Iron Kingdom : The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (26 page)

The Pietists also provided support in the integration of the 20,000-odd Lutherans who entered Prussia as refugees from the archbishopric of Salzburg in 1731–2, most of whom were sent by Frederick William I to live as farmers in the depopulated region of Prussian Lithuania (see below). Pietists accompanied the Salzburgers on their trek through Prussia, organized fund-raising campaigns and financial support, supplied the new arrivals with devotional texts printed at the orphanage and provided their communities in the east with pastors.
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A further – often overlooked – area of evangelizing activity was the Pietist mission to the Jews. From 1728, there existed a Judaic Institute in the city of Halle, under the management of the Pietist theologian Johann Heinrich Callenberg, which ran a well-organized mission – the first of its kind – to the Jews of German-speaking Europe. The missionaries, who received language training in Halle at the first academic Yiddish seminar in Europe, travelled far and wide across Brandenburg-Prussia, buttonholing travelling Jews and trying without much success to persuade them that Jesus Christ was their messiah. Closely intertwined with the orphanage complex, the institute was sustained by the eschatological hope for a prophesied mass conversion of Jewry articulated in the writings of Philipp Jakob Spener. In practice, however, its missionary efforts were focused largely on the conversion and occupational retraining of impoverished itinerants known as ‘beggar Jews’ (
Betteljuden
) whose numbers were on the increase in early eighteenth-century Germany.
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The mission to the Jews thus embodied a characteristically Pietist blend of social awareness and evangelizing zeal. In their missionary endeavours, as in the other spheres of their activity, the Pietists earned official approval by contributing to the tasks of religious, social and cultural integration that faced the administration of the Brandenburg-Prussian state, helping to bring about the ‘domestication’, as one historian has called it, of ‘wild elements’.
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By the 1720s and 1730s, Pietism had become respectable. As often happens in such cases, it had changed in the process. It had begun as a controversial movement with a precarious foothold in the established Lutheran churches. As Pietism gathered new adherents during the 1690s and into the new century, it continued to be burdened by a reputation for excessive zeal.
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By the 1730s, however, the moderate wing of the movement enjoyed unchallenged dominance, thanks to the groundwork laid by Spener and the tireless work of Francke and his Halle collaborators in channelling the surplus spiritual energies of Lutheran nonconformism into a range of institutional projects. A variety of radical Pietisms, some of them overtly separatist, continued to flourish in the other German states, but the Prussian variant shed its embarrassing extremist fringe and became an orthodoxy in its own right. Infused with confidence, the second generation of Pietists used their positions within key institutions to silence or remove opponents, much as the Lutheran
Orthodox had done in an earlier era. The Pietist movement became a patronage network in its own right.
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This position of dominance could not be sustained in the longer term. By the mid-1730s, the most influential and talented members of the founding generation of Halle theologians were dead: Francke (1727), Paul Anton (1730) and Joachim Justus Breithaupt (1732); the succeeding generation did not produce theologians of comparable quality or public profile. The movement was further weakened in the 1730s by internal controversy over a campaign launched by Frederick William I to purge ‘Catholic’ elements in Lutheran ceremonial. Some leading Pietists supported the initiative, but most remained respectful of Lutheran tradition and opposed the king’s liturgical tampering. In this, they found themselves at one with the orthodox leadership of the Lutheran church, a fact that did much to repair the damage done by decades of feuding.
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The allegiance to the state that had won the movement such prominence thus threatened to sunder it. There were signs that the traditional Pietist tolerance of confessional difference was being supplanted, from within the movement itself, by a proto-enlightened enthusiasm for confessional convergence. Then there was the problem that the policy of favouring Pietists for civil service and pastoral posts encouraged ambitious candidates to employ adaptive mimicry in the service of their careers. Many succumbed to the temptation to manufacture narratives of conversion to a truer and more heartfelt faith, or even to counterfeit the grave countenance and demeanour (one source speaks of Pietist ‘eye-rolling’) associated with the more zealous adherents of the movement. This phenomenon – a consequence of the movement’s success – was to leave the term ‘Pietist’ enduringly tainted with the connotation of religious imposture.
