Iron Kingdom : The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (17 page)

7. Satirical portrait of Jacob Paul von Gundling (anon. engraving from
The Learned Fool (Der Gelehrte Narr)
by the Gundling-baiter David F. Fassmann (Berlin, 1729)

But neither his record of service as an educator and courtier, nor his presidency of the academy, nor his steadily growing list of scholarly publications could save Gundling from degenerating into a figure of ridicule at the court of Frederick William I. In February 1714, the king demanded that he deliver a lecture before the assembled guests on the existence (or not) of ghosts while taking regular draughts of strong drink.
After much raucous hilarity, two grenadiers escorted the inebriated commercial councillor back to his room, where he shrieked with terror at the sight of a figure draped in a white sheet emerging from a corner. Provocations of this kind soon became the norm. Gundling was confined in a chamber where the king kept a number of young bears while fireworks were rained down into the room from above; he was forced to wear outlandish courtly attire modelled loosely on French fashions, including a towering wig in an outdated style that had belonged to the previous king; he was force-fed laxatives and locked in a cell overnight; he was pressed into a pistol duel with one of his chief tormentors, the joke being that everyone but Gundling knew that the weapons contained no shot. When Gundling refused to grasp or fire his gun, his opponent discharged a spray of burning powder into his face, setting fire to his wig, to the huge hilarity of all present. He was prevented by his debts from leaving Berlin and constrained by the pleasure of the king his master to return daily to the scene of his humiliations, where his honour and reputation were martyred for the amusement of the royal court. Under these pressures, Gundling’s liking for drink soon developed into fully fledged alcoholism, a weakness that, in the eyes of his detractors, merely enhanced his suitability for the role of court fool. And yet Gundling continued to generate a flow of learned publications on such subjects as the history of Tuscany, imperial and German law, and the topography of the Electorate of Brandenburg.

Gundling even had to to lerate the presence in his bed chamber of a coffin in the form of a varnished wine barrel inscribed with a mocking verse:

Here there lies within his skin

Half-pig, half-man, a wondrous thing

Clever in his youth, in old age not so bright

Full of wit at morning, full of drink at night

Let the voice of Bacchus sing:

This, my child, is Gundeling.

[…]

Reader, say, can you divine

Whether he was man or swine?
²⁴

After his death in Potsdam on 11 April 1731, Gundling’s corpse was publicly displayed propped up in the barrel in a room lined with candles, dressed in a wig hanging down to the thighs, brocaded breeches and
black stockings with red stripes – all clear references to the baroque culture of the court of Frederick I. Among those who came to ogle at this macabre spectacle were commercial travellers on their way to the great fair at Leipzig. Gundling and his barrel were buried soon afterwards under the altar of the village church outside the city. The funeral address was given by the writer (and sometime Gundling-baiter) Fassmann, the local Lutheran and Reformed clergy having conscientiously refused to take part.

8
. The Tobacco Ministry.
Attributed to Georg Lisiewski
, c.
1737
.

Gundling’s ‘martyrdom’ was the flip-side of the raucous masculine camaraderie of the new monarchy. The masculinization that had tentatively announced itself in the ceremony of the coronation had by now transformed the social life of the court. Under Frederick William I, women, who had played such a prominent role at the court of Frederick I, were pushed to the margins of public life. A visitor from Saxony who resided in Berlin for several months during 1723 recalled that the great festivities of the courtly season were held ‘according to the Jewish manner’ with the women separated from the men, and observed with surprise that there were many dinners at court at which no women appeared at all.
²⁵

Reflecting on the regime-change that occurred in 1713, one is tempted to describe it as a cultural revolution. There were continuities in the sphere of administration and finance, to be sure, but in the sphere of representation and culture we can speak of a comprehensive reversal of values and styles. Between them, the first two Prussian kings marked out the extremes between and by which their successors would position themselves. At one end of the spectrum we find the type-A Hohenzollern monarch: expansive and expensive, ostentatious, detached from the regular work of state, focused on image; at the other end his type-B antipode: austere, thrifty, workaholic.
²⁶
The ‘baroque’ style of monarchy inaugurated by Frederick I retained, as we have seen, a certain resonance within the collective memory of the dynasty, and the epochal alternation of tastes and fashions ensured that there would be periodic revivals of courtly largesse – under Frederick William II, court expenditure exploded once again to around 2 million thalers per annum, about one-eighth of the total state budget (the figure for his predecessor, Frederick the Great, had been 220,000).
²⁷
The last decades of the nineteenth century would witness, after a period of relative austerity, a remarkable late blooming of courtly culture around the person of the last Kaiser, William II. But the type-B kingship of Frederick William I also had a vigorous afterlife in the history of the dynasty. The harsh marginal jottings of Frederick William I were imitated (with more wit) by his illustrious son Frederick II and (at greater length and with less wit) by his more distant descendant Kaiser William II. Frederick William I’s habit of wearing military uniform rather than the more expensive civilian alternative was taken up by Frederick II and remained a striking feature of Hohenzollern dynastic representation until the fall of the Prussian monarchy at the end of the First World War. The historical power of the type-B model lay not merely in its association with Prussia’s later ascendancy in Germany but also in its affinity with the values and preferences of an emergent Prussian public, for whom the image of a just and thrifty monarch dedicated to the service of the state came to embody a specifically Prussian vision of kingship.

