Iron Kingdom : The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (70 page)

37. An idealized portrayal of Karl Sand on his way to Mannheim to murder Kotzebue

Thanks to these sharp symbolic polarities, the brutality of the murder was eclipsed in the awareness of many contemporaries by profound excitement at the radicalism of Sand’s action and the purity of his motivation. Having recovered from his self-inflicted wounds, Sand convalesced in prison, where, it was said, the other inmates lifted their chains as they passed his cell in order to spare the sleeping hero. By the time of his execution by beheading at five o’clock in the morning on 20 May, Sand was a celebrity. Crowds lined the streets as he made his way to the scaffold. After his decapitation, spectators surged forward to drench their handkerchiefs in his blood, a new patriotic twist on the traditional practice of collecting the blood of the condemned for medicinal and magical purposes. Relics, including locks of his famed blond hair, circulated within the nationalist networks. It was even reported that the executioner, having dismantled the blood-stained scaffold, used the wood to build a small shed on his vineyard, where he
later welcomed pilgrims who had come to honour the memory of the dead patriot.

In the aftermath of the assassination, a mood of paranoia gripped the Prussian political authorities. Sand’s act seemed to have laid bare the implacable core of the emergent nationalist movement. Even more alarming was the unwillingness of many contemporaries sympathetic to the patriot cause to come out with ringing denunciations of the murder. The most famous case of such equivocation was that of a professor of theology at the University of Berlin, Wilhelm de Wette. One week after the assassination, he wrote a letter of condolence to the murderer’s mother, copies of which were read widely within the fraternity movement. De Wette acknowledged that Sand had committed a criminal act that was ‘punishable by the worldly magistrate’, but argued that this was not the yardstick by which his deed should be judged.

Error is excused by steadfastness and sincerity of conviction, and passion is sanctified by the good course from which it flows. I am firmly convinced that both of these were the case with your pious and virtuous son. He was certain of his cause; he believed it was right to do what he did, and so he was right.

In an oft-quoted passage the professor concluded that Sand’s act was ‘a beautiful sign of the times’.
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Unfortunately for de Wette, a copy of his letter found its way into the hands of Prince Wilhelm Ludwig Georg von Wittgenstein, head of the Prussian police. On 30 September 1819, de Wette was dismissed from his professorial post. There was a wave of arrests, as suspects were rounded up in the police action known as the ‘persecution of the demagogues’ (
Demagogenverfolgung
). New and tougher censorship and surveillance measures were introduced under the Carlsbad Decrees drafted by Metternich with Prussian support and ratified by the entire Confederation in Frankfurt on 20 September.

Among the victims of the conservative turn was Ernst Moritz Arndt, now a professor of history at the University of Bonn. During an early-morning raid of Arndt’s house, a crowd of fraternity students gathered to shower the police with whistles and catcalls as they left the patriot’s home with armfuls of confiscated papers. Despite the objections of Provincial Governor Solms-Laubach, Arndt was suspended from his post in November 1820.
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Friedrich Ludwig Jahn was another suspect. His gymnastic societies were closed, the elaborate stadium established on the Hasenheide was dismantled, and the wearing of the gymnastic
uniform and of the ‘Old German Costume’ was made illegal. Jahn himself would later be imprisoned in Kolberg fortress.

