Iron Kingdom : The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (74 page)

The close identification of the secular authority with the religious life and practice of the Protestant majority had far-reaching consequences for the Prussian Jews. In the debate triggered by Dohm’s famous emancipationist essay
Concerning the Civic Betterment of the Jews
(1781), most commentators had shared the author’s secular conception of the state’s tasks and responsibilities; none was prepared to argue that religion provided adequate grounds for civic discrimination against the Jews, and none saw conversion as either the sole or a necessary means of resolving the problem of Jewish status. Hardenberg’s Edict of Emancipation had likewise been conceived in a secular spirit. What the reformers sought in 1812 was not the religious conversion of the Jews (to Christianity), but their secular conversion to an unconditional membership of the Prussian ‘nation’. Things changed thereafter. Thanks to the edict, the Jews of the core provinces were no longer ‘foreigners’ dwelling on Prussian soil on His Majesty’s sufferance, but ‘citizens of the state’ along with their fellow citizens of Christian faith. The question now was: should the Jews, having already been allowed to participate on an equal footing as private individuals in the sphere of the economy and society, be admitted to participation in the public life of the state? Answering this question involved making claims about the purposes for which the state and its organs existed.

The most striking feature of Prussian Jewish policy after 1815 – and it sets Prussian developments apart from those in most of the other German states – was a new emphasis on religion as the key to the question of Jewish status. In the course of debate over these matters within the council of ministers in 1816, the ministry of finance submitted a long memorandum that opened with some general reflections on the role of religion as the only true foundation for a confident and independent state: ‘A cohesive, independent people’, it argued, should consist of members who share the same ‘basic ideas that are most dear to them’;
religion was the only bond powerful enough to transform a people into a ‘unanimous whole’ capable of unified and determined action in ‘times of external threat’. The report went on to recommend that ‘the conversion of Jews to Christianity should be made easier and should entail the granting of all civil rights’, but that ‘as long as the Jew [remained] a Jew, he must not be permitted to take up a position in the state’.
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The same theme was taken up in the provinces: in a report of 1819, the district government of Arnsberg in the Rhineland affirmed that religion was the main hindrance to emancipation and proposed that the state should introduce measures to encourage Jewish conversions. A report of 1820 from the district magistrates of Münster recommended mandatory Christian adult education for Jews and special benefits for converts to Christianity.
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Frederick William III endorsed these views. When the Jewish mathematician David Unger, a citizen of Prussia, applied for a teaching position at the Berlin Bauakademie (a position in the pay of the Prussian state), he was advised by the monarch personally that his application would be reconsidered after his ‘conversion to the Evangelical Church’(i.e. the Prussian Union). A similar case was that of the Jewish Lieutenant Meno Burg, who had joined the Grenadier Guards in 1812 as a volunteer rifleman and had performed with distinction ever since. In 1830, when Burg was due to be promoted to the rank of captain, the king issued a cabinet order in which he expressed his conviction that, in view of his education and experience of life among Prussian officers, Burg would have the sense to recognize the truth and redeeming power of the Christian faith, and thereby ‘clear away any obstacle to his promotion’.
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In addition to such ad hoc interventions, Frederick William III actively encouraged conversion by introducing a royal bounty for Jewish converts who had the name of the sovereign entered in the church baptismal records as their nominal ‘godfather’. A concerted effort was also made by the state authorities to prevent women who were planning to marry Jewish partners from converting to Judaism, although the legal basis for such action was very fragile, given that the Prussian General Code permitted conversion from or to any tolerated ‘religious party’ after the age of fourteen.
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Other related initiatives included an order forbidding Christian clergymen from attending Jewish festivities (such as weddings and bar mitzvahs) and repeated attempts (in 1816, 1836 and 1839) to prevent
Jews from carrying Christian first names, so as not to blur the socio-legal boundaries between the two communities. Finally, the king supported the work of the Berlin Society for the Propagation of Christianity among the Jews, its daughter-societies in Königsberg, Breslau, Posen, Stettin and Frankfurt/Oder and the network of auxiliary groups in lesser towns. Missionary free schools in Posen – the area of densest Jewish settlement – exploited the new laws on elementary education to lure Jewish children into the classrooms of the missionaries. The Prussian state had become a missionary institute.
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The trend in his policy after 1815 suggests that Frederick William III gradually moved away from the functional conception of religion he had imbibed from the enlightened tutors of his youth towards a belief that the state might exist to pursue ends defined by religion. ‘However strong the claim to tolerance may become,’ he observed in 1821, ‘a borderline must be drawn wherever this implies a step backwards on the road to the redemption of mankind.’
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By the 1840s, the term ‘Christian state’ was in wide use; in 1847, following a debate in the United Diet over the admission of Jews to state office, Friedrich Julius Stahl, a conservative professor of law at the University of Berlin and a convert from Judaism, attempted to endow the idea with a measure of theoretical coherence. His book,
The Christian State
, argued that, since the state was ‘a revelation of the ethical spirit of the nation’, it must itself express the ‘spirit of a Christian people’. It was thus unthinkable that Jews (and other non-believers) should occupy state office.
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Understandably enough, Jewish journalists denounced ‘the phantom of the Christian state’ as merely ‘the very latest pretext for denying us our rights’.
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Yet there was more to it than that. The Christian statism of the post-war era took root because it provided an outlet for the activist, utopian, evangelizing strand in contemporary Protestantism. Moreover, it generated an account, however limited, of the state’s ultimate moral purpose. It invoked an identity between state and society that was religious, rather than ethnic and thus offered an alternative to nationalism, whose arguments were so threatening to the territorial sovereignty of the German princes after 1815. For pursuing these elusive benefits, the Prussian monarchy paid a heavy price. The aggressive confessional statism of the post-war era blurred the boundaries between religious and political dissent. Theological debates and affiliations were
politicized. Political dissent acquired a theological flavour – it became both more absolute and more diffuse.

