of nineteenth-century Prussia and Germany. There is a great degree of truth to Georg Lukacz’s observation (written from a Marxist point of view) that “the axiom of German historiography, ‘Men make history,’ is only the reverse historiographical and methodological side” of the coin of Prussian-bureaucratic absolutism.25 The contradiction in the German historical conception of ethics and freedom thus appears to reflect contradictions within the fabric of German society and politics themselves.
A study of German historiography therefore can not fully divorce itself from an analysis of the basic theoretical concepts of German historians nor from an awareness of the institutional framework within which nineteenth- and twentieth-century historical thought and writing took place in Germany. We shall not, however, undertake to write a social history of ideas in this book. There is already an extensive literature on the relation of ideas to institutions in Germany. A good deal of this literature revolves around the problem of the political and cultural divergence of Germany from the West, a problem which has become central to almost every significant examination of conscience in Germany since World War I.
Within this literature, written from divergent standpoints by historians, social theorists, and cultural critics standing within German traditions, those seeking a way to liberal-democratic values and institutions, and Marxists, there is a broad area of consensus. Germany, it is generally agreed, entered the age of the democratic masses and of modern industry at a time when aristocratic institutions and attitudes were still much more intact in Germany than in the Western European countries, not to speak of the United States. Marxist and non-Marxist historians alike stress the importance of the decline of the middle class in Germany after the sixteenth century, which Hajo Holborn describes as “in many ways more bourgeois than the eighteenth.”26
Germany lacked the great bourgeois families of commerce or finance which in France, Great Britain, or the Netherlands were able to exert a degree of political influence. To a much greater extent than in the West, the manufactories which came into existence in the age of mercantilism were state-owned. Artisans and shopkeepers, still closely attached to a precapitalistic, corporative outlook, occupied a more influential role among the urban classes than in Western countries. On the other hand, the predominant social and economic position of the land-owning aristocracy remained generally intact in the absolutistic territorial states. The process toward bureaucratic, absolutistic centralization took place in the seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury German principalities, as it did elsewhere in Europe. The difference, however, was that the open confrontation which occurred between aristocracy and monarchy in France during the Frondes, or in Bohemia and Moravia in the Winter War, did not come about in Prussia. Here a political compromise emerged between nobility and crown.
The sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, which saw a decline in trade in the Western areas of Germany, witnessed an increasing economic prosperity among the large scale Junker land-owning nobility east of the Elbe, and an accompanying re-establishment of manorial rights at a time when the seignioral system was disintegrating in the West. As in Mecklenburg, Pomerania, and elsewhere, these developments in East Elbian Prussia were accompanied by the emergence of an aristocratic Ständestaat, in which the manorial lords entrenched themselves by occupying interlocking positions of economic, political, and social dominance. The Thirty Years’ War ushered in a reversal of this trend. The economic decline of the Junkers was accompanied by a rise in princely power. In Prussia, as elsewhere in Europe, the aristocracy progressively lost its political functions but was confirmed in its social privileges, and was able to maintain its control over local government and retain its manorial privileges to a much larger extent than in France. East Elbian towns, on the other hand, retained few of their local privileges but were almost thoroughly subordinated to the Hohenzollern bureaucracy. Where territorial princes were less successful than in Prussia in consolidating their power (as in Saxony or Brunswick), territorial or state-wide diets, in which the aristocracy played a dominant role, continued to exist. As Leonard Krieger observed, the Hohenzollerns went much further “beyond the standard division of labor between political power and social privilege to incorporate the aristocracy into the authoritarian military and civil posts of the state itself than did the Bourbons or the Habsburgs.27 It is true that merit tended to replace birth as a prerequisite for office and advancement. Nevertheless, the aristocratic character of the bureaucracy was maintained to a larger extent than in France or Austria. Frederick II indeed sought to strengthen it, and a new bureaucratic nobility, in part recruited from the middle classes, was integrated with the hereditary East Elbian aristocracy through intermarriage, and encouraged to acquire manorial estates.
On a political plane, Enlightenment demands for social reconstruction expressed themselves in a very different form in German states from those in France. The Prussian aristocracy, integrated into the bureaucratic structure and secure in its local privileges, sought to a much lesser extent than its French counterparts to challenge the centralized structure of the monarchy. Nor did the judicial system represent a check on royal absolutism in Prussia as the parlements did in France. Rather, the spirit of reform sought to free the bureaucracy from arbitrary royal interference, and establish rule by law and established procedure. Among the middle classes, too, the academically trained civil servant (Beamte), the professors, Gymnasium teachers, and pastors, possessed a greater influence upon public life and a relatively higher social status than their counterparts in more commercially oriented Western urban settings. There existed no movement for radical social reorganization, but only demands for reforms within the framework of the old system. Recurrent through the writings of the German Enlightenment are demands for individual freedom, intellectual and religious tolerance, due process of law, and economic liberty. Freedom is more often defined in terms of individual spiritual growth rather than in terms of political participation.
As Hajo Holborn observed, “The entire intellectual (geistige) movement of the eighteenth century aimed almost exclusively at the education of individual man and subordinated all political demands to this goal.”28 The state itself was regarded as a positive good, an institution in which, in many ways, the ideals of the Enlightenment had already been attained, a framework where full development of individuality and culture could take place.29 The young Wilhelm von Humboldt’s definition of freedom in terms of “the highest and most proportionate development of one’s resources into one whole”30 was thus compatible with his later assertion that only within a strong nation was the development of freedom possible.
The early enthusiasm with which many Germans received the initial moderate phases of the French Revolution was soon dissipated by the Jacobin Reign of Terror, and was transformed into intense hostility under the impact of the French occupation of the western sections of Germany and the introduction of the Napoleonic political system. Many of the aspirations of German liberals were fulfilled in the years after 1806 by the reforms introduced into the Prussian monarchy by Stein, Hardenberg, Scharnhorst, and Humboldt after the defeats of Jena and Auerstadt. In many ways these reforms resembled those introduced in France between 1789 and 1791. A large degree of economic liberty was granted, the privilege of the guilds and corporations was broken, the peasants were emancipated. The administrative structure was streamlined. A conscious effort was made to link the citizens to the state more closely through the introduction of municipal self-administration, the announcement of plans for the ultimate creation of diets for the provinces and the monarchy, and the creation of a militia drawn from popular conscription. At the same time, the reforms left intact the authority of the monarchy and the central position of the aristocracy in the bureaucracy.
Hans Rosenberg even suggests that the Reform Era marks the victory of “bureaucratic absolutism” over “monarchical autocracy.” What took place in Prussia was a “revolution from above.” The initiative for reforms in Prussia in 1807, as in France in 1788 and 1789, came from a ministerial bureaucracy. In an acute crisis, this bureaucracy sought to reconstruct the state more rationally by assailing the most obsolete claims of the titled aristocracy. Here, however, the similarity ended. In France, as Rosenberg observes, the opposition of the nobility to the curtailment of their privileges and the restructuring of government “was broken by the political emancipation of
