Category: Modern History

The systematic exclusion of Jewish scholars and scientists from teaching and research arguably had graver and longer-lasting consequences than any of the Nazi regime’s other political interventions into research and higher education in Germany.¹ Its quantitative and qualitative dimensions have only come into clear view as a result of in-depth studies, undertaken in the last two decades, that have reliably established that around a fifth of the teaching staff at German universities and other research institutions were dismissed or compelled to resign from 1933 onwards and that 80 percent of these dismissals were racially motivated.² It can be assumed that 1,200 lecturers were affected.³ The unfolding of these developments in the non-university sector is particularly well charted. The dismissal of around ninety “non-Aryans” from the Kaiser Wilhelm Society has been described in detail, drilling down to the level of individual fates,⁴ and the same is true for the approximately thirty committee members of the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft (Emergency Association of German Science) who were hit by these measures.⁵

The state of knowledge regarding the academies of sciences and humanities is not quite as satisfactory. Because the institutional ties binding these scholarly communities are comparatively loose, they have generally shown limited interest in tracing their own histories. Nevertheless, at least all the relevant names have been compiled for the academies, as well. The Leopoldina deleted around ninety names from its long list of members.⁶ The considerably more exclusive academies in Berlin, Vienna, Leipzig, Munich, Heidelberg, and Göttingen each shed on average one to two dozen full and corresponding members.⁷ In total, the German academies lost around 10 percent of their full members and 5 percent of their corresponding members.⁸

The fact that most of these deletions of names took place in or after 1938 could give one the impression that the Gleichschaltung of the academies—their “synchronization” with Nazi ideology—took place at a relatively late stage.⁹ The most spectacular case of all, the resignation of Albert Einstein, the genius of the century, from the Prussian Academy of Sciences and Humanities on March 28, 1933, and from the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities on April 21, 1933, has come be routinely regarded as something of a chronological outlier despite both its clear connection to that context and its significance—in the words of one authoritative expert—“as a portent of the initially voluntary and then forced exodus of Jewish scholars that would soon commence.”¹⁰

Astonishingly enough, the events surrounding Einstein’s decision have never been precisely described and analyzed, even though they harbor significant potential for highlighting the stances both academies adopted on the Nazi seizure of power. That explains why considerable space is devoted to Einstein’s resignation from the Prussian Academy of Sciences and Humanities in the documentation prepared by that association’s successor in East Berlin to mark the centenary of Einstein’s birth in 1979—naturally with the foregrounding of class struggle aspects that was de rigueur at the time. This documentation drew on both archival records relating to Einstein’s resignation and the personal memories of those involved, which Max von Laue recorded for posterity in 1947.¹¹

While this made it possible to form an impression from the sources of what took place at the Prussian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, the state of knowledge about Einstein’s resignation from the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, with its thematic and chronological links to the developments in Berlin, seemed entirely hopeless. The events were shrouded in obscurity. The problem was not that resigning from the Bavarian Academy had been an event of no great significance in Einstein’s life: Afterall, he had only been a corresponding member of the academy in Munich since 1927 and his affliation with it had been fairly loose, whereas the Prussian Academy had granted him a regular full-time salary since 1914 and exempted him from obligations outside of research. The obscurity was rather a product of the desolate state of the sources. Only the two documents Einstein himself published in 1934 were known. One of these was a letter dated April 8, 1933, from the presiding committee of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, in which Einstein was asked “how you understand your relationship with our academy after what has taken place between yourself and the Prussian Academy,” and the other was his reply, dated April 21, 1933, requesting that his name be “removed from the list of members.”¹²

No further information was available, for the academy’s building in downtown Munich was destroyed during the Second World War. Furthermore, it seems highly likely that records were also intentionally purged at some unidentifiable point, because the volumes missing from the rescued proceedings of the mathematics and natural sciences section at the academy and its presiding committee would cover exactly the span of time that is relevant here. At any rate, the academy no longer has any records of its own on the case.

In the absence of substantiated information, an oral tradition outlining these events was able to thrive. It suggested that Leopold Wenger, the academy’s president in 1933, had acted unilaterally “without the knowledge of members of the academy.” This account, which can still be found in recent publications,¹³ was first committed to writing by Walther Meißner for the academy’s bicentennial celebrations in 1959,¹⁴ although Meißner himself had only been elected to the academy in 1938. As Wenger had left Munich as early as 1935 and died in 1953, he was unable to pass comment on Meißner’s version.

Most recently, however, new source material has fortunately come to light that makes it possible to subject the traditional account to historical scrutiny for the first time. At the same time, these sources shed a little light on attitudes within the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities toward the Nazi ascent to power, an issue that has proven somewhat elusive up to now. The freshly discovered material also reveals a second major case of antisemitic discrimination at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences that had previously been entirely overlooked: the ousting of Richard Willstätter, winner of a Nobel Prize in Chemistry, from the academy’s presiding committee in early May 1933.

Several documents with academy provenance that relate to the above-mentioned events have survived despite the near total loss of records. They are found in the personal literary estate of Georg Leidinger (1870–1945), who was a member of the academy’s presiding committee in 1933. His primary role was at the Bavarian State Library, where he headed the manuscripts section. He had been an extraordinary member of the Bavarian Academy since 1909 and a full member since 1916. He was elected secretary of the section for history on December 3, 1932, and took part in every meeting of the academy’s presiding committee until 1941 in this capacity. After his retirement in 1936, he lived in Marquartstein in the mountains of Upper Bavaria, where he died shortly before the end of the war.¹⁵

Leidinger had deposited some of the files and correspondence that he had accumulated in various academic roles in the Bavarian State Library, where they escaped destruction during the war because they had been removed for external storage. The larger portion of his files, which he had kept in his country house, were handed over to the State Library by his widow in 1946. Leidinger’s former colleague and intimate, Albert Hartmann—who, together with two librarian colleagues, had once been “the spearhead of National Socialism in the Bavarian State Library”¹⁶—merged the two parts of the estate to form the “Leidingeriana” collection as had been agreed upon with Leidinger many years previously.¹⁷

A handful of pages within this very extensive estate deal with Einstein’s exit from the academy. For reasons hardly attributable to coincidence, they were filed in a location (cataloged under “Monumenta Boica”) that made them unlikely to be discovered.¹⁸ Nobody ever looked for them there, nestled among documents about an obsolete series of primary sources (discontinued in 1956) for which Leidinger was responsible as the chairperson of the Commission for Bavarian Regional History at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities. But three of the five folders labeled as “Monumenta Boica” actually contain documents on other academy matters in which Leidinger was involved. Folder 2 contains Leidinger’s papers on the “Einstein case,” which he describes as such on the first sheet.

Nor does the wealth of source material supplied by Leidinger end there. As a civil servant accustomed to documenting his actions in detail, he also kept a diary in which he conscientiously recorded day-to-day events from 1906 until his death. As Leidinger expressly bequeathed this diary to Albert Hartmann personally,¹⁹ it only reached the Bavarian State Library after Hartmann’s death in 1973, when it was placed with the rest of his estate.²⁰ “Acta bibliothecaria,”²¹ the curious label adopted by the author, was undoubtedly a factor that contributed to historians overlooking this rich source for a long time; it was only evaluated selectively for the appraisal of questions relating to library history.²²

Naturally enough, the diary mainly reports on developments in the library, Leidinger’s main sphere of activity. In addition, however, Leidinger served on a broad range of academic committees, and he made little distinction between official and non-official matters in his diary. His notes cover all the letters he wrote or received; discussions, meetings, conferences, and exhibitions in which he was involved; and purely personal matters—conversations in corridors or trams, interesting encounters in the city, vacation experiences, and a wealth of other details. They provide a remarkably detailed description of the daily life of a man who played a central role in Munich’s cultural and academic life.

Hartmann, who claimed to have been aware of the existence of the diary volumes since 1936, described the purpose of these notes as he prepared to bequeath them to the library. He noted that Leidinger kept these notes “mainly for himself, as an aid to memory, but also to record certain events, circumstances, and relationships for posterity.”²³ Both of these aspects are indeed important and need to be considered when evaluating the material. Keeping track of his extensive and varied correspondence and meetings was certainly a key motive for Leidinger. The “Acta” are a dull, dry read with their notes in a staccato telegram style detailing who had written to Leidinger when and about what, how and when he had replied, what offprints he had received, and which ones he had dispatched to specific recipients.

Interspersed between these terse notes, however, Leidinger sometimes commented with great clarity and feeling on the matters reported. His intention of leaving a record for posterity shines through quite clearly in these passages. Leidinger, who was always of a very confident bearing—at least outwardly—saw his views and judgments as important enough to be communicated to future generations. He deliberately stylized his notes with this purpose in mind. Readers should not be deceived: As the steady handwriting and the occasional use of very slight flashbacks and foreshadowing show, the diary notes are not a direct and immediate record of events. Leidinger probably made notes in an appointment calendar and wrote them up as diary entries a little later. This explains why especially striking events, such as the Hitler putsch or the Nazi Party’s seizure of power, are described in dramatic terms, presumably to demonstrate—and not without pride—the author’s proximity to them.

I

Albert Einstein’s resignation from the Prussian Academy of Sciences and Humanities was a direct consequence of the Nazi takeover of power in Germany. Einstein was a visiting researcher at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena at the beginning of this episode, and he had already resolved to relocate his professional life to the United States. By the time of the Reichstag fire (in the night of February 27/28, 1933), it had also become clear to him that he had no intention of setting foot on German soil again in the near future. He announced this decision in a public statement on March 10 in which he explained that political freedom, tolerance, and the equality of all citizens before the law did not currently exist in Germany, where people who had contributed substantially to the prospering of international relations were threatened with persecution.²⁴ On March 18, the Prussian Academy of Sciences asked Einstein to inform them “of what had actually happened” as newspaper reports indicated that he had “made public statements opposing the current government in Germany.”²⁵

This letter cannot have reached Einstein. Unaware of its existence, he wrote a letter to the Prussian Academy on March 28, during his passage back to Europe by ship, that only briefly alluded to the “current state of affairs in Germany” to explain that “dependence upon the Prussian government” had become “intolerable” for him and that he would thus “resign from my position at the Prussian Academy of Sciences and Humanities.” The academy received this letter on March 30.²⁶ Einstein had left the academy only a few days before he would have been expelled from it. On April 1, 1933, the day of the nationwide boycott of Jewish businesses, doctors, and lawyers, the academy published a press release in which it expressed “outrage” at Albert Einstein’s “participation in atrocity agitation in America and France” and emphasized its support for the “national idea,” a position from which it saw itself as having “no cause to regret Einstein’s resignation.”²⁷ This press release was picked up by all the major German daily newspapers.²⁸

At this point in time, the National Socialists were going to great lengths to inflame public sentiments in Germany.²⁹ They told the German public that international press reports detailing the mistreatment of Jewish citizens public since the Reichstag fire were “atrocity agitation” and obviously the result of Jewish manipulation of the press. Julius Streicher founded a “Central Committee to Repulse Jewish Atrocity and Boycott Agitation.” As its leader, he spoke in Munich’s Königsplatz Square on March 31 to an audience of (according to a report in the Völkischer Beobachter) an estimated one hundred thousand people who had gathered to demonstrate “against the Jewish atrocity agitation.”³⁰ Two days later, the paper proudly announced that Nazis had attacked Jewish judges and public prosecutors in Munich and that the courthouse known as the Justizpalast (Palace of Justice) had been “swept clear” of Jews.³¹

These developments can hardly have failed to impress themselves on the consciousness of those in charge of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities. The Justizpalast was only a short walk away from the academy building in Neuhauser Straße. Leopold Wenger, a scholar of ancient law, had only been elected to the presidency of the academy on November 12, just a few months earlier.³² In accordance with the academy’s statutes, he had advisers in the form of his predecessor, the classical philologist Eduard Schwartz,³³ and four section secretaries, two from the academy’s historical-philosophical section and two from its mathematical-scientific section. The archaeologist Paul Wolters³⁴ and the mathematician Walther von Dyck had extensive experience with academy business,³⁵ while Georg Leidinger was, as mentioned above, a relative newcomer. The presiding committee also had a Jewish member, Richard Willstätter,³⁶ a Nobel laureate in chemistry who had joined the committee in 1930.

The controversy over alleged atrocity propaganda took place a mere three weeks after a Nazi regime had been installed in Bavaria.³⁷ How political events would continue to unfold was not remotely foreseeable at this point. The presiding committee at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities could not yet have developed a firm stance of its own. It therefore resorted to “lying low” and keeping quiet as long as no actions were directly demanded of it, with the calm self-confidence of an institution that had existed since 1759. The principle of Quieta non movere [Do not move settled things] was the order of the day,³⁸ and it worked for a few years—the new regime did not initially meddle in the academy’s affairs.³⁹

But in the “Einstein case,” a policy of non movere was seemingly deemed infeasible after the events at the Prussian Academy had become publicly known. On April 4, 1933, the day after the Jews had been “swept” from Munich’s Justizpalast, President Leopold Wenger wrote to the Prussian Academy of Sciences and Humanities to request that he be provided with a copy of the current correspondence with Einstein and with Einstein’s current postal address and saying that “the greatest possible expediting” was indicated “given the urgency of the matter.”⁴⁰ The documents were accordingly dispatched to Munich by airmail on April 5.⁴¹ Leidinger’s diary notes on the “Einstein case” begin three days later, on April 7: “Committee meeting at the academy: Einstein case. The Berlin documents have arrived. No result yet after two hours of discussion. The committee members should each try to draft a letter to Einstein by tomorrow.”⁴²

These few sentences alone suffice to demonstrate that Wenger was not acting unilaterally but had raised the matter in the presiding committee of the academy. It is also clear that the presiding committee struggled with its deliberations. The fact that one of its members, Willstätter, was himself Jewish had to be considered. In addition, the composition of the presiding committee was diverse not only in terms of the disciplines represented but also in its age range. Wenger, Leidinger, and Willstätter were all aged around sixty. Schwartz, Wolters, and von Dyck were already in their midseventies. Presumably with these latter three members in mind, Leidinger had noted “Business transacted with an awful impression of the worst kind of senility” in his diary regarding his very first meeting as a member of the presiding committee on December 21, 1932.⁴³

Leidinger’s diary skips the following two days, a rare occurrence, and says nothing about the fresh meeting of the presiding committee scheduled for April 8. But—as noted at the beginning of this article—his literary estate also contains several pages of notes relating to the “Einstein case.” On their cover page, he wrote: “A discussion of this is presumably unnecessary.” The first page bears a pencil draft in Leidinger’s hand, dated April 8, for the letter to be addressed to Einstein.⁴⁴ It is not clear whether these are Leidinger’s notes taken during the meeting or a draft he had formulated before the meeting. As the text contains only a few deletions and rewordings, it seems likely that Leidinger brought a finished draft to the meeting, as had been agreed the previous day; multiple people struggling to formulate a draft together would have presumably engaged in more intensive rewording. Be that as it may, the text as recorded here is identical with the text of the letter that was sent to Einstein.⁴⁵

A second page in the file bears the heading: “Resolution of the Committee of the B. Academy of Sciences and Humanities 8. IV. 33.” Containing just one succinct sentence and penned by an as yet unidentified hand, this memorandum urges the mathematics and natural sciences section at the Bavarian Academy to consider “whether it does not wish to apply for Einstein’s exclusion with regard to Section 11, Subsection 3 of the statutes of the academy.”⁴⁶ It is easy to see that this is the key document in the entire case, for it reveals that the presiding committee had no intention of waiting for Einstein’s reply but was determined to pursue his expulsion even before its own letter to him had been drawn up. This cited passage from the Ordinance on the Organization of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities in the version of July 18, 1923, states: “The Academy may decide to expel a member at the request of a department with a three-fourths majority of the full members.”⁴⁷

Leidinger did not document which presiding committee members were present at the meeting on April 8, but it seems highly likely that the committee was complete. Leidinger was generally thorough in such matters and would presumably have made a note of any absences.⁴⁸ The letter that the academy sent to Einstein on April 8—which became public only because Einstein published it—was signed collectively by “The Presiding Committee of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities.”⁴⁹ It was decidedly brief, containing just one sentence of true significance: “We must therefore ask you how you understand your relationship with our academy after what has taken place between yourself and the Prussian Academy.”

There was no reply from Einstein for quite some time. This was in part perhaps because the Prussian Academy of Sciences and Humanities had forwarded an address (“c/o Prof. P. Ehrenfest, Leiden, Witte Rosenstraat”) to its counterpart in Munich that proved to be inaccurate.⁵⁰ On April 18, the syndic of the Bavarian Academy, Eugen von Frauenholz⁵¹ inquired again in Berlin about the progress of correspondence with Einstein and asked for copies.⁵² On April 22, the section for mathematics and natural sciences, which was responsible for the case according to the academy’s statutes, dealt with it without knowing Einstein’s stance on the letter the presiding committee had sent to him. As the minutes of the section for this period have been lost, Leidinger’s diary provides the only known documentation of this meeting. On April 24, a Monday, Leidinger noted: “Telephone call to the academy to ascertain the result of the meeting of the natural sciences section on Saturday. Huwig⁵³ says: it should first be asked whether the letter has reached Einstein’s hands. Oh, these Schwachmatici [feeble people]!”⁵⁴

The members of the section or department, which naturally also included Willstätter—who, as a member of the presiding committee, may even have chaired this meeting—clearly could not bring themselves to move for Einstein’s expulsion, at least not yet.

Einstein, on the other hand, had already decided to resign from the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities. He had remained in Belgium after disembarking in Antwerp and taken up residence in the seaside resort of Le Coq-sur-Mer near Ostend.⁵⁵ In a letter dated April 21, 1933, he expressed his “wish to have my name removed from the members’ list” and explained this step with clear criticism of the stances taken by “German learned societies.”⁵⁶

This letter must have reached the academy after April 24, 1933. Leopold Wenger, its president, had not awaited the outcome of the matter and had used the days toward the end of the semester break for a brief vacation. It was thus Wenger’s deputy, Eduard Schwartz who informed the section secretaries in writing on April 27 that “Professor Dr. Einstein has declared his resignation from the number of our academy’s corresponding members.”⁵⁷ According to the entries of Leidinger’s diary, the presiding committee discussed the “Einstein case” one final time at its meeting at 11 a.m. on May 3 to determine whether to respond to Einstein’s resignation. They decided to issue “only a short note acknowledging receipt.”⁵⁸

A handwritten page in Leidinger’s estate bearing this date contains a note in his hand that Schwartz had chaired the meeting in his role as deputy. This is followed by the information that it had at least “been decided to write: the acad. has taken note of your letter of resignation.”⁵⁹ At the meeting of the philosophical–historical section on May 6, 1933, mention was made in passing of Einstein’s “resignation without [further] discussion.”⁶⁰

II

Leidinger’s notes on the “Einstein case” end there. For all their laconic brevity, they represent a meaningful source of information about how the academy treated its prominent member. But they also shed light on their author, naturally enough, and illuminate his role as a significant representative of the academy and a person active on many of its commissions. Leidinger’s personal attitude regarding the events was conveyed in just a few scant words that were in keeping with his general diary style: “O diese Schwachmatici!”—“Oh, these feeble people!”

Expressions from student slang like Schwachmatikus belonged to his standard repertoire. Leidinger maintained close ties to his Munich student fraternity, the influential Akademischer Gesangverein, as one of its “old men.” He had even become its historiographer, although he generally preferred compiling editions and shied away from producing major historical accounts.⁶¹ Among the librarians at the Bavarian State Library, this choral society—generally referred to simply as der Verein, “the association”—enjoyed a dominant and unchallenged position. Fraternity lingo was cultivated in everyday life in these circles. People did not confront each other, for instance, but engaged in coramage (a fraternity term for a formal interrogation carried out by a man who felt his honor had been offended, or his chosen representative, of a person deemed to have caused offense).⁶²

A Schwachmatikus was simply a weakling or a feeble person.⁶³ Leidinger regarded the academy members who could not bring themselves to petition for Einstein’s expulsion as such weaklings. Turning this around, the inconspicuous diary note underscores that Leidinger was an adament advocate for Einstein’s removal from the academy—and regarded any discussion of the matter as superfluous and unnecessary.⁶⁴

This raises the question of what motivated his stance. Leidinger’s and Einstein’s fields of disciplinary expertise were in no way adjacent, and Leidinger was certainly not personally acquainted with Einstein—he could not have known more about him than what could be gleaned from newspapers. As a regular reader of the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten and the Völkischer Beobachter, Leidinger would not have read anything about Einstein during the days that are relevant here, but he would have seen many general allegations about the alleged Jewish world conspiracy. That said, some broader consideration of his political views is necessary here.

Leidinger, a Protestant Franconian of lower middle-class origins, was strictly deutschnational—an adherent of a conservative and Protestant brand of German nationalism—before 1933. He was resolutely opposed to the political Catholicism that dominated Bavaria and convinced that it was to blame for the fact that he was never appointed to the role he believed himself destined for, the general directorship of the Bavarian State Library. This explains the satisfaction he derived from the changeover of power in Munich and Bavaria on March 9, 1933. He recorded the prevailing mood as general jubilation and “strong hope” (which may have been predominantly his own).⁶⁵ He would have liked to see the “seizure of power” taken even further; Franz von Epp’s appointment as Reichs-Polizeikommissar (Reich Police Commissioner), which he read about in the newspaper the next day,⁶⁶ was, in his words, only a “half-measure! What a shame that they didn’t get a firm grip on things right away, as will hopefully still happen.”⁶⁷ Whether Leidinger only wanted to see the back of the conservative Catholic government or whether he wanted to see democracy liquidated altogether need not concern us here. At any rate, he was highly satisfied with these unfolding political developments.

Leidinger held national honor, or what he understood as such, in high esteem, and sins against it were unpardonable. He regarded Ludwig Quidde, a fellow academy member and colleague, as an elendiger Volksverräter—a “wretched traitor of the people”—because Quidde was a pacifist.⁶⁸ Einstein, however, was not merely a pacifist but had even publicly distanced himself from Germany and thus, in the Nazi interpretation, likewise become a traitor of the people. That alone would presumably have been enough to turn Leidinger against him.

Furthermore, Einstein was Jewish. Leidinger’s publications are not known to contain antisemitic statements, but his aversion to Jewishness in general and to certain Jews in particular shines through all the more extensively in his diaries. Antisemitic rhetoric features pervasively in his notes from 1918 onwards. This point in time is not coincidental; like so many of his contemporaries, Leidinger blamed Jews for the Bavarian Revolution of 1918/19 and the events that occurred in its aftermath.⁶⁹ Beginning with the crises of the early 1930s, antisemitic comments in his diary become increasingly frequent. After the Nazi seizure of power, Leidinger shed all inhibitions about displaying this aversion openly.

The fact that Jewish citizens were physically attacked and faced mortal threats in March 1933 did not bother him in the slightest, not even when he was personally acquainted with the victims. Leidinger had previously willingly engaged the legal services⁷⁰ of the Munich lawyer Dr. Joseph Weil (1886–1940),⁷¹ who was in turn an avid user of the Bavarian State Library.⁷² When Leidinger had a consultation with Weil on March 14, Weil told him that he had been abused by Nazi thugs on the night of March 10–11. At that point, Leidinger refrained from passing any comment on this in his diary.⁷³ But when he saw Weil again two weeks later—by which time Weil’s mental distress had probably become severe—he could only think of one word for him: “disgusting.”⁷⁴

Dr. Michael Strich (1881–1941),⁷⁵ a private scholar of Jewish origin in Munich, was not physically attacked at this point. He had known Leidinger since the First World War, in which he had fought for Germany on the western front.⁷⁶ Strich offered the Commission for Bavarian Regional History an extensive book manuscript in 1928 that entered a production process supervised by Leidinger in 1930.⁷⁷ This required numerous personal meetings, and Leidinger rarely neglected to put his personal dislike of Strich into words when documenting these conversations. September 5, 1930: “The Jew Strich … stinks terribly of sweat and tobacco”;⁷⁸ July 25, 1932: “this impertinent Jew”; August 18, 1932: “the insolent Jew, Strich”⁷⁹ etc. From the spring of 1933, Leidinger no longer made himself available to Strich as a contact person, although numerous details about the delivery of the book remained to be discussed.⁸⁰ He evaded all attempts at contact for months and put Strich’s letters aside as “whining.”⁸¹

To fully grasp the import of Leidinger’s behavior toward both of these men, it must be borne in mind that both of them were completely “assimilated.” Weil had a Catholic father. Strich was a keen researcher into seventeenth-century Bavarian history and accepted Catholic baptism in 1935. Leidinger’s antisemitism was therefore obviously grounded in racism.

In other words, the head of one of the most outstanding cultural collections in the world, the manuscript section of the Bavarian State Library—a man who interacted with scholars from all over the world in that context—put up no resistance whatsoever to adopting vulgar antisemitic tropes. While the biographical context to this cannot be explored here, it bears noting that Leidinger harbored a great many other grudges against collectives and individuals in addition to his antisemitism: These included women in academic professions (“geese”⁸²), Catholics (“dishonest”⁸³), the ministerial bureaucracy (“idiots”⁸⁴), his own superiors (“useless!”⁸⁵), and even the Bavarian Minister of Education (a “country bumpkin”⁸⁶)—the self-confidence of the brushmaker’s son who had reached the highest echelons of academia must have been threatened from all quarters. It bears recalling once again that that this rhetorical belligerence did not arise situationally during temporary losses of composure, but was well considered by Leidinger: These were formulations that he did not wish to see committed to fire after his death but, on the contrary, preserved for posterity.

The source situation does not allow the attitudes of the remaining members of the presiding committee to be discerned with the same clarity. President Wenger notably chose to avoid having his name directly attached to the academy’s decision. The letter to Einstein was signed by “the Presidium” although the statutes of the academy made it plain that the president was responsible for conducting its correspondence as part of his duties.⁸⁷ When Einstein’s reply arrived, Wenger was not in Munich and had left the task of dealing with the matter to his deputy, Schwartz.

Some parallels in habitus between the two privy councillors Schwartz and Leidinger probably existed. Schwartz also thought along deutschnational national-conservative lines⁸⁸ and had welcomed the Nazi seizure of power, but he was not an avowed supporter of the regime. From the Nazi point of view, however, he was simply too old and too conservative and rapidly found himself relegated to the margins of academia.⁸⁹ Schwartz was also, rumor had it, “no friend of the Jews.”⁹⁰ Leidinger reports that his re-election as president of the academy was prevented by the mathematics and natural sciences section in 1930, “fiendishlyly, due to Jewish intervention!”⁹¹ Schwartz’s son reports that a certain emotional block around this issue existed in the family. He says that his father considered “the Jewish, invariably left-wing influence on the press and parties” disastrous and “counseled restraint in matters connected to [academic] appointments.”⁹²

The roles of Wolters and von Dyck are not visible at all in the few surviving documents. Whether Wolters could have exerted any great influence on the course of developments seems decidedly doubtful. He had probably become prematurely senile. Leidinger considered Wolters no longer capable of conducting academy business and repeatedly attested “senility of the worst kind” to him in his diary.⁹³ Although the known sources shed no light on Willstätter’s position, antisemitism can definitely be ruled out in his case.

That still leaves the role of Walther von Dyck to consider. Although von Dyck expressed a fundamental lack of understanding for the tumultuous course of the “national revolution,”⁹⁴ his letters contain very clear negative statements about the “Jewish question.” He proclaimed himself “no admirer of the Semites” as early as 1894.⁹⁵ In 1921, he attributed “the ruin … of our German being” to “appalling cronyism in Berlin”—behind which he suspected Jewish intrigues.⁹⁶ Von Dyck’s personal dislike of Fritz Haber, a colleague in the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft who was that association’s vice president and a “non-Aryan,” was well known. When Haber resigned⁹⁷, von Dyck remarked expressly in a latter dated May 14, 1933, “that I never considered the election …, especially of Haber, to be good.”⁹⁸

The state of hearts and minds among the presiding committee’s membership is clear enough from this overview to allow the conclusion to be drawn that it was unlikely, in this context, that the “Einstein case” could have taken a different turn. On any committee, a tiny handful of people who were “zealotss, possessed, or obsessed” sufficed to make “any opposition impossible.”⁹⁹ Those who were not among their number might try to tell themselves that it was “more sensible” to sacrifice an individual member than to expose the entire academy to political attacks. The exact distribution of responsibility is probably beyond clarification at this stage. Eduard Schwartz was ultimately the person who formally acknowledged Einstein’s departure. It is one of the ironies of history that he, of all people, is himself now counted among the scholars “driven out” by the Nazi regime because he was frozen out of the academy—likely mainly for age-related reasons.¹⁰⁰

III

Apart from the Einstein case, the page that Leidinger prepared for the meeting of the presiding committee on May 3 also contains two further lines of text that may initially seem puzzling. One reads “Angelegenheit der Betriebszelle” [the active cell affair] and the other contains only the name “Willstätter.” This cryptic note can be decoded by drawing on Leidinger’s diary entries. Among other notes committed to his diary on May 3, he remarks: “The active cell at the academy: The busybody v. Frauenholz paid a visit to Willstätter and tried to persuade him to resign as section secretary. How outrageous! It is not clear to me whether Schwartz was behind this as well. The president, who has just returned from vacation, knew nothing about it, and now he has to smooth out the matter and explain that it was based on a mistake.”¹⁰¹

The events described here had previously been completely hidden from historical research. No one had even registered that Willstätter’s name had simply disappeared from the list of secretaries in the yearbook issued by the academy in 1933.¹⁰² This is odd for reasons of timing alone, since the terms of office of section secretaries lasted for two years and it is known that Willstätter became a section secretary in 1930.¹⁰³ Heinrich Wieland’s belated obituary of Willstätter, who died in 1942, had, moreover, made an admittedly oblique reference to Willstätter already having had “to bid farewell to our body eight years before his death [i.e., in 1933] as a victim of political vandals.”¹⁰⁴

Willstätter was one of the academy’s most prominent members. In 1915, he had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his groundbreaking research into the chemical structure of chlorophyll, among other topics. That same year, he was appointed to a professorship at the University of Munich, and his corresponding membership (1914) in the academy was subsequently upgraded to a full membership (1916). In 1930, the natural sciences section elected him as their secretary, which made him a member of the presiding committee—together with the remaining section secretaries, the president, and the previous president.