A less prominent victim of the crackdown was the excitable young nobleman Hans Rudolf von Plehwe, a lieutenant in the Guards and a passionate disciple of Jahn. Plehwe had attended the festivities on the Wartburg in 1817 and was often to be seen in the streets of Berlin sporting his Old German Costume. He was renowned among his contemporaries for the rigour and regularity of his exercising – an early pioneer of jogging, he was in the habit of running all the way from the centre of Berlin to Potsdam and back; when this became too easy he took to running the same route with cobblestones packed in the pockets of his gymnastic jacket. After taking part in a rally in support of Jahn, he was arrested and transferred to garrison duty at Glogau in Silesia.
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The Prussian crackdown of 1819 was the work of a conservative camarilla that had coalesced around the monarch during the French occupation. After the death of Queen Luise in 1810, Frederick William III had fallen under the influence of a ‘substitute family’of courtiers. Among them was the Hugue not preacher Ancillon, who became one of the first advisers to provide the monarch with consistent arguments against the constitutional designs of the reformers. Any form of national representation, Ancillon warned, would in evitably curtail the powers of the monarch. The dangers implicit in such a scheme were illustrated by the course of the French Revolution, which had begun with a national assembly, and then proceeded via the abolition of monarchy to the dictatorship of an illegitimate usurper. Another figure who loomed large after Luise’s death was Countess Voss, a kindly older woman of conservative views whose company was important to the king during the raw early months of his bereavement. It was Countess Voss who brought her family friend, Prince Wittgenstein, into the king’s inner circle.
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This curious trio, an 81-year-old countess and an aristocrat and a preacher both in their forties, formed the core of an influential court faction. Their indispensability to the king, and thus their power, derived from the fact that they provided him with a counterweight to the growing power of Hardenberg. The king had become deeply dependent on his chancellor and he sought, in characteristic fashion, to compensate by balancing Hardenberg with his own advisory clique. When Hardenberg submitted proposals painstakingly drawn up by his subordinates in the chancellery, these were passed to the intimate circle for comment. It was
a return, in effect, to the ‘cabinet government’ that the reformers had set out to abolish in 1806.

The men of the camarilla worked at many levels to secure their political influence and neutralize that of their opponents. Prince Wittgenstein, Ancillon, and the cabinet councillor Daniel Ludwig Albrecht acted as informal intermediaries between Metternich and Frederick William III, driving a wedge between the king and Hardenberg and exploiting the increasingly conservative international climate for their own ends. They also launched a
sotto voce
campaign of denunciations within the Prussian administration, in which politically moderate senior figures were accused of having harboured, sympathized with or even encouraged political subversion. Among those singled out for suspicion by Wittgenstein and his energetic deputy Karl Albert von Kamptz were Justus Gruner, now a senior civil servant in the Prussian Rhineland, the military reformer General Neidhardt von Gneisenau and the provincial president of Jülich-Kleve-Berg, Count Friedrich zu Solms-Laubach, an old friend of Stein.

In the hawkish atmosphere that now prevailed in Berlin, anyone who did not zealously toe the new line was suspect. In the first week of October 1819, when the ministry of state met to discuss the implications of the Carlsbad decrees, Wilhelm von Humboldt, one of the most progressive figures of the reform era, presented his colleagues with a draft resolution objecting to the decrees. Humboldt argued that by vesting new repressive powers in the Confederation, the decrees compromised the sovereignty of the Prussian monarchy. That this liberal-minded minister should have chosen to argue the case in this way shows how difficult it had become to invoke progressive principles of governance in the new climate. Humboldt failed to win a majority in the ministry, but he was supported by two weighty figures, Minister of Justice Karl Friedrich von Beyme and Minister of War Hermann von Boyen. All three men had been deeply implicated in the reforms implemented after 1806. Humboldt and Beyme were both dismissed on the last day of 1819, although the king stipulated that they were to keep their ministerial salaries of 6,000 thalers (Humboldt turned this offer down in disgust). Hermann von Boyen was also dismissed after a bitter quarrel over the declining status of that fetish of the military reformers, the Prussian Landwehr. Among those who also left their posts over this issue were the reformers Grolman and Gneisenau.

Hardenberg himself cannot be absolved entirely from co-responsibility for the conservative turn. His obsessive concern with the consolidation of his own power as chancellor and senior minister alienated colleagues and subordinates, driving them into opposition and thus strengthening the hand of the conservatives. Humboldt’s departure in 1819, for example, was as much the work of Hardenberg, who saw him as a rival and opponent, as it was of the conservative faction. By struggling so nakedly for power and attempting to suppress the independence of those around him, Hardenberg ensured that ideological tensions were amplified by bitter personal rivalries. Tactically, too, Hardenberg played into the hands of the camarilla, by supporting the censorship and surveillance measures ordered by Wittgenstein. He had always been an exponent of authoritarian enlightenment, rather than a ‘liberal’ in the present-day sense, and thus favoured the use of illiberal means to achieve progressive ends. He was also genuinely alarmed at the spread of subversion within Prussia.
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He may have calculated that repressions would produce a more stable political climate and that this in turn would be favourable to the achievement of his most cherished objective, the creation of a ‘national’ representation of the Prussian people.

