The situation these policies helped promote by the time of the Reformation was one reason why the emperor Charles V found himself incapable of imposing unity against Protestant rebels, as he acknowledged in accepting the Treaty of Augsburg in 1555, and a century later the same mix of religions and political disunity was confirmed by the Treaty of Westphalia’s formula of cuius regio eius religio, recognizing the country’s divisions and giving each ruler the right to determine the official religion of the state. After 1648 many lesser princes, secular and ecclesiastical, seized on this situation to shore up their independence. The more than 300 separate political entities that made up the German lands in the eighteenth century were mostly small in size, some even minuscule, such as the the inward-looking and self-protective “hometowns” studied by Mack Walker, their residents devoted to the communal autonomy they enjoyed inside their walls, and determined to preserve local life as they knew it against outsiders. Like other Germans, they benefitted from the emperors’ policy of protecting smaller states against larger ones in order to prevent rivals from emerging, thus making the Empire into what Walker calls “the incubator of German localism.” In David Blackbourn’s formulation, the Empire “protected the particular in the name of the universal.” There were no German officials in a position to espouse unifying visions in the way French ones did, no ponts et chaussées department to invest imagination, money, and effort in better communication and transport. And of course, “[t]he relative isolation of these self-sufficient worlds was reinforced by a luxuriant structure of tariffs and excises both between and within the individual German territories.”3
These geographical and political divisions also heightened social distinctions, especially between many Bürger and nobles. Social mixing took place in the Residenzstädte, where a certain number of middle-class people drew close to princes and courts through the goods or services they provided, some of them receiving titles and privileges in return. But both in the small towns studied by Mack Walker and in larger independent commercial cities such as Cologne or Hamburg, territorial autonomy (still marked by the presence of urban walls) greatly narrowed the space for such contacts. This would be one important reason why consciousness of Bürger independence was especially strong in Germany. The overall effects of German fragmentation were summarized by Adolf von Knigge, author of a well-known eighteenth-century advice book on manners and proper behavior: “Perhaps in no country of Europe is it so hard to gain general approval, when interacting with people from different classes, regions, and estates … as in our German fatherland; for perhaps nowhere does there reign at once such a great multiplicity of conversations, of modes of education, of religious and other opinions, or such a great diversity in the objects that engage the attention of particular classes of people.”4
Even in the face of this fragmentation, however, Germany still appeared to people as a distinct cultural and social field (as Knigge’s comment testifies), and its division into so large a number of units, many of them small and weak, offered opportunities for reshaping society and politics from within that were available nowhere else. After 1648 a number of territorial states, both threatened and encouraged by the growing power of the French monarchy, would seek to take advantage of the openings this situation provided. In part, state construction in Germany followed lines common to other places; like the French kingdom, German states grew by uniting previously independent territories. But by this time Britain and France were long-established entities, the identity of the first grounded in geography and by now distant conquest, that of the second built up in a process stretching back into the Middle Ages. The expanding German princely states had roots in the distant past, but their modern manner of existence arose out of the post-Reformation settlement formalized in the Treaty of Westphalia, which gave Protestant sovereigns control over the former lands of the Church (and all rulers considerable influence in religious affairs), while creating the conditions for expansion through marriage and inheritance, diplomacy, or warfare. Saxony, Württemberg, Bavaria, Baden, Hanover and Hesse all grew in these ways, but the most remarkable and successful creation was of course Prussia, like its imperial rival Austria an agglomeration of territories put together through marriage and diplomacy, and later by conquest. The former elector of Brandenburg, who acquired the duchy of Prussia by inheritance in the late seventeenth century, proclaimed himself king there only in 1701, adding to his territories another duchy, two counties and several bishoprics. It was a meteoric rise, famously supported by the newly created, highly organized and disciplined Prussian army.
