Iron Kingdom : The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (77 page)

What was significant about the Schön–Rochow showdown was not the enmity between two powerful servants of the Prussian Crown, for this was nothing new, but the extraordinary public resonance of the struggle. In October 1841, when he returned to Königsberg from a sitting of the state ministry in Berlin, Schön was welcomed like a hero: boats flying festive pennants sailed out to meet him as he entered the harbour and the windows of his many Königsberg supporters were illuminated that evening. On 8 June 1843, a year after his removal from office, the liberals in Königsberg orchestrated festivities to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the former president’s entry into state service. A collection was organized, and so widely had Schön’s fame spread across Germany that contributions flowed in from sympathetic liberals as far afield as Baden and Württemberg. The amount collected sufficed to liquidate the remaining debt on the Schön family estate at Arnau, with enough left over to finance the erection of a memorial obelisk in the city. For the first time in Prussian history, a senior state official had allowed himself to be celebrated as the figurehead of a dissident political movement.

The political frustrations that attended the accession of Frederick
William IV were no passing storm; they signalled an irreversible elevation in the political temperature. There was a dramatic sharpening and refinement of critical politics. The radical Jewish physician Johann Jakoby was a member of a group of like-minded friends who met for political discussions at Siegel’s Café in Königsberg. His pamphlet,
Four Questions, Answered by an East Prussian
, published in 1841, demanded ‘lawful participation in the affairs of state’, not as a concession or favour, but as an ‘inalienable right’. Jakoby was subsequently arraigned on charges of treason but was acquitted after a chain of trials by an appeals court; in the process he became one of the most celebrated figures of the Prussian opposition movement. By contrast with the genteel Theodor von Schön and his noble circle, Jakoby represented the more impatient activism of the urban professional classes. The radicalized intellectuals of the urban elites found a forum in the new political associations that proliferated across the major Prussian cities – the
Ressource
in Breslau, the Citizens’ Club in Magdeburg and the Thursday Society in Königsberg, which was a more formally constituted version of the Siegel’s Café group.
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But political participation could unfold in many other contexts as well – in the Cathedral Building Society of Cologne, for example, which became an important meeting place for liberals and radicals, or at the lectures given by visiting speakers in the wine gardens of the city of Halle.
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Within the provincial diets, too, there was an unmistakable change in tone. The demands articulated here and there by individual assemblies during the 1830s now merged into an all-Prussian chorus. In 1841 and 1843, virtually all the diets passed resolutions calling for freedom of the press. In 1843, the Rhenish Diet – supported by a broad swathe of middle-class opinion – rejected a new and in many respects quite progressive Prussian penal code because it breached the principle of equality before the law by incorporating penalties that varied in accordance with a person’s corporate status.
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The campaigns mounted in support of petitions to the diet grew dramatically in size and public resonance.
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The Polish national movement in the province of Posen was initially reluctant to support liberal calls for a national parliament, on the ground that this would further integrate the province into the fabric of the kingdom. But by 1845, Polish patriots and German liberals among the deputies to the diet were ready to join forces in demanding a wide range of liberal measures.
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If the liberals had begun to coalesce into a ‘party of movement’ by the 1840s, the same could not be said of conservatives. Conservatism (a retrospective construct, since the term was not yet in use) remained a diffuse, fragmented phenomenon whose diverse threads had not been woven into a coherent fabric. The nostalgic rural paternalism so eloquently expressed by the estate owner Friedrich August Ludwig von der Marwitz remained a minority taste, even among the landed nobility. The ‘historical school’, formed by opponents of Hegelian philosophy at the University of Berlin, embraced too many conflicting perspectives, not all of which were ‘conservative’ in any straightforward sense, to furnish the basis for an abiding coalition. Those conservatives whose outlook was rooted in the neo-Pietist commitment of the Awakening found it difficult to see eye to eye with those who were inspired by the secular authoritarian statism of the late eighteenth century. The ambivalent attitude of many conservatives towards the bureaucratic state also made collaboration with the authorities difficult. The
Berliner Politisches Wochenblatt
, formed by ultraconservatives in 1831, conceived of itself as a loyalist organ directed against the forces unleashed by the July Revolution in France, but this newspaper soon fell foul of the Prussian censorship authorities, whose officials, according to the paper’s disgruntled sponsor, were men of ‘liberalistic’ temperament. After struggling to acquire a secure readership, the paper went under in 1841.
