Iron Kingdom : The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (28 page)

In Havelberg, as in Brandenburg, the significance of the city church as a forum for the collective self-expression of an urban congregation is heightened by the fact that both cities are cathedral seats. There is thus an implicit dichotomy between the urban church at the medieval core of the city, whose congregation is dominated by the guilds and urban officials – and the cathedral, whose chapter was traditionally recruited from members of the imperial aristocracy. This is very clearly expressed in the geography of Havelberg, where the cathedral, an
imposing structure that resembles a fortified castle, looks down from the heights of the northern riverbank over the little island of the Old City with its shops and stalls and narrow streets. Well into the nineteenth century, the social character of the two congregations was correspondingly polarized: St Laurence remained the church of the townsfolk (as well as of enlisted men stationed in the local garrison), while the nobility patronized the socially and geographically more elevated cathedral.

14. Havelberg Cathedral

The church memorials of Havelberg and Brandenburg remind us of a world that is often overlooked in general accounts of the history of the Prussian lands. This is the world of the towns, a social milieu dominated by master artisans and patrician family networks, whose identity derived from an entrenched sense of autonomy and privilege, both political and cultural,
vis-à-vis
the surrounding countryside. If towns have traditionally occupied a marginal place in the history of Brandenburg-Prussia, this is partly because the urban sector was never especially strong in this part of German Europe – of the thirty German cities with populations of 10,000 or more in 1700, only two (Berlin and Königsberg) were in Brandenburg-Prussia. In any case, it is widely believed that the towns and, more importantly, the spirit of self-administration, civic responsibility and political autonomy that they nurtured, were among the casualties
of Hohenzollern absolutism. Indeed, one historian has written of the deliberate ‘destruction’ of the Brandenburg bourgeoisie by the centralizing monarchical state.
¹
The consequence was a political culture that was strong on obedience, but weak on civil courage and civic virtue. Here again, we sense the powerful negative attraction of the ‘special path’.

There is certainly something to be said for the idea that the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were an era of urban decline, especially if by this we mean the decline of urban political autonomy. Königsberg is perhaps the most dramatic example of a city struggling unsuccessfully to retain its traditional political and economic independence in the face of an aggressive monarchical power. In 1640, when the Great Elector came to the throne, Königsberg was still a wealthy Baltic trading city with a corporate representation in the diet that placed it on a par with the provincial nobility. By 1688, Königsberg’s political autonomy, its influence within the diet and much of its prosperity had been broken. Here, the struggle between the urban authorities and the Berlin administration was especially bitter. Königsberg was a special case, of course, but developments in other towns across the Prussian lands followed a broadly analogous course.

In many towns, the downgrading or removal of political privileges coincided with the introduction of the new excise, a tax on goods and services introduced in stages during the 1660s. Since it was raised directly on goods and services (i.e. at point of sale) the excise did away with the need for fiscal negotiations with urban Estate representatives. The towns thus disappeared as a corporate presence both from the provincial diets and from the ‘permanent committees’ of senior provincial delegates that increasingly managed negotiations between the Estates and the crown. This process of gradual disenfranchisement was reinforced by the imposition, first in Berlin in 1667, and later in all towns, of royally appointed tax commissioners, who soon began to extend the scope of their authority.
²
The pace of centralization slackened during the reign of Frederick III/I, but picked up again under his successor, Frederick William I, whose Council Regulation (
Rathäusliches Reglement
) of 1714 transferred urban budgeting authority to royal officials and curtailed the powers of urban magistrates. Further laws were issued during the reign of Frederick II, who transferred all remaining policing powers from magistrates to royal officials and imposed a system of state authorizations on all sales of
urban property.
³
In the western provinces, too, the communal independence of the towns was largely abolished during the reigns of Frederick William I and Frederick II. The unique constitutions and privileges of towns such as Soest in the Westphalian county of Mark or Emden in East Friesland, were dismantled.
⁴

For most towns, the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were also a period of economic stagnation or decline. In much of Brandenburg and Eastern Pomerania, the poor quality of the soils and the weakness of regional trade meant that the towns were poorly endowed to start with. The impact on the towns of the excise tax is difficult to assess. Initially, some towns were keen on the new tax, since they saw it as a way of rebalancing the fiscal load in their favour (the towns had previously paid a higher rate in contribution tax than the countryside); in some cases the municipal authorities were even pressured by urban taxpayers into begging the government to introduce it. There is some fragmentary evidence suggesting that the excise had a stimulating effect on urban economies. In Berlin, for example, the early excise years saw a boom in construction that began to make good the appalling damage done during the war, a consequence of the fact that the excise redistributed the tax burden within the cities away from land and property towards commercial activities of all kinds.

