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CHAPTER 1 The Landesmutter and Philanthropic Practices in the New German Dynastic States, 1813–1848 In 1835, a Protestant pastor in the Rhineland issued a public appeal to humanitarians (Menschenfreunde) everywhere. Remarkable in content and style, it spoke of new relationships that were being forged between institution building and state identity as well as individual behavior and social capital. Addressing a potential group of educated patrons, the manifesto simultaneously drew on and redeployed a host of symbols around community care, obligations, and responsibilities. If anthropological methods help decode the symbolic frameworks through which people experience reality, in complementary fashion historians’ sensitivity to change helps uncover the emergence and transformation of new symbols in society. Societies, of course, cannot create any symbolic system.1 The pastor’s appeal re›ected a set of historic events that, during the wars against Napoleon, had drawn elements from Old Europe together in new combinations : ties of charity and secular authority tested in Renaissance Italy, confessional changes that inserted poor relief right into the heart of statebuilding , and new values of religious calling that underpinned feminine identity. They elevated a distinct symbol of dynastic authority to new prominence—the mother of the people (Landesmutter)—and supported its institutionalization in philanthropic practices in civil society. In its 21 1. Kertzer, Ritual, Politics, and Power, 4, who argues that symbols do not arise spontaneously , nor is their rede‹nition a matter of chance; rather they re›ect the immediate distribution of power. material forms, indeed, this symbolic framework would play a powerful role in the ongoing transformation of German society and politics. Acknowledging that a large number of institutions were working to reduce misery and want in the decade of the 1830s, Pastor Friedrich Scheibler nonetheless announced his own plan to raise money to endow a female philanthropic association. Such an institute would meet multiple needs, and his list added up to a clear statement about the purposes of Christian love: “to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, aid the sick, take in abandoned widows and orphans, support destitute girls reduced to begging , and ease the burdens of honest yet feeble old people no longer able to work.” In the insecure economic climate of the decade, success required, or so he argued, stability and durability, which could be guaranteed best by charitable gifts (milde Gabe) turned into a permanent fund. Emboldened by the Christian spirit, Scheibler was calling on his brothers and sisters of both confessions in the religiously mixed environs of the Rhineland to support his noble venture. And he laced the manifesto with assurances that by these acts of charity the benefactors would receive God’s abiding pleasure and reap due rewards in heaven. He also promised future patrons that the poor, indeed, would pray for them.2 The pastor’s solicitation, in part, grew out of a religious revival of piety that had swept through German territories in response to the revolutionary wars and the Napoleonic occupation. Religious authority, institutions , and property had been profoundly shaken by the secular reforms and territorial adjustments of the revolutionary decades. While admittedly complex and confessionally diverse, this movement reinvigorated religious commitments and, after 1815, reawakened a sense of mission and social activism, which expressed itself in charitable works.3 Pastor Scheibler was aware of the proliferation of religiously inspired philanthropic institutes elsewhere, and he addressed an audience outside his locality. For him, the “kindness” of the public spoke to the presence of a wider sacred community bound together in its concern for the female poor and destitute. Furthermore , he drew on a vocabulary that increasingly was circulating in urban settings. In German civil society, the word humanitarian was being 22 Staging Philanthropy 2. LK, Abt. 403, no. 7363, Frauenvereine im Oberpräsidialbezirk, Bl. 5–12, Montjoie, May 1, 1835. 3. For a useful description of the importance of this religious revival for women’s Christian activism and subsequent embrace of bourgeois feminism, Catherine M. Prelinger, Charity, Challenge, and Change: Religious Dimensions of the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Women’s Movement in Germany (New York, 1987). For more general discussion of the religious revival, James J. Sheehan, German History, 1770–1866 (Oxford, 1989), 555–65; Nipperdey , Deutsche Geschichte, 1800–1866, 74–75; and, most recently, David Blackbourn, The Long Nineteenth Century: A History of Germany, 1780–1918 (New York, 1998), 134–37. invested with honor, and he sang the praise of those who accepted the “duty of love” at the root of the charitable impulse. The same appeal, however...

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