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Conservatives were thus in no position to coordinate a response to the expansion of liberal dissent. Most either fished around for compromises or lapsed into a resigned awareness of the inevitability of change. Even within the Cabinet, there was little sign of a unified conservative bloc. The political discussions among ministers were surprisingly speculative, conflictual and open-ended, a feature that was encouraged – or at least tolerated – by the king himself.
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In October 1843, Leopold von Gerlach, commander of the I Guards
Landwehrbrigade
in Spandau on the outskirts of Berlin and a close personal friend of the king, reflected on the political situation in Prussia. What worried him was not just the pressure building behind demands for constitutional reform, but also the failure of the conservatives – even within the government – to form a united front against it. Several of the ministers – including the supposedly archconservative ‘Bible Thile’ – had begun to talk ‘quite uninhibitedly’ of conceding a Chamber of Deputies. The ship of state,
Gerlach observed, was sailing in the direction of Jacobinism, driven by the ‘always freshly blowing wind of the Zeitgeist’. He listed various steps that might help to arrest the process of liberalization, but he was under no illusions about the prospects of success. ‘What can these little manoeuvres possibly achieve,’ he concluded, ‘against the onward pressing Zeitgeist, which, with satanic cleverness, wages an unceasing and systematic war against the authority established by God?’
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In these circumstances, it was inconceivable that the king would be able to re-sculpt society in the image of his neo-corporate ideology. He made an unsuccessful attempt to do so in 1841, when he declared in a cabinet order that the Jews of Prussia should be organized for administrative purposes into
Judenschaften
(Jewries), whose elected deputies would represent the interests of the Jewish communities before the local authorities. The order also stated that Jews were to be absolved of the obligation to perform military service. Neither of these measures was ever carried out. The king’s own ministers opposed them – Interior Minister Rochow and the new minister for religious and educational affairs, Johann Albrecht Friedrich Eichhorn, objected that the proposals ran counter to the recent development of Prussian society. A survey of district governments revealed that these, too, were opposed to the king’s plan. Local administrations were prepared to bestow corporate legal status upon Jewish religious institutions, but they were strongly opposed to the imposition of corporate status in the broader political sense favoured by Frederick William, which they saw as hindering the all-important process of societal assimilation. Indeed the vehemence and candour with which they rejected this royal hobby-horse are remarkable. The district government of Cologne even pressed for full and unconditional emancipation of the Jewish minority, pointing out the success of this policy in France, Holland, Belgium and England. The officials of the 1840s were not servile
Untertanen
(subjects) bent on ‘working towards’ their king. They viewed themselves as autonomous participants in the policy-making process.
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As the Jewish initiative suggests, Frederick William’s neo-corporatist vision was out of tune, not only with public opinion in the broadest sense, but even with the prevalent ethos of the administration itself, which found it increasingly difficult to reach consensus on the great political questions of the day. To liberals and radicals, and even to some conservatives, the politics of the new reign seemed fundamentally
incoherent, ‘a deranged mixture of the extremes of our time’.
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No one captured the resulting sense of disconnection better than the radical theologian David Friedrich Strauss, whose pamphlet
A Romantic on the Throne of the Caesars
was published in Mannheim in 1847. Strauss’s tract purported to be about the Emperor known as Julian the Apostate, but was in fact a caricature of the Prussian king, who was depicted as an unworldly dreamer, a man who had turned nostalgia for the ancients into a way of life and whose eyes were closed to the pressing needs of the present.
