Iron Kingdom : The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (80 page)

The United Diet was controversial even before it met. There was a small chorus of moderate conservative enthusiasts, but they were drowned out by the roar of liberal critique. Most liberals felt that the arrangements outlined in the Patent fell far short of their legitimate expectations. ‘We asked you for bread and you gave us a stone!’ thundered the Silesian liberal Heinrich Simon in a polemical essay published – to avoid the Prussian censors – in Saxon Leipzig. Theodor von Schön took the view that the delegates should use the opening session to declare themselves incompetent to act as a general diet and demand a new election. If the Patent was offensive to liberals, it also alarmed the hard-line conservatives, who saw it opening the door to a full-blown constitutional settlement. Many lesser landowning noblemen – even conservative ones – were put off by the special status accorded to the higher nobility; the preponderance of Silesian and Westphalian family names in the upper house also irritated the provincial deputies of the older provinces.
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And yet, at the same time, the announcement of the United Diet triggered a further expansion of political expectations.

On Sunday 11 April 1847 – a cold, grey, rainy Berlin day – a crowd of provincial delegates numbering over 600 was herded into the White Hall of the royal palace for the inaugural ceremony of the United Diet. The king’s opening speech, delivered without notes over more than half an hour, was a warning shot. Infuriated by the reception of his Patent, the king was in no mood for compromise. ‘There is no power on earth,’ he announced, ‘that can succeed in making me transform the natural relationship between prince and people [… ] into a conventional constitutional relationship, and I will never allow a written piece of paper to come between the Lord God in Heaven and this land.’ The speech closed with a reminder that the diet was no legislative parliament. It had been convened for a specific purpose, namely to approve new taxes and a state loan, but its future depended upon the will and judgement of the king. Its task was emphatically not to ‘represent opinions’. He would
reconvene the diet, he told the deputies, only if he considered it ‘good and useful, and if this Diet offers me proof that I can do so without injuring the rights of the crown’.
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In the event, the deliberations of the diet were to prove the hard-line conservatives right. For the first time, Prussian liberals of every stripe found themselves performing together on the same stage. They mounted a campaign to transform the diet into a proper legislature – by securing the right to reconvene at regular intervals, by demanding the power to approve all laws, by protecting it against arbitrary action on the part of the state authorities, by sweeping away what remained of corporate discrimination. Unless these demands were granted, they insisted, the diet could not approve the government’s spending plans. For liberal politicians from the regions, this was an exhilarating chance to socialize and exchange ideas with like-minded colleagues from across the kingdom. A liberal partisan culture began to emerge.

The Rhenish industrialist and railway entrepreneur David Hansemann had been a deputy in the Rhenish provincial diet since 1843 and was a leading figure in Rhenish liberal circles. He took care to procure a large apartment near the royal palace, where he hosted meetings with liberal delegations from other provinces. Parties of liberals also congregated at the hotel Russischer Hof for political discussions, debates and general conviviality. Liberal deputies were urged to arrive in the capital at least eight days in advance of the first session, so that there would be time for preliminary meetings. The importance of this experience in a state where the press and political networks were still fragmented along regional lines can scarcely be overstated. It fired liberals with a sense of confidence and purpose; it also taught them a first intense lesson in the virtues of political cooperation and compromise. As one conservative ruefully observed, the liberals regularly worked ‘late into the night’ coordinating their strategy for key political debates.
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By this means they succeeded in retaining the initiative in much chamber debate.

The conservatives, by contrast, were something of a shambles. Throughout much of the proceedings they seemed on the defensive, reduced to reacting to liberal proposals and provocations. As the champions of provincial diversity and local autonomy, they found it harder to work together on an all-Prussian plane. For many conservative noblemen, their politics were inextricably bound up with elite corporate status – this made it difficult to establish a common platform with potential
allies of more humble station. Whereas the liberals could agree on certain broad principles (constitutionalism, representation, freedom of the press), the conservatives seemed worlds away from a clearly defined joint platform, beyond a vague intuition that gradual evolution on the basis of tradition was preferable to radical change.
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The conservatives lacked leadership and were slow to form partisan factions. ‘One defeat follows another,’ Leopold von Gerlach remarked on 7 May, after four weeks of sessions.
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In purely constitutional terms, the diet was a non-event. It was not permitted to transform itself into a parliamentary legislature. Before it was adjourned on 26 June 1847, it rejected the government’s request for a state loan to finance the eastern railway, declaring that it would cooperate only when the king granted it the right to meet at regular intervals. ‘In money matters,’ the liberal entrepreneur and deputy David Hansemann famously quipped, ‘geniality has its limits.’ Yet in terms of political culture the United Diet was of enormous importance. Unlike its provincial predecessors, it was a public body whose proceedings were recorded and published, so that the debates in the chamber resounded across the political landscape of the kingdom. The diet demonstrated in the most conclusive way the exhaustion of the monarch’s strategy of containment. It also signalled the imminence – the inevitability – of real constitutional change. How exactly that change would be brought about, however, remained unclear.

