Iron Kingdom : The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (49 page)

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
).
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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.
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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.
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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.’
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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