Junkerdom East of the Elbe

Aristocratic landlordism as it had arisen after the sixteenth century in Holstein and Mecklenburg, but particularly in the Prussian provinces east of the Elbe, owed its origins to the economic revolutions of the age of the Reformation. From being a warrior, the knight had become a producer of commodities. But he carried out his resurrection on the legal basis of feudal entitlement. It was from medieval landlordism that he derived, with the help of venal lawyers, the excuses for, on the one hand, driving peasants from the soil and seizing for himself their common woods, waters and pastures, and, on the other, undermining the tenure rights of those peasants who had been spared and destroying their personal freedom, so that they had to give up all opposition and obey his ever-increasing claims on their labour power and that of their families. Princely absolutism did not oppose this robbery, which lasted for centuries. Particularly in Prussia, it always stood on the side of the landlords against the peasants, unless, of course, it fought with the Junkers about the peasants for the purposes of its military or taxation policies. Its so-called protection of the peasants was limited to preserving the peasant class and keeping its despoliation within such bounds that despotic exploitation should not be squeezed by aristocratic exploitation.

Feudal conditions were by no means abolished by the so-called liberation of the peasants. The French peasants who set the torch to the castles of their tormentors had sufficiently enlightened aristocratic leaders. The noble members of the French National Assembly had been in the forefront on that famous August night in 1789 when an end was put to feudal privileges. The German peasants were much too impoverished to apply such a thoroughgoing method. Only here and there, as in East Prussia and Silesia, did they stir a little. On the other hand the cleverer members of the aristocracy supported the liberation of the peasants, but they were concerned with the interests of the Junkers, and not at all with those of the peasants. They recognized that the forced labour of the peasant produced bad and unreliable work, and in transforming him into a free but propertyless proletarian they wanted to squeeze a greater quantity of work out of him. Just as Mirabeau, the aristocratic leader of the Third Estate, distanced himself from the resolutions of the French National Assembly that cleared away the feudal methods of exploitation, so Schön, the most freethinking of all Prussian statesmen, wanted to restore the personal freedom of the peasants, but by no means their free possession of their acres. In their deeply rooted class selfishness, the mass of the Junkers did not even understand this. Only the fearful blows they received from the peasants’ sons of the French army beat a little economic sense into them.

To crawl before French despots was an old and venerable habit of the German princes and Junkers. They crawled enough before Napoleon too. But at the same time they hated in him the plebeian executor of the bourgeois revolution, and this hatred appeared more sharply, the deeper the individual parts of Germany were still sunk in feudalism. However, free peasants would not let themselves be beaten by serfs. The liberation of the Prussian Peasants therefore was limited to making the peasants fit for modern warfare, but otherwise aimed at saving of feudalism whatever could be saved. So the peasants were given their personal freedom and lured with all kinds of promises about regulation of their rights of tenure until the enemy had been driven from the land, Then the peasant class was cheated worse than the bourgeois.

The great mass of the small peasants, that is the peasants who did not possess their own team of draught animals, fell with the emancipation of the peasants out of the frying pan into the fire. They could neither confirm their right of tenure nor free themselves from feudal dues, services and compulsory labour. On the other hand, their personal freedom from now on exposed them to every whim of the Junkers. The bounds that the eighteenth century monarchy had still tried to set to the clearance of the peasants fell away. The Junker did as he wished with these peasants. He could evict them ‘with compensation for whatever tenure rights might exist’, he bought them out or simply gave them notice to quit their acreage, or used their ignorance to make them give up whatever rights they had. Enough – for a derisory sum or, if even that was too much for him, with force or with lies and trickery, he depressed them to the level of a class of propertyless proletarians whose freedom consisted in this, that the peasants were deprived of all rights where the Junkers were concerned, and the Junkers were free of all duties towards the peasants. For a part of this proletariat, this lack of rights was even legally established by the Statute of Servants (Gesindeordnung) of 1810. This is how the great mass of the peasants were thanked for Grossbeeren, Dennewitz, Leipzig and all the countless battles of the Napoleonic wars. Even in 1848, the Junker Bismarck publicly boasted, as if it were an ideal state of affairs, of the fact that the labourers on his estate at Kniephof had to drudge unpaid, the men for 156 days in the year, the women for 26, for supplies in kind that were by his own account wretched, and for wages fixed, in summer, at 4 silver groats a day for men and 3 for women, and in winter, at one groat less for either sex.

