Time and Power: Visions of History in German Politics, from the Thirty Years' War to the Third Reich

by Christopher Clark

Overview

From the bestselling author of The Sleepwalkers, a book about how the exercise of power is shaped by different concepts of time

This groundbreaking book presents new perspectives on how the exercise of power is shaped by different notions of time. Acclaimed historian Christopher Clark draws on four key figures from German history—Friedrich Wilhelm of Brandenburg-Prussia, Frederick the Great, Otto von Bismarck, and Adolf Hitler—to look at history through a temporal lens and ask how historical actors and their regimes embody unique conceptions of time. Elegantly written and boldly innovative, Time and Power reveals the connection between political power and the distinct temporalities of the leaders who wield it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691217321
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	04/13/2021
Series:	The Lawrence Stone Lectures , #11
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Christopher Clark is the Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge. His books include The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 and Kaiser Wilhelm II: A Life in Power.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

The History Machine

FREDERICK WILLIAM, the prince known as the Great Elector, was the first Brandenburg Elector of whom numerous portraits survive. Many of them were commissioned by the sitter himself. They document the changing appearance of a man who spent forty-eight years — longer than any other member of his dynasty — in sovereign office. Depictions from the early years of the reign show a commanding, upright figure with a long face framed by flowing dark hair; in the later images, the body has swollen, the face is bloated, and the hair has been replaced by cascades of artificial curls. And yet one thing is common to all the portraits painted from life: intelligent, dark eyes that fix the viewer in a sharp stare. The engraving shown opposite page 1 (figure 1.1) was based on a sketch by Anselmus van Hulle, court painter to the Prince of Orange. In 1645 or 1646, van Hulle attended the negotiations for the Peace of Westphalia in Münster and Osnabrück in order to capture the likenesses of the sovereign and delegates taking part. The decision to frame the engraved portrait of each peacemaker in the manner of an epitaph suggests this was not merely a portrait. It was intended to serve as a memorial to a man of renown who had left a mark on the history of his times.

Frederick William presided over the restoration — indeed the transformation — of the Brandenburg composite monarchy in the aftermath of the devastations of the Thirty Years' War. During his reign, which lasted from 1640 until 1688, Brandenburg acquired a small but respectable army, a land bridge across Eastern Pomerania to the Baltic coast, a modest Baltic fleet, and even a colony on the west coast of Africa. Brandenburg became a regional power, a sought-after ally, and a principal party to major peace settlements.

In 1667, Frederick William, the Great Elector, composed a 'Fatherly Instruction' for his heir. The document began, in the manner of the traditional princely testament, with exhortations to lead a pious and god-fearing life, but it soon broadened into a politico-historical tract of a type without precedent in the history of the Hohenzollern dynasty. Sharp contrasts were drawn between the past and the present. The Duchy of Prussia, the prince reminded his heir, had once languished in the 'intolerable condition' of vassalage to the Crown of Poland; only the Elector's acquisition of sovereignty over the Duchy had annulled that oppressive state of affairs. 'All this cannot be described; the Archive and the accounts will bear witness to it'. The future Elector was urged to develop what we would call a historical perspective on the problems that beset him in the present. Industrious consultation of the archive would reveal not only how important it was to maintain good relations with France, but also how these should be balanced with 'the respect that You, as an Elector, must have for the Reich and Emperor'. There was also a strong sense of the new order established by the Peace of Westphalia and the importance of defending it if necessary against any power or powers that should set out to overturn it. In short, this was a document acutely sensitive to its own location in history and charged with an awareness of the tension between cultural and institutional continuity and the forces of change.

This chapter is about that tension. It is doubtful whether the Elector ever developed a coherent view of 'history', in the sense of a philosophical standpoint on its meaning or nature. He was a man oriented towards questions of power and security, not given to speculative reflections or to the discussion of issues of principle. And 'history' in its present-day sense, an abstract, collective-singular noun denoting an all-encompassing, multilayered process of transformation, did not yet exist. The word had not yet undergone that process of expansion and 'temporalisation' that would establish it as one of the matrix concepts of modernity. Yet the Elector and his regime did possess, so this chapter will argue, something more intuitive, a highly distinctive and dynamic form of historicity, rooted in the sense that the monarchical state occupied an exposed location on the threshold between a catastrophic past and a threat-rich future.

