Iron Kingdom : The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (43 page)

The mainly Polish nobility of West Prussia did not, by and large, offer any resistance to the Prussian annexation. In some areas, such as the Netze district, local landed families boycotted the homage ceremonies to the new monarch, but there were virtually no acts of outright opposition.
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Yet this did not suffice to endear the Polish nobles to Frederick, who spoke of them with contempt in numerous internal government documents. They were taxed at a higher rate in contribution than their Protestant (German) counterparts; they were forbidden to meet in county diets; they were not permitted to form a provincial credit society.
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The policies adopted by the king in his other lands to consolidate noble land ownership were inverted in the new province: Frederick actively encouraged Polish noblemen to sell up their lands and urged the provincial administration to find Protestant buyers, whether or not these were of noble stock. As a result, the proportion of noble land in bourgeois hands in West Prussia rose at almost twice the average rate across the Hohenzollern lands.
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The reason for these measures, Frederick declared, was that the Polish magnates were sucking wealth out of the country by drawing income from their West Prussian estates and spending it in Warsaw. In June 1777 he issued an ultimatum demanding that landowners with properties on both sides of the Polish border take up sole residence within West Prussia or lose their West Prussian estates.

The impact of these policies is difficult to establish with any precision. There was often more bark than bite in Frederick’s orders; little seems to have been done, for example, to implement the ultimatum of 1777. The king’s anti-nobiliary policies were in any case directed mainly at the small elite of true magnate nobles, such as the Czapskis, Potockis, Skorzowskis, Prebendows and Dabskis, who remained attached to the Warsaw court and social scene; Frederick was far less hostile to the minor Polish nobility in West Prussia and actually took steps to conserve it.
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West Prussia became a focus of energetic administrative intervention: money was set aside for the improvement of the towns, especially Bromberg and Kulm; marshes were drained; forests were cut back to open up new arable and pasture land; a new canal was built linking the river Netze with the Brahe, thereby permitting ships to transfer from the Oder to the Vistula. Frederick threw himself into countless matters of detail,
ordering, for example, that fruit trees be planted, schools founded, potatoes introduced, dikes built and cheap seed grain made available to the peasantry.
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The impact of the new regime on the peasants who made up the bulk of the population in the annexed areas was mixed. The talk of ‘liberating’ them from their former ‘Polish servitude’ was largely propaganda, since peasants in Polish Royal Prussia had already enjoyed extensive freedom of movement. On the other hand, the installation of independent judicial organs within the domains administration did provide peasants with enhanced legal protection against the caprice of landlords.
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As the rigorous fiscal regime of the Brandenburg-Prussian state was imposed, taxes naturally went up for everyone, just as they had in Silesia, though they were now more transparent and more evenly distributed. By the mid-1770s, the new province was contributing 10 per cent of Brandenburg-Prussian state revenues, a share that was fully proportional to its size and population. The major capital investments made in the province could thus largely be funded without recourse to external income.

The impact of the annexation on the regional economy is difficult to assess in the absence of precise statistics. Population growth in the urban sector was very slow; this may suggest that heavy taxation drew money away from local investment. The effort to maintain a substantial war chest ensured that much local wealth was taken permanently out of circulation. The introduction of tariffs on the Polish border inevitably caused serious disruption, since they blocked the north–south trade routes that had traditionally been the bread and butter of the towns. On the other hand, the agrarian sector benefited from the boom conditions driven by the opening up of the real estate markets and Britain’s enormous appetite for imported grain, a state of affairs reflected in the rapidly rising cash value of landed estates.

The success of the royal administration in winning the trust and loyalty of its new subjects varied from region to region. The ethnically German Protestants who formed the majority in the towns were quickly assimilated into the new system, despite some early cries of protest. Feelings among the Catholics were less favourable, despite Frederick’s repeated promises that he would respect the liberty of all Catholics to worship in the accustomed fashion. Among the Polish nobility there was, with good reason, a general feeling of distrust towards the new masters. ‘After the sovereign became Prussian,’ one observer of conditions in the
Netze district noted in 1793, ‘the Polish nobility was no longer what it had been; an element of bitterness entered its character and a distrust of Germans that will long endure.’
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Yet much depended upon one’s precise location within the social structure of the province: the new Cadet School at Kulm, for example, was popular with families of the lesser Polish nobility and after the turn of the century, we encounter many double-barrelled surnames in which the original Polish names have been paired with adopted German equivalents – Rosenberg-Gruszcy
ń
ski, Hoike-Truszczy
ń
ski and so on.
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Among the Kashubian peasants and landlords who farmed the poor sandy soils in the north of the province, there is even some indirect evidence – in the form of Polish-language anecdote collections – for participation in the fashionable cult of Frederick the Great.

Perhaps the people most completely won over to the promises and propaganda of the new regime were the Prussian administrators themselves. Again and again in the documents relating to the administration of West Prussia, we find references to the need to set local institutional and economic life on a ‘Prussian footing’.
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The term ‘Prussian’ occurs as an antonym to the allegedly Polish vices of servitude, disorder, lassitude. The idea that Prussianness stood for certain abstract virtues acquired a sharper focus in this protracted encounter with subjects from outside the ambit of the Holy Roman Empire. It has often been observed that the experience of colonial government in India and elsewhere gave rise to a ritualized enactment of Britishness that found full articulation only as part of a discourse of moral and cultural superiority. In the same way, an overwhelmingly negative perception of native Polish traditions blended with the sanguine ameliorism of the enlightenment to heighten confidence in the distinctive merits of the ‘Prussian way’.

