Berlin's Forgotten Future

Front matter

City, History, and Enlishtenment in

Eighteenth-Century

— Germany ~

Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Note on the Translations xi

. City, History, Enlightenment ı

III

If the first shift discussed concerns the perceived nature of temporal change and the second concerns its representation, the third reflects a new conception of the social function of this representation. Friedrich Nicolai provides a concise formulation of the new view in an 1806 treatise on the history of the Freemasons and the Rosicrucians. Here he writes: “History carries the torch that guides enlightenment.”” In the eighteenth century, historical investigation becomes part and parcel of a wide-ranging program of middle-class emancipation.” This emancipatory intent has several implications for the kinds of historical writing that dominate in the period. First, the study of the past becomes a means to challenge the political and social status quo. Both courtly historiography and traditional Christian historiography had been (and often continued to be throughout the eighteenth century) affirmative in nature. Christian historians used past events as a means to validate the teachings of the Bible; court historians, to legitimate or valorize a particular regent or lineage. Over the course of the eighteenth century, however, historical writing, increasingly dominated by middle-class intellectuals, becomes a tool of social criticism.” Investigations into the Christian past reveal the historical variability of its dogma, just as political history challenges the supposedly unlimited authority of the territorial princes. In his History of Osnabrück (1768), for example, Justus Möser concludes that the princes had originally been the elected representatives of the landowners and thus could not claim an unassailable right to rule.®

These critical investigations, whatever their theoretical consequences, were not intentionally relativistic, and they usually aimed at cautious reform rather than any radical transformation of society. In the religious sphere, progressive theologians conceived critical Bible scholarship and the historicization of contemporary dogma as a means to uncover the truth of Christianity that underlay its historically specific manifestations.” Lessing’s own reflections on religion can be viewed within this context. Political and social history, for its part, rarely called into question the paternalistic and monarchical foundations of German political organization. Nonetheless, the role of critical historical studies in justifying and inspiring attempts at social reform should not be underestimated.

A second consequence of the middle-class character of eighteenth-century historical writing was a thematic expansion and reorientation. The historical challenge to existing power structures entailed a simultaneous affirmation of the values of the upwardly mobile middle class. Historical investigations played an important role in the self-aflirmation of an emerging group of nonnoble elites, often by deemphasizing the historical significance of war and diplomacy in favor of those spheres of activity in which the middle class loomed large. For the first time, for example, economic culture becomes an object of historical investigation, as in August Ludwig Schlözer’s Attempt at a General History of Trade and Navigation in Ancient Times (1760) and in lecture courses like Leonhard Johann Karl Justi’s “The History of Commerce, Public Policy and Finance” (1755-56) and Johann Friedrich Reitemeier’s “The History of the European Trading Companies in East India” (1781-82). One also finds works on the history of technology and inventions, of various artisanal occupations, and of the cultural significance of tobacco, to name just a few areas of interest.“

The shift away from high politics toward social and cultural investigations is closely linked to the period’s belief in the didactic function of history, inasmuch as these were the areas with the most immediate utility for middle-class readers. The orientation of historical knowledge toward the practice of everyday life is central to the period, and various authors stress the need to make the past relevant to the contemporary reader. This relevance, however, is something that must be established through an explication of the link between past and present, rather than being derived from the timeless moral lesson that one can distill from a given historical occurrence as explicated through the topos of historia magistra vitae. While it is clear that the present drives the interest in the past in the eighteenth century, the two temporal dimensions are not only linked in the sense that the great figures from the past model appropriate behavior or that the lessons of certain historical situations can be memorized for their future application. Rather, inasmuch as the present evolves out of the past, the lessons to be learned concern the trajectory of development and the potential for improvements. Enlightenment historiography, in other words, is oriented toward the future. At least among the more progressive authors, the goal of historical education is not to hammer home a selection of moral wisdom by way of historical example but rather to cultivate the critical faculties of the learner so that he can participate in the creation of that future.™

