monarch. It was Frederick William III who appointed Karl vom Stein as his chief adviser in October 1807, until he was forced by Napoleon to dismiss him (after allegations that Stein was plotting against the French). After appointing Alexander Count Dohna and Karl von Altenstein (an old boy from the ‘Franconian clique’) as joint chief ministers, the king called Hardenberg to the ministries of finance and the interior in June 1810 and granted him the new title of Staatskanzler, designating him as Prussia’s first prime minister.
Yet Frederick William III remains a shadowy figure. J. R. Seeley, author of a three-volume nineteenth-century portrait of Stein, described the king as ‘the most respectable and the most ordinary man that has reigned over Prussia’.6 At a time when Prussia’s cultural and political life was dominated by brilliant personalities – Schleiermacher, Hegel, Stein, Hardenberg, the Humboldts – the monarch was a pedantic and narrow-minded bore. His conversation was stunted and brusque. Napoleon, who often dined with him during the summer days in Tilsit, later recalled that it was difficult to get him to talk about anything but ‘military headgear, buttons and leather satchels’.7 Though he was rarely far from the centre of Prussian high politics in the crisis years before the defeat, he appears to us as a cipher, trying to blend into the background, fleeing the moment of decision and leaning on the counsels of those closest to him. As crown prince, Frederick William had been denied the chance to learn the business of government from the inside. (By contrast, he was to offer his own son, the future Frederick William IV, a key role in Prussian domestic politics – yet another example of the dialectical alternation of paternal regimes so characteristic of the Hohenzollern dynasty.) Throughout his life, the king combined a sharp, if reticent, intelligence with a profound lack of confidence in his own abilities. Far from embracing the opportunities of kingship, Frederick William saw the crown as a ‘burden’ to be borne, a burden he felt many others were better qualified to carry than he.
Frederick William’s accession to the throne in 1797 was attended by the usual Hohenzollern contrasts. The father had pursued territorial prizes at every conceivable opportunity; the son was a man of peace who eschewed the quest for glory and reputation. The father’s reign saw the last exuberant gasp of baroque monarchy, with its displays of wasteful splendour and bevies of mistresses; the son was austere in his tastes and remained faithful to his wife. Frederick William III found the City Palace in Berlin too imposing and preferred to stay in the smaller residence he had occupied as crown prince. His favourite domicile of all was a rustic little estate he bought at Paretz near Potsdam. Here he could live in tranquil domesticity and pretend he was an ord