The Rise of Prussia 1700-1830

Philip G. Dwyer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317887027
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

At the beginning of the eighteenth century Prussia was but one in a mosaic of German states, but it rose to be the unchallenged leader of German-speaking Europe after the fall of Napoleon. The book goes beyond the political, military and diplomatic concerns of the Prussian elite, whose record of events is the one upon which most histories of Prussia are based, and explains its rise in relation to Prussian society as a whole. Political analysis is integrated with material on such areas as agrarian society, urban life and religion, which are not fully examined in existing histories.

Chapter One
Prussia in history and historiography from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century

STEFAN BERGER

Prussia has meant all things to all people. Its history is characterized by manifold contradictions, inconsistencies and extremes of interpretation which are mirrored in its historiography. At one end of the spectrum lie the historical concerns which underpinned Law No. 96 of the Allied Control Council for Germany of 25 February 1947 which officially ended Prussia’s existence. Strongly influenced by British historiography on Prussia, notably by the writings of Geoffrey Barraclough (1908–1984) and A. J. P. Taylor (1906–1990), representatives of the British government pressed hardest for the dissolution of Prussia which, they argued, was the epitome of militarism, aggressiveness and illiberalism. It was a state so morally rotten that it could only be abolished. At the other end stood the mainstream of German historiography until and well beyond 1947 which was committed to defending the Prussian state. The extraordinary range of different interpretations of Prussian history has much to do with the baffling number of binary oppositions which have structured its historiography. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Prussia was a centre of religious tolerance while, in the nineteenth century, it ruthlessly suppressed Liberals, Catholics, Socialists and Poles. Prussia under Frederick II has been portrayed as an absolutist state, run by a brutal and unfeeling despot. But Frederick, the friend and admirer of Voltaire, also made Prussia one of the centres of the European Enlightenment. In the eighteenth century, Prussia divided the Reich, while in the nineteenth it emerged as the motor behind the unification of Germany. Prussia’s reputation rested to no small degree on its army, and a ‘social militarism’ (Otto Büsch) came to penetrate every fibre of its society. But Prussia was also one of the earliest states in which the despotism of the absolute monarch had its limits in the rule of the law. The General Legal Code (Allgemeines Landrecht) of 1794 breathed the spirit of the Enlightenment and has been widely regarded as the most progressive and comprehensive legal code of its time, and yet Prussia remained, well into the twentieth century, one of the tightest feudal societies in Europe. Land of the darkest reaction to some, for others it was the modern state par excellence, in which ‘reform from above’ (Otto Hintze, 1861–1940) had prevented the excesses of the French Revolution. The technical, industrial and economic progress of Prussia in the nineteenth century seemed in blatant contradiction to its political and social ‘backwardness’. Viewed through certain historiographic lenses, Prussia could be portrayed as a tyranny ruled by the traditional elite of reactionary Junkers. Change the prism only slightly, and Prussia reappears as the very model of a progressive bourgeois state, in which the ‘enlightened absolutism’ of its rulers successfully modernized society and state. In the Weimar Republic, Prussia was the key pillar of Weimar democracy. Until the so-called Prussia coup in 1932, it had been a bastion of the democratic parties and a model for SPD-Centre Party co-operation. At the same time, the political right successfully mobilized the spiritual heritage of the ‘old Prussia’ against the ‘new Republic’ and thus undermined the Republic’s legitimacy. The famous National Socialist postcard which portrayed Hitler next to Frederick II, Bismarck and Hindenburg was no coincidence. Prussianism, however facile, was an important weapon in the armoury of National Socialist propaganda. And yet, under the Nazis, the Prussian state and its administration was dissolved when the unitary state was created in 1934. Furthermore, Prussian Junkers formed an important part of the German resistance against Hitler. This list of antitheses could easily be prolonged, but the extraordinary range of views and opinions on Prussia over the whole period of its history should be clear by now.

There has never even been agreement among historians as to the proper definition and periodization of Prussian history. Many histories of Prussia begin with the history of the Teutonic Order which, in the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, created a state of their own in Prussia. This state was divided into two following the Second Peace of Thorn which ended the Thirteen Years’ War in 1466. Only the eastern part remained under the administration of the Teutonic Knights who had to swear an oath of allegiance to the Polish king. The western parts became Royal Prussia and were directly incorporated into the territories of the Polish crown. In 1525, the last Grand Master of the Knights, Albrecht von Hohenzollern, converted to Lutheranism and secularized the country. He became the first Duke of Brandenburg-Prussia. It was on this Prussia and, in particular, on the House of Hohenzollern and their building of a powerful state in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that much German (and Anglo-Saxon) historiography has concentrated ever since. Yet the two Prussias continued to coexist until 1772–93, when Brandenburg-Prussia annexed Royal Prussia. It has been only recently that historians such as Klaus Zernack (*1931) and Karin Friedrich (*1963) have pointed to the importance of recognizing the dual roots of Prussian history. They have repeatedly demanded that historians of Prussia locate its history in the Polish and German contexts, in the history of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Holy Roman Empire. One can only underline their plea for a Prussian history that ‘faces both ways’.¹ Historians have come to realize that the regional diversity of the Prussian lands presents them with formidable problems of interpretation. The different Prussian provinces were treated quite differently, even in the nineteenth century, for example, with regard to the right to self-administration. In several important ways, Prussia was badly divided. In terms of religion, two-fifths of its population were Catholic after 1815. Different Prussian provinces had different legal systems and social structures. So, for example, the traditions of the Rhineland remained, for the most part, completely at odds with the traditions of the Old Prussia east of the river Elbe.

