In November 1861, Karl Mathy wrote from Leipzig to his close friend and long-time political ally in Berlin, Max Duncker:
Far be it from me to ask you to write me pointless letters with contents useless to us both. We are hardly ladies . . . and a bit of gossip from our little circle of friends would be . . . no relief for your [troubled] mind. Ask anything of me, dear Duncker, put my friendship to the test, then you will see indeed whether its colors are true.1
Mathy’s somewhat prickly and seemingly trivial letter reflected an ongoing shift in the political culture of nineteenth-century Germany. A “New Era” liberal ministry had replaced a post-revolutionary conservative cabinet in Prussia, bringing into state service moderate liberals such as Duncker. The new government struggled, however, to reconcile King Wilhelm I’s demands for additional military spending—on an army that swore loyalty to him alone—with the hard-won constitutional right of the legislature to pass the state budget. Duncker had been drifting toward the Crown’s position since he had joined the Berlin government two years earlier. Mathy, for his part, insisted on the rights of the Landtag and sharply criticized the liberal ministry.
This book interprets the practice of politics represented in Mathy’s letter as a manifestation of what contemporaries sometimes called “political friendship.”2 Political friends shared lasting personal affinities, professional favors, and political beliefs. For these liberals, that meant constitutional monarchy, basic civil rights, and, ultimately, the establishment of a unified kleindeutsch nation-state. Political friendship was not only a bilateral relationship; it could also provide the basis for informal networks of personal, professional, and political support. But by asserting in his letter that he and Max Duncker were “hardly ladies,” Karl Mathy also threatened to redefine their political relationship: from a friendship founded on—feminized—emotional bonds to an alliance based solely on political utility in a—masculinized—public sphere. His misogynist reprimand suggests that German liberals also policed the boundaries of political life through friendship. Who was entitled to form political friendships?
Other informal networks existed at the time across the political spectrum and across European borders—networks of archconservatives, democrats, and socialists. I contend that what Karl Mathy called their “little circle of friends” represented one such informal network, of moderate liberal notables, formed in the 1840s and 1850s in response to government repression in the German Confederation (1815–66). The liberals in this network often pursued their goals parallel to the structures of centralized civic organizations and burgeoning political parties. They were well-to-do, well educated, and, thus, they thought, well-placed to exert influence in elite social circles. The network included academics, journalists, and artists, as well as monarchs, royal heirs, and government ministers in Baden, Coburg, and Prussia. These figures have long been neglected or forgotten in the historiography on this pivotal period. This study spotlights these bourgeois, noble, and royal activists on the same stage.
The relationships within the network exemplified the intersection of intense emotions with political and professional interests. Core members included Max Duncker, Charlotte Duncker, Karl Mathy, Karl Samwer, Duke Ernst II of Coburg, Franz von Roggenbach, Karl Francke, Heinrich von Sybel, and Gustav Freytag. The second tier of members often interacted personally with many core members and offered the network professional and political favors. This tier included Hermann Baumgarten, Rudolf Haym, Berthold Auerbach, Grand Duke Friedrich I of Baden, Ernst von Stockmar, and Eduard von Tempeltey. Additionally, network affiliates frequently interacted with or assisted core members while sharing their political goals: Alexander von Soiron, Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia (future German Emperor Friedrich III), J.G. Droysen, Robert Morier, August von Saucken-Julienfelde, and Grand Duke Carl Alexander of Weimar.
This network of political friendship gave moderate liberals the means to negotiate political compromises—first among themselves, then with conservative governments. The issue at stake in Karl Mathy’s letter was, therefore, more than a mere disagreement over budgetary policy: it concerned whether and how liberals should reach accommodations with state power in exchange for the advancement of national unification. It concerned the meaning of liberalism in a period of rapid change and rolling crises. By investigating this network of political friends, I contribute to recent scholarship on the “period of accommodation” between liberals and the state to argue that political friendship was fundamentally important to moderate German liberals’ practice of politics during the nineteenth century.
In the mid-1970s, Uriel Tal contended that German intellectuals in the nineteenth century faced a “perplexing alternative.”3 They supported industrialization, national cultural renaissance, empirical inquiry, and cosmopolitanism, but so did the leaders of the larger German states, as Tal put it. German intellectuals thus found themselves in an awkward position because they considered themselves “revolutionaries and at the same time supporters of the regime.”4 Although some of Tal’s claims about intellectuals in Germany—by which he meant liberal writers and politicians—have since been modified, questions remained about the limits of liberal dissent within a repressive system that also, German liberals believed, formed the last bulwark against a far worse fate: republican revolution and the destruction of property.
Historians have continued to examine the interactions between state and non-state political actors in Germany between the Revolutions of 1848/49 and the founding of the German Empire in 1871. In the 1980s, Thomas Nipperdey and James Sheehan echoed Uriel Tal, arguing that our understanding of Germany history after 1849 as an era of reaction required revision.5 Wolfram Siemann soon made a forceful case for the 1850s and 1860s as a distinct “period of upheaval” in Central Europe.6 For these scholars, the 1850s were not simply a brief, bleak interlude between the stirring Revolutions of 1848/49 and Bismarck’s wars of unification. Rather than an antechamber to the Hall of Mirrors, the years between 1848 and 1871 represented a period of social transformation and political settlement in its own right.
Building on these early reappraisals of the 1850s and 1860s, some historians have more recently advanced the thesis that, during this period, moderate democrats, liberals, and conservative officials forged a kind of triangular political accommodation.7 The first two groups abandoned certain ideological points—civil liberties and parliamentary government, for example—in exchange for economic support from the state, legitimate participation in political life, and, above all, national unification under Prussia. How did this atmosphere of accommodation bear on the lives of moderate liberals? How did they approach post-revolutionary accommodations with state power?
Focusing on associations and networks of left liberals and democrats, Andreas Biefang, Christian Jansen, and a small number of other scholars have argued that a post-revolutionary “negotiation,” “accommodation,” or “settlement” occurred in German politics. Biefang first explored the role of the relatively small elite of German associational life from the beginning of the New Era in 1858 until the founding of the German Empire.8 He argues that a tightly circumscribed group of moderate, bourgeois associational leaders, a “practical elite,” cooperated across the lines separating moderate democrats from moderate liberals in order to advance kleindeutsch unification.9 On the committees of the Nationalverein, at the Abgeordnetentage, and in other leading civic organizations, liberals and democrats learned to settle their political differences and seek accommodation with an increasingly illiberal Prussian government. Unlike in the years between 1815 and 1848—the Vormärz—and the 1850s, when bourgeois elites worked mostly in state parliaments and mixed local, regional, and national viewpoints to formulate policy goals, Biefang contends that this bourgeois elite and their organizations represented the emergence of mass politics and hierarchical party structures in the German Confederation.10
Biefang analyzes committee protocols and personal letters among this small elite to explain opposition activists’ understanding of the ideal form of a future German nation-state and their settlements with Bismarckian realpolitik. Above all, Biefang maintains, rather than succumbing to infighting, liberal and democratic elites created a “basic political structure capable of compromise” and resolving internal disagreements, reaching extensive memberships and the public at large—all in order to advance concrete policies.11
Christian Jansen has expanded on Biefang’s work, tracking the post-revolutionary lives of liberals and democrats who served in the Frankfurt Parliament in 1848/49. Ultimately, Jansen argues, the democrats who remained in the German Confederation reached grudging accommodations with state power in the 1850s and 1860s to advance kleindeutsch unification.12 Jansen first outlined this settlement in an instructive periodization of post-revolutionary radical action. After the uncertain “transitional years” for democrats and liberals during the Revolutions of 1848/49, the period between 1852 and 1857 represented “the turn to realpolitik” in a public sphere tightly regulated by German governments. Jansen recognizes that the dawn of the New Era in 1858 launched “the reorganizational phase of national-liberal opposition,” while Biefang’s “transregional organizations,” such as the Nationalverein, openly advocated for the foundation of a liberal German nation-state.13 Overall, liberals and democrats in this period, “through trials and tribulations, with the obligatory schisms and rivalries, but ultimately with astounding success . . . pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.”14 Yet, Jansen’s argument does not sketch an important aspect of liberal activity at the time. As the following analysis will show, moderate liberals pulled themselves up by their political bootstraps only with the support of their political friends.
Christian Jansen has also demonstrated the scholarly value of what he calls a “collective history of politics,” which considers political actors together in their social and material worlds.15 He charts political discussion and organization among German democrats and left liberals who did not emigrate after 1849.16 He contends that as they became more cynical and more skeptical of the political idealism of the Vormärz, they ultimately formed a political “counter elite” who adapted to, and then shaped, the post-revolutionary political culture of Germany.17 Liberals and democrats both belonged to a broad oppositional milieu that approached state power as a means to achieve domestic reforms and national unification.18 Jansen pays particular attention to how material concerns, such as professional income, housing, travel, and social isolation, drove left liberals and democrats to moderate opposition to the conservative monarchical states.19 This element of Jansen’s work also raises interesting questions: did moderate liberals, who were supposedly more amenable to the post-revolutionary German states, suffer similar repression? If so, how did they try to overcome it?
