The German Genius

the king of the Romans), 94 spiritual and temporal princes, 103 counts, 40 prelates, 51 free cities, all equally sovereign (or half-sovereign), and around 1,000 knights, all claiming authority but ruling collectively barely 200,000 subjects. 9 The main innovation among this morass was the fact that sovereign (and mainly Protestant) German states “spun away” one by one from their former historical hub, the Catholic Austrian/Hapsburg Empire. By using their new territorial rights, which gave them an independent foreign policy and armaments, Bavaria, Brandenburg-Prussia, Saxony, and Württemberg emerged from the Austrian shadow (though only Brandenburg-Prussia had a professional army worth the name). 10 In 1667, Samuel Pufendorf, a jurist and the very man who coined the phrase “the Thirty Years’ War,” described what had been the former empire as a political and constitutional “monstrosity.” 11 Population had collapsed, Württemburg’s falling, as an example, from 445,000 in 1622 to 97,000 in 1639. The German states were now so fragmented that in the 1690s barges navigating the Rhine to the Channel paid border tolls on average every six miles. 12 Trade patterns had shifted to the North Atlantic following the voyages of discovery, and the German economy withered.
    This new world didn’t endure. Over the next 200 years, the single most important political, cultural, and social development in central Europe was the rise of Brandenburg-Prussia, the cell from which what followed emanated. In 1700 Hapsburg Austria was 9 million strong and still the preeminent part of the “Heiliges Römisches Reich deutscher Nation” (Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation). Prussia at the time could boast a population of barely 3 million and, in terms of territory, ranked only eleventh in Europe. Yet, by the middle of the eighteenth century it boasted Europe’s third-strongest army and was breathing down Austria’s neck. 13 The root cause of this change owed something to the Peace of Westphalia because under it Brandenburg-Prussia had acquired the territories of East Pomerania, Magdeburg, Minden, and Silesia. Prussia’s successes also owed something to a line of rulers who lived long and productive lives. But the most important development, the development that came to shape and characterize Prussia, in her own eyes as well as in the eyes of others, was a new variety of the Christian religion. Germanness, as we now understand it, emerged in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and cannot be understood without a firm grasp of Pietism.
    P IETISM AND P RUSSIANISM
     
    Friedrich the Great has, with good reason, attracted most attention from historians as a forceful personality who, by a combination of military prowess, personal charisma, and an intellectual/artistic cast of mind, helped catalyze the German renaissance that is the subject of the next few chapters. There is no doubt that he played an important role. Recent scholarship, however, has focused rather more on his father, Friedrich Wilhelm I. Without the achievements of this man, and the reforms he initiated, Friedrich the Great might not have had quite the glittering career that he did have.
    When Friedrich came to power in 1740, aged twenty-eight, what gave the Prussian state the special character it already had was the unparalleled emphasis among state employees on the conscientious fulfillment of their official duties. “Whereas in other European capitals monarchs reigned over court establishments characterised by ostentatious luxury, the Prussian kings wore military uniforms and promoted an official ethic of parsimony and frugality.” The Prussian bureaucracy was even then well known for its commitment to much higher standards of honesty and efficiency than its European counterparts. 14
    In the 1950s the German historian Carl Hinrichs advanced the thesis that the source of the Prussian state-service ideology can best be understood as the fruit of the Pietist movement, and he highlighted several significant connections between Pietism and the major policy initiatives introduced by Friedrich Wilhelm I. Hinrichs’s central book on the subject, Preussentum und Pietismus , was released only after his death and comprised a series of essays rather than a fully evolved thesis. These shortcomings have recently been addressed by Richard Gawthrop, whose arguments I have adapted in what follows. 15
    Pietism first appeared around 1670, when its strong