Iron Kingdom

by Clark, Christopher

  In a sense, Prussia had returned to the European dynastic norm. Frederick William was not an especially stupid man, and he was certainly a person of deep and wide-ranging cultural interests – his importance as a patron of the arts and architecture is beyond dispute.49 But he was incapable of providing the Prussian governmental system with a strong commanding centre. One consequence of this weakening of the sovereign’s grip on policy was the re-emergence of the ‘antechamber of power’, that space within which advisers, ministers and would-be friends of the king competed for influence on the monarch. Among Frederick William’s advisers there was one in particular whose influence over domestic affairs was unrivalled. Johann Christoph Wöllner was an intelligent and ambitious commoner who had worked his way up from humble origins to become a pastor and later, through a highly advantageous marriage to the daughter of his patron, the master of a landed estate. Wöllner held an exalted position within the inner circle of the Rosicrucian order in Berlin and established contact with Frederick William while he was still crown prince. Frederick the Great was un-impressed by this connection, describing the crown prince’s upwardly mobile companion as a ‘scheming, swindling parson’. But with the accession of Frederick William II to the throne, Wöllner’s day had come. In 1788, he was appointed minister of culture in place of the Baron von Zedlitz, one of the most distinguished and progressive figures in the Frederician administration. In this post, Wöllner dedicated himself to an authoritarian cultural policy whose objective was to curb the supposedly corrosive effects of scepticism on the moral fabric of school, church and university. The centrepiece of Wöllner’s campaign to restabilize the ideological substance of public life in the kingdom was the famed Edict on Religion of 9 August 1788, a law designed to arrest and reverse the corrosive effect of rationalist speculation on the integrity of Christian doctrine.

  It was no accident that Wöllner’s strictures were directed specifically at religious speculation, for it was in the sphere of religion (and especially Protestant religion) that debate over the implications of philosophical rationalism had done most to unsettle conventional certainties. The impact of enlightenment on the Prussian clergy in particular had been reinforced by Frederick II’s practice of favouring rationalist candidates for appointments to clerical office. The preamble to the edict stated baldly that ‘enlightenment’ – the word was printed in bold letters on a line of its own – had gone too far. The integrity and coherence of the Christian church was in danger. Faith was being sacrificed on the altar of fashion.

  The edict introduced new censorship mechanisms to impose doctrinal conformity on all texts used for school and university study. The disciplinary powers of the Lutheran and Calvinist consistories – the most senior confessional administrative organs – were reinforced. Monitoring procedures were introduced to ensure that candidates appointed to clerical posts actually subscribed to the articles of faith of their respective confessions. Further measures followed. A censorship edict was published in December 1788 in an effort to stem the flow of pamphlets and articles criticizing the new measures. A Royal Examining Commission was established to flush out the rationalists in church and teaching offices. Among those subjected to investigation was pastor Johannes Heinrich Schulz of Gelsdorf, who was notorious for preaching that Jesus was a man like any other, that he was never resurrected, that the doctrine of a general resurrection was nonsense and that hell did not exist.50 Another who came to the attention of the authorities was Immanuel Kant himself: in the autumn of 1794, he received a stiff warning in the form of a royal order stating that the essay collection published as Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone ‘abused [… ] philosophy for the purpose of distorting and disparaging several principal and fundamental doctrines of Holy Scripture’.51

  Wöllner’s edict has often been seen as a reactionary backlash against the Prussian enlightenment.52 This is certainly how some of its contemporary critics saw it. Yet in many respects, Wöllner’s religious policy was deeply rooted in the traditions of the Prussian enlightenment. Wöllner had himself been a Freemason before he joined the Rosicrucians (who were in any case an outgrowth of the Masonic movement), had been educated at the rationalist University of Halle and was the author of various enlightened tracts urging agricultural improvement, land reform and the abolition of serfdom.53 The central purpose of the edict was not – as some of its more polemical contemporary critics claimed – to impose a new religious ‘orthodoxy’, but rather to consolidate the existing confessional structures and thereby safeguard the pluralist compromise struck at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. In this sense it accorded with Prussia’s tradition of multi-confessional religious co-existence. Thus the edict forbade not only the public propagation of heterodox rationalist views, but also proselytizing by Catholics among members of the two Protestant faiths. It even extended the state’s guardianship (in article 2) to the various ‘sects previously publicly tolerated in our states’, including the Jews, the Herrnhut brethren, the Mennonites and the Bohemian brethren.54

  The edict was also notable for its essentially instrumental view of religion. Underpinning it was the – characteristically enlightened – belief that religion had an important role to play in securing public order. What mattered was not the existence of theological speculation as such, but the fact that the ‘poor masses of the population’ were being led away from their accustomed faith in scriptural, clerical and – by extension – sovereign authority.55 The need for stabilizing measures seemed all the more urgent for the fact that the absorption of large tracts of Polish territory (see chapter 10 below) had greatly increased the number of Prussia’s Catholic subjects and raised questions about the confessional balance of power within the kingdom. For these and other reasons, many of the most prominent enlightened theologians were happy to support the edict as a policy for the maintenance of religious peace.56

