Abstract
Reviewed by: Bodie A. Ashton, University of Passau, Germany
There is a tendency to oversimplify German history (or, admittedly, any history), especially in the nineteenth century. After the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815) came the Restoration, spearheaded from Vienna by Metternich. At some point after the issuing of the Karlsbad Decrees (1819), the Vormärz period began, before revolution swept across the German states in 1848 and 1849. Upon the defeat of the revolutionaries, a period of reaction ensued. This ended after Bismarck’s rise to power, which presaged the establishment of the German Empire. The Bismarckian phase of German history continued until the succession of Wilhelm II, who dismissed the Iron Chancellor; Wilhelmine German history lasted, of course, until Germany’s defeat in the First World War in 1918.
Even those with the most cursory historical understanding must recognize how simplistic and incomplete this picture of German history is. Nonetheless, it seems to persist. What this often means is that certain periods and events are privileged by exhaustive scholarship, while others are left by the wayside. One of those periods – the decade between the 1848 revolutions and the emergence of Bismarck as the minister-president of Prussia – is generally boiled down as merely reaction, a return to a pre-revolutionary status quo. But, as Anna Ross argues in this outstanding and compact book, this ignores the complexities and importance of an era that not only set the scene for what followed, but is also vital in its own right to the story of Prussia’s (and Germany’s) historical development.
Ross begins with a clear challenge to conventional wisdom. Far from simply laying (or re-laying) the foundations of the pre-Revolution status quo for a post-Revolution era, the joint ministry of Friedrich Wilhelm von Brandenburg and Otto Friedrich von Manteuffel (and, after Brandenburg’s sudden death in 1850, the singular ministry of Manteuffel) was tasked with balancing a fundamentally different socio-political scene to that which had existed prior to 1848. Indeed, the changes wrought by revolt made a restoration impossible (in much the same way that the term ‘Restoration’ for the immediate post-1815 era is something of a misnomer). Ross is careful here not to be tempted to fall into the trap of many other historians, in using overly simplistic labels to describe the characters in her story. Manteuffel, for instance, is most definitely not an ‘ultra-conservative’. Nor is he a ‘constitutionalist’, and certainly not a ‘liberal’ – he opposed Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s promulgated constitution of 1848 not on the grounds of the undermining of the National Assembly’s mandate to craft one, but instead because he thought constitutions to be dangerous – but rather a ‘realist’, adapting to the circumstances he was presented with. Similarly, Ross dismisses the characterization of the justice minister Friedrich Carl von Savigny as a ‘reactionary conservative’ as ignoring Savigny’s far more nuanced attitudes and positions. These were, then, reform-minded ministries, with sweeping mandates to bring about the changes necessary to save Prussia from revolutionary catastrophe. This required conceiving of the Ministry of State as a broad church that could appeal to conservatives, but also moderates and liberals, thus marginalizing the elements at the extreme fringes of politics. What this often meant was that many of the flagship Prussian institutional reforms often credited to others either originated with or were perfected by Brandenburg and Manteuffel. Here, the reader would be well advised to pay close attention to Ross’s chapter on criminal justice. Much is (justifiably) made of the Prussian General Law Code (ALR), which was mooted by Friedrich I, begun in the reign of Friedrich II, but only propagated by Carl Gottlieb Svarez and Ernst Ferdinand Klein in 1794. In theory, this made substantive law uniform throughout all of the kingdom. In practice, however, the Code’s applicability suffered both from its long gestation, which meant that it incorporated ‘a mixture of pre-Enlightenment and Enlightenment attitudes that often contradicted one another’ (75), and the fact that Prussia had undergone serious territorial and political revisions between its drafting and the advent of the Brandenburg ministry. The dramatic reordering of codified law and the understanding of the legal apparatuses after the Revolution, however, allowed for the laying of the foundations of a modernized legal order by the 1850s. In other words, while the ALR had gone some way to unifying Prussian law, it was the works of the Brandenburg and Manteuffel ministries, over half a century later, that rebuilt the Code so that, by the time Germany unified in 1871, it could form the basis of a rational, national legal system.
Beyond the Barricades is hardly a long work, at 229 pages. Within those pages, however, Anna Ross has managed to encapsulate a vast and impressive amount of information and analysis. This is by no means limited to broad, generalized headings of ‘domestic policy’ and ‘diplomacy’; penal reforms find space alongside the dissemination of commerce statistics and property rental ordinances, demonstrating the wide-ranging works of these heretofore critically overlooked state ministries. Also, while Prussia is clearly the focus of the work, the author skilfully compares and contrasts developments in Berlin with parallel developments in Vienna, Munich, Stuttgart, Dresden and others. Ross’s work, therefore, not only stands as an impressive study of Prussia in its own right, but also reminds scholars of other German states (and of Germany in general) that we write off the immediate post-revolutionary years at our peril. This work will become a standard reference for nineteenth-century German studies in the years to come.