To bring unity to such agglomerations, and to draw sufficient resources from them, the rulers needed servants and officials, and they set about assuring that they would be loyal and effective. In Prussia as in other states the originally separate territories had long possessed bodies of officials and administrators, but the Hohenzollern rulers’ determination to squeeze more resources out of them to bolster their military ambitions led them to absorb these earlier corps into a single one organized in order to support and supply the army, a pattern echoed in less militaristic fashion elsewhere.5 Good state servants had to be literate and educated, qualities the sovereigns sought to assure through establishing, maintaining, and regulating universities. In Protestant regions new faculties had been founded first of all to provide alternatives to Catholic religious institutions, but state officials were trained in them as well as pastors. The original Prussian one, opened in Königsberg in 1544, served both groups from the beginning, providing training for officials in the faculties of law and philosophy that were set up alongside the theological one. In the eighteenth century Immanuel Kant would spend his whole career there, teaching students who would mostly become clergy or state officials. By then other states had begun to set up universities to train their civil servants as well; in the century after 1694, new ones were established all across Germany, at Halle, Göttingen, Erlangen, Münster, and Bonn.6 There future state officials were trained in the administrative disciplines called Cameralistik, but in addition the state governments fostered the spread of Roman law, in part because princes could use its statist principles “to assert their authority vis-à-vis both local rivals and the imperial authorities.”7
Out of these developments there would emerge a social phenomenon unique to Germany, a distinct grouping of high-status non-nobles called the Bildungsbürgertum. The term would become common only in the twentieth century, but the phenomenon was already emerging in the developments just mentioned. As the name indicates, the members of this group owed their position first of all to education; their occupations were primarily state service and professional work (chiefly law, medicine, teaching, and the ministry), categories that would long be more closely linked in Germany than elsewhere. Hans-Ulrich Wehler maintains (perhaps with a small amount of pardonable hyperbole) that no comparable group in modern European and North American history has had “such lasting influence and such an astounding impact down into the twentieth century.”8 To be sure, non-noble state officials operated elsewhere, collecting the excise and manning government agencies in England, and sometimes achieving high position and riches in France. But English excise tax collectors did not have university educations, and French intendants, although mostly graduates of a law faculty, often owed their positions to personal connections. Many had noble origins and those who did not acquired some species of noble status through their work: they were part of the Old Regime system of privilege, not members of a separate Stand; as a group they never developed the same close relationship to Bildung.9 These features of the Bildungsbürgertum were one source of the characteristically German orientation toward the two seemingly opposite poles of Macht and Geist, power and the things of the mind.
The role governments envisaged for these officials was not merely administrative; they were to be the agents of the states’ efforts to give a new emphasis and coloration to the notion of bürgerliche Gesellschaft. In the seventeenth century the idea included an expectation
that the state would act as overseer of social life in both its economic and moral dimensions, working to improve well-being and assuring that behavior reflected religious and communal standards. After around 1700 it acquired a heightened association with developing economic resources in order to add to wealth and the tax base, with establishing uniform legal procedures and obligations throughout previously independent and differently governed territories, and with a more positive view of individual citizens (especially men as heads of households) as bearing both the ability and the responsibility to contribute to social advance through their own efforts. Isabel Hull rightly emphasizes that this idea of civil society was largely future oriented: it rested on a sense of human potential yet to be realized, a vision that inspired its departures both from the prevailing belief that production and consumption had to be limited to traditional levels and from the longstanding assumption that it was the responsibility of authorities to provide moral discipline for their subjects. But the writers and officials who gave voice to this vision easily underestimated the power of the forces whose development they encouraged; they wanted “to open the floodgates of production, consumption, population, and wealth,” but expected the flow of new energy to strengthen society as they knew it, preserving its hierarchical structures.10
In order to grasp the importance of the officials whose lives were devoted to these policies for the development of a modern form of bourgeois life we need to view them against the background of existing ways for defining bourgeois status in pre-modern Germany. The fragmentation of the country meant that the local forms taken by membership in urban society varied greatly in their details, but the spirit was broadly similar everywhere. Bürgerrecht or urban citizenship was articulated in accord with the assumptions of the ständisch order; it was not a single category, but a congeries of greater and lesser rights to participate in urban affairs. As one recent historian puts it, “The early modern state and early modern cities were tangles of legal distinctions, special provisions for special groups, stratified levels of rights, privileges, and duties that classified individuals into specified relationships with the governing authority.” The complexity of such arrangements is well illustrated by the case of Bremen, where four different kinds of Bürgerrecht co-existed at the end of the eighteenth century, two of them associated with residence in the Altstadt, the original and most prestigious part of the city, of which only one, requiring a higher payment, gave the right to guild mastership and thus to sell goods (Handelsfreiheit); the others (neither of which conveyed these commercial privileges) were associated with residence in newer sections, the Neustadt and the Vorstadt whose inhabitants had less status and power. Some places such as Hamburg (the subject of the study from which the general statement quoted just above comes) were relatively open to outsiders, even Jews, who could sometimes make their way into the urban elite on the basis of success in business, but even there governing arrangements were strictly hierarchical and set up to preserve the position of families with deep roots. Much more exclusive were locales like the “hometowns” studied by Mack Walker, where Bürger spoke of themselves in terms of equality and democracy, but in a manner that limited participation to those whose rights derived from an inherited place in a bounded collectivity determined to protect itself against outsiders.11
As the social identity of the fledgling Bildungsbürger developed, it exhibited a clear contrast to all these situations. Earlier the graduates of university faculties had been inserted into local society as members of what was called the Gelehrtenstand (sometimes referred to as the Gebildete or educated), a category that like other estates varied from place to place but which everywhere carried certain privileges, involving dress, forms of respect, and a place in both ceremonial processions and council meetings. Like other modes of urban status, this one was often inherited or acquired chiefly through family connections. In the early eighteenth century positions in the Prussian judiciary were largely of this sort, requiring some education to be sure, but depending less on demonstrated qualifications than on patronage; judges were more concerned about status and precedence than personal formation, an easily understandable preference given that their income came more from fees, gifts, and bribes than from regular salaries. Administrative bureaucrats were even less likely to put a high value on learning or training; they have been described as “a hodge-podge of social types and backgrounds,” including “adventurers, favorites, and coat-tail riders.” Neither the loyalty nor the efficiency of such people could be firmly relied on.