The attack on Willstätter that Leidinger reports is confirmed and commented on in detail in another hitherto unnoticed document relating to academy history, the memoirs of the “busybody” Eugen von Frauenholz, who was the academy’s syndic at the time. Frauenholz had been a career officer in the Bavarian army until 1918. He had then undertaken university studies, obtained a doctorate and later a habilitation degree, and established himself as a military historian. From 1928 onwards, he acted as the academy’s syndic, which essentially meant that he was its managing director—the role did not necessarily demand extensive legal knowledge. He was ousted together with President Karl Alexander von Müller¹⁰⁵ in 1944 and took early retirement.¹⁰⁶

During the collapse of the Third Reich in 1945, Frauenholz wrote his memoirs for later publication. They are dated from April 17 to July 20 and have remained unprinted and largely unread among the papers of his literary estate to this day.¹⁰⁷ In lengthy passages on the “Jewish question,” Frauenholz emphasized his lack of understanding for the actions taken against the Jewish population; he claimed to have made no effort to hide, as syndic, “my understanding that every Jew should be treated as he deserves, and that Jews who were important scholars could not be excluded.” He personally had “not had any bad experiences with Jews.”¹⁰⁸ He then begins to describe the “Willstätter case”:

Now, I did have one experience that went in the other direction. Privy Councillor Willstätter, the well-known physicist, was a Jew and a department secretary at the academy. When a directive came out forbidding the appointment of Jews to offices, I considered it my duty as syndic to go to Privy Councillor Willstätter, without saying anything to anyone, and to bring this decree to his attention in a private conversation, so that he could resign from his office himself if he wished to do so. I expressly told him that I was coming without having informed the president in advance; after Goebel’s death, the acting president at the time was once again Privy Councillor Schwartz, who was no friend of the Jews. I told Willstätter that I wanted to bring the directive to his attention in confidence so that he could decide for himself whether he wanted to leave office voluntarily or to await further developments. What he wanted to do was for him to decide; I just wanted to spare him and the academy from unpleasantness, and nobody at the academy knew I had visited him. His behavior was not quite correct, because he raised the matter at the next meeting of the presiding committee, not only referring to me—which I had never forbidden him—but also stating his conviction that Privy Councillor Schwartz was behind my visit. I had given him assurances to the contrary.¹⁰⁹

Frauenholz wrote his account in Matrei in East Tyrol from memory, without access to documents, and some details are blurred or inaccurate. Willstätter was not a physicist, of course, and Karl von Goebel, who had died after a short period in office, had not been succeeded as president by Eduard Schwartz but by Leopold Wenger, whose tenure in the role also only lasted for a few years. But this text by Frauenholz, an independent second witness, fully supports Leidinger’s account. Its emergence in the face of the German defeat naturally implies that readers must exercise caution; self-apologetic tendencies should be expected. But the credibility of this passage is supported by the fact that Frauenholz had no incentive to protect Schwartz, who had already died, and to whom he could easily have shifted responsibility here.

Perhaps the honorable intentions Frauenholz claimed can even be credited to him, a man who cultivated chivalrous and courtly ideals and who had ridden into battle as an old-school heavy cavalryman with a lance and a saber. He was close to the former Bavarian royal family and a convert to Catholicism, and he had served as a chamberlain to Prince Ludwig Ferdinand since 1923. He clearly had no ideological affinity with National Socialism; at the University of Munich, where he lectured on military history, he was considered incapable of “representing the military sciences in the spirit of National Socialism.”¹¹⁰ He did not join the Nazi Party until 1941.¹¹¹

The “directive” that Frauenholz was reacting to was presumably the “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” passed on April 7, 1933. Its aim was to remove all “non-Aryans” from public service positions, and a rapid series of increasingly draconian regulations followed that targeted Jews for discrimination in every area of public life. The academy soon began dismissing Jewish members of its project staff.¹¹² A third such decree, issued on May 6, 1933, expressly mandated the dismissal of university professors and honorary public servants who had already been discharged from their duties.¹¹³

Remarkably enough, there seems to have been little official pressure exerted on Jewish instructors at the University of Munich at this point in time; only Hans Nawiasky—who had long been a persona non grata on account of his politics and his alleged relativization of the “shameful peace” of Versailles—had already been suspended from his teaching duties on April 20.¹¹⁴ Frauenholz was thus getting ahead of events to some extent with his intervention in the academy. To deduce just how far ahead he was, however, one would need to know when exactly he visited Willstätter, which is unclear. All that is definitively known is that Willstätter sent a letter to Friedrich Schmitt-Ott, the president of the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft, on April 25 to tender his resignation from his position on the expert committee for chemistry on the grounds that his recent election “did not yet take changed circumstances and opinions into account.”¹¹⁵ It is possible that Willstätter became aware of this sea change via Einstein’s letter of resignation if it arrived in Munich on that day. Alternatively, Frauenholz’s visit could also explain this step on his part. In this latter case, Frauenholz would have launched his plan to “Aryanize” the academy’s presiding committee before the Bavarian state parliament passed its own Enabling Act—in its final session in the Third Reich, on April 28/29, 1933—that made it clear that the “national revolution” had also prevailed in Bavaria.¹¹⁶

Whatever the exact sequence of events, it had become foreseeable by this point that “non-Aryans” would not be able to retain prominent positions in public life. The problem that Frauenholz probably foresaw for the academy was that its statutes did not supply any mechanism for excluding a member of its presiding committee. The only options for removing Willstätter from the committee were to expel him from the academy entirely, which had proven somewhat difficult even in Einstein’s case, or to nudge him into leaving voluntarily. Academic etiquette, which was maintained even during the drastic purges of 1938, demanded asking colleagues to resign from their offices rather than dismissing them outright.

As we have seen, Leidinger had no empathy at all with oppressed Jewish fellow citizens and colleagues, and his perception of this incident as “outrageous” was clearly not because of its antisemitic tendencies. He generally disliked the “noble Mr. v. Frauenholz”¹¹⁷ and regarded his move as a form of interference with the rights of academy members. This explains why he referred to him in his notes as a Betriebszelle—a word that should not be understood in its Nazi meaning (Betriebszellen-Organization as a workers’ organization) but as an allusion to Betriebsamkeit (busy activity).

Willstätter could have been protected by his unimpeachable patriotism: He was a signatory of the infamous “Manifesto of the Ninety-Three” in 1914, a document that sought to justify German military operations in Belgium during the First World War, and he had not distanced himself from it later, as some other signatories had.¹¹⁸ He had been awarded the Iron Cross in 1917 for his scientific research on poison gas defense. This distinguished him sharply from Einstein, an avowed pacifist. In addition, Willstätter was—also in contrast to Einstein—highly decorated in Bavaria; in 1925, he had (together with Eduard Schwartz!) been among the first four researchers admitted to the noble Maximilian Order for Science and Art after the end of the monarchy.¹¹⁹

Nevertheless, Willstätter does not appear to have received any backing from the presiding committee at its meeting on May 3, 1933. This is the conclusion that must be drawn from his reaction to the meeting, which Leidinger recorded on May 15, 1933: “Meeting of presiding committee in the academy presidium: Willstätter sends a letter with his resignation as section secretary and from all academy commissions.”¹²⁰

Willstätter had not followed the advice given him by his friend Fritz Haber on April 1 to avoid vacating any position voluntarily and await “extreme duress.”¹²¹ On the other hand, Haber himself had not stuck to his own advice, either: He resigned from his position as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry in Berlin-Dahlem on April 30¹²² after having been forced to dismiss most of his staff—including Willstätter’s daughter Ida, who had worked for him as a research assistant—under the provisions of the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service.¹²³

Now, following Haber’s example, Willstätter opted for what he called “privatization.” This step must have been all the more bitter as Willstätter had already yielded to antisemitic pressure and resigned from his university professorship in 1925.¹²⁴ He did not expressly mention the incident at the academy in his memoirs, but he did include “academy meetings with my boring minutes” among the things that had ceased but that he did not miss “after Hitler’s seizure of power.”¹²⁵

Willstätter was succeeded as section secretary by the physicist Jonathan Zenneck,¹²⁶ who proved willing to acquiesce to the demands of the new regime and expressly defended discrimination against Jewish researchers in interactions with foreign colleagues.¹²⁷ Zenneck concluded “Science and the Volk,” his speech marking the 178th anniversary of the academy’s founding, delivered on June 16, 1937, with a bold proclamation that “science is service to the people.”¹²⁸ He did not mention that Jews in Germany were no longer part of science or of the people—because it was already common knowledge anyway.

Although Zenneck and his colleagues at the academy did have to deal with accusations leveled at them in 1940 by Otto Hörner, the lecturer’s leader at the Gau level, that they were trying to “preserve the Bayer. Academy as the last island of a reactionary anti-National Socialist republic of scholars,”¹²⁹ this reproach essentially only referred to efforts on the part of the academy to preserve its rights to self-administration and to choose its own members. It had long abandoned its innermost raison d’être —from as early as 1933—by depriving individual members of this republic of their citizenship without scholarly justification or ousting them from their academic roles. A large question mark must be attached to the view that the academies of sciences and humanities were only gleichgeschaltet (synchronized with Nazism) at a comparatively late stage.¹³⁰ As the events of spring 1933 show, the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, at least, did not need any “Gleichschaltung” to be aligned with antisemitism. A large proportion of its members, and especially of its most influential members, had long been marching in step with the new holders of power. This explained the conclusion that Richard Willstätter had already been forced to draw at the time: “From the very beginning, the universities and learned societies were among the first exponents of this weakness.”¹³¹

IV

In mid-October 1938, the Prussian Academy of Sciences and Humanities complied with a request from the minister of science, education, and national culture, Bernhard Rust, and asked its three Jewish full members to resign, which they did.¹³² In the aftermath of the November pogroms of November 9–10, 1938, the Bavarian Academy—by then under its new president, Karl Alexander von Müller, who had close ties to the regime¹³³—also pressured the Jews among its full members into leaving. On November 14, Richard Willstätter resigned from the academy together with the mathematicians Alfred Pringsheim and Heinrich Liebmann and the Indologist Lucian Scherman.¹³⁴ Willstätter managed to emigrate to Switzerland at the beginning of March 1939 and find safe exile in Muralto near Locarno. On July 13, 1939, his name was also removed from the list of members of the Prussian Academy, to which he had belonged since 1914.¹³⁵

After the demise of the Nazi regime, Willstätter could not be readmitted to the academy—he had died in 1942—and Einstein, now a permanent resident of the USA, had no interest in being readmitted. Quite soon after the American military government permitted the academy’s reestablishment on July 25, 1946, Arnold Sommerfeld was assigned the task of seeking to persuade Einstein to withdraw his resignation. Sommerfeld had always had a good relationship with Einstein.¹³⁶ He was familiar with the letter the academy had sent to Einstein in April 1933 from Einstein’s publication of it in 1934, and he apologized on the academy’s behalf for the “highly inappropriate” request:

There was nothing we could do after the madness had suddenly broken out. … But now the madness is over, and the academy would like to send you its proceedings again. … A refusal on your part would be embarrassing for us, of course. I ask you to bury the hatchet and accept membership of the academy again.¹³⁷

Einstein’s reaction on December 14, 1946, was friendly but firm:

Since the Germans murdered my Jewish brethern in Europe, I want nothing more to do with Germans, not even with a relatively harmless academy. It is different with the few individuals who remained steadfast within the realms of what possibilities there were. I heard with pleasure that you were among their number.¹³⁸

Einstein’s stance influenced the academy’s approach to selecting new members in the early post-war years. It had to be acknowledged that the election of a scholar to the academy was now—in contrast to the time before 1933—not primarily an honor for the scholar, but rather for the academy, and one which not every scholar was necessarily eager to grant. This was expressly stated in the discussions that took place in the run-up to the the membership elections of 1951. In the mathematics and natural sciences section, ten possible candidates for nominations were discussed, one of whom was the mathematician Hermann Weyl (1885–1955). Weyl’s candidacy was being advanced chiefly by Heinrich Tietze, a section secretary of long standing.¹³⁹ Weyl had emigrated in 1933 and found employment alongside Einstein at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton.¹⁴⁰ Another mathematician in the section, Oskar Perron (1880–1975), who had been a member of the academy since 1924, was concerned that this context meant that electing Weyl could cause the academy to suffer the embarrassing fate of being rejected by a candidate again, as had already happened with Einstein. In a short memorandum addressed “To the mathematicians of the Bavarian Academy expected to attend the election session,” Perron explained his reservations about the election of foreign scholars and especially those who had been forced to emigrate from Germany. He also subjected the academy’s behavior during the Nazi years to a remarkably self-critical assessment. This is all the more notable given that Perron himself had proven to be a steadfast and courageous opponent of Nazism.¹⁴¹ His comments on the academy and the “Einstein case” speak for themselves and represent an appropriate conclusion to this study:

And now about the emigrants! To them, especially, we cannot say that we are an illustrious society. Because we deserted them all. We should not inflate our importance in front of them. We should crawl into the furthest mousehole and be ashamed. Personally, I am ashamed of myself too, and that’s the crux of my stance here. That is why I am in favor of strict reticence and modest flourishing in obscurity. For what did we, what did the academy do to save the persecuted scholars in the Third Reich? Nothing. We reach for the convenient excuse that we didn’t have the power, that we were not able. In truth, however, we did not try in earnest at all. Each of us simply shied away from the risk, perhaps because of the conflicting motive of being worried about our families. We were not heroes. But the emigrants had no choice, for the most part; they and their families had to bear the risk and endure endless suffering. That is why they are a good step above us—we who silently let everything happen—in the estimation of the world. Hermann Weyl is certainly among those who are prepared to forget (and not just because he coped relatively well personally, as the bright star he is, but because of his noble character), and he showed us when he was here that he is well-disposed toward us all. But I do not want to inflate my importance in front of him, and I’m afraid that his neighbor and colleague Einstein will say something to him like: “Well, well—the Bavarian Academy! You needn’t flatter yourself too much I offer my condolences. By the way, the gentlemen wanted to have me as well, but I gave them a smack.”¹⁴²

Appendix

1

Inquiry from President Leopold Wenger to the Prussian Academy of Sciences, April 4, 1933 (copy),
PAW (1812–1945) (Prussian Academy of Sciences 1812–1945), II–III 57, p. 29, Archive of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Berlin.

Der Ausschuß unserer Akademie ist in die Behandlung des Falles Einstein darum einzutreten genötigt, weil Einstein korrespondierendes Mitglied unserer Akademie ist. Aus der im Namen der Akademie abgegebenen Erklärung des Herrn Sekretars Heymann ersehen wir, daß Herr Einstein aus Ihrer Akademie ausgetreten ist. Wir bitten, uns aus den in Ihrer Erklärung erwähnten Schriftstücken eine Abschrift der Austrittserklärung Einsteins zugehen zu lassen und ebenso, da dies für die Behandlung der Angelegenheit durch unsere Akademie nötig ist, wenn möglich eine Abschrift des Schreibens, in welchem Sie von Herrn Einstein Rechenschaft gefordert haben. Falls noch weitere Schritte von Ihnen in der Angelegenheit erfolgen sollten, so wären wir für jeweilige Mitteilungen sehr dankbar, sowie auch wir von unseren Beschlüssen Sie in Kenntnis setzen werden.
Für eine möglichste Beschleunigung wären wir bei der Dringlichkeit der Angelegenheit sehr dankbar.
Schließlich bitten wir um Mitteilung eines Weges, auf dem wir Herrn Einstein direkt ein Schreiben zukommen lassen können.
Hochachtungsvollst
L. Wenger
Präsident.

2

Letter from the Presiding Committee of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities to Albert Einstein, Munich, April 8, 1933.
Published in Albert Einstein, Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam 1934, p. 126–127; handwritten manuscript in Leidingeriana Iv.b.3.c, BSB.

Euer Hochwohlgeboren!
Sie haben in Ihrem Schreiben an die Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften Ihren Austritt mit den¹⁴³ in Deutschland gegenwärtig herrschenden Zuständen motiviert. Die Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, die Sie vor einigen Jahren zum korrespondierenden Mitglied gewählt hat, ist ebenfalls eine deutsche Akademie, mit der Preußischen und den sonstigen¹⁴⁴ Akademien in enger Solidarität verbunden¹⁴⁵, sodaß Ihre Trennung von der Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften¹⁴⁶ nicht ohne Einfluß auf Ihre Beziehungen¹⁴⁷ zu unserer Akademie bleiben kann.
Wir müssen¹⁴⁸ Sie daher fragen, wie Sie nach dem, was zwischen Ihnen und der Preußischen Akademie vorgegangen ist, das Verhältnis zu unserer Akademie auffassen.
¹⁴⁹Das Präsidium der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.

3

Decision of exclusion made by the Presiding Committee of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, April 8, 1933,
manuscript, Leidingeriana IV.b.3.c., BSB.

Beschluß des Ausschusses der B. Akademie der Wissenschaften 8.IV.33:
Die Umstände, unter denen Herr Einstein seinen Austritt aus der Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften erklärt hat, veranlassen den Ausschuß, an die 2. Abteilung die Frage zu richten, ob sie nicht im Hinblick auf §11, Abs. 3 der Satzungen den Ausschluß Einsteins beantragen will.

4

Albert Einstein’s letter of resignation, April 21, 1933,
Le Coq-sur-Mer, typed copy in Leidingeriana IV.b.3.c, BSB; published in Albert Einstein, Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam 1934, 127–128.

Ich habe den Rücktritt von meiner Stellung an der Preussischen Akademie damit begründet, daß ich unter den obwaltenden Umständen weder deutscher Bürger sein, noch in einer Art Abhängigkeitsverhältnis zu dem preußischen Unterrichtsministerium stehen wolle.
Diese Gründe würden an und für sich eine Lösung meiner Beziehungen zur Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften nicht bedingen. Wenn ich trotzdem wünsche, daß mein Name aus der Liste der Mitglieder gestrichen wird, so hat dies einen anderen Grund.
Akademien haben in erster Linie die Aufgabe, das wissenschaftliche Leben eines Landes zu fördern und zu schützen. Die deutschen gelehrten Gesellschaften haben aber – soviel mir bekannt ist – es schweigend hingenommen, daß ein nicht unerheblicher Teil der deutschen Gelehrten und Studenten, sowie der auf Grund einer akademischen Ausbildung Berufstätigen, ihrer Arbeitsmöglichkeiten und ihres Lebensunterhaltes in Deutschland beraubt wird. Einer Gesellschaft, die – wenn auch unter äusserem Drucke – eine solche Haltung einnimmt, will ich nicht angehören.
Mit vorzüglicher Hochachtung
gez.
A. Einstein

5

An die Herren amtierenden Klassensekretäre.
Ich beehre mich mitzuteilen, daß Herr Professor Dr. Einstein seinen Austritt aus der Zahl der korrespondierenden Mitglieder unserer Akademie erklärt hat.
E. Schwarz
Frauenholz

Human beings are storytellers who live by and are given life by the tales they tell themselves and each other. Stories shape our lives more than we generally know or can even truly imagine. Although bees, ants, and some mammals are also able to use visual signs or speech-like sounds to communicate, Homo sapiens is—as far as we know thus far—the only species with the capacity to use language as a fundamental tool for shaping life in all its dimensions. Humans’ ability to tell stories, like their technical inventiveness and a capacity for economic organization, is of such decisive importance that we can and may speak with considerable justification of Homo narrans, the storytelling creature, as well as of Homo faber and Homo economicus.

When the famous storyteller Salman Rushdie—who was born in India and went to school in England—was still a small boy, his father told him many marvelous stories from the East—stories from One Thousand and One Nights, the Panchatantra, the Kathasaritsagara (the “Ocean of the Streams of Story”), as well as legends and adventure stories featuring mighty heroes. Rushdie gained two unforgettable insights into the question of what it means to grow up with stories. One of the lessons he learned was:

that stories were not true (there were no “real” genies in bottles or flying carpets or wonderful lamps), but by being untrue they could make him feel and know truths that the truth could not tell him, and second, that they all belonged to him, just as they belonged to his father, Anis, and to everyone else, they were all his, as they were his father’s, bright stories and dark stories, sacred stories and profane, his to alter and renew and discard and pick up again as and when he pleased.¹

Scheherazade showed him that “stories told against death” can “overcome even the most murderous of tyrants,” and later in his own life he discovered that a story could turn a fanatic into a murderer.² Stories do not merely narrate life and death but are intimately bound up with life and death and ultimately inexhaustible. Stories give us a feel for who we are. In Salman Rushdie’s phrasing, “Man was the storytelling animal, the only creature on earth that told itself stories to understand what kind of creature it was.”³

Telling and understanding stories is a core human skill acquired during the evolution of human culture. Experiences are passed on by narrating them. Without stories, we could neither draw inspiration from the past nor envision a shape for the future; we would have only the experience of a present in which we would, as it were, subsist from hand to mouth. The sheer variety of narrative content and forms that exist is immensely broad, highly differentiated, and far from easy to survey. Academic disciplines, especially, all have their own distinctive narrative forms, with clear differences between theoretical, empirical, and historical branches of inquiry; the forms closest to the kind of storytelling that seeks to entertain are found in the latter groups. We can do little more than speculate about everything in our past, expressing the results in stories that may then be more or less credible. The further these stories reach back in time, the more challenging it becomes to create them, substantiate them step-by-step, or appraise them. This is naturally all the truer for those long spans of time for which there are no extant written sources.

We do not know how long people have been telling each other tales. This development is a part of the history of human culture that consists of many small stories about progress (and pursuit of lines of inquiry). Each of these stories can be appraised as true, false, or mere speculative conjecture. Even scholars (who normally do not narrate but reflect and argue) ultimately tell stories with the potential to change dramatically and repeatedly whenever new evidence comes to light. Narratives about the origins of tales, too—about their beginnings in time and space, how old they are, and what changes they have undergone—must also, from a scholarly point of view, remain provisional hypotheses. Meta-stories like these are sometimes called “narratives” or “myths,” although the use of “myths” in common parlance refers to stories and legends from the oral tradition about gods and heroes or cosmic creation or collapse. It is true, of course, that many propositions and causal inferences from the scholarly tradition bear a remarkably strong resemblance to traditional myths: they are also (subtle) origin narratives that seek to explain the major and minor details of world events and the thoughts and actions of those involved.

Curiosity about the origins of many mysterious things in our surroundings has hardly been confined to scholarly circles; “common people” have often assuaged their own curiosity by inventing or appropriating tales within their milieus. These “etiological” tales provide mythical or legendary explanations that incorporate fairy-tale or even farcical elements for a wealth of topics. The most diverse phenomena (why all beans have a black seam; how the moon was placed in the sky; why a human lifetime spans seventy years) are explained in stories that usually contain surprises.⁴ The Mongols, for example, explain the origin of their fairy tales in an origin narrative based on their religious conceptions. This story of a kind person bringing fairy tales to the earth’s surface as the gift of a god of the underworld is an etiology that has emerged out of a shamanic environment.⁵ In formal terms, the story of the god’s gift to the blind Tarwaa belongs to a hybrid type: as a mythical fairy tale, it suggests that a certain proximity exists between myths and fairy tales.

To search for insights from cultural studies into the origins of fairy tales, we need to engage with the history of human evolution as it is currently narrated—essentially on the basis of insights from evolutionary biology—by writers such as the historian Yuval Noah Harari.⁶ Harari sees the “Cognitive Revolution” that he estimates to have taken place between seventy thousand and thirty thousand years ago as a pivotal point in human history. This is when Homo sapiens is thought to have developed specific abilities to remember, communicate, learn, and invent, thus providing a basis for individuals to cooperate with peers and work on shared activities in larger groups than before.

Storytelling requires language, the ability of certain kinds of living beings to communicate with each other—by means of sounds or visual signs—about things and circumstances they perceive. Non-human animals are known to use different sounds or sequences of sounds to communicate information and can repeat acoustic signals or gestures, but they deploy these signals only in broadly stereotypical patterns and can scarcely combine them in novel ways. In contrast, human languages—going beyond metaphors that apply mental images to new contexts (a night-black soul, heavenly singing) and references (in which one phenomenon points to another, like dark clouds indicating rain)—make use of words as signs that can detach themselves from specific reference objects and refer to other words, sentences, and texts.

“Tradition” [Überlieferung], the passing down of diverse cultural phenomena and values down through generations, is a complex process, but also a word that can be apprehended in an instant. A language can be understood correctly only by people who do not confuse broad general concepts with designations for specific things and can distinguish symbols from indicators (i.e., indirect from direct statements). Face-to-face communication also has the added dimension that speaking is almost inevitably accompanied and supported by facial expressions, gestures, or some other bodily movements that also require comprehension.

In comparison to the languages of other animals, human language is extremely flexible. A finite number of sounds (and written characters) can produce an infinite number of sentences that all have their own special meanings. While signals repeated in identical form appear reliable, the meanings of words can deceive. This also applies, of course, to the tales formed from words that were initially used—as Harari assumes in his account of human evolution—to exchange gossip. As a form of communication about absent persons, gossip possesses more marked narrative qualities than, say, rumors; gossip seeks not merely to convey information, but also to entertain, and it often has an expressive quality that reveals much about the connection between its purveyor(s) and the people selected as its subjects. Gossip is often concerned with judging individuals within a group. It follows that it does not usually spread beyond a reasonably narrow circle of people (relatives, acquaintances, friends). Gossip’s integrating effects are limited; furthermore, it also serves to marginalize unpopular individuals. Cumulatively, however, these social functions of storytelling could well have created a foundation of trust that made cooperating in larger groups feasible, although (in Harari’s estimation) successful joint projects at this stage would not have involved groups containing more than one hundred fifty people.⁷

To enable cooperation in even larger groups, a different and more extensive kind of communication is needed: communication not just about what one has seen and heard but about things that do not even exist. Invented stories, in other words, that go beyond tangible reality! Only humans appear to be capable of speculating about possibilities and inventing stories. A language with a capacity for fiction can be used not only to lend color to many things, but also to create shared fictions. Such ideas (about divine beings, national affiliations, or monetary systems) can in turn be assembled into narratives that facilitate flexible cooperation in large groups. While bees or ants can communicate using rigid schemes, and chimpanzees can only interact with a few close members of their immediate community, humans are able to communicate and cooperate with large numbers of strangers. Shared stories make this possible.

People—and we should be very clearly aware of this—are nothing less than “entangled in stories”: as narrators of what has been handed down to them and of their own experiences, and as the subject matter of their own storytelling about the past, the present, or even the future. This entanglement is fundamental, because, in the words of the philosopher Wilhelm Schapp, “what we know about people are their stories and the stories that are told about them.”⁸

How exactly should we conceive of this process of forming stories from words? Most everyday stories are, as Hermann Bausinger understands them, offshoots that develop from conversations. Storytelling requires a certain amount of calm, a somewhat relaxed attitude on the part of the narrator and the listener, and a reservoir of mental images. Our memories and latent desires consist essentially of sensory contours. These memories and vague yearnings take shape only when they are expressed in language. A first sentence gets the story on track—or rather opens up some possible tracks and cuts off others. With each new sentence formulated, the scope for shaping how the narrative continues becomes more constricted—but using (mental) images widens it again. Sentences that consolidate information about past and current events can even become traps that imprison narratives. Other sentences, by contrast, transport narrators to new visual scenes and plot resolutions.⁹

Storytelling is social action and shapes social action. As Harari illustrates with various examples, every ambitious human endeavor is rooted in shared stories that exist only in people’s minds. These products of the imagination (religious systems, nations, money) can only exert effects in the real world because we act as if they existed. Inventing plausible and compelling stories is admittedly far from easy. Unlike a lie, an “imagined reality is something that everyone believes in” and the result is that imagined realities have real power in the real world for as long as the beliefs about them persist.¹⁰ Patterns of human cooperation can be reshaped by making changes to the underlying myths, for example, by giving a new founding legend to an association of states or changing the target projections for an economic project. People think their way through ever more complex situations and contexts with the help of “fictive” linguistic constructs, especially in scholarly research disciplines. Each new generation of scholars reworks, advances, or expands on the “language games” of its predecessors.

The broad field of cultural studies is essentially comprised of a tightly woven web of stories that have been substantiated to a greater or lesser degree. In the specialist discipline within their realm that focuses specifically on examining the oral tradition, the stories are highly diverse. In a first step, two broad narrative complexes need to be distinguished: (1) The larger group encompasses stories that aim to present and explain material that is real, tangible, or factual—or at least relates to real conditions that can be perceived by human senses. (2) The smaller group encompasses stories that present entirely imaginary scenarios and are completely unconcerned with external realities. The prototypes offered by genre theory for the first group include reports, treatises, epics, and legends. Fantasy, fairy tales, and farces are genres that exemplify the characteristics of the second group. The first group tends to adopt a more sober style of reporting and the second group typically embraces more embellishments and entertaining elements. From a formal point of view, a wealth of specific narrative forms (epic, anecdote, legend, joke) and types of formulaic language (proverb, idiom) can be slotted into a rough grid between myths and metaphors with voluminous “true stories” at one end and minimalistic “visual snapshots” at the other. The proverb “A lie has no legs” encapsulates a common everyday experience (that lies cannot stand on their own and tend to eventually be exposed or disproven) in an image (now generally not perceived) that contains a story in a nutshell.¹¹

All narrative forms are historical products—results yielded by cultural development, in other words, but not in the sense that their history as genres can be recounted with any certainty in its specifics (apart from genres of such recent provenance as the modern short story). Genres are always abstract concepts that elude sensory perception. They are developed with the benefit of hindsight and on the basis of reflection in order to formally structure the complex world of storytelling and create an overview that facilitates a better understanding of it.

We will now focus on the group of “unrealistic” stories that are not directly linked to the real world, and here specifically on fairy tales [Märchen¹²], which will need to be distinguished more precisely over the course of time from various adjacent genres: fables and farces, sagas and legends, and tall tales and parodies. Our search for fairy tales is inevitably (and always) colored by our contemporary perspective and thus reflects a conventional characterization of “fairy tales” with which we are all more or less familiar, albeit generally unconsciously.

A “Tale of Two Brothers” recorded on an Egyptian papyrus from the thirteenth century BCE is often cited as the oldest completely preserved wonder tale.¹³ It contains numerous references to magical transformations and was generally regarded by earlier generations of researchers as a literary adaptation of various stories and myths from the oral tradition. One can reasonably assume that stories with characteristics of fairy tales were told outside ancient Egypt and also much earlier, probably well before the invention of hieroglyphics and even before the earliest known writing system, namely, the cuneiform script invented by the Sumerians in the fourth millennium BCE. The earliest written records there contained only notes and marks made by the city’s economic administrators. They were not yet texts in a form that allowed for the conservation of spoken language for posterity.

