The Historical Journal, 42, 4 (1999), pp. 1155-1160 Printed in the United Kingdom © 1999 Cambridge University Press

The Historical Journal, 42, 4 (1999), pp. 1155-1160 Printed in the United Kingdom © 1999 Cambridge University Press

REFORM AND INERTIA: THE POLITICS OF CHANGE IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY GERMANY

Restaurationssystem und Reformpolitik: Suddeutschland und Preufien im Vergleich'. Edited by Hans-Peter Ullmann and Clemens Zimmermann. Munich: R. Oldenbourg 1906 Pp. 272. ISBN: 3-486-168-5. DM 98.

Von Wien nach Koniggrdtz: die Sicherheitspolitik des Deutschen Bundes im europaischen Gleichgewicht, 1815-1866. By Jiirgen Angelow. Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1996 Pp 418 ISBN 3-486-56143-X. DM 88.

Stadt und Burgertum in Frankfurt am Main. Ein besonderer Weg von der standischen zur modernen Burgergesellschqft, 1760-1314. By Ralf Roth. Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1996 Pp 804 ISBN 3-486-56188-X. DM 128.

In the past two hundred years, different generations have drawn wildly divergent conclusions as to the achievements and scope of the Prussian reform movement and the role it played in the development of state and society in nineteenth-century Germany. The conflicting nature of these different conclusions becomes immediately apparent on a visit to the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin. Central Berlin is littered with monuments to the Prussian reformers. Indeed, a monument to the Freiherr vom Stein stands almost opposite the museum, celebrating his emancipation of the serfs and other enlightened reforms. Such monuments reflect the verdict of the old school of German historians that the reforms crucially helped to liberalize and modernize Prussia, thereby paving the way for kleindeutsch unification in 1871. A very different view of German history is presented by the display in the Deutsches Historisches Museum itself, where the Prussian reform movement barely merits a mention. Instead, the museum display is more interested in developments elsewhere in Germany during this period. This radical reassessment of the reform era is best understood as a somewhat extreme response to modern trends in the historiography of nineteenth-century Germany.

On the one hand, historians have questioned the extent to which 1806 really marked a radical break from the past, stressing the continuities between the reform era and earlier reform initiatives. On the other hand, historians have emphasized the partial nature of the Prussian reforms, and the extent to which the reformers failed to achieve their goals. More generally, historians have consciously rejected the traditional Prusso- centric approach to German history, recognizing that the Prussian experience was by no means typical of the rest of Germany. This reassessment of the reform era in terms of both Prussian and German history has transformed our understanding of its significance.

These developments are the subject of Restaurationssystem und Reformpolitik, a recent collection of essays edited by Hans-Peter Ullmann and Clemens Zimmermann. The book questions the periodization of early nineteenth-century German history into 'reform' and 'restoration' eras. It asks how far reform activities continued after 1815-19, whether all states suffered equally from the conservative turn of events, and how justified we are in interpreting this period in terms of the opposition between'state and society and between the proponents of change and those who defended the status quo. In answering these questions, the book traces the progress of government-led reform in six key areas: constitutional politics, administrative structures, financial policy, economic modernization, the role of the nobility, and education. In each case, complementary pairs of essays covering reforms in Prussia and in the Rheinbund states enable the reader to place the Prussian experience in a wider context. It is perhaps regrettable that the comparison between Prussia and the South German states is never anything more than implicit. A more general essay drawing out the parallels and differences between the two experiences might have been a useful addition to the collection.

By and large, however, the book's tight structure makes for a comprehensive and very coherent whole. It is an extremely useful addition to the literature on the reform era and its aftermath, which crystallizes our understanding of the period in the light of recent research. The book offers new insights into well-worn topics, as well as providing an excellent general introduction to the reforms themselves and to some of the historical debates surrounding them. Particularly stimulating are the two essays on constitutional reform by Winfried Speitkamp and Herbert Obernaus, Eckart Schremmer's essay on Prussian finances, and Hartmut Harnisch's essay on Prussian economic policy. In general, the Prussian essays are more thought-provoking than those on South Germany. These suffer from having to cover developments in several states at the same time and sometimes lapse into simply listing the reforms in various different states in turn, rather than analysing them more fully. Nevertheless, the decision to examine Prussia in greater depth rightly reflects Prussia's greater geographical and historical importance in Germany. It therefore serves as a useful corrective to the tendency to over-compensate for the Prusso-centric approach of German historians in earlier generations.