Complementing the work of Jansen and Biefang, historians such as James Brophy, David Barclay, and Anna Ross have studied the role of state leaders in the processes of political accommodation. Their studies explore the creation of horizons of political possibility in the period—in so far as state officials conceived of, and acted on, the possibilities of settlement with liberal businessmen and professionals. These scholars made an important contribution to the question of a post-revolutionary political accommodation in their political histories, which were based largely on government documents, ministerial debates, and commercial policy.
James Brophy has suggested that the 1850s saw “accommodation” on industrial policy between liberal businessmen and the Prussian cabinet under Otto von Manteuffel. Rather than acting as the hatchet men of political reaction, many Prussian state ministers believed that economic growth would increase popular support for the post-revolutionary state and resolidify the legitimacy of the monarchy. Conservative officials compromised with liberals on commercial policy and blocked—or at least blunted—the efforts of archconservative courtiers around the king to erase the gains of the revolutions.20 David Barclay reached a similar conclusion about state officials’ openness to accommodation with moderates on cautious reform during the reign of Friedrich Wilhelm IV.21 I show, however, that the Manteuffel government was less willing to engage with liberals from the arts and academia (the Bildungsbürgertum) than it was prepared to negotiate with liberals from industry and trade (the Besitzbürgertum).
Anna Ross has recently and more closely explored the role of the Prussian state in the processes of political accommodation. In Ross’s book, Minister President Manteuffel steered a “middle course” between democrats and reactionaries to deliver domestic reforms unseen in Prussia since the Reform Era (1808–19). Ross highlights the major judicial, economic, and press reforms of the Manteuffel cabinet. She argues that these reforms reflected conservatives’ willingness to adapt to post-revolutionary constitutional constraints and to extend the reach of the Prussian state into the everyday lives of its subjects.22 The Manteuffel period also included systematic spying, court intrigue, official corruption, and political persecution—particularly under Carl von Hinckeldey’s Berlin police.23 On balance, however, Ross’s account emphasizes the pragmatism, nuance, and shrewd politicking of Manteuffel and other Prussian leaders. This revisionist viewpoint differs from Christian Jansen’s portrayal of the persecution of left liberals and democrats in the German Confederation.24 Many moderate liberals, I demonstrate, also suffered state harassment for their politics after the revolutions, despite their efforts to seek political and professional accommodation with the Manteuffel government.
This book generally supports the thesis that a significant accommodation occurred between liberals and the state after 1848/49. It also takes the 1850s as a discrete period of societal transition in the German Confederation. But it insists that friendship was central to the political lives of moderate liberals in Germany and thus shaped the boundaries of their accommodation with state power. We must therefore consider friendship alongside the structures of associational life, the political networks of democrats and left liberals, and the policies of state leaders. This network of political friends demonstrated that personal and professional considerations were inseparable from debates about the merits of political cooperation with state leaders—the adaptation of liberalism to realpolitik. It also suggests why so many of the political projects of moderate liberals failed in the 1860s. By studying this network, we can perceive that the process of political accommodation appears more drawn out and emotionally charged than has been portrayed previously. We should thus extend the processes of political accommodation for moderate liberals back into the 1840s. We should also mark 1861 as the point when they began to signal their willingness to accept anti-constitutional rule and national unification by force.25 This dating is unconventional but well supported by the evidence. Until now, most historians have stressed that 1866 was the year when German liberals succumbed to the lures offered by Bismarck.26
This book sheds light on these historiographical debates because it is conceived as a “cultural history of politics.” Lynn Hunt’s history of the French Revolution was one of the first to deploy this methodology.27 She wrote that “rather than recounting a narrative” of the revolution’s politics, she was interested in investigating the underlying cultural assumptions about what constituted politics and what produced a cohesive “revolutionary experience” among groups and individuals.28 Hunt advocates a reading of the French Revolution that focuses on the “values, expectations, and implicit rules that expressed and shaped collective intentions and actions” and how these cultural conditions were in turn shaped by the “explosive interaction between ideas and reality.”29 This discursive exchange, for Hunt, forms the basis of political culture.
In the 1990s and 2000s, other historians developed this approach further. For them, “the cultural history of politics” was premised on the theoretical assumption, arising from postmodern and communication theory, that perceptions of reality—politics included—both derive from and influence discourse. This methodology encourages scholars to investigate how historical actors talked and wrote about politics, as well as how they negotiated the meaning of their political ideals and organized social relations and actions around them.30 Ute Frevert has argued that the definition of the political versus the apolitical is itself a highly political cultural negotiation.31 Politics in the past was not separated from art, emotions, or imagination.32 Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger has meanwhile contended that political units, such as the church, nation, or state, act as “action-inducing fictions that exist through discursive representation.”33
The notion that politics is inseparable from emotions, personal bonds, or fiction seems almost self-evident.34 These historians were reacting, however, to an insistence on political history as the arena of Great Men, reasoned debate, and economic competition.35 Scholars practicing the cultural history of politics argue instead that we should probe the fixity of social categories and show how these changed over time.36 Both Thomas Mergel and Ute Frevert have advocated for an anthropological approach to historical subjects, albeit without seeking a new kind of historicism.37
Using the cultural history of politics to analyze shifting meanings and uses of political friendship among this network of moderate liberals alters our view of the landscape of politics in nineteenth-century Germany. In such a history, we see that the liberals who often rejected political parties and centralized civic associations practiced politics through friendship—it shows how elite Germans “lived liberalism.”38 Historians must consider not just liberals’ activities “with explicit relevance to political events” but also their wider personal and professional connections.39 In doing so, historians can gain a clearer understanding of the processes of accommodation between moderate liberals and conservative officials beyond the realm of clubs, the press, and government. The remainder of this introduction explores in detail the book’s guiding analytical categories: the political, the professional, and the personal.
Members of the network premised their pursuit of the nation-state—no matter whether they were in government service or out of it—on moderate liberalism and on a kleindeutsch answer to the “German Question.” Overall, they were illustrative of the liberalism of their time. Liberalism in Europe and the German Confederation was fluid, and its proponents were divided by status and class differences.40 Dieter Langewiesche, James Sheehan, and Thomas Nipperdey have noted how liberalism, much like conservatism, remained vague in the years between the Congress of Vienna (1814–15) and the March Revolution of 1848.41 Many nineteenth-century liberals were members of the bourgeoisie. As David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley have argued, this elite class, past and present, shared a belief in the rights of private property and the rule of law—these were fundamental to liberalism.42 Yet, as Blackbourn contends, equating liberalism with the bourgeoisie is too simple.43 German liberals could hail from the nobility (Roggenbach), from princely families (Ernst of Coburg), or from the business community (Mathy).44 However, the liberal script almost always included two important aspirations: the emancipation of individuals from status-based society, and the disassociation—at some level—of markets from state cameralism and the guilds.45 These aspirations, inherited from the Enlightenment, postulated freedoms of speech, association, and religion. Liberals also sought the right of educated and propertied men to full citizenship and representation in elected legislatures with budgetary powers. Their ideal government would be composed of ministers appointed by a monarch within the framework of a written constitution: such ministers would be obliged to defend royal policies before the legislature. This thinking did not preclude, however, beliefs in cultural imperialism and racial hierarchies.46
Starting with the Revolution of 1848 and the nationally elected Frankfurt Parliament, liberals in Germany began to clarify their conceptions of liberalism and divide into increasingly coherent groups. Liberals debated how much popular representation was needed in a constitutional state, how much power should be wielded by what type of monarchy, and how accommodation could or should be reached with democrats who favored parliamentary government.47 Meanwhile, conservatives favored an even more powerful monarchy with strict limits on freedom of the press and association. The eruption of popular violence even before the collapse of the Frankfurt Parliament in 1849 contributed to a fundamental realignment among democrats, liberals, and conservatives. The moderate wings of the three ideological groups sought cooperation to achieve their respective goals of parliamentary government, liberal national unification, and a stable monarchical state. Here lay the genesis of the triangular processes of post-revolutionary accommodation.
Members of the network of political friends belonged, by and large, to the moderate liberal camp: they constituted a younger generation of “Old Liberals,” “Gothaer,” or “constitutionalists.”48 They were “old” liberals because, during the Vormärz, they had been active in dissenting religious movements, the liberal press, and state legislatures. Most Old Liberals then served in the Frankfurt Parliament or supported the Holstein rebels in the First Schleswig War. The “question” of the incorporation of Schleswig into a future German nation-state absorbed liberals for nearly two decades.49 In the 1850s and 1860s, they remained committed to constitutional monarchy and a federal nation-state under Prussian leadership.50 These liberals favored state ministers responsible before the legislature but rejected both parliamentary government and universal suffrage.51 Unlike democrats, liberals of all stripes tended to see themselves as tribunes of “the people,” bound, not to their constituencies, but to their own conscience and political judgement.52 Like moderate liberals in other parts of Europe, the political friends eschewed highly organized civic associations because they thought deferring to associational steering committees might restrain their political autonomy. They also rejected political parties as the vehicles of special interests.53 Moderate conservatives needed the support of the Old Liberals to buttress state legitimacy after the Revolutions of 1848/49, whereas moderate democrats needed the Old Liberals’ blessing to reenter legitimate political life in the 1850s.54
There was also a smaller group of “left liberals” from the era of the Paulskirche. They were not democrats, but they were more willing than their Old Liberal confederates to endorse popular legitimacy over monarchical prerogatives as the basis of the state. During the revolutions, they had considered the moderate-liberal “March Ministries” to be overly cautious and too deferential to monarchical authority.55 These left liberals tended to mix quite easily with moderate democrats at the Frankfurt Parliament and in later civic organizations such as the Nationalverein. After the revolutions, the two groups formed a “counter elite” of politicians and publicists separate from moderate liberal notables and conservative state officials.56 During the 1830s and early 1840s, many members of the network of political friends who were Old Liberals had held convictions similar to the left liberals and democrats, but by 1849 they had denounced democrats for raising the twin specters of republican revolution and the destruction of private property.