The intellectual cosmos that existed before the age of writing will forever remain closed off to us, along with its narrative cosmos, and can only be accessed—as mentioned above—by means of (imaginative) stories. And stories (in scholarly language: theses and hypotheses) are abundant, especially as they relate to fairy tales. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, when legends and fairy tales were increasingly being perceived as specific narrative forms and not only being separately collected in dedicated collections but also being provisionally defined, attempts to capture their nature were based on a extensive web of hypotheses of which scholars were only partially aware.¹⁴

Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) laid the initial foundations with his assertion that “natural poetry” existed alongside consciously wrought “artistic poetry.” This distinction was soon taken up by Jacob Grimm (1785–1863), who understood it as an “eternally founded” difference between the poetry of the educated and the uneducated.¹⁵ “Natural poetry,” as the Brothers Grimm understood it, was not only the more deeply-rooted and authentic kind of poetry but essentially also the “right” kind: it was contrasted favorably with rationally formed literature and prized for its naive expression and its elementary, sensual nature. As natural poetry came to be equated with folk poetry, the stories that ordinary people told (and were still telling) in their everyday lives—especially fairy tales—began to seem especially valuable and garnered considerable attention. This theory of natural poetry and folk poetry soon became closely linked with an additional theory that focused on the oral transmission process by which this poetry was passed down: despite all its propensity to change (variability), it appeared to maintain an astonishing degree of fidelity (stability) and longevity (continuity). From the beginning of the nineteenth century right up to, quite often, the present day, extreme consistency—not merely over centuries, but even over millennia— has frequently been attributed to the folk tradition. This double theory of a quasi-natural folk poetry transmitted via an unswerving oral tradition led to a de-historicization of the material that was being collected; the stories found circulating among the “folk” appeared to be essentially timeless. Philologists and historians who looked more closely at these tales, however, noticed that some of them did indeed contain references to time and place—historical signals, in other words. This led the Brothers Grimm to distinguish two groups of stories, a group independent of historical time (the “more poetic” fairy tales), and a group of “more historical” legends with links to specific times and places.¹⁶

The establishment of the legends as a separate category marked the beginning of a harmonization process for the genre of the fairy tale, a process that the Brothers Grimm, especially, advanced further with their stylistic standardizations. Their selection of fairy tales was oriented toward stories with features such as single-line plots, formulaic introductions and conclusions, and the rule of three (characters, means of enchantment, and magical episodes tending to come in triples). Furthermore, their own additions and adaptations (whenever and wherever they deemed it appropriate) made the genre more uniform, as well. The upshot was that the form taken by the Children’s and Household Tales of the Brothers Grimm—the stories that nineteenth-century collectors widely regarded as a model collection of fairy tales , which in turn exercised a decisive influence on future searching for the origins of fairy tales—was the product of a complex process of de-historicization and harmonization that was, incidentally, also continued by Johannes Bolte (1858–1937) and Georg Polívka (1858–1933) in their Notes on the tales and by Max Lüthi (1909–1991), the twentieth-century scholar of fairy tales with the most compelling arguments.¹⁷

The Brothers Grimm viewed fairy tales as shards of a shattered gemstone (specifically, as remnants of Germanic myths). Many scholars investigating the origin of fairy tales have since followed them in this direction or thought along similar lines but drawn on other bodies of mythology, such as the myths of a different Indo-European people like the Celts or a more specific body of nature, astral, lunar, or solar mythology. Other scholars have instead favored a polygenetic theory.¹⁸ The polygenetic approach, which is rooted in anthropology, perceives fairy tales as expressing such fundamental human traits that the stories can arise anywhere in the world and re-emerge in different eras. Most research into the origin of folktales has drawn on the comparative method developed by philologists and applied principles developed for comparing written texts to the area of oral lore. Researchers have zoned in, above all, on individual motifs in tales (and interpreted them liberally as “identical” or “characteristic.”) Structural parallels in the stories compared have attracted hardly any attention.

Borne along by the positivist trend toward the end of the nineteenth century, Nordic narratologists, in particular, derived a “geographical-historical method” from the comparative method that organized the history of the evolution of individual fairy tale types according to spatial and temporal categories by organizing all the available versions (including literary versions and sometimes also illustrations) into a structure that revealed the “original home,” time of genesis, and often even the “original version” of a tale.¹⁹ The results attained using this method led, for instance, to the origins of the farcical tale “Kaiser und Abt” (The Emperor and the Abbot) being traced to an early seventh-century Jewish community in the Middle East. Many details from these results have been criticized or refuted.²⁰ It is almost self-evident that historical processes cannot feasibly be reconstructed by emphasizing only the elements of tradition that persist and ignoring the innovative changes that result from the spontaneity and creativity of individual bearers of tradition. But since its slow emergence in the nineteenth century, narrative research has displayed a fascination with unchanging continuity over vast spans of time that has blinded scholars to dynamic aspects of historical change.

An example from the second half of the twentieth century may illustrate this: August Nitschke (1926–2019), a well-respected historian in his main fields of expertise, concluded from his analysis of the social orders and patterns of behavior in fairy tales that the “Machandelboom” [The Juniper Tree] story, which the Grimm Brothers included in their collection, dates back to Neolithic times; that the tales of “Aschenputtel” [Cinderella] and “Allerleirauh” [All-Kinds-of Fur] can be attributed to hunters and herders after the last ice age; and that the tale of “Hansel and Gretel” originated among farmers and fishers “confronted with the eeriness of woods and water” during the Mesolithic period.²¹ These unsophisticated conclusions—which are representative of a large number of similar ideas advanced by Nitschke—give an impression of how the thinking in his book latches on to unspecific analogies without applying high standards of source criticism to the contextualization of texts. At the same time, they also show how, even in our own time, a historian and his audience can still hold deeply ingrained and unreflected stereotypical beliefs about a fairy tale tradition that is taken to have remained unchanged for thousands of years.

This kind of reasoning based on assumptions about social conditions in prehistorical or historical times has ultimately been typical for every generation of researchers since the early nineteenth century. Researchers have proceeded by isolating individual motifs in tales that are known today and tracing them back to periods in ancient or medieval history on the basis of having uncovered similar motifs in the literature from those earlier periods. These are then deemed—assuming continuity of transmission—to be the forerunners of and the stimulus for the tales in their current versions. Much more rarely, and with little lasting success, have scholars suggested the possibility of development in the other direction—i.e., that the motifs found in literature might provide starting points for an opaque and convoluted oral tradition. Proponents of this idea included Theodor Benfey (1809–1881), who saw Indian literature as a model for European fairy tales as early as 1859, and later Albert Wesselski (1871–1939), who interpreted medieval tales from the literary genre of the exemplum as narrative impulses.²²

The opposite view was advocated by the American folklorists who still believed after the Second World War that the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel (considered to have a virtually unchangeable core) had supplied the model for the Circe episode in the Odyssey and even that Homer’s deployment of the ship’s rudder motif in the prophecy of Tiresias, whom Odysseus encounters in Hades, was merely an embellishment on Homer’s part (more than two and a half millennia ago!) of a seafarer’s tale not recorded before 1956.²³

The question of how old fairy tales are cannot be answered without addressing other fundamental questions. Does one understand fairy tales as products of the past (as inventions of anonymous storytellers, as variable retellings that have emerged from the process of transmission, as borrowings from literature) or as an elementary expression of the human psyche? And can one determine specific areas of origin for the entire genre or only for specific themes?²⁴ It is clear, at any rate, that one must begin by examining individual fairy tales (perhaps as types that can be meaningfully characterized) before it becomes possible to draw any more general conclusions about the genre. Working from this perspective, it can be acknowledged, at a minimum, that oral transmission of individual traditional fairy tales over at least three generations has been demonstrated in numerous cases, but also that conclusive evidence exists for quite a few fairy tales being based on the inventions of single individuals (who may in some cases also have drawn on stores of imagery supplied by their personal dream experiences). In this light, it is clear that the origin of fairy tales is hardly a completely homogeneous phenomenon with a monocausal explanation.

Does this mean that modern fairy tale researchers are inextricably caught up in the present day’s tortuously tangled web of scholarly stories about fairy tale origins? Is it impossible to identify even a few phases in the history of the evolution of the genre? All is not lost—we only need to take a closer look at the parameters which govern the insights available to us. This means, to begin with, that we need to account for the historical evolution and the flexibility of the fairy tale as a genre designation since its first emergence around the dawn of the nineteenth century, and over the course of its subsequent refinement, with various shifts in emphasis along the way. We also need to appraise the body of sources available with a critical eye and reflect more deeply on the methodologies used. The comparative method tends to produce vague and inadequate results when it fails to take formal aspects into account along with content, and the vast majority of older interpretations of fairy tales made precisely this mistake.

In addition to comparing fairy tale motifs, scholars should pay at least as much, if not more, attention to structural elements , especially as fairy tales are structurally far more complex than, say, legends. There were multiple such attempts in the structuralism era, but the results were not satisfactory from a historical perspective. As mentioned above, scholars postulated that fairy tales arose at an early point in the cultural evolution of humanity and out of specific living environments. Some authors discerned relations of production in fairy tales that led them to view the tales as having emerged from patriarchal tribal societies (or their disintegration). Rather than assuming that the form of fairy tales remains essentially stable over time, some scholars advanced the hypothesis that what were initially basic, simple tales of magic could evolve over time in response to new social conditions such as changed forms of marriage.²⁵

The view that the fixation of stories in literary form could have significantly determined the development of popular narrative forms from quite early on was long a rather niche minority position in cultural studies. In Western culture, for example, one could start with the story of Cupid and Psyche in the Metamorphoses of Apuleius from the second century CE, since this marks the beginning of a history of fairy tales that can be based on solid source criticism.²⁶ This history then stretches across many “empty” centuries during the early medieval period and into the high medieval period until a consolidated narrative tradition with elements that are characteristic for fairy tales becomes clearly visible in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance.

The existence of a starting point in upper Italian cities such as Florence and Venice—in the literary works of Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) and Giovanni Francesco Straparola (ca. 1480–ca. 1558)—and a somewhat later continuation in Naples in the widely read “tales of tales” (Pentamerone) by Giambattista Basile (1583–1622) was clearly highlighted a few years ago.²⁷ This Italian entertainment literature was followed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by the literarization of fairy tales in France, for example by Charles Perrault (1628–1703), and this in turn influenced German Enlightenment writers to narrate fairy stories in the eighteenth century, a tradition that was further transformed in the era of Romanticismin the realms of both “high literature” and “folk literature.”²⁸

It was in the modern era in Europe that the conception of fairy tales as popular oral folk tales (Volksmärchen) gradually emerged and came to prevail. The genre gained its profile not only by means of processes of transmission and borrowing, but also (and to an even greater degree) from various selection processes or, to be more precise, from two processes of differentiation which excluded, on the one hand, legends and farcical stories and, on the other, literary fairy tales that now came to be described using the newly coined term Kunstmärchen. The contributions of the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm (1786–1859) were a major factor in this process that still stands out today, especially those of Wilhelm, who worked continuously over the course of his lifetime to refine the style of their collected Children’s and Household Tales.²⁹

Folk tales—as a whole, not just the tales presented by the Brothers Grimm—are essentially all creative products wrought by individual personalities gifted with imagination and then successively “told into shape” in the oral transmission process—regardless of where or who the initial story came from—gradually taking on “typical” forms that could be easily committed to memory. The more research clarifies the convoluted interdependencies, borrowings, and adaptations in the fairy tale tradition of the European modern era, at any rate, the more clearly visible an essentially “literary” legacy of fairy tales becomes—and the more strongly the selective perception and the definitions and categories of the fairy tale researchers themselves remain entangled in a history of fairy tales that spans the whole world.

To summarize: Individual fairy tale motifs probably existed in oral storytelling even before the invention of writing (for how long?), but entire fairy tale narratives cannot be determined before they were first fixed in writing. More concretely, this suggests that fairy tales can only be traced back around four thousand years in the East, although the extent to which one includes narrative fragments and distinguishes fairy tales from myths is a matter of definition. In the European context, however, it hardly seems realistic to see a degree of continuity in the transmission of tales before the late Middle Ages. One can thus scarcely speak of a history of the evolution of fairy tales in Europe before then. Fascination with all things “ancient” is, in any case, a historical artifact of the nineteenth century; age is hardly valuable for its own sake. Hypothetical attributions of age should probably not be given more weight than perceptions of quality. Fairy tales are, first and foremost, meaningful—adventurous wonder tales that stand out from the broad stream of human storytelling by virtue of their effectiveness. They ultimately derive their value from their existence in the present and not from their past.

The author wishes to thank Bernhard Gissibl (Mainz) for his helpful suggestions and comments.

When Adolf Waibel, the director of the Augsburg cotton company SWA (Mechanische Baumwollspinnerei und Weberei Augsburg), attended a conference of the International Cotton Federation in Atlanta, Georgia, from October 7 to 9, 1907, he was especially struck by the local cotton farmers, whose “sunburnt features and wiry frames gave the meeting its distinctive character.”¹ Any time a speaker gave voice to the American farmers’ concerns, Waibel reported, they erupted into paroxysms of “thunderous applause,” making him “think involuntarily of the Wild West.”² For Waibel, the conference in Atlanta was the highlight of an extended fact-finding mission.³ A delegation from the Old World had spent almost three weeks travelling by chartered train around the Cotton Belt in the southern states, covering a total distance of over 7,500 kilometers. Although the Augsburg textile industry had been importing cotton from the USA since at least the 1840s, Waibel (fig. 1) was the first Augsburg businessman to meet in person with American farmers and representatives of the cotton exchanges, cotton presses, and railway, shipping, and insurance companies that dealt with the coveted commodity.

Although Waibel’s trip only took him to the transatlantic stations of the global cotton trade, it does illustrate how Augsburg’s textile industry was enmeshed in a complex international network. From the 1840s onwards, the city’s exponentially rising demand for cotton had seen it become one of Germany’s leading centers for textile manufacturing, with almost a million spindles (nearly 10 percent of Germany’s entire spinning capacity) by the eve of the First World War.⁴ It was only able to achieve this status due to its access to cheap US cotton. How did Augsburg textile businesses, whose annual cotton demand grew to some twenty-five thousand metric tons by 1914, organize exports of the commodity from the USA? How did the global cotton trade, long dominated by the British Empire, manifest itself in the Bavarian city? How did local businesses compete in the global market for what Sven Beckert has described as “the most important commodity of the nineteenth century”?⁵

Methodology: Global History

In order to formulate these questions more precisely, it is helpful to consider the methodologies of the school of “world” or “global history” that developed in the 1990s.⁶ Whereas German historiography had long focused primarily on the expanding mesh of relationships between nation-states, this new perspective on global history explores the growing interaction and integration of a transnational, intercontinental, worldwide network of economics, society, politics, and culture in a manner unconstrained by Eurocentric theories of modernization.⁷ Global historians view the economy as a key driver of developments in these other areas, though without subscribing to any form of economic reductionism. In a global history of the nineteenth century, nation-states and individual German states such as Bavaria, Prussia, and Saxony recede into the background as historical actors; instead (assuming we do not wish to abstract away from specific places altogether and adopt an absolutely global perspective), greater importance is accorded to local non-state actors such as the Augsburg cotton industrialists, whose business activities spanned the globe but nevertheless remained rooted in their particular local context.

The methodological aim of the present study is to investigate the history of globalization through the lens of Augsburg’s cotton imports. In the context of worldwide circulation of commodities, goods, capital, and information, there is value in examining international interactions and relationships at the level of this local industry, which prospered in competitive national and international markets throughout the nineteenth century. Augsburg may have been hundreds of miles away from the ports of entry, but its mass import of American cotton meant that the city was undeniably part of a global market. Augsburg’s textile entrepreneurs also served as officials of various national and international associations, which attempted to “govern” global processes; that is to say, to control and manage them with the involvement not just of the state but also private enterprises and advocacy groups.⁸ Studying the situation in Augsburg between 1840 and 1914, the period of the first historical wave of globalization,⁹ allows us to describe how globalization unfolded in concrete terms, tracing its rhythms of acceleration and retardation rather than simply presenting the story of linear progress as so often told.

To what extent did Augsburg’s cotton businesses actively shape and precipitate the accelerated globalization processes of this period, and to what extent were they themselves passively shaped or domineered by these processes? Driven by the profit motive characteristic of industrial capitalism,¹⁰ Augsburg’s factory directors were primarily concerned with purchasing cotton as cheaply as possible. This raises a host of questions: Where did these industrialists buy cotton and with what strategies? What information did they have about global market affairs? What sort of communication network(s) did they have? In what kinds of activities were they involved? What structural factors did the local cotton industry have to deal with when importing its “white gold”? How did import practices in Augsburg develop and change over the decades as the market became more complex and increasingly susceptible to international crises, due to increasing global integration? The high volatility of cotton prices,¹¹ which depended on a whole array of unpredictable factors, constantly forced the Augsburgers to take economic risks despite their best efforts to minimize the inherent hazards.

This study may also highlight the potential of an agent-based perspective, using the cotton trade in Augsburg to illustrate how variable the levels of agency enjoyed by participants of this mercantile chain could be and how the internal logic of the global market sometimes reduced them to complete passivity.¹² The analysis explores the dialectical tensions between local and global action, micro- and macrostructures, individual episodes and structural factors, even while keeping the nation-state context in mind (there is, after all, no eo ipso contradiction between the concepts of globalization and nation).¹³

The Rise of Augsburg’s Cotton Industry in a Global Context

In the late eighteenth century, the American inventor Eli Whitney’s groundbreaking cotton gin, a machine that separated cotton fibers from their seeds,¹⁴ paved the way for the USA, with its mass monoculture plantations, to become the world’s largest cotton producer by the early nineteenth century, leaving India and Egypt far behind. Thus began the unrivaled domination of King Cotton in the southern states, interrupted only by the American Civil War. That war highlighted the inhuman price of this economic success, for the industry relied on the exploitation of African American slaves.¹⁵ While the United States is estimated to have produced just three thousand bales annually in 1790, it had surpassed a million by around 1835. Production continued rising: to almost 4.5 million by 1861, 8.5 million by 1890, ten million by 1894, and over sixteen million by 1914.¹⁶ This made raw cotton the USA’s most important export. In 1912, foreign cotton sales were worth 565 million dollars, about 26 percent of all US exports. The USA’s near-monopoly on global cotton production was reflected in a 70.37 percent share of the global cotton crop in 1911/1912.¹⁷

This surge in American cotton production was driven by high demand, especially from the European markets, which in the nineteenth century were primarily served by the British textile industry. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, Britain used its colonial power (with devastating effects) to supplant India as the world’s leading producer of cotton textiles.¹⁸ The emergence of industrial textile manufacturing ushered in a wholly new chapter in world economic history, marked by the “great divergence”¹⁹ between Europe and Asia. A flourishing industry, centered in Manchester and Liverpool, sprang up in the imperial “motherland of industrialization” and went on to dominate the global market in the first half of the nineteenth century.²⁰ The liberal idea of free trade provided the economic framework for unfettered market activity. Both in Britain and on the continent, however, the industrial revolution did not gain full momentum until the invention of steam trains and steamboats revolutionized transportation and vastly reduced freight costs.²¹ The telegraph also played a role, ushering in a communication revolution,²² only to be later superseded by the invention of the telephone.²³ Alongside these developments, which brought about a compression of space and time,²⁴ the gradual establishment of an international gold standard system facilitated the increasing integration of the world market.²⁵

While England’s cotton industry blazed the trail that global economic history would follow, in continental Europe its attentive student Germany became the largest consumer of cotton, albeit only many years further down the line.²⁶ Between 1836 and 1840, the German Customs Union imported just 8,917 metric tons of raw cotton per year; by 1871–1875 the figure stood at 116,390, and by 1912 at 506,891 metric tons.²⁷ The German cotton industry’s growing consumption is attributable not least to a sharp rise in per capita cotton consumption, from 0.74 kilograms in 1834 to 2.47 kilograms in 1877 to 6.98 kilograms in 1909,²⁸ as cotton largely replaced older fibers such as flax and wool. Although Germany continued importing Indian and Egyptian cotton in the nineteenth century, a steadily growing proportion came from the USA, with American imports accounting for 77.7 percent of total German consumption by 1911/12.²⁹

The first cotton factories were built in the Kingdom of Bavaria during the Vormärz period, thanks to the stimulus brought by the German Customs Union. Augsburg, which as a former imperial city had a long history as a commercial and financial center, took a leading role.³⁰ The sweeping generalization that Bavaria only underwent “limited industrialization”³¹ makes it easy to overlook the fact that highly industrialized, internationally connected centers of industry developed there, too, in cities such as Augsburg, which perfectly exemplifies the historical thesis that industrialization was usually concentrated in specific regions with semi-autonomous economies.³² For Augsburg, this region was Bavarian Swabia, which for a time had more active ties to Vorarlberg, Switzerland, and Alsace than to closer territories such as Lower Bavaria and the Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin.

In the present context, it is not necessary to delve further into the structural factors behind the rise of Augsburg’s cotton industry, which benefited from a productive combination of a ready supply of energy, capital, and commodities; a transnational transfer of knowledge, technology, and expertise; and, following the railway connection in 1840, a good transportation infrastructure.³³ Its success was also driven by an innovative circle of businessmen and bankers, who used stock shares as their main financing instrument, and willing laborers from the surrounding countryside, who submitted to the demands of the machine age. The founding of SWA in 1837 marked the start of a wave of new cotton mills and factories in the area, which continued up until the late 1860s. By the First World War, around twenty textile businesses had been established, variously producing yarn, thread, woven fabrics, and printed textiles. Although only spinning mills and sewing-thread factories purchased raw cotton, the businesses involved in further processing were equally dependent on the commodity price, which was more or less passed along through the production chain.

Prior to the First World War, some twelve thousand people in and around Augsburg depended on the local textile industry for their livelihoods, with SWA alone employing almost 2,700 workers in 1900. From around 1900 to 1908/09, SWA operated the German Empire’s largest weaving mill (with almost three thousand looms) and one of the largest spinning mills³⁴ (with 127,000 spindles; a local rival, the Stadtbach mill, had 189,000 spindles, which made it the third-largest spinning mill in the empire³⁵). In 1908/09, Augsburg accounted for 5.5 percent of all cotton spindles and 4.2 percent of all cotton looms in Germany. Given the fragmented nature of industry in the empire, the German cotton industry (whose annual cotton demand—roughly estimated—rose to over one hundred thousand bales by 1908) was thus highly concentrated in Augsburg, and the city’s cotton businesses enjoyed great success despite the disadvantageous distance from the ports. Even in the face of economic downturns, right up until the First World War they regularly paid out handsome dividends, generally between 10 and 20 percent.³⁶

Cotton as a Commercial Good

Not all cotton is created equal. Its quality varies according to staple (i.e. fiber) length, fineness, uniformity, preparation (smoothness), color, purity, and fragrance.³⁷ American producers grew two main botanical varieties: long-staple Sea Island (Pima) cotton, similar in quality to Egyptian Mako cotton, and shorter-staple upland cotton, which was much more widely planted.³⁸ While high-quality Sea Island cotton (alongside Mako cotton) was primarily used in Augsburg for sewing-thread production, the spinning mills tended to buy upland varieties, which were preferred to short-staple Indian cotton due to their quality. The Liverpool Cotton Association categorized American cotton into five territorial groupings: Sea Island, Florida Sea Island, Upland, Texas, and New Orleans. Until the First World War, these territorial designations were paired with seven quality grades: ordinary, good ordinary, low middling, middling, good middling, middling fair, and fair.³⁹ Middling Orleans, later middling American(s), was often used as a benchmark for measuring price movements on the cotton markets.

Augsburg spinners wanted to get the right grades of cotton for the types of yarn they produced, so reliable standards were crucially important. However, according to William H. Hubbard, the different exchanges and markets defined these standards differently: “For example, middling in Savannah meant one thing, and in Augusta not one hundred and fifty miles away, meant something entirely different.”⁴⁰ The Augsburg mills therefore paid close attention to cotton classes and their standardization; because the spinning machines were quite sensitive, the quality of the raw cotton needed to be as consistent as possible.

While they managed to attain a degree of assurance about the quality of cotton, the biggest headache for the spinners’ business planning was the highly volatile price of American cotton, which, in the period under consideration here, usually also determined the price of cotton from other sources. The reason this was such a concern was that commodity and energy costs often accounted for well over half of spinning mills’ expenditures.⁴¹ A confounding factor was that rises in the commodity price were not always matched by a rise in the sale prices of the finished products (yarns, woven fabrics, etc.), meaning that profit margins were squeezed.

Imports were also subject to a host of other risks, which could lead to large and unpredictable price fluctuations.⁴² Since cotton is a natural product, crop yields were at the mercy of the weather. Continuous expansion and sometimes partial reduction of cultivated acreage in the Cotton Belt in the USA also influenced prices, as did political events and crises like the American Civil War. The more integrated the global economy became over the course of the nineteenth century, the greater the effects of individual economic, banking, and financial crises on the global cotton market. Market manipulation and financial speculation also strongly affected prices. The phenomenon of stock market speculation meant that getting timely information about market affairs was a crucial challenge for the mills in Augsburg. Over the course of time, the ever more integrated global market was increasingly dominated by internationally versed market experts, whose mercantile experience allowed them to dictate the terms of cotton purchases, including in provincial Augsburg. Last but not least, cotton prices fluctuated due to the consumption of cotton textiles. Since global spinning capacity expanded in line with demand, raw cotton was notoriously scarce.

It is unclear whether the textile entrepreneurs in Augsburg were aware, when they began purchasing cotton from abroad for industrial processing in the 1830s, of just how many intermediate stages the commodity passed through between the plantation and the spinning mill in Augsburg. Depending on the period, a whole host of intermediaries and “service providers” took a cut from the sale of cotton: starting with landowners, tenant farmers, and farmhands, followed by the ginning, pressing (cotton intended for export was generally pressed twice), and baling factories. Then there were the middlemen, the trading companies and international merchants. To prepare the cotton for resale, the farmers’ products had to be classified and samples had to be taken. Both in the USA and Europe, cotton was transported by railway and sometimes by river barge. If cotton was purchased from Liverpool or another European port, that added another stage of transport. Shipping companies were responsible for transporting cotton over the sea; further fees went to harbor yards and warehouses. There were also insurance companies that insured sea and land shipments, especially against fire; the American, British, and German banks involved in financing the cotton trade; and, last but not least, various trading agents and brokers and the cotton exchanges themselves, which arbitrated any disputes over the quality of cotton. Later on, there were local cotton agents in Germany, too, who represented import companies selling raw cotton. Post and telegraph offices handled domestic communications.

Historical Phases of Augsburg’s US Cotton Imports

The history of Augsburg’s cotton imports is not just the history of the physical movement of a commodity, but also a history of communication, information, knowledge, perception, networks, trade routes, transport, trading hubs, banking and finance, and industry advocacy groups, with all these various strands converging in an increasingly globalized market. This section will seek to develop a micro-perspective on local cotton purchases with particular reference to SWA, a major firm whose archives have been preserved largely intact in the Augsburg City Archives. These archives not only allow us to reconstruct SWA’s well-documented import activities, but also provide instructive insights into contemporary perceptions of globalized economic affairs by the company management. To provide an expanded perspective on the regional cotton industry, references are also made to reports of the Chamber of Commerce for Swabia and Neuburg (Handels- und Gewerbekammer für Schwaben und Neuburg), which was dominated by Augsburg textile industrialists.

The Early Years up to 1860

The first cotton purchased by SWA (in 1837, three years before the mill actually began production) came not from the USA, but from Egypt. This purchase is of interest because it illustrates certain key structural features of the contemporary cotton trade. The (then) Austrian city of Trieste, at the northern tip of the Adriatic Sea, was the central trading place for Egyptian cotton. SWA appointed a businessman and cotton trader there, Ignaz Hagenauer,⁴³ as their representative, issuing him precise instructions by mail about their purchasing interests and intentions. SWA’s speculative enquiry to Hagenauer reveals only limited knowledge of the Trieste cotton market, which may have been acquired via personal contacts or the press. To make up for the gaps in its knowledge, SWA requested “a comprehensive report on your cotton market.”⁴⁴ Not long afterward, the company sent the businessman Gustav Frommel from Augsburg to Trieste as their agent for cotton purchasing, so as to ensure better representation of its interests. Frommel kept an “attentive eye on the local cotton market”⁴⁵ and apparently also made purchases on SWA’s behalf. It was probably this special knowledge of the cotton trade that secured Frommel’s later promotion to SWA’s commercial director on March 30, 1839. In the pre-telegraph age, SWA entrusted people like Frommel to represent the company’s interests in person. This sort of personal connection would continue to play an important role in future international business transactions, despite the revolution in communication brought about by the telegraph. It is no longer possible to establish whether SWA’s first shipment of cotton went via Venice or directly from Trieste to Augsburg. What is known is that a businessman from Innsbruck, Martin Tschurtschenthaler, transported the cotton bales by horse and cart over the Alps and from there via Füssen to Augsburg in a journey lasting around a month.

SWA continued to buy most of its cotton from Egypt until the end of the 1830s. In the 1840s, it made its first purchases of cotton from the United States. While Indian cotton was mainly imported through London at that point, American cotton was sourced from ports such as Rotterdam, Le Havre, and, above all, Liverpool, which, with its enormous cotton warehouses, was long the world’s leading hub for trade in the coveted commodity and served as the barometer for cotton prices right up to the age of the German Empire. English and German spinning mills had very different buying strategies. While the English mills clustered in and around Manchester relied on weekly “spot sales” in nearby Liverpool to cover their requirements, German cotton businesses were forced to buy ahead, usually needing enough stock to last for months or even a year. This had two significant consequences for the German spinning mills’ business planning and costings: Firstly, buying ahead tied up a large amount of capital, which meant they lost a lot of interest on money that could not be invested elsewhere. Secondly, given the large quantities of cotton involved, the mills had to approach purchasing decisions with great caution, as minimal differences in price became very expensive when multiplied. This meant it was vital for SWA to closely monitor the English and then also the American markets.

To this end, SWA corresponded extensively with foreign trading companies in Rotterdam, Le Havre, and Liverpool, who kept the Augsburg management updated on market trends.⁴⁶ SWA’s correspondence reveals a growing awareness of the complex global market. One example can be seen in an exchange from late November 1842 with two traders in Liverpool, William Preller and Hermann Frommel, about the current prospects for British exports to China and India, which would relieve pressure on the German market.⁴⁷ That said, in the 1840s, the SWA managers still sometimes displayed ignorance about the commodity from the far-off USA, despite their network of correspondents. For instance, in a letter dated August 20, 1844, SWA’s representative remarked, blissfully unaware of meteorological conditions in the American Cotton Belt, that “we have observed that the American cotton harvest coincides exactly with the grain harvest in Germany, which this year was exceptionally abundant, so that we expect to be able to buy at even lower prices next spring.”⁴⁸

Despite occasional naivety, in the early years SWA proved to have a knack for choosing the right time to buy American cotton cheaply, though it sometimes still had to weather price spikes. In 1847, for instance, a poor harvest in the USA drove up commodity prices by 50 to 60 percent, meaning SWA had to spend around 93,000 gulden more on cotton than in the preceding year.⁴⁹ Even a fall in cotton prices could be bad news, since, if the company had failed to buy cotton at the lowest price, the losses would have to be written off in the annual accounts. In the early decades, purchasing decisions were generally made on the basis of cotton samples (and hence on the basis of very specific batches) sent from the import markets of Liverpool or Le Havre.