  It thus makes little sense to see the controversy that broke out over the edict as a conflict between ‘enlightenment’ and a political ‘reaction’ bent on turning the clock back. The real struggle was between different visions of enlightenment. On the one hand, there were those enlightened defenders of the edict who saw in it a rational exercise of the state’s authority in the interests of religious peace and the liberty of individuals to be ‘left undisturbed in their chosen public confession’.57 On the other, there were those radical critics who argued that the edict oppressed individual consciences; one of these, the Kantian law professor Gottfried Hufeland, even argued that public institutions should reflect the rational convictions of the individuals composing them, even though this implied that ‘there must be as many churches as there are personal convictions’.58 From one perspective, the confessional identities bequeathed by history to the present were parcels of religious liberty to be safeguarded against the anarchic individualism of the radical critics; from the other, they were a stifling legacy of the past whose continued existence was a burden upon individual consciences. The real issue turned on the locus of rational action. Should this reside in the state, as Pufendorf had proposed, or should it be vested in the unfolding reasoned enquiry of individuals, as the more radical disciples of Kant appeared to be suggesting? Was the state better placed to uphold a rational public order grounded in the principles of natural law, or should this be left to the increasingly dynamic political forces within an emergent civil society?

  The public furore provoked by the edict and its flanking measures revealed the extent to which enlightened critical debate had already politicized the Prussian public. There was a new sharpness in the tone of printed comment that prompted the king to observe with alarm in September 1788 that ‘freedom of the press’ (Presse-Freyheit) had mutated into ‘impudence of the press’ (Presse-Frechheit).59 There were also institutional frictions between the makeshift organs established by Wöllner to police the edict through censorship and the existing bodies of ecclesiastical self-governance, many of which were dominated by theological liberals. The disciplinary proceedings aga
inst the flagrantly heterodox pastor Schulz collapsed when the senior judicial and consistorial officials appointed to investigate him came to the conclusion that since he was a Christian (though not a Lutheran as such), he should be permitted to remain in office.60 As this and many other cases revealed, there was now a network of officials at the apex of the administrative system who had passed through the crucible of the Berlin enlightenment and were prepared to defend their understanding of an enlightened political order against the authoritarian prescriptions of Wöllner and Frederick William II.61 It was surely no coincidence that Johann Friedrich Zöllner, the consistorial official who had passed the tract for publication, Johann Georg Gebhard, the tract’s Calvinist author, and Ernst Ferdinand Klein, the judge entrusted with finding a verdict for the Supreme Court, were all sometime members of Berlin’s Wednesday Club.

  In the face of such resistance, Wöllner’s efforts to silence debate and purge the administrative structures of rationalist critics were bound to enjoy at best a limited success. In the spring of 1794, Hermann Daniel Hermes and Gottlob Friedrich Hillmer, members of the Royal Examining Commission, travelled to Halle to conduct an inspection of the city’s university and high school. The University of Halle had once been the headquarters of Pietism, but it was now a bastion of radical theology whose governing body had formally protested the recent censorship measures. When Hermes and Hillmer reached the city on the evening of 29 May and made their way to their quarters in the Golden Lion Hotel, they were besieged by a crowd of masked students who stood before their windows until the small hours of the morning chanting rationalist slogans. On the following night an even larger and louder crowd of students gathered to hear one of their number deliver a speech seething, in the ears of an unsympathetic onlooker, with ‘blasphemies and irreligious expressions’, before bombarding the windows of the examiners’ rooms with tiles, bricks and cobblestones.

  To make matters worse, the academic authorities of the university refused to implement Wöllner’s policy within the faculties – partly because they were hostile to the spirit of the edict, and partly because they saw the imposition of such measures from above as incompatible with academic freedom and the autonomy of their institution. ‘What is our power?’ Hermes exclaimed in despair during a difficult meeting with senior university officials. ‘We have not yet succeeded in dislodging one single neological preacher. Everybody is against us.’62

  By 1795, with the failure to implement the new measures in Prussia’s most important university, it was clear that the Wöllner authoritarian project had run out of steam. There was, to be sure, a generalized tightening of censorship, especially as the unfolding of the French Revolution revealed the scale of the threat posed to traditional authority by political radicalism. One prominent contemporary witness to these developments was the publisher and patriot Friedrich Nicolai, who moved his own journal, the Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek, to Altona (a town adjoining Hamburg but under Danish rule) in 1792 to avoid the scrutiny of the Prussian censors. In a letter to Frederick William II of 1794, Nicolai protested against the recent measures, observing that the number of independent printing presses operating in Berlin had fallen from 181 to sixty-one as a consequence of the regime imposed after 1788, and suggesting slyly that this was damaging to royal tax revenues.63 Whether this contraction was exclusively the result of censorship (as opposed to market forces) is doubtful. Yet there clearly was a heightened impatience with government censorship among members of the Prussian intelligentsia. This was partly a function of real constraints, but it also expressed the expansion of expectations that had occurred during the intellectual and political ferment of the 1780s. ‘Freedom of speech’ was defined in far more radical terms by the mid-1790s in Prussia than it had been in the previous decade, and the warm glow in which the charisma of ‘Frederick the Unique’ had bathed the wheels of the state machine gradually faded after 1786.