In 1831, there were 13,151,883 subjects in the Kingdom of Prussia. Of these, about 5,430,000(or roughly 41 per cent) lived in the provinces of Saxony, the Rhineland and Westphalia, areas that had been Prussian only since 1815. If we add the inhabitants of the Grand Duchy of Posen, annexed by Prussia following the second Polish partition of 1793, incorporated into the Napoleonic Duchy of Warsaw after the Peace of Tilsit in 1807 and only ‘returned’ to Prussia in 1815, then the proportion of new Prussians rises to nearly 50 per cent. The task of making Prussians had to begin anew. This problem was not unique to Prussia – Baden, Württemberg and Bavaria also emerged from the upheavals of the Napoleonic era with substantial new territories. In these states, however, the integration of new subjects was facilitated by the creation of territorial parliaments and the imposition of a unitary administrative and judicial structure. Prussia, by contrast, acquired no ‘national’ parliament and no ‘national’ constitution.

The kingdom also remained fragmented in an administrative sense. There was still no unitary legal fabric. The Berlin administration attempted to homogenize the system piecemeal in the 1820s, but Rhenish (i.e. Napoleonic) law remained valid in the western provinces, with the result that candidates for the judiciary there had to be trained within the Rhineland or Westphalia. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, there were, in addition to the
Geheime Obertribunal
in Berlin, four other supreme courts, including one for the Rhineland, one for Posen and one in Greifswald for formerly Swedish Pomerania.
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The formerly Swedish part of Pomerania kept its own traditional legal code, its own institutions of communal and urban self-government, and its own distinctive municipal constitutions.
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The Rhineland, too, retained the relatively liberal system of local governance introduced by the French.
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The use of the Prussian General Code in most of the other provinces concealed the great variety of local laws and regulations. The Emancipation Edict of 11 March 1812 was not extended to the provinces
acquired in 1815, so that the Jews of the kingdom lived under no fewer than thirty-three different legal codes. One district authority spoke of the state’s having capitulated – in this sphere at least – to the provinces and localities.
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Prussia was therefore less juridically homogeneous in 1840 than it had been in 1813. It is worth emphasizing this fragmentation, because Prussia has often been perceived as the very model of a centralized state. Yet the thrust of the Stein municipal reforms had been precisely to devolve power upon what became a widely admired system of urban self-government. Even the more conservative Revised Municipal Law introduced in Westphalia in 1831 provided the towns with more autonomy than they had enjoyed under the Napoleonic system.
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Throughout the post-war era, the organs of the central state adopted a deferential attitude to the grandees of the Prussian provinces, and the provincial elites remained strongly aware of their distinctive identities, especially in the peripheral areas of east and west. This tendency was amplified by the fact that whereas each province had its own diet, the kingdom as such had none. One effect of the constitutional settlement of 1823 was thus to magnify the significance of the provinces at the expense of the Prussian commonwealth. East Prussia was not ‘merely a province’, one visitor to Königsberg was told in 1851, but a
Land
in its own right. Prussia was in this sense a quasi-federal system.