Previous attempts to differentiate between reforms in Prussia and in the South German states have contrasted the combination of economic modernization and constitutional backwardness in the former with that of economic backwardness and constitutional modernization in the latter. One of the most interesting aspects of this collection is the more complex view it provides of this dichotomy. For instance, Christof Dipper rejects the charge of comprehensive economic backwardness in the South German states. Instead, he contrasts the slow pace of agricultural reform and belated abolition of guild restrictions with modernizing economic policy in other areas, notably the South German states' early entry into the J^ollverein and enthusiastic construction of state railways. Conversely, Herbert Obernaus questions the assumption that con­stitutional reform was blocked in Prussia after 1819. He argues that the Prussian Provinziallandtage represented a genuine effort on behalf of the crown prince and others to reform the constitution along standisch lines. Hartmut Harnisch's essay on Prussian economic policy provides possibly the most interesting example of this reassessment of constitutional and economic developments. He argues that the Prussian aristocracy did not emerge victorious from its conflict with the reformers despite the financial gains of some landowners as a result of the emancipation of the serfs. In fact, Prussian agrarian reforms forced the aristocracy on the defensive. The Provinziallandtage certainly did not represent a return to the standisch society of former times, since their competences were modest and they could do nothing to prevent the bureaucracy from furthering economic modernization at state level.

As a whole, the book is intended to challenge the notion that the ' restoration era' was a time of stagnation and repression. In this sense, it perhaps draws its inspiration from the way in which historians like Wolfram Siemann and Hans-Ulrich Wehler have

recently reassessed the 1850s and 1860s, arguing that these were decades not merely of 'reaction' but also of radical change. Such an approach is probably more suited to the later period. After all, during the 1820s and 1830s censorship of the press and of political activities in general was rigidly enforced, Prussia herself had no constitution and industrialization was barely under way in most states. Fortunately, the essays in this collection do not fall into the revisionist trap of simply up-turning previous historical judgements. Where necessary, the authors readily admit the lack of reform in some areas. This is most striking in Bernd Wunder's blunt statement that there was no reform at all of administrative structures in Vormarz Prussia. By and large, the essays simply present a more nuanced picture of the restoration, as a period in which the longer-term impact of the reform era began to be felt in political and economic terms, forcing powerful reactionary elements on to the defensive and, where necessary, prompting further reforms. This picture might be refined still further through examining developments in other states in North Germany apart from Prussia. In Saxony, for instance, very few reforms were implemented in the Napoleonic era, but the revolution of 1830 brought sweeping change. The years that followed saw the introduction of a constitution and of municipal and local self government, Saxon membership of the Zollverein, the emancipation of the serfs, and the construction of Germany's first long­distance railway between Leipzig and Dresden.

Military reform was, of course, a crucial area of change during the Napoleonic era. The collection's failure to address this issue is its most glaring omission. Up to a point, this failure is made good by Jurgen Angelow's recent study of the security policy of the German Confederation: Von Wien nach Koniggratz. Angelow asserts that this is the first serious study of military policy at confederal level, and as such it is a welcome contribution to the literature. The book opens with an analysis of the Confederations' military architecture and the negotiations which formulated it. Angelow then investigates the diplomatic significance of various international crises and the impact of these crises on the Confederation's security arrangements: the revolutions of 1830, the Rhine crisis of 1840, the revolutions of 1848/9, the Crimean war, Italian unification, the Schleswig-Holstein crisis and war of 1863/4, ^anci the collapse of the German Confederation in 1866.

As its title indicates, the book is an attempt to understand the development of military organization within the German Confederation primarily in terms of the changing balance of power in Europe. This approach reflects the role of the German Confederation as a crucial element in that balance of power, constructed to maintain what Angelow terms the 'Wiener Ordnung' both within Germany and in Europe as a whole. Such an approach is clearly justified, but it proves quite problematic in practice since Angelow cannot avoid covering material which has already been dealt with extensively elsewhere.