It was to free itself from this situation that the Prussian state began to institute its system of professional qualification through university attendance and testing, beginning with judicial officials and spreading to administrative ones. The system evolved in stages, but had achieved considerable regularity by 1760. Similar requirements were applied to clergy at this time, and by the end of the century they had been extended to other professionals and copied in other states. Although nobles continued to occupy posts at the highest level in administration and the judiciary, all these groups took on a character that reflected the states’ demands that their members complete a certain level of schooling, either in a university or an upper secondary institution such as a Gymnasium, and that they be able to pass one of the increasingly rigorous examinations. In this way the old Gelehrtenstand gave way to a new professional intelligentsia, defined by its demonstrated qualifications, and deeply connected to the state that regulated its training and certified its suitability.12
By the middle of the eighteenth century “the core of academically trained professionals and bureaucrats stood under the direct jurisdiction of the central state,” the effect of monarchical campaigns to “detach these groups from their municipal bonds.” They could be judged only in state courts, not local ones, they were exempt from military service as well as from many taxes, and affronts to their honor were considered offenses against the state itself. These privileges and exemptions testified to their condition as staatsunmittelbar, directly connected to the state. Anthony La Vopa suggests that they understood and appreciated their situation in just these terms: even those who stood relatively low in the ranks of eighteenth-century Bildungsbürger saw themselves as liberated from the constricted and often merely private relations in which local institutions (such as schools) operated; as state servants they were “perched above local society and invulnerable to its pressures,” and they valued their state office for its “promised disentanglement from local dependencies.” This sense of independence was nurtured too by the increasing prominence in German universities of the neo-humanist classicism of Christian Wolff and Wilhelm von Humboldt, with its aspirations to represent universal Kultur. Conceiving their identity in terms of this education may have been especially attractive to the state officials in face of the disappointment some voiced about the often dreary and mechanical specialization their actual work imposed. Isabel Hull’s observation that they had “literally fallen out of the ständisch order” highlights their situation very well, except that it would be more accurate to say that they had been drawn out of that order through insertion into the network of institutions through which the territorial states pursued their goals. As a result, “they pointed to a new conception of Bürgertum, in the sense of Staatsbürger, or active, participating citizen-members of the new civil society.”13 They were in an important sense the first modern German bourgeois, independent of the old and complex order of locally based ständische society more than even big merchants and manufacturers in Hamburg or Bremen, who still belonged to it.
Important as we should recognize this move away from the old order to be however, it was by no means complete. The Prussian constitutional law of 1794, the Allgemeine Landrecht, designated state officials as a separate Stand, thus making them part of a society still structured as a graded hierarchy. Hegel called up this mix of qualities by naming them the “allgemeine [general or universal] Stand,” an oxymoronic construction (since each Stand was by definition
particular to some function) that attached modern features to an older social vision. Moreover their status as citizens was rendered uncertain in the eyes of some by the oath of loyalty they had to swear to the monarch, depriving them of the personal independence that citizenship was taken to presuppose. Assertions that such people were too dependent on authority to be genuine Bürger were voiced well into the nineteenth century.14 These features stood in contrast to the more modern ones etched by their independence from traditional local status hierarchies and their work in infusing social relations with the general principles of civil society. Their situation reveals both that powerful modernizing visions were generated out of the web of institutions and people the states wove, but also how incompletely those visions were realized.
Bürgerlichkeit and the networks of Aufklärung
The new notion of citizenship that developed in connection with the reforming activities of states gained an additional dimension from a specifically cultural network in which the early Bildungsbürger played an important role, namely the chain of people and instruments dedicated to spreading Enlightenment. This network was particularly significant in German history because it constituted the first vehicle through which activity of any kind on a national scale was fostered. Like much else in Germany at the time, the Aufklärung belonged largely to a world of scattered localities. Whereas the French Enlightenment had an undoubted center in Paris, from which it spread to provincial academies and readers, and London had a similar status in England, in Germany the Aufklärung had no single focal point, or rather it developed simultaneously in a variety of separate but connected places.15 In them, interested people formed local associations, some called reading societies, some patriotic societies, some masonic lodges, all devoted to general improvement through individual and collective self-cultivation. Newspapers, travel accounts, reports of scientific discoveries and experiments, and foreign and domestic fiction were all among the materials around which people came together in these groups. Wilhelm Ruppert discerns in this phenomenon a felt “need for an expansion of the Lebenswelt,” a phenomenon that mirrored, in reverse, the fragmentation and localism that characterized so much of German life. Answering the question to which Kant also gave a more famous reply, Moses Mendelssohn said that Aufklärung, Bildung and Kultur were all “modifications of social life, effects of people’s efforts and strivings to improve their social existence.” James Sheehan notes that a central part of this program was to “set free human talents and productive powers” by doing away with restrictions that enclosed people within local condition and the limits they imposed.16
Modernity and Bourgeois Life Page 16