The thematic reorientation in eighteenth-century history can also be linked to its critical agenda. In emphasizing those activities in which the middle class has the highest level of participation, it implicitly relativizes the role of the ruling nobility in the course of historical development.® The shift in focus, however, is by no means perceived in terms of group interests. What appears from a late twentieth-century perspective as a refocusing on the concerns of a different class was conceived and articulated in the late eighteenth century as a universalist project. This universalist agenda constitutes a third consequence of the middle-class basis of historiography in this period. As is the case with the Enlightenment intellectuals more generally, eighteenth-century historians are interested in transcending particularism and hence stress the historical role of humans as such rather than any particular estate.‘ The emphasis on a universal humankind as the subject of history, which can be seen as part of a more general anthropological turn in the period, finds its most pronounced expression in the increasingly popular genre of universal history (Universalgeschichte) as well as in the more explicitly teleological Geschichtsphilosophie. Friedrich Schiller describes the task of universal history in his inaugural lecture on the topic: “What states did man pass through before he rose from that extreme to this extreme, from the state of the isolated cave dweller—to that of the sharp-witted thinker, the cultivated man of the world—universal world history offers an answer to this question.” But more limited investigations also reflect this emphasis on the universally human, to the extent that an event’s impact on humankind becomes the criterion for evaluating its historical significance. As the philosopher Thomas Abbt remarks in a 1760 article entitled “On the Different Uses of Ancient History”: “Perhaps one may be so bold as to assert that only those events which concern the entire human race, or each person in particular, deserve the attention of an intelligent reader.”®

Histories of the whole of humanity have a long tradition in Christian Europe, but eighteenth-century universal history eventually detaches itself from the Christian model, eliminating once and for all the notion of four successive world empires followed by the Last Judgment. Intellectuals were by no means antireligious, as various analyses of the peaceful coexistence of the Enlightenment and religiosity in Germany have made clear.” Nonetheless, world-historical narratives in the period become largely secularized. Divine intervention no longer constitutes a valid factor in historical explanation; the meaning of historical events must be derived from the events themselves. In this secularized context, the human being as such becomes the subject of history in another sense as well, namely, as the source of historical progress. As Hans Erich Bödeker remarks, “Increasingly, human beings learned to view themselves as the condition for and the motive force behind all change.””° History comes to be viewed as something that is made by humans, ideally on the basis of the universal faculty of reason.

At the same time, however, writers of history also become more attuned to the complexity of causal relationships, recognizing both the role of the irrational and of supraindividual factors in shaping the course of human development. Significant in the latter case is not only the interest in natural factors (natural disasters, climate, geography) but also the struggle to understand the meaning of social phenomena that operate above the level of individual control. Despite a relatively high level of optimism regarding the potential of social engineering, one can discern in the period a degree of anxiety vis-a-vis social processes that seem to have acquired the status of a second nature. Long-term population fluctuations, patterns of economic crisis, and especially the seemingly ceaseless growth of luxury production all are phenomena that challenge attempts at simple causal explanation, operating according to a seemingly inscrutable, immanent logic. The historical-theoretical implications of this growing awareness of large-scale social processes have received little attention in the scholarship, despite the apparent affinity between the inexorable linearity of some of these processes and that of theories of human development. In this context in particular, the city, as the site where these processes appear in their most acute form, plays a crucial role.

Iv

The three elements of historical understanding that I have introduced here in ideal-typical form are not intended as an exhaustive characterization of historical consciousness in eighteenth-century Germany. Not only do other shifts occur that have not been mentioned, but those which have been addressed are by no means universal. Because the period is one of transition, it is not surprising that older conceptual models continue to hold sway alongside newer ones. Thus, even as the foundation for its validity is hollowed out, the topos of history teaching life remains widespread in the eighteenth century (as it does today), often coexisting in a single text with a sensitivity to historical difference. In On German Literature, for example, Friedrich II acknowledges on the one hand the existence of a “taste of the times,” but he also adopts a transhistorical standpoint in referring to the “one hundred examples” that history can provide to illustrate the causes for the rise and fall of states.”

