Frederick assigned clear priority to the central provinces of the kingdom. In a revealing passage of the Political Testament of 1768, he even declared that only Brandenburg, Magdeburg, Halberstadt and Silesia ‘constituted the actual body of the state’. This was in part a matter of military logic. What distinguished the central lands was the fact that they could ‘defend themselves, as long as the whole of Europe [did] not unite against their sovereign’.136 East Prussia and the western possessions, by contrast, would have to be given up as soon as hostilities began. Perhaps this helps to explain why Frederick discontinued the momentous East Prussian reconstruction programme his father had launched.137 The conduct of his subjects under foreign occupation during the Seven Years War also seems to have given him pause. He was particularly resentful of the fact that the Estates of East Prussia had sworn an oath of fealty to his nemesis Tsaritsa Elisabeth in 1758. After 1763, Frederick, the indefatigable chief inspector of his realm, never made a single visit to East Prussia. He simply ordered the East Prussian chamber presidents to report to him in Potsdam or to attend him at his headquarters during the annual manoeuvres in West Prussia.138 This reflected a significant demotion in the importance of this province, which had been something of a fetish to Frederick William I and his grandfather the Great Elector.
If we read them literally, Frederick’s comments on the state sometimes seem to imply that the functions of the sovereign have been partly absorbed into the impersonal collective structures of an administration working in accordance with transparent rules and regulations. Yet the reality could hardly have been more different, for the governance of Prussia during Frederick’s reign was an intensely personal affair; indeed, in some respects the political process was even more concentrated on the person of the king than it had been under his father, Frederick William I. His father had created a collegial system of ministerial government in which the monarch often took his cue from the recommendations of a powerful council of ministers. But this system fell into disuse after Frederick’s accession to the throne. His personal contacts with ministers became ever more rare after 1763, as their functions were duplicated and partly displaced through the king’s growing reliance on cabinet secretaries attached directly to his own person.
The political process thus came to centre more and more around the small team of secretaries who controlled access to the king, oversaw his correspondence, kept him up to date on developments and advised him on policy issues. Whereas the secretaries travelled around with the monarch, the ministers generally remained in Berlin. While the ministers tended to be aristocratic grandees such as Karl Abraham Freiherr von Zedlitz (the minister charged with educational affairs), the secretaries were mostly commoners. A characteristic example was the reclusive but enormously influential August Friedrich Eichel, the son of a Prussian army sergeant who usually began work at four o’clock in the morning. Under Frederick William I, responsibility and influence had been tied to the function of the individual within the administrative system; under Frederick, by contrast, proximity to the sovereign was the decisive determinant of power and influence.
Paradoxically, this concentration of power and responsibility in the king reversed the centralizing impetus of the reforms introduced by Frederick William I. By communing directly with the chamber officials in the provinces, Frederick undermined the authority of the General Directory, whose purpose was to act as the supervisory authority overseeing the various provincial officialdoms. On many occasions, Frederick even issued orders to the provincial chambers without informing the central administration, thus enhancing the authority of the provincial administrators, shifting power away from the centre and loosening the sinews of the territorial state structure.139
Frederick saw no reason to doubt the efficacy of this highly personalized system. As he pointed out in the Political Testament of 1752, it was necessary ‘in a state like this one that the prince conducts his affairs himself, because if he is clever he merely pursues the interest of the state, whereas a minister always follows ulterior motives that touch upon his own interests…’140 In other words, the interests of the state and those of the monarch were quite simply identical in a way that did not apply to any other living person. The hitch with this arrangement lay in the conditional clause ‘if he is clever’. The Frederician system worked well with the indefatigable, far-sighted Frederick at the helm, applying his quick and capacious intellect, not to mention his courage and decisiveness, to the problems that came to his desk. But what if the king were not a genius-statesman? What if he found it difficult to resolve dilemmas? What if he were hesitant and risk-averse? What, in short, if he were an ordinary man? With a monarch like that in the driving seat, how would this system function under pressure? Frederick, we should remember, was the last of a freakish run of abnormally gifted Hohenzollern rulers. Their like would not be seen again in the history of the Hohenzollern dynasty. Without the discipline and focus of a powerful figure at the centre, there was the danger that the Frederician system might splinter into warring factions, as ministers and cabinet secretaries competed for control of their overlapping jurisdictions.
8
Dare to know!
CONVERSATION
The Prussian enlightenment was about conversation. It was about a critical, respectful, open-ended dialogue between free and autonomous subjects. Conversation was important because it permitted the sharpening and refinement of judgement. In a famous essay on the nature of enlightenment, the Königsberg philosopher Immanuel Kant declared that
Enlightenment refers to man’s departure from his self-imposed tutelage. Tutelage means the inability to make use of one’s own reason without the guidance of another. This tutelage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in intellectual insufficiency, but in a lack of will and courage [… ]. Dare to know! [Sapere aude!] Have the courage to use your own reason! This is the motto of the Enlightenment.1
Read in isolation, this passage makes enlightenment seem a solitary business, encapsulated in the struggle of an individual consciousness to make sense of the world. But at a later point in the same essay, Kant observes that this process of self-liberation through reason has an unstoppable social dynamic.