1 Thus the formulation of Karin Friedrich, ‘Facing both ways: new works on Prussia and Polish-Prussian relations’, German History 15 (1997), 267. See also Klaus Zernack, ‘Preußen als Problem der osteuropäischen Geschichte’, Studia Historica Slavo-Germanica 6 (1977), 31–48.

An independent statehood of Prussia is still often dated to 1701, the year in which the Hohenzollern Duke of Brandenburg-Prussia was crowned king. In the eighteenth century, the foundations of the Prussian state were laid under Frederick William I and Frederick II. As late as 1978, Sebastian Haffner’s (1907–1999) best-selling history of Prussia drew almost exclusive attention to eighteenth-century Prussian history, a time when Hohenzollern Prussia allegedly was ‘the most modern state in Europe’.² If the starting-point for Prussian history is already contested terrain, the end-point finds historians even more divided. Some have followed the Prussian conservative critics of Bismarck’s policies of unification in arguing that Prussia had come to an end in 1871. With the foundation of the German Reich, Prussia ceased to exist as an independent state. Others have fiercely debated whether the German Reich became Prussianized after 1871, resembling a kind of enlarged Prussia, or whether Prussia became Germanized (Verreichlichung Preujiens). Today, a great number of historians of Prussia, including the editor of this collection, are willing to consider Prussian history until the formal dissolution of the state of Prussia by the Allied Control Council in 1947. Certainly, this seems justified with regard to the important role that the Prussian state [Land) played in the constitutional set-up of both Imperial Germany and the Weimar Republic, and also with regard to National Socialist attempts to exploit the myth of Prussia for Nazism’s political aims. In the following, I hope to be able to demonstrate how different historical interpretations of Prussian history were often mixed up with specific political agendas as well as with methodological and theoretical debates about the nature of history and historical enquiry.

2 Sebastian Haffner, Preujien ohm Legende (Hamburg, 1978), p. 21.

Prussian historiography in the eighteenth century

The roots of the idea of writing the ‘official’ history of Brandenburg-Prussia can be traced back to the reign of Frederick William (1640–1688) who employed a number of court historians, among whom Samuel von Pufendorf (1632–1694) was the most famous. While subsequent Prussian kings continued the tradition of encouraging an officially sanctioned view of their state, it was the lack of a coherent history of Brandenburg-Prussia which ultimately made Frederick II reach for his pen and publish the Mémoires pour Servir à I’Histoire de Brandebourg (1746). Following the example of Voltaire’s Siècle de Louis XIV, its first part consisted of Brandenburg’s diplomatic and military history, while its second part dealt in some detail with what might be termed the cultural history of customs and traditions. The focus on the interests of the Prussian state was combined with the espousal of anti-Polish sentiments. The latter were to have direct political implications after Brandenburg-Prussia annexed Western Prussia in 1772. Frederick taxed Polish-speaking Catholic landowners and nobles far more heavily than their German-speaking Protestant counterparts and discriminated against them in various other ways. The Western Prussian cities had to pay higher taxes while, at the same time, they lost most of their political clout.

At the same time, Frederick II, inspired to an extent by Voltaire, consciously turned away from his enlightened civilizatory historiography and instead judged every aspect of life with regard to the Hohenzollems’ expansion of power. He thus became the first in a long line of historians who placed the political history of the state before everything else. Even when, from the 1950s onwards, a social history of Prussia began to emerge in West German historiography, much of that social history was primarily concerned with explaining the peculiar nature of the Prussian state. Hence, the state-centredness of Prussian history has never really been overcome and remains one of the key shortcomings of today’s historical writings on the subject.