The worst drawback of the excise was simply the fact that
only
the towns paid it; rural areas still paid the old contribution. This was not how things had been planned. The Great Elector had initially intended to levy the excise on town and countryside alike, but pressure from the provincial nobilities persuaded him to restrict it to the cities. What this meant was that urban manufacturers now faced competition from rural producers whose goods were duty-free as long as they were not sold within the excise towns. Many noble estate owners exploited this state of affairs by having merchandise carted direct to the major regional markets, where they could undercut urban competitors in their own region. The problem was reinforced in areas dependent upon trade by the fact that the excise undermined the regional competitiveness of manufacturers and traders trying to shift goods across the border – this complaint was often heard in Kleve, for example, where it was felt that the excise had cut the volume and profitability of the Rhine river trade, and in Geldern where the excise was seen as having depressed trading activity on the Maas.
⁵

The impact of the growing Prussian army – and in particular of garrisons – on the towns of Brandenburg-Prussia was ambivalent. On the one hand, the soldiers and their wives and children stationed in garrison towns represented both consumers and a supplementary workforce. Since military service was not a full-time occupation, soldiers in garrisons augmented their meagre military wage by working for townsfolk. In a garrison town like Prenzlau in the Uckermark to the north of Berlin, or Wesel in the Rhenish Duchy of Kleve, many soldiers chose, when not on duty, to work in the workshops and manufacturies of the masters in whose houses they were billeted. In this way they could earn several times their basic military wage. If they were married, their wives might seek employment in the town’s textile manufactury. The presence of soldiers thus contributed to the consolidation of a textiles manufacturing sector that was partly dependent upon cheap unguilded labour. Military service may also have helped to stabilize urban social structures by providing the most vulnerable strata of the community with a small but tolerable income.
⁶
Since wealthier burghers who preferred not to billet a soldier could pay poorer householders to take him instead, the billeting system had a small redistributive effect.

But there was a downside. Although the highly flexible billeting system used in the garrison towns worked astonishingly well, there were also many incidents of tension between householders and billeted servicemen. The presence in the city of substantial numbers of men who were subject to the authority of the military courts generated jurisdictional disputes. Military commanders sometimes succumbed to the temptation to flaunt the municipal authorities by requisitioning supplies from civilian sources or forcing local burghers to serve in the guards. The low-wage labour provided by off-duty soldiers undercut craft apprentices in workshops where troops were not employed, sowing tension within the ranks of the city’s incorporated professions.
⁷
In lean times, when additional work was hard to come by, the dependants of garrison soldiers might be seen begging on the streets.
⁸
Soldiers, with their privileged knowledge of the fortifications surrounding the city, were also involved in the smuggling of goods across the excise boundaries.
⁹
More ominously, one scholar has suggested that the ‘militarisation of civic society led to an arbitrary and little-regulated domination of garrison cities by the army, fostering an atmosphere of passivity among the burgher population and magistracies’.
¹⁰

This argument should not be pushed too far. Soldiers were certainly
a familiar sight on the streets of garrison towns and a crucial ingredient in the social scene at all levels – from the tavern to the patrician salon. But there is little evidence that this involved the permeation of urban civil society with militarist values or patterns of comportment. The conscription system established in Prussia allowed for a wide range of exemptions freeing young men of the burgher classes from the legal obligation to serve. These included not only the sons of upper-middleclass fathers, who were expected to pursue an academic degree or a career in trade or economic management, but also the sons of master artisans in various privileged trades, who were trained to work in their father’s trade. It has been estimated that across the Hohenzollern lands, some 1.7 million men benefited from such exemptions.
¹¹

The eighteenth-century peacetime Brandenburg-Prussian military was not, in any case, an institution capable of transforming the outlook and sensibility of its own recruits through systematic socialization and indoctrination. The military in the eighteenth-century towns was porous and loosely organized. Basic training lasted for less than a year (its duration was locally determined and varied widely from place to place), and even during this phase, soldiers were not ‘de-civilianized’ through isolation from the society around them. On the contrary: if they were married, they lived in barracks with their wives and other dependants – the military was not yet the exclusively masculine domain it would later become. (Indeed, marriage was encouraged for foreign recruits as a way of binding them more firmly to the Prussian service.
¹²
) If they were unmarried, they were expected to find lodgings with burghers. As for those soldiers who wished to remain in service after completion of their basic training, we have seen that their military duties consumed so little of their time that they were able to supplement their income through various forms of casual labour. Some soldiers picked up extra pocket money by standing guard duty in lieu of others who were off working for wages. It is clear that a symbiosis did evolve between military personnel and town populations,
¹³
just as large numbers of student lodgers made a distinctive contribution to the social mix and local economy of university towns. But the soldiers no more ‘militarized’ their garrison towns than the students ‘academicized’ theirs. There were, of course, disputes between town councils and military authorities (just as there were between burghers and students), but these mostly demonstrate the readiness of ‘civilian’ authorities to protest when they
saw local commanders overstepping the boundaries of their authority.