It is possible that a public may enlighten itself; indeed if its freedom is not constrained this is virtually inevitable. For there will always be a few individuals who are capable of thinking for themselves despite the established authorities that claim to exercise this right in their name, and who, as soon as they have cast off the yoke of tutelage, will spread about them the spirit of a reasoned appreciation of one’s own worth and the duty of every person to think for himself.2
In the percolation through society of this spirit of critical, confident independence, conversation played an indispensable role. It flourished in the clubs and societies that proliferated in the Prussian lands – and more broadly in the German states – during the second half of the eighteenth century. The statutes of the ‘German societies’, a supra-territorial enterprise whose network included a society founded in Königsberg in 1741, explicitly defined the formal conditions for fruitful conversation among the members. During the discussion that followed readings or lectures, members were to avoid arbitrary or ill-considered comments. Critiques should engage in a structured way with the style, method and content of the lecture. They should employ, in Kant’s phrase, ‘the cautious language of reason’. Digressions and interruptions were strictly prohibited. All members were ultimately guaranteed the right to have their say, but they must wait their turn and make their comments as concise as possible. Satirical or mocking remarks and suggestive wordplay were unacceptable.3
We find the same preoccupation with civility among the Freemasons, whose movement had grown to encompass between 250 and 300 German lodges with 15–18,000 members by the end of the eighteenth century. Here too, there were injunctions to avoid immoderate speech, frivolous or vulgar commentary and the discussion of topics (such as religion) that would stir divisive passions among the brothe
rs.4 This may all sound stiflingly prim from a present-day perspective, but the purpose of such rules and norms was serious enough. They were designed to ensure that what mattered in discussion was not the individual but the issue, that the passions of personal relationships and local politics were left behind when members joined the meeting. The art of polite public debate had still to be learned; these statutes were the blueprints of a new communicative technology.
Civility was important, too, because it helped to iron out the asymmetries of status that otherwise threatened to cramp discussion. Freemasonry was not, as one historian of the movement has claimed, an ‘organisation of the emergent German middle classes’.5 It attracted a mixed elite constituency that included members of the nobility and educated or propertied commoners in almost equal measure. Although some German lodges began life by opening their doors exclusively to one or the other of these two groups, most of these soon merged. In such mixed society, the observance of transparent and egalitarian rules of engagement was essential if status differences were not to cripple debate from the outset.
The conversation that powered the Prussian enlightenment also took place in print. One of the distinctive features of the periodical literature of this era was its discursive, dialogical character. Many of the articles printed in the Berlin Monthly (Berlinische Monatsschrift), for example, the most distinguished press organ of the German late enlightenment, were in fact letters to the editor from members of the public. Readers were also treated to extensive reviews of recent publications, and sometimes also to lengthy replies by authors with a bone to pick with their reviewers. Occasionally the journal would call for views on a specific question – this was the case, for example, with the famous discussion on the theme ‘What is enlightenment?’ that began with a query posted by the theologian Johann Friedrich Zöllner in the pages of the Berlin Monthly in December 1783.6 There was no permanent staff of journalists, nor were most of the articles in each issue directly commissioned by the journal. As the editors, Gedike and Biester, made clear in the foreword to the first edition, they depended upon interested members of the public to ‘enrich’ the journal with unsolicited contributions.7 The Berlin Monthly was thus above all a forum in print that operated along similar lines to the associational networks of the towns and cities. It was not conceived as fodder for an essentially passive constituency of cultural consumers. It aimed to provide the public with the means of reflecting upon itself and its foremost preoccupations.
The resonance of the Berlin Monthly and other journals like it was greatly enhanced by the proliferation across northern Germany of reading societies.8 The purpose of these groups was to pool money for the purchase of subscriptions and books in a society where public libraries were as yet unknown. Some were relatively informal gatherings with no permanent home that met in the house of one of the better-off members. Others were reading circles specializing in the dissemination of specific journals. In some towns, local book dealers ran a library service that allowed readers to gain temporary access to new publications without paying the full purchase price. Associations of this kind multiplied at a remarkable rate during the last decades of the eighteenth century. Whereas there were only about fifty of them in the German states in 1780, the number increased to around 200 during the next ten years. They tended increasingly to meet in premises rented or bought for their own use that provided a congenial setting for discussion and debate. Statutes ensured that every member joined the meeting on equal terms and that the imperatives of politeness and reciprocal respect were observed. Parlour games and gambling were prohibited. In all, the German reading societies encompassed a membership of between fifteen and twenty thousand.
