Iron Kingdom : The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (75 page)

For some, Prussia meant the rule of law; hence the confidence with which Old Lutheran separatists in Silesia cited the Prussian General Code in their defence against arbitrary action by the state authorities.
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To these humble subjects of the Prussian Crown, the code was a safeguard for freedom of conscience, a ‘constitution’ curtailing the state’s right to intervene in the life of the subject. The law that guaranteed certain individual liberties also held out the promise of public order, another cherished feature of Prussian governance. In a Protestant song that circulated during the ‘Cologne events’ of the late 1830s, the anonymous author contrasted the arrogance and despotism of the Catholic clergy with the orderliness of the Prussian way of life:

For us who live in Prussia’s land

The King is always lord;

We live by law and the bonds of order,

Not like some bickering horde.
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‘Prussianness’ thus came to imply commitment to a certain order of things. The ‘secondary virtues’ of Prussophile cliché – punctuality, loyalty, honesty, thoroughness, precision – were all attributes of service to a higher ideal.

To what ideal precisely? The time was past for the kind of king-cult that had thrived after the reign of Frederick the Great. The government did its best to propagate monarchist patriotism in the 1830s, but with limited success. The ‘Prussia Song’, adopted by the government as a kind of territorial anthem in the later 1830s, articulated an officially condoned version of Prussian patriotic sentiment. Written by Bernhard Thiersch, a teacher at the Halberstadt Gymnasium, and set to a jaunty marching tune by Heinrich August Neithard, director of music of the II Grenadier Guards Regiment, the song opened strongly with the words ‘I am a Prussian, do you know my colours?’ but soon lost itself in servile monarchist effusions. An imaginary Prussian – stoical, reserved and masculine – approaches the throne ‘with love and loyalty’ and hears from it the mild voice of a father. He swears filial allegiance; he feels the king’s call vibrating in his heart; he observes that a people can really flourish only as long as the bonds of love and loyalty between king and
subjects remain intact etc. etc. The ‘
Preussenlied
’ was a good marching ditty, but it never took off as a popular song, and it is not difficult to see why.
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Its field of reference was too narrowly military, the monarch at its centre too disembodied, the tone too grovelling to capture the boisterous aspirations expressed in popular patriotism.

The one institution that all Prussians had in common was the state. It is no coincidence that this period witnessed an unprecedented discursive escalation around the idea of the state. Its majesty resonated more compellingly than ever before, at least within the milieu of academia and senior officialdom. No individual did more to promulgate the dignity of the Prussian state after 1815 than Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the Swabian philosopher who took up Fichte’s vacant chair at the new University of Berlin in 1818. The state, Hegel argued, was an organism possessing will, rationality and purpose. Its destiny – like that of any living thing – was to change, grow and progressively develop. The state was ‘the power of reason actualising itself as will’;
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it was a transcendent domain in which the alienated, competitive ‘particular interests’ of civil society merged into coherence and identity. There was a theological core to Hegel’sreflections on the state: the state had a quasi-divine purpose; it was ‘God’s march through the world’; in Hegel’s hands it became the quasi-divine apparatus by which the multitude of subjects who constituted civil society was redeemed into universality.

In adopting this approach, Hegel broke with the view prevalent among Prussian political theorists since Pufendorf and Wolff that the state was no more than a machine engineered to meet the external and internal security needs of the society that fashioned it.
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Hegel vehemently rejected the metaphorical machine-state favoured by theorists of the high enlightenment, on the grounds that it treated ‘free human beings’ as if they were mere cogs in its mechanism. The Hegelian state was not an imposed construct, but the highest expression of the ethical substance of a people, the unfolding of a transcendent and rational order, the ‘actualization of freedom’. From this it followed that the relationship between civil society and the state was not antagonistic, but reciprocal. It was the state that enabled civil society to order itself in a rational way, and the vitality of the state depended in turn upon each of the particular interests that constituted civil society being ‘active in its particular function – equipping itself for its particular sphere and thereby promoting the universal’.
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Hegel’s was not a liberal vision – he was not a champion of unitary national legislatures, having seen what they were capable of in Jacobin France. But the progressive orientation of his vision was undeniable. For all his misgivings about the Jacobin experiment, Hegel celebrated the French Revolution as a ‘splendid dawn’ that had been greeted with joy by ‘all thinking people’. Hegel’s Berlin students were told that the Revolution represented an ‘irreversible achievement of the world spirit’ whose consequences were still unfolding.
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The centrality of reason and a sense of forward momentum suffuse his reflections on the state at every point. There was no place in the Hegelian polity for privileged castes and private jurisdictions. And by elevating the state above the plane of partisan strife, Hegel brought into view the exhilarating possibility that progress – in the sense of a beneficent rationalization of the political and social order – might simply be a property of the unfolding of history, as embodied in the Prussian state.
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It is difficult, from a present-day standpoint, to appreciate the intoxicating effect of Hegel’s thought on a generation of educated Prussians. It was not a question of Hegel’s pedagogical charisma – he was notorious for standing hunched over the lectern reading out his text in a halting and scarcely audible mumble. According to an account by his student Hotho, who attended Hegel’s lectures at the University of Berlin, ‘his features hung pale and loose upon him as if he were already dead.’‘He sat there morosely with his head wearily bowed down in front of him, constantly leafing back and forth through his compendious notes, even as he continued to speak.’ Another student, the future Hegel-biographer Karl Rosenkranz, recalled laborious paragraphs punctuated by constant coughing and snuff-taking.
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It was the ideas themselves and the peculiar language Hegel invented to articulate them that colonized the minds of disciples across the kingdom. Part of the explanation lies in the context. Hegel’s appointment was the work of the sometime Hardenberg protégé, enlightened reformer and Minister of Education Karl von Altenstein. The philosopher’s writings provided an exalted legitimation for the Prussian bureaucracy, whose expanding power within the executive during the reform era demanded justification. Hegel steered a path between doctrinaire liberalism and restorationist conservatism – in an era of deepening political uncertainty, many found this
via media
enormously attractive. His writing balanced opposing standpoints, often with dazzling virtuosity. His
dialectical wizardry, combined with an oracular and sometimes obfuscating mode of delivery, opened the work to diverse interpretations, enabling Hegelian language and ideas to flow seamlessly into the political ideologies of both right and left.
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Finally, Hegel appeared to offer a means of reconciling the fact of political and social conflict with the hope for an ultimate harmony of interests and purposes.

