Part Two of the Imperial Reform (Reichsreform)
Ep. 224 – The Reichstag of the Holy Roman Empire – History of the Germans
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Transcript
Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 224 – The Reichstag of the Holy Roman Empire
I am afraid today’s episode is not your usual swordplay and skullduggery. What we are looking at today is the Reichstag as it operated throughout the Holy Roman Empire from 1495 to 1803. Sounds a bit like dour constitutional law, but bear with me.
We will look at a couple of classic tropes, like, whether the empire consisted of more than 300 sovereign states who could do whatever they wanted, whether the Reichstag was a talking shop hat never did anything except stopping the emperor from becoming a proper monarch. And, as usual, we will talk about money and printing, and why German politician speeches are invariably long on fact and short on rhetoric.
So, let’s start at the beginning. When was the first Reichstag?
The shift from Royal Assembly (Hoftag) to Imperial diet (Reichstag)
Oh – and that is already the first booby trap. Because if you go to the historyofthegermans.com website, not just to support the show, but also to consult the transcript, you can find me mentioning a Reichstag in Worms in 1069. And if you go to the internet, you can find another Diet of Worms in 770, that was so long ago, it was called by Charlemagne’s father, Pippin the Short.
But these aren’t real Reichstage. Why? Is it because the chroniclers in the 11th century called them something different? No, there were several gatherings that were referred to as Diata Imperialii, which is Latin for Reichstag. What happened is that in the 1980s some German historians met up and decided that all Imperial assemblies that took place before 1495 were Hoftage, “Royal Assemblies”, and that those that came after Maximilian’s Imperial Reforms were to be called Reichstage, “Imperial Diets”.
Was that just down to the uncontrollable urge to categorize everything from the size of sheets of paper to the 20+ categories of delays on the Deutsche Bahn trains. Or does it mean something?
The key difference between a Hoftag and a Reichstag is the role of the king or emperor in the proceedings.
A Hoftag in the Middle Ages was all about the emperor. He called the meeting, he presided over the proceedings. If there were decisions to be made, like for instance the resolution of a dispute or the conviction of a criminal, it was the emperor who chaired the panel of judges. Princes who were dissatisfied with how things went made their views known by leaving the Hoftag. Speaking out against the emperor was not really an option.
At the diet of Worms in 1495, things were dramatically different. As we heard last week Maximilian wasn’t allowed to take part in any of the debates. His role was limited to opening the assembly, setting the agenda and – once the imperial estates had concluded their debates – either approve or reject the proposals. So, during the weeks and months the debates were going on within the three colleges, of the electors, the princes and the cities, he was basically hopping up and down outside the locked doors shouting, give me the money, the French king is about to slip back out of Italy and it will take fifty years of war to get rid of him again.
But he could not be heard, because he was – outside. All he could really do was gently massage the minds of participants in 1 on 1 private meetings.
In short, both the Hoftag and the Reichstag are gatherings of the most powerful people of the realm, but the Hoftag is presided over by the king, whilst the Reichstag largely excludes the king form the deliberations. This idea of banning the king except for special occasions still exists in the UK. By constitutional convention king Charles III is not allowed to enter the Commons debating chamber. The last king to set foot in there had been Charles I in 1642. And that is why the State Opening of Parliament takes place in the House of Lords, where the king is allowed to enter.
The diet in Worms was however not the first time the imperial estates got together without their king. Sometimes that was due to natural causes, as in when the king or emperor had died and the estates came together to elect a new one. But there had also been assemblies like the one in Trebur in 1076, where the excommunicated emperor Henry IV was banned from taking part (episode 33 if I am not mistaken). And then there are the assemblies where antikings were elected, like the one in March 1077, where for obvious reasons the reigning king wasn’t present.
During the 15th century, when the emperors Sigismund and Friedrich III were often far too busy to come to the assemblies they had called, the imperial estates had become accustomed to discussing their issues by themselves, so accustomed indeed that they no longer wanted him to be in the room when he finally showed up.
I did try to pin down the exact date when they threw the emperor out, but have not got to the bottom of it. What we do know is that in 1495, the rule was “No kings, no emperors indoors”.
