solidly responded with the flat of his hand so promptly! and in such a manner! that [Hackemann] almost tumbled onto the king; at this point he [Hackemann] asked His Majesty whether it was [… ] not a most punishable thing to behave in such a way and to attack someone thus in the presence of the all-highest?
Frederick William, who clearly took pleasure in such raucousness, merely commented that a scoundrel deserves the blows he receives.23
Emblematic for the tone and values that prevailed in the monarch’s milieu after 1713 was the fate of Jacob Paul von Gundling. Born near Nuremberg and educated at the universities of Altdorf, Halle and Helmstedt, Gundling was one of the many academically trained men who were drawn to Berlin during the expansion of intellectual life that took place in the city under Frederick I. In addition to a professorial teaching post at a new school for sons of the nobility in Berlin, Gundling occupied an honorary court post as official historiographer for the Oberheroldsamt (Chief Herald’s Office), an institution founded in 1706 to establish the genealogical credentials of noble applicants for public office. But disaster struck in 1713, when both of these institutions were swept away in the weeks following Frederick William’s accession. Gundling managed to secure a place in the new system by adapting himself to the king’s views and working freelance for a few years as an adviser on economic policy, a role in which he became known as an opponent of noble fiscal and economic privilege. He was rewarded for his services with various honorary titles (including ‘Commercial Councillor’ and the presidency of the Academy of Sciences) and became a frequent guest at the Tobacco Ministry. Indeed Gundling remained a courtier of sorts, dependent on the royal purse, until his death in 1731.
7. Satirical portrait of Jacob Paul von Gundling (anon. engraving from The Learned Fool (Der Gelehrte Narr) by the Gundling-baiter David F. Fassmann (Berlin, 1729)
But neither his record of service as an educator and courtier, nor his presidency of the academy, nor his steadily growing list of scholarly publications could save Gundling from degenerating into a figure of ridicule at the court of Frederick William I. In February 1714, the king demanded that he deliver a lecture before the assembled guests on the existence (or not) of ghosts while taking regular draughts of strong drink. After much raucous hilarity, two grenadiers escorted the inebriated commercial councillor back to his room, where he shrieked with terror at the sight of a figure draped in a white sheet emerging from a corner. Provocations of this kind soon became the norm. Gundling was confined in a chamber where the king kept a number of young bears while fireworks were rained down into the room from above; he was forced to wear outlandish courtly attire modelled loosely on French fashions, including a towering wig in an outdated style that had belonged to the previous king; he was force-fed laxatives and locked in a cell overnight; he was pressed into a pistol duel with one of his chief tormentors, the joke being that everyone but Gundling knew that the weapons contained no shot. When Gundling refused to grasp or fire his gun, his opponent discharged a spray of burning powder into his face, setting fire to his wig, to the huge hilarity of all present. He was prevented by his debts from leaving Berlin and constrained by the pleasure of the king his master to return daily to the scene of his humiliations, where his honour and reputation were martyred for the amusement of the royal court. Under these pressures, Gundling’s liking for drink soon developed into fully fledged alcoholism, a weakness that, in the eyes of his detractors, merely enhanced his suitability for the role of court fool. And yet Gundling continued to generate a flow of learned publications on such subjects as the history of Tuscany, imperial and German law, and the topography of the Electorate of Brandenburg.
Gundling even had to to lerate the presence in his bed chamber of a coffin in the form of a varnished wine barrel inscribed with a mocking verse:
Here there lies within his skin
Half-pig, half-man, a wondrous thing
Clever in his youth, in old age not so bright
Full of wit at morning, full of drink at night
Let the voice of Bacchus sing:
This, my child, is Gundeling.
[…]
Reader, say, can you divine
Whether he was man or swine?24
After his death in Potsdam on 11 April 1731, Gundling’s corpse was publicly displayed propped up in the barrel in a room lined with candles, dressed in a wig hanging down to the thighs, brocaded breeches and black stockings with red stripes – all clear references to the baroque culture of the court of Frederick I. Among those who came to ogle at this macabre spectacle were commercial travellers on their way to the great fair at Leipzig. Gundling and his barrel were buried soon afterwards under the altar of the village church outside the city. The funeral address was given by the writer (and sometime Gundling-baiter) Fassmann, the local Lutheran and Reformed clergy having conscientiously refused to take part.