39. Hegel at the lectern, surrounded by students. Lithograph from 1828 by Franz Kugler.

‘Hegelianism’ was not the stuff that popular identities are made of. The master’s work was notoriously difficult to read, let alone understand. Richard Wagner and Otto von Bismarck were among those who attempted without success to make sense of him. Moreover, his appeal was confessionally coloured. Hegel hailed from a Protestant Pietist milieu, whose imprint can be discerned in his attempts to assimilate the earthly to the divine order. Catholic students responded ambivalently to his teachings. In 1826, a group of Catholic students at the University of Berlin even made a formal complaint to the ministry of education: it seems that Hegel had made light of Catholic doctrine, observing that if a mouse were to nibble at a eucharist wafer after its consecration, then, by virtue of the sacramental miracle of transubstantiation, ‘God would exist in the mouse and even in its excrement.’
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Asked by the ministry to explain himself, Hegel invoked the principle of academic freedom
and added that Catholics were free to stay away from his lectures if they so wished. Even without such irritations, it was clear that Hegel’s sacralization of the state held a more immediate appeal for Protestant adherents of the Prussian state church than for Catholics, whose relationship with the Protestant secular authority was more problematic.

Within the Protestant mainstream, however (not to mention assimilated Jewish circles), Hegel’s influence was profound and lasting. His arguments diffused swiftly into the culture, partly through the students who crowded into his lectures and partly through the patronage of Culture Minister Altenstein and his privy councillor Johannes Schulze, a sometime Hegel student, who supported the candidacy of Hegelians for key academic posts, especially at the universities of Berlin and Halle. Hegelianism – like post-modernism – became ambient, infiltrating the language and thinking even of those who had never read or understood the master’s work.

Hegel’s influence helped to establish the modern state as a privileged object of enquiry and reflection. No one better exemplifies the discursive escalation that took place around the concept of the state during the years of realignment that followed the French Revolution. The state was no longer just the site of sovereignty and power, it was the engine that makes history, or even the embodiment of history itself. This distinctively Prussian intimacy between the idea of the state and the idea of history left abiding traces on the emergent cultural disciplines of the universities, not least history itself. Leopold von Ranke, the founder of history as a modern scholarly discipline, was no enthusiast of Hegel, whose philosophical system he denounced as unhistorical. Worlds lay between Hegel’s metaphysical understanding of the ‘history of human consciousness and spirit’ and the obsessive quest for authentic sources and the insistence upon accurate description that were the hallmark of the nascent Prussian historical school. Yet the young Ranke, a Saxon who came to Prussia in 1818 at the age of twenty-three and was appointed to an academic post at the University of Berlin in 1825, did not entirely escape the contagion of Prussia’s statist idealism. In essays published in 1833 and 1836, Ranke declared that the state was a ‘moral good’, and an ‘idea of God’, an organic being with its ‘own original life’, which ‘penetrates its entire environment, identical only with itself’. Throughout the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century, the ‘Prussian school’ of
history would remain overwhelmingly focused on the state as the vehicle and agent of historical change.
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After the philosopher’s death during the cholera epidemic of 1831, Hegelianism disintegrated into warring schools and passed through swift ideological mutations. Among the raucous ‘Young Hegelians’ who coalesced in Berlin in the late 1830s was the youthful Karl Marx, a new Prussian from the Rhineland and the son of a Jewish convert to Christianity, who had moved to Berlin in 1836 to continue his studies in jurisprudence and political economy. For Marx, the first true encounter with Hegel’s thought was a revelatory shock akin to a religious conversion. ‘For some days’, he told his father in November 1837, his excitement made him ‘quite incapable of thinking’; he ‘ran about madly in the garden by the dirty water of the Spree’, even joined his landlord on a hunting excursion, and found himself overpowered by the desire to embrace every street corner loafer in Berlin.
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Marx would later reject Hegel’s understanding of the state bureaucracy as the ‘general estate’, but it stayed with him none the less. For what else was Marx’s idealization of the proletariat as the ‘pure embodiment of the general interest’ than the materialist inversion of the Hegelian concept? Marxism, too, was made in Prussia.

In the 1840s, political dissent across the European continent became better organized, more confident and socially more diverse. Popular cultures acquired a harder critical edge. An intensifying social crisis generated conflict and violence, confronting administrative and political establishments with problems they seemed unable to solve. This was the most turbulent phase of the post-Napoleonic ‘age of flux and hiatus’.
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In Prussia, these trends were amplified by a regime change. The death of Frederick William III on 7 June 1840 left an oppressive residue of unfinished business. The political predicaments of the previous reign were still unresolved. Above all, Frederick William III’s ‘solemn and famous promise’ to grant a constitution remained, at his death, ‘an unredeemed pledge’.
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The hopes and expectations of liberals and radicals across the kingdom were focused on his successor.