In order to flesh out this claim and clarify its implications, I first examine the arguments deployed in the conflict between the electoral government and the noble-dominated provincial Estates, focusing in particular on the historicity implicit in the arguments offered by both sides, because when the prince invoked the idea of 'necessity' or 'emergency' against the entrenched claims of the traditional holders of provincial power, he was in effect playing the future against the past. I then ask whether there was something Calvinist in the historicity of the Elector and of his government — confessional tensions, after all, were woven into the conflicts between the Elector's largely Calvinist administration and his Lutheran Estates. The Reformed faith was the most complex intellectual system to which the Elector made a conscious commitment. A final section examines the efforts of the Elector's government to secure the services of an official historian, focusing in particular on the writings of Samuel Pufendorf, who came to Berlin to take up his post as official historiographer in January 1688, a few months before the Elector's death. Here I suggest that Pufendorf first provided, as a theorist, powerful philosophical justifications for the consolidation of Electoral power and then fashioned, as a historian, an ambitious, archivally researched narrative that captured the dynamic historicity of the Elector and his officials. The chapter closes with a brief reflection on how the repudiation of traditional privilege that became a salient theme of the Elector's reign found expression in the elaborate ceremony that attended the coronation of the first Prussia king in 1701.

Composite Monarchy in an Age of War

The political entity whose throne Frederick William ascended in 1640 was no unitary state. It was a 'composite monarchy' comprising territories acquired by different means, subject to diverse laws and ruled under different titles. The heartland was the Electorate of Brandenburg, purchased by the Hohenzollerns in 1417 for four hundred thousand Hungarian gold guilders. Through strategic marital alliances, successive generations of Hohenzollern Electors had acquired territorial claims to a number of noncontiguous territories to the east and the west: Ducal Prussia on the Baltic and the Duchy of Jülich-Kleve, a complex of Rhenish territories comprising Jülich, Kleve (Cleves), Berg, and the Counties of Mark and Ravensberg. Thanks to a family connection dating back to 1530, the Hohenzollerns also claimed the right of succession to Pomerania, a strategically important territory between Brandenburg and the Baltic Sea.

Within their diverse possessions, the Electors of Brandenburg shared power with regional elites organised in representative bodies called Estates. In Brandenburg, the Estates approved (or not) taxes levied by the Elector and (from 1549) administered their collection. In return, they possessed far-reaching powers and concessions. The Elector was forbidden, for example, to enter into alliances without first seeking the approval of the Estates. In a declaration published in 1540 and reiterated on various occasions until 1653, the Elector even promised that he would not 'decide or undertake any important things upon which the flourishing or decline of the lands may depend, without the foreknowledge and consultation of all our estates'. The provincial nobilities owned the lion's share of the landed wealth in the Electorate; they were also the Elector's most important creditors. But their outlook was vehemently parochial; they had no interest in helping the Elector to secure faraway territories of which they knew little.

The estates inhabited a mental world of mixed and overlapping sovereignties. The Estates of Kleve maintained a diplomatic representative in The Hague and looked to the Dutch Republic, the Imperial Diet (the assembly of the Holy Roman Empire), and on occasions even to Vienna for support against illicit interventions from Berlin. They envisaged establishing their own system of taxation and forming a corporate 'hereditary union' with the nearby territories of Mark, Jülich, and Berg and frequently conferred with the Estates of these lands on how best to respond to (and resist) demands from Berlin. The estates of Ducal Prussia, for their part, were still subjects of the Polish crown; they saw neighbouring Poland as the guarantor of their ancient privileges. As one senior Electoral official irritably remarked, the leaders of the Prussian Estates were 'true neighbours of the Poles' and 'indifferent to the defence of [their own] country'.