Fundamentally, German liberals, like most European liberals, were monarchists who favored a powerful constitutional monarch overseeing the functioning of the machinery of state.57 Even among Vormärz democrats, there were few true republicans. The monarchical principle was central to the political culture of nineteenth-century Central Europe: it provided the basis of what was considered acceptable politics.58 Historians’ discussion of liberals’ attitudes toward monarchy is often abstract. Yet, many liberals cultivated political friendships with the living embodiments of state power in Germany: flesh-and-blood princes. Exploring these relationships as an aspect of the “modernization” or nationalization of European monarchies reveals a network of political friends that bonded to, debated with, and advised monarchs.59 After 1849, relationships with individual princes shaped the view among German liberals that national unification could best be achieved through consensus among the monarchs of Germany.
The small group of princely network members often employed their bourgeois and noble counterparts as state officials. It was difficult for members to maintain political friendships across immense status divides, however, partly because princes could rely on powerful dynastic connections to which bourgeois and noble members had only indirect access. Ernst of Coburg was connected to the monarchs of the United Kingdom and Belgium, as well as to leading state ministers in Austria. Friedrich of Baden and Carl Alexander of Weimar were both sons-in-law of King Wilhelm I of Prussia and had tight family connections to the Russian court. Simply put, non-princely members of the network needed the princes more than the princes needed them. Nevertheless, reinserting monarchs into scholarly conversations about liberal constitutionalism and nationalism shows how bourgeois liberals failed to understand that the liberal princes held a far more authoritarian view of liberal nationalism.60
Many of the monarchs who engaged with network members ruled smaller states in the German Confederation. Early German liberalism at the national level was influenced by the political situation in the many small- and medium-sized states.61 As in southern Europe, regional variations in Central Europe were fed by different experiences of the late Enlightenment, the Napoleonic system, and repression after the establishment of the Confederation in 1815.62 Place was thus key to individual liberals’ political experiences in the Vormärz. Liberals in northern Germany tended to take the United Kingdom as a model of monarchy limited by a powerful parliament. Southern liberals, by contrast, tended to favor institutional models from centralized France, particularly the economic policies and basic civil rights promoted by the July Monarchy and its “citizen-king,” Louis-Philippe.63 The southern German states, moreover, facilitated constitutional experimentation in the Rhenish Confederation (1806–13) and during the early period after Napoleon.
The Vormärz was not characterized only by what Gordon Craig called “provincialism and atomization.”64 After the “reading revolution” began in the eighteenth century, print costs declined, literacy grew, and the extensive reading of novels, newspapers, journals, and letters created a small but important German-speaking civil society that transcended state borders.65 These expanded horizons helped readers establish new understandings of themselves, their politics, and their personal relationships.66 Rural and poorer folk were not left out of this project either, as Volkskalender, broadsheets, and group readings opened a window onto the burgeoning ideological divides among the educated public.67
The nation was something many educated Germans, not just bourgeois liberals, were building. Vormärz nationalism was rather hazy and locally oriented—most people felt they were Prussian or Coburgers first, for example, then German.68 Celia Applegate and Abigail Green have addressed state-building at the level of the medium-sized German states, as well as the regional expressions of German nationalism.69 Nationhood, even as seen from the church steeple, was growing broader and moving toward political unity. Much of the struggle between nationalists in the 1850s and 1860s was over the form and function of a future German nation-state in Central Europe.70 Would it simply be a consolidated version of the Confederation: a Staatenbund or a Bundesstaat? Would it be a Bundesstaat under the control of Austria, Prussia, or even Bavaria and Saxony? Or would a unified Germany be something else entirely?
Advocates for Kleindeutschland (“Little Germany”) argued that the nation-state should unite the thirty-nine Confederal states, except Austria, under the Prussian king. Excluding Austria would make Catholics a minority in the new state and cement the power of the Protestant Hohenzollern court and the Prussian government over central affairs. Großdeutsch, or “greater German,” thinkers were a diverse group. One idea, advanced mainly by southern German nationalists, held that any future Germany must include Austria. They debated among themselves whether the “German” lands of the Archduchy of Austria and the Kingdom of Bohemia should be included, while the Habsburgs kept control over “non-German” lands, such as the Kingdoms of Hungary and Lombardy-Venetia, or if there should be a loose union incorporating the whole Habsburg realm—creating a “Reich of seventy million.” Either state of affairs would have given the Austrian government overriding influence in Central Europe; hence, kleindeutsch proponents feared that Habsburg control would tarnish the “German-ness” of the new nation-state. Nevertheless, as Christian Jansen has argued, both klein- and großdeutsch activists shared in a nationalist “cult of unity” and in liberal assumptions about the participation of civil society in government policymaking.71 They also mixed relatively easily, both socially and politically, before the Revolutions of 1848/49 forced German nationalists to turn ideals into policy.
A third camp proposed the aptly named “Third Germany,” or Trias, solution. Here, the smaller states would unite around the kings of Saxony and Bavaria to form a federal state within the current Confederation, balancing the rival forces of Austria and Prussia.72 The proponents of a Third Germany remained divided and mutually suspicious until the 1850s, when Friedrich Ferdinand von Beust led the Saxon government and Trias efforts. Beust drafted influential but unsuccessful proposals for Confederal reform in the 1860s, and Trias plans were reflected in the Austrian reforms presented to the Frankfurt Fürstentag (Congress of Princes) of 1863. Many small-state monarchs resented the pretensions of the Bavarian king, who in turn suspected the Saxon government of deceit. Nonetheless, the specter of a Third Germany frightened network members and Prussian leaders alike. Liberals in the network tended to favor a federal state under Prussian leadership. By contrast, hardline conservatives tended to favor the inclusion of Austria because they believed that the neo-absolutist Habsburg Empire would marginalize liberals, radicals, and other “revolutionaries” in the new state. Moderate conservatives in the southern states, suspicious of Hohenzollern ambitions, often favored the cautious reforms and the balance of powers that a Trias solution might offer Europe.73
For many people, the answer to the question of whether Germany should be unified was simply “no.” A group of “Greater Prussians” rejected nationalism as the Trojan Horse of plebeian revolution. Many Prussian archconservatives desired the expansion of Prussian power and territory for its own sake. Bismarck was one of their early tribunes. Clemens von Metternich, Austrian foreign minister and “founding father of the German Confederation,” believed that limited political concessions to liberalism were necessary to stabilize the post-Napoleonic order, but he rejected nationalism because it could not provide a stable basis for European politics and was not conducive to maintaining peace.74 Others, mostly reactionaries seeking the return of personal rule and the society of orders (Ständestaat), rejected accommodation with nationalism and liberalism—at least publicly—and fought to return to the pre-Napoleonic status quo.75
Despite all the possible Germanies, between 1815 and 1866, the German Confederation (Deutscher Bund) remained the basic political and international framework within which members practiced politics and pursued national unification. The Confederation has, until relatively recently, been neglected as a force in Central European society and politics.76 The Confederation was a loose, defensive alliance of thirty-five sovereign monarchs and four free cities. As the Great Powers at the Vienna Congress had intended, the Prussian and Austrian governments dominated Confederal affairs. The Confederation was meant to buttress Central Europe against France and Russia and facilitate military cooperation among German rulers. Domestically, the Confederation was tasked with suppressing revolution and muzzling political dissent.77
The structure of the German Confederation was not set in stone, however. Its constitution allowed amendments by the unanimous consent of the Confederal diet, which was composed of ambassadors representing each monarch and free city. Thus, for example, the prince of Liechtenstein, ruling a tiny state tucked between Switzerland and Austria, could block any reform he found threatening. A smaller “plenum” of the largest states enacted narrower resolutions, but reforms had to pass committee, plenum, and then a vote by all ambassadors.78 The difficulty of reforming, and especially centralizing, the Confederation was part of Metternich’s design.79 The Confederation remained an institution intended to suppress liberalism, democracy, and revolution, and one of its primary functions became the coordination of police and military activities. Reformist monarchs in any given state would have to convince more than thirty other leaders of the merits of his or his ministers’ plan.
There existed in the Confederation no single, unifying school system, church, army, or press. From the March Revolution of 1848 until the Crimean War in the mid-1850s, there was more agreement than conflict among the conservative governments of the larger German states, even as they struggled for national supremacy. In those same years, some smaller states, such as Baden, Coburg, and Weimar, acted as incubators for future political accommodations by bringing leading liberals into official positions. The political unification of Germany would upset the conservative post-Napoleonic order and violate international law, whether in its kleindeutsch or Trias form. German reformers thus searched for a way to reconcile the monarchical legitimism that underlay the Confederation with their desires for national consolidation. This was the political context in which the network of liberal, kleindeutsch political friends developed.
