Iron Kingdom : The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (30 page)

The association between noble status and officer rank was reinforced during the reign of Frederick the Great by the practice of obstructing the promotion of non-nobles. Although the king was forced to admit commoners to senior military posts during the Seven Years War when noble candidates were in short supply, many of them were later purged or marginalized. By 1806, when the officer corps numbered 7,000 men, only 695 were of non-noble descent and most of these were concentrated in the less prestigious artillery and technical arms of the service.
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Yet this increasingly close identity of interest with the crown could not inure the nobility against the effects of social and economic change. During the second half of the eighteenth century, the landed nobility entered a period of crisis. The wars and economic disruption of the 1740s and 1750s–60s, aggravated by government manipulation of the grain market through the magazine system and demographic overload through the natural expansion of estate-owning families placed the
landowning class under increasing strain. There was a dramatic growth in the indebtedness of Junker estates, leading in many cases to bankruptcies or forced sales, often to commoners with cash in hand. The growing frequency with which estates changed hands raised questions about the cohesion of the traditional rural social fabric.
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This was not a matter the king took lightly. Frederick II was more socially conservative than his father had been. The nobilities were the only corporate group (in Frederick’s view) capable of serving as officers in the military. From this it followed that the stability and continuity of noble property were crucial to the viability of the Frederician military state. Whereas Frederick William I had deliberately set out to dilute the social pre-eminence of the nobility, therefore, Frederick adopted a policy of conservation. The crucial objective was to prevent the transfer of noble land into non-noble ownership. There were generous tax concessions, ad hoc cash gifts to families in financial straits, and efforts – largely futile – to prevent landowners from over-mortgaging their estates.
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When these measures failed, Frederick’s instinctive response was to tighten state control of land sales, but this proved counterproductive. Transfer controls involved an aggressive curtailment of the freedom to dispose of property. The administration thus had to reconcile conflicting priorities. It wished to restore and preserve the dignity and economic stability of the noble caste, yet it sought to achieve this by curtailing the fundamental liberties of the estate-owning class.

The quest for a less interventionist and controversial method of supporting the noble interest ultimately led to the foundation of state-capitalized agricultural credit unions (
Landschaften
) for the exclusive use of the established Junker families. These institutions issued mortgages at subsidized interest rates to ailing or indebted landowning families. Separate credit unions were established for each province (Kurmark and Neumark in 1777, Magdeburg and Halberstadt in 1780, and Pomerania in 1781). Interestingly enough, the idea of using such institutions to consolidate noble landholdings seems to have come from a commoner, the wealthy Berlin merchant Büring, who presented his ideas to the king during an audience of 23 February 1767, although there were also longstanding traditions of noble corporate financial self-help in a number of provinces.

The credit unions were at first very successful, if this can be measured by the rapid increase in the value of their letters of credit, which soon
became an important medium of financial speculation. Credit union loans certainly helped some ailing estates to make productivity improvements. But the legal requirement that loans be tied to ‘useful improvements on the estate’ was often very loosely interpreted, so that the government’s subsidized credit was tapped for purposes that did little to consolidate noble landownership. The credit unions did not in any case suffice to tackle the looming problem of indebtedness across the entire rural sector, since landowners who ran out of cheap credit with the
Landschaften
simply went to other lenders. By 1807, while the combined credit unions held 54 million thalers of mortgage debt in all, a further 307 million thalers of estate-based debt were held by bourgeois lenders.
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As these developments suggest, the relationship between the Junkers and the sovereign house had now turned full circle. In the sixteenth century, it was the Junkers who had kept the Electors afloat; by the last third of the eighteenth century, the polarities of their interdependency had been reversed. Some historians have spoken of a ‘power compromise’ (
Herrschaftskompromiss
) between the crown and the Junkers whose effect was to consolidate the domination of the state and the traditional elites at the expense of other forces in society. The problem with this metaphor is firstly that it implies that at some point both ‘parties’ agreed on a kind of steady-state power-sharing arrangement. But the opposite was true. The relationship between the crown (and its ministers) and the various provincial nobilities was one of never-ending friction, confrontations and renegotiation. A second problem with the ‘power compromise’ thesis is that it overstates the stabilizing potential of collaboration between the state and the traditional elites. The truth is that, despite their best efforts, the crown and its ministers proved completely unable to arrest the processes of social and economic change that were transforming the face of rural society in the Prussian lands.

To work the soil was the destiny of most inhabitants of German Europe in the eighteenth century. Cultivated land accounted for about one-third of total land surface and about four-fifths of the population depended on agriculture for survival.
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The power relations governing the ownership
and exploitation of land were thus of overwhelming importance, not only for the generation of nutrition and wealth, but also for the political culture of the state and society more generally. The collective power of the nobility over Brandenburg-Prussian rural society was rooted only partly in its controlling share of landed wealth. There was also a crucial legal and political dimension. From the middle decades of the fifteenth century, the Junkers succeeded not only in restructuring their landholdings so that the best arable land fell to the lordship, but also in supplementing their economic advantage with political powers enabling them to exert direct authority over the peasants on their estates. They acquired, for example, the right to prevent peasants from leaving their farms without prior permission, or to bring back (if necessary by force) peasants who had absconded and taken up domicile either in a town or on another estate. They also demanded, and gradually secured, the right to impose labour services on their peasant ‘subjects’.

