Iron Kingdom : The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (76 page)

The new king, Frederick William IV, was already forty-five years old when he ascended the throne. He was something of a puzzle, even to those who knew him well. His predecessors, Frederick William III, Frederick William II and Frederick the Great, had all been educated in the spirit and values of the enlightenment. The new king, by contrast, was a product of the Romantic era. He had grown up on a diet of romantic historic novels – a favourite was the Prussian writer Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, a descendant of the Huguenot colony in Brandenburg whose historical romances featured high-minded knights, damsels in distress, windswept crags, ancient castles and gloomy forests. Frederick William was a romantic not only in his tastes, but also in his
personal life. He wept frequently. His letters to intimates and siblings were long unbosomings copiously sprinkled with batches of up to seven exclamation marks.
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Frederick William IV was the last Prussian – perhaps the last European – monarch to place religion at the centre of his understanding of kingship. He was a ‘lay theologian on the throne’, for whom religion and politics were inseparable.
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At times of stress and high drama, he turned instinctively to biblical language and precedents. But his Christianity was not merely a matter of images and formulations; it shaped his policies and affected his choice of advisers.
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Long before the death of his father in 1840, the crown prince surrounded himself with like-minded Christian friends. For his sceptical younger brother Prince William, writing in 1838, it was clear that the heir to the throne had fallen into the hands of a ‘sect of enthusiasts’. Prince William complained that these ‘fanatics’ had been able to ‘gain complete control of his entire person and his labile imagination’. The ethos of awakened Christianity had established itself so securely in the crown prince’s following, Prince William argued, that ambitious courtiers with an eye on the future sovereign had merely to master the behavioural reflexes of Pietistic devotion in order to assure their advancement. The accession brought many of the crown prince’s Christian friends – Leopold von Gerlach, Ludwig Gustav von Thile (known to his detractors as ‘Bible Thile’), Count Anton von Stolberg-Wernigerode and Count Karl von der Groeben – into positions of political influence. These were men who had been involved with the Protestant awakening of the 1810s; some of them had close ties with the Pietist and Lutheran separatist movements on the fringes of the Prussian state church.

For Frederick William IV, as for his father, the Prussian state was a Christian institute. However, whereas Frederick William III had set out to impose his own eclectic brand of Calvino-Lutheranism on the Protestant congregations of Prussia and antagonized Prussia’s Catholics by seeking a confrontation over the issue of mixed marriages, his son’s Christianity was broader and more ecumenical. To the consternation of his father, Frederick William IV chose to marry a Catholic princess, Elisabeth of Bavaria, and insisted that she be allowed to convert in her own time (as indeed she duly did). His outspoken support for the refurbishment and completion of the great cathedral at Cologne reflected not only a characteristically romantic taste for the Gothic style, but also
his determination to acknowledge Catholicism as a religion with historic and cultural claims to equality within the Prussian state.

The Anglo-Prussian bishopric in Jerusalem, founded in 1841 with the intention of evangelizing the Jews of the Holy Land and building contacts with the eastern Christians, was a uniquely ecumenical institution occupied in alternation by clergymen of the Church of England and the Prussian Union. Its chief architect was the king’s close friend Carl Josias Bunsen, an expert on liturgical history who shared Frederick William’s enthusiasm for the early Christian church.
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Already as crown prince, Frederick William had been critical of the heavy-handed measures taken by his father’s administration against the Lutheran dissidents in Silesia and Pomerania. One of his earliest acts as king was to order the release of those Old Lutheran clergymen who had been imprisoned during the confrontations of the late 1830s. The obstacles to the creation of a separate Lutheran territorial church were gradually removed and the flow of Lutheran emigrants to North America and Australia came to an end.