How did members’ professions and class profiles influence their activities as political friends? The network was relatively homogenous. Most members were men of the bourgeoisie, but some came from the lower nobility and ruling dynasties.80 None hailed from artisan or peasant families. Princes in the network, such as Duke Ernst II of Coburg and Grand Duke Friedrich I of Baden, were rulers of smaller states. All of the men in this consciously masculine network received some university education. They were overwhelmingly Christians and predominantly Protestants from northern Germany. Few were raised in Prussia, however, and Franz von Roggenbach and Berthold Auerbach, Catholic and Jewish, respectively, were important members from the south. The overall composition of the network reflected the restricted place of women, Jews, and Catholics in the German-speaking public sphere.
The men of the network thus fell into that peculiar sociopolitical category of German society that crystalized around 1850: that of the “notable.”81 Notables (Honoratioren) were local or regional elites, generally from the families of the educated or propertied bourgeoisie.82 Prominent in local politics, notables tended to serve as mayors, city councilors, board members of charitable organizations, or in the local offices of the state bureaucracy. They thus formed a relatively homogenous group that favored consensus and flexible solutions to local issues but maintained a “national rather than parochial orientation” in their worldview.83 Much of the network’s difficulty in reconciling members’ liberal ideals with organized action, even their reliance on political friendship for mutual support and political organization, arose from the politics of notables that shaped electoral life well into the German Empire.84 The network’s rise and fall as an informal constellation of notables confirms that even in the mid-1860s, the politics of notables had become a fragile basis for political organization in Germany.85
Within their professions, however, the members of the network were relatively diverse. Max Duncker, Heinrich von Sybel, and Hermann Baumgarten were professional historians and professors. Duncker, Sybel, and J.G. Droysen were founders of the “Prussian School” of German nationalist history.86 They argued, with their friend Heinrich von Treitschke, that the Prussian state and monarchy led the world-historical mission to unite Germany.87 Political unification would then unfold, they thought, in the realization of personal and national liberty and power: hence their fixation on unity, power, and freedom.88 Like most European liberals, they believed that the larger the nation-state became, the better placed it would be to protect individual liberty and promote civilizational progress.89
Rudolf Haym was a professor of philosophy who taught German literature in the same nationalist vein, contributing to the processes of canon formation and nation-building.90 Haym was also the long-time editor of the political and historical journal, the Preußische Jahrbücher. In the 1860s and 1870s, Sybel became a leading parliamentary voice in the National Liberal Party in Berlin. Sybel and Droysen are more widely acknowledged as foundational figures in the emergence of history as a modern discipline than Max Duncker or Hermann Baumgarten; but Baumgarten had an important influence on Max Weber and Duncker served for many years as political advisor to the Prussian crown prince, Friedrich Wilhelm, before helping draft parts of the North German constitution that were reproduced in the constitution of the German Empire.91
Karl Samwer was a trained lawyer and spent most of his life in state administration. He was an advisor and minister to the rebel governments in the Duchy of Holstein during the First and Second Schleswig Wars (1848–51, 1864). He served as a minister to Duke Ernst of Coburg in the intervening years. Karl Francke likewise worked as a finance and foreign minister in the Holstein governments during the First and Second Schleswig Wars and in exile as a high administrator in the Coburg government. Franz von Roggenbach became an unofficial advisor to Friedrich of Baden in 1859 and his leading minister in the early 1860s. Roggenbach was close to the circle of moderates around Wilhelm I of Prussia and Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm. He was also one of Bismarck’s most implacable enemies.92
Gustav Freytag was the (in)famous bourgeois realist author of Debit and Credit and the popular historical series, Bilder aus der deutschen Vergangenheit.93 Freytag became an antisemite during the German Empire, but in the 1850s and 1860s, he was close friends with fellow writer Berthold Auerbach, a Jewish Württemberger. Auerbach wrote, among many other works, the Black Forest Village Stories and published a popular almanac for the common folk. He was more politically aloof than other members, but his courtly and artistic contacts were vital to the network. Auerbach’s membership also demonstrated how political friendship could extend to confessional and religious “Others”—if they were liberals.94
Charlotte Duncker was the only core female figure among the friends. Married to Max Duncker, she guided him through his rocky political career in the 1850s and 1860s. She also acted as an independent advisor and mediator of favors and political intelligence throughout her life, while also caring for her family’s home and health.95 Charlotte Duncker and her husband were also extremely close to Karl and Anna Mathy—an instance of political friendship between couples. Other women were involved in this liberal network, despite male efforts to exclude them from political discussions. Anna Mathy corresponded with members and arranged political favors, but caring for an ill son, as well as her own precarious health, kept her from participating in politics to the same degree as Charlotte Duncker. Royal women, such as Crown Princess Victoria of Prussia, Queen Victoria’s daughter, granted access to royal audiences, dispensed professional favors, and provided political protection to bourgeois members of the network. Princess Victoria also cultivated relationships with Charlotte Duncker and the wives of other network members.
Finally, Karl Mathy spent time in Switzerland as a political exile in the 1830s before serving as a representative in the Baden legislature in the 1840s. He then worked in the short-lived Reich finance ministry during the Revolutions of 1848/49, was finance minister of Baden in 1865, and, after the Seven Weeks’ War of 1866, became the leading minister in the Grand Duchy of Baden. For most of the time that the network existed, however, Mathy was a banker. He helped charter credit banks in Leipzig, Coburg, and Karlsruhe. He also worked under David Hansemann as an early manager in the Disconto-Gesellschaft. Mathy was the businessman of the network, and he participated in the difficult negotiations between liberal business leaders and conservative Prussian officials in the 1850s and 1860s.96
The porous borders between academia, business, and state service for these liberals help illustrate Anna Ross’s findings about the “blurred boundary between state and civil society” in which bourgeois professional organizations influenced conservative ministerial policy.97 State repression spared few liberals in the network after 1850, however. The political friends were denied career opportunities, harassed by the police, and eventually driven into exile. Post-revolutionary governments made little distinction between perceived opponents’ political, professional, and personal lives. Indeed, such a distinction would have limited the effectiveness of state repression. Network members’ halting accommodations with state power in the late 1850s and 1860s, by contrast, led to professional advancement and emotional stability for many of its members.
Friendship in the Vormärz was a broad designation that captured a variety of political and religious hues. The term represented deep personal relations as the framework for political and dissenting religious opinions. It was also a supposedly neutral, private term used by groups of dissenters to avoid state bans on political parties and civic associations.98 How did (inter)personal relationships affect the development of politics and government affairs in 1850s and 1860s Germany?
Liberals did not form their worldviews in isolation but in conversation with political friends and enemies across Germany. Yet, most historians of politics have overlooked or dismissed the role of emotional relationships.99 Others have merely acknowledged the gap before moving on.100 The concept of political friendship complements existing analyses of liberal and radical publications and organizations in Germany before and after 1848.101 To understand wider changes in midcentury liberalism and nationalism, one must also focus more squarely on the development and deployment of emotional relationships.
Political friendship was maintained by the exchange of emotional support through letters and personal visits that usually included political discussions. Educated Germans forged personal contacts and political alliances at university, at work, through print media, and in state legislatures. Even as they did so, however, they were also moving through different “emotional communities,” mixing feelings, politics, and professional ambition.102 Personal support among political activists offered what William Reddy has termed an “emotional refuge” from state repression.103 At the same time, emotional bonds helped individuals adapt to new political arrangements—ideological accommodations with conservative state officials, for instance.
Approaching the topic of political friendship with the tools of cultural history allows me to demonstrate how individuals marshaled emotions in multilateral relationships for expression, manipulation, or assurances of authenticity—political or otherwise. But much like emotion, friendship is notoriously difficult to define.104 The meaning of both terms changed with the constellation of social expectations built around them.105 Contemporaries spent a great deal of time and energy trying to decide whether an emotion in a letter, or a friendship, was true. This fact testifies to the importance that they placed on feeling and friendship as metaphors and as criteria against which to gauge political life, especially under state repression.106 Determining whether an emotion in the past was authentic, however, can be as difficult as determining whether a friendship was true, especially since the two were often intertwined. In some cases, emotions and friendships were performative or manipulative—though that does not preclude affinity or love.
Nevertheless, expressions of emotion and friendships operated in historical discourse in ways that are not unfamiliar to historians. The scholarly study of ghosts, apparitions, and holy visitations suggests how to approach other ephemeral, subjective phenomena. Whether the Virgin Mary actually appeared to Bernadette Soubirous in a grotto near Lourdes, or whether three girls actually saw her in a field outside the German village of Marpingen, is not the crucial point. People believed that these events happened, could have happened, or empirically did not happen, and that is what should interest historians. The way people wrote about apparitions “as a text of sorts” or as a “genre” both reflected and affected an array of social, political, and economic structures—and their negotiation.107 Projects of modernity, European or otherwise, were predicated on fiction, but fictions have continued to have real effects in the processes of state-building and nation-building—as in much else.108 The historical agency of ghosts and apparitions, on the one hand, and emotions and friendships, on the other, are functionally similar discursive phenomena.
