Conservatives were thus in no position to coordinate a response to the expansion of liberal dissent. Most either fished around for compromises or lapsed into a resigned awareness of the inevitability of change. Even within the Cabinet, there was little sign of a unified conservative bloc. The political discussions among ministers were surprisingly speculative, conflictual and open-ended, a feature that was encouraged – or at least tolerated – by the king himself.26 In October 1843, Leopold von Gerlach, commander of the I Guards Landwehrbrigade in Spandau on the outskirts of Berlin and a close personal friend of the king, reflected on the political situation in Prussia. What worried him was not just the pressure building behind demands for constitutional reform, but also the failure of the conservatives – even within the government – to form a united front against it. Several of the ministers – including the supposedly archconservative ‘Bible Thile’ – had begun to talk ‘quite uninhibitedly’ of conceding a Chamber of Deputies. The ship of state, Gerlach observed, was sailing in the direction of Jacobinism, driven by the ‘always freshly blowing wind of the Zeitgeist’. He listed various steps that might help to arrest the process of liberalization, but he was under no illusions about the prospects of success. ‘What can these little manoeuvres possibly achieve,’ he concluded, ‘against the onward pressing Zeitgeist, which, with satanic cleverness, wages an unceasing and systematic war against the authority established by God?’27
In these circumstances, it was inconceivable that the king would be able to re-sculpt society in the image of his neo-corporate ideology. He made an unsuccessful attempt to do so in 1841, when he declared in a cabinet order that the Jews of Prussia should be organized for administrative purposes into Judenschaften (Jewries), whose elected deputies would represent the interests of the Jewish communities before the local authorities. The order also stated that Jews were to be absolved of the obligation to perform military service. Neither of these measures was ever carried out. The king’s own ministers opposed them – Interior Minister Rochow and the new minister for religious and educational affairs, Johann Albrecht Friedrich Eichhorn, objected that the proposals ran counter to the recent development of Prussian society. A survey of district governments revealed that these, too, were opposed to the king’s plan. Local administrations were prepared to bestow corporate legal status upon Jewish religious institutions, but they were strongly opposed to the imposition of corporate status in the broader political sense favoured by Frederick William, which they saw as hindering the all-important process of societal assimilation. Indeed the vehemence and candour with which they rejected this royal hobby-horse are remarkable. The district government of Cologne even pressed for full and unconditional emancipation of the Jewish minority, pointing out the success of this policy in France, Holland, Belgium and England. The officials of the 1840s were not servile Untertanen (subjects) bent on ‘working towards’ their king. They viewed themselves as autonomous participants in the policy-making process.28
As the Jewish initiative suggests, Frederick William’s neo-corporatist vision was out of tune, not only with public opinion in the broadest sense, but even with the prevalent ethos of the administration itself, which found it increasingly difficult to reach consensus on the great political questions of the day. To liberals and radicals, and even to some conservatives, the politics of the new reign seemed fundamentally incoherent, ‘a deranged mixture of the extremes of our time’.29 No one captured the resulting sense of disconnection better than the radical theologian David Friedrich Strauss, whose pamphlet A Romantic on the Throne of the Caesars was published in Mannheim in 1847. Strauss’s tract purported to be about the Emperor known as Julian the Apostate, but was in fact a caricature of the Prussian king, who was depicted as an unworldly dreamer, a man who had turned nostalgia for the ancients into a way of life and whose eyes were closed to the pressing needs of the present.30
POPULAR POLITICS