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The expansion of political activism around the diets took place against the background of a broader process of politicization that reached deep into the hinterlands of the Prussian provinces. In the Rhineland in particular the 1840s saw dramatic growth in the popular consumption of newspapers. Rates of literacy were very high in Prussia by European standards, and even those who could not read for themselves could hear newspapers being read aloud in taverns. Beyond the newspapers, and far more popular with the general public, were ‘people’s calendars’ (
Volkskalender
), a traditional, cheap, mass-distributed print format that offered a mixture of news, fiction, anecdotes, and practical advice. By the 1840s, the market in calendars had become highly differentiated, catering to a range of political preferences.
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Even the traditional commerce in popular printed prophecy acquired a sharper political edge in the 1840s. Of particular concern to the Prussian authorities was the ‘Prophecy of Lehnin’, a text of obscure origin that appeared to divine the future of the House of Hohenzollern. The Prophecy of Lehnin, which circulated widely in the Rhineland, had traditionally foretold the imminent conversion of the royal house to Catholicism – reason enough in itself to attract the hostile attention of the authorities – but the early 1840s saw the appearance of a more radical version predicting that the ‘infamous king’ would be punished with death for his role in an ‘atrocity’.
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This creeping politicization of popular culture was not confined to the print media. Song was an even more ubiquitous medium for the articulation of political dissent. In the Rhineland, where memories of
the French Revolution were especially vivid, the records of the local police are full of references to the singing of forbidden ‘liberty songs’, including endless variations on the
Marseillaise
and the
ça ira
. Liberty songs recalled the life and deeds of Kotzebue’s assassin Karl Sand, celebrated the virtuous struggles of the Greeks or the Poles against Ottoman and Russian tyranny and commemorated moments of public insurrection against illegitimate authority. No fair or public festivity was complete, moreover, without travelling ballad-singers (
Bänkelsänger
), whose songs were often irreverently political in content. Even the ‘peepshow men’, travelling performers who exhibited
trompe-l’oeil
scenes, were adept at weaving witty political critiques into their commentaries, so that even ostensibly harmless landscape views became pretexts for satire.
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From the 1830s, carnivals and other popular traditional festivities such as Maypole ceremonies and charivaris also tended increasingly to carry a (dissenting) political message.
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By the 1840s, the carnivals of the Rhineland – especially the elaborate processions orchestrated on the Monday before Ash Wednesday – had become a focal point for political tension between locals and the Prussian authorities. With its anarchic, twelfth-night atmosphere, in which conventional social and political relationships were inverted or satirized, the carnival was suited to become an eloquent medium of political protest. It was precisely in order to discipline the unruly energies of the street festival that carnival societies were founded in the Rhineland in the 1820s and 1830s. By the early 1840s, however, these too had been infiltrated by the spirit of dissent. In 1842, the Cologne carnival society split when radical members declared that ‘the republican carnival constitution’ was the only one ‘under which true foolishness could flourish’. They intended to enthrone a ‘carnival king’ whose authority was to be defended by a ‘standing army of fools’. The unusually radical Düsseldorf carnival society was also known for its harsh satires of the monarch.
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Ridicule of the king was an increasingly prominent feature of dissenting utterances in Prussia during the 1830s and 1840s. Although only 575 cases of
lèse-majesté
were actually investigated during the decade between 1837 and 1847, the records suggest that a multitude of other such misdemeanours went unprosecuted, and we can presume that many more again never came to the attention of the police at all. Yet such cases as did come before the courts were generally treated seriously.
When the tailor Joseph Jurowski from Warmbrunn in Silesia declared in a drunken moment ‘our Freddy is a scoundrel; the king is a scoundrel and a swindler’, he received the remarkably harsh sentence of eighteen months in jail. The judicial official Balthasar Martin, from near the city of Halberstadt, was sentenced to six months of imprisonment for stating, while sitting in a tavern, that the king ‘drank five or six bottles of champagne a day’. ‘How can the king take care of us?’, Martin asked his listeners, presumably unaware that a police informer was sitting among them. ‘He’s a lush, the lush of lushes, he only drinks the really potent stuff.’
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