The turbulence and destruction of the Thirty Years' War (1618–48) placed these delicately balanced arrangements under pressure. In Brandenburg, the estates remained deeply sceptical of military expenditures and foreign combinations of any kind. Even after repeated incursions into Brandenburg territory by Protestant and Imperial troops, they remained impassive in the face of entreaties for financial assistance from the sovereign. As they saw it, their function was to forestall unwarranted adventures and to preserve the fabric of provincial privilege against incursions from the centre. But as the war dragged on, the fiscal privileges of the Brandenburg nobilities began to look fragile. Foreign princes and generals had no compunction in extorting contributions from the provinces of Brandenburg; why should the Elector not take his share? This would involve rolling back the ancient 'liberties' of the Estates. For this task, the Elector turned to Count Adam Schwarzenberg, a Catholic and a foreigner with no ties to the provincial nobility. Schwarzenberg lost no time in imposing a new tax without any recourse to the usual provincial organs. He curtailed the power of the Estates to oversee state expenditures and suspended the Privy Council, transferring its responsibilities to the Council of War, whose members were chosen for their complete independence from the Estates. In short, Schwarzenberg installed a fiscal autocracy that broke decisively with corporate tradition. The corporate nobility came to loathe him for his assault on their corporate liberties. In 1638–39, when Schwarzenberg's power was in its zenith, fly sheets circulated in Berlin decrying the 'Hispanic servitude' of his rule.

The effects of the war on the Duchy of Kleve were less drastic. Here, as across Germany, heavy contributions and extortions were levied as various armies fought for control of the strategically important lower Rhine. But the occupation of the eastern areas on the right bank of the Rhine by Dutch troops brought money into the country, revived trade, and strengthened the political connection with The Hague. Whereas the interventions of Count Schwarzenberg, combined with widespread devastation, had weakened the Estates in Brandenburg, the Estates of Kleve remained as powerful as ever and continued to be confident in the political support of the nearby United Provinces, whose garrisons remained in many towns, even after the war had come to an end.

Ducal Prussia lay outside the areas of the most intense conflict during the Thirty Years' War and thus managed to avoid the destruction visited upon Brandenburg. Here, the Estates had traditionally ruled the roost, meeting regularly in full session and keeping a tight grip on central and local government, the militia, and the territorial finances. The traditional Prussian right of appeal to the Polish crown, still formally sovereign in the territory, meant that they would not easily be pressed into cooperating.

Prince versus Estates

In December 1640, when Frederick William acceded to the throne, Brandenburg was still under foreign occupation. A two-year truce was agreed with the Swedes in July 1641, but the looting, burning, and general misbehaviour continued. Only in March 1643 did Frederick William return from the relative safety of Königsberg in Ducal Prussia to ruined Berlin, a city he scarcely recognised. Here he found a population depleted and malnourished and buildings destroyed by fire or in a parlous state of repair. The predicament that had bedevilled his father's reign remained unsolved. Brandenburg had no military force with which to establish its independence. The small army created by Schwarzenberg was already falling apart and there was no money to pay for a replacement. In the Duchy of Kleve and the County of Mark, the new Elector was sovereign in name only; these were still occupied by Imperial, Spanish, Dutch, Hessian, and French troops. As for Pomerania, it was likely to remain under Swedish occupation for the foreseeable future. Johann Friedrich von Leuchtmar, a privy councillor and the Elector's former tutor, summarised Brandenburg's predicament in a report of 1644: Poland, he predicted, would seize Prussia as soon as it was strong enough; Kleve in the west was under the control of the Dutch Republic. Brandenburg stood 'on the edge of the abyss'.

In order to restore the independence of his monarchy and press home his territorial claims, the Elector needed a flexible and disciplined territorial fighting force. The creation of such an instrument became one of the consuming preoccupations of his reign. It also placed the Elector on a collision course with the Estates. In a letter of October 1645 to the Estates of Kleve, he explained that he needed to occupy the entire area of the Duchy with his own troops in order to avert the prospect of being driven out of his possessions by rivals in the region. And 'since a soldier cannot live on wind', this would mean the continuation of special financial contributions. These were necessary, the Elector explained, because the retention of cities was not possible without an occupying force:

In these irregular times of war and this ruined state of affairs, in this state of extreme need (where a case cannot always be made for privilege [ubi privilegii ratio haberi semper non potest]) we sincerely hope that you will not view these measures, which are undertaken in the spirit of faithful and paternal princely care for the rescue and conservation of Our lands and indeed for the welfare of you and yours, as a deliberate and premeditated infraction of the privileges you have already invoked in this matter (of which, incidentally, We have to date received no thorough report), and that you will not insist on the disbanding of these troops, who have been raised at such heavy cost, or on the demolition of the fortifications (which could not happen without the greatest danger and ruin ... to Our reputation and Our country).