Nonetheless, the evolutionary and causal model of historical understanding, the awareness of historical perspective, and the link between history and middle-class emancipation represent three key moments in the historical-theoretical force field of the period. Taken together they describe a plane of historical-theoretical discourse, offering a starting point for an attempt to graph the line of intersection between this plane and the one constituted by the discourse on the city. By investigating this line of intersection as it appears in the works of the Berlin Aufklärer, I hope to provide some insight into the role played by everyday experience in the evolution and articulation of the new understanding of history. Texts addressing urban life and urban phenomena certainly do not provide a transparent representation of Vierhaus’s “real-historical process” — the impact of social reality on eighteenth-century historical consciousness — but they can at least gesture to the role of material conditions. As I mentioned, the thrust of this impact would seem to be in the form ofa challenge to overly simplistic theoretical models. If, for example, one can accept as representative Schiller’s claim that the discovery of “primitive” peoples convinced the Europeans of their advanced position on the timeline of human development, the domestic urban experience tended to complicate such naive linearity. The challenge was raised on an obvious and concrete level through the presence of various disenfranchised groups, from prostitutes to day laborers and indigents. Whereas the discussion of these individuals in texts often gives rise to reflections on imminent social disintegration, the marginalized and disadvantaged urban Jewish communities are often perceived as a case of arrested historical development and thereby linked to the distant past. The aggregation of such groups in the city creates a sense of nonsimultaneity both more palpable and more problematic than that perceived as existing between Europeans and the inhabitants of distant islands.

The urban context, at least for those who care to think seriously about it, also presents more abstract challenges to historical thought. As the site of a confrontation between social and natural processes, where the borders between the two often blur, the city forces intellectuals to consider the historical significance of these processes, to attempt to situate them within emerging models of historical development. Of most immediate concern is the question of how to interpret the rapid growth of the cities themselves, a quasi-natural process that seems to indicate growing prosperity even as it demonstrates the limited ability of humankind to shape its own destiny. But other historically charged concerns arise as well. What, for example, is one to make of the seemingly endless succession of new fashions that appear in the city? How does one reconcile the project of individual self-cultivation, perceived as closely linked to urban forms of sociability, with conceptual models of the gradual development of the species as a whole? Can the detachment from traditional mechanisms of social control that characterizes big-city life open up possibilities for human progress or does it merely lead to degeneracy? These are the questions raised and reflected upon in the works of Gedike, Nicolai, Lessing, and Mendelssohn, as well as in other essays on the city written in the period. Admittedly, all of these representations of the urban environment are pretextualized to varying degrees by literary and rhetorical convention, but it is precisely in the interface between convention and narrative content that the subjective experience of urban life, together with its historical-theoretical implications, becomes apparent.

The Case of Berlin

Berlin’s central role in these discussions is no coincidence. Eighteenth-century considerations of urban life, to the extent that they deal with Germany at all, find it impossible to ignore this city. The interest in Berlin is not surprising, because the city was, in several important respects, unusual in the German-speaking world. Part of its uniqueness has to do with sheer size. In the period after 1750, only Berlin, Hamburg, and Vienna could boast more than 100,000 residents.’”” These three cities were thus at least twice the size of the next largest group of cities, most of which had between 30,000 and 50,000 residents.” The emergence of an entirely new category of Großstadt in central Europe was recognized by contemporaries as a historical novelty and led, particularly in the case of Berlin, to comparisons with London and Paris and to discussions of the dangers of urban sprawl. Friedrich Gedike, for example, whose anonymous letters “On Berlin” are the focus of the next chapter, attempts to counter the charge that Berlin, like Paris and London, has become too populous in proportion to its geographic extension.”

Even within the aforementioned triumvirate of large German cities, however, Berlin again stands out due to the rapidity of its growth. The comparison with Hamburg is particularly revealing. Hamburg’s population remained relatively constant between 1650 and 1800, hovering between 70,000 and 75,000 until the latter half of the eighteenth century, when it increased to 100,000. The population of Berlin, in contrast, jumped from 12,000 in 1650 to 55,000 in 1700, and then nearly tripled to 150,000 by 1800. Much of this growth came from immigration, not only of economic refugees from the Brandenburg countryside but also of groups from other German states and other nations.” Berlin was thus a singularly cosmopolitan city for the period, home to Huguenots and Bohemians as well as an unusually wealthy and prominent Jewish community, and this diversity comes up repeatedly in the descriptions from the travel literature. Within German-speaking lands, only Vienna was comparable in this regard. Already in 1752 the city’s rapid expansion had led the Berlin theologian and demographer Johann Peter Süßmilch to investigate its causes in a work entitled A Treatise on the Rapid Growth of the Royal Residence Berlin.” As discussed in the following chapter, Süßmilch’s treatise does not merely register this growth but also attempts to place Berlin’s expansion within the context of a more general historical narrative, revealing a peculiar hybrid of Christian and secular historical models in the process.

