As the head and ‘supreme bishop’ of the Prussian Union Church, Frederick WilliamIIIinterpretedthis changeof policyasadirectchallenge to his authority. After efforts to negotiate a settlement had failed, the monarch ordered Droste-Vischering’s arrest in November 1837–it was a matter, as his ministers put it, of ‘demonstrating the fullness of the royal power in the face of the power of the Catholic church’.67 Additional troops were secretly transferred to Cologne to handle any local unrest and the archbishop was escorted from his palace to an apartment within the walls of the fortress of Minden, where he remained under house arrest, forbidden to receive official guests or to discuss ecclesiastical issues. After royal decrees were issued criminalizing the practice of requiring the contract, the Prussian hierarchy hardened its position. On the eastern periphery of the Prussian dominions, where there was also a large Catholic population (including many Poles), the archbishop of Gnesen and Posen, Martin von Dunin, formally reintroduced the marital education contract; he too was arrested and incarcerated in the fortress of Kolberg.
In the course of these dramatic interventions, there were demonstrations in the streets of the major Catholic towns and clashes between Prussian troops and Catholic subjects. After the publication of an official papal declaration condemning the Prussian government, resistance to the new measures quickly spread to Paderborn and Münster, whose bishops likewise announced that they would return to demanding the marital contract. By the early months of 1838, a major controversy had blown up over the issue. There was extensive press coverage throughout the German states (and across Europe) and a flood of pamphlets, of which the best known and most widely read was the polemical Athanasius, a hard-hitting denunciation of the Prussian government by the sometime Rhenish radical and ultramontane Catholic Joseph Goerres. Across the western provinces, the events of 1837–8 produced a lasting radicalization of Catholic opinion. One Protestant contemporary who observed this struggle with mingled fascination and indignation was Otto von Bismarck, the future Prussian statesman, now in his early twenties.
The official churches and the various sectarian or separatist movements did not entirely monopolize the spiritual life of Prussians. On the margins of the churches, and in the numerous interstices of religious belief and practice there flourished a rich variety of eccentric variations on the norm, in which the tenets of licensed dogma blended seamlessly with folk belief, speculative natural philosophy and pseudo-science. These were the hardy weeds that shot up ceaselessly between the paving stones of official religion. They fed to some extent upon the energies released by the religious revivals. In Catholic rural or small-town communities, the post-war turn towards mystery and miracle could easily tip over into credulity and superstition. Late in the summer of 1822, there were reports of a ‘miraculous fiery light’ over an image of Mary in the little Catholic church of Zons, a small town on the banks of the Rhine between Cologne and Düsseldorf. When pilgrims began descending on the town, the church authorities in Cologne and Aachen mounted an investigation, which found that the light was due to refraction of the sun’s rays through a window, and efforts were made to dissuade further pilgrims from congregating in the church. Such unruly local enthusiasms demanded constant vigilance on the part of the church authorities.68
The Catholic ecclesiastical and the Protestant secular authorities found it easy to agree on the case of the Zons ‘fiery light’; other forms of miraculous belief were more problematic, because they lay in the grey zone between folk magic and popular piety. The practice – well established in the Prussian Rhineland – of ‘healing’ persons stricken with rabies by laying a thread from the shrine of St Hubertus into an incision on the forehead was deplored by the state authorities but tolerated by (most of) the local church leadership. One characteristic feature of the awakened Rhenish Catholicism of the 1820s and 1830s was an aspiration to build bridges between theology and the more outré varieties of contemporary speculative science and natural philosophy, including mesmerism and animal magnetism.69
On the Protestant side, too, religious belief could interact with folk magic in ways that the authorities found unsettling. In 1824, it was reported that the former stable-boy Johann Gottlieb Grabe in Torgau (in Prussian Saxony) was ‘healing’ over 100‘patients’ per day through a combination of prayers, incantations, magical movements and animal magnetism. A government investigation at the Charité Hospital in Berlin refuted Grabe’s claim to possess healing powers, but this did nothing to diminish his charisma as a healer. One Torgau merchant was even reported to have purchased Grabe’s leather trousers, so that he might strengthen himself with the residual magnetism still inhabiting them.70 In 1842, intense public controversy surrounded the Rhenish Catholic shepherd Heinrich Mohr of Neurath, whose feats of healing attracted as many as 1,000 persons per day, many of whom crossed the region to be seen by him. Figures such as Mohr filled a need that was not satisfied by contemporary medical practice, which stood helpless in the face of most chronic illnesses. But it was his ‘blessing’ above all that patients were after, a detail that particularly alarmed the Catholic church authorities because it implied the usurpation of one of the ordained clergy’s definitive powers.71
Harder to place is the ‘sect’ that gathered in Königsberg around the maverick preachers Johann Wilhelm Ebel and Heinrich Diestel in the late 1830s. These two provided what we would now call marital counselling based upon an eclectic practical theology in which ideas drawn from pre-Christian natural philosophy were cobbled together with chiliastic expectation, humoral theory and mid nineteenth-century preoccupations with marriage and sexuality. Drawing on the teachings of the East Prussian millenarian mystic Johann Friedrich Schoenherr, Ebel and Diestel posited that the act of coitus between a man and a woman was essentially a re-enactment of the moment of creation, when two vast balls, one of fire and one of water, had collided to form the universe.72 The sexual act between man (fire) and woman (water) thus had an intrinsic cosmic significance and value and should be accepted and cultivated as an essential feature of any harmonious marital relationship. Male participants in the circle were advised to make love to their wives with the lamp lit, rather than in darkness, so that erotic fantasies were banished and ‘blind lust’ was transformed into ‘conscious affection for the spouse’.73 Members of the circle – including the women – were urged to take positive pleasure in the sexual act. The two clergymen attracted a circle of high-status Königsbergers, including men and women from some of the city’s leading families.
What with all the colliding of fire and water, the mood within the circle grew rather steamy, there was an unexpected pregnancy and rumours spread that the preachers were encouraging licentiousness and extra-marital sex. It was claimed – fancifully – that men and women attended the ‘conventicles’ of the sect in a state of nudity, that initiates received something called the ‘seraphic kiss’, ‘with which the most abominable excesses were connected’, and that ‘two young ladies had died from the consequences of excessive libidinous excitement’.74 To his great embarrassment, Theodor von Schön, who knew several of the participants personally, was obliged to mount an investigation. The resulting trial, known across Protestant Germany as the ‘Muckerprozess’ (trial of the fanatics) received intense and controversial press coverage.75 We are used to thinking of religion as an ordering force but the boundary between the collective, external canonized identity of the official confessional parties and that untidy package of private human needs and inclinations that we call ‘religiosity’ became highly unstable during the decades between the revolutions.
MISSIONARY STATE
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 religio
n 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’.76 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.77
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’.78 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.79
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.80
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.’81 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.82
Understandably enough, Jewish journalists denounced ‘the phantom of the Christian state’ as merely ‘the very latest pretext for denying us our rights’.83 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.
APOTHEOSIS OF THE STATE
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.84 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 mun
icipal constitutions.85 The Rhineland, too, retained the relatively liberal system of local governance introduced by the French.86 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.87
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.88 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.89
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