It is still not entirely clear why these changes came about, especially as they ran counter to prevailing developments in contemporary western Europe, where the trend was towards the legal emancipation of formerly subject peasants and the commutation of compulsory labour services into money rents. It may be that because the lands east of the river Elbe were zones of comparatively recent German settlement, traditional rights among the peasantry were relatively weak. The population decline and widespread desertion of cultivable land during the long agrarian depression of the late Middle Ages certainly placed noble landlords under pressure to maximize revenues and cut cash costs. The contraction of the urban economy undermined one potential source of resistance, since it was the towns that had most energetically contested the right of landlords to retrieve peasant absconders. Another important factor was the weakness of state authority. Deeply indebted and heavily dependent upon the provincial nobilities, the Electors of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Brandenburg had neither the power nor the inclination to resist the consolidation of noble legal and political power in the localities.

Whatever the causes, the result was the emergence of a new form of landlordship. It was not a system of ‘serfdom’, properly speaking, since the peasants themselves were not the property of their masters. But it did involve a measure of subjection to the personal authority of the lord. The noble estate became an integrated legal and political space. The landlord was not only the employer of his peasants and the owner of
their land; he also held jurisdiction over them through the manorial court, which was empowered to issue punishments ranging from small fines for minor misdemeanours to corporal punishments, including whippings and imprisonment.

Historians have long been preoccupied with the authoritarian features of the Prussian agrarian system. The émigré German scholar Hans Rosenberg described a regime of miniature autocracies in which

Local dominance was complete, for, in the course of time, the Junker had become not only an exacting landlord, hereditary serf master, vigorous entrepreneur, assiduous estate manager, and nonprofessional trader, but also the local church patron, police chief, prosecutor, and judge. […] Many of these experts in local tyranny were experienced in whipping the backs, hitting the faces and breaking the bones of ‘disrespectful’ and ‘disobedient’ peasant serfs.
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For the bulk of Prussian subjects the consequence of this aristocratic tyranny was ‘abject poverty’ and ‘helpless apathy’; peasants in particular suffered ‘legal and social degradation, political emasculation, moral crippling and destruction of [their] chances of self-determination’. But they were, in the words of another study, ‘too down-trodden to revolt’.
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This view is widely echoed in the literature on the German special path, where it is presumed that the Junker-dominated agrarian system, by instilling habits of deference and obedience, had deleterious and lasting effects on Prussian – and by extension German – political culture. The historiographical black legend of Junker tyranny has been remarkably tenacious, partly because it chimes with a broader cultural tradition of anti-Junker sentiment.
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In recent years, a rather different picture has emerged. Not all peasants in the East-Elbian lands were the subjects of lords. A substantial proportion were free tenant farmers, or non-subject employees. In East Prussia in particular, free peasants – the descendants of free settler-colonists – ran 13,000 out of 61,000 peasant farms across the province by the end of the eighteenth century. In many areas, the settlement of immigrants on crown and noble land created new concentrations of non-subject farmers.
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Even traditional lordships in the Brandenburg heartland incorporated a substantial contingent of persons who were paid wages for their labour or operated as specialist subcontractors managing particular resources, such as dairy herds, on an entrepreneurial basis. The Junker estates, in other words, were not lazily run
cereal monocultures, in which labour was free and incentives for innovation non-existent. They were complex businesses that involved substantial operating costs and high levels of investment. Waged labour of various kinds played a crucial role in sustaining the manorial economy, both at the level of the lordship itself and among the ranks of the better-off subject villagers, who themselves frequently employed labour in order to maximize the productivity of their own holdings.

There was, to be sure, an extensive regime of compulsory labour services. In eighteenth-century Brandenburg, labour services were generally limited to between two and four days a week; they were heavier in the Neumark, where peasants rendered labour service for four days a week in winter and six in summer and autumn.
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Services also varied within individual lordships. On the estate of Stavenow in the Prignitz, for example, the inhabitants of the village of Karstädt were required to ‘come to the manor at six in the morning on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays with a horse team, or if horses are not needed, with another person on foot, and to stay until they are told they can come in from the fields with the cowherder’. By contrast, the smallholders of the little fishing village of Mesekow on the same estate were liable to ‘serve with the hand as often as they were told’.
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Yet these burdens were balanced to some extent by the strong hereditary property rights enjoyed by many subject peasants. In the light of these rights, it seems plausible to describe labour services not simply as feudal impositions, but as rents. While most fullholding peasants would dearly have loved to commute their hated labour services to money rents, it does not seem that the services were so burdensome as to prevent them from making a reasonable living out of their plots, or to prevent settler-farmers from other parts of Germany from accepting subject status in return for hereditary land titles. A study of the Stavenow estate in the Prignitz suggests that, far from being condemned to ‘abject poverty’, the average Brandenburg village peasant may actually have been better off than his southern and western European counterparts. In any case, seigneurial labour burdens were not engraved in stone; they could be, and sometimes were, renegotiated. This happened, for example, in the years following the devastation of the Thirty Years War, which left a huge number of farms deserted. Faced with a desperate labour shortage, landlords on many estates caved in to the demands of peasants for reductions in their services. Indeed, many landlords
conspired in pushing labour rents down by outbidding their neighbours for incoming settlers looking to establish themselves on farmsteads.
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The state authorities, moreover, intervened to protect peasants against high-handed action by landlords. Laws and edicts issued by successive sovereigns after 1648 gradually subjected the patrimonial courts of the Junker lordships to the norms of territorial law. Whereas the consultation of lawyers in patrimonial cases had been a rarity in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, landlords tended after the Thirty Years War to employ legally qualified court administrators. In 1717, Frederick William I ordered under the threat of severe penalties that every court was to acquire a copy of the newly published Criminal Code (
Criminal-Ordnung
) and to operate in conformity with its guidelines in all criminal cases. Patrimonial courts were also required to render a full quarterly report of trials conducted. This trend continued under Frederick II.