How should historians determine which friendships were political friendships? In the context of Restoration France, Sarah Horowitz has considered friendship a useful political category if the individuals involved held mutual concerns beyond political patronage and professional interests.109 For the purposes of this book, I consider historical subjects to be “political friends” if they exchanged emotional declarations, shared intimate family details or sensitive personal information, carried on political discussions, and called on each other for professional favors and political action. Political friends shared lasting personal affinities, professional favors, and political beliefs. If we remove the component of politics, then we have a friendship in the current understanding of the term. But friendship need not imply political consensus. A friendship today might seem more authentic, or admirable, if the two parties hold conflicting political views.
The network on which this study focuses was based on overlapping and often entangled political friendships. To be integrated into the network, a prospective member had to be able to understand the norms of political friendship that had developed from a confluence of historical trends and individual experiences that also included participation in certain civic associations and political events—as chapter 1 shows. To qualify, so to speak, for network memberships, individuals had to share political friendships with most other members and regularly engage in network efforts to provide emotional or material support and advance liberalism and kleindeutsch nationalism. Members of the network supported one another when there was considerable risk or no clear personal advantage in doing so. They also shared intimate and potentially damaging personal information and experienced longing for one another that they often expressed in letter-writing. This study counts an individual as a network member if they maintained emotional bonds, political discussion, and the sharing of favors for an extended period—for many members, this lasted for nearly two decades. A few, such as Hermann Baumgarten and Ernst von Stockmar, were active in the network only in its final years due to their relative youth.
As chapter 1 demonstrates, political friendships between kleindeutsch liberals and großdeutsch nationalists or democrats were generally precluded after the Revolutions of 1848/49. These liberals chose to inhabit a much more homogenous political world after 1849. Other historical figures corresponded with several network members and bonded with them personally, but the surviving historical record—with all its inherent biases—proved insufficient to include them in the network.
Based on these flexible criteria, we can imagine the network of liberal political friends as concentric (table 1.1). The core members of the group, among them the Dunckers, the Mathys, Gustav Freytag, and Ernst of Coburg, were most active and most interconnected personally, professionally, and politically. They were the primary organizers of network campaigns and some of its longest members. The second tier of members included Berthold Auerbach, Rudolf Haym, and Friedrich of Baden. These members were also deeply involved in the network, its personal connections, and its political and professional projects. They were, however, less likely to take part in day-to-day organizing or maintained bonds with fewer network members. The final ring of the network comprised individuals with whom many network members maintained political contact and with whom a few of them had personal relationships. These network affiliates shared most of its members’ political sympathies but lacked personal connections to a majority of its members.
Table 1.1. Network Members and Affiliates. Created by the author to illustrate overall findings.
Core Members
Members
Affiliates
Charlotte Duncker
Max Duncker
Ernst II of Coburg
Karl Francke
Gustav Freytag
Karl Mathy
Franz von Roggenbach
Karl Samwer
Heinrich von Sybel
Ludwig Ägidi
Berthold Auerbach
Hermann Baumgarten
Friedrich I of Baden
Rudolf Haym
Anna Mathy
Ernst von Stockmar
Eduard von Tempeltey
Friedrich Bassermann
Carl Alexander of Weimar
J.G. Droysen
Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia
Robert Morier
August von Saucken-Julienfelde
Alexander von Soiron
Christian von Stockmar
Crown Princess Victoria of Prussia
Not all political friendships were the same; the nature of relationships between individual members varied and changed over time. The granular approach of this study highlights the variety of personal, professional, and political experiences that made the network so complex and representative of the moderate liberal milieu. This was a network composed primarily of bourgeois liberals that incorporated lesser nobles and minor monarchs, almost all of whom had similar lived experiences and political convictions and were similar in age. To establish a quantifiable definition of political friendship or network membership would risk obscuring the mutability that was the network’s greatest asset before 1859.
The moderate liberals whom I study built their network on this personal-political foundation. Yet, it must be emphasized that theirs was an informal network. Recognizing the central importance of informal sociability allows me to explore changing social expectations regarding the gendered role of emotional expression in interpersonal relationships, it opens a window on the development of societal norms, and it shows how educated Germans negotiated the meaning and extent of their accommodations with state power. Following the same individuals through granular episodes over a quarter century allows me to demonstrate how the overlapping emotional and social freight of politics and friendship changed over time. Political friendship first facilitated political cooperation and personal survival; then it helped network members gain important official posts. Eventually, though, it could not bear the weight of emerging mass politics, party politics, and centralized civic life.
Political friendship and informal networks were not unique to these moderate German liberals; they existed in other European states and across the political spectrum in Central Europe.110 As Margaret Lavinia Anderson has argued in the case of Ludwig Windthorst and the German Center Party, political influence and professional patronage in the nineteenth century were often “no less decisive for being informal.”111 The Prussian conservative milieu was also bound by “close and intensive” personal relationships and family networks.112 The mixing of personal and political matters in written correspondence helped sustain the early socialist movement in Germany as well.113 Although other political networks in the German Confederation contained overlapping personal and political affinities, they seem to have operated more as patronage and pressure groups dominated by a few senior figures within monarchical courts. Two examples can demonstrate this point.
The so-called Wochenblatt group, composed of moderate liberals and moderate conservatives around August von Bethmann Hollweg and aligned with Prince Wilhelm of Prussia, worked to advance their views in the press and to ensure that their affiliates entered or kept influential positions at court and in the Prussian bureaucracy.114 Their connections to the liberal political friends whom I have studied facilitated the rise of some network members into the Prussian state service and academia. However, the “Wochenblattpartei” remained distinct in the 1850s and soon thereafter faded from view. A second case concerns archconservatives at the Prussian court whose social and political activities coalesced around the brothers Leopold and Ludwig von Gerlach, around the vitriolic conservative journal, Die Berliner Revue, and around Hermann Wagener’s Neue Preußische Zeitung (or “Kreuzzeitung”).115 In part because this conservative network did not fade so quickly from view, the role of friendship in the political activities, personal bonds, and internal debates of these networks represents a promising area for future research.
Political friendship was thus historically contingent, and the kind of network that I have chosen to study had deep roots in European history. The Enlightenment paved the way for sentimental culture among elite Europeans in the eighteenth century.116 Sentimentalist and German classicist writers taught readers to value the “authentic” expression of emotion as a marker of personal cultivation and the key to meaningful relationships beyond status or class.117 The Enlightenment project of creating an educated, egalitarian public sphere began in the salons, reading circles, and debate clubs of upper-class Europe. This process encouraged the formation of friendship based on shared understandings of the potential of the individual, the inevitability of civil society’s liberation from the social order of the Old Regime, and the eventual triumph of rationalism in government, commerce, and religion.118 Writers believed that nurturing emotional bonds between enlightened individuals would help them build a public sphere in which they could then work to reform the state and society.119
By the end of the Napoleonic Wars, nationalism and the goal of the nation-state as the telos of these interpersonal relations began to shape the discourse of educated German-speakers.120 The proper conduct of emotional relationships among citizens as co-nationals would create a free society and pave the way for national unification. According to this viewpoint, a government that respected individual rights and allowed all citizens to realize their full potential would thereby contribute to the progress of the nation and the state itself. Bildung was central to this project. It was the basis of liberal political action, and it remained so.121 Future network members acquired a shared emotional vocabulary and shared political experiences in the years before the Revolutions of 1848/49.
Taking stock: these political friends constituted a network because core members enforced unwritten rules of interaction, the circulation of information, adherence to political liberalism, and kleindeutsch nationalism. If someone neglected to offer appropriate emotional support during times of trouble, failed to correspond at an appropriate level about professional, political, and personal topics, or deviated from the consensus around political methods, they were isolated from the network and its resources. For instance, they were denied access to sensitive information about government plans, professional recommendations, and advice on pivotal life decisions. Divergent political views were considered personal betrayal, just as disappointed emotional expectations were considered political betrayal.
