Writing, citizenship, and the making of civil society in Germany, 1780-1840.

Abstract

This dissertation fundamentally reexamines the encounters between state and citizen on the local, everyday level in Germany in the decades surrounding Napoleon, 1780-1840. It attempts to rehabilitate the German citizenry from judgments of apoliticism and passivity for an epoch in which the primacy of the state is thought to have reduced them to pawns on a chessboard. Germany's turn toward modernity during this period entailed the construction of a free and open civil society for which the state itself provided the crucial impetus. However, by bringing a range of cultural and social history methodologies to bear on this reform from above, this dissertation reconceptualizes the state not as a site of domination but as a locus of citizenship practice. It dissects Germany's notoriously formalized bureaucratic culture--again, on the local level--by examining official written texts ranging from contracts and petitions to statistical almanacs and intelligence gazettes. Focus is on the ways citizens asserted themselves within the state through these texts and through the mediation of powerful municipal scribes (Schreiber) who are the dissertation's main subjects. The narrative follows these scribes from their eighteenth-century heyday, as the political class in the southwest German duchy of Wurttemberg, to their downfall, in wake of Napoleon's conquests. These local officials had presided over a system of writing which bound citizens to the state through elaborate and onerous formalities. The freer, more entrepreneurial traffic in texts to emerge after their fall heralded a new emphasis on citizens' autonomy from administrative tutelage. This account of civic emancipation falls into three main parts: textuality and citizenship; bureaucracy and local society; and civil society as cultural production. The concern throughout is to integrate macro- and microhistorical perspectives in the analysis of bureaucratization, parliamentarization, the popular diffusion of Enlightenment culture, and the advent of a public sphere and associational life in Germany.