And this obviously changed the nature of these gatherings. Earlier assemblies were grounded in the medieval understanding that vassals owed their lord not just military aid, but also advice and good counsel. Hence they were meant to improve the ruler’s decision making in war and justice by providing information or suggestions, not by forcing him in one way or another.
As we move into the 14th and 15th century, these assemblies take a more antagonistic stance, demanding that the emperor resolves key issues, like the schism, the endless feuding, marauding mercenaries or foreign incursions. As we have seen, these antagonistic stances culminated in the blow-up of 1495, where the imperial estates tried to put a gun to Maximilian’s head.
So, there really is a change in the late 15th century that justifies the distinction between Hoftag and Reichstag, but I will not go and correct every episode where I used the term Reichstag before. If this was a book, I would probably do it, but it isn’t and I won’t.
The peculiar composition of the Reichstag
In 1495 the Reichstag was by no means the only assembly that took part in the governance of kingdoms and principalities. The English parliament had already been around for 200plus years, the Polish Sejm and the Cortes of Spain and Portugal claim to be even older. There were assemblies in Hungary, Estates general in the duchy of Burgundy and France, royal councils in Denmark and Sweden. And on the level below, the imperial principalities, there were assemblies, Landstände, where representatives of the local nobility, clergy, cities and commoners agreed their position vis-a-vis their lord. The Landtag of Württemberg was one of the most prominent and lasting of these, but we encountered them as well in Austria and Tyrol in recent episodes. Almost every political entity in the 15th and 16th century had some sort of representative body alongside its ruler. They all different in terms of member selection, organisation, procedure etc, but even then, the Reichstag was very much an outlier.
Let’s start with the composition – who is a member of the Reichstag and why?
In England parliament had the lords and the commoners, the Cortes in Spain were organized into clergy, nobles and procurators of the cities. In France, the Estates General comprised the three orders of clergy, nobility and commoners. All of these were meant to represent their social group in their dealings with the king.
In 1521, when membership of the Reichstag was initially fixed, there were 402 estates invited to participate , divided into three colleges. The most senior college was that of the 7 electors. The College of the princes comprised 51 ecclesiastical princes, 32 secular princes, 83 prelates and 143 counts. And lastly the 86 free imperial cities formed the third college.
But, not every count, duke or prince was admitted to the Reichstag. Only if your great,great,great,great,great and some more greats grandfather had been enfeoffed with a county or duchy directly by the emperor, then you had a seat or share of a seat in the Reichstag. However, if you were a wealthy count, even if you were three times richer and three times more powerful than the wealthiest count in the Reichstag, but you were a vassal of a territorial prince, no dice. Equally only free imperial cities were admitted, even though many were smaller than say Stralsund or Rostock. The key difference to England, France and almost everywhere else is that the Reichstag was not based on social orders, like noble, churchman or commoner, but based on whether or not there was a direct vassalage connection to the emperor – the famous immediacy.
Basically the Reichstag reflected and continued the feudal status hierarchy which was already ancient history by 1495. The idea was that the obligation of the imperial vassals to provide advice and council to the king, was flipped into a right to take part in the decision making. And this right was not based on being a member of a particular social group like noble, clergy or commoner, but on the ancient bond of vassalage, established hundreds of years ago and renewed dozens of times since. That explains the presence of the free imperial cities. They too had become vassals of the emperor when he had granted them their charter. They were there not to represent the interests of the urban population of the empire, but to safeguard the interest and liberties of their hometowns.
If one were to take this logic to its conclusion the imperial knights who were direct vassals of the emperor should have been invited to vote in the Reichstag. But logic is apparently only for those who can afford it.
The historian Peter Wilson describes this unusual structure of the empire as a “mixed Monarchy”. If you really want to understand how the Holy Roman Empire worked, get his brilliant book alternatively called “The Heart of Europe” or “The Holy Roman Empire”. This is where most of what I am taking about today comes from.
What was the Reichstag and all these other assemblies for?
Now, having discussed the intellectual Uberbau of the Reichstag as a continuation of the feudal structure in a modernized form, let’s talk about the practical purpose of these assemblies and the Reichstag in particular.
