Iron Kingdom : The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (45 page)

Civility was important, too, because it helped to iron out the asymmetries of status that otherwise threatened to cramp discussion. Freemasonry was not, as one historian of the movement has claimed, an ‘organisation of the emergent German middle classes’.
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It attracted a mixed elite constituency that included members of the nobility and educated or propertied commoners in almost equal measure. Although some German lodges began life by opening their doors exclusively to one or the other of these two groups, most of these soon merged. In such mixed society, the observance of transparent and egalitarian rules of engagement was essential if status differences were not to cripple debate from the outset.

The conversation that powered the Prussian enlightenment also took place in print. One of the distinctive features of the periodical literature of this era was its discursive, dialogical character. Many of the articles printed in the
Berlin Monthly
(
Berlinische Monatsschrift
), for example, the most distinguished press organ of the German late enlightenment, were in fact letters to the editor from members of the public. Readers were also treated to extensive reviews of recent publications, and sometimes also to lengthy replies by authors with a bone to pick with their reviewers. Occasionally the journal would call for views on a specific question – this was the case, for example, with the famous discussion on the theme ‘What is enlightenment?’ that began with a query posted by the theologian Johann Friedrich Zöllner in the pages of the
Berlin Monthly
in December 1783.
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There was no permanent staff of journalists, nor were most of the articles in each issue directly commissioned by the journal. As the editors, Gedike and Biester, made clear in the foreword to the first edition, they depended upon interested members of the public to ‘enrich’ the journal with unsolicited contributions.
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The
Berlin Monthly
was thus above all a forum in print that operated along similar lines to the associational networks of the towns and cities. It was not conceived as fodder for an essentially passive constituency of cultural consumers. It aimed to provide the public with the means of reflecting upon itself and its foremost preoccupations.

The resonance of the
Berlin Monthly
and other journals like it was greatly enhanced by the proliferation across northern Germany of reading societies.
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The purpose of these groups was to pool money for the purchase of subscriptions and books in a society where public libraries were as yet unknown. Some were relatively informal gatherings with no permanent home that met in the house of one of the better-off members. Others were reading circles specializing in the dissemination of specific journals. In some towns, local book dealers ran a library service that allowed readers to gain temporary access to new publications without paying the full purchase price. Associations of this kind multiplied at a remarkable rate during the last decades of the eighteenth century. Whereas there were only about fifty of them in the German states in 1780, the number increased to around 200 during the next ten years. They tended increasingly to meet in premises rented or bought for their own use that provided a congenial setting for discussion and debate. Statutes ensured that every member joined the meeting on equal terms
and that the imperatives of politeness and reciprocal respect were observed. Parlour games and gambling were prohibited. In all, the German reading societies encompassed a membership of between fifteen and twenty thousand.