The expansion of political activism around the diets took place against the background of a broader process of politicization that reached deep into the hinterlands of the Prussian provinces. In the Rhineland in particular the 1840s saw dramatic growth in the popular consumption of newspapers. Rates of literacy were very high in Prussia by European standards, and even those who could not read for themselves could hear newspapers being read aloud in taverns. Beyond the newspapers, and far more popular with the general public, were ‘people’s calendars’ (Volkskalender), a traditional, cheap, mass-distributed print format that offered a mixture of news, fiction, anecdotes, and practical advice. By the 1840s, the market in calendars had become highly differentiated, catering to a range of political preferences.31 Even the traditional commerce in popular printed prophecy acquired a sharper political edge in the 1840s. Of particular concern to the Prussian authorities was the ‘Prophecy of Lehnin’, a text of obscure origin that appeared to divine the future of the House of Hohenzollern. The Prophecy of Lehnin, which circulated widely in the Rhineland, had traditionally foretold the imminent conversion of the royal house to Catholicism – reason enough in itself to attract the hostile attention of the authorities – but the early 1840s saw the appearance of a more radical version predicting that the ‘infamous king’ would be punished with death for his role in an ‘atrocity’.32
This creeping politicization of popular culture was not confined to the print media. Song was an even more ubiquitous medium for the articulation of political dissent. In the Rhineland, where memories of the French Revolution were especially vivid, the records of the local police are full of references to the singing of forbidden ‘liberty songs’, including endless variations on the Marseillaise and the ça ira. Liberty songs recalled the life and deeds of Kotzebue’s assassin Karl Sand, celebrated the virtuous struggles of the Greeks or the Poles against Ottoman and Russian tyranny and commemorated moments of public insurrection against illegitimate authority. No fair or public festivity was complete, moreover, without travelling ballad-singers (Bänkelsänger), whose songs were often irreverently political in content. Even the ‘peepshow men’, travelling performers who exhibited trompe-l’oeil scenes, were adept at weaving witty political critiques into their commentaries, so that even ostensibly harmless landscape views became pretexts for satire.33
From the 1830s, carnivals and other popular traditional festivities such as Maypole ceremonies and charivaris also tended increasingly to carry a (dissenting) political message.34 By the 1840s, the carnivals of the Rhineland – especially the elaborate processions orchestrated on the Monday before Ash Wednesday – had become a focal point for political tension between locals and the Prussian authorities. With its anarchic, twelfth-night atmosphere, in which conventional social and political relationships were inverted or satirized, the carnival was suited to become an eloquent medium of political protest. It was precisely in order to discipline the unruly energies of the street festival that carnival societies were founded in the Rhineland in the 1820s and 1830s. By the early 1840s, however, these too had been infiltrated by the spirit of dissent. In 1842, the Cologne carnival society split when radical members declared that ‘the republican carnival constitution’ was the only one ‘under which true foolishness could flourish’. They intended to enthrone a ‘carnival king’ whose authority was to be defended by a ‘standing army of fools’. The unusually radical Düsseldorf carnival society was also known for its harsh satires of the monarch.35
Ridicule of the king was an increasingly prominent feature of dissenting utterances in Prussia during the 1830s and 1840s. Although only 575 cases of lèse-majesté were actually investigated during the decade between 1837 and 1847, the records suggest that a multitude of other such misdemeanours went unprosecuted, and we can presume that many more again never came to the attention of the police at all. Yet such cases as did come before the courts were generally treated seriously. When the tailor Joseph Jurowski from Warmbrunn in Silesia declared in a drunken moment ‘our Freddy is a scoundrel; the king is a scoundrel and a swindler’, he receiv
ed the remarkably harsh sentence of eighteen months in jail. The judicial official Balthasar Martin, from near the city of Halberstadt, was sentenced to six months of imprisonment for stating, while sitting in a tavern, that the king ‘drank five or six bottles of champagne a day’. ‘How can the king take care of us?’, Martin asked his listeners, presumably unaware that a police informer was sitting among them. ‘He’s a lush, the lush of lushes, he only drinks the really potent stuff.’36
These calumnies referred to an image of the king that by the mid-1840s had established itself ineradicably within the popular imagination. Frederick William IV, a plump, plain, unmilitary man who was known as ‘fatty flounder’ to his siblings and close friends, was the least physically charismatic individual to occupy the Hohenzollern throne since the reign of the first king. He was also the first Prussian king ever to be lampooned in numerous satirical images. Perhaps the most famous contemporary depiction, produced in 1844, portrays the monarch as a portly, drunken puss-in-boots clutching a bottle of champagne in his left paw and a foaming glass in his right, pathetically attempting to ape Frederick the Great against the backdrop of the palace complex at Sans Souci. Having relaxed literary censorship shortly after his accession to the throne, Frederick William reimposed the censorship of images, but it proved impossible to prevent grotesque visual satires of the monarch from circulating widely across the kingdom.37