These emotional foundations of liberals’ activities are impossible to overlook. For example, Max Duncker’s inability to write frequently enough while in government service angered members eager for both political intelligence and emotional support. The network cut off Duncker’s access to shared contacts and sources of information due to his early support for Bismarck in the Prussian constitutional crisis—after the network had secured him a government post and helped him fulfill his duties as a court advisor. Political friendship was unable to support a network of mutual political and personal aid in a more open society after 1858, when liberals and democrats revived associational life, expanded party politics, and entered state service. This finding supports Sarah Horowitz’s argument that friendship, though useful for political organizing in post-Napoleonic states without formal parties or much civic activity, later proved an unstable foundation for political life in a society marked by freedom of the press, mass politics, and organized civil engagement.122
Letter-writing was the primary means through which these political friends tried to maintain their network.123 After 1850, few members lived in the same place at any given time. Letters were complex sources, part of a Sattelzeit “obsession to express oneself” in written correspondence and diaries that adapted fictional aspects from art and literature.124 They acted as prisms, refracting the boundaries between the political, professional, and personal in the mid-nineteenth century.125 In this way, letters are simultaneously “ego-documents” that explore social and political identities while offering a window onto the formation of the self “with the ‘self’ at the intersection of different sets of roles and expectations.”126 Because emotional subjectivity (exploring the self through writing) was central to contemporary letters, they contained a mixture—at times, a seemingly absurd mélange—of requests, communiqués, and fanciful ruminations.127 Confederal reform proposals, official reports, and draft constitutions were also written and circulated in epistolary form. Not only did letters blur the boundaries between public and private for bourgeois liberals and their noble and princely correspondents; they also integrated politics into emotional exchanges as part of a “cult of epistolary friendship” that shaped contemporary political culture.128
As not all friendships were the same, neither was all correspondence alike. When friends exchanged letters, it served a purpose beyond the sharing of information or requesting help; it addressed longing and was expected to carry emotional freight. This feature differed fundamentally from how most historical figures wrote to newspapers or corresponded with institutions. Although (political) friends may have discussed the same political issues in their correspondence as they might have in a periodical, the fact that the addressee was a friend meant the interaction had to respect the rules of friendship as a social institution. The difference between corresponding with or about a friend and other forms of writing also appears in chapter 5, in how some network members wrote scholarly political history while simultaneously producing intensely emotional biographies of dead political friends.129 The medium was still the book, but its subject and object shaped the text and its reception. Letters between friends traded in a set of norms that were interwoven with other aspects of the letter-writers’ lives. In an environment of political repression, this multiplicity bound otherwise isolated individuals and provided both emotional intimacy and political community that later proved difficult to disentangle.
An economy of trust, in which letters served as the main currency, underlay historical actors’ political discussions and their views on state and society. Written feelings expressed authenticity and intimacy—trust—to correspondents, and they solicited reassurances and reciprocity in return.130 Correspondents might misinterpret or disregard political information if it was not accompanied by the right personal touches—particularly in a period of postal surveillance by the state when personal trust and inside knowledge was key to the interpretation of enclosed information.131 If political discourse was an “intersection between the realm of ideology and the realm of social action,”132 then it was also an intersection between historical actors mediated through letters and an iteration of the eighteenth-century republic of letters.133
Edited volumes of correspondence between public intellectuals, politicians, and state leaders usually exclude what editors consider irrelevant gossip or personal information.134 Such omissions are often necessary, but relevant political information was not entirely comprehensible to contemporaries without the pages upon pages of everyday and extraordinary expressions of feeling. The erasure of emotion—sometimes taking the form of declamations that seem embarrassingly intense—from elite political liberalism in German Europe stems from contemporaries’ insistence on the supposed rationality of politics.135 But that did not stop them from strategically deploying emotions to boost their political and professional profiles, to alter their relationship to power and politics. We think with our friends, and emotional regimes underlie political ones.136
Letters were not the only medium of network communication. Secret and not-so-secret meetings were also important. Members recorded their impressions of these gatherings in diaries and official reports. The political friends also vacationed or took the waters together in an era when fears of nervous collapse fueled a booming resort economy in Europe.137 Additionally, princely members often provided a safe haven for political gatherings under post-revolutionary repression. Ernst of Coburg, for example, invited his bourgeois political friends to intimate dinners, hunts, and discussion in smoke-filled parlors. Such relationships between princely and bourgeois members of the network also demonstrated how, through political friendship, liberal elites crafted their program toward the state after 1848.
The first four chapters of the book progress chronologically. The exact beginning of the network is difficult to pinpoint. No one month, or even year, marked the coalescence of the many individual relationships into one network of emotional, political, and professional support. Chapter 1 sketches the outline of the German Confederation before exploring the biographies of network members: their generational background, family status, education, as well as religious and professional identities. The first chapter ends by addressing the acceleration of political encounters and personal bonding during the Revolutions of 1848/49, in the First Schleswig War, and at the Erfurt Parliament (1850).
The restoration of the German Confederation and the end of the First Schleswig War in 1851 drove many members into exile in other Confederal states. Chapter 2 charts the network’s development from 1851 through 1858. Gustav Freytag, for example, sought asylum from a Prussian secret arrest warrant in Coburg. Others, such as Max Duncker and Heinrich von Sybel, reentered academia but found their careers blocked by hostile state ministries. I then focus on the case of political friendship between the Mathy and Duncker families. Emotional and professional support from the network proved crucial for its members’ material and political survival under post-revolutionary state repression. This was an era when the Prussian government used not only the carrot of reform to attract liberals but also the stick of police harassment to soften them into accommodation with the state.
Chapter 3 examines the political activity of network members beginning with the Prussian regency in 1858 and the war in northern Italy in 1859. At this time, network members began to enter government office. Liberals sought such posts not only to defend the legacy of their Revolution in 1848 but also to advance new plans for the monarchical unification of Germany.138 The peculiar sovereignty of monarchs in the smaller states was the topic of much discussion among German nationalists, including the liberal network. Chapter 3 analyzes members’ serious plans to reform the Confederation in the early 1860s, a period of extreme historical contingency. It does so in order to highlight the possible Germanies that liberals envisioned before Bismarck’s unification decided the matter. At the same time, however, a decline in state surveillance opened space within the network for increasingly adversarial debates about specific government policies, particularly during the Prussian constitutional crisis—policies in which members were now imbricated. Some members failed to meet contradictory demands for emotional support and agreement on political strategy. Efforts to limit perceived offenders’ access to shared resources showed how core members enforced social norms developed in the 1850s, while undermining the emotional foundations of those very norms.
The shaky foundations of political friendship worsened until the network split into two rival camps. Chapter 4 explores the fault lines within the network. By analyzing a campaign to undermine rival members, it demonstrates how political friends failed to appreciate the new circumstances under which efforts to discipline unorthodox members took place. The chapter then examines the pragmatic rapprochement among network members in late 1863 and early 1864 around the Frankfurt Princes’ Congress and the Augustenburg candidacy in the Second Schleswig War. It shows the simultaneous resiliency of political friendship within the network, which could still mobilize around the cause of national unification. Within a year, however, the network split again. Chapter 4 concludes by charting the network’s disintegration with the Seven Weeks’ War of 1866 and the foundation of the North German Confederation in early 1867.
In the decades after the collapse of the network in 1866, many former members wrote biographies of departed political friends. In chapter 5, the final chapter, I address how four members turned their deceased subjects into sympathetic, semi-fictive characters in order to tell their own story of German unification—reimagining personal pasts as national history. They invented thoughts and feelings for these friends-turned-subjects-turned-characters, presenting to readers biographical fiction as historical fact. In this process––which I term affective characterization––the writers sought to integrate their subjects, themselves, and the network into recent political history. The biographers also used their texts to defend their political choices in the decades before German unification and to insist on their own historical relevance, despite their many failures. Thus, a book that began with network members’ common biographies returns to analyze those sources as products of these individuals’ desire to write their history of pre-unification Germany.
1. Karl Mathy to Max Duncker, 26 November 1861, BArch N2184/14, Bl. 153.
2. Members adopted this term from the general political discourse of the time to describe their relationships and mutual associates. See, for example, Gustav Freytag und Heinrich von Treitschke, 4; Ernst of Coburg to Freytag, 18 January 1860, Briefwechsel, 121–22; Freytag, Karl Mathy, 384; GStAPK, VI. HA Nl. Max Duncker, Nr. 5, Bl. 168. German conservatives also used the term. See, for instance, Leopold von Gerlach, Denkwürdigkeiten, 1: 128.
3. Tal, Christians and Jews in Germany, 33.
4. Tal, Christians and Jews in Germany, 33.
5. Nipperdey, Germany from Napoleon to Bismarck, 599; Sheehan, German History, 710, 719–22. A similar situation prevailed in the historiography on the UK in the 1850s. See Taylor, Decline of British Radicalism, 2.
6. Siemann, Gesellschaft im Aufbruch. See also Jansen, Einheit, Macht und Freiheit, 20.
7. Because of their insistence on reform over revolution, questions about the means and ends of liberal accommodation with conservative state power appears in other nineteenth-century European contexts. See, for example, Riall, Sicily and the Unification of Italy, 15, 115–16; Rampton, Liberal Ideas in Tsarist Russia, 4, 85–86, 186.
8. Biefang, Politisches Bürgertum, 17, 21.
9. Biefang, Politisches Bürgertum, 17–18.
10. See also Biefang, introduction to Der Deutsche Nationalverein, xi; Nipperdey, Organisation der deutschen Parteien.
11. Biefang, Politisches Bürgertum, 17–18.
12. Jansen, Einheit, Macht und Freiheit, 21, 30, 481, 604.
13. Jansen, introduction to Nach der Revolution, xvi.
14. Jansen, introduction to Nach der Revolution, xvii.
15. Jansen, Einheit, Macht und Freiheit, 27. Henning Albrecht also provides an example of how to integrate historical actors into their immediate intellectual and political milieus while paying close attention to their influence on national society. See Albrecht, Antiliberalismus und Antisemitismus.
