Gradual Change in 18th & 19th Century Germany

Paul Elovitz’ insightful essay on how people change is based on the American and English experiences. However, as a historian born in Central Europe who has researched and taught European history in America for nearly half a century, I am aware that political processes (and therefore some of the elements of change) are different in my areas of specialization and throughout the world.

The English tradition from the Magna Carta to the bloody revolution of the 17^th century restricted the authority of monarchs’ decision-making and taxation. This approach was transferred from England to the “new world.” It is the broader background of why the American colonists felt entitled to resist their European overlords at the end of the 18^th century. They freed themselves and expected their executive to face removal after four or a maximum of eight years. This enshrines the long-standing tradition of hampering excesses of the executive without revolution or outright murder.

This approach is core to the American political system. Americans like to start anew rather than tinker with improvements. Interestingly enough, because the initial revolution started over the unwillingness to pay seemingly unfair taxes, they continue to be a major focus of discussion in our society. There is also the odd fantasy that resolving issues associated with taxes will resolve many other problems.

In the Central European setting, changes that restricted executives were brought about gradually inside the courts of monarchs and princes and the tradition of tinkering and improving is still highly valued. Changes concentrated mainly on procedures and processes that restrained the hundreds of small kingdoms and principalities in the many German states of the 18^th century, and

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 then the few larger courts of the 19^th century. The princes and monarchs were gradually restrained not so much by revolution, the threat of revolution, or the example of revolution, but rather by bureaucracies and their rule-bound processes.

Thus, while the US designed an approach that could potentially unhinge practically everything that a previous administration has accomplished, the Central European approach grew out of administrative reforms, called the ministerial system by the middle of the 18^th century, which stressed continuity and responsibility. It has meant gradual, if not glacial, change and in the 19^th century led to the modern parliamentary systems.

One example emerged in my earliest research and goes back to the small state of Württemberg in the late 17^th and early 18^th centuries. A woman who killed her baby there by overlaying (smothering with her body in bed) at night was almost automatically given the death penalty. But with time, the professors at the University of Tübingen, who were usually called upon to assist with determining guilt or innocence, and the bureaucrats who had begun to exert increasing influence, began to argue that mitigating circumstances might allow them to propose to the king that a woman should be spared the ultimate punishment; on occasion, they even considered the woman to have been innocent.

The important point about this development is that every case was taken up individually and carefully recorded (the files are still available in Stuttgart), and all future cases were argued, and passed forward to the king, based on these earlier and new or additional arguments. In other words, the king’s authority to arbitrarily decide the guilt or innocence of a woman who had overlaid her child was circumscribed.

Why this change in this state? One reason may be traced to public education. By the 18^th century, the German states in general had the most widespread elementary educational system anywhere, with Württemberg having passed its first comprehensive school ordinance in 1550. Every little town and village had its own school and the literacy rate had reached such an amazing level that by the outset of the 19^th century, when Napoleon recruited there, only three out of some 2,500 recruits could not read. All elementary schools included girls, just as Martin Luther had recommended in 1517. Practically, that meant that boys and girls sat in classes together, in separate rows, and that they could all read. While a de-

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bate still raged in the literature about the humanness (Menschlichkeit) of women, at that time they were already being included in one of the most important expressions of society: the written word. Additionally, later in the century, it meant that some women of the area became major literary figures that enjoyed a significant female and male readership. Psychologically, these gains meant, in turn, that ordinary women began to think of themselves as human beings (Menschen), with direct access to the divine and rights that encompassed both sexes.

Significant improvements in childrearing, one of the pillars of psychohistorical understanding, helped advance society generally. These improvements may be observed both in advice literature and in memoirs. As much as we have read in psychohistorical scholarship about the abuses of previous centuries, including in the 18^th, a counter-trend was already under way. It may be traced to gradual improvements in bureaucratic processes and schools, but it is also connected to a better understanding of children as children. Thus, the upper and middle levels of society had reached what Lloyd deMause called the intrusive mode of childrearing in “The Evolution of Childhood.” The leading members of society had already begun to view children as part of the early stages of adults who needed to be persuaded, rather than beaten, to become fully functioning members of their communities.

Let me now shift from 18^th century Württemberg to 19^th century Prussia. The best known example of massive change here is Prince Otto von Bismarck’s healthcare, accident, disability, and old age insurance programs of the 1880s; these reforms came about in response to the Socialist party’s pressure to enact them. Because of educational and bureaucratic reforms of the 18^th and early 19^th centuries, a consensus had emerged that allowed these changes, which continue to the present. They were not necessarily the wish of the monarch or his chief minister Bismarck and they were constrained by these changes, in part because they understood this reality and because they felt forced to respond to popular will. Neither Hitler’s murderous interruption nor East Germany’s communist dictatorship were able to interrupt the consensus that encouraged later leadership to tinker and improve rather than to start all over again with new programs, as opponents of Obamacare call for today.

One might well ask: how did this consensus emerge? How did a majority of the population continue to agree that this gradual

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approach was and is useful? The answers may be surprising. In spite of these changes being introduced in different parts of Germany, by different regimes, bureaucracies, and even philosophies of government, the new systems worked. For example, basic education for everyone and disability/regular pension payments became so deeply ingrained in the population that they are seen as a right, a human right. In the case of education, the consensus is that public education may not be perfect, but it works for the most part and will be improved. In regard to pensions, everyone seems to accept that older persons have a right to enjoy a dignified life after retirement.

The other important point about both education, the pension program, and the associated restraints on a king (or today on a prime minister and a parliament) is that bureaucracies had emerged both in Württemberg and Prussia that restrained executive activities. I am convinced that with time a group consensus has emerged that says, in essence, that one can trust the state. While that trust was totally misplaced during the National Socialist (Nazi) and Deutsche Demokratische Republik (East German communist) periods, it remains one of the main differences between the US and Germany.

In Germany, every step in the direction of accepting all members of the community’s right to participate in it came less through revolution and dramatic externally imposed change, but rather through gradual improvements to what earlier bureaucrats and lawmakers had designed. Thus emerged the idea of a Rechtsstaat, a state of laws, and with it the consensus that it can be trusted to act lawfully. Even after this trust was horrendously abused in the 1930s and ‘40s, and again in the second half of the 20^th century in Eastern Germany, most members of the society once more believe that the state follows established laws for the benefit of its citizens and can therefore be trusted.

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