The Defortification of the German City, 1689–1866 by Yair Mintzker (review)

This book, based on Yair Mintzker’s prizewinning Stanford dissertation, seeks to answer a question that is rarely asked: what happened to the walls around German cities? Mintzker asks this question to write a wide-ranging cultural/political history of German urban society from the perspective of city walls. As Mintzker points out, the blithe explanation is that the once ubiquitous walls around cities simply “disappeared” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the apparent denial of any agency in the defortification of cities seems invalid, of course. Mintzker also identifies and deconstructs three seemingly obvious explanations why Germans tore down their city walls: demographic/economic, industrial, and military. The demographic/economic explanation is that, as cities expanded, the building of large suburbs outside the walls made the walls less useful and more problematically obtrusive. The industrial explanation similarly argues that transportation needs demanded the breaching and dismantling of city walls. The military explanation is that new artillery made city walls obsolete militarily.

Throughout his work, Mintzker shows that each of these simple explanations is inadequate and that the reality of defortification was much more complicated. The economic/demographic explanation does not hold water because many rapidly growing cities expanded their walls, whereas many smaller cities dismantled theirs. The industrial explanation fails entirely because most German cities were defortified by the end of the Napoleonic Wars—long before the transportation needs of industrialization. Counterintuitively, Mintzker shows that the military explanation is also incorrect: in reality, city dwellers wanted to dismantle their walls because they were all too effective militarily (a point discussed later).

Mintzker begins with an exploration of the importance walls had for a city’s identity. In an exemplary cultural study, he presents a plethora of evidence from across Germany to show how much urban dwellers identified themselves and their communities with the architecture of the walls, towers, and gates that surrounded them. The city was anthropomorphized, i.e., it was imagined to be a living body, a body whose appearance and orifices were its walls and gates. Of course many of the ceremonies, symbols, and traditions of the urban community were directly connected to the walls and the gates of the city. In this cultural context, as Mintzker shows, the “disappearance” of cities’ walls in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is very intriguing. Given how much urban dwellers identified with their walls, it is rather unthinkable that they were unconcerned about their destruction.

After this initial contextualization, the book is organized roughly chronologically, a choice that works well. Mintzker’s narrative is easy to follow and is based on many case studies of different cities, based on archival sources from each. The basic argument is that in the long eighteenth century (1689–1789), it was the newly centralized German absolute monarchies that, following the model of French absolutism, drove the destruction of cities’ fortifications, which were the symbols of local political identity and the physical means of domestic political resistance. The monarchies replaced them with barriers designed only to facilitate tax collection and policing. This trend was supported by the fashions of monarchical representation, which found “open” cities with wide boulevards more impressive than the relics of obsolete military fortifications. At the same time, absolute monarchies, especially the Prussian one, intensely fortified and garrisoned those cities that were better situated to contribute to the defense of their territory. Given the pressure from absolute monarchies, urban communities were relatively powerless to resist the transformation of their walls. Indeed, as city walls became a symbol of state power, rather than a symbol of urban identity, city dwellers contributed to their “disappearance” by breaching them with illegal gates and stealing building materials from them.

The focus of Mintzker’s book is on the “great defortification surge” that took place during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Mintzker’s survey of German cities convincingly demonstrates that in the century before the fall of the Bastille, only one-fifth...