While one cannot draw definite conclusions about the subjective experience of urban life from population statistics alone, the essays, travelogues, and fictional texts that address Berlin make it clear that these changes gave rise to an increased sense of the dynamism of the city. This pervasive sense of rapid transformation, more than anything else, underlies eighteenth-century Berlin’s uniqueness as an impetus for reflection on historical change. This is not to deny the importance of other major German or European cities as focal points for the articulation and mediation of historical consciousness. On the contrary, the discussion of Descartes, Rousseau, and their German disciples at the beginning of the chapter was intended to demonstrate the general historical-theoretical significance of the city in eighteenth-century Europe, a significance that often becomes most visible in comparisons among cities, either across different time periods, different territories, or both. A more comprehensive understanding of the role of the city in the formation of eighteenth-century historical consciousness would require an analysis of several major European cities, paying special attention to the way in which temporal structures are actualized within the specific discursive traditions associated with each. With regard to the German-speaking world, eighteenth-century Vienna no doubt deserves special attention, because it shares some of the characteristics that made Berlin unique in the period: rapid growth, a diverse population, and an association, at least after 1780, with the forward-looking policies of “enlightened” absolutism.”

And the various textual mediations of the major foreign metropolises, especially Paris, London, and Rome, could certainly be mined for their historical-theoretical content as well. Nonetheless, the unparalleled dynamism of Berlin does provide some justification for focusing on this city, especially within the context of the German Enlightenment. Commentators perceive eighteenth-century Berlin as an arriviste on the urban scene. Unlike Hamburg, it has no connection to the medieval traditions of the free imperial city.” Unlike Vienna, it is not the capital of an empire with links to antiquity, nor is it suffused with the faded glory of that antiquity like Rome. And unlike Paris or London, which were already vibrant cultural, economic, and political centers with more than 500,000 residents in the seventeenth-century, Berlin’s evolution into a major European capital only becomes apparent after 1750. Indeed, a number of late eighteenth-century writers on Berlin occupy themselves precisely with the question of whether the city has in fact “arrived” and what this arrival means for its future. Later, Berlin’s lack of tradition ossifies into something of a cliché. In the eighteenth century, however, Berlin’s conspicuous modernity challenges commentators to find appropriate temporal models with which to interpret recent changes in the city and to delve into its murky past to determine exactly how it did evolve into its present state. Perhaps paradoxically, then, it is precisely the lack of preexisting historical narrative into which to insert Berlin that makes it a focal point with regard to historical consciousness.

Demographic movements provide only part of the story in this context. The rapid growth of Berlin in the eighteenth century, together with the tensions (and opportunities) that accompanied it, must be viewed within the context of profound, longer-term changes in the very nature of the city as a social and political entity that were occurring in Germany at the time. The early modern period was long considered by subsequent historians to be an epoch of urban decline, in which the inexorable rise of the territorial princes gradually eroded the status of what were conceived of as the powerful, independent, and largely bourgeois trading cities of the Middle Ages. Already anticipated by late eighteenth-century critics of German absolutism like Justus Méser, this attitude became particularly prevalent among liberal historians of the nineteenth century, who viewed the emergence of the absolutist state as a fatal detour from the path toward a liberal-democratic constitutional state that had been anticipated in the self-governing medieval German city.’

An increased interest in the relationship between the city and larger political and economic structures in the past few decades, however, has resulted in a shift in perspective.” Historians now recognize the period as one of radical reorientation rather than decline, in which the majority of cities lose their status as self-contained political entities and begin to function as nodes in the administrative, economic, and political networks of the emergent territorial states. Particularly in the case of the provincial capitals, one finds a gradual integration of the city into an expansive web of social, cultural, economic, and political relationships, in which it functions as a kind of nucleus. In other words, city and state become increasingly interconnected, a development that finds its concrete illustration in the demolition of the defensive city walls that occurs regularly in this period as well as in their replacement, especially in Brandenburg-Prussia, by customs control points. Contemporaries were well aware of the connection between city and state, especially in the case of Berlin, where the rise of territorial power and the increasing status of the city went hand in hand. Friedrich Gedike makes this connection explicit in one of the first letters in his collection, where he remarks: “In short, Berlin is the emblem of the Prussian monarchy, where more or less everything useful and entertaining has been crowded together with the aim of satisfying only itself.” **