16. Jansen, Einheit, Macht und Freiheit, 31, 27.
17. Jansen, Einheit, Macht und Freiheit, 13, 21.
18. Jansen, Einheit, Macht und Freiheit, 21–22.
19. For example, see Jansen, Einheit, Macht und Freiheit, 27, 63–64, 101–103. Based on association charters and police records, Janine Murphy has recently argued that the 1850s represented a “negotiation for survival” that pre-dated the Nationalverein. In the process, associational leaders and state officials reached an implicit détente on the place of politics in civic life. See Murphy, “Contesting Surveillance,” 21–22, 24, 35.
20. Brophy, “Political Calculus of Capital,” 152–53, 160. See also Brophy, “Salus Publica Suprema Lex,” 122–51.
21. Barclay, Frederick William IV, 221.
22. Ross, Beyond the Barricades, 48.
23. Ross, Beyond the Barricades, 178, 186.
24. See Jansen, Einheit, Macht und Freiheit, 55.
25. Jansen contends that the New Era represented only a “half break” with the repressive policies of the Manteuffel cabinet. See Jansen, Einheit, Macht und Freiheit, 68. Testing this claim in the case of these moderate liberals offers another reason to investigate this process of accommodation into the 1860s and liberals’ accommodation with Bismarckian national unification in 1866/67.
26. Liberal “surrender” is often dated even more precisely to the Indemnity Act of September 1866.
27. Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class.
28. Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class, 10–11, 13.
29. Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class, 10–11.
30. Mergel, “Überlegungen,” 588–89; Bösch and Domeier, “Cultural History of Politics,” 579–80.
31. Frevert, “Neue Politikgeschichte,” 14. See also Frevert, Men of Honour, 8.
32. Stollberg-Rilinger, introduction to Was heißt Kulturgeschichte des Politischen, 10–11.
33. Stollberg-Rilinger, introduction to Was heißt Kulturgeschichte des Politischen, 14.
34. See the canonical Anderson, Imagined Communities.
35. See Frevert, “Neue Politikgeschichte,” 13–14; Smith, Gender of History, 59, 98.
36. Frevert, “Neue Politikgeschichte,” 24; Mergel, “Überlegungen,” 592; Bösch and Domeier, “Cultural History of Politics,” 581.
37. Mergel, “Überlegungen,” 588. For an earlier call for a more anthropological historical methodology, see Nipperdey, ed., Gesellschaft, Kultur, Theorie. On questions of pastness and distance, see Lowenthal, Past Is a Foreign Country.
38. Hadley, Living Liberalism, 3. See also Kwan, Liberalism and the Habsburg Monarchy, 1–2; Langewiesche, “Anfänge der deutschen Parteien,” 356.
39. Leonhard, Liberalismus, 33.
40. See Riall, Sicily and the Unification of Italy, 14–15, 25; Rampton, Liberal Ideas in Tsarist Russia, 1, 4, 186; Gould, Origins of Liberal Dominance, 2, 5; Kwan, Liberalism in the Habsburg Monarchy, 4, 8; Isabella, Risorgimento in Exile, 25–26.
41. Langewiesche, Liberalismus in Deutschland, 13–15; Sheehan, German Liberalism, 5; Nipperdey, Germany from Napoleon to Bismarck, 254–55; Blackbourn, History of Germany, 97–98; Leonhard, “Formulating and Reformulating,” 84; Kwan, Liberalism in the Habsburg Monarchy, 4. Conservatives remained divided into supporters of corporatist monarchy and more “statist” conservatives who embraced reforms that increased the presence of the state in everyday life. The Gerlach brothers and Otto von Manteuffel were leading representatives of these camps, respectively. See Leopold von Gerlach, Denkwürdigkeiten, 1: 97, 2: 645, 2: 749. See also Achtelstetter, Prussian Conservatism, 1–2.
42. Blackbourn and Eley, Peculiarities of German History, 18; Leonhard, “Formulating and Reformulating,” 82–83.
43. Blackbourn, History of Germany, 97.
44. On different status and class-based forms of liberalism, see Koselleck, Preußen zwischen Reform und Revolution; and Kocka, Industrial Culture and Bourgeois Society; Woltz, “Staatspolitische Wirken,” 7–29; Scheeben, Ernst II; Müller, Our Fritz.
45. See Langewiesche, “Nature of German Liberalism,” 100–101.
46. See, for instance, Paul Pfizer’s notion of the “instinct for freedom” in Pfizer, “Liberal,” in Staats-Lexikon, 1st ed., 9: 713–14, 717–18. See also, Kwan, Liberalism in the Habsburg Monarchy, 4, 7; Fitzpatrick, Liberal Imperialism in Germany; Guettel, German Expansionism; Pitts, Turn to Empire.
47. For a classic regional study on this topic, see Langewiesche, Liberalismus und Demokratie in Württemberg.
48. Christian Jansen and Andreas Biefang have both distinguished in useful ways between democrats and liberals in the post-1848 era. See Politisches Bürgertum, 47, 248–49; Jansen, Einheit, Macht und Freiheit, 15–16. See also, Kwan, Liberalism in the Habsburg Monarchy, 32.
49. See, for example, Wippermann, “National-Politische Bewegung,” in Staats-Lexikon, 3rd ed., 10: 370. See also chapters 1 and 3.
50. Biefang, Politisches Bürgertum, 47.
51. Biefang, Politisches Bürgertum, 47.
52. Jansen, Einheit, Macht und Freiheit, 15.
53. Biefang, “Introduction,” xix; Kwan, Liberalism in the Habsburg Monarchy, 31. In this way, they differed little from other European liberals in their view on centralized party politics. See Parry, Politics of Patriotism, 36, 84; Soper, Building a Civil Society, 140–41, 143.
54. Ross, Beyond the Barricades, 13; Biefang, Politisches Bürgertum, 44.
55. Jansen, Einheit, Macht und Freiheit, 15–16.
56. Jansen, Einheit, Macht und Freiheit, 14, 21.
57. Levinger, Enlightened Nationalism, 195; Lees, Revolution and Reflection, 22; Hirschhausen, Liberalismus und Nation, 118–19. See also Parry, Politics of Patriotism, 52–54; Gould, Origins of Liberal Dominance, 7, 125; San Narciso, Barral-Martínez, Armenteros, introduction to Monarchy and Liberalism in Spain, 1–3.
58. Barclay, Frederick William IV, 8; Levinger, Enlightened Nationalism, 9–10.
59. On the adaptation of monarchies to the demands of the nineteenth century, see Barclay, Frederick William IV, 4–7; Müller, Our Fritz; Møller, “Domesticating a German Heir,” 131; Paulmann, “Searching for a ‘Royal International’,” 145–77.
60. Frank Lorenz Müller’s work is exemplary in this regard. See Müller, Our Fritz; Müller, Royal Heirs. A focus on German monarchs as persons who interacted personally with liberals is absent from Brian Vick’s and Harald Biermann’s otherwise outstanding studies of pre-unification politics and nationalism. See Vick, Defining Germany; Biermann, Ideologie statt Realpolitik.
61. On this point, see Kaschuba, “Zwischen Deutscher Nation und Provinz,” 84–85; Walker, German Home Towns, 325.
62. Riall, Sicily and the Unification of Italy, 12.
63. Lees, Revolution and Reflection, 15–16.
64. Craig, Politics of the Unpolitical, 144.
65. As Dena Goodman argues in the context of the French Enlightenment, “The epistolary genre became the dominant medium of creating an active and interactive reading public.” Goodman, Republic of Letters, 137. See also Brophy, “Common Reader,” 126–28.
66. J. Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, 69; R. Habermas, Frauen und Männer, 345–46, 355.
67. Brophy, Rhineland; Applegate, “Mediated Nation.”
68. On the fluidity of Vormärz nationalism, see Vick, Defining Germany, 41, 48–49. See also Langewiesche, “Nature of German Liberalism,” 97–98, 106.
69. Applegate, Nation of Provincials; Green, Fatherlands. See also Ashton, Kingdom of Württemberg and the Making of Germany; Fenske, Der liberale Südwesten; Rogosch, Hamburg im Deutschen Bund.
70. On the longue durée of this debate, see Langewiesche, Nation, Nationalismus, Nationalstaat; Langewiesche, introduction to Föderative Nation.
71. Jansen, Einheit, Macht und Freiheit, 407. Dieter Langewiesche has contended that nationalists of all stripes shared the assumption that a new nation-state would “become an instrument of progress.” See Langewiesche, “Nature of German Liberalism,” 110.
72. Flöter, Beust; Burg, Die deutsche Trias in Idee und Wirklichkeit. See also Wiens, Imperial German Army.
73. In the 1860s, these southern conservatives participated in the Deutscher Reformverein alongside großdeutsch advocates. The association worked to popularize Trias reform plans and counter the public presence of the pro-Prussian Deutscher Nationalverein.
74. Siemann, Metternich, 438, 557.
75. Berdahl, Politics of the Prussian Nobility, 5–6.
76. Jürgen Müller’s first monograph remains the best work on the Confederation as a national institution: Müller, Deutscher Bund und deutsche Nation. See also Gruner, Der Deutsche Bund, 1815–1866; Müller, Der Deutsche Bund; Bentfeldt, Der deutsche Bund als nationales Band. The recent historical focus on the Confederation as a meaningful (transnational) political structure reflects similar work on the even looser structure of the Holy Roman Empire. For example, see Stollberg-Rilinger, Emperor’s Old Clothes; Wilson, Heart of Europe. Efforts to discover a historical precedent for the European Union may partly explain the new demand for books on the subject.