Perhaps the most extreme expression of disregard for the person of the sovereign was the Tschechlied, a song that recalled the attempted assassination of the king by the mentally disturbed former village mayor Heinrich Ludwig Tschech. Tschech had failed to secure official support for a crusade against local corruption in his native Storkow and fell under the delusion that the monarch was personally to blame for his misfortune. On 26 July 1844, having had himself photographed in a theatrical pose by a daguerreotypist in Berlin, Tschech walked up to the royal carriage and fired two shots at close range, both of which missed. The public initially responded with a wave of sympathy for the king, although it was also widely expected that Tschech would be spared the death penalty in view of his abnormal mental condition. Frederick William was at first inclined to grant him clemency, but his ministers insisted that he be made an example of. When it became known in December that Tschech had been executed in secret, public sentiment swung against the king.38 Over the following years a range of Tschech songs circulated in Berlin and across the German states. Their irreverence is captured in the following stanza:
40. Frederick William IV as a tipsy Puss-in-Boots trying vainly to follow in the footsteps of Frederick the Great. Anonymous lithograph.
A fortune ill beyond compare
Befell poor Tschech the village mayor,
That he, though shooting close at hand,
Could not hit this bloated man!39
THE SOCIAL QUESTION
In the summer of 1844, the Silesian textile district around Peterswaldau and Langenbielau became the scene of the bloodiest upheaval in Prussia before the revolutions of 1848. The trouble began on 4 June, when a crowd attacked the headquarters of Zwanziger Brothers, a substantial textile firm in Peterswaldau. The firm was regarded in the locality as an inconsiderate employer that had exploited the region’s oversupply of labour to depress wages and degrade working conditions. ‘The Zwanziger Brothers are hangmen,’ a popular local song declared.
Their servants are the knaves.
Instead of protecting their workers,
They crush us down like slaves.40
Having broken into the main residence, the weavers smashed everything they could lay their hands on, from tiled ovens and gilt mirrors to chandeliers and costly porcelain. They tore to shreds all the books, bonds, promissory notes, records and papers they could find, then stormed through an adjacent complex of stores, rolling presses, packing rooms, sheds and warehouses, smashing everything as they went. The work of destruction continued until nightfall, bands of weavers making their way to the scene from outlying villages. On the next morning, the weavers returned to demolish the few structures that remained intact, including the roof. The entire complex would probably have been torched, had someone not pointed out that this would entitle the owners to compensation through their fire insurance.
Armed with axes, pitchforks and stones, the weavers, by now some 3,000 in number, marched out of Peterswaldau and found their way to the house of the Dierig family in Langenbielau. Here they were told by frightened company clerks that a cash payment (five silver groschen) had been promised to any weaver who agreed not to attack the firm’s buildings. Meanwhile two companies of infantry under the command of a Major Rosenberger had arrived from Schweidnitz to restore order; these formed up in the square before the Dierig house. All the ingredients of the disaster that followed were now in place. Fearing that the Dierig house was about to be attacked, Rosenberger gave the order to fire. After three salvos, eleven lay dead on the ground; they included a woman and a child who had been with the crowd, but also several bystanders, including a little girl who had been on her way to a sewing lesson and a woman looking on from her doorway some 200 paces away. Eyewitnesses reported that one man’s head had been smashed by the shot; the blood-flecked pan of his skull was thrown several feet from his body. The defiance and rage of the crowd now knew no bounds. The troops were driven away by a desperate charge and during the night the weavers rampaged through the Dierig house and its attached buildings, destroying eighty thousand thalers worth of goods, furnishings, books and papers.