The simple precision of this particular statement is somewhat misleading, however, because other passages in the text suggest the indeterminate status of the city in this transitional period. Whereas in this remark Berlin is represented as the state in microcosm, in other passages it appears as an independent entity that can best be understood within the framework of the “big city.” This oscillation corresponds to an inconsistency in the author’s discussion of the residents themselves: the “Berliners” are sometimes treated as an urban population, sometimes as an independent people with its own “national” character, and sometimes as identical with the “Brandenburgers.”

In these three categorizations ofthe city residents, which also appear in other descriptions of the city, one can discern three strands of urban discourse that converge in discussions of Berlin and indicate some of the conceptual challenges the city presented to commentators. The notion of the Berliners as a people unto itself hearkens back to the traditional concept of the city as an autonomous, self-governing community of individuals bound together by a common culture and, more important, by a common set of legal rights. This general understanding of the city still predominates in Zedler’s Universallexicon, where the author of the entry on “city” places a heavy emphasis

Ic on cultural and especially legal autonomy. He refers to the residents’ “unity of temperament in their external way of life and comportment,” as well as to the fact that they live “according to a single set of rights and laws.” % In contrast, the conflation of Berlin and Brandenburg that one also finds in Gedike gestures to the centralization and consolidation taking place in his own day and suggests that the state, rather than the city per se, has become the new frame of reference. Finally, his comments on the Berliners as big-city dwellers points to a metropolitan future that has already arrived, where the big city constitutes an independent entity with characteristics that transcend state boundaries.*°

A tension between past, present, and future thus informs even the most basic elements in descriptions of Berlin, and this tension points back to the historical-philosophical complexity that was mentioned earlier. An awareness of this tension, however, should not distract us from the fact that writings on eighteenth-century Berlin generally emphasize the city’s forward momentum. When one considers the changes taking place in the wake of Prussia’s rise to power, this emphasis is hardly surprising. While the consolidation of the power of the territorial states can be linked to urban decline in the case of certain previously powerful trading centers — Augsburg and Nuremberg are two striking examples — it also laid the foundation for the meteoric rise of the capital or court cities (Residenzstädte). In the cases of Berlin and, to a certain extent, Vienna, this rise meant the appearance of an entirely new category of city, with a population, degree of social diversity, and level of political and economic complexity that had been hitherto unknown in central Europe.” The powerful presence of the state in these cities was in no way indicative of a lack in dynamism. On the contrary, in the words of the twentieth-century urban historian Etienne Frangois, it is “remarkable to see how, after 1650, the capital cities take the place of the free cities and the traditional trading centers as the privileged sites of economic, social, and cultural innovation.” 8

Berlin, a city whose sovereigns were actively engaged in raising it to the status of a first-tier European capital, was at the forefront of this development. Here, as elsewhere, the aforementioned reorientation had farreaching social consequences. To address them in any detail would require a separate study. For the purposes of my analysis, it will suffice to point out that changes in administrative, political, and economic organization, like the demographic shifts with which they were inextricably intertwined, contributed to a sense of instability (if viewed negatively) and opportunity (if viewed positively) among city residents. That the latter was also the case can be seen in the pull exerted by the city on an emerging cultural elite, Lessing included, as well in the stream of artisans, shopkeepers, and domestic servants who came to the city in the hope of finding employment.” Old centers of urban decision making such as the magistracy and the guilds saw their power erode, either through a restriction of their sphere of influence, as in the case of the Prussian Trade Guild Law (Handwerksordnung) of 1733, or through their incorporation into a more comprehensive state apparatus, as in the case of Friedrich Wilhelm I’s various efforts to centralize and reform the state administration in the first part of the century.”

What has to be remembered is that these attempts at consolidation, even if they ultimately resulted in an ossified, authoritarian bureaucracy, functioned at the outset as a dynamic element in urban life. Although a social order grounded in estate-based corporatism continued to predominate in Prussia until at least the early nineteenth century, these changes in administration helped to weaken its hold.” As Christoph Dipper writes with regard to the rise of a professional bureaucracy, “after the middle of the eighteenth century, Prussia was the territory in which the specialized qualification of future state officials had become most detached from the methods of selection that were typical of an estate-based society.””” And it was, of course, in the capital city, the center of Prussian administration, where the impact of this dissolution was most palpable. The concentration of state offices in Berlin created unprecedented opportunities for upward social mobility for a new, university-educated segment of the middle class.”

