Iron Kingdom : The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (27 page)

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.

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: