Agatha Ramm - Germany, 1789-1919: A Political History

Volume 35

GERMANY 17891919

AGATHA RAMM

First published in 1967 by Methuen & Co Ltd.

This edition first published in 2020
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1967 Agatha Ramm

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ISBN: 9780-36702813-8 (Set)
ISBN: 9780-42927806-8 (Set) (ebk)
ISBN: 9780-36724823-9 (Volume 35) (hbk)
ISBN: 9780-42928458-8 (Volume 35) (ebk)

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AGATHA RAMM

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1 The Rhineland

Although this is not primarily a work of historical research, I worked in the archives at Stuttgart, Munich, Darmstadt and Karlsruhe when I wrote its first chapter. I could not have done this profitably had not the archivists there been so generous in letting me draw upon their knowledge and skill. They gave me much more than the papers for which I happened to ask. I should like especially to thank Dr Clemm of Stuttgart, Dr Schottenloher of Munich and above all Dr Hans Rall, also of Munich. I owe a great debt of gratitude to Dr Rall in the writing of the whole from beginning to end. I should like to thank Mrs Phyllis Gomme who turned my crude ideas into maps and Professor Edna Purdie who helped me to write the section on Herder. I will not name individually friends and colleagues in Oxford and in Somerville who have given me of their knowledge, put their books at my disposal and saved me from many mistakes. But I bring my work to a close knowing my debt to them and to those both younger and older than myself who have taught me much of what I have here tried to set down.

AGATHA RAMM

Somerville College,

Oxford

July 1967.

I have used what, to me, was familiar English usage wherever an English form exists for a German word, but I have written Louis rather than Ludwig in the belief that the French form is nowadays more familiar than the English Lewis. I have written Duke for Herzog, Count for Graf, but preserved the German Freiherr and not used Baron, which normally translates it, since this, carrying different associations in English, seemed to me confusing. Among place-names, I have written Hanover, Brunswick, Frankfurt, Leipsig, Munich, Saxony, Bavaria rather than their German forms.

A. R.

Germany 17891919

T HE STARTING-POINT is the essential fact that authority in Germany lay in a mosaic of fragments. Politically Germany was a divided land: or rather, had never been consolidated. The map opposite shows that a traveller by road along the right bank of the Rhine would cross nineteen political frontiers within 124 miles. There were altogether over three hundred political units in Germany. They were at the base of the political structure in Germany. They ruled their territories as bureaucratic autocracies but could provide little in the way of government. Parts of Franconia and Swabia, where there were many knights lands, had little administration or justice, police or roads, few churches, hospitals or schools.

The free or self-governing cities were more sophisticated political communities. They, with their surrounding territories and dependent villages, were very much better administered and could take pride in their churches, schools, hospitals and civic institutions. They were variously organised. Most oligarchic was Lubeck, which vested its government in sixteen senators, (lawyers, merchants and men of old families) and four burgomasters. Their power was absolute and for life and vacancies among them were filled by co-option. Hamburg, less oligarchic, governed itself by three colleges of burghers, who granted the revenue and managed its expenditure through a committee of themselves, and by a senate, comprising four burgomasters, four syndics (or lawyers), four clerks and twenty-four other members. The senate co-opted new members as vacancies occurred and sat in secret. Frankfort was still less oligarchic, governing itself by a senate of fifty-one members and two burgomasters, all elected by the 14,000 burghers. Cologne in the same way governed itself by a senate (forty-nine members) and burgomasters (six in number) elected, except for seven senators, by all the burghers or those qualified to be burghers by the exercise of a recognised occupation.