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After 1740, Pietism quickly declined in the theological faculties of the universities and within the clerical networks of Brandenburg Prussia. This was in part the result of a withdrawal of royal support. Frederick the Great was personally antipathetic to the ‘Protestant Jesuits’ who had enjoyed his father’s protection, and consistently favoured enlightened candidates for posts in church administration, with the consequence that Berlin became a renowned centre of the Protestant enlightenment.
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The University of Halle, once the bastion of the movement, became a leading centre of rationalism, and was to remain so well into the following century. There was a gradual fall in the number of persons attending
the orphanage complex in Halle, and a corresponding decline in the circle of donors willing to support its activities. All this was reflected in the waning fortunes of the Pietist mission to the Jews in Halle, whose final annual report, published in 1790, opened with the observation that ‘if we compare the earlier days of our institute with the present, then the two are as body and shadow…’
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How far-reaching was the impact of the Pietist movement on Prussian society and institutions? Pietists valued restraint and understatement and despised courtly luxury and wastefulness. At court and in the organs of military and civilian education they systematically extolled the virtues of modesty, austerity and self-discipline. In this way they amplified the impact of the cultural change wrought by Frederick William I after 1713, when towering wigs and richly embroidered jackets became the despised trifles of a bygone era. Through their role in the cadet schools, they helped to shape attitudes and comportment within the provincial nobilities, more and more of whose sons were passing through the cadet system by the middle decades of the eighteenth century. This may in turn account for the dislike of ostentation that came to be seen as a hallmark of the Prussian Junker caste. If the fabled modesty of the Junker was in many individual cases pure affectation and posturing, this merely testifies to the power of the persona popularized by the Pietist movement.

Pietism also helped to prepare the ground for the Prussian enlightenment.
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The movement’s optimism and its future-oriented focus bore an affinity with the enlightened idea of progress, just as its preoccupation with education as a means of shaping personality ‘gave rise to that comprehensive pedagogization of human existence that was an essential characteristic of the enlightenment’.
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The development of the natural sciences at the University of Halle reveals how closely Pietism and enlightenment, despite their many differences, were intertwined; the ‘field of force’ between them shaped the assumptions guiding scientific enquiry.
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The Pietist emphasis on ethics over dogma and the commitment to tolerance in dealing with confessional difference likewise prefigured the fashions of the later eighteenth century – witness Kant’s conception of morality as the highest sphere of rationally accessible truth, and his tendency to subordinate religious to moral intuitions.
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Some of the most influential Prussian exponents of enlightened and romantic philosophy were reared within a Pietist milieu. The cult of
introspection associated with the romantic movement had a Pietist antecedent in the Pietist ‘spiritual biography’, of which Francke’s own widely read narrative of his conversion became an archetype. Its secular successor, the ‘autobiography’, emerged as an influential literary genre in the mid to late eighteenth century.
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The romantic philosopher Johann Georg Hamann was educated at the Kneiphof School in Königsberg, a stronghold of moderate Pietism, and subsequently attended the city’s university, where he came under the influence of the Pietist-inspired philosophy professor Martin Knutzen; the introspective and ascetic quality of the Pietist outlook can be traced in his writings. Hamann even underwent a conversion experience of sorts, brought on by a period of close Bible-reading and penitential self-observation.
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The influence of Württemberg Pietism can be discerned in the writings of G. W. F. Hegel, who came to exercise a profound influence on the development of philosophy and political thought at the University of Berlin; Hegel’s conception of teleology as a process of self-realization was underpinned by a Christian theology of history with recognizably Pietist features.
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And what of the Brandenburg-Prussian state? Moulded on to the frieze that dominates the fac#231;ade of Francke’s orphanage building in Halle are two black Prussian eagles, their wings outspread, a vivid reminder to all who passed by of the movement’s proximity to state power. The positive contribution rendered by the Pietists to the consolidation of dynastic authority in Brandenburg-Prussia offers a striking contrast with the political neutrality of the contemporaneous Pietist movement in Württemburg and the subversive impact of Puritanism in England.