These early modern assemblies were not meant as a representation of the will of the people or some such newfangled stuff. They served two basic purposes, one was to grant a special status to the important constituents of the realm, usually the bishops, dukes, counts, nobles etc. That was supposed to keep them engaged and aligned with the king or prince. The assembly was a place to find consensus amongst the people who really mattered.
Secondly, assemblies and parliaments were there to facilitate tax collection. Most kings and princes did not have their own tax collection infrastructure. That meant they were to a large extent dependent on the willingness of their subjects to cough up the cash. Such willingness is typically correlated to the amount of influence the payer has over the use of the funds, or for our American friends, no taxation without representation. Hence most of the early modern estates included some form of representation of those who ended up paying. And in many cases the estates established and maintained the tax collection infrastructure, thereby ensuring the fairness or sometimes unfairness of the process.
That is why most of these assemblies had a separate chamber or order for the commoners who bore the lion’s share of the tax burden created by the lord’s decision to support the king’s wars, palace building or mistresses.
If you look at the parliament In England and the estates general in France you can see a fairly clean picture – the nobles and clergy debate the grand politics and then the funding is put t the Commons or Tiers Etat. And you can see how this pattern then developed further, either organically as in England or as a rupture in France. The taxpaying Commons and Tiers Etat demanded more and more say in the big decisions and then power shifts to these precursors of modern parliaments.
Why the Reichstag could not become the nucleus of a democratic parliament
The Reichstag did not experience such a trajectory. It started in 1495, ran until 1803 and was revived in a fundamentally different form in 1866/1871.
The stability of the membership
Part of why the Reichstag never became a true representative structure was the fixed membership. In England the king can and always could appoint literally anyone to the house of Lords, like for instance a 29-year old parliamentary aide with no publicly known skills or achievements.
In the empire, that was not that easy. For example the Liechtensteins, who had for centuries been amongst the largest landowners in Bohemia, Moravia and Austria were elevated to imperial princes during the 30-years war. But it took them almost another century before they could purchase the tiny fiefs of Vaduz and Schellenberg that gave them access to the Reichstag and are today the country of Liechtenstein.
Effectively the membership of the Reichstag shrunk throughout most its history. In 1521, the initial tally was 402 imperial estates and by 1792 that had gone down to 204 imperial estates. If you forget about the back and forth with the Palatine vote, only one Elector was added before 1803, the Elector of Hannover. The secular princes went from 51 to 84, in part through the elevation of counts to princes. 21 of the 51 ecclesiastical principalities disappeared during the reformation. Imperial cities shrank from 86 to 51 and the number of counts fell from 143 to 48 through expiry of the family, sale or elevation to princely rank. Only about fifty new members were created throughout that period.
Stability in the upper house is neither unusual nor an impediment to a transition to a modern parliament. In England the House of Lords was slowly sidelined and in France the Assemblée Nationale did away with the colleges of the nobles and their heads. It is the representation of the commoners that tended to be the nucleus of democracy.
The lopsided structure of the taxation model
As we said, the reason that commoners are invited to assemblies is because they pay the lion’s share of the taxes. And matters of burden sharing and taxation gave parliament and the Assemblee Nationale their role in the English and the French Revolution.
The Reichstag could never play such a role, because the Reichstag did not decide on individual taxation. In 1495 the Reichstag approved the “common penny” a tax levied on every household in the empire. That system failed, mainly because the empire could not collect the tax. The princes had refused to let the emperor use their infrastructure to the extent they had one in the first place. Collection was then given to the parish priests. And parish priests had no interest in chasing their flock for some imperial tax they would not see any benefit from.
After this failure the empire reverted back to the system of the Imperial register or Imperial Matrikel that existed since 1420. This register contained a fixed quota of soldiers each imperial estate had to provide if called. So for instance the duke of Cleves owed 60 horse and 540 men on foot, whilst the abbot of St. Maximian owed 6 horse and 44 men on foot. Such small contingents had become ineffective by the 1500s, so the obligation was converted into a cash contribution.