In 1840, SWA purchased just 34.9 metric tons of American cotton; this rose to 271 metric tons by the following year, and from 1845 to 1860 oscillated between 500 and 600 metric tons, peaking at 604 metric tons in 1857 (see chart 1). From 1843 to 1852, the Augsburg company purchased its cotton exclusively from the USA. In 1853, it began importing small quantities of cotton from India, but this accounted for barely more than 10 percent of total annual consumption prior to the American Civil War.

During the early years, when the companies from Augsburg bought cotton in Liverpool, this normally involved not just the trader who actually imported the cotton, but also a buying and a selling broker, each with their own fees. For this reason, as the decades passed, it became increasingly imperative for the German spinners to free themselves from the British-dominated Liverpool market.⁵⁰

SWA’s initial purchases in the 1840s were of cotton already stored in European warehouses, but, in late March 1847, the company decided to buy the commodity directly from the USA for the first time (albeit with an importer still acting as intermediary).⁵¹ In general, only companies with lots of capital could afford to import cotton directly, due to the many uncertainties involved. Two considerations spoke in favor of direct imports: Firstly, it eliminated the commission and brokers’ fees charged at the European ports. Secondly, a direct link to the country of origin gave better access to the desired cotton grades, which were often unavailable in Europe. SWA was ahead of the curve with this innovative buying strategy, which many other German spinning mills only adopted decades later.

After the opening of the Augsburg–Munich line in 1842, cotton was increasingly transported by railway. A rail line between Augsburg and Nuremberg followed in 1849, and two years later the Ludwig South-North Railway connected Munich to Berlin via Hof. In the 1850s, the railway network expanded right across the continent, allowing cotton to be transported by rail all the way from the Atlantic entry ports. From 1851 onward, SWA increasingly relied on the telegraph for its international communications, alongside traditional postal correspondence. In 1866, the transatlantic telegraph cable was laid, shortening the time needed to relay messages from days to a few minutes and revolutionizing intercontinental business dealings.⁵² The cable removed barriers to interaction, and made world trade easier and much faster.

Domestic politics hindered the development of business in German territories during the revolutions of 1848/49, while in the 1850s it was international events that were unfavorable, as wars and crises drove up food prices and dampened consumer spending. The Crimean War (1853–1856) significantly drove up the price of cotton, with sharp fluctuations rippling through to Augsburg in 1855. The cotton price rose rapidly again after the Treaty of Paris in 1856, soaring from 5.5 to 9.5 pence per English pound (lb), before falling back to 5.5 pence the following year. The global economic crisis that began in the USA in August 1857⁵³ spread to Europe in fall of that year and caused a “universal trade crisis.”⁵⁴ Augsburg companies that had concluded large sales of textiles early enough reaped a handsome profit. SWA, for instance, achieved record profits that year of almost 270,000 gulden. In 1859, the Second Italian War of Independence caused a “slump in business”⁵⁵ even north of the Alps, prompting SWA to cut working hours between May and August. In 1860, an exceptional cotton harvest in the USA resulted in very low prices; of the almost six hundred metric tons processed by SWA that year, no less than 584.6 came from America.

The Impact of the American Civil War (1861–1865)

While the Augsburg cotton companies weathered the crises of the 1850s relatively well, the American Civil War, which broke out in 1861 over the issue of slavery, posed new and unfamiliar challenges for the local textile industry.⁵⁶ The blockade of Confederate ports ordered by President Abraham Lincoln brought cotton exports to a virtual standstill,⁵⁷ with grave consequences. The Lancashire textile industry, which depended almost exclusively on American cotton, was hit especially hard; the “Cotton Famine” resulted in mass unemployment and the closure of many companies.⁵⁸ The small quantities of American cotton that were available rose dramatically in price, with the cost of Middling Americans in Liverpool increasing almost fivefold from 6 1/4 pence per English pound (lb) in 1860 to 27 1/2 pence (briefly peaking at 31 pence) in 1864.⁵⁹

What effect did the cotton scarcity have on the textile industry in Augsburg? Initially, the companies’ policy of buying large quantities ahead of time reaped dividends; in the first year of the war, they were able to continue production without any significant cutbacks. However, the Chamber of Commerce for Swabia and Neuburg gave a far more critical assessment of the following year, 1862:

The continuation of the American Civil War, which has led to steady price increases of many commodities, especially cotton, is weighing heavily on German industry, and its disruptive influence is especially palpable in our region, which has many cotton mills.⁶⁰

If they wanted to continue production at the same level, these businesses had to source cotton from outside of the USA. Like much of the industry, SWA mainly attempted to make up for the shortfall in American cotton by buying from India. Imports from the Indian subcontinent shot up from thirteen metric tons in 1860 to 254 metric tons in 1865 (see chart 1). Other replacement cotton was sourced from Italy and the Levant. During the war, SWA managed to more or less satisfy the demand, with the biggest shortfall coming in 1863, when supply fell by around 16 percent compared with prewar levels. However, purchasing cotton from other countries created serious problems for the spinning machines, which had been precisely calibrated for American cotton. The short-staple Indian cotton could only be used to make lower-quality textiles, and overall production declined. The Stadtbach mill did better than SWA at sourcing replacement cotton, and, with its increased spinning capacity, even managed to increase its cotton consumption from 12,257 bales in 1860 to 15,610 bales in 1865.⁶¹ However, this probably represented an exception rather than the rule in Augsburg.

Some local companies, meanwhile, became veritable war profiteers, using a portion of their abundant cotton reserves for highly profitable speculation rather than actual production. The wildly fluctuating yarn market also offered frequent opportunities to buy low and sell high.⁶² Both the Stadtbach mill and SWA witnessed exceptional profits between 1861 and 1863. Paradoxically, SWA achieved its “highest ever”⁶³ profits to date in 1862, when the price of American cotton doubled relative to the previous year. These results were dependent, however, on temporary market conditions, and when the pendulum swung the other way in 1864, the Stadtbach mill was forced to cut back its production. Hopes of economic recovery were not glimpsed until 1865, “when the great political drama in North America came to a temporary conclusion.”⁶⁴

What lessons did the Augsburg cotton companies take from the American Civil War? Being forced to branch out to other sources of cotton created a general awareness that the American monopoly was no longer an absolute given. SWA continued buying a lot of Indian cotton even after the American Civil War. The Chamber of Commerce for Swabia and Neuburg expressed concern about the future of cotton production in the American South following the abolition of slavery:

We are not yet able to precisely assess […] what effect the emancipation of slaves that has now begun will have, and how their willingness to cultivate cotton as free laborers will affect cotton production in the southern states of North America this year and in the years to come.⁶⁵

No evidence has survived of what spinners in Augsburg thought about the connection between cotton production and slavery. However, the Augsburger Lassalleaner, an early social democratic newspaper founded in March 1864, was sympathetic to President Lincoln and his commitment to “the great task of abolishing slavery.”⁶⁶ Apart from that, there are scattered references in the Augsburg press to slavery, which was closely tied up with cotton cultivation.⁶⁷

The USA recovered slowly from the devastating civil war, which had placed its cotton industry on a new and initially very fragile footing. It took until 1879/80, almost two decades, for American cotton exports to return to prewar levels.⁶⁸ Although slavery had now been abolished, cotton production remained reliant on African American laborers, who still lacked full rights and independence. Back in Germany, the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 briefly had a negative impact on the Augsburg textile industry, followed by a period of exceptionally good business that allowed SWA to pay out lavish dividends. The next slump did not come until the Franco-Prussian war in 1870, when production was cut back.

The Emergence of National Advocacy Groups: From 1870 to the Turn of the Century

The founding of the German Empire in 1871 is generally associated with the economic boom of the Gründerzeit. But the unification of the empire was rather less of a blessing for the German textile industry, since the incorporation of Alsace-Lorraine and its strong textile industry greatly increased domestic competition. The total number of cotton spindles and looms in Germany rose by 56 and 88 percent, respectively. The expansion of spinning and weaving capacity in the preceding years had outstripped growth in consumption, which led to unprecedented competition at the national and international levels. For the first time, the problem of overproduction reared its head.

The Panic of 1873 triggered a worldwide economic depression, and also brought home once again the enormous risks the rapidly growing global market posed for Augsburg’s industrialists.⁶⁹ There was growing opposition to free trade, with a particular focus on establishing a counter to the economic power of Britain, which dominated global textile production thanks to the industrial center of Lancashire and the influential cotton market in Liverpool. Augsburg’s local chamber of commerce therefore published a statement on German trade and customs policy that called—“with particular reference to the textile industry in our region”—for “the cosmopolitan trade policy pursued hitherto, which has driven the country to impoverishment and ruin thanks to decades of unfavorable trade balances, to be replaced by a truly national trade policy dedicated solely to German interests.”⁷⁰ These calls for Germany to impose limits on a global economic liberalism that mainly benefited Britain (due to its considerable geographic advantages) must be understood as a national response to an unequal international playing field.⁷¹ In the challenging economic climate, German cotton entrepreneurs banded together in various institutions and organizations to ensure better representation of their economic and political interests. Augsburg textile industrialists were at the forefront of these processes of institutionalization.⁷²

Association of South German Cotton Industrialists

The founding of the Industrial Exchange Association (Industriebörsenverein) in Augsburg in 1859 paved the way for the Association of South German Cotton Industrialists (Verein süddeutscher Baumwollindustrieller, VSBI), which was formally constituted on July 4, 1870. The association was intended to represent the interests of the cotton industry of Bavaria, Württemberg, Baden, and parts of Saxony with respect to foreign trade, customs, economic regulation, social policy, and the development and regulation of transportation (in particular railways). As well as reaching agreements on influencing the market, limiting production, and regulating prices, one of the new association’s functions was the compilation of statistics on cotton.⁷³ It also cooperated with national and international cotton industry organizations. If the founding of the VSBI is viewed in the context of the global textile chain, which at that time spanned from overseas cotton farming to domestic sales of yarn and woven fabrics, then it can be understood as an attempt to better manage the international trade flow, initially within the association’s immediate sphere of influence in Germany, and thereby amplify the agency of the textile industrialists involved in the association. For a long time, Augsburg-based companies called the shots in the VSBI.⁷⁴ Theodor Haßler (fig. 2), the director of the Stadtbach mill from 1868 to 1889, served as vice president of the VSBI for ten years and then as president from 1882 to 1899.⁷⁵ Under his leadership, the VSBI relocated its headquarters to Augsburg. Ferdinand Groß (SWA director from 1893 to 1907) served as president of the VSBI after Haßler’s tenure, while Albert Frommel (SWA director from 1872 to 1893) represented the association on the permanent committee of the German Trade Association (Deutscher Handelstag).⁷⁶

The VSBI was especially active in campaigning against the imperial government’s free trade policy, and managed to successfully mobilize public opinion. This paved the way for the establishment of the Central Association of German Industrialists (Centralverband deutscher Industrieller, CVDI),⁷⁷ which was founded in Berlin on February 15, 1876. Haßler was initially appointed vice president of the CVDI, and then in 1880 president. Under his influence, Otto von Bismarck decided, following the severe economic depression of 1877/78, to move away from the free trade policy that the empire had followed until that point. Preparations for this change of direction, which was formalized by the Customs Tariff Act of July 15, 1879, were made by the Imperial Inquest on Behalf of the Cotton and Linen Industry (Reichs-Enquete für die Baumwollen- und Leinen-Industrie) set up in 1878, on whose committee Haßler served and which consulted other Augsburg factory directors as industry experts.⁷⁸

Direct Imports

The inquest committee is of particular interest for the present study because it provides considerable insight into the import activities of the Augsburg cotton companies (as well as German cotton companies more generally), which continued to rely primarily on American cotton. According to the experts the inquest consulted, German spinners were, at that point in time, buying a far greater proportion of their cotton (between 30 and 60 percent of their annual requirements) directly from the countries of production than they had prior to the 1870s.⁷⁹ One of those surveyed was Prosper de Rudder, the director of the Senkelbach spinning mill in Augsburg, who remarked, “In 1877, we bought most of our American, East Indian, and Egyptian cottons from the countries of origin, and, due to the unfavorable market conditions, only a small proportion from England and other foreign and German markets.”⁸⁰ Those looking to import cotton directly from America had a choice between the markets of New Orleans (Louisiana), Galveston (Texas), Mobile (Alabama), Savannah (Georgia), and Charleston (South Carolina). The transit port was generally Rotterdam or Bremen.

De Rudder’s remark reflects a fundamental shift in the buying policy of German cotton spinners, who were increasingly reducing their dependency on the Liverpool market. This tendency can also be seen in the declining imports of cotton from Britain to Germany after the American Civil War, which fell nearly 70 percent between 1867 and 1877, from 919,782 to 284,207 centners. De Rudder gave a rundown of the different fees levied on cotton purchases at the main European markets. While Liverpool demanded 3.5 percent of the purchase price, Le Havre and Bremen charged just 2.75 percent.⁸¹ A. Dollfus, an Alsatian cotton spinner, was blunt in his criticism of British commerce: “The English want to sell cotton at far more than it’s actually worth.”⁸²

Direct imports, on the other hand, generally offered a favorable purchase price; in 1877/78, this price normally already included all fees,⁸³ which came to around 5 percent. Importing cotton directly also opened up a far greater choice of varieties and grades. Since one area SWA had chosen to focus on was “producing special grades,” the company felt “compelled to only use very good raw material, and in some source countries this can only be procured at the places of production when the harvest is coming in.”⁸⁴ Since the cotton grades required by the Augsburg businesses were either not available at all at the European markets or “only at exorbitant prices,” SWA began “regularly buying up a whole year’s supply” of “certain varieties” from the USA.⁸⁵ This was a major financial challenge, even for the wealthiest companies,⁸⁶ and SWA, despite its solid financial footing, sometimes had to take out large loans of up to a million marks to buy ahead in this way.⁸⁷ Companies with less capital were unable to buy direct from overseas for a long time. Moreover, having so much working capital tied up in this way meant German companies often responded slowly and inflexibly to changes in cotton prices or demand.

Payments to the USA were made using “sight drafts.”⁸⁸ Sight drafts with a term of sixty days were standard for cotton imported directly from the USA.⁸⁹ The challenge for the Augsburg spinners, and all other German mills, was that these drafts, which US exporters insisted on, could only be drawn at British banks for a long time.⁹⁰ This meant that payments for cotton deals had to be made abroad, and businesses in Augsburg had no choice but to conduct their transactions in pound sterling through British banks, generally in London, which earned a cut off each payment. Dealing in foreign currency also entailed an exchange loss. Added up, these factors put German businesses at a structural disadvantage compared with their international competitors. The experts interviewed by the inquest frequently criticized the lack of trust shown to German banks and the German currency by exporters from the American South.⁹¹

The Bremen Cotton Exchange

Although German spinners were long forced to import cotton on less favorable terms than their English counterparts, the growth in direct imports from the USA was a first step toward emancipation from British hegemony. Heinrich Spörry, who owned a spinning mill in Mühlhausen, estimated that in 1878 German spinners paid 11.52 marks more per 100 kilograms of American cotton than English spinners.⁹² The cost of shipping imported cotton from Liverpool to Augsburg at that time was 5.15 to 5.68 marks per 100 kilograms, which was far more expensive than the three to four marks that textile-producing cities along the Rhine had to pay.⁹³

If the German cotton industry wanted to compete successfully on the international market despite these disadvantages, it needed to liberate its European trading activities from the dominant influence of the British market. This could be achieved only through institutional and physical expansion of a German port for American cotton imports. The obvious candidate was Bremen,⁹⁴ which was already active in the import business. There was growing interest among merchants there in attracting trade away from Liverpool, Le Havre, and Rotterdam.⁹⁵ They wanted to make sure, furthermore, that they were not left entirely empty-handed by the increasing tendency for German spinners to import directly and cut out the middlemen. A new institution, the Bremen Cotton Exchange, promised a solution to this problem.

The basis for the exchange was laid in 1872 with the foundation of the Committee for the Cotton Trade (Comité für den Baumwollhandel), which brought together importers, traders, and brokers. Regulations governing the Bremen cotton trade (the Bremer Baumwoll-Usancen, replaced in 1875 by the Bestimmungen für den Bremer Baumwollhandel)⁹⁶ established legal certainty and standards not dependent on the British market; Bremen now adopted new standard samples for the different cotton varieties rather than relying on those used in Liverpool. This independent classification and arbitration of the quality, and hence the value, of imported cotton was a key factor behind Bremen’s meteoric rise as a trading hub. In 1877, merchants there founded the logistics company Bremer Lagerhaus-Gesellschaft with a view to expansion of the cotton trade. Later that same year, the Bremen Cotton Exchange itself was founded. Like its precursor, the Committee for the Cotton Trade, the exchange brought together a variety of players in the cotton market: importers, brokers, agents, freight carriers, and bankers. The exchange’s breakthrough as an internationally competitive trade association came when the German cotton industry came on board. The first of the cotton mill associations to join was the VSBI, in 1886. Its then president, the Augsburg industrialist Haßler, was in favor of establishing closer ties with “the maritime trade and the rest of the world,”⁹⁷ and welcomed the invitation from Bremen to bring the south German textile industry “a step nearer to the sea.”⁹⁸ Striking an almost imperialist tone, he declared that “We also want to ensure that Bremen, as a German port, attains the status as a cotton market that it deserves.”⁹⁹ Five other German cotton spinning associations followed the example of the VSBI, and similar organizations from Austria (1894) and Switzerland (1906) later followed suit. Haßler himself was elected to the expanded committee of the Bremen Cotton Exchange as the representative of the VSBI, and SWA Director Groß later served on the committee as well.

Despite the name, the Bremen Cotton Exchange was not an exchange in the strict sense; that is to say, it was not a cotton-trading institution in its own right, with fixed trading hours, listings, and stock trader meetings.¹⁰⁰ It was merely an association that offered stakeholders in the cotton market an organizational framework to facilitate their business and alleviate legal uncertainties.¹⁰¹ Obtaining legal certainty was deemed especially important given the increasing direct imports of cotton from the USA, as maintaining the consistent quality of the supply was a great challenge. An independent quality check with its own standards, a recognized arbitration process, and tribunals to decide on disputes secured Bremen’s rise to a new European cotton center. The exchange helped establish a German passage alongside the other transatlantic trade routes and created a vital new hub in the expanding global market. The exchange, an unlikely association of traders and spinners, can only be properly understood in the context of the desire to reduce Germany’s dependence on Britain. Buyers and sellers only put aside their economically opposing interests for the sake of greater collective trading power. The Bremen Cotton Exchange represented its members beyond Germany’s borders at international conferences on regulation of the cotton trade.¹⁰²

The success of the Bremen Cotton Exchange, which almost exclusively imported American cotton, is documented by the steady rise in import figures after its initial founding as the Committee for the Cotton Trade, from 157,630 bales in 1870 to 206,300 in 1875.¹⁰³ The boost that the exchange received when the German cotton spinning associations joined in 1886 can be seen in the rise from 457,700 to 658,400 bales between 1885 and 1887. When it surpassed 493,000 bales in 1886/87, Bremen overtook Le Havre as the continental port with the highest volume of cotton imports. Imports passed the million bales mark for the first time in the first half of the 1890s, and peaked in 1911/12 at 2,870,000 bales. Shortly before the First World War, Bremen’s cotton imports rivaled Liverpool’s, with the Hanseatic port supplying Scandinavia, Poland, Russia, Austria, Switzerland, and other countries.

The actual business of buying cotton was dealt with by specialist import companies, which were either founded in Bremen or opened branches there as the Bremen Cotton Exchange became increasingly established on the continental European market. These companies, which were often represented in the centers of the German spinning trade by local commercial agents, were the intermediary between the buying spinners and the selling exporters. Between 1876 and 1913, address directories for Augsburg list a constant tally of around ten cotton agents,¹⁰⁴ who represented not just German import companies but also British and American ones, who were equally eligible to join the Bremen Cotton Exchange.

Dealing with Uncertainty: SWA between 1870 and 1900

A micro-perspective on SWA shows that, despite the Panic of 1873, competing tendencies towards free trade and protectionism, and strong competition from Britain, and many economic ups and downs, there was an enormous expansion in the production of cotton textiles in Augsburg between 1870 and 1900. While SWA’s annual cotton consumption stagnated in the first half of the 1870s between 670 and 758 metric tons, this figure rose markedly after 1876 (908 metric tons), and more than doubled in the course of the 1880s (1880: 1,213 metric tons; 1889: 3,116 metric tons); by 1900, cotton consumption had soared to 5,351 metric tons (see chart 2). In addition to the American cotton it favored, SWA also used a lot of Indian cotton. Buying cotton from India (which between 1883 and 1885, when SWA’s need for cotton rose sharply, made up over 50 percent of its total consumption) made the company less dependent on American imports alone. However, when American cotton prices were low, SWA purchased more cotton from the USA, as in 1899 and 1900, when the company only sourced around 10 percent of its annual cotton requirements from outside America.

Analyzing the development of American cotton prices between 1870 and 1900 reveals a steady decline as the market recovered from the Civil War, from 10 9/16 pence per English pound (lb) of Middling Americans (by Liverpool classification) in 1871/72 to a historic low of 3 13/16 pence in 1898/99.¹⁰⁵ Although this fall in prices appears linear from a longer-term perspective, in the interim SWA had to wrestle with constant price fluctuations. It attempted to buy at the cheapest point in time, always hoping that prices would not fall further so that it would not have to write down any purchases that had already been made in the annual accounts. It was not uncommon to wonder, as in an 1885 report, “how much further the commodity will depreciate.”¹⁰⁶

If prices rose again, this created an opportunity for profit; in 1880 SWA Director Frommel laconically remarked that the company’s profits were attributable not to its production “but solely to fortunate speculation in cotton.”¹⁰⁷

The SWA management was constantly seeking to get a handle on the volatile cotton prices, often deploying ingenious reasoning. The uncertainties included both objective factors, like the actual cotton yields, and subjective ones, like having better information, which allowed some spinning mills to predict movements on the market faster than their competitors; market manipulation also contributed to the uncertainty, as will be discussed further below. Given the geographic remoteness of the American cotton plantations, it was impossible to observe them directly; SWA had instead to utilize all the information it could get from its communication network to try and accurately estimate crop yields and make purchasing decisions accordingly, since the expected yield of the upcoming harvest also affected the value of remaining stock from the previous season. If a poor harvest was followed by a good one, an abundance of cotton would drive down prices. Two good harvests in succession, on the other hand, as in 1890/91 and 1891/92, threatened to “ruin business” altogether.¹⁰⁸ As Frommel reported to a general meeting of SWA, “This business year […] has been one of the most calamitous for our industry in its whole existence. Even the wars of 1870 and 1866, the crises of 1859 and 1857, yes even the great revolutionary year of 1848 had less deleterious consequences, because a steep fall in prices was followed by a recovery.”¹⁰⁹ The Chamber of Commerce for Swabia and Neuburg likewise pinned most of the blame for the worst financial results “for as long as the cotton industry has existed in our region” on the “gigantic harvest” of 1890/91 and the “monster harvest” of 1891/1892.¹¹⁰

Accurate predictions of market fluctuations were vital, and so companies in Augsburg consulted up-to-date yield estimates, weather reports warning of storms or a “killing frost,”¹¹¹ and predictions of insect plagues—all of which could also be tainted by misinformation, which competitors sometimes even deliberately spread. During this period, the Augsburg companies got their latest news about the precious commodity via telegraph, telephone (SWA was hooked up to the network in 1886¹¹²), newspapers, and specialized publications, such as Alfred B. Shepperson’s Cotton Facts (New York),¹¹³ John Jones’s Handbook for Daily Cable Records of American Cotton Crop Statistics (Liverpool),¹¹⁴ and the various reports by the influential Neill Brothers.¹¹⁵ The Bavarian spinners were also kept informed by their contacts in the main European cotton centers, and received the latest harvest forecasts from the Augsburg cotton agents. Finally, the Bremen Cotton Exchange and VSBI published statistical records of past cotton harvests and prices, with which companies could gain a basic grasp of the volatile cotton market.¹¹⁶ Compared with the naivety of the pre-1848 years, Augsburg’s cotton industrialists were now far better informed about production conditions in the USA.¹¹⁷

Despite the perils of unexpected price drops, SWA hoped for cheap cotton prices in the long run “due to the great expansion of cotton cultivation in the United States in recent times.”¹¹⁸ When the Augsburg cotton spinners were caught off-guard by the bumper harvest of 1891/92, there were suspicions “that this result is likely attributable to an expansion of cotton plantations that we were unaware of and that the Americans in all probability concealed from us.”¹¹⁹ However, when the American cotton farmers later attempted to shift cotton prices in their favor by reducing the area under cultivation, they came in for criticism from SWA Director Groß.¹²⁰

The many imponderable factors that determined cotton prices were exacerbated by deliberate speculation on the cotton exchanges that began to spring up in the 1870s, especially those, like the exchanges in Liverpool, New York, New Orleans, and Le Havre, that allowed trading in futures.¹²¹ Futures, which could be obtained equally quickly in the USA and Europe thanks to the transatlantic telegraph, initially served the very practical purpose of allowing companies to hedge their own cotton purchases or sales against price volatility.¹²² However, while some used them to protect their businesses, others used them as a very profitable form of financial speculation; SWA Director Frommel reported that there had been “unprecedented speculation in American cotton in Liverpool” between July and September 1881.¹²³

Futures trading in a natural commodity always brought with it the risk of market manipulation. SWA, with its cautious buying policy, long steered clear of futures, with the supervisory board chair, Paul Schmid, declaring to the new director, Groß, in 1893 that “the futures business” could “no longer be countenanced.”¹²⁴ Observers in Augsburg took a dim view of the growing stock market speculation in the final years of the nineteenth century, which saw investors betting on whether cotton prices would rise or fall. The Chamber of Commerce for Swabia and Neuburg first voiced general concerns about the issue in 1897: “It makes matters very difficult for good, sound industry that cotton prices are no longer determined by supply and demand, but primarily by the manipulations of speculators in New York and Liverpool.”¹²⁵

Stock market speculators were also accused of manipulating the media, going so far as to spread fake news about cotton growth or weather conditions:¹²⁶

Through their agents in Germany, especially Hamburg, they influence the newspapers. The newspapers are offered cable reports from New York, which they reprint in the belief that they are doing their readers a great service, without realizing how much damage they are doing to business and how dubious their sources are.¹²⁷

The local chamber of commerce was especially appalled that Augsburg’s newspapers also allowed themselves to be used for these sorts of manipulations, which “have had a disruptive effect on virtually the whole German industry.”¹²⁸ Systematic stock market speculation, which caused rapid price fluctuations previously unseen in the cotton trade, made the already difficult trading conditions even more challenging.¹²⁹ And so the chamber took some pleasure in the news of the collapse of “exorbitant speculative enterprises in New Orleans”¹³⁰ in 1895 and of “New York speculation”¹³¹ in 1900.

It was not just speculative market risks that affected cotton prices, but also social and political events. For instance, a strike by English laborers in Lancashire prompted SWA Director Groß to hope for “lower cotton prices,” which he planned to “take advantage of by buying up cotton”;¹³² however, this hope was not fulfilled. The Augsburg cotton industry always kept a close eye on its British rivals, who had various competitive advantages and tended toward overproduction. Whenever British sales to India and the rest of Asia slumped, this exposed the German market to the risk of having to compete on unequal terms with exports of textile products from Britain.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Augsburg’s textile industrialists were far more sensitive to the cotton market’s entanglements in global political and economic affairs, which increasingly eluded simplistic notions of cause and effect. As their horizons widened, they became aware of a complex cluster of global economic factors that could affect the price of cotton even from the other end of the world, as with the Sino-French War of 1883.¹³³ The political conflicts were frequently accompanied by global banking and economic crises. For instance, in 1893 the chamber of commerce noted the impact on cotton prices of “unfavorable news from America” and “payment defaults in Liverpool and Australia.”¹³⁴ The same year also saw prices affected by a dangerously “falling silver price,”¹³⁵ which, in combination with dwindling gold reserves, sparked a panic on the US capital markets in May, resulting in the collapse of many American banks and businesses. Consequently, even as it looked ahead to 1894, the chamber of commerce complained of “the still unsatisfactory business conditions in the United States.”¹³⁶

Professionalization of Augsburg’s Industrialists

Keeping pace with the increasing demands of the global cotton market required more specialized personnel. While in the first half of the nineteenth century Augsburg’s leading businessmen learned their trade in Austria, Italy, and Switzerland,¹³⁷ in later decades prospective factory directors headed to the key European markets for American cotton.¹³⁸ Groß and Waibel became acquainted with the workings of the international cotton trade in Le Havre, Bremen, and Liverpool,¹³⁹ while Otto Lindenmeyer, who succeeded Waibel as SWA’s director in 1911, gained international experience in Lausanne, Basel, Liverpool, and the Balkans, where he represented English spinning mills.¹⁴⁰
Frommel’s formative years took him to Havana. Schmid, the influential longstanding chair of the SWA supervisory board (fig. 3), began his career in Geneva, London, and Frankfurt, while his uncle, Paul Schmid, Sr., worked in New York.¹⁴¹ Consequently, by the time of the German Empire, SWA’s senior ranks were filled with quintessential international businessmen, fluent in multiple languages and au fait not just with the transatlantic markets but also, thanks to the trade in Indian and Egyptian cotton, those of Asia and Africa.¹⁴²

The Emergence of International Advocacy Groups: From 1900 to World War I

As the twentieth century dawned, the globally expanded horizons of Augsburg’s textile industrialists were increasingly reflected in the language that they used. The chamber of commerce’s annual reports were now sprinkled with terms like “global economy” (Weltwirtschaft),¹⁴³ “world peace” (Weltfriede),¹⁴⁴ “global consumption” (Weltverbrauch),¹⁴⁵ the “state of the world” (Weltlage),¹⁴⁶ “global market conditions” (Weltkonjunktur),¹⁴⁷ and “world market” (Weltmarkt).¹⁴⁸ SWA paid growing attention to total “global demand” (Weltbedarf)¹⁴⁹ for cotton and to “global consumption” (Weltkonsum)¹⁵⁰ of the commodity. This rhetoric of “world” and “global” was reflected in practice by a new, almost cybernetic feel for cotton demand, the probability of satisfying that demand, and resultant prices, with global demand always calculated based on expected or actual American crop yields.