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As a fifth column within Brandenburg-Prussian Lutheranism, the Pietists were a much more effective ideological instrument than the Calvinist confessional prescriptions and censorship measures of the Electors and kings could ever have been. But the Pietists did more than merely assist the sovereign; they fed the energy from a broadly based movement of Protestant voluntarism into the public enterprise of Brandenburg-Prussia’s newly elevated dynasty. Above all, they propagated the idea that the objectives of the state might also be those of conscientious citizens, that service to the state could be motivated not just by obligation or self-interest, but also by an encompassing sense of ethical responsibility. A community of solidarity emerged that extended beyond the networks of patron–client relationships. Pietism created the beginnings
of a broad-based activist constituency for the monarchical project in Brandenburg-Prussia.

Does it make sense to speak of Brandenburg-Prussia’s external relations in terms of a ‘Protestant foreign policy’? Historians of power politics and international relations have often been sceptical about such claims. Even in the era of ‘religious war’, they point out, the imperatives of territorial security overrode the demands of confessional solidarity. Catholic France supported the Protestant Union against Catholic Austria; Lutheran Saxony sided with Catholic Austria against Lutheran Sweden. Confessional allegiances were only very rarely strong enough to prevail against all other considerations – the readiness of the Calvinist Palatinate under Frederick V to risk everything for the sake of the Protestant interest in 1618 – 20 was rare, perhaps even exceptional.

Yet it would be misleading to conclude that foreign policy was formulated on the basis of an entirely secular calculus of interest or that confession was an unimportant factor. It played an important role in structuring dynastic marital alliances, for one thing, and these in turn had important consequences for external policy, not least because they often entailed new territorial claims. It is clear, moreover, that many Protestant rulers perceived themselves as members of a Protestant community of states. This was certainly true of the Great Elector, who advised his successor in the Political Testament of 1667 to work wherever possible in concert with the other Protestant territories and to be vigilant in defending Protestant liberties against the Emperor.
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Confessional factors featured prominently in policy debates within the executive. Arguing against an alliance with France in 1648, the privy councillor Sebastian Striepe pointed out that Cardinal Mazarin was hostile to the reformed faith and was likely to press forward with the Catholicization of France.
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In the 1660s, as the mistreatments of French Calvinists intensified, the Elector wrote to Louis XIV to express his concern.
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In the 1670s, Frederick William switched to the anti-French coalition in order to prevent the subjugation of the Dutch Republic, the centre of northern European Calvinism. Geopolitics and the promise of
subsidies drew him back to France in the early 1680s, but his return to the Brandenburg-imperial alliance of 1686 was motivated in part by disquiet over the brutal persecution of the Calvinist Huguenots in France.
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One way of demonstrating confessional solidarity without risking armed conflict was to offer asylum and other forms of assistance to persecuted co-religionists in another state. The most celebrated example of this type of gesture politics was the Edict of Potsdam of 1685, by which the Elector invited persecuted French Calvinists to settle in the lands of Brandenburg-Prussia. It was Frederick William’s answer to the French king’s quashing of the rights granted to the Huguenots under the Edict of Nantes (1598). In all, some 20,000 French Calvinist refugees settled in the lands of the Elector. They tended to come from the poorer strata of the Reformed population – the wealthiest had generally chosen economically more attractive destinations such as England and Holland. Their resettlement was supported (by contrast with Holland and Britain) with state-subsidized assistance, cheap dwellings, tax exemptions, discounted loans and so on. Since Brandenburg, whose population had still not recovered from the mortalities of the Thirty Years War, stood in sore need of skilled and industrious immigrants, this was a self-interested but highly effective gesture. It irritated Louis XIV profoundly
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(which, of course, was a part of its purpose) and earned the approbation of Protestants across the German lands. There was an intriguing disproportionality in this: of the 200,000-odd Huguenots who fled France in the face of persecution, only about one-tenth fetched up in the Prussian lands, yet it was the Elector, more than any other sovereign, who succeeded in capturing the moment for his reputation. Pitched in a lofty, universalizing moral register, the edict has (somewhat misleadingly) been celebrated ever since as one of the great monuments to the Prussian tradition of tolerance.