This system had a number of advantages. First, it allowed to break down the overall commitment made to the imperial estates. So if the Reichstag awarded 100,000 florins for a campaign against the Turk, it was clear to the last penny how much of that the duke of Cleves or the abbot of St. Maximian owed. It also allowed the wealthiest estates, namely the great cities to hide how wealthy they really were. If taxes had been collected directly, for one it would be hard to predict how much would actually be collected, and it would show how many taxable households there were in say Nürnberg. And if the neighboring princes had known how much wealth there was, the cities feared, they would be gobbled up.
On the downside, the Matrikel system was a) very imbalanced, with some places paying high dues relative to economic capacity and others low ones and b) only very rarely reset. So the matrikel became a sort of unit of measure. For instance during the long Turkish war 1663 to 1742, the Reichstag would regularly express their commitment as x times the matrikel, i.e., x times their commitment in the imperial register.
All this meant was that the level of taxation agreed in the Reichstag had limited impact on the man on the street. Sure, if the empire demanded very high contributions, their local lord would raise local taxes to pay for it. However, when the emperor asked for lower or no taxes, the local lord was unlikely to reduce the tax burden. He would simply keep it for him or herself. Moreover, maximum 10% of the empire’s population lived in the free imperial cities represented in the Reichstag. Even if these estates had an interest in keeping taxes low for the common man, they did not care for the other 90% of the empire’s population. And because the composition of the Reichstag was extremely static, that never changed.
The Reichstag as part of the “Status Hierarchy”
So, if the Reichstag was not about representing the interests of social groups, not even in the rather rudimentary early modern/medieval way, what was it about?
In the main, it was a about status. The empire was held together by the status hierarchy it conveyed to its members. Say you were a Prince Elector, the highest princely rank in the empire with the right to elect the emperor. This status can only exist as long as there is an empire and an emperor to elect. Therefore, even once the elections had become non-contentious acclamation of whichever Habsburg’s turn it was, there were still elections, so that the electors could feel valued and important. You may think how backward, but I find this a lot less ridiculous than the French aristocrats believing their self-worth was dependent on which part of the royal underwear they could pass to his majesty during their morning levee.
This status model was extremely successful, arguably more successful than anything the emperors had tried in the centuries before.
You may painfully remember that we split the History of the Germans some two years ago and discussed the North, namely the Eastern Expansion into the formerly Slavic lands east of the Elbe, the Hanseatic League and the Teutonic Knights. The reason for that was that the empire had broken into two parts, the lands near to the king and the lands far from the king.
The former were mainly southern Germany, Austria, Bohemia and the Rhine Valley, lands where the kings and emperors had their base, where they would often pass through on their way to coronations, elections and imperial diets. Meanwhile the lands north of the Main River and East of the Rhine had drifted further and further away from the imperial orbit. Martin Rady commented that the very first time an emperor came to Pomerania was in 1712, and that was the emperor of all the Russians.
Basically the dukes of Mecklenburg, Holstein, Oldenburg, Brunswick, Calenberg etc. barely featured in the imperial history since the 11th century and even the electors of Saxony and Brandenburg put in only brief appearances. Basically they did not see much value in what the empire had to offer and they got busy with the Scandinavian Kingdoms, England and Poland.
The imperial reforms of 1495 changed that. Being an imperial prince with a full vote in the college of Princes provided them with a sense of importance and status that suddenly made it worth while getting involved with imperial politics again. Status was not the only thing, the other institutions, like the courts, the eternal peace etc., played a role as well.
But this was a time where status was exceedingly important. Princes were constantly stretching themselves and their states to keep up with the Joneses’. If your neighbor built a theatre, you needed one too. Your collection of Chinese porcelain had to be on par with the other princes. At weddings and hunts, you had to scrub up not just nicely but real nice. The obsession filled the country with literally thousands of baroque palaces, gardens, follies, hunting lodges, opera houses and whatever a discerning prince could need. Each one trying to be a mini or sometimes maxi Versailles and always, always, bigger and better than the one next door.
Apart from self-aggrandization, the status component did also have tangible benefits for those who had it. Basically once an entity had become an imperial estate, it had become unlikely that they would fall under the control of a territorial prince. For instance, not a single free imperial city lost their status after 1607. And that mattered.