The approach is most successful for the earlier period. Angelow argues that the federal and decentralized structures of the German Confederation were deliberately chosen at the expense of more centralized national models and that such structures were not ill-suited to the demands of their time. The years after 1815 were a period of peaceful collaboration between the European great powers, in which international congresses resolved potential crises and the Concert of Europe successfully maintained the restoration order, supported by the Quadruple and Holy Alliances. By and large, the military constitutions of other European powers were not oriented towards mobilization, and consequently the unwieldy nature of the German army was less combined traditional corporate structures with more modern elements. As a result, the municipal institutions of Frankfurt drew on a sufficiently broad social basis for the town to overcome the internal conflicts created by modernization, enforcing the need for political consensus and the successful management of socio-economic change. This explains, for instance, the belated abolition of guild and other trading restrictions in Frankfurt.

Roth makes this case very persuasively, but it is not his only concern. In keeping with recent historical trends, Roth aims to move beyond a purely political or socio-economic study and to portray the cultural world and 'mentality' of the Frankfurt Biirgertum. In this, he fails. The book is excessively long and too many ofits 700 pages are devoted to an exhaustive quantitative study of the shifting composition of Frankfurt's political, economic, and bourgeois elites. Of course, it is interesting to see how this changes with time and the discrepancy between the groups wielding political and economic power during much of the period is particularly striking. Equally, Roth does well to integrate social, cultural, and scholarly societies into the general picture provided by his study of political institutions and tax records. Yet tracing the development and proliferation of these societies and their activities only gives a superficial picture of the cultural world of the Frankfurt burger, and does little to illuminate his 'mentality'. Recent historical developments, such as the study of civic processions and public festivities, might provide a fruitful approach to this question, but Roth accords these aspects a fairly cursory mention. Other potential sources of material, like the Frankfurt press, are ignored altogether. This might be acceptable in a more limited and concise study, but is inexcusable in a book of this length.

More generally, and rather more successfully, Roth uses the case of Frankfurt to make a number of interesting arguments about the nature of German liberalism, which undermine traditional views. First, he argues that the radicalization of the revolution in 1848-9 did not lead the Frankfurt middle classes to take refuge in more conservative politics. In fact, the Frankfurt constituent assembly had a strong left-liberal majority, and Frankfurt continued to be dominated by left-of-centre politics during the 1850s and 1860s. Second, he argues that in Frankfurt liberalism was a supra-confessional movement, integrating Jews and Catholics with the dominant Protestant elites around the unifying idea of Bildung. Consequently, conventional views of the decline of liberalism due in part to its confessionally limited appeal, and the resultant rise of political Catholicism, do not apply to Frankfurt. Although the Kulturkamfif was rife throughout the rest of Prussia in the 1870s, it passed Frankfurt by. Issues such as school reform were not confessional here, rather they cut right across confessional camps. Roth's argument is persuasive, but its implications require further consideration. It is not enough simply to assert that Frankfurt's experience was different. How far should Roth's conclusions about Frankfurt cause us to modify our view of the national picture? After all, as the confederal capital and one of only three free cities, Frankfurt was clearly a very special case. This status meant, for instance, that in Frankfurt republicanism was a generally accepted political principle rather than a dirty word. The relationship between monarch and parliament was never even an issue before Frankfurt's annexation by Prussia in 1867. In this sense, Frankfurt's experience was almost totally atypical. What, then, can a study of Frankfurt tell us about political developments in the rest of Germany? Roth remains silent on the wider implications of his study.

This raises interesting questions about the relationship between local specificity and national trends in German history, and in the study of German liberalism in particular.

On the one hand, local case studies of this kind are indispensable to a proper understanding of nationwide developments during this period. Only thus can such developments be revealed in their full complexity. On the other hand, this very process is likely to complicate our understanding of the general picture, and perhaps to contradict our view of developments at national level. Exceptions can be used both to prove and to undermine a more general rule. The discrepancy between local and national experience is particularly problematic in Germany, due to the decentralized and federal nature of its political structures. Inevitably, politics developed their own dynamic in sovereign states like Frankfurt, reflecting the state's constitution and its socio-economic make-up. The persistence of pre-unification political structures in most of Germany even after unification - though interestingly not in Frankfurt - meant that the sphere of' local' (state) politics was curiously detached from that of national politics at Reichstag level. Any understanding of movements such as liberalism and political Catholicism needs to take into account developments in both political arenas, and the way in which the two intersected.

st john's college, Cambridge

abigail green

Дата добавления: 2015-11-04