What kind of state did Frederick II bequeath to his successors? ‘The state’ was one of the central themes in Frederick’s political writings. His father, Frederick William I, tended, as we saw in
chapter 5
, to legitimate his policies in terms of the need to consolidate his own ‘sovereignty’. By contrast, Frederick insisted upon the primacy of the state as an abstract structure quite separate from his own person. ‘I have held it to be my
duty,’ he wrote in the Political Testament of 1752, ‘to work for the good of the state and to do this in all domains.’
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‘I have devoted my life to the state,’ he told his brother Henry in February 1776. The state represented, in a subjective sense, a vicarious form of immortality: whereas the death of the king would extinguish his consciousness, rendering his hopes for the future meaningless, the state would endure. ‘I am thinking only of the state,’ Frederick wrote, ‘for I know only too well that everything – even if the sky should crash in upon the earth – will be a matter of absolute indifference to me from the moment of my death.’
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Taken to its logical conclusion, the primacy of the state implied a relativization, a demotion, of the ruler’s status. Nowhere is this more pointedly expressed than in the Political Testament of 1752, where Frederick observed that ‘the ruler is the first servant of the state. He is paid well so that he can maintain the dignity of his office. But he is required in return to work effectively for the well-being of the state.’
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This idea was not new – the idea of the sovereign as the ‘
premier domestique
’ of the state can be found in the writings of Fénelon, Bossuet and Bayle.
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Samuel Pufendorf, biographer of the Great Elector and the most influential German student of Hobbes, defined the sovereign in functional terms as the guarantor of the state’s collective interest. The same line of argument runs through the works of the sometime professor of philosophy at Halle Christian Wolff, whose works Frederick read with admiration as crown prince. Wolff celebrated the ascendancy of an abstract legal and bureaucratic state with wide-ranging responsibilities for health, education, labour protection and security.
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But no Prussian dynast had ever made this concept so central to his understanding of the sovereign office. It explains (or at least rationalizes) his distaste for the Frederician personality cult and his renunciation of the conventional trappings of dynastic kingship. His insistence on wearing a worn blue officer’s coat, stained at the front with long streaks of Spanish snuff, signified the self-subordination of the monarch to the political and social order he represented.

So completely did Frederick personify the idea of the state, that prominent officials came to see serving the monarch and serving the state as one and the same thing. In his inaugural address to the new chamber in Glogau (Silesia), the Provincial President Ludwig Wilhelm Count von Münchow declared that the highest aim of the Prussian administration must be ‘to serve the best interest of the King and the country without
any ulterior motive’; ‘no day – indeed, if possible, not even an hour – should pass without our having rendered some service to the king.’
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The king was thus more than an employer; he was a model whose values and way of life were internalized by senior civil servants. We get a sense of what this could mean for an individual official from the service diary of Friedrich Anton von Heinitz, head of the Mines and Foundries Department of the General Directory. Heinitz was not a Prussian but a Saxon who had entered Frederick’s service in 1776 at the age of fifty-two. In a diary entry dated 2 June 1782, Heinitz noted that one should view hard work in the public cause as an act of divine worship. ‘You have as your example the King; who can match him? He is industrious, places obligation before recreation, sees first to his business [… ]. There is no other monarch like him, none so abstemious, so consistent, none who is so adept at dividing his time…’
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Frederick also projected the abstract authority of the state through architecture. Nowhere is this idea more eloquently realized than in the ensemble of public buildings that bordered the Forum Fridericianum (now the Bebelplatz) at the beginning of Unter den Linden in the centre of Berlin. One of Frederick’s first acts as king was to order the court architect Georg Wenceslaus von Knobelsdorff to build an opera house on the eastern side of the square. The resulting theatre was one of the largest in Europe, capable of seating 2,000 people. Flanking the opera house on the southern side was St Hedwig’s Cathedral, built in honour of the king’s Catholic subjects – a remarkable monument to inter-confessional tolerance in the heart of a Lutheran city. To drive the message home, the portico of the church was modelled on the syncretic Pantheon of ancient Rome. In the 1770s, a new and capacious royal library was erected on the western side.

There were, to be sure, elements of traditional monarchical self-representation in these projects. But the Forum was also a highly conscious articulation of the cultural purposes of the state.
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Plans and elevations of the new buildings and of the square as a whole were widely circulated; they were the subject of sometimes controversial discussion in the Berlin journals and salons. Both the opera and the library remained open to the general public after their completion.
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Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the whole ensemble was the absence of a royal palace. Frederick had originally intended to include one, but he lost interest in the idea after the Second Silesian War. The opera house was
thus the first building of its kind north of the Alps not to be physically joined to a royal palace. The royal library was likewise a freestanding structure, highly unusual for the period. The Forum was, in other words, a
Residenzplatz
without a
Residenz
(palace); the contrast with virtually every European square of this kind was not lost on visitors.
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In architecture, as in the person of the king, the representation of the Prussian state was uncoupled from that of the Prussian dynasty.

If the state were to wean itself from the need for constant dictatorial interventions by the sovereign, it needed to have a coherent fabric of law; here too Frederick practised what he preached, rationalizing the court system and setting the leading jurists of the day to the work of constructing a general law code for the Prussian lands. Though unfinished at his death, the Prussian General Code of Law (1794) would later serve as a kind of constitution for the kingdom of Prussia.
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In his work towards the post-war reconstruction of Prussia, Frederick was a conscientious servant of the general interest – villages devastated during the wars were rebuilt in accordance with the principle later set out in the General Code that the state is obliged to ‘compensate’ those who have been ‘forced to sacrifice their special rights and advantages to the welfare of the generality’.
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By the same token, as we have seen, Frederick accepted that the state had an obligation to war-orphans and invalids, and institutional care for these groups was expanded during his reign.