Bookshops were another important venue for enlightened sociability. The main room of Johann Jakob Kanter’s bookshop in Königsberg, founded in 1764, was a large, attractive, bright space that served as the city’s ‘intellectual stock exchange’. It was a café littéraire in which men and women, young and old, professors and students could leaf through catalogues, read newspapers and buy, order or borrow books. (Since Kant owned only 450 books when he died in 1804, it is likely that, like other intellectuals in the city, he borrowed many of his books from Kanter.) Here, too, patrons were expected to cultivate a respectful and civil tone in their dealings with each other. Kanter not only sold books, he also produced a compendious catalogue of publications (which ran to 488 pages in 1771), a bi-weekly newspaper and various political tracts – including a blistering essay attacking Frederick the Great by the young Königsberg philosopher Johann Georg Hamann.9
Beyond the reading societies, lodges and patriotic associations was a network of other gatherings: literary and philosophical associations and learned groups specializing in natural science, medicine or languages. There were also more informal circles, such as the group of writers and aspirant poets around the Berlin Cadet School master Karl Wilhelm Ramler, whose close associates included the publisher Friedrich Nicolai, the dramatist Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the patriot poet Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim, the biblical scholar Moses Mendelssohn, the jurist Johann Georg Sulzer and many other prominent figures in the Berlin enlightenment. Ramler belonged to at least one of the many Masonic lodges in Berlin and was a member of several clubs; he was also a poet in his own right – albeit of third-rate verse. What contemporaries cherished in him was above all his gift for friendship and his lively, courteous sociability. After his death in April 1798, an obituary recalled that Ramler, who remained unmarried until his death, had lived ‘only for his art and his friends, whom he loved dearly without making a show of it. He had many [friends] in all walks of life, especially among scholars and businessmen.’10
Another analogous figure was the patriot activist Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim. He too was unmarried, entertained literary aspirations and used his financially secure position as an ecclesiastical official in the city of Halberstadt to support a circle of aspiring young writers and poets in the city. Like Ramler, Gleim maintained an extensive correspondence with many of the luminaries of contemporary Prussian letters. The sociable conversation that drove the enlightenment in Prussia was not sustained by statutes and subscriptions alone; it owed much of its intensity and inclusiveness to men like Ramler and Gleim, for whom the unselfish cultivation of a wide circle of friends was a life’s work. Writers, poets, editors, club, society and lodge members, readers and subscribers, these were the ‘practitioners of civil society’ whose engagement with the great questions of the day, literary, scientific and political, helped to create a lively and diverse public sphere in the Prussian lands.11
It would be a mistake to think of this emergent public sphere either as a supine, passive mass of apolitical burghers, or as a seething force of opposition and latent rebellion. One of the most striking things about the social networks that sustained the Prussian enlightenment was their proximity to, and indeed partial identity with, the state. This was in part a matter of the intellectual tradition out of which the Prussian enlightenment grew. The links with cameralism, the ‘science’ of state administration established at the Prussian universities during the reign of Frederick III/I, and further consolidated under Frederick William I, were only gradually severed. Then there was the social location of the Prussian intelligentsia. Whereas men of independent means or free-lance writers played an important role in contemporary French letters, the dominant group within the Prussian enlightenment was that of the civil servants. A study of the Berlin Monthly has shown that of all contributors to the journal over the thirteen years of its existence (1783–96), 15 per cent were noblemen, 27 per cent were professors and school teachers, 20 per cent were senior officials, 17 per cent were clergy, and 3.3 per cent were army officers. In other words, more than half of the contributors were in paid state employment.12
A striking example of the convergence between the state and elements of civil society was the Berlin Wednesday Club, a ‘private society of friends of learning’ that met regularly during the years 1783 to 1797 (virtually t
he same years as the Berlin Monthly was in existence). The members of this group, which numbered first twelve and later twenty-four participants, included senior officials such as the minister of state Johann Friedrich Count von Struensee and the legal officials Karl Gottlieb Svarez and Ernst Klein; among other members were Johann Biester, who was both editor of the Berlin Monthly and secretary of the Wednesday Club, and the publisher and sometime patriot activist Friedrich Nicolai. Nicolai’s old friend Moses Mendelssohn, the by now renowned Jewish scholar and philosopher, was an honorary member. Meetings were held in the home of one of the group. Although discussions sometimes focused on scientific topics of general interest, most meetings were concerned with contemporary political issues. Debates were often heated, but an effort was made to observe the forms of civilized discussion, namely mutual respect and reciprocity, impartiality, and a commitment to eschewing opinion and vacuous generalizations in favour of rigorous fact-based interpretation. Preparation for a meeting began with the pre-circulation of a treatise on some matter of government administration, finance or legislation. This served as the basis for debate. Comments could also be submitted in writing. Essays that had been debated by the society sometimes later appeared in the Berlin Monthly.
It is difficult to imagine a better illustration of the fundamentally conversational character of enlightened literary culture. The Wednesday Club could hardly be described as an institution of the ‘public sphere’, since its meetings were shrouded in the strictest secrecy – an essential measure, given that several of the group were serving ministers. Yet it does demonstrate the kinds of synergy that were becoming possible between the informal networks of civil society and the state during the last years of Frederick II’s reign.
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