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A devolved, pragmatic approach to government went hand in hand with an implicit acceptance of cultural diversity. Early nineteenth-century Prussia was a linguistic and cultural patchwork. The Poles of West Prussia, Posen and Silesia accounted for the largest linguistic minority; in the southern districts of East Prussia, the Masurians spoke various agrarian dialects of Polish; the Kashubians of the Danzig hinterland spoke another. Until the mid nineteenth century, the Dutch language was still widely used in the schools of the former Duchy of Kleve. In the Walloon districts of Eupen-Malmédy – a small east-Belgian territory that was transferred to Prussia in 1815 – French remained the language of schools, courts and administration until 1876.
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The ‘Philipponen’, communities of Old Believers who settled in Masuria as refugees from Russia in 1828–32, spoke Russian – traces of their distinctive wooden churches can still be seen in the area today. There were communities of Czechs in Upper Silesia, Sorbs in the Cottbus district, and speakers of the ancient Slavic dialect of the Wends scattered across
villages in the Spreewald near Berlin. Eking out an existence on the long spit of Baltic coastal land known as the Kurische Nehrung were the Kuren, inhabitants of one of the barest and most melancholy landscapes of northern Europe. These hardy fishermen spoke a dialect of Latvian and were known for supplementing their monotonous diet with the flesh of crows they caught and killed with a bite to the head. Some areas, such as the district of Gumbinnen in East Prussia, were trilingual, with substantial communities of Masurian, Lithuanian and German speakers living in close proximity.
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Prussian policy in the eastern provinces had traditionally been to treat these settlements as ‘colonies’ with their own distinctive cultures; indeed, the Prussian administration helped to consolidate provincial vernaculars by supporting them as the vehicle of religious instruction and elementary education. Protestant clerical networks were also important. They disseminated hymn books, Bibles and tracts in a range of local languages and offered bi-lingual services in minority language areas. The first Lithuanian-language periodical in the kingdom,
Nusidavimai
, was a missionary journal edited by a German-speaking pastor working among the Lithuanians.
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German-speaking Prussians, such as the statesman and scholar Wilhelm von Humboldt and the Königsberg theology professor Martin Ludwig Rhesa, played a crucial role in establishing Lithuanian and its folk heritage as an object of wider cultural interest.
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Not until 1876 did a general law define German as the official language of all parts of Prussia.

Prussia thus remained, in the words of a Scottish traveller who toured the Hohenzollern provinces in the 1840s, a ‘kingdom of shreds and patches’. Prussia, Samuel Laing observed, ‘has, in ordinary parlance, only a geographical or political meaning, denoting the Prussian government, or the provinces it governs – not a moral or social meaning. The Prussian nation is a combination of words rarely heard, of ideas never made [… ]’
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Laing’s comment, though hostile, was insightful. What exactly did it mean to be ‘Prussian’? The Prussia of the restoration era was not a ‘nation’ in the sense of a people defined and bound together by a common ethnicity. There was not, and never had been, a Prussian cuisine. Nor was there a specifically Prussian folklore, language, dialect, music or form of dress (leaving aside the uniforms of the military). Prussia was not a nation in the sense of a community sharing a common history. Moreover, ‘Prussianness’ had somehow to define itself on
grounds that had not already been occupied by the powerful competing ideology of German nationalism. The result was a curiously abstract and fragmented sense of identity.