In his Memoirs, Frederick II heavily criticized the acquisition of the Prussian crown in 1701, which he regarded as rather unnecessary for the well-being of the Prussian state. It had more to do, he argued, with the vanity of Frederick I, who appears as the antithesis to Frederick William I. While the former is accused of wasting the state’s resources on an expensive court life and on various aspects of representation, the latter’s sobriety, sternness and prudence are portrayed as the very model of a Prussian king. This set the tone for many of the subsequent interpretations until Carl Hinrichs (1900–1962) pointed out that the first Frederick’s understanding of power was completely different from that of his successors and hence had to be judged differently.³ While Frederick I was still attempting to emulate the absolutism of Louis XIV, the coming to power of Frederick William in 1713 represented a fundamental caesura in the nature of absolutist rule in Prussia. There is a broad consensus in Prussian historiography after Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886) and Johann Gustav Droysen (1808–1884) that Frederick William should be viewed as the founder of modern Prussia because it was under his reign that the military, financial and administrative systems were all totally transformed. In an influential attempt to explain this transformation of Prussia in the first half of the eighteenth century, Gerhard Oestreich (1910–1978) introduced the concept of‘social disciplining’ (Sozialdisziplinierung).⁴ In his view, the social stability and political power of Prussia, surrounded by potentially hostile neighbours, rested on an increasingly internalized system of norms and values which stood at the heart of Frederick William’s reform project. This undertaking cannot be adequately understood without reference to the king’s religious beliefs. In particular, as Hinrichs never tired of pointing out, Frederick William’s state was the embodiment of the Protestant ethics of hard work, rational organization and sober efficiency. Protestantism had significantly influenced many eighteenth-century North-Western European states such as Holland, Sweden, England and Russia (under Peter the Great), but nowhere was that influence more penetrating than in Prussia.

3 Carl Hinrichs, Preujien als historisches Problem. Gesammelk Abhandlungen (Berlin, 1964).

4 Gerhard Oestreich, ‘Strukturprobleme des europäischen Absolutismus’, in Gerhard Oestreich, Geist und Gestalt des jmhmodernen Staates. Ausgewählte Aufsätze (Berlin, 1969), especially pp. 19 Iff.

Many historical accounts distinguish between the rigorous Protestant absolutism of Frederick William and the ‘enlightened absolutism’ of his successor Frederick II. For much of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century historiography of Prussia, Frederician Prussia was the epicentre of what constituted Prussian history. In the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), Frederick II challenged the delicate balance of power between the European powers and laid the foundations for the rise of Brandenburg-Prussia to great-power status, which then occurred in the first half of the nineteenth century. Yet while many nineteenth-century historians stressed the national mission of Frederick and drew a straight line between the Seven Years’ War and the Wars of Unification fought by Prussia between 1864 and 1871, it needs to be emphasized that Frederick II was not concerned with German interests but only with the interests of the Prussian state and its ruling house. The history of Prussia under Frederick II cannot be understood by applying categories of the later nation-state. Eighteenth-century Prussianism was state-oriented; nineteenth-century Prussianism was nation-oriented. In his writings, Frederick had constituted the notion of a specifically Prussian idea of the state (which was harsh, achievement-oriented, tolerant, just and based on the ethics of duty and obedience), yet this state theory was different from nineteenth-century German nationalism (although, in many respects, it did become part of German nationalism).

Some historians, including Friedrich Meinecke (1862–1954), have argued that one should distinguish between Frederick II’s ruthless Machiavellian foreign policy and his more enlightened domestic policies which culminated in the imposition of the rule of law and a general programme of ‘reform from above’. However, both Frederick’s domestic and foreign policies can ultimately be traced to the overriding concern for the Prussian state interest. His ‘enlightened absolutism’ was not concerned with applying abstract philosophical principles of the Enlightenment. Rather, it initiated a reform programme which aimed at optimizing the state’s resources for the good of the state. Those who espoused the principles of an ‘enlightened absolutism’, such as the Prussian senior civil servant (Geheimer Oberfinanzrat) August Heinrich Borgstede (1757–1824), studied history so as to better comprehend the nature of the Prussian state. Such understanding was perceived as the crucial precondition for reforming the state in a sensible manner. Much has been made of the allegedly progressive nature of subsequent Prussian ‘reforms from above’ which, according to several historians, prevented a revolution in Prussia along French lines. By contrast, it has been pointed out more recently that Frederick II’s organization of the state and the army in particular already had a number of structural weaknesses which ultimately contributed to the defeat of the Prussian state in 1806–7. As far as Frederick II’s ‘enlightened absolutism’ is concerned, an interesting and as yet unanswered question was posed by Karl Otmar von Aretin (*1923) who suggested that ‘enlightened absolutism’ was largely a phenomenon of the economically backward states of central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe.⁵ Here much more comparative research would be needed.

5 K. O. von Aretin (ed.), Der aufgeklärte Absolutismus (Cologne, 1974), p. 23.

Not all historians of Prussia in the eighteenth century were concerned with the state of Brandenburg-Prussia or the House of Hohenzollern. In eighteenth-century Royal Prussia, for example, the estates and burghers overwhelmingly resented the Hohenzollerns and were loyal subjects of the Polish crown. Seventeenth-century historians such as Christoph Hartknoch (1644–1687) haile...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of Maps and Tables
• List of Prussian Rulers
• Preface
• About the Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The rise of Prussia
• 1. Prussia in history and historiography from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century
• PART ONE: POLITICS, RELIGION AND SOCIETY
• PART TWO: THE RURAL AND URBAN ENVIRONMENT
• PART THREE: THE STATE AND THE ARMY
• PART FOUR: PRUSSIA, THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND NAPOLEON
• Suggestions for further reading
• A note on further research possibilities
• Index