The main challenge for the market was that global demand for cotton was rising faster than production.¹⁵¹ Conditions on the global market were exacerbated by the vast rise in US domestic consumption; by 1895, America had a spinning capacity of over sixteen million spindles. In the face of these pressures on the supply of cotton, Augsburg’s factory managers were constantly engaged in making more or less hypothetical estimates of cotton prices for the next American harvest.¹⁵² The local spinning mills incorporated every new piece of meteorological or statistical information into their calculations, especially official information published by American government bodies such as the Department of Agriculture’s Weather Bureau and its Division of Statistics and, later on, the Department of Commerce and Labor’s Census Bureau (founded in 1903).¹⁵³

Augsburg’s demand for cotton also rose significantly in the years leading up to the First World War. SWA’s annual consumption rose from 5,351 metric tons in 1900 to a peak of 7,277 metric tons in 1913. The proportion of Indian cotton ranged from between 20 and somewhat more than 30 percent. Whereas the tail end of the nineteenth century had seen a linear decline in the price of cotton, which fell as low as 3 13/16 pence per pound (lb) in 1898/99,¹⁵⁴ it began to rise again in 1900, albeit with far greater fluctuations than before, at points temporarily almost tripling in price.¹⁵⁵

New Heights of Stock Market Speculation

The constant fluctuations of cotton prices in the years leading up to World War I were largely the result of speculation on the New York Mercantile Exchange, which rose to unprecedented heights in the new century.¹⁵⁶ The chamber of commerce’s annual reports complain nonstop about the often turbulent cycles of bull and bear markets. The author of one report from early 1901 was incensed by a “cotton corner in New York” that “drove the price of cotton up to twelve cents.”¹⁵⁷ Alongside rampant stock market speculation, the growth in US domestic demand meant that, despite the expansion of American plantations, the USA was able “to dictate prices for the cotton-consuming world.”¹⁵⁸ There was much contemporary criticism of a “New York bull clique”¹⁵⁹ that temporarily ramped up cotton prices in 1902/03, creating great “uncertainty about whether there would be a sufficient supply of cotton to meet global demand.”¹⁶⁰ In 1904, there was then an “unbridled bullish movement,”¹⁶¹ which critically threatened the interests of the European cotton industry.¹⁶² This rapid price rise was associated mainly with the “cotton king”¹⁶³ and “arch-speculator”¹⁶⁴ Daniel J. Sully. Beginning in late 1903, Sully “bulled” the price of cotton up to as high as seventeen cents,¹⁶⁵ resulting in “heavy losses upon spinners and […] the closing of many mills.”¹⁶⁶ Only after the spectacular collapse of “the bull clique’s leading member”¹⁶⁷ on March 18, 1904, did the price gradually come down again. A price plunge at the end of the year made the European dependence on the speculative American market all the more starkly apparent. Charles W. Macara, president of the influential British Federation of Master Cotton Spinners’ Associations, complained in 1904 that the rise in American cotton prices had brought the vast industry to the brink of complete paralysis.¹⁶⁸

In Augsburg, meanwhile, industry experts were increasingly doubtful that they could rely on information about cotton from the USA. In September 1903, Schmid, the chair of the SWA supervisory board, expressed anger at the “arbitrariness of American speculators” who “even manipulate news about the state of the harvest as they see fit.”¹⁶⁹ In a review of 1904, the chamber of commerce observed that claims about the enormous damage to the cotton harvest caused by the feared boll weevil likewise distorted the facts.¹⁷⁰ The chamber was critical not just of private speculators, but now also of reports from official sources, writing for instance that “the official report by the Washington bureau was also grossly unreliable.”¹⁷¹ Schmid also condemned the “knowingly false official information published by the American Department of Agriculture.”¹⁷² In addition to financial investors’ manipulation of the market, a very different sort of speculation was now emerging: American cotton farmers were increasingly organizing into trusts that sought to influence cotton prices in their favor. Thus, speculators “were able, using new, quintessentially American means, to gradually drive up prices by a significant degree despite the exceptional harvest.”¹⁷³

The International Cotton Federation

The British cotton industry, which was the worst affected by speculation, led the way in the European response to American market manipulation.¹⁷⁴ Macara initiated an international congress of the European cotton industry that took place in Zurich in March 1904.¹⁷⁵ This congress laid the foundations for a new, transnational body: the International Federation of Master Cotton Spinners and Manufacturers’ Associations (International Cotton Federation), which Macara presided over for many years from Manchester. Augsburg was represented on the new international federation’s board by Groß, who served as honorary treasurer.

The federation aimed primarily to oppose American speculation via international laws, make the transatlantic cotton trade less unpredictable, and open up alternative cotton-growing regions around the world. In the following years, it pushed for reforms not just to the trade in cotton but also to agricultural production in the USA itself, with the goal of increasing harvest yields. The federation also produced reliable statistics about worldwide cotton reserves, demand, and consumption. The overarching goal of its members was to bring about greater standardization of the cotton trade.¹⁷⁶

The reformers therefore turned their attention to many different aspects of the cotton trade, some of which seem relatively peripheral. They sought to standardize the pressing, baling, storage, weight, units of measurement, quality standards, moisture levels, transport, bills of lading, insurance, stock exchange rules, contractual forms, and so on, to give commodity buyers in Europe greater legal certainty in their international business dealings. The International Cotton Federation’s sphere of influence quickly expanded to America, Asia, and Africa.

The federation’s central forum was its annual congress, which took place in various European cities in the years leading up to the First World War, and was attended by industrialists from Augsburg.¹⁷⁷ At the congress held in Manchester and Liverpool in 1905, SWA Director Groß (fig. 4) pushed for the introduction of the metric system in international cotton trading, which until now had been dominated by British imperial units.¹⁷⁸ Groß himself presided over the third international congress, hosted in Bremen in 1906. The main topics of discussion were international cotton exchanges, regulation of the global cotton supply, and efforts to establish cotton growing in European colonies. In his opening address, Groß emphatically supported not just the principle of competition but also efforts to “remove the ill feeling sometimes apparent in the competition between nations,” since “the first consideration for the welfare of all industry is the peace of the world, and the lasting good-will of the nations.”¹⁷⁹

Just as the VSBI and Bremen Cotton Exchange had done at the national level in Germany, the International Cotton Federation now represented a European-centric association whose members put aside their competing interests for the sake of greater collective trading power. Groß expressed the belief that a forum like the Bremen congress could secure harmony between individual nations’ conflicting interests by promoting “mutual respect shown everywhere and at all times.”¹⁸⁰ He formulated the utopian vision of a transnational community coming together to “further the welfare and prosperity of an industry equally important for all countries”¹⁸¹ Groß clearly shared the same view of the federation’s historic mission as Macara, whose “idea of internationalism” consisted in trying “to see things in their worldwide relations.”¹⁸² Macara saw the founding of the federation not simply as “the birth of a new international idea in industry,” but, far more momentously, as “the birth of a League of Nations.”¹⁸³ The idea of a transnational league went far beyond the purely economic dimension of the International Cotton Federation. The Bremen congress of 1906 also dipped its toes in political waters by seeking an audience with Kaiser Wilhelm II, who received a deputation from the federation on his yacht.¹⁸⁴

The 1907 Atlanta Conference

Another Augsburg cotton industrialist who rose to prominence in the International Cotton Federation was Waibel, who succeeded Groß as SWA’s commercial director following the latter’s death in early March 1907. Waibel served on the federation’s Cotton Contract Commission, whose duty was to “collect information on the baling, handling, marketing, and shipping [fig. 5] of American cotton, and consult with the authorities of the various Cotton Exchanges and the associations of spinners and American cotton planters, with a view to drafting new contracts.”¹⁸⁵ Just a year later, the commission was able to report its first success, when the Liverpool exchange accepted its proposals and introduced a new contract that reduced the price of international trade.¹⁸⁶

Leading representatives of the American cotton industry attended one of the annual congresses for the first time in Vienna in 1907. They invited members of the European federation to come to a conference in Atlanta, Georgia, in order to foster closer future cooperation and break down transatlantic divides.¹⁸⁷ The German delegation that set off in fall 1907 had twenty members, of whom no fewer than five were from Augsburg.¹⁸⁸ Among them was Waibel, the freshly appointed director of SWA, whose supervisory board had authorized him to attend the Atlanta conference because “this fact-finding mission will undoubtedly afford him valuable experiences that will also benefit our company.”¹⁸⁹ The SWA director’s long journey—nearly eight thousand kilometers—mainly took him through the Cotton Belt (fig. 6) in the southern states. The visit gave Augsburg’s industrialists unprecedented access to those involved in cotton growing on the other side of the Atlantic. For the first time, they were able to witness and learn about the Americans’ production and marketing at first hand. They had ample opportunity to visit cotton farms and cotton exchanges and speak with representatives of the cotton growing industry and the newly established American associations, as well as politicians and officials, including government ministers, state governors, congressmen, and presidents of chambers of commerce.¹⁹⁰ The first main consequence of this expanded access to the American market was improved communication and closer (or in many cases entirely new) networks connecting the stakeholders along the cotton commodity chain.

The highlight of the European delegation’s trip was the congress in Atlanta from October 7 to 9, 1907. With its vast array of attendees—the European delegation alone had over a hundred members—it seemed as if the congress had brought together the entire global cotton industry under a single roof in a way never before witnessed: “In terms of the number of attendees, the scale, and the variety of invested capital, there has certainly never been an assembly like this before, nor will there likely be one to rival it any time soon.”¹⁹¹ As with the industry advocacy groups in the German and European context, the Atlanta congress sought to put aside the competing interests of different segments (for structural reasons, cotton farmers, exporters, exchanges, and spinners were diametrically opposed on many issues) and create a new organization capable of collective action.

At the congress, the American farmers attempted to circumvent the intermediaries and commodity exchanges by establishing direct links with the European cotton spinners.¹⁹² In his report on the congress, Waibel, as an advocate of the industry, rejected the farmers’ plan: “It is a utopian fantasy to imagine that trade could be entirely eliminated and that planters could sell directly to spinners.”¹⁹³ The SWA director laconically remarked that speculation would “always exist in one form or another.”¹⁹⁴ Waibel was especially opposed to jettisoning the futures market, which, as a “fine measurer of value” and “cheap reinsurance organization,”¹⁹⁵ allowed businesses to secure their transactions. While not uncritical of the excesses of futures trading, the Augsburg industrialist wrote with sober pragmatism that

What may be prohibited in one country by special legislation will simply continue unperturbed elsewhere. Nothing whatsoever can be achieved by laws confined to one country, and the prospect that all countries in the cotton trade would uniformly legislate against the futures exchanges will not be deemed likely or feasible even by their fiercest opponent.¹⁹⁶

Waibel was more critical of the independently organizing American farmers themselves, who were calling for guaranteed minimum prices for their cotton. The Augsburg director believed that, if the planters’ intention was to “systematically hold back their cotton and force prices up,” such demands would amount to speculation “on the grandest scale” and of “the most dangerous sort.”¹⁹⁷ The American farmers’ “price-fixing cartel” would, in Waibel’s view, be as damaging as “artificial manipulations of the cotton market.”¹⁹⁸ The 1907 chamber of commerce report was even more critical of the Atlanta farmers’ demands, claiming they—backed by “paid agitators” and “powerful organizations”—were only interested in “getting the highest possible prices for cotton.”¹⁹⁹ It was feared there could be a dire scarcity of cotton if the farmers made good on their threat to drive up prices by reducing the acreage under cultivation. The farmers could instead, the report claimed, achieve far higher yields by expanding and intensifying cotton growing. However, the “great labor shortage in the southern states” and (in the racist view of the report writer) “idleness of the negro population”²⁰⁰ would prevent a rapid increase in cotton production.

The chamber of commerce’s skeptical attitude overlooks the European spinners’ many successes at the Atlanta conference, where they were able to successfully negotiate a “better selection of seed,” “more careful picking and ginning,” and “improved baling, pressing, storage, and transportation of cotton.”²⁰¹ There were encouraging signs that transatlantic communication could now develop into transatlantic cooperation, words into action, promising progress for intercontinental trade.²⁰² However, what the Atlanta congress failed to do was establish a completely new international organization that brought together the American farmers and European cotton industrialists.²⁰³

The “Baumwollkulturkampf”: Cultivating Cotton in the Colonies

Another prominent topic at the International Cotton Federation’s annual conferences concerned efforts to develop cotton growing in colonial territories so as to provide an alternative source and break the American monopoly. New organizations sprung up to support these efforts. The first was the British Cotton Association, founded in 1902 to promote cotton farming in the British colonies. The Augsburg industrialist Haßler had already pushed for the cultivation of cotton in the German colonies during his tenure as president of VSBI in the 1880s, and his Stadtbach mill provided support to the Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Plantagen-Gesellschaft, a company founded in 1886 to establish plantations in Germany’s East African colonies.²⁰⁴ The “cotton question,”²⁰⁵ which escalated into a “cotton emergency”²⁰⁶ or “cotton-growing struggle”²⁰⁷ (Baumwollkulturkampf), was also one of the main concerns of the Colonial Economic Committee, established in 1896 as a spin-off of the German Colonial Society founded in 1887.²⁰⁸ Founding member Karl Supf, a native of Nuremberg, spent years advocating cotton production in the German colonies.²⁰⁹

In 1900, SWA contributed one thousand marks for an “expedition to establish local cotton cultivation in the German colony in Togo.”²¹⁰ It was thus directly involved in the German Empire’s expansion into colonial cotton production. In 1904, the supervisory board discussed providing funding to a plantation company in Togo (Pflanzungsgesellschaft Kpeme).²¹¹ In March 1907, a donation of five thousand marks was made to the Colonial Economic Committee to promote cotton production in the German colonies.²¹² The VSBI raised 150,000 marks for the committee between 1907 and 1912.²¹³ Despite the enthusiasm of the colonial authorities and some promising early successes, Germany’s African cotton yield (produced by local populations living and working in very poor conditions) fell short of the high expectations.²¹⁴ In 1912, the German colonies produced a total of eleven thousand bales of cotton, enough to cover at best a tenth of Augsburg’s annual demand at the time.²¹⁵ Looking beyond the German colonies, SWA also took an interest in cotton growing in Mesopotamia, but this did not lead to any appreciable results.²¹⁶ When the committee of the International Cotton Federation met in Berlin in October 1911, the expansion of cotton cultivation in countries outside the United States was likewise high on the agenda.²¹⁷

An Increasingly Virtual Market: The Situation in Augsburg in the Period up to 1914

Despite all efforts to find alternatives, the Augsburg mills remained primarily dependent on American cotton up until 1914, during which time cotton prices continued to fluctuate sharply. Between 1907 and 1913, the price for a kilogram of Middling Americans (loco Bremen) averaged between 110 and 155 pfennigs, reaching extremes of 89.5 pfennigs in December 1908 and 160.5 pfennigs in June 1911. The strongest movement came between September and December 1911, when the price plunged by 40 percent. Previously, in 1908, it had fallen (albeit more slowly) by 30 percent. During this time, there was a renewed surge of speculation.²¹⁸ Although weather conditions caused considerable variation in American harvest yields—ten million bales in 1909, over 15.5 million in 1911, over sixteen million in 1914—commodity speculation remained very tempting to financial investors, who sought to capitalize on uncertain crop forecasts, whether by selling short or buying long. The Chamber of Commerce for Swabia and Neuburg observed in 1906 that the “global cotton business” appeared to be “temporarily healthy,”²¹⁹ but this state of health proved to be very temporary indeed, even though the financial and banking crisis that broke out in the USA in 1907 briefly reined in cotton speculation. Prices consequently rose that year, gradually leading to a shortage of money that meant “bullish speculators were unable to take full advantage,”²²⁰ despite a relatively low cotton harvest, and so the “outrageous prices”²²¹ that the cotton planters hoped for failed to materialize. In 1908, the VSBI attempted to counter the economic downturn caused by the American crisis by cutting business activity by 14 percent, but the other German cotton associations did not back the measure.²²²

In the years leading up to the First World War, the Augsburg spinners also realized that the rapid expansion of worldwide spinning capacity had undermined the automatic connection that used to exist between a plentiful harvest and a fall in cotton prices. In 1909, American speculation returned with a vengeance, and, in combination with reports of a poor harvest, drove commodity prices to “extraordinary heights.”²²³ Two years later, in 1911, cotton prices collapsed in the last quarter of the year. This took a heavy toll on Augsburg’s businesses, which had to record significant losses in the year’s balance sheets: SWA—whose annual cotton account between 1900 and 1914 ranged from 2.8 to 7.2 million marks²²⁴—reported a loss of nine hundred thousand marks. The following year, 1912, speculators once again managed to manipulate commodity prices,²²⁵ and in 1913 the price of Middling Americans (loco Bremen) lurched between 121 and 147 pfennigs per kilogram. Despite the volatile prices, SWA, which had opened a fourth factory in 1909/10, continued increasing its production capacity up until 1914, and its demand for raw cotton rose accordingly (see chart 3).

Augsburg’s textile industrialists adopted various strategies to counteract the structural uncertainty of cotton prices, which was exacerbated by speculation and unpredictable economic fluctuations. Initially, they strictly followed a “hand to mouth”²²⁶ buying policy where they only bought as much cotton as they needed for existing yarn or cloth orders. Consequently, the required cotton was generally purchased less far in advance, something made possible by modern communication technology. The cotton agents in Augsburg made bids by telephone and telegram, based on the weekly price updates from New York.²²⁷ These agents could represent up to a dozen cotton importers, though sometimes they acted solely on behalf of a single broker in Bremen, who in turn acted as a sales representative for an American cotton exporter.

Through such intermediaries, SWA did business with over twenty cotton companies between 1900 and 1914. Although it made some import deals directly with US trading companies, including the famous Alexander Sprunt & Son in Wilmington (North Carolina),²²⁸ most of its transactions went through Bremen-based firms, agencies, or brokers. SWA’s business partners in Bremen included German importers such as Heineken & Vogelsang, Gebrüder Plate, and H. Bischoff & Co., as well as British and American importers such as Pferdmenges, Preyer & Co., Inman Akers & Inman, and McFadden Bros. & Co.²²⁹ The latter company alone, which had owned a subsidiary in Bremen (McFadden Zerega and Bros.) since 1892, imported over two hundred thousand bales a year to Europe through the Hanseatic port.²³⁰ SWA still also made occasional purchases via Liverpool.²³¹ Just how smoothly the Augsburg cotton imports generally went is made clear by the rare cases where serious problems occurred along the long import chain. For instance, in summer 1910, SWA fell victim to fraud by the cotton company Steele, Miller & Co., and had to swallow a loss of 162,000 marks²³² after the American firm went bankrupt.

In the 1910s, the real economy became increasingly virtual. Various trading companies now moved to selling cotton not just for the short term, but for several years ahead. SWA, which had been purchasing certain cotton grades for immediate delivery for decades, was initially resistant to this new form of speculative commodity buying. The growing risks of an increasingly fast-paced market, however, forced even this company into futures trading in the end. Lindenmeyer, who was appointed commercial director on January 1, 1911, and had learned the art of hedging cotton in Liverpool,²³³ paved the way for the company to protect its cotton transaction against significant price fluctuations using futures.²³⁴ The supervisory board was very reluctant “to depart from the principle followed hitherto” of refraining from active market speculation, but concluded that “the exceptional present circumstances justify such a step.”²³⁵ Consequently, SWA was cautiously active on the futures market until World War I, profiting on occasion from favorable price developments.²³⁶ Right up until 1914, Lindenmeyer felt obliged to stress that futures “were by no means speculative in character,”²³⁷ but rather that “it was no longer possible to protect our inventories against loss” without the “safety valve of hedging.”²³⁸ In a departure from his previous conservatism, the supervisory board chair, Schmid, supported Lindenmeyer’s new course, which “is now the modern way of thinking.”²³⁹ The Bremen Cotton Exchange also moved with the times and began futures trading in 1914, though this was then suspended again during the First World War.²⁴⁰

The First World War and the Return of Politics

Political events, especially wars, had often negatively impacted the development and expansion of the global cotton market over the course of the long nineteenth century. The Balkan Wars of 1912–1913 now brought the threat of war ever closer to Germany. At SWA too, “fears of becoming entangled in further wars” were “straining tempers.”²⁴¹ The economic paralysis triggered by the threat of war prompted the south German and Alsatian cotton mills once again to agree upon a mutual cutback of business in spring 1914, this time of 17 percent. However, the outbreak of the First World War, which soon saw the British naval blockade preventing the import of American cotton to Germany, meant that normal economic activity was largely suspended, despite the temporary and modest wartime boom from commissions to make materials for uniforms and zeppelins. Augsburg cotton businesses’ attempts to circumvent the blockade using neutral ports such as Genoa yielded only limited results, as did the representative they dispatched to the USA to look after their interests. The war condemned the Augsburg companies to unprecedented passivity.

Since the 1840s, globalization had seen the world economy make impressive advances, but now the First World War forcefully reasserted the primacy of politics in the global context.²⁴² The German military administration confiscated the cotton reserves of the mills in Augsburg in the national interest. A “struggle between nations […] more violent and bloody than any before seen in history”²⁴³ not only had a devastating material impact on the warring nations, but also destroyed the vital network of a highly globalized economy. The war rapidly undid the preceding seventy years of global economic integration in the German cotton industry; a process of “deglobalization” tore apart international economic activities and advocacy groups at the seams.²⁴⁴ In 1916, the SWA spinning mill only produced 7.5 percent of its peacetime output. Switching to Indian and Egyptian suppliers was not enough to make up for the loss of American cotton. The global structures and economic relations that had grown up over the course of decades atrophied, and Augsburg’s cotton industry was reduced to national rather than international stature.²⁴⁵ It was not until the Wirtschaftswunder of the 1950s that the local textile industry returned to prewar levels of productivity.

Augsburg at the Intersection between Local and Global

The history of cotton imports to Augsburg between 1840 and 1914 shows clearly that the city could not have become one of Germany’s leading textile centers without the extensive imports from America. Although there were times when the local spinning mills purchased up to 50 percent of their cotton from India, there was far greater commercial focus on US suppliers and markets. During the period under consideration here, Augsburg-based companies did not merely passively profit off a globally expanding and consolidating cotton market, but actively helped to shape it, with the aim of securing cotton on the most favorable terms.

It would be an exaggeration to present Augsburg’s entrepreneurs as major drivers of globalization or as multinational business magnates.²⁴⁶ When it came to organizing production and exports of its products, the Swabian textile industry acted at a local rather than a global level; but when it came to buying cotton, it was very much operating on international terrain. From the 1830s onward, it branched out further and further into this terrain and navigated it with growing assurance, buying cotton in the Netherlands, France, Britain, or directly from the USA. Through its involvement in trade associations like the Bremen Cotton Exchange, it helped to expand this terrain, establish new connections, and exert greater control over commodity flows, thus reshaping the geography of the European cotton trade.

The great, often imponderable complexity of the global cotton market presented a unique challenge for Augsburg’s textile entrepreneurs. The factory directors’ main priority was to make cotton—which as a natural commodity was exposed to many uncertainties—less volatile, more predictable, and easier to manage in their own interests. One way to improve their grasp of the market and its peculiarities was to professionalize its personnel, ideally recruiting people with experience of the key European cotton markets of Le Havre and Liverpool. Greater professionalism at senior management level helped businesses expand their networks of commercial contacts, an informal yet crucial communicative resource that previous studies have overlooked.²⁴⁷

Another way to reduce the uncertainties of the global cotton market was to band together in trade associations that advocated for the industry’s interests. Initially, Augsburg’s industrialists organized at the regional level in south Germany (VSBI) and at national level (CVDI, imperial inquest committee). Later, they branched out to the international port of Bremen (Bremen Cotton Exchange), before finally bridging the gap between Europe and the USA (International Cotton Federation). Step by step, they progressed from regional advocacy groups representing their own local interests to a federation that included the country where the cotton was actually grown. This transatlantic expansion of the German spinners’ interests was made manifest by SWA Director Waibel’s 1907 trip to America. German industrialists used member organizations and trade associations as a way to expand their agency.

The transnational scope of the International Cotton Federation was without precedent at the time. During the period of the German Empire, Augsburg entrepreneurs became increasingly involved in trade organizations, which allowed them in turn to exercise governance over distances not previously possible.²⁴⁸ This greater agency came at the cost of setting aside (at least in theory, though often not in practice) structurally opposing interests between groups such as spinners and cotton traders so as to increase their collective influence.

Augsburg industrialists also supported greater standardization of the global cotton trade as a strategy to increase calculability.²⁴⁹ The more globally integrated the market became, the greater the need for standardized, regulated trading conditions in terms of product quality, legal matters, units of measure, currencies, insurance, bills of lading, baling standards, and so on. There were also efforts to standardize the compilation and publication of market information such as statistical data, while reliable legal standards increased confidence by helping to resolve any disputes that arose in the course of international trade or, even better, prevent them from occurring in the first place. However, the choice of standards for things like units of measure and currency was often based on market actors’ interests rather than on merit. One example of this was the dispute over whether to introduce a metric system for yarn numbering, which was eventually settled in favor of the market-dominant British. Britain’s preeminent role in the global economy meant the German spinning mills faced all sorts of structural disadvantages, some of which continued right up until the First World War.

The private, locally rooted commercial actors acted primarily in their own business interests, unlike political bodies, such as governments, that represented the interests of entire regions. The state did not normally stipulate or determine commercial activities, which were motivated by profit. The true actors in the field of foreign trade were not whole economies but individual companies;²⁵⁰ these did not operate as atomistic units, however, but formed associations to advance their mutual interests.

In terms of agency, the present study of entrepreneurs in Augsburg’s cotton industry reveals a diverse range of activities and forms of participation in the international market. These frequently demanded great flexibility, and actors were often put on the defensive or condemned to passivity. The concept of action familiar from classical political history, which is premised on the idea of sovereign decision-makers, is inadequate to describe the many varieties of entrepreneurial activity at the intersection between structures and events, fixed conditions and variable means, macro- and microeconomics. The fields of action that emerged between these poles are best understood in terms not of one-dimensional, monocausal subject–object relations, but rather of systemic, multilateral, and polycentric structures.

A closer analysis of the Augsburg cotton industrialists’ business activities shows that they were primarily communicative in nature. Large quantities of information were exchanged through extensive communication networks: constantly updated bids, inquiries, weather reports, statistical news, commodity orders, and so forth. Technological advances changed not just the modes of communication that were used (for instance, new inventions like the telegraph and telephone), but also the intensity and volume of communication, and vastly accelerated action and reaction times on the market. In combination with new modes of transportation, these new media compressed both time and space, and forced the now-synchronized entrepreneurs on both sides of the Atlantic to act ever more quickly while simultaneously processing ever more information. However, more information, even statistical data that bore the seal of scientific rigor, did not automatically provide a better basis for decision-making, as there was also an increased risk of deliberate misinformation being spread.

Another aspect of the Augsburg textile industrialists’ business practices was the emphasis on instrumental rationality. Their choice of means was motivated primarily by the end of maximizing profits (the characteristic motive of industrial capitalism). However, residues of value-rational behavior still lingered, such as SWA’s longstanding reservations about investing in futures despite it making perfect sense from an economic point of view. These reservations suggest a moral aversion to a market instrument that was regarded as highly speculative and increasingly detached from the real economy. Furthermore, all capitalist number-crunching notwithstanding, Augsburg’s industrialists continued to attach great value to trust in their business partners.²⁵¹

The example of futures trading, which ushered in the phenomenon of deliberate market speculation, makes clear that the history of Augsburg cotton imports cannot be adequately described solely in the terms of a classical economic history, but must also take account of historical subjects’ knowledge and perceptions. Having better information often entailed an economic advantage. However, since this information never provided an objective guide to action but always had to be interpreted, it was constantly being transformed into subjectively colored perceptions of market possibilities. The faster that commerce became after the invention of the telegraph and telephone, the more quickly purchasing decisions had to be made, and the riskier they became for those who were unwilling to protect their transactions using futures. Companies that did not seize the initiative at the right time could easily become passive victims of merciless market mechanisms. The need to become active on futures markets, which extended the credit-driven economy ever further into the future, raises a fundamental theme of modern economics: namely, that global economic expansion inevitably involves increased risk-taking. Companies hungry for profit had to accept a whole host of contingencies, imponderables, and uncertainties, even as they sought to minimize these risks.²⁵² This high-risk way of doing business brought with it a constant pressure to modernize as well.

It was the allure of profits that finally coaxed Augsburg’s entrepreneurs into riskier international trade so as to obtain the cotton that they needed. Although this meant that south German companies were now operating in a global framework, their activities were still rooted in Augsburg. The Bavarian city remained the local point of departure for economic activities with a global geographic reach, the vantage point from which the meaning and purpose of these activities were framed, the hub around which economic space, with its regional, national, and global spheres of action, was concentrically arranged. Global value creation orbited around local profitmaking. The present study of global trade in a particular location thus reveals both the global dimensions of the local and the local conditions of the global.²⁵³

The global history perspective adopted here has also demonstrated the fruitfulness of an approach that situates global economic phenomena within specific local contexts, thereby contributing to a topography of a globe-spanning economy that is always also a social topography of economic relations. It would be a tempting challenge to use Augsburg as a test case for whether the concept of “glocalization”—as popularized by Roland Robertson— can be applied historically.²⁵⁴ The choice to examine globalization from Augsburg’s perspective has in any case shown that the global economic integration of the long nineteenth century was not an anonymous process of consolidation, but involved a host of local processes of adaptation that gave concrete expression to globalization, which was only ever manifested in a situated, context-bound form. Situating global phenomena within a specific local context reveals the fine-grained differences in how globalization progressed in different places, with distinctive rhythms, dynamics, phases, scopes, and histories. Studying a localized instance of globalization could help to shed light on the “multiple modernities” that existed even within Western society.²⁵⁵

However, the focus on the phenomena of globalization investigated here should not be taken to imply that the economic activities of the textile industry in Augsburg can be reduced to a simple interplay of local and global factors, or that these companies’ transnational operations were unaffected by the politics of nation-states and individual German states. After all, it was the Bavarian and German governments that determined the framework within which these companies operated, by establishing chambers of commerce, customs tariffs, trade and labor laws, and so on.²⁵⁶ Leading textile industrialists in Augsburg were in turn often closely involved in municipal, regional, and national politics.²⁵⁷ Just as local, national, and global perspectives should be seen as complementing rather than competing with one another, it would be misguided to treat the economic and political spheres as completely separate. Ultimately, what allowed Augsburg cotton companies to flourish on the fiercely competitive markets right up until the First World War was a dialectical interplay between local, regional, national, and global factors.

