Francia­Recensio 2016/2
Frühe Neuzeit – Revolution – Empire (1500–1815)
Linda Brüggemann, Herrschaft und Tod in der Frühen Neuzeit. Das Sterbe­ und Begräbniszeremoniell preußischer Herrscher vom Großen Kurfürsten bis zu Friedrich Wilhelm II. (1688–1797), München (Herbert Utz Verlag) 2015, 463 S., 14 Abb. (Geschichtswissenschaften, 33), ISBN 978­3­8316­4442­1, EUR 52,00.
rezensiert von/compte rendu rédigé par
Helen Watanabe­O’Kelly Oxford
This book discusses the ceremonial employed at the deaths and burials of five Prussian rulers: Friedrich Wilhelm I, the Great Elector, who died in 1688, and the kings Friedrich I, Friedrich Wilhelm I, Friedrich II and Friedrich Wilhelm II, who died in 1713, 1740, 1786 and 1797 respectively. These five examples enable the author to chart the development from electoral Brandenburg to royal Prussia, from what she calls »Baroque pomp« to a secularised Enlightenment ritual, and to demonstrate how five very different personalities employed ceremonial and ritual as part of their panoply of power. In an introductory chapter the author surveys existing research on ritual and ceremonial in general and on funerary practices in particular. She adopts Barbara Stolberg­Rilinger’s definition of ritual (p. 12) and sets out the questions she hopes to answer in the book: to what extent Prussian funerals created symbolic capital in Bourdieu’s sense (p. 16); how the balance was struck between religious observance dictated by true piety and that dictated by the need to »perform« power as part of dynastic representation (p. 16); how true the contention of Stolberg­Rilinger and Ute Daniel is that courtly self­
presentation was addressed to a supra­national courtly public rather than to the ruler’s own subjects (p. 15); to what extent changes in funerary ritual were the product of the emergence of Prussia as a kingdom. Chapter 2 is devoted to what the author calls the »Grand Cérémoniel« used at the death of the Great Elector. She provides a wealth of interesting detail about the death­bed and the seventeenth­century concept of the »good death« imbued with awareness of vanitas and faith in eternity. She distinguishes the ritual relating to the decay of the »natural body« of the ruler from the mourning ritual relating to the »political body« which succeeded the death and describes the detailed regulations governing the conduct of courtiers and subjects, the official acknowledgement of the successor as part of the ceremony, the solemn funeral procession or Leichbegängnis, the ephemeral triumphal arch through which the procession passed commemorating the elector as a great military commander, and finally the magnificent funerary publication by Christian Cochius consisting of 400 folio pages and 200 coloured engravings. This provides the baseline against which later funerals can be judged.
Chapter 3 deals with the royal ceremonial that was used in 1713 when Friedrich I, the first King in Prussia, died. Even though it is his successor Friedrich Wilhelm I, well known for eschewing the Lizenzhinweis: Dieser Beitrag unterliegt der Creative­Commons­Lizenz Namensnennung­Keine kommerzielle Nutzung­Keine Bearbeitung (CC­BY­NC­ND), darf also unter diesen Bedingungen elektronisch benutzt, übermittelt, ausgedruckt und zum Download bereitgestellt werden. Den Text der Lizenz erreichen Sie hier: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by­nc­nd/4.0/
courtly magnificence of his father, who is organising the ceremonies, they must nonetheless be royal in their dimensions and, as Brüggemann points out following Heinz Duchhardt, functioned as a substitute for the coronation that no Prussian king staged again after 1701. The author illuminates Friedrich I’s use of ceremonial and ritual already in the funeral of his consort Sophie Charlotte in 1705 and includes a short excursus on the codification of ceremonial as a branch of knowledge in the eighteenth century (p. 135f.). She concludes that the funerary ceremonial for Friedrich I, coming so soon after his elevation to royal status, was directed at other princes and intended to emphasise that status. Friedrich Wilhelm commissioned magnificent folio volumes from Benjamin Ursinus von Bär to commemorate both his father and his mother and these were the last such publications in Prussia (p. 175). Before the analysis of the death and burial of Friedrich Wilhelm I in 1740 and after what Brüggemann calls the »caesura« in Prussian funerary ceremonial after 1713, she inserts a section on the change in attitudes to death brought about by the Enlightenment (p. 181f.). She characterises these as a less fervent belief in the afterlife and in eternity which led to a change in death­bed ritual, the fear of a Scheintod, of being buried alive, the concept of death as »the brother of sleep«, and the medicalisation