Bookshops were another important venue for enlightened sociability. The main room of Johann Jakob Kanter’s bookshop in Königsberg, founded in 1764, was a large, attractive, bright space that served as the city’s ‘intellectual stock exchange’. It was a
café littéraire
in which men and women, young and old, professors and students could leaf through catalogues, read newspapers and buy, order or borrow books. (Since Kant owned only 450 books when he died in 1804, it is likely that, like other intellectuals in the city, he borrowed many of his books from Kanter.) Here, too, patrons were expected to cultivate a respectful and civil tone in their dealings with each other. Kanter not only sold books, he also produced a compendious catalogue of publications (which ran to 488 pages in 1771), a bi-weekly newspaper and various political tracts – including a blistering essay attacking Frederick the Great by the young Königsberg philosopher Johann Georg Hamann.
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Beyond the reading societies, lodges and patriotic associations was a network of other gatherings: literary and philosophical associations and learned groups specializing in natural science, medicine or languages. There were also more informal circles, such as the group of writers and aspirant poets around the Berlin Cadet School master Karl Wilhelm Ramler, whose close associates included the publisher Friedrich Nicolai, the dramatist Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the patriot poet Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim, the biblical scholar Moses Mendelssohn, the jurist Johann Georg Sulzer and many other prominent figures in the Berlin enlightenment. Ramler belonged to at least one of the many Masonic lodges in Berlin and was a member of several clubs; he was also a poet in his own right – albeit of third-rate verse. What contemporaries cherished in him was above all his gift for friendship and his lively, courteous sociability. After his death in April 1798, an obituary recalled that Ramler, who remained unmarried until his death, had lived ‘only for his art and his friends, whom he loved dearly without making a show of it. He had many [friends] in all walks of life, especially among scholars and businessmen.’
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Another analogous figure was the patriot activist Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim. He too was unmarried, entertained literary aspirations
and used his financially secure position as an ecclesiastical official in the city of Halberstadt to support a circle of aspiring young writers and poets in the city. Like Ramler, Gleim maintained an extensive correspondence with many of the luminaries of contemporary Prussian letters. The sociable conversation that drove the enlightenment in Prussia was not sustained by statutes and subscriptions alone; it owed much of its intensity and inclusiveness to men like Ramler and Gleim, for whom the unselfish cultivation of a wide circle of friends was a life’s work. Writers, poets, editors, club, society and lodge members, readers and subscribers, these were the ‘practitioners of civil society’ whose engagement with the great questions of the day, literary, scientific and political, helped to create a lively and diverse public sphere in the Prussian lands.
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It would be a mistake to think of this emergent public sphere either as a supine, passive mass of apolitical burghers, or as a seething force of opposition and latent rebellion. One of the most striking things about the social networks that sustained the Prussian enlightenment was their proximity to, and indeed partial identity with, the state. This was in part a matter of the intellectual tradition out of which the Prussian enlightenment grew. The links with cameralism, the ‘science’ of state administration established at the Prussian universities during the reign of Frederick III/I, and further consolidated under Frederick William I, were only gradually severed. Then there was the social location of the Prussian intelligentsia. Whereas men of independent means or free-lance writers played an important role in contemporary French letters, the dominant group within the Prussian enlightenment was that of the civil servants. A study of the
Berlin Monthly
has shown that of all contributors to the journal over the thirteen years of its existence (1783–96), 15 per cent were noblemen, 27 per cent were professors and school teachers, 20 per cent were senior officials, 17 per cent were clergy, and 3.3 per cent were army officers. In other words, more than half of the contributors were in paid state employment.
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A striking example of the convergence between the state and elements of civil society was the Berlin Wednesday Club, a ‘private society of friends of learning’ that met regularly during the years 1783 to 1797 (virtually the same years as the
Berlin Monthly
was in existence). The members of this group, which numbered first twelve and later twenty-four participants, included senior officials such as the minister of state Johann Friedrich Count von Struensee and the legal officials Karl Gottlieb
Svarez and Ernst Klein; among other members were Johann Biester, who was both editor of the
Berlin Monthly
and secretary of the Wednesday Club, and the publisher and sometime patriot activist Friedrich Nicolai. Nicolai’s old friend Moses Mendelssohn, the by now renowned Jewish scholar and philosopher, was an honorary member. Meetings were held in the home of one of the group. Although discussions sometimes focused on scientific topics of general interest, most meetings were concerned with contemporary political issues. Debates were often heated, but an effort was made to observe the forms of civilized discussion, namely mutual respect and reciprocity, impartiality, and a commitment to eschewing opinion and vacuous generalizations in favour of rigorous fact-based interpretation. Preparation for a meeting began with the pre-circulation of a treatise on some matter of government administration, finance or legislation. This served as the basis for debate. Comments could also be submitted in writing. Essays that had been debated by the society sometimes later appeared in the
Berlin Monthly
.

It is difficult to imagine a better illustration of the fundamentally conversational character of enlightened literary culture. The Wednesday Club could hardly be described as an institution of the ‘public sphere’, since its meetings were shrouded in the strictest secrecy – an essential measure, given that several of the group were serving ministers. Yet it does demonstrate the kinds of synergy that were becoming possible between the informal networks of civil society and the state during the last years of Frederick II’s reign.