1. From Jena to Bamberg

The twin battles of Jena and Auerstedt, in which Napoleon’s forces crushed the Prussian troops, and the destruction and pillaging in their wake, fundamentally changed life in the Thuringian city of Jena. Teaching at the university was temporarily suspended, student numbers fell sharply, and many professors left the city to seek employment elsewhere. These included the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), who had lived in Jena since early 1801 and been appointed professor there in 1805 (unsalaried at first, though he later drew a modest stipend). Hegel initially left the city only temporarily, between early November and mid-December 1806, so that he could oversee the printing of his Phenomenology of Spirit by the publisher Anton Göbhardt in Bamberg. Upon his return, he found himself facing great personal and professional difficulties. On February 8, 1807, his former housekeeper, Christiane Charlotte Burckhardt (née Fischer), gave birth to their son, Georg Ludwig Friedrich Fischer. Hegel had no plans to marry her, and mother and child stayed behind in Jena when he departed to Bamberg for the second time in early March 1807.¹

Although Hegel had considered moving to Bamberg already in late 1800,² the final decision to do so was primarily due to his difficult circumstances. His biographer Terry Pinkard writes: “When, out of the blue, [Friedrich Immanuel] Niethammer offered him a position as editor of a newspaper in Bamberg, Hegel jumped at the chance, although it is clear that he did it with some regret.”³ Although Hegel accepted the editor’s job at the Bamberger Zeitung for want of any other alternatives, he saw it as a strictly temporary solution, “something to which he was not completely averse but which was clearly second-best for him.”⁴ He still hoped to pursue an academic career,⁵ writing in June 1808 to the Jena publisher Carl Friedrich Ernst Frommann: “I cannot go there without a respectable salary, but with one, I would love to, and, if I consider the matter well, would rather go nowhere else. Apart from Jena I almost despair of obtaining honorable work again.”⁶

Although biographical studies have paid some attention to Hegel’s work as an editor in Bamberg,⁷ details of his social life there are generally scant and confine themselves to lists of his activities as well as his friends and acquaintances in the city.⁸ Hegel’s correspondence during his time in Bamberg—from March 1807 to November 1808—suggests that he associated mainly with doctors, clergymen, civil servants, and army officers. While some of these individuals were prominent figures in the city’s history or in the wider intellectual, literary, and educational history of the period, of others there is little trace beyond Hegel’s mentions of them in his correspondence. This article examines the biographies and networks of Hegel’s Bamberg acquaintances more closely and situates them within their historical context in order to give a clearer picture of the philosopher’s social circle during his Bamberg years than previous accounts and to shed further light on the intellectual and social changes that were occurring in the city at the turn of the nineteenth century.

2. Context

The context of Hegel’s life and work in Bamberg between spring 1807 and fall 1808 was shaped by four main factors. The first and probably most important was the secularization of the prince-bishopric [Hochstift] after the city was occupied by Bavarian forces in fall 1802, ending Bamberg’s centuries-old status as an independent ecclesiastical territory. Bamberg, with a population of 18,388 in 1804, went from being the capital of an autonomous territory and residence of a prince-bishop to a provincial Bavarian town.⁹ While some of the city’s residents lost out as a result (the cathedral chapter and university were closed, the prince-bishopric’s bureaucracy and most of the monasteries were dissolved), for others it meant new opportunities. Prior to 1802, Bamberg had been the seat of a Catholic bishopric, and Protestants were unable to practice their religion openly; following its incorporation into Bavaria, the city became multidenominational. The local Protestants were granted the old collegiate church of St. Stephan’s, where they held services from 1806 onwards.¹⁰ Bamberg also underwent major health and social reforms. Adalbert Friedrich Marcus (1753–1816),¹¹ the former personal physician to the prince-bishop, had become founding director of Bamberg’s pioneering general hospital in 1789, but his career subsequently stalled under the reign of the last prince-bishop, Christoph Franz von Buseck (r. 1795–1802). Marcus took the change of rulers as an opportunity to secure the post of medical director for Franconia and implement wide-ranging reforms. In late April 1803, Marcus wrote to Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling that he wanted “to bring medical institutions in Franconia to a point without precedent in Germany.”¹² During that year, he proceeded with breathtaking speed to that end, founding a health board, a hospice, a maternity home, training centers for midwives and medical orderlies, a medical and surgical academy, and a psychiatric institute. As a result, Bamberg’s healthcare system was soon highly advanced by the standards of the time. In May 1803, Schelling wrote to Hegel, “Marcus governs land and people, and his hospital, which is now a medical school, is set up superbly once again.”¹³

Bamberg’s resulting reputation among educated Central Europeans as a center for pioneering medicine was a second key factor that shaped Hegel’s time in the city. Aside from the hospital, this renown was due mainly to Marcus and his intermittent deputy Andreas Röschlaub (1768–1835) championing the new, much-discussed Brunonian theory of medicine, which they began provisionally implementing in Bamberg in the mid-1790s. The Bamberg physicians’ reforms and experiments attracted hordes of young doctors to the city in the years around 1800. A visit by the philosopher Schelling began a phase of collaboration with Marcus and Röschlaub that culminated in Marcus and Schelling copublishing the Yearbooks of Medicine as a Science (Jahrbücher der Medicin als Wissenschaft, 1805–1808).¹⁴

When Marcus became increasingly attracted to Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, however, it caused a rift between him and Röschlaub, who had developed the Brunonian model into his own theory of excitation.¹⁵ Exasperated by Marcus’s egotism and intellectual fickleness, Röschlaub accepted a post in Landshut in 1802, and Marcus replaced him with the young physician Conrad Joseph Kilian (1771–1811) from Jena, who was a firm proponent of Naturphilosophie.¹⁶ However, Kilian also fell out with Marcus in 1804 after Marcus published a critical article about Würzburg’s university and hospital under Kilian’s name. Kilian, who felt he had been slandered and bullied by Marcus, launched legal proceedings against him and published a lengthy polemic attacking Marcus in 1805.¹⁷

Hegel, who may have met Kilian during his time in Jena, was aware of these events. In December 1804, he wrote to his friend Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer (1766–1848)¹⁸—a philosopher, theologian, and fellow native of Württemberg—“I heard of Marcus’s triumph over Kilian and feel sorry for the latter, who despite his actual legal victory is the defeated party.”¹⁹ In a later letter to Niethammer, dated March 1805, Hegel wrote, “Without a doubt, some fine insights are still to be expected from Kilian and Marcus. Kilian at least does not appear to be as completely laid out on the floor against Marcus as it seems, and at least apparently is still able to knock Marcus down.”²⁰ In November 1805, Hegel received a highly critical report about Röschlaub from his correspondent Karl Wilhelm Gottlob Kastner (1783–1857). Röschlaub was alleged to have plagiarized the dissertation of Karl Eberhard Schelling, brother of the philosopher.²¹ Hence, even before 1807, Hegel was aware of Bamberg’s reputation as a leading center for medicine as well as of the quarrels between some of its preeminent physicians.

A third key factor that shaped the historical context of Hegel’s time in Bamberg was the Coalition Wars against Revolutionary/Napoleonic France, in which the city was repeatedly caught up between 1796 and 1815. Bamberg was first occupied by France in 1796, and was divided between French and Austrian occupying forces from December 1800 until April 1801. In summer 1806, French troops were once again stationed in Bamberg, and Napoleon signed the declaration of war on Prussia in the city in early October that same year.²² When the French forces departed from Bamberg, they were joined by the Alsatian priest Gérard Gley (1761–1830), who had left France in 1791 due to the passing of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. After working as a tutor for aristocratic families in Cologne and Mainz, Gley came to Bamberg in 1794, where he discovered the medieval Heliand manuscript in the cathedral library, worked as a language teacher, and in 1795 became editor of the Bamberger Zeitung, the prince-bishopric’s first independent newspaper.²³ According to Matthias Winkler, the success of the paper—which Gley edited until 1801, and then again from 1804 to 1806, from the rear annex of Marcus’s house²⁴—and of the political supplement Charon demonstrates “the innovativeness of the émigré Gley, who shortly after his arrival in Bamberg identified gaps in the publishing market and managed to tap into potential demand.”²⁵ Gley also studied Kant’s philosophy, and met with Schelling and August Wilhelm Schlegel—with whom Marcus presumably put him in touch—in Bamberg in 1800. In 1805, he traveled to Erlangen to attend Johann Gottfried Fichte’s inaugural lecture.²⁶ When Gley joined the troops commanded by Marshal Louis-Nicolas d’Avoût²⁷ as an interpreter in the fall of 1806 and accompanied them to Prussia and Poland, the editorship was left vacant, and Niethammer subsequently offered the post to Hegel, writing:

The last time the French came through the city, the owner of the local newspaper released its editor, a French émigré, to accompany Marshal Davoust and, hoping for his return, temporarily gave the editorship to Bamberg’s Professor Täuber, who is doing such a marvelous job that he has all but tolled the paper’s death knell. This circumstance, in conjunction with the fact that the previous editor is not coming back, has prompted the newspaper’s owner, Mr. Schneidewind or Schneidewang²⁸ or whatever his peculiar-sounding name may be, to seek assistance as quickly as possible.²⁹

Niethammer was initially offered the post himself but turned it down because he already had too many demands on his time, instead passing the offer along to his friend Hegel.³⁰ The editorship in Bamberg came to Hegel thanks to biographical twists and turns resulting from the Coalition Wars. As a resident of Bamberg, he witnessed further effects of the wars firsthand. By August 1808 at the latest, a large number of wounded French soldiers were accommodated in the city.³¹ The same month, Hegel informed Niethammer that Bavarian troops would be moving out and a “10,000-strong” French division would be stationed in the city.³²

A fourth important contextual factor in Hegel’s experience in Bamberg was the rise of bourgeois society there since the 1790s, which provided new cultural opportunities in a city which had traditionally been dominated by the prince-bishop’s court and other administrative structures. The founding of the Bamberger Zeitung in 1795 is just one of several striking examples of these new developments. Informal weekly meetings of a group of local dignitaries (lawyers, doctors, businesspeople, prosperous artisans) led to the founding of a formalized club in 1792. The physician Marcus was one of the leading figures³³ in the club, which was renamed the “Society of Local Dignitaries” in 1796 and then “the Harmony” in 1808. The club provided a sociable meeting place for Bamberg’s gentry and educated bourgeoisie. It accepted “all persons of rank, artists, businessmen, any respected citizens of a noble, moral character,” and had around two hundred members (including both men and women) during Hegel’s time in Bamberg.³⁴ On New Year’s Eve 1808, the philosopher attended a costume party that Marcus held in honor of the district general commissioner, Count Friedrich Karl von Thürheim (1762–1832).³⁵

Another milestone in the rise of bourgeois society was the founding of Bamberg’s theater. Three years after members of the Society of Local Dignitaries set up an amateur theater in 1797, the prince-bishop appointed Daniel Gottlob Quandt (1762–1815), from Leipzig, to establish a professional ensemble in Bamberg once the ongoing War of the Second Coalition was over. After Quandt’s troupe fell into financial difficulties, he was replaced in spring 1802 by the writer Julius Graf von Soden (1754–1831), who had worked with Gley and Marcus as coeditor of the Bamberger Zeitung and its supplement Charon. Soden purchased a property on Zinkenwörth (now Schillerplatz) and had it converted into a theater. In addition to performances of Soden’s own plays and dramas by the popular contemporary playwrights August Wilhelm Iffland and August von Kotzebue, the theater presented older popular works including Schiller’s The Robbers, Lessing’s Emilia Galotti, and Mozart’s operas.³⁶ However, the running costs exceeded Soden’s means, and he was forced to sell the theater in February 1808 (i.e. while Hegel was living in Bamberg) to the innkeeper Anna Maria (Nanette) Kauer. Kauer refurbished the theater and Gesellschaftshaus (a venue for social and cultural events), but its financial situation remained precarious, and there was a frequent turnover of directors.³⁷

3. Montgelas’s Man in Bamberg: Joseph du Terrail Bayard (1765–1815)

Niethammer, who was appointed Protestant school superintendent for Franconia in 1806, undoubtedly played the key part in arranging the editorship for Hegel, but the approval of Joseph du Terrail Bayard, one of the most influential Bavarian officials in the former prince-bishopric, was clearly significant as well. Niethammer, to whom Bayard initially offered the job, passed the offer to his friend Hegel “after reminding Privy Councilor von Bayard of the matter yesterday,” and Bayard himself took over the editorship until Hegel’s arrival.³⁸ In his reply to Niethammer, Hegel signaled that he was interested in principle, and added, “It will be a very advantageous circumstance in this regard for me to deal with Privy Councillor von Bayard.”³⁹ In Bamberg, the philosopher and the Bavarian civil servant were in regular contact. In July 1807, for instance, Hegel let Niethammer know that Bayard had asked after him.⁴⁰ However, when political tensions ran high in Bamberg a month later—“Patrols have abounded in the city for several nights and days,” as Hegel wrote to Niethammer—contact with Bayard appears to have become more difficult:

I have not dared cross Mr. von Bayard’s path at such a time […] I gather that he withdrew from all the managing. Anyone who claimed to the people of Bamberg—you know how they are—that the district government showed much intelligence in operations that contradicted and canceled one another every hour would have gained the reputation among them of having a mania for paradox.⁴¹

In a letter to Niethammer from January 1808, Hegel described Bayard as having a “good head,” but

he is such a completely practical administrator that he has often explained to me that he puts no stock in theory if it does not have a so-called practical use. He shares the usual Bavarian ideas in other ways as well: that Bavarians have an excellent [basic] nature, and that it would not be easy to find elsewhere peasants with such native wit, and so on. This is the sort of reply one hears when the scientific standing, culture, and knowledge expected of every educated man come up for discussion, and when the lack of it in Bavaria is remarked. I told him on one occasion that Bavaria has been a real blot on the luminous painting that is Germany. He thought this was nothing but a self-conceit of Saxons or Protestants who do not want to hear of [Andreas] Lamey,⁴² the founders of the Academy, and so on.⁴³

Hegel mentioned Bayard again in a letter to Niethammer in 1810, by which point Hegel had already moved to Nuremberg.⁴⁴

An attempt to trace Bayard’s biography, of which no in-depth study has yet been published, reveals primarily that he was close to Bavaria’s leading statesman of the day, Maximilian von Montgelas (1759–1838). Bayard came from the County of Artois and is said to have completed part of his education in Paris, in addition to having been enrolled at the University of Ingolstadt as a student of logic between 1783 and 1785.⁴⁵ According to the historian Joachim Heinrich Jäck, he subsequently entered the service of Duke Charles II August of Palatine-Zweibrücken (1746–1795), whose brother would later become Elector Maximilian IV Joseph of Bavaria.⁴⁶ From the early 1790s onwards, Bayard worked as a secretary at the Palatine-Bavarian embassy to the Franconian Imperial Circle in Nuremberg, and in 1792 he became editor of the Teutsche Ministerialzeitung (renamed Deutsche Staats- und Ministerialzeitung in 1793), a Nuremberg newspaper opposed to the French Revolution.⁴⁷ In 1794, Bayard received permission from the Palatine-Bavarian elector to wear the uniform of a lieutenant à la suite.⁴⁸ His duties in Nuremberg included “monitoring attempts by foreign powers to recruit deserters and subjects of the principality, and buying military gear and other items back from them,” in addition to carrying out covert recruitment for the Eleventh Palatine-Bavarian Fusilier Regiment.⁴⁹

Between 1794 and 1798, Bayard regularly supplied Montgelas—who at that time was living in Ansbach as secretary to the exiled Duke of Zweibrücken (the later Maximilian IV Joseph) and working on reforms of the Bavarian civil service⁵⁰—with information about the affairs of the Franconian Circle and messages that arrived in Nuremberg from Paris and Vienna. In March 1795, for instance, he reported on the election of Georg Karl Ignaz von Fechenbach zu Laudenbach (r. 1795–1808) as Prince-Bishop of Würzburg. He also sent Montgelas excerpts from French newspapers.⁵¹

Karl August von Hardenberg (1750–1822), Prussia’s leading statesman in Franconia, evidently took notice of Bayard’s talents, recruiting him into Prussian service and even sending him on a diplomatic mission to Paris.⁵² After Bayard had, according to his own words, “served under three royal ministers […] in Prussia,” he returned to Bavarian service in 1800,⁵³ when he was appointed to a post in the foreign ministry. Upon taking up the office in February, he received a special allowance of three hundred gulden.⁵⁴ In his new role, Bayard attended meetings of the Bavarian state council, established in 1799, where he took positions on a variety of issues and presented several rescripts.⁵⁵ Given Bayard’s earlier work for the Teutsche Ministerialzeitung in Nuremberg and Hegel’s later appointment in Bamberg, it is notable that, in a state council meeting on March 10, 1802, Bayard presented a draft rescript on a matter relating to press affairs that outlined the conditions under which the Duchy of Berg’s privy councilor Johann Anton Mannes should be permitted, subject to certain conditions, “to transform his Düsseldorf gazette into a general advertiser for the Duchy of Berg.”⁵⁶

Following his final state council meeting in October 1802,⁵⁷ Bayard was appointed director of the first deputation of the Würzburg district government in 1803, making him the highest-ranking Bavarian official in the former bishopric after Count Thürheim, general commissioner for the Franconian principalities.⁵⁸ In June 1803, Elector Maximilian IV Joseph promoted Bayard to the rank of full privy councilor “in recognition of our exceptional satisfaction with his services.”⁵⁹ In early October 1805, he met in Würzburg with the commissaires des guerres of the first and second corps of the Napoleonic army in his capacity as the Bavarian representative to negotiate arrangements for supplying French troops in Northern Franconia.⁶⁰ According to Jäck, Bayard met his wife the same year while performing administrative duties in Ansbach.⁶¹

While Bayard resided in Würzburg, artists such as the painter Johann Martin von Wagner (1771–1858) sought his patronage,⁶² and he socialized with Schelling (who was a professor in Würzburg between 1803 and 1806), his wife Caroline, and Meta Forkel-Liebeskind, all of whom were also acquainted with Hegel. In May 1806, for instance, Caroline wrote to Schelling that Bayard had told her “about a letter from Liebeskind to you” that, because it had been “addressed to him,” had “traveled halfway through Germany before finally reaching you.”⁶³

In 1808, Bayard was appointed chancellor of the Main district, with its seat in Bamberg. The post came with an annual salary of 2,600 gulden, making him Bavaria’s second-highest government representative in the district after general commissioner Stephan Freiherr von Stengel (1750–1822), who collected a salary of 6,000 gulden.⁶⁴ In fall 1810, Bayard moved to Ansbach to take up the post of district chancellor for the Rezat district,⁶⁵ but in 1814—one year before his death—he is once again referred to as district chancellor in Bamberg. He died in Ansbach at the age of fifty.⁶⁶

In sum, Bayard was a civil servant who clearly enjoyed the trust of Montgelas and, after several years of service in the state council, was one of the most influential officials in Bavaria’s new Franconian territories from 1803 onwards. He also had a particular interest in press matters and actually worked as a newspaper editor at several points. Although Hegel described him as a pragmatic “administrator,” he appears to have also cultivated friendships with artists and intellectuals in both Würzburg and Bamberg.

4. Aristocrats, Academics, and Army Officers

In a letter to Niethammer’s wife Rosine Eleonore in late May 1807, Hegel concisely summed up their mutual Bamberg acquaintances:

I meet Fuchs at times. I see the Bengels⁶⁷ at times while taking a walk. The tea circle is not as organized during the summer. I am frequently at Ritter’s […] and at Mrs. von Jolli’s. I also frequent Diruf’s house. […] I have been made acquainted with the Countess Rotenhahn⁶⁸ as well. She is a particularly respectable woman, and her daughters are likewise as natural and good-natured as they are educated and full of talents.⁶⁹

A look at the biographies of the individuals mentioned in this passage reveals that they were mainly scholars and army officers and their wives who, like Hegel himself, had only been in Bamberg for a short time. The Protestant theologian Karl Heinrich Fuchs (1773–1847) came from a Huguenot family in Heidelberg. After attending school and university there, he accepted a pastorate in Wachenheim an der Haardt in the Palatinate in 1796. Three years later, he became a Reformed military chaplain in Carl Philipp Joseph von Wrede’s (1767–1838) Electoral Palatine-Bavarian Brigade. He came to Würzburg in 1803 with the army of Lieutenant General Friedrich Wilhelm zu Isenburg during the bishopric’s secularization. There he worked as a Protestant pastor—first for military personnel, later for all the city’s Protestant residents—and consistorial councilor. In 1804, the local university awarded Fuchs a doctorate and gave him a temporary post as professor of theology. Like Bayard, Fuchs moved from Würzburg to Bamberg in 1806, after Würzburg became capital of the newly formed Grand Duchy of Franconia. In 1807, he married Friederike Vogel, the daughter of a treasury official from Bayreuth.⁷⁰ After serving in Bamberg as pastor of the newly opened Protestant church of St. Stephan’s and as a consistorial councilor, Fuchs moved to Regensburg in 1810 to take up a post as dean. He subsequently spent a period in Ansbach before ending his career in Munich as senior consistorial councilor and second preacher [zweiter Hauptprediger]. A eulogy printed after Fuchs’s death in 1847 said that he had devoted himself to the “uniquely difficult task” of establishing Protestant worship in Bamberg “with prudence, intelligence, noble dignity, and firm resolve.”⁷¹

Like Bayard’s, Fuchs’s career took numerous unexpected turns due to the upheavals of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era. Moreover, like Bayard, he played a part in integrating the secularized Franconian bishoprics into the Bavarian state. Hegel mentions Fuchs several times in his correspondence.⁷² In July 1807, the philosopher commented on the pastor’s wife: “Young [Miss] Fuchs’s father [Karl Heinrich Fuchs] has a splendid garden and hothouse in Bayreuth, but his daughter’s hothouse warm feeling in Bamberg perhaps does not meet with a similarly hot embrace by others.”⁷³ In January 1808 Hegel wrote to Niethammer, “The local Protestant Church will be opened in a week. [Karl] Fuchs is having an invitational text printed. I have just read the proofs.”⁷⁴ Hegel also refers to the grave illness of the Fuchses’ eldest child in one of his letters.⁷⁵

The “Mrs. von Jolli” whom Hegel mentions several times in his correspondence with obvious admiration⁷⁶ was born Marie Eleonore Alt. Although originally from Bamberg, she married an army officer from elsewhere and left the city with him a few years later. Her husband, Ludwig (Louis) Jolly (1780–1853), came, like Fuchs, from a Huguenot family in the Palatinate; his father was the pastor of a Walloon church in Mannheim. At the age of fifteen, Ludwig Jolly joined an Electoral Palatine-Bavarian fusilier regiment and embarked on a military career. In 1803, he was posted to the garrison in Bamberg, where he met the seventeen-year-old Marie Eleonore, a Catholic registrar’s daughter. He married her in October of the following year. Jolly returned to war in 1805, and in 1806 came back from the War of the Fourth Coalition with the rank of captain. In 1808, their first daughter was born, and they spent half a year in Nuremberg. The following year, he left the army and returned with Marie Eleonore (now pregnant again) to his native Mannheim, where he later became mayor and a successful businessman.⁷⁷

Karl Jakob Diruf (1774–1869), with whose family Hegel was on sociable terms, was likewise a native of the Electoral Palatine, and his name again suggests Huguenot ancestry. Diruf studied philosophy and medicine in his home city of Heidelberg before practicing in Heilbronn. Later, he served as a doctor in the Austrian army and became a prosector⁷⁸ at the veterinary school in Munich. He also taught at Munich’s medical school and trained orderlies at the Herzog-Josephs-Spital. Subsequently he accompanied the Bavarian crown prince (the later Ludwig I) on trips to Landshut, Göttingen, Italy, and France. In late 1805, Diruf was posted to Bamberg as medical councilor and junior physician with responsibility for medical and charitable institutions.⁷⁹ He took over from Kilian as deputy to the aforementioned Marcus.⁸⁰ It did not take long for relations to cool between Diruf and his superior. In 1807, a row broke out with Marcus and the committee responsible for supervising Bamberg’s hospital, because Diruf refused to compile monthly statistics on the patients.⁸¹ As a result, Marcus threw his weight behind his nephew Karl Moritz Marc (1784–1855) and tried to have him replace Diruf. In a petition to the Bavarian Interior Ministry in September 1807, Marcus claimed that “medical councilor Diruf’s behavior suggests he himself wishes to be posted elsewhere.”⁸² Despite this, Diruf retained the post for the time being, although he mainly worked in the psychiatric institute and hospice to avoid further conflict with Marcus. Diruf also taught at the Bamberg medical and surgical academy, and, when this was reorganized into a school for country doctors in fall 1809, he was given responsibility for teaching anthropology, zoology, physics, and public health [Staatsarzneywissenschaft].⁸³ In January 1810, he moved to the Grand Duchy of Würzburg, where he worked as a general practitioner, medical councilor, and spa physician in Bocklet.⁸⁴ Another point of interest in the present context is Diruf’s publication of a work on natural explanations of meteorites [Ideen zur Naturerklärung der Meteor- oder Luftsteine] in Göttingen in 1805, a topic that Hegel later addressed in his lectures on the philosophy of nature.⁸⁵

Hegel’s circle of acquaintances in Bamberg was thus made up of well-educated individuals who rarely settled in one place for long and whose path of migration brought them to Bamberg during the tumultuous period between 1802 and 1810. In late 1807, this group expanded to include a married couple whom he described as a “new acquisition” for the city: the lawyer and flute virtuoso Johann Heinrich Liebeskind (1768–1847) and his wife Sophia Margarethe Dorothea, known as Meta (1765–1853). The daughter of the Göttingen theologian Rudolph Wedekind had already had an eventful life by this point: having separated from her first husband, the music scholar Johann Nicolaus Forkel, after a brief marriage, Meta Liebeskind had a year-long affair with the poet Gottfried August Bürger, who afterwards scornfully referred to her in letters and poems as Furciferaria (a reference to the Latin furcifer, a fork fitted around the necks of slaves in ancient Roman times, combined here with sexual overtones). Beginning in the late 1780s, she translated numerous works from English and French, including Constantin-François Volney’s Les Ruines, ou méditations sur les révolutions des empires (1791), Thomas Paine’s political treatise Rights of Man (1792), and William Godwin’s novel Caleb Williams (1795). During the Republic of Mainz (1792/93), she moved in the circles of leading Jacobins, including Georg Foster and her brother Georg Wedekind. Because of these personal ties, she was imprisoned for a period after the republic’s fall. In 1794, she married Liebeskind, two years after she had given birth to his son in the village of Vorra in the parish of Frensdorf, not far from Bamberg. The child was christened Adalbert Joseph Anton, and his godparents are listed as the Bamberg physician Marcus and Joseph Sippel, a pharmacist, city councilor, and professor of natural science at the University of Bamberg.⁸⁶ The Liebeskinds lived in Riga, Königsberg (1794), and Ansbach (1797), before moving in spring 1807 to Bamberg, where Johann took up a post in the judiciary.⁸⁷

Hegel wrote about Meta in a letter to Niethammer (in which he presumed that the free-spirited author and translator would “not be unknown” to his friend):

Her friendship with Mrs. [Caroline] Schelling might perhaps—depending on one’s judgment of the latter—add some timidity to one’s curiosity to get to know her. She seemed good-natured to me, and he is indeed quite a charming man. The manners and culture of the rest of Bamberg are perhaps not completely suited to this family, and are perhaps even somewhat opposed to it. So I am all the more inclined to think I will find an interesting, free and easy circle of friends here.⁸⁸

Meta had known Caroline Böhmer-Schlegel-Schelling, the daughter of the Göttingen orientalist Johann David Michaelis, since her youth. They had lived together during the time of the Republic of Mainz, and Meta had visited her in Jena in 1797 en route from Königsberg to Ansbach, and later in Würzburg in 1804. The record of this second visit shows that she was acquainted with Bayard as well.⁸⁹

For a while, close personal relations developed between Liebeskind, his wife, and Hegel. “The Liebeskinds are a great acquisition for me,” Hegel wrote to Niethammer on July 8, 1807, “I visit almost no other house.”⁹⁰ A month later, the philosopher informed his friend that “a few days ago I played a game of l’hombre with the Countess [Julie] von Soden hosted at Mrs. Liebeskind’s.”⁹¹ However, Liebeskind was transferred to Munich in late 1807, so their personal contact with Hegel lasted only a few months.⁹²

The handful of Catholic families that Hegel associated with included Georg Franz Pflaum (1778–1807) and his wife. Pflaum and his father, Matthäus Pflaum (1748–1821), a privy councilor and judicial official who rose to prominence as a criminal law reformer in the Prince-Bishopric of Bamberg in the 1790s,⁹³ were also friends with Niethammer. Georg Pflaum’s career began under the last prince-bishop of Bamberg, Christoph Franz von Buseck. In the court almanac of 1796, Pflaum is listed as a canon [Domicellar] at the collegiate chapter of St. Stephan.⁹⁴ He was promoted the following year, and later became privy councilor [Hofrat] and junior treasury counsellor [zweiter Kammerkonsulent]. On September 2, 1802, he married Barbara Schlehlein, daughter of the senior civil servant Johann Georg Albert Schlehlein, in a ceremony at the cathedral presided over by the prince-bishop himself.⁹⁵ After secularization, the Bavarian government appointed the ambitious young lawyer to the position of judge.⁹⁶ However, Hegel’s acquaintance with Pflaum was only brief, for on May 2, 1807, just two months after his arrival in Bamberg, Pflaum passed away. The records of the parish of St. Martin’s list the cause of death as “gout and inflammatory fever.”⁹⁷

Hegel immediately passed news of the death to Niethammer:

Pflaum died but two hours ago. This news—which I did not want to delay sending you, dear friend, since I know how much this family interests you—will surprise you as well, since no one expected it. His father told me that the day before yesterday he wrote you convinced that Pflaum felt better—a conviction shared by doctors, acquaintances, and even the patient himself. The illness was a painful gout moving about in the members. He suffered from it greatly, and his wife no less.⁹⁸

In a letter to Niethammer’s wife composed four weeks later, Hegel again referred to the unexpected death and gave a detailed account of the young widow’s grief.⁹⁹ Pflaum had been treated by the physicians Marcus and Johann Philipp Ritter (†1813), both of whom were also personally acquainted with Hegel. According to Jäck, Ritter had introduced the young Marcus (who converted from Judaism to Catholicism in 1781) into Bamberg society, and remained friends with him until his death.¹⁰⁰ In a letter to Niethammer in August 1807, Hegel wrote that he enjoyed the “occasional glass of wine after dinner with the honorable Privy Councillor [Johann Philipp] Ritter.”¹⁰¹

5. Complex Relationships: Hegel, the Pauluses, and Adalbert Friedrich Marcus

As we have seen, most of Hegel’s acquaintances in Bamberg were, like himself, outsiders who were only living in the city for a few months or years as a temporary stepping-stone in their careers. Another example of this pattern is the Protestant theologian Heinrich Eberhard Gottlob Paulus (1761–1851) and his wife Karoline. The Pauluses, who, like Hegel, were natives of Württemberg, merit more detailed attention than Hegel’s other acquaintances for two reasons: Firstly, they had first met each other in Jena¹⁰² and subsequently in Nuremberg and Ansbach.¹⁰³ Secondly, Karoline had had an affair with Marcus in Bad Bocklet in summer 1801, which led to her becoming pregnant. Although August Wilhelm, born in spring 1802, was raised in the Paulus household, both mother and father knew that he was Marcus’s son.¹⁰⁴ The family moved to Würzburg—at that time under Bavarian rule—in 1803, where Paulus assumed the post of professor of theology at the university (an appointment that Marcus had a key part in arranging).¹⁰⁵ Things became thorny, however, when Würzburg temporarily regained its status as an independent territory, and Paulus was transferred to Bamberg of all places. Paulus was originally supposed to be given a post at the University of Altdorf, but the district general commissioner Count Thürheim, unimpressed by Paulus’s accomplishments in Würzburg, prevented this. Instead of the professorship, Paulus received the office of consistorial councilor and educational superintendent in Bamberg.¹⁰⁶

