Iron Kingdom by Christopher Clark

Author:Christopher Clark
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: European History
Publisher: ePenguin
Published: 2007-09-05T15:00:00+00:00

CONFLICTS OF FAITH

In religion as in politics, this was an era of differentiation, fragmentation and conflict. Revivalist movements mobilized the faithful in ways that unsettled the equilibrium of the religious communities. The state intervened more aggressively in the confessional life of the kingdom than at any time since the reign of the Great Elector, so that the boundaries between religious nonconformity and political dissent were blurred. Confessional networks became incubators for partisan political affiliations. Religion was more than a reservoir for the language and arguments of political discourse; it was a powerful motive for action in its own right. Its dynamism as a social force was greater in this era than at any time since the seventeenth century.

In December 1827, an Englishman returned from Berlin to London with ‘pleasing testimonies to the increase in religion amongst influential persons in the Prussian dominions’. This evangelical traveller told a prominent London missionary society of a prayer meeting in Berlin where he had met ‘30 persons of the first rank’. He reported that the king and his ministers were at one in the pursuance of pious projects and told of numerous meetings with army officers of ‘truly Christian spirit’.52 The English traveller had witnessed in Berlin one of the centres of the ‘Awakening’, a socially diverse movement of religious revival that swept across the Protestant north of Germany during the first decades of the nineteenth century. Awakened Christians emphasized the emotional, penitential character of their faith. Many of them experienced the transition from unbelief or a merely nominal Christian commitment to the fullness of awakened religious awareness as a traumatic moment of ‘rebirth’. One participant in a nocturnal prayer meeting that took place in Berlin in 1817 recalled that at the stroke of midnight ‘the Lord appeared, living and personal, as never before or since, in front of my soul. With a deep inward shock and hot stream of tears, I recognised my sinfulness, which stood before my eyes like a mountain.’53

This kind of religious commitment was personal and practical rather than ecclesiastical; it expressed itself in an astonishing range of social initiatives: voluntary Christian societies sprang up dedicated to the distribution of charity, the housing and ‘betterment’ of ‘fallen women’, the moral improvement of prisoners, the care of orphans, the printing and distribution of Bibles, the provision of subsistence labour for paupers and vagrants, the conversion of Jews and heathens. The Silesian nobleman Hans Ernst von Kottwitz, for example, a central figure in the early Awakening, set up a ‘spinning institute’ for the city’s unemployed; a new mission to the Jews was founded in Berlin in 1822 and patronized by key figures within the elite, including close associates of the monarch himself.

To the west, in Prussian Westphalia, the pious Count Adalbert von der Recke founded the Düsselthal Salvation Institute in 1817 to provide a refuge for the orphaned and abandoned children whose numbers had risen after the Napoleonic Wars; he later added a workhouse for Jews seeking conversion to Christianity. Like many

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