The Frederickian Monarchy and the Enlightenment in Prussia

CHAPTER ONE

THE FREDERICKIAN MONARCHY AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT IN PRUSSIA

The Edict on Religion was late eighteenth-century Germany’s most public political scandal. Registered on 9 July 1788, one year before the French Revolution’s outbreak, it required Prussian preachers to teach only Christianity’s fundamental truths, which it deﬁ ned as the divinity of Jesus, the truth of the Bible, and the triune God. Critics instantly charged the edict’s author, Johann Christoph Woellner, with attacking the Enlightenment. In a ﬂ urry of books and pamphlets, enlightened writers across Germany, such as Carl Friedrich Bahrdt, Ernst Christian Trapp, and Anton Friedrich Büsching, to name only a few, decried the Edict as the Spanish Inquisition’s return and anointed Woellner the poster child of counter-enlightened reaction.1 Taking their cues from eighteenth-century polemics against Woellner, historians have pegged him as the Enlightenment’s implacable foe.2

1 Carl Friedrich Bahrdt, Das Religions-Edikt. Ein Lustspiel in fünf Aufzügen. Eine Skizze. Von Nicolai dem Jüngern (Thenakel [Vienna]: Johann Michael Bengel, 1789). This text is also available in English translation as Carl Friedrich Bahrdt, The Edict of Religion. A Comedy and The Story and Diary of my Imprisonment, trans. John Christian Laursen and Johan van der Zande (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2000). Anton Friedrich Büsching, Untersuchung wenn und durch wen der freyen evangelisch-lutherischen Kirche die symbolischen Bücher zuerst aufgelegt worden? (Berlin: Friedrich Vieweg, 1789), Ernst Christian Trapp, Ueber die Gewalt protestantischer Regenten in Glaubenssachen (Braunschweig: Verlag der Schulbuchhan- dlung, 1788). A microﬁ lm collection of almost every text written both for and against the edict is now available. See Dirk Kemper, ed., Missbrauchte Aufklärung?: Schriften zum preussischen Religionsedikt vom 9. Juli 1788 (Hildesheim Georg Olms Verlag 1996). 2 On Woellner, see Paul Bailleu, “Woellner, Johann Christoph von,” in Allgemeine deutsche Biographie, ed. Rochus Wilhelm Liliencron, et al. (Leipzig: Duncker & Hum- blot, 1875), 44: 148–58. and J.D.E. Preuss, “Zur Beurtheilung des Staatsministers von Woellner,” Zeitschrift für Preussische Geschichte und Landeskunde 2–3 (1865, 1866): 577–604; 65–95. Schwartz, Der erste Kulturkampf and Valjavec, “Das Woellnersche Religionsedikt.” See also Mehring, Zur deutschen Geschichte, 424–28, Karl A. Schleunes, “Enlightenment, Reform, Reaction—the Schooling Revolution in Prussia,” Central European History 12, no. 4 (1979), Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism, 48–49, 128–130, 310–311, and Sheehan, German History, 1770–1866, 292–94. The work that comes closest to the position taken here is Thomas P. Saine, The Problem of Being Modern, or the German Pursuit of Enlightenment from Leibniz to the French Revolution (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 24 chapter one

The problem with this interpretation is not that it is untrue, but that historians have accepted it as completely true. There is no doubt that Woellner spoke very critically of the Enlightenment. His anti-Enlighten- ment sentiments must be understood, however, as part of the polemic in which his critics also participated enthusiastically. Put another way, we must temper all the participants’ words with context. First, if judged by contemporary standards, the edict itself was politically moderate, as it only prescribed what preachers could say before their congregations and did not interfere in academic debate. Woellner’s approach was, therefore, perfectly consistent with existing cultural and political practices in eighteenth-century Germany.3 Second, as subsequent chapters will argue, Woellner’s opponents used state power to control religious practice when it suited their needs, which means that there was no fundamental incompatibility between enlightenment and the use of state power to maintain control. Indeed, as we will see throughout this text, things such as print censorship and the placing of limits on public speech were integral to the process of the Enlightenment in eighteenth- century Prussia. Finally, like his anti-edict opponents Woellner was a product of Prussia’s most important enlightened institutions—both state and public. He attended the University of Halle, reviewed books for the Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek, and belonged to such social organizations as the Freemasons and the Montagsklub (“Monday Club”).4 To borrow a line from Margaret Jacob, Woellner lived the Enlightenment.5

1997), 280–309. It does not, however, take into account Woellner’s own enlightened background and fails, thus, to render problematic the prevailing historiographical vision of the Enlightenment. 3 Ian Hunter has recently shown how the edict perpetuated Prussia’s traditional Religionspolitik, which had long prescribed religious practices in the name of public order. Ian Hunter, “Kant’s Religion and Prussian Religious Policy,” Modern Intellectual History 2 (2005). It should also be noted that the Edict ofﬁ cially tolerated Jews and heterodox Christian faiths, such as Moravians, for the ﬁ rst time under Prussian law. This is why Otto Hintze called the edict a Toleranzedikt in his classic Otto Hintze, Die Hohenzollern und ihr Werk. Fünfhundert Jahre vaterländischer Geschichte (Berlin: Parey, 1915), 415. 4 Woellner was a member of the Montagsklub from 1781 to 1792. As a Freemason, Woellner was a member of the Berlin lodge “Aux Trois Globes,” or “Zu den Drei Weltkugeln.” See, Preuss, “Beurtheilung.” 5 Jacob, Living the Enlightenment. Jacob emphasizes the role that Freemasonic institutions played as a proving ground for ideas and behavior patterns that would dominate the French Revolutionary period. I argue, in contrast, that eighteenth- century sociability also yielded programs that were oriented toward maintaing the status-quo. Other works on sociability: Manfred Agethen, Geheimbund und Utopie: Illuminaten, Freimaurer und deutsche Spätaufklärung, Ancien Régime, Aufklärung und