Frederick William was not a liberal. Nor, on the other hand, was he an authoritarian statist conservative in the Kamptz-Rochow-Wittgenstein mould. The governmental conservatism of the Restoration era was rooted in the authoritarian strand of the Prussian enlightenment. By contrast, Frederick William was steeped in the corporatist ideology of the romantic counter-enlightenment. He was not opposed to representative bodies as such, but they had to be ‘natural’, ‘organic’, ‘grown’; in other words, they had to correspond to the natural and god-given hierarchy of human status and accomplishment, as exemplified in the medieval ‘society of orders’. Underlying his vision of politics and history was an emphasis on continuity and tradition – a response, perhaps, to the trauma he experienced in 1806 as he fled eastwards with his mother from the advancing French and to his mother’s sudden death in 1810, during Prussia’s ‘time of iron’. Frederick William’s attitude to the modern bureaucratic Prussian state was ambivalent. The state did not in his view embody the living forces of historical continuity; it was an artificial thing whose claim to universal authority violated the older and more sacred authority of the locality, the congregation, the corporation. The king was thus more than a supreme administrator, and certainly more than the first servant of the state. He was a sacred father, bound to his people in a mystical union and gifted by God with a peerless understanding of his subjects’ needs.
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The king articulated these commitments in a language that could sound almost liberal. It was a feature of the idiom of political romanticism that it tended at least superficially to blur the differences between progressive and conservative positions. Frederick William spoke admiringly of Britain and its ‘ancient constitution’. He was open – like his romantic Bavarian colleague Ludwig I – to the appeal of German cultural nationalism. He invoked the buzzwords ‘renewal’, ‘revitalization’ and ‘development’ and denounced the evils of ‘bureaucracy’ and ‘despotism’ in a way that seemed to speak to liberal aspirations. One of the king’s closest friends recognized that he expounded a diffuse combination of ‘Pietism’, ‘medievalism’ and ‘aristocratism’ with ‘patriotism’, ‘liberalism’ and ‘Anglomania’.
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All this made Frederick William IV a difficult man to read. Hyperbolic expectations of political change often attend a change of regime. They were encouraged in this case by early signs of a more liberal course. The new monarch immediately announced that all the Prussian provincial diets were to meet at the beginning of 1841 and thereafter every two years (under his father they had met every three years); he also spoke of the ‘reinvigoration’ of representative politics.
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In September 1840, when the Königsberg Diet presented a memorandum begging the monarch to grant a ‘representation of the entire land and of the people’, Frederick William replied that he intended ‘to continue cultivating this noble work’ and to oversee its further ‘development’.
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What exactly the king meant by these words was unclear, but they aroused huge excitement. Political offenders were released from confinement, and Ernst Moritz Arndt was permitted to resume his teaching post at the University of Bonn. Censorship restrictions were relaxed. There were also concessions to the Poles in the province of Posen. On 19 August 1840, there was a general amnesty for Poles who had taken part in the November uprising of 1830. The provocative Eduard Flottwell was removed in 1841, political émigrés from Russian Poland were permitted to take up residence in the province, the German settlement policy was abandoned, and a new school language ordinance met the basic demands of the Polish activists.
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The new minister of education, health and religious affairs, Johann Albrecht Friedrich Eichhorn, who took up his post in October 1840, was a former collaborator of Stein and one of the architects of the Customs Union; his entry into the ministry of state kindled liberal hopes.
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Another hopeful sign was the political rehabilitation of
Hermann Boyen, the veteran champion of military and political reform, who had been forced out of public life by the conservative ministers in 1819. Now seventy-one years old, Boyen was recalled to Berlin and appointed minister of war. The new king fêted the elderly warrior, assigning him the first place in the ministry of state (on grounds of his seniority) and appointing him to the command of the I Infantry Regiment. At the unveiling of a monument to Gneisenau, Frederick William presented Boyen with the Order of the Black Eagle – eloquent testimony to the king’s determination to close the gap between patriotic and dynastic memories of the war against Napoleon. Boyen’s dramatic rehabilitation sent out clear political signals – the old man had only recently offended conservative opinion with a polemically partisan biography of the great patriot and military reformer Scharnhorst.

