Iron Kingdom : The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (29 page)

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 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.