Making of a German Constitution : a Slow Revolution

Undermining Absolutism • 133sat on the key legal codification commissions for the North German Confederationafter 1866 and the Reich after 1871, including Adolf Leonhardt, Rudolf Bennigsenand Gottlieb Planck, were hardened veteran politicos of the Hanover constitutionalconflicts of the 1850s. Indeed, liberal constitutionalism, which was in serious troublein Hanover in 1865, was given a new life after the founding of the North GermanConfederation in 1866.The Germanisten ConferencesThe Germanisten conferences of 1846 and 1847 have been mentioned in the literatureon German history. The most thorough treatment, however, remains R. HintonThomas’s study of 1951. 6 His work made these previously obscure conferencesvisible. However, Thomas wrote prior to the advance of social history, and it didnot take into consideration the economic crisis and social upheavals that hit CentralEurope in the 1840s. His approach was that of intellectual history, and, for this reason,the Germanisten conferences were considered in isolation from other events.Factoring in the economic and social crisis, however, helps to reveal the considerablepolitical opportunism that was at the heart of these conferences. It was no fluke ofhistory that the Germanists suddenly chose to hold a conference in these years.Crop failures in 1845 and the economic downturn that followed by 1847 producedwidespread hunger in the German lands. Both the 1844 weavers’ rising in Silesia andthe peasants’ revolt in Galacia of 1846 were ominous signs of human suffering, andliberals, including the ranks of the Germanists, interpreted these events as an indicatorof the failure of governments to feed their own people. By the time of the potatorevolution in Berlin of 1847, hunger mixed with general discontent regarding nobleprivileges, including judicial privileges, was a strong source of acrid discontent.While liberal transformationists could not have had a hand in the crop failures oreconomic downturn, the character of the demands expressed by discontented crowdswas not altogether spontaneous. In reality, it had been cultivated by the Germanists,who after Jacob Grimm included anyone and any genre so long as they or it offereddata to support the liberal sociopolitical agenda.Through a variety of modes of communication, the Germanists had led the inclinationsof the people toward constitutional transformation and encouraged anawareness of the inefficacy of the existing arrangements. At the popular level, theindictments against noble privileges had been spoon-fed to the young generationof 1848. They were born in the 1820s and were the first generation to be sent off toslumber with their little heads filled with folk tales. Ordinary Germans may not havebeen able to absorb the complexities of Eichhorn, Mittermaier, Grimm or Reyscher’ssystems, but they could identify with arbitrariness of Mother Gothel in the tale ofRapunzel or the jealous cruelty of the Queen in Snow White. Indeed, the Hausmärchendepicted noble women and others in authority as unnatural villains and thefeminine, increasingly, appeared as a metaphor for imbalance and disorder.