Ordinary Prussians: Brandenburg Junkers and Villagers, 1500-1840 (review)

Conventionally, the Elbe River marks the boundary between freedom and oppression in early modern Central Europe. There, the postfeudal land tenure of old-regime France and western Germany is often thought to have shaded perceptibly into something like Russian serfdom or Polish robotage. In "East Elbian Prussia," the homeland of the Junker nobility, peasants rendered unpaid menial service to their lord, needed his mediation to obtain justice (even against the lordship itself), and even had to secure his formal permission to marry or to emigrate. Prussia's leadership in Germany's nineteenth-century unification meant that its authoritarian rural order indelibly stamped the political culture of the modern industrial nation. For all the attacks leveled in the last two decades against this so-called Sonderweg argument, the picture of East Elbian Prussia has remained largely uninterrogated.

Hagen's mammoth microhistory successfully dismantles the "dualistic east-Elbian/west-Elbian approach to German social and political history" (652). Importing from western German historiography a heightened sensitivity to peasant initiative, it decouples rural social history from teleologies of modernity, aiming instead to recover the texture of an "agrarian regime ... as old as Egypt" (1). Hagen's analysis centers on the triangular relationships of nobles, farmers (Hagen eschews the pejorative term "peasant"), and the state. As the Junkers converted feudal tenures into what Hagen calls "commercialized manorialism," they periodically confronted recalcitrant farmers and central-state interference.

Hagen does not deny the reality of Junker domination so much as embed it in the wider milieu of village life. Meticulous attention to the labor and resources needed to exploit the land reveals the farmers' impressive bargaining power, and sustained treatment of non-farming villagers (such as tavernkeepers and blacksmiths), mediating officials, and poorer local nobles fleshes out a world of choices, negotiations, and strategies rather than mere lordly oppression. Hagen, in reconstructing this world, addresses an encyclopedic array of questions about family life, economics, justice, and material culture. Anyone wanting to know how villagers found marriage partners, how a manor house operated, how severely theft was punished, or how much a funeral cost will find it among Hagen's eighty-odd subsections.

At the heart of this study is an exhaustive analysis of a single estate archive, that of Stavenow, comprising 728 folders filled with court transcripts, parish registers, household inventories, and bailiffs' reports. Hagen strives, despite judicious use of quantitative analysis, mainly to recover "human subjects' words," their "audible tongues" (646, 125). Often, however, he merely strings together the transcribed words and deeds of an ever-changing cast of fleetingly described characters. Besides making the book hard to follow, this method reflects a deep discomfort with the mediation of the sources, and of their authors. "It would be preferable," he candidly admits, "to escape these mediators, and the suspicion that they censored their interlocutors, putting words in or taking them out of their mouths" (24). In this regard, Hagen misses a methodological opportunity: The story of the Stavenow archive's production and structure might have provided both a narrative device to frame his heroic labors more accessibly, and an analytical distance on the material that yet remains faithful to its authenticity. Nonetheless, this is a powerful, evocative, and much-needed account.