The Pauluses moved into Marcus’s home on Lange Straße in central Bamberg in summer 1807.¹⁰⁷ This created a very delicate situation, since not only did Marcus’s wife live there, but also her cousin, with whom Marcus had also had an illegitimate son in 1802. Consequently, Marcus began looking for a second house.¹⁰⁸ Staying in Marcus’s home evidently opened up some promising career opportunities for Paulus, for in August 1807 Hegel wrote to Niethammer: “The Pauluses are connected through Marcus and the wife of the Commercial Councilor with one branch of the [District] President’s [Stengel’s] family.”¹⁰⁹ The “wife of the Commercial Councilor” was Juliana (Esther) Stieglitz (1765–1834), the widow of Marcus’s brother, the Russian commercial councilor Nathan Marc,¹¹⁰ who died in Bamberg in 1801. Her second marriage (in 1810) was to the widowed district general commissioner Stephan von Stengel, who this passage from the letters suggests she was already close friends with in 1807.¹¹¹ Alongside Bayard, Stengel was one of the most influential Bavarian officials in the Main district.¹¹² Marcus gave a New Year’s party in his honor at Bamberg’s Feast of St. Michael in 1808, which Hegel also attended.¹¹³

Hegel evidently hoped his acquaintance with Paulus would bring him financial benefits, too. In late August 1807, he wrote to Niethammer that he had heard that the king had “earmarked 300,000 florins for education, of which 45,000 florins are to fall to the province of Bamberg. I have suggested to Paulus that he should get hold of some of it for me as well, since I also belong in education.” However, the next line indicates that he regarded the theologian as more of an abstract theorist than a practical organizer: “The only question is whether he is sufficiently in command of the empirical side to do so.”¹¹⁴

After the departure of the Liebeskinds, the Pauluses appear to have been one of the central nodes of Hegel’s social network in Bamberg. Alluding to their shared roots in Württemberg and time together in Jena, he wrote to Niethammer in November 1807 that “no people anywhere can compare with those of Jena, and especially with the Swabians of Jena. Just do not whisk Paulus, too, away from here in the organizational shuffle.”¹¹⁵ In a letter to Johann Sulpiz (Melchior Dominikus) Boisserée (1783–1854)—an art collector and friend of Hegel—in August 1808, Dorothea Schlegel (1764–1839) also spoke of the friendship between these two Swabian scholars who had ended up in Bamberg together:

Hegel lives in Bamberg and writes the local newspaper; he spends every evening at Paulus’s house, and since, although I was silent in company, my objections must have been written all over my face, Paulus and Hegel had a conversation with me in a more select circle in which I disputed all manner of things and revealed my thoughts.¹¹⁶

In September 1808, however, it seemed that Paulus would be leaving Bamberg. “Paulus has recently been on the road for school and curriculum inspections,” Hegel wrote to Niethammer,

I am sure the trip showed what an impact a good example can have. He has had occasion to visit Nuremberg with his wife and is impatiently awaiting something in the offing there. […] There is a real earthquake going on here. No one stands fast in his present position. Anyone who has not just been appointed is about to leave, wants to leave, or fears having to.¹¹⁷

A month later, in a letter to Karl Ludwig von Knebel (1744–1834),¹¹⁸ a poet and translator living in Weimar, Hegel wrote regretfully that “the acquaintances I had here, especially Paulus, are being once more dispatched elsewhere in the [mis]organizational shuffle. Paulus will go to Nuremberg as School Councilor; others are off in other directions.”¹¹⁹ However, on October 26, 1808, Hegel was informed by Niethammer (whose reforms have left their mark on the Bavarian school system to this day) that he had been nominated as rector of the gymnasium in Nuremberg and was to begin work there the following week. In the new role, he would be “implementing reforms to the gymnasium under District School Councilor Paulus’s instruction.”¹²⁰ Consequently, Hegel was at least able to maintain this contact—one that was of particular interest due to his relationship with Karoline, which may have been intimate in nature (though it is impossible to say for certain based on the available evidence).¹²¹

6. Observations on the Nature of Hegel’s Bamberg Network

In a 1979 essay, Wolfgang Reinhard observed that urban elites are “not primarily constituted by their members’ possessing the same social attributes, but through the social entanglement [Verflechtung] of these members, which enables, facilitates, and channels interactions.”¹²² Reinhard identified “four categories of personal relations that play a key role as potential bearers of interaction, for it can be shown that ‘networks’ of such relations have enabled not just solitary transactions but the formation of groups.” These four relations are kinship, common regional origin, friendship, and patronage.¹²³

If we analyze Hegel’s network in Bamberg in terms of these categories, kinship clearly played no role (unlike in the next chapter of his life in Nuremberg, where he married Marie Helena Susanna von Tucher, a member of one of the city’s leading patrician families¹²⁴), but common origin, friendship, and patronage were indeed significant factors. Hegel shared a common regional origin (in Protestant Württemberg) with his main correspondent, Niethammer and with the Pauluses. It is also striking that most of Hegel’s central acquaintances in Bamberg were Protestant, and that several of them (Fuchs, Jolly, Diruf) came from the Electoral Palatinate, a southwest German region to which the Swabian Hegel may have felt a closer affinity than to Catholic Franconia. In any case, when Hegel received the offer from Bamberg in early 1807, he was still hoping for an appointment at the University of Heidelberg.¹²⁵

Friendship was definitely an important category in Hegel’s network in Bamberg. He maintained his friendships both by correspondence (especially with Niethammer) and by socializing in person; it is notable that he befriended both men and women.¹²⁶ In his study of correspondence between Würzburg professors around 1800, Clemens Tangerding found that friendships were not cultivated simply for their own sake, but always had an instrumental and strategic character as well:

In the scholars’ correspondence, friendship manifests itself […] as an appeal to inaugurate or to continue mutual aid. It is striking how often professors proclaim friendship to colleagues when they are asking their addressee for something or granting the other person’s request.¹²⁷

Hegel was not the only one cultivating contacts for the sake of his future career; Paulus, to give one example, can also be observed behaving in a very similar way.

The final category, patronage, was one of the most important social relations in the early modern society of estates,¹²⁸ and it continued to play a key role in the politically turbulent period around 1800. It was politically influential men like Bayard and the district general commissioners Thürheim and Stengel who decided on the promotions and postings that determined the course of people’s careers. With respect to finding patronage, Hegel again appears to have corresponded and kept company with the right people.

One thing that is striking is the transitory nature of Hegel’s network. Reading his Bamberg correspondence, one has a sense not of a permanently settled group, but of constant comings and goings. Civil servants were frequently relocated due to Bavaria’s wide-ranging bureaucratic reforms in the wake of secularization and mediatization, while clergymen like Fuchs and doctors like Diruf pulled up stakes after a few years to take up more lucrative posts elsewhere. Hegel likewise saw Bamberg as a mere temporary stopping point: by his own admission, the editorship there was a way of

reaching Bavarian ground and soil at least temporarily, and of having my shoes in it even if not yet my feet. Since this engagement does not bind me to a definite time, in Bamberg I can doubtless for the moment pursue private study and discharge my obligations at the same time.¹²⁹

In this context of high geographic mobility, letters were a crucial method of maintaining relationships between different locations.¹³⁰ This mobility was also a key reason why the scholars and civil servants that this article has focused on did not develop long-lasting ties to Bamberg and its inhabitants;¹³¹ for them, the old seat of the Franconian bishopric, reduced in 1803 to the status of a provincial Bavarian town, was merely a temporary stop along the way to a more lucrative or appealing career opportunity.

Introduction

By the end of 1813, Napoleon’s Grand Empire had collapsed in central Europe and, apart from a few isolated garrisons, French forces had withdrawn from all the territories east of the Rhine. With their coordinated military operations, the alliance between Russia, Prussia, Austria, and Britain had achieved its goal. Most recently, a series of uprisings had forced the French to withdraw from the territory of the Netherlands and present-day Belgium, which Napoleon had annexed in 1810. In Italy, Viceroy Eugène Beauharnais was struggling to hold his position on the Adige River; meanwhile, the Austrians had already regained control of the region to the east, Veneto, and the British field marshal, Lord Wellington, had retaken the Iberian Peninsula and advanced deep into southern France.

Significant differences emerged among the allies over whether to continue the offensive. Klemens von Metternich, Austria’s leading statesman, was willing to recognize the Rhine and the Alps as France’s “natural borders.” Tsar Alexander I of Russia, by contrast, pushed for an invasion of France, arguing that a lasting peace could only be agreed upon in Paris, and only with someone other than Napoleon. The British cabinet in London, primarily concerned with the fate of the Netherlands, was wary of offering overly generous concessions to the defeated French emperor and took the unusual step of dispatching the foreign secretary, Lord Castlereagh, to the continent.¹

As 1813 drew to a close, the allied powers resolved to continue the military campaign, and Karl Philipp of Schwarzenberg’s and Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher’s armies marched into France, experiencing a series of victories and defeats in the early months of 1814. Meanwhile, Napoleon rebuffed all diplomatic overtures. When Russia, Prussia, Austria, and Britain signed the Treaty of Chaumont on March 9, 1814, Castlereagh was one step closer to achieving his great ambition of turning the wartime coalition into a “quadruple alliance” for peace. The terms of the treaty were utterly unprecedented in the diplomacy of the day: a twenty-year military alliance, a coordinated continuation of the war until Napoleon’s defeat, and jointly conducted peace negotiations. The intention, in Castlereagh’s words, was “not only to procure, but to preserve peace.”² The allied forces renewed their westward push and captured Paris on March 31, 1814; having lost the support of his marshals, Napoleon subsequently abdicated on April 6. Two weeks later, on April 23, the four allied powers—now joined by Portugal—signed an armistice with France, represented by the new French foreign minister, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, acting on behalf of Louis XVIII, who had been restored to the throne.

Austria’s War in Italy, 1813/14

The implosion of Napoleon’s Grand Empire in the second half of 1813 and his retreat to France left central Europe to the north and south of the Alps in a “limbo of unresolved questions.”³ The territories from which Napoleon’s troops had withdrawn found themselves facing very different fates. The governor of the Russian tsar asserted claims to Poland by right of military conquest, and the representative of the Austrian emperor laid claim to northern Italy for similar reasons. Meanwhile, the German territories recovered from the French were, except where the allies acknowledged their ruler, placed under the control of a provisional central administration for the transition period, which had been set up in 1813 under the leadership of Baron vom Stein on behalf of the alliance.⁴ Matters were different yet again in those south German members of the Confederation of the Rhine that had voluntarily switched to the side of the anti-French coalition; Bavaria led the way with the Treaty of Ried (October 8, 1813).

On both sides of the Alps, the decisive factor in the potential new state order was the political interests of the Austrian Empire. At the same time that the far better-known battles of the “Wars of Liberation” were taking place in in Saxony and along the Main River, Austrian forces were independently (with only occasional support from the British) waging war against the Italian viceroy Eugène, Napoleon’s stepson and general.

Vienna had never taken its eyes off the Duchy of Milan, an economically important territory that Austria had acquired in 1713 but been forced to cede to Napoleon’s Cisalpine Republic in 1797; the empire had likewise ruled the regions of Veneto, Istria, and Dalmatia from 1797 to 1805 before losing them to the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy. The Austrians’ military victories against Eugène, a celebrated general, in 1813 and 1814 allowed them to secure control of northern Italy, paving the way for the proclamation of the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia in April 1815.

Italy was high on the political agenda of Emperor Francis I of Austria and his leading minister, Metternich. Metternich’s first “vision of a rebuilt Europe in a state of peace,” which he devised in May 1813 as Austria was tentatively drawing closer to the anti-Napoleon coalition, called for the restitution of the Papal States and for Austria to be given the region of Veneto to the east of the Adige.⁵ At the talks with Napoleon in February 1814, Metternich called for the restoration of Italy’s independent states (états indépendans).⁶

After prolonged hesitation, a phase of neutrality, and several attempts at mediation, the Habsburg Empire finally sided with Russia and Prussia in mid-August 1813 and declared war on France. The largest of the alliance’s three armies, the Army of Bohemia, with just under 240,000 troops under Schwarzenberg’s command, set off towards Dresden to the north, where an inconclusive engagement ensued in late August.⁷

At the same time, the far smaller Army of Inner Austria, an all-Austrian force of 50,000 men under the command of General Johann von Hiller, began operations against Viceroy Eugène along the border between Carinthia, Carniola, and Friuli. By mid-October 1813, when the Battle of the Nations was fought at Leipzig, the viceroy had been forced to abandon Illyria, Friuli, and eastern Veneto (apart from a few fortresses and the city of Venice) and withdraw his French–Italian troops beyond the Tagliamento.⁸

The Austrians now attempted to come at their enemies from behind through the Adige and Eisack valleys, a plan that required control of the road through the Puster valley, over which the Austrian lieutenant field marshal Franz Philipp Fenner von Fenneberg and Italian general Alessandro Gifflenga fought in October. This military situation explains Metternich’s interest in quickly concluding the Treaty of Ried with Bavaria; the seventh secret article of that document allowed the Austrians to conduct military operations in Tyrol.⁹ Austria could thus move troops and supplies through Bavarian territory in the Inn valley without disruption, and from there south via the Brenner Pass, even before a decision had been made about returning Tyrol to Austria. Moreover, the troops stationed in Upper Austria to defend against Bavaria—around 25,000 men under the command of the general Prince Heinrich XV of Reuss-Plauen—could now be redeployed to reinforce the Army of Inner Austria. Emperor Francis appointed Reuss military governor of all conquered territories in Italy.¹⁰

By the end of October, Hiller’s Austrian troops had passed through the Puster valley and occupied the cities of Bolzano and Trento. To circumvent Gifflenga’s blockade of the Chiusa di Verona, he advanced toward Vicenza via the Sugana valley, forcing Eugène to beat a rapid retreat to the west bank of the Adige, where he set up headquarters in Verona. The viceroy now found his position threatened from the south as well, for the Austrians, supported by the British Navy, had landed on the Adriatic coast and taken control of Ferrara.

In early 1814, as the allied forces were marching into France, the new commander-in-chief of the Austrian army in Italy, Field Marshal Heinrich von Bellegarde, initiated negotiations with King Joachim Murat of Naples. Bellegarde, who now had 55,000 men at his disposal, did not want to attack Eugène’s position on the Adige without the support of Murat, whose army controlled the areas south of the Po. In a treaty of alliance signed on January 11, 1814, the king pledged to send 30,000 men into battle against Eugène. He launched his first offensive near Ancona in mid-February.

Thereupon, Eugène withdrew from Verona, the southern Alpine passes, and the line of the Adige to a position on the far side of the Mincio, between Lake Garda and Mantua. Neither side advanced significantly at the Battle of the Mincio River on February 8. Clashes with Murat along the Po continued, and Eugène’s position came under a new threat when British troops under Lord William Bentinck landed in Tuscany in early March 1814 and occupied the Ligurian coast up to Genoa.

Eugène’s position in Italy finally became unsustainable with Napoleon’s abdication on April 13, 1814; the viceroy and Bellegarde formally ended armed conflict in Italy with the conventions of Schiarino-Rizzino and Mantua (on April 16 and 23, respectively). The whole of Lombardy (up to the old border along the Ticino) came under Austrian control, and the remaining French and Italian garrisons were ordered to surrender. Hostilities ceased and the French troops withdrew to the west. In the face of mass unrest in Milan, Eugène declared his abdication on April 26 and left Verona with his wife Augusta and two-week-old daughter Théodelinde. Accompanied by an Austrian escort, they set out for the court of Eugène’s Bavarian stepfather, King Maximilian I Joseph in Munich.¹¹

Just as the Russian tsar now controlled most of Poland, the Austrian emperor, thanks to the conquests by his troops, had taken control of the region north of the Po, from the Adriatic to the Ticino (between Lake Maggiore and Pavia), which marked the border with Sardinia-Piedmont. This was the region granted to the Habsburg Empire in the second secret article of the First Peace of Paris of May 30, 1814: “Les possessions de Sa Majesté Impériale et Royale Apostolique en Italie seront limitées par le Pô et le Tesin et le lac majeur.”¹² The public part of the treaty executed Metternich’s plan of dividing the rest of Italy into sovereign states (etats souverains).¹³

In the fluid situation during the campagne de France and the engagements along the Mincio in spring 1814, various plans were drawn up for reorganizing central Europe, based on the principles to which the four powers had agreed. For example, in April 1814, Karl August von Hardenberg, prime minister of Prussia, set out a “plan for the future arrangement of Europe” (Plan für die künftige Gestaltung Europas).¹⁴ Napoleon’s defeat, the document begins, has “undone his monstrous plans of world domination”; the victors must now, “through a just equilibrium and balanced distribution of power,” establish a European order that would ensure a stable, manageable peace. France was to be limited to its 1789 borders, while Russia had “every right to a considerable enlargement. Austria, Prussia, Sardinia, and Holland shall be restored, and receive the power and territorial expansion necessary to maintain both equilibrium and their […] independence.” Regarding Tuscany, Modena, the Papal States, and Naples, the document makes a less binding commitment: they were to be “restored as circumstances permit.” Switzerland would be “free and independent of any external influence,” while Germany was to be “a confederation of sovereign states united by a federal treaty.” Bavaria also gets a mention: as compensation for territories ceded to Austria, it was to receive Würzburg, Aschaffenburg, Hammelburg, districts in Baden and Hesse between the Main, Tauber, and Neckar, and territories on the left bank of the Rhine between Speyer, Landau, and Kaiserslautern.

Imaginary maps were a key component of the political plans. New borders were imposed on rulerless regions, with the promise of bringing stability and greater security to Europe and preventing a revival of French hegemony. The major German-speaking powers, Prussia and Austria, sought to compensate themselves for the extensive territories they had lost in the treaties of Pressburg (1805) and Tilsit (1807). Hardenberg’s plan aimed to restore both powers to the size they had been in 1805—measured not in terms of geographical area, but of population. The process of tallying up subjects and shuffling them around had its roots in cameralist resettlement theories and the mechanistic calculi born of the eighteenth-century faith in numbers. The Congress of Vienna was denounced even at the time for attempting it. Other powers articulated their interests more emphatically. For example, Britain insisted that the French withdraw from the Dutch-Belgian region and that the port of Antwerp be demilitarized; furthermore, the British delegation did not want colonial matters to so much as appear on the agendas at the peace talks or the congress.

The fundamental decisions about the new European order had already been made before the Congress of Vienna convened in late 1814 and early 1815. According to the First Peace of Paris,¹⁵ signed on May 30, 1814, the Netherlands were to be enlarged and ruled by the House of Orange, the independent states of Germany were to be united by a “federative bond,” Switzerland was to be constituted as independent of all external influences, and Italy was, in the document’s succinct formula, to be composed of sovereign states. These fundamental arrangements had first been formulated when the four allies met in February 1814; they arose out of an interest in creating a line of militarily strong buffer states along France’s eastern border to prevent any future incursions into central Europe and the Italian peninsula. Secret articles appended to the Paris treaty settled France’s Alpine border in favor of Sardinia-Piedmont and Austria, though Savoy was to remain in French hands for the time being. The former territories of the Holy Roman Empire on the left bank of the Rhine, which France had occupied since 1792 and now had to return, were to be used for the expansion of Holland and to compensate Prussia and other German states.

Italy’s Political Landscape in 1814/1815

Austria’s dominance in northern Italy was the result of the military developments between August 1813 and April 1814: Austria had fought the war against the Kingdom of Italy, which was collapsing along with Napoleon’s empire, singlehandedly, which meant that time-consuming diplomatic agreements or complex transitional administrations were not necessary. All the Great Powers were prepared to recognize the Austrian Empire’s exclusive control over northern Italy, provided that the House of Savoy’s legitimate claims in Piedmont-Sardinia were respected. Britain played a special role due to the superiority of its navy. It controlled the island of Sicily and gave protection to the Bourbons, the ruling family of Naples, who were living there in exile. Britain also supported the Austrians in the North Adriatic and intervened in the Tuscany-Liguria region.

As already noted, the peace treaty of May 1814 formalized the Habsburgs’ dominance, fixing Sardinia’s border along the line of the Ticino and awarding all the territories to its east, from the Alps to the Po, to the Austrian emperor. At the Congress of Vienna, Metternich was able, by doggedly exploiting disagreement among the Swiss cantons, to successfully assert a further claim to a small but strategically important Alpine region: in March 1815, the three districts of Valtellina (Bormio, Sondrio, and Chiavenna), located to the north of Lake Como, became part of Austria.¹⁶ Between 1822 and 1825, a new road was built there that directly linked Tyrol to Lombardy via the Stelvio Pass; at an elevation of 2,758 meters, it remains the second-highest paved Alpine pass to this day.

It was only the Peace of Paris that confirmed that not just Veneto but also Lombardy would return to Habsburg control.¹⁷ Already in March 1814, however, Emperor Francis had begun issuing decrees over what he termed his “conquered provinces” in Italy.¹⁸ Following the peace agreement, Field Marshal Bellegarde, commander-in-chief of the Austrian troops, was appointed commissioner of the occupied Italian territories. Returning from London to Vienna in July 1814, Metternich pushed for Austria’s sovereignty over the occupied territories in northern Italy to be formally recognized as soon as possible.¹⁹ Provisional civil administrations were set up in Milan and Venice. They assisted the Central Organizing Court Commission (Central-Organisirungs-Hof-Commission), established in Vienna in late July 1814 to reorganize the territories Austria had won back or newly acquired.

In February 1815, Emperor Francis decided on the proposals of the organizing commission, and in April 1815 awarded “my Italian states” the status of a kingdom, though the name Regno Lombardo-Veneto was only introduced at the last minute.²⁰ As the name suggests, this kingdom, established by the highly condensed atto costitutivo of April 7, 1815, was a composite state, with two separate governors (Franz Joseph Graf Saurau in Milan and Peter Graf Goëss in Venice) and two advisory assemblies known as “congregations.”²¹ The final institutional arrangement, based on the structures of the Austrian states, was agreed upon during the emperor’s lengthy tour of the kingdom between October 1815 and May 1816; Metternich’s proposals on this matter consistently sought to strengthen the state’s rights to self-government.²² Francis’s younger brother Archduke Anton was appointed viceroy, but he never took up the office and was replaced by his brother Rainer in 1818.²³

Austria’s “sphere of hegemony” on the Italian peninsula²⁴ extended far beyond the new regno, encompassing Tuscany, Modena, Parma, and Piacenza as well. In summer 1814, Austria had contingents stationed throughout this region to defend the Habsburg Empire’s claims if necessary. Victor Emmanuel I of Sardinia–Piedmont, who was restored to his throne in May 1814 with the support and close involvement of Austria, immediately laid claim to western Lombardy and Parma. King Murat of Naples, despite having nominally been an ally of Austria since the start of 1814, was also considered a loose cannon, especially given that he had troops stationed far outside his territory.

Hence, Metternich’s political plans to stabilize Europe involved not just central Europe but also Italy in its entirety. In mid-1814, before the start of the Congress of Vienna, he considered founding a Lega Italica, which was intended to serve a twofold security function: firstly as a defensive military alliance to protect against France and secondly as a kind of “central police force” to ward off Jacobinism, which Metternich viewed as a perpetual threat. He saw the principles of the French Revolution and the possible foundation of a unified Italian state codified in a constitution as an ever-present danger that had to be “killed off.”²⁵ Metternich’s policy on Italy was—from an earlier stage and to a more pronounced extent than his policy on the German Confederation—dominated by considerations of security. As a result of these concerns, he sought to maintain direct or indirect control over the peninsula so that Austria could maintain a military defense able to quash any effort to expand on France’s part while also keeping a watchful eye on the Italian territories, ready to intervene swiftly in the event of revolutionary unrest.²⁶ The restitution of the individual states of the ancien régime (with minimal changes to borders) and a rejection of constitutions were further cornerstones of Metternich’s plans for Italy. Vienna avoided any policy or terminology that so much as hinted at “the idea of unifying Italy into a single power.”²⁷ It was primarily for this reason that the Napoleonic Regno d’Italia was replaced by the Habsburgian Regno Lombardo-Veneto.

Metternich’s tactic for the negotiations at the Congress of Vienna, which began in September 1814, was to delay any discussion of Italian matters for as long as possible.²⁸ He thereby intended to win time while developments unfolded in Naples, where King Murat was opposing French and Spanish demands for the restitution of the Bourbon monarchy. When, at the first official meeting of the decision-making Committee of Eight on November 13, 1814, the Spanish representative Pedro Gómez Labrador proposed the formation of a separate committee to specifically address Italy’s restructuring, along the same lines as had been done a month earlier for Germany, Metternich, who was chairing the meeting, rebuffed him with uncharacteristic verve: Italy, he said, had never been a “true political body” but “only a collection of independent states […] grouped under a single geographic designation,” and, moreover, unlike with Germany, no agreement had been made to form a “federative bond” for Italy. The territorial configuration of the individual Italian states should therefore be discussed “separately and successively,” going from north to south.²⁹ Metternich’s characterization of Italy for tactical reasons as a mere “geographic designation” led to his being depicted as the archenemy of Italian unification during the Risorgimento.

Metternich succeeded in that the eight powers’ negotiations in Vienna began with a matter that had essentially already long been settled: the proposal that the king of Sardinia-Piedmont be given control of Genoa as compensation for having ceded territories in Savoy to France. After brief hearings on the precise arrangements, the congress agreed to this proposal on December 12, 1814, and King Victor Emanuel had annexed Liguria before the year was out. The disappearance of the ancient maritime republic from the map of Europe, without Genoa being given a special status within the kingdom of Piedmont or at least that of a free port, sparked outrage among the opposition in the British House of Commons. Victor Emanuel’s plans to annex parts of Lombardy, by contrast, quickly proved to be wishful thinking.

After arrangements for the two major northern territories, Lombardy-Venetia and Sardinia-Piedmont, and the Papal States in central Italy had been settled, Metternich introduced a master plan for the remaining territories on the peninsula in January 1815.³⁰ The Austrians now gradually distanced themselves from King Murat of Naples and instead sided with the Bourbon claims. The fact that Napoleon’s brother-in-law had continued to station troops in central Italy, beyond the borders of his kingdom, was steadily eroding trust in his reliability as an ally.

To bypass dealing with Talleyrand in Vienna, Metternich did not negotiate his plans for the Italian peninsula at the congress but dealt directly with the French government in Paris. Metternich’s “principle of legitimacy,” according to which monarchs who had lost power under Napoleon’s reign should be restored, played a key role, but even more important was his fear that Murat could trigger a revolutionary war in Italy “under the banner of […] national freedom.”³¹ The British foreign secretary, Castlereagh, discussed Metternich’s plans with the French king Louis XVIII in person on his return journey to London and secured his support.

Napoleon’s escape from Elba in late February 1815 and the “Hundred Days” reign rendered all diplomatic plans for Italy obsolete. Murat sided with the returned emperor and issued the Rimini Proclamation, calling on all Italy, from the Alps to Sicily, to rise up against the Austrians and create an independent nation. In response, Austria declared war on Murat, and then defeated him in a brief but psychologically important campaign at the foot of the Apennines in April/May 1815; this lesser-known military action took place at the same time that allied forces were marching against Napoleon in Belgium. Based on this victory, in late May, the Bourbon monarch Ferdinand IV returned to Naples as king under the protection of the Austrian army and British navy. Formal treaties tied his political future closely to the interests of the Habsburg Empire.

In early June 1815, in the final days of the congress, the Committee of Five quickly agreed upon territorial arrangements for Italy based on Metternich’s program from the start of the year. No mention was made of Tuscany; the emperor and his family had already decided in early 1814 that Grand Duke Ferdinand III, the emperor’s brother, should return from Würzburg to Florence (though without actually consulting Ferdinand on the matter).³² Meanwhile, Archduke Francis IV of Austria-Este was finally able to assume the rule of the Duchy of Modena, more than a decade after his family had inherited the ducal title back in 1803.

In reality, the situation in Tuscany was extremely complex. In 1801, it had been elevated to the status of the Kingdom of Etruria, and, until Napoleon integrated the region directly into France in 1808, it was ruled by a branch of the Spanish Bourbons who had formerly ruled Parma. The Spanish infanta Maria Luisa, sister of the Spanish king, Ferdinand VII, laid claim to these lands, and one of the key tasks of Labrador, the chief Spanish delegate, and Talleyrand was to support her claims. Metternich had not originally included the Parma Bourbons in his plans for Italy, but was forced to revise these plans and concede the heritable Duchy of Lucca. Spain was not content with this meager territory, however, and was the only major European power to refuse to sign the congress’s Final Act. Ferdinand VII did not ratify the treaty until 1817, when a new treaty offered the Parma Bourbons succession rights to the duchies of Parma, Piacenza, and Guastalla. The Congress of Vienna had granted these duchies to Napoleon’s second wife, Marie Louise, daughter of the Habsburg emperor, but only ad personam and for her lifetime; the new treaty meant that after her death (which came in 1847), they would revert from the Habsburgs to the Bourbons.

A quick glance from Italy to the opposite coast to the east reveals that Austria conceived of itself not just as an Italian but as an Adriatic power. The reconstituted kingdoms of Illyria (including Laybach and Trieste) and Dalmatia, and the portion of Croatia returned to the Kingdom of Hungary, which included the port of Fiume, extended the full length of the Adriatic coast from Istria to Dubrovnik. Vienna also showed an interest in the protectorate of the Ionian islands off the west coast of Greece, which had been controlled by Britain since 1809, but Russia repeatedly vetoed this proposal during the negotiations.³³

Bavaria’s Compensation and the Dispute over Salzburg

Metternich had to contend with a far greater range of interests during the negotiations over the areas of central Europe north of the Alps than he did during those over Italy: the “wing powers” of Russia and Britain; Austria’s traditional rival, Prussia, which had an interest in Saxony and its own ideas about what form the German Confederation should take; and “middle states” such as Bavaria, Württemberg, and Baden, which owed their elevation in status and sovereignty to Napoleon’s protectorate but had abandoned the French coalition before the end of 1813. Their prize for joining the alliance against the French was a guarantee that they would retain their territory and sovereign status. Thus, even before the Congress of Vienna, it was clear that the results of the territorial revolution that had transformed central Europe during the Napoleonic era between 1803 and 1810 would remain in place; there was no question of a “restoration” of the prerevolutionary status quo.