8. The Tobacco Ministry. Attributed to Georg Lisiewski, c. 1737.
Gundling’s ‘martyrdom’ was the flip-side of the raucous masculine camaraderie of the new monarchy. The masculinization that had tentatively announced itself in the ceremony of the coronation had by now transformed the social life of the court. Under Frederick William I, women, who had played such a prominent role at the court of Frederick I, were pushed to the margins of public life. A visitor from Saxony who resided in Berlin for several months during 1723 recalled that the great festivities of the courtly season were held ‘according to the Jewish manner’ with the women separated from the men, and observed with surprise that there were many dinners at court at which no women appeared at all.25
Reflecting on the regime-change that occurred in 1713, one is tempted to describe it as a cultural revolution. There were continuities in the sphere of administration and finance, to be sure, but in the sphere of representation and culture we can speak of a comprehensive reversal of values and styles. Between them, the first two Prussian kings marked out the extremes between and by which their successors would position themselves. At one end of the spectrum we find the type-A Hohenzollern monarch: expansive and expensive, ostentatious, detached from the regular work of state, focused on image; at the other end his type-B antipode: austere, thrifty, workaholic.26 The ‘baroque’ style of monarchy inaugurated by Frederick I retained, as we have seen, a certain resonance within the collective memory of the dynasty, and the epochal alternation of tastes and fashions ensured that there would be periodic revivals of courtly largesse – under Frederick William II, court expenditure exploded once again to around 2 million thalers per annum, about one-eighth of the total state budget (the figure for his predecessor, Frederick the Great, had been 220,000).27 The last decades of the nineteenth century would witness, after a period of relative austerity, a remarkable late blooming of courtly culture around the person of the last Kaiser, William II. But the type-B kingship of Frederick William I also had a vigorous afterlife in the history of the dynasty. The harsh marginal jottings of Frederick William I were imitated (with more wit) by his illustrious son Frederick II and (at greater length and with less wit) by his more distant descendant Kaiser William II. Frederick William I’s habit of wearing military uniform rather than the more expensive civilian alternative was taken up by Frederick II and remained a striking feature of Hohenzollern dynastic representation until the fall of the Prussian monarchy at the end of the First World War. The historical power of the type-B model lay not merely in its association with Prussia’s later ascendancy in Germany but also in its affinity with the values and preferences of an emergent Prussian public, for whom the image of a just and thrifty monarch dedicated to the service of the state came to embody a specifically Prussian vision of kingship.
ADMINISTRATION
It has often been noted that the reigns of Frederick William the Great Elector and his grandson King Frederick William I stand in a complementary relation to each other. The Great Elector’s achievement was centred on the outward projection of power. Frederick William, by contrast, has been called Pruss
ia’s greatest ‘inner king’, in honour of his role as the founding father of the Prussian administrative state. The opposition between the two can, of course, be overstated. There was no epochal rupture in administrative practices to match the cultural revolution at court. It is probably more accurate to speak of a process of administrative consolidation spanning the century between 1650 and 1750. This process was at first most pronounced in the spheres of revenue extraction and military administration. It was the Great Elector who began simplifying and centralizing the previously haphazard arrangements in place for the collection of the Electoral revenues – i.e. those from crown land, tolls, mines (which were the property of the crown) and monopolies. A first step was taken in this direction with the creation of an Electoral administration for the collection of the royal revenues in Brandenburg in the 1650s. Yet it was not until 1683 that the central revenues office, under the energetic East Prussian nobleman Dodo von Knyphausen, succeeded in acquiring direct control over Electoral revenues from the entirety of the Hohenzollern territories. Knyphausen’s work of consolidation continued after the Great Elector’s death: in 1689 he oversaw the establishment of a central Brandenburg-Prussian revenue office with a stable institutional structure. As a result of this innovation, it proved possible to draw up for the year 1689 – 90 the first complete balance sheet of income and expenditure in the history of Brandenburg-Prussia.28 A further important centralizing step was undertaken in 1696 with the foundation of a unified central administration for the management of the royal domains.29
A parallel process of concentration can be observed in those areas responsible for the maintenance of the army and the waging of warfare. A General War Commissariat (Generalkriegskommissariat) was established in April 1655 to organize the army and its financial and logistical support. Under a series of capable administrators it grew into one of the key agencies of the Electoral administration, controlling all the revenues (contribution tax, excise tax and foreign subsidies) destined for military expenditures and gradually undermining the tax-collecting powers of the Estates by drawing their local officials into the sphere of its authority. By the 1680s, the commissariat had begun to arrogate to itself a more general responsibility for the health of the domestic manufacturing economy, launching a programme to establish Brandenburg as self-sufficient in wool-based textiles and mediating in local conflicts between the trade guilds and new businesses. There was nothing uniquely Prussian about this merging of financial, economic and military administration; it was undertaken in emulation of Louis XIV’s powerful contrôleur-général, Jean-Baptiste Colbert.
With the accession of Frederick William I to the throne in 1713, the process of reform acquired a new momentum. For all his dysfunctionality as a social being, Frederick William was an inspired institution-builder with an architectonic vision of administration. The roots of this passion can be traced back to the comprehensive princely training provided by his father. At the age of only nine, Frederick William was entrusted with the management of his own personal estate at Wusterhausen to the south-east of Berlin, a task he performed with prodigious energy and conscientiousness. By this means, he acquired a first-hand familiarity with the day-to-day responsibilities of managing an estate – still the fundamental operational unit of the Brandenburg-Prussian economy. He was only thirteen when he began attending meetings of the Privy Council in 1701; his induction into other departments of the administration followed soon after.