If this was his hope, it was deluded. The conservatives had long been warning against the concession of a ‘national’ representation of any kind. In their view, any workable form of representation had to be tailored to the interests and privileges of the existing, historically grounded corporate bodies within society. By contrast, a constitution that aimed to represent the Prussian nation as an undifferentiated whole was guaranteed to produce insurrection and disorder. For this reason, Metternich advised Wittgenstein in November 1818 that the King of Prussia should ‘never go further than the establishment of provincial Diets’.
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Encouraged by the camarilla and by his own fears and uncertainties, the king distanced himself from the beleaguered Hardenberg. A committee established to resolve the constitutional question in December 1820 was stocked with conservatives and the chancellor was sent away on a foreign mission early in 1821 to ensure that he did not interfere with its work. He died on 26 November 1822, having lived for long enough to see his project ruined. By the General Law of 5 June 1823, the government announced its intentions to the public. Prussia was to receive no written constitution and no national parliament. Instead, the king’s subjects would have to make do with provincial diets.

The diets convened under the General Law were elected and organized along corporate lines, with the nobility, the cities and the peasantry separately represented, a measure intended to suggest continuity with the traditional estate representations of the old regime. Corporate quotas ensured that the regional nobilities enjoyed numerical preponderance, though the precise numbers varied from province to province. Together, the noble deputies could veto any proposal from the assembly. To ensure that they would not pose a challenge to the central administration, the responsibilities of the diets were very narrowly defined. They were convened only once every three years and they were granted no legislative or revenue-approving powers. Their deliberations were secret in order to prevent their becoming focal points for political agitation, and it was illegal to publish their proceedings. In short, they were not intended to function as representative organs in a present-day sense, but rather as advisory bodies that would also take on various administrative chores, such as the supervision of major publicly funded institutions in the regions.
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In the eyes of an even moderately progressive observer, the diets appeared outlandishly retrograde. They failed, among other things, to reflect the structure and power relations of provincial society. This was particularly the case in the Rhineland: the nobility, which had traditionally played a marginal role in most of the region, was grossly over-represented, a fact that grated with a society in which bourgeois values and cultural preferences were dominant. Deputies from the major industrial and commercial cities found themselves representing 120 times as many constituents and thirty-four times as much taxation revenue as their colleagues from the noble Estate. The whole process was further encumbered by the indirect election of deputies for the third and fourth estates. Voters from the respective social groups were required to nominate electors, who in turn elected district electors, who in turn elected the deputies who sat in the diet. It was a system designed to shield the assembly as far as possible from the currents and conflicts of provincial society.
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An effort was also made to prevent the diets from becoming a forum for politicization: deputies were assigned to seats by lot, so that like-minded factions could not form partisan blocks within the assembly.
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By contrast with Baden, Württemberg and Bavaria, Prussia thus remained a pre-parliamentary state.

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The conservatives had won the day. But their victory was less fundamental, less final, than it appeared. A process of political change was under way that could no longer be reversed.
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The acquisition of the Rhineland in 1815 irrevocably altered the political chemistry of the kingdom. With its large and confident urban middle class, the Rhineland introduced an element of dissent and turbulence that energized Prussian politics throughout the post-war decades. The Rhenish elites were sceptical of the ‘Lithuanian’ administration in Berlin and they strenuously resisted wholesale integration into the kingdom. Rhenish Catholics looked with suspicion on the new Protestant administration and Rhenish Protestants fought a twenty-year battle with Berlin in defence of their (relatively democratic) synodal constitution.
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There was also a struggle over the Napoleonic legal system, whose egalitarian social presumptions and powerful endorsement of private property rights were far better suited to conditions in the Rhineland than the Prussian General Code. The efforts of the conservatives to impose Prussian law in the west met with determined local opposition and the idea was ultimately abandoned. The Rhineland thus remained a foreign country in legal terms, with regulations, institutions – including, for example, jury service – and judicial training facilities of its own. Indeed, as the Rhenish Napoleonic system gained adherents among jurists from the East-Elbian provinces, it became an important force for change. The new law code introduced in the Kingdom of Prussia after 1848 was modelled on the Rhenish system, rather than the old Frederician code.
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