The discussion in this section will concentrate on the region of the eastern Alps, which was the subject of bilateral negotiations between the Habsburg Empire and the Kingdom of Bavaria. The key decisions in the territorial disputes between the two neighboring powers (whose relations had been marked by frequent conflict throughout the eighteenth century) were not hammered out at the Congress of Vienna, but before and afterwards. Hence, the final territorial configuration of the Wittelsbachs’ kingdom was only settled in April 1816—and it looked rather different than Bavaria had envisioned.

From April 1813 onward, the option of switching sides against Napoleon gained increasing ground in Munich.³⁴ The question took on a new urgency when Austria declared war on France; in late summer 1813, Bavarian and Austrian troops were mustered against each other in the Innviertel and Upper Austria. The Russian tsar called on the Bavarian king Maximilian I Joseph to join the alliance against Napoleon, leading to direct negotiations between the two commanders-in-chief, General Karl Philipp von Wrede on the Bavarian side and Prince Heinrich XV of Reuss-Plauen on the Austrian side. From mid-September, any hopes that Bavaria could remain neutral in the ongoing conflict had disappeared, but it was only with considerable reservations, and at the last minute, that Max Joseph—having written that “betraying” Napoleon “would be a cowardice incongruous with the loyalty of my character”—assented to the signing of the Treaty of Ried, which took place on October 8, 1813.³⁵

Max Joseph allied himself with Napoleon’s opponents just as the French emperor was planning his offensive against Bernadotte’s and Blücher’s armies to the north of Leipzig, making it a very risky move for the Bavarian king. In exchange for this volte-face, however, his kingdom’s powerful neighbor, Austria, guaranteed Bavaria absolute sovereignty and constitutional independence, as well as the retention of its territory. There was no time to reach agreement on specific questions of territory; Max Joseph had wanted Franconia and Swabia to be named as preferred territories in any compensation to Bavaria, but this did not make it into the final version of the text.³⁶ All that was agreed upon was the principle that any adjustments of borders would be made without compulsion and through the exchange of territories that were of equal value and contiguous with existing possessions.

The allied forces received an additional 36,000 Bavarian soldiers as reinforcement. Moreover, Austria benefited from the immediate opening of Tyrol for military operations to support Hiller’s Italian campaign in the Puster and Eisack valleys; it was for this reason that Austria had repeatedly stressed its interest in controlling the Inn–Brenner route during the treaty negotiations.³⁷

For Metternich, the main factors in the decision of October 1813 were calculability and stability: “any reversal of Napoleon’s new territorial order would have triggered a chaos of old and new claims.”³⁸ He also needed Bavaria as an ally, as part of a “fixed system,” as he called it, that was intended to bring Bavaria to the side of Austria, Prussia, and Britain and thereby keep France and Russia in check.³⁹ The priorities were to prize Bavaria away from the French coalition as quickly as possible, to gain access to the new ally’s military resources, and, hopefully, to trigger a domino effect that would bring further members of the Confederation of the Rhine over to the allies’ side. The principles of the Treaty of Ried, which ruled out both the dissolution of the large Rhine Confederation states and a return to the order of the Holy Roman Empire, prefigured the federal solution for central Germany that Metternich outlined shortly afterwards: “Allemagne composée de princes souverains uni par un lien fédératif qui assure et garantisse l’indépendance de l’Allemagne.”⁴⁰ Metternich had explicitly recognized the sovereign status of the princes of the Confederation of the Rhine ever since the Treaty of Teplitz, which founded the Coalition.⁴¹ Bavaria’s carefully worded proclamation of war on October 14 therefore justified the change of sides in terms of “securing the independence of the Germanic nation and the states comprising it.”⁴²

Because it was too late for the Bavarian troops under Wrede’s command to be mobilized for the Battle of Nations at Leipzig, they occupied Würzburg instead. In late October 1813, they were defeated in the Battle of Hanau as they attempted to cut off Napoleon’s retreat to France, but they played a successful part in the invasion of France in February/March 1814. Max Joseph, his foreign minister Maximilian von Montgelas, and his commander-in-chief Wrede, who was sympathetic to the offensive course favored by the Russian tsar, thus earned a place in the allied powers’ inner circle.⁴³

After the allied forces reached Paris and forced Napoleon’s abdication, peace talks began in the French capital in April 1814. Wrede—who had been promoted to field marshal and granted the status of prince—had been named Bavaria’s chief negotiator, despite his own vehement objections, because he was the “most credible” representative of “Bavaria’s new political position”⁴⁴ and had proved himself a capable commander in the campagne de France. The Bavarian foreign ministry now contemplated various scenarios for an exchange of territories with Austria. It was considered certain that Bavaria would be able to hold on to the Innviertel, but the claim to Tyrol had already been as good as abandoned. The only part of Tyrol to remain under nominal Bavarian control was the Inn valley, which had been practically ungovernable due to unrest and revolts ever since Austrian troops had occupied the eastern and southern areas of the region until November 1813. Maximilian Graf Lerchenfeld, commissioner-general of the Innviertel, was removed from his post in January 1814.⁴⁵

A question mark hung over Salzburg. The Peace of Pressburg of December 26, 1805, had granted the Duchy of Salzburg, as it was then, along with Berchtesgaden, to the Habsburg Empire as compensation for the loss of Tyrol to Bavaria. After the 1809 conflict and a prolonged French occupation, Salzburg and Berchtesgaden were awarded to Bavaria in early 1810, along with the Innviertel, the western part of the Hausruckviertel, Bayreuth, and Regensburg. Faced with the prospect of ever less palatable losses in the Alpine region, Munich increasingly looked north for suitable compensation: to Main-Franconia (especially Würzburg), the Neckar-Kreis, and other areas along the Main and Rhine.⁴⁶

In May 1814, Wrede negotiated on these matters in parallel with the Paris peace talks: firstly with Johann von Wessenberg, the Austrian envoy in Munich, and then with Metternich himself.⁴⁷ Wessenberg wanted Salzburg, the Innviertel, and the Hausruckviertel in their entirety for Austria, whereas Wrede wanted Bavaria to retain at least the northern parts of Salzburg (the city and the lower-lying parts of the Flachgau). Metternich steered Wrede’s gaze to Würzburg, Aschaffenburg, Fulda, and—repeatedly—Mainz. In the end, however, Prussia—represented by Karl August von Hardenberg—laid claim to Mainz, which was a key strategic fortress that controlled the line of the Main, had served on a number of occasions as an important base for Napoleon, and lay at the intersection between the two military defensive blocs that Austria and Prussia were seeking to establish within the German Confederation.

The treaty that Metternich and Wrede signed in Paris on June 3, 1814, fleshed out the declarations of principle in the Treaty of Ried with concrete details.⁴⁸ The territorial arrangements were divided into two groups, according to when they would take effect:

– Bavaria had to immediately (within two weeks) relinquish Tyrol (excluding the district of Vils and Kufstein Fortress) and Vorarlberg (excluding the district of Weiler) to Austria; in return, it was to receive Würzburg and Aschaffenburg. This exchange was completed by the end of June; Wrede had already occupied the Franconian territories since October 1813.

– Bavaria would also have to return to Austria the Innviertel, the Hausruckviertel, and the Principality of Salzburg, except for the district of Laufen and the territory on the left banks of the Salzach and Saalach. However, Munich would only be obliged to hand over these territories once it had been given what it considered an acceptable “equivalent.” To this end, Metternich offered the city and fortress of Mainz and the “ancient Rhine-Palatinate” (l’ancien Palatinat du Rhin), which had passed to Baden in 1802/03. Other exchanges with Baden, Württemberg, Hesse-Darmstadt, and Nassau were considered in order to create a land bridge between the Main and the Palatinate.

To consolidate Bavarian claims on the left bank of the Rhine, too, Austria involved Bavaria in the provisional administration of the territories to the south of the Mosel that were being held in reserve to offer as compensation.

Neither Munich nor Vienna was especially happy with this compromise; Emperor Francis himself made a written note on Metternich’s report from Paris: “The treaty with Bavaria is bad. In particular, I do not like that we will not obtain Bertolsgaden or the Bohemian possessions [i.e., Redwitz in the Upper Palatinate].”⁴⁹ In reply, Metternich reminded his emperor of the overarching political interests, especially the need to cultivate good relations between Bavaria and Austria, so as to prevent Munich from developing any sort of closer political ties with Prussia. His words, surprisingly for the man in charge of the Habsburg Empire’s foreign policy, have the air of a profession of faith: “We have only one fixed point in our relationship with Germany. That point is Bavaria.”⁵⁰

Negotiations in Vienna

Despite reservations on both sides, Montgelas briefed the Bavarian king’s representative at the Congress of Vienna on the basis of the Peace of Paris. This representative was once again Marshal Wrede, since Montgelas himself refused to travel to the congress despite repeated urging from Max Joseph—a move he himself later conceded was a mistake. Montgelas hoped that Bavaria would be required to cede Salzburg and the Innviertel in exchange for the territories Austria had promised along the Main and Rhine. His instructions for the congress make explicit mention of Mainz, Wetzlar, Frankfurt, Hanau, and Fulda, as well as the “whole of the area on the left bank of the Rhine between this river, the new French border, and the Mosel.”⁵¹

The negotiations at the Congress of Vienna initially centered on Prussia’s claims to compensation—i.e., on Poland and Saxony. Once the crisis that threatened to derail the talks had been averted at the start of 1815, it was necessary to deal with Prussia’s territorial claims first, since these would determine the range of options available for all subsequent agreements. At the first meeting of the Committee of Five on January 12, 1815, Metternich had announced that Austria and Bavaria would deal with unresolved issues through bilateral talks.⁵² Wrede’s negotiations with Wessenberg and Metternich began on February 19 and centered once again on Frankfurt and Mainz. The Austrian minister consulted the Great Powers’ leading diplomats—Hardenberg for Prussia, Nesselrode for Russia, Wellington for Britain—to sound out the feasibility of meeting Bavaria’s demands. Wellington reported home that Wrede was not remotely interested in territories to the left of the Rhine for Bavaria and favored maintaining the status quo; he would in no case be given Mainz or Frankfurt.⁵³ Wellington further noted that territory still had to be found for the former viceroy Eugène Beauharnais, which should remain subordinate to the sovereignty of the king of Bavaria. Salzburg—“to which both Austrians and Bavarians attach the utmost importance”—was the thorniest issue. The Bavarian crown prince, Ludwig, who was especially attached to Salzburg, had made the matter personal; resolving it would require—to quote Wellington—“a good deal of coolness.” Discussing the strategic position of Salzburg, the British marshal sided with Austrian representatives such as Field Marshal Schwarzenberg, who saw Bavarian control of Salzburg as a potential threat to the line of the Danube and Austria’s links to Italy.⁵⁴ Therefore, Wellington concluded, “I conceive that Salzburg ought to belong to Austria.” In late February, Emperor Francis instructed his foreign minister to support all Bavarian claims in western Germany, and ordered him, with an air of finality, “to explain that I shall not concede the return of Salzburg under any circumstances.”⁵⁵

In the subsequent course of the talks, Mainz was taken off the table as a bargaining chip and replaced by the parts of the Palatinate on the right bank of the Rhine around Mannheim and Heidelberg, an area that had long been ruled by the Wittelsbachs. For a while, despite the emperor’s order, plans were also discussed to divide the Duchy of Salzburg along a line from Radstadt to the Gerlos Pass, via St. Johann im Pongau and Zell am See; Bavaria would retain the territory to the north of this line, while the area to the south would go to Austria. Wellington shared the view that Salzburg’s chief strategic value for Austria lay in the intra-Alpine link from Styria to Tyrol along the Enns and the Salzach, and that it would thus suffice to cede the southern portion of the duchy to Austrian control.⁵⁶

On April 23, 1815, representatives of the five powers in Vienna agreed to a treaty between Austria and Bavaria that had been negotiated by Wessenberg, Wrede, and Nesselrode; Metternich referred to it right from the outset with the qualifier “éventuelle.”⁵⁷ This treaty would have allowed Bavaria to retain the northern part of the Duchy of Salzburg and part of the Innviertel. The expansive potential gains for Bavaria along the Rhine and Main were subject to the results of as-yet-unconcluded negotiations with the governments of Baden (from which Munich hoped to obtain the entire Main-Tauber-Kreis and part of the Neckar-Kreis), Württemberg (where it hoped to obtain Nördlingen, Dinkelsbühl, Isny, Leutkirch, and other towns), the Grand Duchy of Hesse-Darmstadt (Alzenau, Seligenstadt, Miltenberg, Amorbach, Wimpfen, etc.), and the Electorate of Hesse (the city of Hanau).⁵⁸ However, it could scarcely be expected that the princes of these states would consent to cede these territories to Bavaria. Especially unlikely was that the rulers of Baden would agree to return the Electoral Palatinate to Bavaria (“la réversibilité des parties de l’ancien Palatinat”) in the event that the male line of the ruling ducal house died out (article 16 of the treaty).⁵⁹ The text of the treaty was never formally ratified and thus is not included in the Congress of Vienna’s Final Act. As Wrede sarcastically yet clear-sightedly remarked to Montgelas: “It is a veritable sea we have to drink up. Now it is the turn of Baden, Württemberg, and Hesse to make difficulties for us.”⁶⁰

The Congress of Vienna thus “failed to resolve the Bavarian border and compensation problem.”⁶¹ As if that were not enough, on Metternich’s initiative the Austrian promises from April were quietly dropped in the final days of the congress. Article 51 of the Final Act gave Austria sole possession of the territories held in reserve on the left bank of the Rhine, which it had co-governed with Bavaria since summer 1814. On June 12, 1815, by which time the official negotiations were already over, Wilhelm von Humboldt signed a secret agreement (to which Russia and Britain were privy) in which Prussia supported Austria’s claims to Salzburg, the Innviertel, and even the Palatinate. A series of other reserve territories that might conceivably also have been used to compensate Bavaria were instead awarded to Austria, with full rights of sovereignty. Vienna and Berlin planned to share provisional command of the Fortress of Mainz; the city itself would later pass to the Grand Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt.⁶²

Given this closing of ranks by the Great Powers over the settlement of south German affairs, the only political avenue left to Bavaria was to bide its time, engage in tactical maneuvers, and score the occasional pinprick against Austria. Wrede’s refusal to withdraw Bavarian troops from the left bank of the Rhine initially prompted displeasure and threats from Vienna. Later, when Metternich, in the course of the protracted, complicated negotiations over a second peace treaty with France in the fall of 1815, was looking for ways to curb Prussia’s aggressive claims, an unexpected opportunity opened up for Bavaria to retain the northern part of Salzburg. In a long memorandum from Paris in September, Metternich once again tried to persuade his emperor to claim the strategically important Mainz for Austria, and give up part of Salzburg by way of compensation: “If Austria wishes to play a worthy role in Germany, and not wholly relinquish this arena to Prussia, then there can be no doubt that it is essential to have possessions in Germany, specifically on the Rhine. Were Austria to hold Mainz with ample surrounding lands, it would truly rule the politics of all south German courts […] Acquiring the whole Bishopric of Salzburg, by contrast, will always be faced with considerable difficulties.”⁶³ Having presented Emperor Francis with the alternative of giving up either Salzburg or Mainz, Metternich was informed in a meeting with Field Marshal Schwarzenberg and General Duka, the emperor’s adjutant general, that the emperor had rejected his advice and that “for military reasons, the possession of Salzburg would have to take precedence over the possession of Mainz.”⁶⁴ Thus—as the Austrian emperor ordered with uncharacteristic bluntness and finality on September 28, 1815—the city itself and the entire Principality of Salzburg, the whole Innviertel, “every last village,” and the ceded part of the Hausruckviertel must be returned to Austria. Even the matter of the “Rupertiwinkel” was reopened, the cluster of judicial districts on the west banks of the Salzach and Saalach whose cession to Bavaria had been taken for granted since the bilateral negotiations began.⁶⁵ Ultimately, despite further appeals in which he went so far as to elevate the Austrian acquisition of Mainz to the status of a “moral question,”⁶⁶ Metternich had no choice but to reluctantly execute the decision to retain Salzburg, as ordered by the emperor in ever-sharper words. On November 3, 1815, the minister agreed to a treaty with the other Great Powers requiring Munich to immediately cede Salzburg and the territories around the Inn, and in return to accept the territory on the left bank of the Rhine, including the Fortress of Landau, that Austria offered as compensation. Metternich sent his emperor the following report on Ludwig’s reaction: “The crown prince of Bavaria is in a mighty rage over the cession of the city of Salzburg. He is [practically] knocking on the doors of all my colleagues in a blind fervor to assert his right.”⁶⁷ Count Aloys von Rechberg, who Montgelas had authorized to undertake further negotiations in Paris in the causa Salzburg, lodged a protest, but stood no chance against the united front of the Great Powers.⁶⁸

Lower Franconia, the Palatinate, and the Consequences of the Treaty of Munich (1816)

The final act of the territorial dispute between Bavaria and Austria—which proved brief but highly dramatic—began after the signing of the Second Peace of Paris with France on November 20, 1815.⁶⁹ Emperor Francis instructed Metternich: “I must order you to press through the Salzburg, Innviertel, and Hausruckviertel matter, if not by gentle means, then by force, and to do so soon.”⁷⁰ Before the year was out, Metternich had dispatched a high-ranking military official familiar with the area to Munich for bilateral talks,⁷¹ namely, Lieutenant Field Marshal Johann Peter von Wacquant de Geozelles, who had been Austria’s commissioner for handing over Salzburg and Berchtesgaden in 1810. Montgelas began the talks with a show of intransigence, insisting that Salzburg remain under Bavarian control and demanding better compensation, referring among other things to the claims of Eugène Beauharnais. This provoked a note of protest from the Great Powers and an advance of Austrian troops along the Enns at the beginning of 1816. In his comments on Metternich’s reports, Emperor Francis worked himself up into an uncharacteristically agitated state, declaring that he would “put an end to the affair with Bavaria” and assert his rights, by force if need be, and with “no half measures.”⁷² However, he did not believe the breakdown in relations was irreparable, and wanted to limit the military measures to threatening gestures.⁷³ In the end, it was the Bavarian king who backed down: in late January, he sent Crown Prince Ludwig, escorted by Rechberg, to speak directly with Emperor Francis, who was touring his new Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia. It was “not exactly a pleasure trip” (voyage de plaisir), Ludwig wrote to his father.⁷⁴ The emperor was unwilling to concede anything except in regard to Bavaria’s claims to the Main-Tauber-Kreis, to the south of the new Bavarian possessions on the Main between Würzburg and Aschaffenburg. This area, around Boxberg, Wertheim, and Tauberbischofsheim, currently belonged to Baden. In a letter to Max Joseph, dated February 7, 1816, Emperor Francis offered the king an annual compensation of 100,000 gulden if the Main-Tauber-Kreis were not ceded to Bavaria.⁷⁵

In February 1816, while the final negotiations were taking place, preparations were made in Munich for the withdrawal from Salzburg. Furniture from Schloss Mirabell and important documents were transported to Munich, and the quarries near Fürstenbrunn at the foot of the Untersberg were declared the private property of the Bavarian crown prince. In Munich, Prime Minister Montgelas refused with increasing stubbornness to be the sole signatory to the treaty with Austria, as he did not want to become the scapegoat for the loss of Salzburg. He bluntly declared, “I hate the treaty,”⁷⁶ and demanded that Rechberg, the envoy in Vienna, sign it instead. Rechberg sent his superior a barbed reply: “If one has had the rare fortune to idle around in the foreign ministry for seventeen years, it is scarcely comprehensible that one should fear a momentary storm.”⁷⁷ The king summoned the two quarreling officials, whereupon his minister said to his face that he had three portfolios to manage and hence no time for negotiations; Rechberg, who had been the king’s friend since his Zweibrücken days, responded that, as a Swabian who did not own an inch of land in Bavaria, he feared the nation would accuse him of having sold Bavaria to Austria. The agitated Max Joseph took to bed with colic; he had failed to “mediate between his two old confidants.”⁷⁸ It was Crown Prince Ludwig who finally managed to broker a compromise a few days later; as a result of his efforts, the Treaty of Munich of April 14, 1816, was signed not by the usual two parties, but by three: Montgelas and Rechberg both added their signatures next to that of the Austrian envoy Wacquant.⁷⁹

The provisions of the Treaty of Munich have shaped Bavaria’s outline on the map right down to the present day. The Innviertel, including Braunau, Ried, and Schärding, and the regions bordering it to the east, from the Hausruck to Vöcklabruck, returned to Austrian control, as did the Tyrolean district of Vils and the greater part of the Duchy of Salzburg. However, as agreed in 1814, Bavaria retained the areas of Salzburg on the left banks of the Salzach and the Saalach (and, as article 19 mentions in passing, Berchtesgaden). This area, known as the “Rupertiwinkel” and comprising the judicial districts of Tittmoning, Laufen, Waging, and Teisendorf, which have been part of Bavaria ever since, was equivalent to around 15 percent of the old archbishopric by population, 20 percent by area, and moreover contained the region’s best farmland—and therefore represented a significant loss for Salzburg.

Consequently, the new Bavaria of the nineteenth century expanded not southeastwards, but northwestwards. Numerous legal titles and lands belonging to myriad former owners were amalgamated into a new Lower Main District (Untermain-Kreis), which in 1817 comprised no fewer than forty-six judicial districts (Landgerichte) and thirteen judicial districts of the nobility (Herrschaftsgerichte).⁸⁰ From 1814, the chief part of the territory was made up of the “Grand Duchy” of Würzburg, which had formerly been under Bavarian control in 1802 and from 1803 to 1805 and then granted to the Habsburgian grand duke of Tuscany, and the “Principality” of Aschaffenburg, which in the Holy Roman Empire had formed the core of the Mainzer Oberstift, and, since 1803, had been part of the succession of states ruled by the archbishop, archchancellor, and prince-primate Karl Theodor von Dalberg (most recently, in 1810, the Grand Duchy of Frankfurt). Bavaria had been able to take possession of these two large territorial units following the Peace of Paris of May 30, 1814. Only two years later, with the Treaty of Munich of April 14, 1816, did (parts of) the districts of Hammelburg, Brückenau, and Bieberstein, nestled between Würzburg and Aschaffenburg, pass to Bavaria. This strip of land in the Rhön Mountains—which in the past had changed hands between the Bishopric of Fulda, the Principality of Nassau-Orange-Fulda, and the Grand Duchy of Frankfurt—had been occupied by Austrian troops since late November 1813, meaning that Vienna could cede it directly to Munich.⁸¹ With regards to the other areas mentioned in the Treaty of Munich, by contrast, Austria could merely promise to intercede with their current owners and attempt to persuade them to make concessions to Bavaria. These efforts bore fruit very quickly in the case of the Grand Duchy of Hesse-Darmstadt, which on July 7, 1816, transferred to Bavaria several districts on the Main that consolidated the Aschaffenburg territory. These were Alzenau (which Darmstadt had acquired from Mainz in 1803), and then—up toward the Odenwald Mountains—Miltenberg and Amorbach (both of which had also originally belonged to Mainz and passed to Darmstadt in 1810, having been held by the Principality of Leiningen and by Baden in the interim), and Kleinheubach, which in the eighteenth century had belonged to the princes of Löwenstein-Wertheim-Rochefort.⁸² Only in the Frankfurt General (Territorial) Recess of July 20, 1819, did Baden, with the mediation of the Great Powers and in exchange for an extensive package of political guarantees (articles 6–10), cede the part of the district of Wertheim situated around Steinfels to the south of Lohr on the left (east) bank of the Main, which before 1806 had also been a Löwenstein possession (article 1).⁸³

It was not just Lower Franconia (known from 1837 as “Lower Franconia and Aschaffenburg”) that was born from the spirit of a provisorium; the Austrian reserve territories on the left bank of the Rhine, chiefly comprising the districts of Zweibrücken, Kaiserslautern, and Speyer and the city of Landau, became the “Rhine Circle” (Rheinkreis). Although Ludwig I renamed this Bavarian Rhine Circle of 1816 “the Palatinate,” so as to suggest a historical continuity, in reality it was a new construct, assembled from territories previously belonging to over forty non-Wittelsbach owners during the Holy Roman Empire; that is to say, Bavaria was not having old lands restored to it, but rather being given a package of territories pieced together to compensate for the loss of Salzburg. However, the “old” Electoral Palatinate on the right bank of the Rhine did make a reappearance in the Treaty of Munich, whose first secret article confirmed the Wittelsbachs’ right of succession should the House of Baden die out (“la reversion de la partie du Palatinat du Rhin dite le cercle de Neckar”).⁸⁴ This clause was long a cause of tension in southern Germany, particularly between Baden and Bavaria, until it was revoked by the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1818, which recognized the succession rights of the morganatic Hochberg line (the issue had assumed particular urgency following the death of Grand Duke Karl Ludwig Friedrich of Baden that same year). The Frankfurt Recess (July 1819) revoked any further claims Bavaria might have been able to derive from the treaty of 1816, which is why Ludwig I never formally acknowledged it, instead repeatedly pressing his claims to the Palatinate.⁸⁵

Bavaria was included in the French reparation payments, but there was no direct land link between the new territories on the Main and those on the Rhine. The treaty of April 14 provided only for a military road running from Würzburg to Frankenthal through Baden’s territory; secret article 5 also gave the option of a second military road through Hessian territory. The lack of a direct land bridge (Amorbach and Mannheim were separated by a distance of just under fifty kilometers, as the crow flies) violated the terms of the Treaty of Ried of 1813, and this was why the Austrian emperor had in principle recognized Bavaria’s claims to the Main-Tauber-Kreis (supplementary article 2). The territory remained under Baden’s control, but from 1820 onward Austria paid Bavaria an annual sum of 100,000 gulden (the expected annual revenue from the region, as calculated by the crown prince) as indemnity for there being no land bridge between Franconia and the Palatinate. This “contiguity compensation” (Kontiguitätsentschädigung) was not paid directly, but instead offset against the cost of the 200,000 centners of salt from Hallein that Austria supplied to Bavaria each year at a preferential price (supplementary articles 2–4).

As a result of the territorial exchanges between 1814 and 1816, Bavaria made a net gain of just under 100,000 inhabitants, meaning that, within borders more or less corresponding to those of the present day (apart from the Rhine Circle, a few towns along the Kinzig and in the Rhön Mountains, and the town of Coburg), it was home to a population of 3.5 million; by way of comparison, the equivalent figure today stands at 12.7 million, while at the start of the Napoleonic period, in 1801, the total population of the Wittelsbach possessions had been 2.3 million.

Like Prussia, Bavaria was not compensated in the east, as it had hoped and expected to be, but rather with territories to the west. It thus became part of the barrier of “middle states” (Mittelstaaten; mid-sized German states smaller than Prussia and Austria) established on the left bank of the Rhine in line with British policy so as to curb future expansion attempts by France, and thereby also a player in one of Europe’s central political arenas. The political and economic dynamism of the territories on the Rhine provided crucial impulses and challenges that fueled Bavaria’s modernization in the nineteenth century; by contrast, Salzburg, after its return to Austria on May 1, 1816, was downgraded to a district (Kreis) of Upper Austria, and, in 1825, Franz Schubert reported that grass was growing between the cracks of the paving stones in the city’s plazas.⁸⁶

Unlike the dispute over Poland and Saxony, which involved all the European powers and dominated the negotiations at the Congress of Vienna, Bavaria’s territorial claims and disputes were strictly between itself and Austria. This meant they could be resolved through bilateral agreements before and after the congress, in June 1814 and April 1816—though Viennese politicians did not shy away from mobilizing the support of Britain, Russia, or Prussia on the emperor’s behalf at critical moments, as in June and November 1815. At the congress itself, the Bavarian representative, Rechberg, played a key role in the final phase of negotiations in May/June 1815 in ensuring that the sovereignty of former members of the Confederation of the Rhine was recognized, that the results of the territorial consolidation of 1803/1806 were preserved, and that the German Confederation—i.e., the concrete realization of the “federative bond” stipulated by the earlier Peace of Paris, the details of which were fleshed out during the “second German conferences” in May/June 1815—only took the form of a very loose association.⁸⁷

The Treaty of Munich is, in many respects, better than the bad reputation it enjoyed in some quarters at the time—indeed, it proved, in the words of Eberhard Weis, to be a “real stroke of fortune for Bavaria.” The provisions of this treaty, signed precisely two hundred years ago, allowed Bavaria to develop lasting “good neighborly relations” with Austria,⁸⁸ following almost constant military confrontation between Munich and Vienna in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, from the War of the Spanish Succession through to the Tyrolean rebellion of 1809.

In late 1816, Emperor Francis I married the second daughter of King Max Joseph, Princess Caroline Augusta (it was his fourth and final marriage).⁸⁹ This marked the start of a series of better and lesser-known marital unions between the Habsburgs and Wittelsbachs in the nineteenth century. Personal relations never recovered between Metternich, who described the territorial negotiations with Bavaria as a “wretched” business, the “trickiest” and “most arduous” of his political life (the emperor seconded this view, describing them in March 1816 as “highly disagreeable” and thanking God they were over),⁹⁰ and the Bavarian crown prince, the later Ludwig I; the two men had taken too high a toll on each other’s nerves in the years from 1814 to 1816.⁹¹ However, there was gradual progress in terms of concrete economic collaboration: a series of treaties governing the borders around Berchtesgaden were agreed (the last coming in 1851), and salt production in the neighboring districts was coordinated. The Bavarian–Austrian Salt Treaty of 1829, which is still valid to this day (albeit revised in 1957), regulates mining and forestry rights in Hallein and Pinzgau in the mutual interest of both sides—a subtle continuation of premodern traditions that not only established Bavarian-owned woodlands on Austrian soil, but also respected the rights of the local population to the use of the land.⁹² The Munich–Salzburg–Vienna telegraph line was opened in 1850, and subsequent planning for the railway line connecting Munich to the east was coordinated across borders between the Maximilian Railway (Munich–Salzburg) and Empress Elisabeth Railway (Salzburg–Linz–Vienna). In 1860, the first train from Bavaria arrived at the new railway station in Salzburg.⁹³

The treaties of Ried, Paris, and Munich, concluded between 1813 and 1816, thus ushered in a profound transformation of relations between Bavaria and Austria.⁹⁴ A “secular rivalry” that just a few decades earlier, under Joseph II, had posed a very real threat to the integrity of the Wittelsbach possessions, came to an end in 1813. Austria “moderated its political interests,” “respected Bavaria’s independence,” and accepted the neighboring kingdom as a “strategic partner,”⁹⁵ as reflected in Metternich’s above-quoted description of Bavaria as a “fixed point” in Vienna’s relations with Germany.

Despite the conflicts described here in the years 1813–1816, in the critical situation in the second half of 1813, when Bavaria became the first member of the Confederation of the Rhine to join the alliance against Napoleon, it was Bavaria’s old rival Austria that recognized its status as a consolidated “middle power,” which Napoleon had initially granted it, respected its sovereignty, and became the guarantor of its continued existence in the new European order—and thus, as Michael Doeberl puts it, became Bavaria’s “savior.”⁹⁶