41. How the weavers suffered; and how the state responded. This woodcut published in the radical journal Fliegende Blätter in 1844 refers to the Silesian uprising of that year and bears the caption: Hunger and Desperation.
The worst was over. Early on the following morning troop reinforcements, complete with artillery pieces, arrived in Langenbielau and the crowd of those who remained in or around the Dierig buildings was quickly dispersed. There was some further rioting in nearby Friedrichsgrund, and also in Breslau, where a crowd of artisans attacked Jewish houses, but the troops stationed in the city managed to prevent any further tumults. About fifty persons were arrested in connection with the unrest; of these eighteen were sentenced to terms of imprisonment with hard labour and corporal punishment (twenty-four lashes).41
There were many tumults and hunger riots in the Prussian lands during the 1840s, but none resonated in public awareness like the Silesian weavers’ revolt. Despite the best efforts of the censors, the news of the revolt and its suppression spread across the kingdom within days. From Königsberg and Berlin to Bielefeld, Trier, Aachen, Cologne, Elber-feld and Düsseldorf, there were extensive press commentaries and public discussion. There was a flowering of radical weaver poems, among them Heinrich Heine’s apocalyptic incantation of 1844, ‘The Poor Weavers’, in which the poet invokes the misery and futile rage of a life of endless work on a starvation wage:
The crack of the loom and the shuttle’s flight;
We weave all day and we weave all night.
Germany, we’re weaving your coffin-sheet;
Still weaving, ever weaving!
Numerous essays appeared over the following months analysing the uprising from every possible angle.
The Silesian events caused a sensation because they spoke to a fashionable contemporary obsession with what was coming to be known as ‘the Social Question’ – there are parallels with the almost contemporary British debate that greeted the appearance of Carlyle’s essay of 1839 on the ‘Condition of England’. The Social Question embraced a complex of issues: working conditions within factories, the problem of housing in densely populated areas, the dissolution of corporate entities (e.g. guilds, estates), the vicissitudes of a capitalist economy based on competition, the decline of religion and morals among the emergent ‘proletariat’. But the central and dominant issue was ‘pauperization’, the progressive impoverishment of the lower social strata. The ‘pauperism’ of the pre-March era differed from traditional forms of poverty in a num
ber of important ways: it was a mass phenomenon, collective and structural, rather than dependent upon individual contingencies, such as sickness, injury or crop failures; it was permanent rather than seasonal; and it showed signs of engulfing social groups whose position had previously been relatively secure, such as artisans (especially apprentices and journeymen) and smallholding peasants. ‘Pauperism,’ the Brockhaus Encyclopaedia noted in 1846, ‘occurs when a large class can subsist only as a result of the most intensive labour…’42 The key problem was a decline in the value of labour and its products. This affected not only unskilled labourers and those who worked in the craft trades, but also the large and growing section of the rural population who lived from various forms of cottage industry.
The deepening misery was reflected in patterns of food consumption: whereas the inhabitants of the Prussian Rhine province consumed on average forty-one kilos of meat per annum in 1838, this figure had fallen to thirty by 1848.43 A statistical survey of 1846 suggested that between 50 and 60 per cent of the Prussian population were living on or near the subsistence minimum. In the early 1840s, the deepening of poverty across the kingdom triggered a moral panic among the Prussian literary classes. Bettina von Arnim’s This Book Belongs to the King, published in Berlin in 1843, opened with a sequence of fanciful literary dialogues whose common theme was the social crisis in the kingdom.44 Included in the text was a detailed appendix recording the observations of Heinrich Grunholzer, a 23-year-old Swiss student, in the slums of Berlin. Over the three decades between 1816 and 1846, the population of the capital had risen from 197,000 to 397,000. Many of the poorest immigrants – wage labourers and artisans for the most part – settled in the densely populated slum area on the northern outskirts of the city known as the ‘Vogtland’ because many of the earliest arrivals hailed from the Vogtland in Saxony. It was here that Grunholzer recorded his observations for Arnim’s book.
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