It was easy for progressive scholars, writers and thinkers to see the state as a partner in the enlightened project, because the sovereign himself was a renowned champion of its values. Immanuel Kant’s suggestion that the phrases ‘age of enlightenment’ and ‘age of Frederick’ were synonymous was no pious platitude.
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Of all the monarchs of eighteenth-century Europe, Frederick came closest to personifying the values and outlook of enlightenment. He joined a Masonic lodge in 1738, while he was still crown prince. He was, as we have seen, a sceptic in religious questions and an exponent of religious tolerance. When asked in June 1740 whether a Catholic subject should be permitted to enjoy civic rights in the city of Frankfurt an der Oder, he replied that ‘all religions are just as good as each other, as long as the people who practise them are honest, and even if Turks and heathens came and wanted to populate
this country, then we would build mosques and temples for them.’
¹⁴
He gathered about him some of the leading figures of the French enlightenment. Voltaire in particular, with whom Frederick sustained a long if intermittently fractious conversation, was for many years the foremost literary star of the enlightenment and his close association with the Prussian king was famous throughout the continent. Frederick’s own writings were composed in imitation of the sparkling but cool and detached tone of the contemporary French masters.

Then there were those early sovereign acts by which Frederick revealed his readiness to translate ideas and convictions into practice. On his accession to the throne, he ordered that the journal
Die Berlinischen Nachrichten
was no longer to be subject to censorship, and that the rationalist philosopher Christian Wolff, who had been driven away from the University of Halle by the Pietists in the 1720s, should be recalled forthwith.
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Even more striking was his decision, against the advice of the leading Prussian jurist of the era, Samuel von Cocceji, to suspend the use of judicial torture in his lands. Torture was still widely used by the European judicial systems to secure confessions from suspects. In 1745, Zedler’s
Universallexikon
, one of the canonical encyclopaedias of the German enlightenment, defended the use of torture as an investigative tool, and the practice was retained in the
Theresiana
, the great codex of Austrian law published in 1768.
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But on 3 June 1740, only three days after his father’s death, Frederick ordered that torture was no longer to be used, except in a small range of extreme cases involving crimes against king or country, or instances of multiple murder where robust interrogation was required to secure the identity of unknown accomplices. In a further order of 1754, Frederick extended this ban into a blanket prohibition, on the grounds that torture was not only ‘cruel’ (
grausam
) but also unreliable as a means of getting at the truth, since there was always the danger that suspects would implicate themselves in order to avoid further torture.
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This radical measure left many judges and legal officials complaining that there now existed no means of extracting a confession – the queen of proofs under all the
ancien régime
legal systems – from recalcitrant offenders. A new evidential doctrine had to be improvised to cover cases where there was a plenitude of evidence, but no confession.

Frederick also reduced the number of crimes punishable by death and made a small but significant change to the arrangements for execution
by the wheel. This gruesome practice involved breaking the body of the offender on the scaffold with blows from a cartwheel and expressed a characteristically early-modern understanding of public executions as a quasi-religious ritual centred on the scourging of the malefactor in preparation for his or her departure into the afterlife. Frederick ordered that in future executions of this kind, the offender was to be strangled by the executioner out of view of the crowd
before
the application of the wheel. His intention was to preserve the deterrent effect of the punishment while doing away with the infliction of unnecessary pain.
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Here, as in the case of torture, a rational assessment of the utility of the practice was coupled with an enlightened distaste for acts of cruelty (for, if you strip the religious dimension from the torments meted out to the offender, nothing remains but cruelty). These achievements should not be downplayed – in 1766, it was still possible in France for a youth found guilty of blasphemy and the desecration of a wayside shrine to have his right arm hacked off and his tongue torn out before being burned at the stake.
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