Another crucial component of Berlin’s dynamism as it is conceived by eighteenth-century commentators is the city’s reputation for tolerance. Although scholars of the period have long since cast a critical eye toward the

Berlin Enlightenment under Friedrich IL, mapping out its limits and revealing its often illusory character, there can be no doubt that contemporaries viewed the city as unique in terms of the intellectual latitude granted to its residents. This latitude was most obvious in the religious sphere, where the politically inspired immigration policies of the Hohenzollerns had led to a religious heterogeneity that undermined the church’s ability to speak with a single, unified voice. General religious tolerance, together with public scandals, including Friedrich II’s decision to grant asylum to the French materialist philosopher La Mettrie, led to a widespread stereotype of Berlin as a bastion of atheistic thought. As Goethe remarks to his sister in a letter from 1766, “I think there is now no other place in Europe as godless as the residence of the Prussian king.” Yet despite the powerful association of Berlin and religious freedom, critical discussion was by no means limited to the religious sphere. To be sure, certain subjects were taboo. The fundamental legitimacy of monarchical rule, for example, was rarely called into question; it was primarily addressed, as in the case of Kant’s essay on enlightenment, in order to affirm its superiority to other forms of political organization.” However, it would be inaccurate to reduce the Berlin Enlightenment to the freedom to criticize religion. Encouraged by the relative lenience of Friedrich II toward the press and caught up in the general politicization of public discourse that took place in Germany in the 1780s, intellectuals debated numerous issues of city and state government, from school reform to agricultural policy.”

Even in the economic sphere, with regard to which it has become clear that state intervention and the militarization of the economy in Prussia hindered the natural emergence of an entrepreneurial class, one must recognize the extent to which Berlin was perceived as a place where radical changes were taking place.” Friedrich Nicolai, who built a small family press into a highly profitable and influential publishing empire, can be taken as evidence of the opportunities available in the city. Also significant in this regard are the aforementioned Trade Guild Law of 1733; the establishment and expansion of wool, silk, and porcelain manufacturing facilities in the city, with which Moses Mendelssohn was involved for most of his life; and the financial crisis and profound redistribution of wealth that followed the end of the Seven Years’ War.”

My intent here is not to valorize absolutism in eighteenth-century Prussia but rather to counter the assumption that eighteenth-century Berlin, because of its status as a court city with a strong state presence, was characterized by inertia. On the contrary, as Deborah Hertz has argued, it was precisely this presence that powered Berlin’s rapid growth and fostered its heterogeneous social structure. Administrative expansion created a need for new bureaucrats, mercantilist policies generated new opportunities for Jewish and gentile merchants and financiers, and the powerful court drew in aspiring courtiers. These individuals attracted a supporting cast of artisans, clerks, tutors, and servants in turn.” Berlin’s sizable intelligentsia was yet another definable group of residents, albeit one whose members sometimes served equal time in other occupations. As these various social groupings indicate, eighteenth-century Berlin was something ofa hybrid: part court city, part state capital, and part bustling metropolis. The tensions that arise between these various identities are reflected in the works under consideration here and contribute to the perception of Berlin’s dynamism in this period. The city’s hybrid personality, in other words, is a key aspect of its modernity. As the nucleus of an evolving political unit that anticipated the modern nation-state in many respects, Berlin functioned as a space where the social consequences of various incipient processes of modernization — bureaucratization, secularization, the erosion of tradition, and the spread of rationalized forms of production and distribution— made themselves felt with particular intensity. To be sure, these processes competed with powerful conservative tendencies in the policies of the Hohenzollerns, as can be seen, for example, in their resolute commitment to maintaining the social privileges of the nobility. Often, however, such tendencies ended up contributing to the vitality and heterogeneity of the city. If the Prussian monarchy had not been so concerned with the welfare of the landed nobility, for example, it would not have created the attractive positions in the military and civil service that brought them to Berlin and encouraged them to mix with the middle-class elites.”