In his verse satire
Germany – a Winter’s Tale
, the poet, essayist, wit and radical satirist Heinrich Heine described his return to Prussia after thirteen years in Parisian exile. Heine hailed from a modest Jewish mercantile family in Düsseldorf, attended lectures by Hegel in Berlin, and converted to Christianity as a young adult in order to clear any obstacles to a career in the bureaucracy, a reminder of the assimilatory pressure exerted on Jewish subjects by Prussia’s ‘Christian state’. In 1831, having abandoned his ambition to enter state employment and acquired a considerable reputation as a poet and writer, he left Prussia
to work as a journalist in Paris. In 1835, thanks to his outspoken critical commentaries on contemporary German politics, the Confederal Diet issued a nationwide ban on the publication and circulation of his books. A literary career inside the Confederation was now out of the question.
Germany – A Winter’s Tale
was published in 1844, following a brief and unhappy visit to his native Rhineland. The first Prussians to welcome him home were of course the customs officials, who made a thorough search of his luggage. In a sequence of sparkling quatrains, Heine evokes his experience at the Prussian border:

They snuffled and burrowed through trousers and shirts

And handkerchieves – nothing was missed;

They were looking for pen-nibs and trinkets and jewels

And for books on the contraband list.

You fools! If you think you’ll find anything here

You must have been sadly misled!

The contraband that travels with me

Is stored up here, in my head!

[…]

So many books are stacked in my head –

A number beyond estimation!

My head is a twittering bird’s nest of books

All liable to confiscation!

It would be absurd to deny that these verses captured something real about the Prussian state. The oppressive, humourless and pettifogging engagement of the Prussian censorship authorities with political dissent was widely lamented by freethinkers across the kingdom. In the diary of the Berlin liberal Karl Varnhagen von Ense, the burdens of censorship are a constant theme. He writes of the ‘misery of small-minded, mischievous, obstructive surveillance’, the inventiveness of the censors in devising ‘ever new provocations’, the frustrations of running a critical literary journal under the arbitrary rule of the censorship office.
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On the other hand, as even Varnhagen was aware, Prussian censorship was laughably ineffective. Its real purpose, he observed in August 1837, was not to police popular reading habits, but to justify itself to the rest of the royal administration: ‘The people can read what it wishes,
regardless of the content; but everything that might come before the king is carefully vetted.’
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It was virtually impossible, in any case, to control the traffic in contraband print. The political fragmentation of German Europe was a disadvantage from the censors’ point of view, for it meant that works banned in one state could easily be printed in another and smuggled across the lightly guarded borders. The radical Württemberg card seller Thomas Beck frequently crossed the border into the Prussian Rhineland with sheaves of his forbidden publications concealed within his hat.
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‘I am now a large-scale importer of banned books into Prussia,’ Friedrich Engels, the radical son of a pious Barmen textile manufacturer, wrote to his friend Wilhelm Graeber from the city of Bremen in November 1839. ‘Börne’s
Francophobe
in four copies, the
Letters from Paris
by same, six volumes, Venedey’s
Prussia and Prussianism
, most strictly prohibited, in five copies, are lying ready for dispatch to Barmen.’
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Confederal bans on books such as Jakob Venedey’s
Prussia and Prussianism
, an angry tract against the Prussian administration by a Rhenish liberal, were ineffective because German booksellers routinely concealed their contraband stocks from the authorities.
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Songs were even harder to pin down, since they took up so little paper and could circulate without printed text. The politicization of popular culture confronted government with a mode of dissent that could never be effectively policed, because it was informal, protean, omnipresent.

The figure of the Prussian soldier, with his arrogant, affected, supercilious pose, symbolized for many, especially in the radical milieu, the worst features of the polity. It was in the city of Aachen, once the ancient capital of Charlemagne, now a sleepy Rhenish textile centre, that the returning Heinrich Heine caught his first glimpse of the Prussian military:

I wandered about in this dull little nest

For about an hour or more

Saw Prussian military once again

They looked much the same as before.

[…]

Still the same wooden, pedantic demeanour

The same rectangular paces

And the usual frozen mask of disdain

Imprinted on each of their faces.

They still strut so stiffly about the street

So groomed and so strictly moustached,

As if they had somehow swallowed the stick

With which they used to be thrashed.

Popular antipathy to the military varied in intensity across the kingdom. It was strongest in the Rhineland, where it fed on local patriotic resentment of Protestant Berlin. In many Rhenish towns, tension between solders and civilians – particularly young male civilians of the artisan and labouring classes – was a part of day-to-day life. Soldiers standing watch before public buildings made easy targets for young men on a night out; many chance violent encounters between soldiers and civilians occurred in or near taverns.
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Troops were also hated for their role in law enforcement. Prussian towns were very lightly policed by tiny contingents of ill-trained constables whose official duties included a wide range of tasks, such as attending to the orderly disposal of ‘raw materials and waste’, the cleaning of ‘streets and drains’, the clearing of obstacles, the removal of dung, the delivery of summonses, the ‘notification of official announcements by hand-bell’, and so on.
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The feebleness of civilian policing meant that the Prussian authorities were often forced to fall back on the military as a means of restoring order. In cases of serious tumult, the few local gendarmes generally made themselves scarce and waited for military assistance while the crowd, sensing its power, took the initiative – this is precisely what happened at Peterswaldau and Langenbielau in 1844. Lacking nuanced techniques of crowd management, military commanders tended to progress abruptly from verbal warnings to mounted charges with sabre blows or even gunfire. But this was not a specifically Prussian problem. In England and France too, the use of military units to restore order remained the norm. And the extreme violence meted out at Langenbielau in 1844 was no more typical of Prussian conditions than the Peterloo massacre of 1819 was of policing methods in Great Britain.