Take the city of Trier is an example. Trier had sent its archbishop off to live out his life in Koblenz and had become a free city. As a free city, they were invited to come to the Reichstag in 1495 and several occasions thereafter. They even hosted a Reichstag in 1512. But most of the time, Trier did not show up and, crucially, refused to commit to the imperial taxation system. So the city was unceremoniously dropped from the 1521 register. When they realized what they had done, they desperately wanted to get back in and crucially, be again recognized as a free, imperial city. But the Imperial court, the Reichskammergericht decided in 1580 that, if you did not pay, you had no right to play. And now it was too late to come back in. The Archbishop took back control of the city and the dream of freedom and independence was over, sacrificed by a stingy accountant.
That explains why the much wiser burghers of Lübeck, who had had only scant interaction with the empire until then, decided to pay 4x what they used to in order to be a member of the Reichstag. Lübeck remained a free imperial city and and later a city state within Germany until 1937. Money well spent I would say.
The Decision making process in the Reichstag
Decision making in the Reichstag was famously laborious and slow. Jakb Wimpfeling said already in 1500 that “The Reichstag is a body where the Emperor proposes, the colleges deliberate in secret, vote separately, then quarrel endlessly until nothing is decided—or everything is diluted to meaninglessness.” Regensburg, where the Reichstag would sit permanently after 1663 was better known for the quality of its taverns than of its debates.
As we discussed last week, there were three separate colleges, one for the electors, one for the imperial princes as well as the counts and prelates and one for the imperial cities. Voting happened first within the colleges followed by an arbitration process between the colleges. That arbitration process began with aligning electors and princes before the cities were brought in. Only once all three colleges had reached unanimity did the Reichstag decision go to the emperor who had only the choice between accepting or sending it back to be debated for another month or two.
That sounds complex already, and when you take into account that there were 402 imperial estates with a seat in the Reichstag, it sounds almost impossible to manage.
But here is the good news, only 281 of the 402 imperial estates ever participated in a Reichstag. Usually no more that half of the invitees showed up. Even at the crucial Reichstag of 1495 only 147 estates were present.
And there is the other important point. Because the seat was linked to the territory, not to individuals, one single individual could represent more than one vote. So, if a bishop held several bishoprics, he had multiple votes. Or if a count sold his county, or passed it on via inheritance, this vote could now be exercised by someone else. After the reformation, several bishoprics became principalities and integrated into other territorial lordships. And occasionally fiefs moved across as a consequence of war.
So, after all this two and fro in 1792 Austria held 1 electoral vote, 3 princely votes and 2 comital votes. Prussia, though smaller in territory, had 1 electoral, but 8 princely and 1 comital vote. Of the remaining 84 princely votes, 30 were held by bishops and abbots, the rest by 35 secular princes and electors plus Denmark and Sweden with one vote each.
The smaller entities did not really matter. The 48 counts and 40 prelates shared just 6 votes of the 90 votes in the College of Princes. The 51 remaining cities were so disadvantaged by the voting process, their influence was also usually marginal.
If you then take into account that many of the ecclesiastical princes were second sons of the princely or electoral houses, the Reichstag really required only about 40 to 50 individuals to agree. And since rarely more than half of them showed up, we are looking at more like 20-30 guys taking the decisions. That sounds a lot more viable than 402.
Were there really over 300 sovereign states in the empire?
Basically these hundreds tiny statelets did not carry much weight in the Reichstag. And the idea that they were like independent sovereigns is also not true. Sure, the very largest ones, Austria, Prussia, Saxony, Hannover would forge their own foreign policy and sent envoys to foreign courts, occasionally courts where they were themselves the king, as for example in England, Poland, Denmark, Russia and Sweden.
But for someone like the counts of Hohenlohe-Weikersheim with their six villages and oversized Schloss, there was no way they would send an envoy abroad. At a stretch they may appoint a representatives to the Reichstag, but usually only as a joint effort together with their cousins in Neuenstein and Öhringen and still their representative was not be working exclusively for them. If they had to take a stance in major conflicts, they usually aligned with one of their bigger neighbors.
Such micro-principalities were much more involved in the 10 imperial circles which we will discuss in more detail next week.
What powers did the Reichstag have?