After the Junkers had created for themselves the proletariat that was both indispensable for large-scale agricultural enterprise and defenceless against the most thoroughgoing exploitation, they plundered the minority of spannfähig peasants, i.e. those possessing their own draught animals, in a different manner. These peasants were divided into those still having security of tenure and those whose right of tenure was insecure, or rather made insecure over the course of years by the encroachments of the Junkers. The spannfähig peasants with insecure right of tenure were ‘regularized’. They were able to secure the right to possess their land freely and liberate themselves from all feudal burdens by giving up to the Junkers a third or a half of their acreage, according to the degree of insecurity of their tenure. Moreover, a further large portion of these spannfähig peasants were excluded from regularizing their situation by dubious interpretations of the law, and were just as exposed to the arbitrary will of the Junkers as were their comrades in misfortune who possessed no draught animals. The spannfähig peasants with secure tenure were ‘released’: they were allowed to have their feudal charges estimated as rent in money or in corn, and to buy themselves off completely by paying twenty-five times the value of the rent.

Thus there emerged between 1815 and 1848, as a result of the regularization, in the Provinces of Brandenburg, Pomerania, Silesia, Prussia and Posnan no more than 70,582 hereditary holding, of which 20,000 were in the Province of Posnan alone, where the government proceeded somewhat more sharply against the rebellious Polish nobility. In addition, 289,652 spannfähig peasants were released from their feudal obligations. In the process of regularization and release itself the peasants suffered, not only from the ‘reform’ that cost them so dear, but from the activities of the town authorities which everywhere worked hand-in-glove with the Junkers. The whole emancipation cost the peasants 1,533,050 morgen of land,18,544,768 talers in capital payments, and a further 1,599,992 talers and 260,069 bushels of corn in annual rents.

The emancipation of the Prussian peasants turned out to be a bloody caricature of what the French peasants had achieved in their revolution. Across the Rhine, absolutism and feudalism had been destroyed, and their spectral return after Waterloo only proved that their days were numbered. East of the Elbe, they flourished all the more comfortably the more the exploitation of the masses enabled them to put the royal domains and the Junkers’ estates on a capitalist footing. Large scale agriculture now had a proletariat in all due and legal form, the last drops of whose sweat it could mint into money, and the colossal expenditure of money and land with which the peasants had had to foot the bill for four centuries of plunder provided the means to set up agricultural industries. The first and most important was the distillation of schnaps, which from now on began to flood first Germany and then the whole world with Prussian fusel oil. The Prussian spirit industry poisoned the masses with a success only surpassed by the poisoning of China by the Anglo-Indian opium industry. The still is a better emblem of the Junkers east of the Elbe than any warrior crest. And while they erected new bulwarks to their power with this and other highly-modern industries like sugar beet refining, the Prussian Junkers clung convulsively to a whole lumber of feudal privileges, manorial policing rights, manorial courts, control of Church offices, hunting rights, etc.

It was a wondrously distorted world, and it may well have looked as it appeared to Heine, the Rhenish poet: a child with a pumpkin-head, a blond moustache and grey pigtail; with long arms, spidery but strong, a monstrous belly but a short gut. But until it had finished off this tough and obstinate class of Prussian Junkers, the German bourgeoisie could not think of ruling politically on its own, especially since these Junkers had forged for themselves, in the Prussian army and the bureaucracy, weapons that were always ready to strike.