This was a rather loose bundle of arguments. 'I'm doing this for your own good' was one of them, though not one that the Estates were likely to find persuasive. In a later declaration to the delegates of the Kleve Estates in Königsberg, the Elector fleshed out this claim, noting that were the Estates to succeed in blocking supply, the result would be misery, as the collapse of the Elector's small armed forces opened the Duchy to further 'enemy attacks and sieges' and thus to 'utmost ruin and danger'. More forceful was the reference to the broader state of emergency that had given rise to his demands for money — though it is interesting to note the softness of the Latin parenthesis, which stopped short of proposing a global suppression of privilege, even under extreme circumstances. The observation that the Elector had not as yet been fully apprised of what the privileges in question actually were implied scepticism about the precise scope and the legal foundation of the Estates' claims. Finally, there was the reminder that refusing to comply would have ruinous consequences for the prince himself and for his lands.

This was the case the Elector made to justify the contributions he intended to levy on his subjects in Kleve. At their core was the claim that the Elector had no choice but to act as he did. 'We remain graciously confident', he declared in a letter to his officials in the Duchy in November 1645, 'that they [the Estates] will duly take this to heart as an unavoidable necessity (unvermeidliche Nothwendigkeit)'; other letters spoke of 'a need that cannot be circumvented' (unumgängliche Noth) or of 'extreme need' (äusserste Noth).

The standoff between the sovereign and the Kleve Estates came to a head during the Northern War of 1655–60. In 1657, Frederick William demanded the raising of over four thousand armed men and the payment of eighty thousand Reichsthaler to finance the new troops and cover the expense of maintaining garrisons and fortresses. In presenting this request to the Estates, Moritz von Nassau-Siegen, the Elector's governor in the Duchy, observed that the Elector had tried as far as possible to avoid burdening the Estates with further demands. Now, however, he was in a position where he could pursue his 'project to achieve peace' (den vorhabenden friedens zweck) only with the support of his 'loyal Estates and subjects' (dero getrewen Staenden und Unterthanen). If these were to 'abandon' him, he warned, the Elector's 'need' (Noth) — emergency might be a better translation in this context — would become even more pressing and the desired peace even harder to achieve. 'And since the only true friend was a friend in need' (Und dan nun ein getrewer freund in der noth erkant wuerde), the Governor reasoned, in terms that recall the logic of a protection racket, the Elector did not doubt that the Estates would be his 'friends' and come to his aid.

(Continues…)

---

Excerpted from "Time and Power"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Christopher Clark.
Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ix

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 The History Machine 19

Chapter 2 The Historian King 72

Chapter 3 Boatman on the River of Time 118

Chapter 4 Time of the Nazis 171

Conclusion and Epilogue 211

Notes 227

Index 281

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Clark’s book is brilliantly constructed, dazzling in its scholarship, and immensely stimulating. It shows how Prussian and German rulers located their exercise of power in conceptions of their relationship to past and future, casts new light on the ways in which belief in the nature of the state developed, and describes how the destruction of faith in the state following the First World War gave rise to new and dangerous millennial ideas of the Nazis.”—Ian Kershaw, author of To Hell and Back: Europe 1914–1949

“A masterpiece by one of the most renowned historians in the world.”—Jürgen Osterhammel, author of The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century

“A rich and innovative contribution to temporal studies and political history.”—François Hartog, author of Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time

“Highly original and impeccably researched. Time and Power is an important contribution to the growing literature on the history of temporality.”—Anson Rabinbach, coeditor of The Third Reich Sourcebook

Editorial Reviews

One of Times Higher Education's Best Books of 2018

One of the Financial Times' Summer Books of 2019: History

From the Publisher

"Whatever it lacks in grace, it amply makes up for in intellectual vigour."

New Statesman