of death, whereby the doctor was more likely to be present at the death­bed than the priest. Friedrich Wilhelm I had laid down strict instructions for his burial and funeral which, for the first time in Prussia, were organised as two separate ceremonies. He was interred quietly in a so­called »stilles Begräbnis« as befitted the soldier­king he had been in life. The public ceremony took place two weeks later, with a lying­in­state, a magnificent coffin and funeral procession, all contrary to his expressed wishes. Friedrich II also laid down very precise instructions for an even more modest burial, specifying the terrace in front of Sanssouci in Potsdam as his last resting place and forbidding ceremonial of any kind. These instructions too had to be ignored. His successor Friedrich Wilhelm II simply could not inter his famous and long­lived predecessor under cover of darkness and without any guard of honour or funerary ritual, as Friedrich II wished. This would have reflected badly on him and seemed like contempt for his uncle. He therefore organised all those elements that Friedrich II wished to avoid: the lying­in­state, the formal procession of the body to the church, the ephemeral architecture, all of which aroused huge media interest. The ceremonial, however, differed greatly from that of his predecessors. As Brüggemann points out, these funerary rites were addressed to the Prussian subjects. Three rooms in the Palace in Potsdam were transformed into a theatre of death as part of the lying­in­state, described in detail on page 302–306, and it was claimed at the time that some 60 000 people passed through these rooms to pay their respects. When the body was formally transferred to the Garnisonkirche in Potsdam and placed in an ephemeral structure, this was not decorated with Christian symbols. It was instead a »Temple of Immortality« twelve metres high which celebrated Friedrich as a philosophe, a secular genius, a Great Man. It was not until 205 years later that he was Lizenzhinweis: Dieser Beitrag unterliegt der Creative­Commons­Lizenz Namensnennung­Keine kommerzielle Nutzung­Keine Bearbeitung (CC­BY­NC­ND), darf also unter diesen Bedingungen elektronisch benutzt, übermittelt, ausgedruckt und zum Download bereitgestellt werden. Den Text der Lizenz erreichen Sie hier: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by­nc­nd/4.0/
reburied in the exact place he had specified in 1752. He would surely be pleased by the potatoes that are always placed today on his grave­slab!
Brüggemann describes in chapter 7 how the death of Friedrich Wilhelm II further reduced the role of the death­bed as the exemplary encounter between a Christian and his Maker that it had been in the time of the Great Elector. Though apparently pious, Friedrich Wilhelm II did not prepare spiritually for his own death and hoped to postpone it by ever more exotic medical treatments. He was not even comforted in his last hours by a priest. Though he did lie in state and though large crowds of his subjects again lined the streets, the funerary ceremonial was reduced. According to Brüggemann, the Prussian state was the focus of the events rather than the person of the deceased monarch.
This work is, as its author tells us, an only lightly revised doctoral thesis for Munich University. It is a solid piece of work, informative, clearly written, giving all kinds of useful insights into death and burial practices at an important German court during a particularly significant century in its evolution, always arriving at convincing analyses and conclusions. It is a great pity that it could not have been turned from a thesis into a book. This would have entailed severely pruning the discursive footnotes which take up half or sometimes more of every page. They are printed in even smaller type than the text and contain unnecessary asides on every conceivable topic – accurate and informative but distracting the reader from the actual subject matter. As a book it would have had to be better printed and illustrated properly. The quality of the fourteen black­and­white illustrations is at present so poor and their size is so small as to make them virtually pointless. If they had even been given a page each, rather than half a page, some of the detail would have been visible. However, these criticisms of the outward form of the work do not take from the fact that it is a well­
written study that is worth reading.
Lizenzhinweis: Dieser Beitrag unterliegt der Creative­Commons­Lizenz Namensnennung­Keine kommerzielle Nutzung­Keine Bearbeitung (CC­BY­NC­ND), darf also unter diesen Bedingungen elektronisch benutzt, übermittelt, ausgedruckt und zum Download bereitgestellt werden. Den Text der Lizenz erreichen Sie hier: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by­nc­nd/4.0/