THE LANDED NOBILITY
The ownership and management of land was the defining collective experience of the Brandenburg-Prussian nobilities. The proportion of land in noble hands varied considerably from territory to territory, but it was high by European standards. The averages for Brandenburg and Pomerania (according to figures from around 1800) were about 60 and 62 per cent respectively, while thee quivalent figure for East Prussia (where the crown was the dominant landowner) was 40 per cent. By contrast, the French nobility owned only about 20 per cent of the cultivable land in France, while the figure for the nobility of European Russia was as low as 14 per cent. On the other hand, Brandenburg-Prussia looks less anomalous if we compare it with late eighteenth-century England, where the nobility controlled about 55 per cent of the land.22
The landed nobility of the East-Elbian regions of Germany were and are known collectively as ‘Junkers’. Deriving from ‘jung Herr’, the term originally meant ‘young lord’ and referred to those German noblemen – often second and younger sons – who helped to conquer or settle and defend the lands taken from the Slavs during the waves of German eastward expansion and settlement in the middle ages. In return for their military services they were granted land and perpetual tax exemptions. There were substantial disparities in wealth. In East Prussia, there was a small minority of true magnate families descended from mercenary commanders who had fought in the employ of the Teutonic Order during the Thirteen Years War against Poland (1453–66). In Brandenburg, where most noble families descended from settler-landowners, the average Junker estate was quite modest by European standards.
Since it was in the interest of the colonizing sovereigns of the Middle Ages to settle as many warrior-nobles as possible in areas vulnerable to Slav reprisals, noble land concessions were often small and close together, so that a single village might be partitioned among several families. The statistically dominant group, accounting for around half of the nobility, was that of noble families whose possessions encompassed between one and several estates and villages.23 But even within this group, there were wide disparities. A gulf separated families such as the Quitzows (later the Kleists), for example, whose lordship at Stavenow in the Prignitz encompassed 2,400 acres of demesne arable, from the general run of Junker families in the district, who had to get by with less than 500. In such a setting it was natural that the lesser noble families should concede leadership in local and provincial politics to a small circle of wealthy and often intermarried elite families. It was from this ‘dress-circle’ of landed families that the key mediators in negotiations with the crown tended to be drawn.
The localized political structures of the seventeenth-century Hohenzollern territories militated against a shared political identity centred on Berlin. The Junkers – especially in Brandenburg – were largely shut out of senior state offices during the later decades of the Great Elector’s reign and made only slow inroads into this area during the eighteenth century. Their political ambitions focused above all on Estate-controlled offices at district and provincial level and their horizons thus tended to be rather narrow, a condition reinforced by the fact that many of the less well-off families could not afford to educate their children away from home. The regional specificities of the various Hohenzollern territories were reflected in patterns of kinship and intermarriage. In Pomerania and East Prussia there were strong kinship links with Sweden and Poland, while houses in Brandenburg frequently intermarried with families in neighbouring Saxony and Magdeburg.
The eighteenth-century Hohenzollern monarchs, for their part, never spoke of a ‘Prussian’ nobility but always of a plurality of provincial elites possessing distinct personalities. In his Instruction of 1722, Frederick William I declared of the Pomeranian nobles that they were ‘as loyal as gold’; though they might argue a little, they would never opposethe orders of the sovereign. The same was true of the Neumark, the Uckermark and the Mittelmark. By contrast, the nobles of the Altmark were ‘bad, disobedient people’ and ‘impertinent in their dealings with their sovereign’. Almost as bad were the Magdeburg and Halberstadt nobilities, who, he urged, should be kept away from official posts in their own or neighbouring provinces. As for the nobles of the western provinces, Kleve, the county of Mark and Lingen, these were ‘stupid and opinionated’.24
Nearly half a century later, in his Political Testament of 1768, Frederick the Great spoke along similar lines of the territorial nobilities within his monarchy, declaring that the East Prussians were spirited and refined, but still too attached to their separatist traditions and thus of dubious loyalty to the state, while the Pomeranians were obstinate but upstanding and made excellent officers. As for the Upper Silesians, whose homeland had only recently been conquered and annexed to the Hohenzollern lands, these were lazy and uneducated and remained attached to their former Habsburg masters.25
It was only very gradually that a more homogeneous Prussian elite emerged. Intermarriage played a role in this process. Whereas virtually all Brandenburg families married within their own provincial elite until the end of the seventeenth century, things had changed by the 1750s and 1760s, when there were signs of an increasingly enmeshed kinship structure. Almost one-half of the marriages contracted by leading families in Brandenburg, Pomerania and East Prussia were to lineages based in another Hohenzollern territory. The most important institutional driver of homogenization was the Prussian army. The rapid expansion of the eighteenth-century officer corps forced the administration to recruit energetically among the provincial elites. New state-subsidized academies were established at the beginning of the eighteenth century in Berlin, Kolberg and Magdeburg; shortly after his accession, Frederick William I integrated these into the central Cadet Corps School in Berlin.
Although there were certainly efforts to pressure noble families into forwarding their sons for military training, many leapt at the chance created by the cadet system. It was particularly attractive to those numerous families who could not afford to educate their sons in the privately run academies frequented by the monied nobility. Promotion to the rank of captain and above brought the opportunity to earn a better income than many lesser landed estates could sustain.26 A characteristic example of the new generation of career officer was Ernst von Barsewisch, the son of a small estate-owner in the Altmark, who was sent to the Berlin Cadet Corps School in 1750, because his father could not afford to send him to university to be trained for state service. In his memoirs, Barsewisch recalled that the cadets (of whom there were 350 when he attended the school) were taught writing, French, logic, history and geography, engineering, dancing, fencing and ‘military draughtsmanship’ (militärische Zeichenkunst) .27
The shared experience of military training and, more importantly, of active military service doubtless fostered a strong sense of esprit de corps, though this was achieved at appalling cost. Some families in particular became specialist suppliers of boys for sacrifice on the field of battle – the Wedels notably, a Pomeranian family, lost seventy-two (!) of their young men during the wars of 1740–63. Fifty-three male Kleists perished in the same battles. Of the twenty-three men in the Belling family of Brandenburg, twenty were killed during the Seven Years War.
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.28
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.29
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.30 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.31
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.
LANDLORDS AND PEASANTS
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.32 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.33
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’.34 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.35
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.36 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.
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