  Despite this souring of the public mood, it is important not to overstate the oppressiveness of the post-Frederician administration. A recent study of the Berlin press during the French Revolution has shown that Prussian subjects had access to extremely detailed and reliable press coverage of contemporaneous events in France, not only during the liberal revolution of 1789–92, but also during the Jacobin Terror and thereafter. Reports in the Berlin press incorporated sophisticated political commentaries, which were by no means always hostile to the cause of the revolutionaries. The Haudesche und Spenersche Zeitung in particular was remarkable for the sympathy with which the positions and policies of the various parties (including even Robespierre and the Jacobins) were set out and explained. At no time did the Prussian government seriously attempt to prevent the dissemination of information about the French events, even at the time of the trial and execution of the king in 1792–3, or to ensure that the regicides and their allies were cast in an especially hostile light. Nor did the authorities prevent the widespread use of such contemporary reportage for educational purposes, not only in the Gymnasien (grammar schools) but also in village and elementary schools. Nowhere in the German states, with the possible exception of Hamburg, do we find press coverage of comparable quality and candour. Despite the pervasive fear of revolution and all the vexations of censorship, Axel Schumann writes,

  the fact remains that between 1789 and 1806, four journals appeared under Prussian censorship in the capital and residential city of Berlin, in which the French Revolution was celebrated as a historic necessity and as the victory of reason over aristocratic arrogance and monarchical mismanagement.64

  TWO-HEADED STATE

  In the summer of 1796, crowds of Berliners swarmed to see the latest theatrical sensation orchestrated by the famous Swabian illusionist Karl Enslen. The show opened with a trio of beautifully fashioned automatons: a Spaniard with a flute, a woman playing the glass-organ and a trumpeter who could also speak. There followed an ‘aerial hunt’ involving floating animal figures filled with gas, and an android gymnast whose movements were so life-like that one would have taken him for a man, were it not for the muted creaking of the neck-joint. Towards the end of the performance, the lights were extinguished and a loud clap of thunder announced a series of ghostly apparitions culminating in a spectacular trompe-l’oeil.

  Then there is seen far off in the distance a bright star; the star widens; and out of it there comes the very exact likeness of Frederick the second, in his usual clothing and posture [… ]. The image grows bigger and bigger, comes nearer and nearer, until it seems to stand as large as life just before the orchestra. The effect of this apparition on the floor and in the boxes was remarkable. The clapping and jubilation was endless. When Frederick seemed about to retreat to his star many called ‘Oh stay with us!’ He returned into his star, but after loud cries of encore he had to come back twice.65

  Here was a theatre of the modern type, where darkness was used to heighten the impact of illusion (a recent innovation), where tickets and seats were set at different prices for different pockets. Men and women, minor officials, craftsmen and clerks mingled in the audience, but people of noble estate were there too, and even members of the royal family – albeit only as paying customers. And here was the figure of the resurrected king summoned back to life to satisfy a crowd hungry for entertainment and prepared to pay for it. Did those royals who watched this remarkable projection feel a certain unease at the spectacle of the dead king, hailed by his people, but also at their beck and call? It is hard to think of a scene that better exemplifies the ambivalence and modernity of nostalgia.

  By 1800, Berlin was – in terms of its intellectual and social life – the most vibrant city of German Europe. Its population was approaching 200,000. There was a dense network of clubs and societies, of which we know thirty-eight by name, and sixteen Masonic lodges.66 Beyond the circles of the better-known organizations there was a further array of now-forgotten clubs catering to the lower social strata. Berlin’s clubland was not just large, it was also highly textured and diverse. The Monda
y Club, the Wednesday Society and the Thursday Circle were small and exclusive gatherings that met the needs of intellectuals and enlightened members of the upper bourgeoisie. The city also offered a wide range of societies focused on specific interests: the Society of Naturalist Friends, for example, or the Pedagogical Society that met on the first Monday every month in a suburban council chamber at Werder, or the Economic Heating Society that discussed ways of reducing the consumption of wood, a scarce and expensive commodity at this time. The Philomatic Society, with a membership of thirty-five, catered to people with an interest in the sciences, including the Jewish Kantian philosopher Lazarus Bendavid, the sculptor Johann Gottfried Schadow and the senior official Ernst Ferdinand Klein. Then there were the Medical Club – a forerunner of the later professional organizations – and the Pharmaceutical Society, which maintained a herbarium and a small library for the use of its members. The Military Society concerned itself with the need for military reform and encompassed some 200 members – it was an early focal point for the reforming energies of those activists who would come to the fore after 1806. For those who wished to keep abreast of the latest developments in politics, science and culture, there was a wide range of reading societies and other commercial reading facilities, such as lending libraries. Newspapers and journals could also be had in the coffee houses; and the lodges often maintained considerable libraries.