77. See Siemann, Der “Polizeiverein” deutscher Staaten; and Siemann, Deutschlands Ruhe. The institutions of the German Confederation have been included in re-evaluations of the repressive powers of conservative governments in the Vormärz and after 1849. See de Graaf et al., Securing Europe after Napoleon; and Schulz, Normen und Praxis. Chapters 1 and 2 address the limitations of state repression.
78. “Bundesakte,” in Dokumente, ed. Huber, 86.
79. Siemann, Metternich, 439–40; Müller, Deutscher Bund und deutsche Nation, 34–35.
80. Marc Mulholland designated the social group in question, from industrialists to those who offered “services certified by educational qualification, such as doctors, lawyers, and other professionals.” Mulholland, Bourgeois Liberty and the Politics of Fear, 3–4. Jürgen Kocka describes the two component groups of the Bürgertum as the Bildungsbürgertum—those with an academic degree who live off that certification, that is, civil servants, professors, lawyers, physicians, etc.—and the Wirtschaftsbürgertum or Besitzbürgertum—those who participated in commerce and owned capital, such as merchants, bankers, and manufacturers. Kocka, Industrial Culture and Bourgeois Society, 192–93.
81. Blackbourn and Eley, Peculiarities of German History, 253. The political class of the notable was also present outside of Germany, of course, but it seemed to have held less sway over national politics. See, for example, Soper, Building a Civil Society, 142.
82. Blackbourn and Eley, Peculiarities of German History, 19.
83. Blackbourn and Eley, Peculiarities of German History, 253, 259–60.
84. See, for example, Anderson, Practicing Democracy; Retallack, Notables of the Right. See also Langewiesche, “Anfränge der deutschen Parteien,” 356; Nipperdey, Organisation der deutschen Parteien.
85. Biefang, Politisches Bürgertum, 17–18.
86. White, Content of the Form, 83.
87. Lees, Revolution and Reflection, 41.
88. Jansen, Einheit, Macht und Freiheit.
89. See, for example, English Liberals in Parry, Politics of Patriotism, 28.
90. See Ansel, Prutz, Hettner und Haym.
91. GStAPK, VI. HA Nl. Max Duncker, Nr. 211, Bl. 41–46, 57–70; Craig, Germany, 13.
92. See, for example, Heyderhof, ed., Im Ring der Gegner Bismarcks.
93. On Freytag’s fiction and nonfiction, see Applegate, “Mediated Nation,” 33–50; Ping, “Gustav Freytag,” 605–30.
94. On the complexity of integration and Jewish-Christian friendships, see Rahden, Jews and Other Germans, 7, 87–89.
95. Sarah Horowitz has examined the role of networks of elite women in Restoration France in bridging political divides between men. See Horowitz, Friendship and Politics, 81, 88.
96. Such relationships and activities represent a neglected point of contact between German Bildungs- and Besitzbürgertümer prior to unification. See Brophy, “Political Calculus of Capital,” 152–53; Barclay, Frederick William IV, 218, 221; Ross, Beyond the Barricades, 12. See also Hull, Sexuality, State, and Civil Society.
97. Ross, Beyond the Barricades, 14. Gordon Craig also challenged the supposedly apolitical attitude of German writers from Goethe to G.G. Gervinus. See Craig, Politics of the Unpolitical.
98. See Graf, Politisierung, 24–25; Garrioch, “From Christian Friendship to Secular Sentimentality,” 167–68, 171–72.
99. Rosenwein, “Worrying About Emotions,” 821.
100. Personal relations between liberals are largely absent from Harald Biermann’s study of kleindeutsch liberals’ foreign policy, with the important exception of his discussion of the weight of “trauma” from 1848/49 on liberal leaders. See Biermann, Ideologie statt Realpolitik.
101. For some of the members’ published political writings, see Rosenberg, Die nationalpolitische Publizistik Deutschlands.
102. Rosenwein, “Worrying About Emotions,” 842. See also Rosenwein, Emotional Communities.
103. Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, 121, 124–25, 129; Boddice, History of Emotions, 77.
104. See Horowitz, Friendship and Politics, 8, 20–21. See also Borutta and Verheyen, introduction to Präsenz der Gefühle, 11–12, 20–21.
105. See, for example, Siegel, Entfernte Freunde.
106. Horowitz, Friendship and Politics, 113; Frevert, “Defining Emotions,” 25.
107. Blackbourn, Marpingen, 4, 7–8; Harris, Lourdes, xviii.
108. See Tanaka, New Times in Modern Japan; Ivy, Discourses of the Vanishing.
109. Horowitz, Friendship and Politics, 16–17, 113.
110. As Till van Rahden notes, investigating individual political friendships as part of a network with regional and national goals might introduce micro history to the discussion of bourgeois liberalism in order “to trace the multilayered and contradictory mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion and to analyze the interaction of several dimensions of relations . . .” Rahden, Jews and Other Germans, 16, 86. See also Stollberg-Rilinger, introduction to Was heißt Kulturgeschichte des Politischen, 21; Dann, Nation und Nationalismus, 14, 20; Horowitz, Friendship and Politics.
111. Anderson, Windthorst, 3. A “circle of friends and competitors” played a major role in Republican women’s organizing in the nineteenth-century United States, allowing women to participate in partisan politics despite their being disenfranchised. See Gustafson, Women and the Republican Party, 81–82.
112. Achtelstetter, Prussian Conservatism, 8–9.
113. Welskopp, “Vernetzte Vereinslandschaften,” 105–106.
114. See Behnen, Das Preußische Wochenblatt.
115. Ross, Beyond the Barricades, 29; Albrecht, Antiliberalismus und Antisemitismus; Hahn, Die Berliner Revue. See also Leopold von Gerlach, Denkwürdigkeiten; Ernst Ludwig von Gerlach, Aufzeichnungen.
116. Koschorke, Körperströme, 100.
117. Habermas, Frauen und Männer, 251–52; Frevert, “Defining Emotions,” 14; Heinrich, Leben Lesen, 31, 145.
118. Habermas, Frauen und Männner, 247–49; Graf, Politisierung, 47–48.
119. Joskowicz, Modernity of Others, 63–66; Gall, “Liberalismus und ‘bürgerliche Gesellschaft,’” 340.
120. Mosse, “Friendship and Nationhood,” 355, 360.
121. Bollenbeck, Bildung und Kultur, 107, 216; Langewiesche, Liberalismus in Deutschland, 68; Altgeld, Katholizismus, Protestantismus, Judentum. Belgian liberals maintained a similar criterion: “capacity.” See Gould, Origins of Liberal Dominance, 34.
122. Horowitz, Politics of Friendship, 3.
123. Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, 128; Horowitz, Politics of Friendship, 11, 93–95.
124. Habermas, Frauen und Männer, 23–26, 276–78; French, German Women as Letter Writers, 18; Horowitz, Friendship and Politics, 67; J. Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, 66–67; Hämmerle and Saurer, introduction to Briefkulturen und ihr Geschlecht, 12; Koschorke, Körperströme, 194–95; Fulbrook and Rublack, “Social Self,” 264, 267.
125. Habermas, Frauen und Männer, 31; Cook, Epistolary Bodies, 16–17.
126. Fulbrook and Rublack, “Social Self,” 268.
127. Habermas, Frauen und Männer, 247–48; Koschorke, Körperströme, 208; Goodman, Republic of Letters, 17–18. Falko Schnicke argues that historians’ letters were an informal space for posing and clarifying methodological issues in the development of history, defining history as a discrete discipline. See Schnicke, “Kranke Historiker,” 14.
128. Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, 128; Hämmerle and Saurer, introduction to Briefkulturen und ihr Geschlecht, 14; Cook, Epistolary Bodies, 6.
129. See chapter 5.
130. Friendship was key to the rebuilding of trust among the politically active in France who had become “atomized” during the revolutionary and Napoleonic eras. See Horowitz, Friendship and Politics, 2–3, 5, 22, 42–43, 68.
131. Frevert, “Defining Emotions,” 25.
132. Matthew Levinger makes this claim in Enlightened Nationalism, 11.
133. Friendship was also crucial to the French republic of letters. See Goodman, Republic of Letters, 2–3.
134. Excellent collections of liberal political correspondence, which exclude much “personal” material, include Im Ring der Gegner Bismarcks; Nach der Revolution 1848/49; Sybel, Briefwechsel; Oncken, ed., Großherzog Friedrich.
135. Rosenwein, “Worrying about Emotions,” 821; Frevert, “Defining Emotions,” 3–4. Early socialists also blurred private and political matters in their correspondence and reports. See Welskopp, “Vernetzte Vereinslandschaften,” 108–109. This understanding of “rational” politics was also highly gendered. See, for example, Kreklau, “Gender Anxiety,” 174.
136. Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, 121, 129; Arendt, Life of the Mind.
137. Radkau, Zeitalter der Nervosität, 13–14. German academics were devoted observers of their own and others’ health. See Schnicke, “Kranke Historiker,” 11–13.
138. Langewiesche, Liberalismus in Deutschland, 83–85; Ross, Beyond the Barricades, 15.