The accession of the new monarch also brought an end to the career of Police Chief Karl Christoph Albert Heinrich von Kamptz, that zealous hunter of demagogues who had worked with Wittgenstein to shut down political dissent in the post-war years. In the 1830s, Kamptz had become a hate figure whose name often cropped up in the songs and poems of the radical opposition. He was shocked to receive, while taking the waters in Gastein in the summer of 1841, a note from Berlin informing him that the ‘vitality and spiritual energy’ of His Majesty called for younger and more vigorous servants.
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The impact of such signal interventions was enhanced by the vibrant personal style of the new monarch. Frederick William IV received the homage of the Prussian Estates in Königsberg and Berlin, as his predecessors had done, but he was the first of his dynasty to follow up the formal part of the proceedings with an impromptu public address to the crowds gathered before the palace. These two speeches, delivered in a passionate, evangelical, plebiscitary idiom, had an electrifying effect on spectators and public opinion.
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The exhilaration and optimism generated by the inaugural ceremonies and the king’s speeches quickly dissipated, however. Alarmed by the intensity of liberal speculation, the king took steps to quash press discussion of his constitutional plans. In a cabinet order of 4 October, Interior Minister Gustav von Rochow was ordered to announce that the king regretted any misunderstandings that had arisen from his reply to the Königsberg diet and wished it to be known that he had no intention of granting its request for a national assembly. This announcement met with disappointment and bitterness, compounded by the fact that the
bad news came from the desk of Rochow, a hardliner from the previous reign who was loathed by liberals throughout the kingdom.
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Among those who found themselves at loggerheads with the new regime was the long-serving provincial president in Königsberg, Theodor von Schön. Schön was an emblematic figure, even for his contemporaries. He had made repeated journeys to England in his youth; throughout his life he remained a Smithian economic liberal and an admirer of the British parliamentary system. He had been a close associate of Stein, indeed he had drafted Stein’s Political Testament of 1808, which called for a ‘general national representation’. Only through the ‘participation of the people in the operations of the state’, Schön had written, could the ‘national spirit be positively aroused and animated’.
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During the early post-war years he worked with considerable success to develop the basis for a constructive interplay between the regional government and corporate assemblies in West Prussia. Like many moderate reformers, he was aware of the limitations of the provincial diets established in 1823, but welcomed them none the less as a platform for further constitutional development.
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As the provincial president of Prussia (East and West Prussia had been amalgamated under this name in 1829), he was a powerful local boss who held one of the pivotal offices in the post-Napoleonic Prussian state. He also stood at the head of an influential party of liberal East Prussian noblemen, including the Lord Mayor of Königsberg, Rudolf von Auerswald.

During the press debate that followed the homage of the Estates in September 1840, Schön composed the essay
Where Are We Headed?
in which he celebrated the era of reform, lamented the ‘bureaucratic [… ] reaction’ that followed and called for the establishment of a general Estates assembly: ‘Only with national representative institutions,’ he argued, ‘can public life begin and develop in our state.’ Published in a limited edition of only thirty-two copies,
Where Are We Headed?
circulated privately among the Provincial President’s closest friends and associates. Schön also presented a copy to the king, presumably in the belief that he and the new monarch, whom he knew well, were essentially in agreement on the constitutional question. Frederick William’s reply to Schön’s tract was sharp and unequivocal. He would never allow a ‘piece of paper’ (constitution) to come between him and his subjects. It was his sacred duty, he declared, to continue ruling Prussia in ‘patriarchal’ fashion; ‘artificial’ organs of representation were unnecessary.
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Relations between Berlin and Königsberg quickly cooled and the conservatives in Berlin seized the opportunity to reaffirm their control over the government’s policy.
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Interior Minister Gustav von Rochow raised the stakes by sending Schön the text of a radical song that had been passed to the Berlin police, in which the East Prussian provincial president was lauded as a ‘teacher of liberty’. Schön responded to this provocation with undisguised disdain, rebuking the minister and denouncing him as a danger to the state he served. A bitter press feud broke out; Schön’s friends launched salvos against the interior minister in the East Prussian liberal newspapers, while Rochow ordered his subordinates in the ministry to plant poison-pen pieces, not only in Prussian journals, but also in the Leipzig and the Augsburg
Allegemeine Zeitungen
– such was the importance Prussian officials attached to the state of public opinion in the other German territories. The clash came to a head in May 1842, when
Where Are We Headed?
was republished without Schön’s permission by a radical in Strasbourg. The new edition included a long afterword attacking the king. Schön’s dismissal was announced on 3 June, followed by that of Rochow ten days later; Frederick William IV wished to avoid the appearance of partisanship that might have been conveyed by removing only one of the two antagonists.