Frederick William was therefore already well versed in the inner workings of the administration when an outbreak of plague and famine in East Prussia plunged the monarchy into crisis in 1709–10. The epidemic, which was probably brought into the region by the movement of Saxon, Swedish and Russian troops during the Great Northern War of 1700–1721, killed around 250,000 people, more than a third of the East Prussian population. In a chronicle of the small city of Johannisburg, in the south of the kingdom not far from the Polish border, one contemporary recalled that the plague had spared the city in 1709, but had returned with all the more ferocity in 1710 taking ‘both the preachers, both the school teachers and most of the town councillors to their graves. The city was so emptied of people that the market place was overgrown with grass and only fourteen citizens remained alive.’30 The impact of the disease was compounded by a famine that weakened resistance and decimated communities of survivors. Thousands of farms and hundreds of villages were abandoned; in many of the worst affected areas, social and economic life came to a complete halt. Since the areas of highest mortality were in the eastern areas of East Prussia, where the crown was the main landowner, there was an instantaneous collapse in crown revenues. Neither the central nor the provincial administration proved capable of responding effectively to the disaster as it unfolded; indeed a number of the chief ministers reacted by trying to conceal from the monarch the seriousness of the crisis.
The disaster in East Prussia highlighted the inefficiency and corruption of the ministers and senior officials, many of whom were personal favourites of the king. A party – including crown prince Frederick William – formed at court to bring down the leading minister, Kolbe von Wartenberg, and his cronies. After an official enquiry revealed misappropriations and embezzlement on an epic scale, Wartenberg was forced into retirement; his close associate Wittgenstein was incarcerated in Spandau fortress, fined 70,000 thalers and subsequently banished. The episode was a formative one for Frederick William. This was the first time he had become actively involved in politics. It was also a turning point in the reign of his father, who now began to let power pass gradually into the hands of his son. Most importantly, the East Prussian débâcle left the crown prince with a burning zeal for institutional reform and a visceral hatred of corruption, wastage and inefficiency.31
Within a few years of his accession to the throne, Frederick William had transformed the administrative landscape of Brandenburg-Prussia. The organizational concentration that had begun under the Great Elector was now resumed and intensified. The management of all non-tax revenues across the territories of Brandenburg-Prussia was centralized; on 27 March 1713 the Chief Domains Directory (Ober-Domaänen-Direktorium), which managed the crown lands, and the Central Revenues Office (Hofkammer) were merged to form a new General Finance Directory (Generalfinanzdirektorium). Control over the finances of the territory now rested in the hands of only two institutions, the General Finance Directory, which dealt above all with lease income from the royal domains, and the General Commissariat (Generalkommissariat), whose task was to collect the excise tax levied in the towns and the contribution tax paid by people in the countryside. But this state of affairs in turn generated new tensions, for the two authorities, whose responsibilities overlapped at various points, soon became bitter rivals. The General Finance Directory and its subordinate provincial offices regularly complained that the exactions of the Commissariat were preventing their leaseholders from keeping up with their rents. When the General Finance Directory, for its part, tried to raise its rental income by encouraging its leaseholders to establish small rural businesses such as breweries and manufacturies, the Commissariat protested that these enterprises placed urban taxpayers at a competitive disadvantage, since they were outside the towns and therefore not liable to excise. In 1723, after much deliberation, Frederick William decided that the solution was to merge the two rivals into an omnicompetent super-ministry that bore the unwieldy title ‘General Chief Directory for Finance, War and Domains’, but was known simply as the General Directory (Generaldirektorium). Within two weeks, the merger had been extended to cover all the subordinate provincial and local offices of both bodies.32
At the apex of the General Directory, Frederick William installed what was known as a ‘collegial’ decision-making structure. Whenever an issue had to be resolved, all the ministers were required to come together at the main table in the relevant department. Along one side sat the ministers, facing them on the other were the privy councillors of the relevant department. At one end of the table the
re was a chair left empty for the king – a pro forma observance, since the king scarcely ever attended meetings. The collegial system delivered several advantages: it brought the decision-making process out into the open and thereby prevented (in theory) the empire-building by individual ministers that had been such a prominent feature of the previous reign; it ensured that provincial and personal interests and prejudices were balanced out against each other; it maximized the relevant information available to the decision-makers; most importantly, it encouraged officials to take a holistic view. Frederick William sought to reinforce this tendency by urging the former employees of the General Finance Directory not to be shy in learning from their colleagues of the General Commissariat, and vice versa. He even threatened to use internal examinations in order to test whether knowledge was being transferred efficiently between the officials of what had previously been rival administrations. The ultimate objective was to forge an organic, pan-territorial body of expertise out of a plurality of separate specialist knowledges.33
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