It has often been noted that the reigns of Frederick William the Great Elector and his grandson King Frederick William I stand in a complementary relation to each other. The Great Elector’s achievement was centred on the outward projection of power. Frederick William, by contrast, has been called Prussia’s greatest ‘inner king’, in honour of his role as the founding father of the Prussian administrative state. The opposition between the two can, of course, be overstated. There was no epochal rupture in administrative practices to match the cultural revolution at court. It is probably more accurate to speak of a process of administrative consolidation spanning the century between 1650 and 1750. This process was at first most pronounced in the spheres of revenue extraction and military administration. It was the Great Elector who began simplifying and centralizing the previously haphazard arrangements in place for the collection of the Electoral revenues – i.e. those from crown land, tolls, mines (which were the property of the crown) and monopolies. A first step was taken in this direction with the creation of an Electoral administration for the collection of the royal revenues in Brandenburg in the 1650s. Yet it was not until 1683 that the central revenues office, under the energetic East Prussian nobleman Dodo von Knyphausen, succeeded in acquiring direct control over Electoral revenues from the entirety of the Hohenzollern territories. Knyphausen’s work of consolidation continued after the Great Elector’s death: in 1689 he oversaw the establishment of a central Brandenburg-Prussian revenue office with a stable institutional structure. As a result of this innovation, it proved possible to draw up for the year 1689 – 90 the first complete balance sheet of income and expenditure in the history of Brandenburg-Prussia.
²⁸
A further important centralizing step was undertaken in 1696 with the foundation of a unified central administration for the management of the royal domains.
²⁹

A parallel process of concentration can be observed in those areas responsible for the maintenance of the army and the waging of warfare. A General War Commissariat (
Generalkriegskommissariat
) was established in April 1655 to organize the army and its financial and logistical support. Under a series of capable administrators it grew into one of the key agencies of the Electoral administration, controlling all the revenues
(contribution tax, excise tax and foreign subsidies) destined for military expenditures and gradually undermining the tax-collecting powers of the Estates by drawing their local officials into the sphere of its authority. By the 1680s, the commissariat had begun to arrogate to itself a more general responsibility for the health of the domestic manufacturing economy, launching a programme to establish Brandenburg as self-sufficient in wool-based textiles and mediating in local conflicts between the trade guilds and new businesses. There was nothing uniquely Prussian about this merging of financial, economic and military administration; it was undertaken in emulation of Louis XIV’s powerful
contrôleur-général
, Jean-Baptiste Colbert.

With the accession of Frederick William I to the throne in 1713, the process of reform acquired a new momentum. For all his dysfunctionality as a social being, Frederick William was an inspired institution-builder with an architectonic vision of administration. The roots of this passion can be traced back to the comprehensive princely training provided by his father. At the age of only nine, Frederick William was entrusted with the management of his own personal estate at Wusterhausen to the south-east of Berlin, a task he performed with prodigious energy and conscientiousness. By this means, he acquired a first-hand familiarity with the day-to-day responsibilities of managing an estate – still the fundamental operational unit of the Brandenburg-Prussian economy. He was only thirteen when he began attending meetings of the Privy Council in 1701; his induction into other departments of the administration followed soon after.

Frederick William was therefore already well versed in the inner workings of the administration when an outbreak of plague and famine in East Prussia plunged the monarchy into crisis in 1709–10. The epidemic, which was probably brought into the region by the movement of Saxon, Swedish and Russian troops during the Great Northern War of 1700–1721, killed around 250,000 people, more than a third of the East Prussian population. In a chronicle of the small city of Johannisburg, in the south of the kingdom not far from the Polish border, one contemporary recalled that the plague had spared the city in 1709, but had returned with all the more ferocity in 1710 taking ‘both the preachers, both the school teachers and most of the town councillors to their graves. The city was so emptied of people that the market place was overgrown with grass and only fourteen citizens remained alive.’
³⁰
The impact of the
disease was compounded by a famine that weakened resistance and decimated communities of survivors. Thousands of farms and hundreds of villages were abandoned; in many of the worst affected areas, social and economic life came to a complete halt. Since the areas of highest mortality were in the eastern areas of East Prussia, where the crown was the main landowner, there was an instantaneous collapse in crown revenues. Neither the central nor the provincial administration proved capable of responding effectively to the disaster as it unfolded; indeed a number of the chief ministers reacted by trying to conceal from the monarch the seriousness of the crisis.