The English parliament and many other assemblies had the power to decide on war and peace, since they controlled the money needed to conduct such wars.
On paper that was the same in the Reichstag. If the emperor wanted to take the empire to war against for example France, he could only do that with the consent of the Reichstag. However, every imperial estate, even a tiny one, was allowed to go to war against foreign enemies, provided it did not harm neither the emperor nor the empire. For example in 1698 the elector of Saxony joined Russia in a war against Sweden without asking the Reichstag. And that logic applied to the emperor as well. He could go to war against France in his capacity as Lord of the Low Countries and archduke of Austria.
The emperor only required the Reichstag consent for his war with France, if he wanted access to imperial resources, either in the form of taxes or military forces. As we have seen with Maximilian I in 1495, that can occasionally be decisive, but not always. And if they could conduct the war using just their own resources, the Habsburg occasionally did go without Reichstag approval. I guess in about 2 years, when we have worked our way through the incessant wars of the 16th, 17th and 18h century, we will have a much better perspective on whether the Reichstag and its support mattered to the outcome.
Reichstag matters beyond war and peace
War and taxes was however not the only topic of debate in the Reichstag. Its other tacit objective as to improve co-ordination and coherence across the empire.
The Reichstag for instance ensured that people could move freely between the imperial estates. The problem then was not so much people trying to come in, rather than people trying to get away, for example from the draft into the Prussian army, religious prosecution or just general economic malaise. Quite often the states competed for immigrants, like the French Huguenots in order to refill the population depleted by war and disease. The Reichstag ensured that most people in the empire could take advantage of these sometimes generous offers.
Another issue that came up regularly was coinage. For centuries the emperors had been forced to pass the imperial regalia to the princes, which included the right to mint their own coins. So that by 1495 there were 456 places with the right to produce currency. Minting was a short term money spinner for many cash strapped princes, because they could call in the existing coins in their lands and reissue coin with lower gold or silver content. Or they would simply create vast amounts of debased coins to pay their soldiers, resulting in immediate inflation and occasionally a financial crash.
The Reichstag passed rules limiting the number of mints to no more than 40, set standards for the two most common coins, the Florin and the Thaler and intervened again and again in cases of debasement. They did not succeed completely and there were always wildly different coins in circulation, but they curbed the worst excesses. And maybe one central currency in the hand of an absolutist king would not have been such a great idea – just ask the French about the Mississippi bubble.
Similar efforts were made to reduce the number of toll stations that seriously hampered trade. For instance transporting salt from Frankfurt to Cologne added 60% in tolls. As a consequence merchants would unload wine south of Mainz and transport them over land via Frankfurt and Kassel and then on the Weser down to the North Sea. An absurd detour. Here the Reichstag was less successful, but note that in 1766 France still employed 20,000 revenue officers collecting tolls on domestic traffic and treated Lorraine as a foreign country.
Another – unintended – benefit of the Reichstag was that it provided a sort of permanent international conference. The Habsburgs had of course a permanent presence, as did the kings of Denmark and Sweden. Envoys from France and Italy could easily come to the Reichstag and use it as a platform for informal discussions.
The Bureaucracy
Something else that is quite specific to the Reichstag was the amount of paper it produced. For one, most Reichstag decisions were published in print, the first one in 1486. The Corpus Recessum Imperii that recorded all the Reichstag decisions was first published in 1501, a solid 270 years before Hansard recorded the debates in the English parliament. The proceedings at the Reichstag became part of a broad political information exchange that got turbo boosted when the Thurn and Taxis family opened the imperial postal service to private users in 1516. Germany had the first daily newspaper in Europe, 67 years before England. Apparently in the 16th and 17th centuries this country of poets and thinkers was full of news junkies.
In general, the Reichstag was mainly driven by written memoranda and weighty policy papers, not by rousing speeches. That had a lot to do with the habit of sending representatives to the Reichstag. The gatherings were scheduled for 2 months and often went on much longer. Most princes found it impossible or inopportune to leave their comfy palaces for such a long time. Moreover, the Reichstag was initially gathering in different imperial cities, before it finally settled in Regensburg. If the empire had had a capital, the important princes would have established a town palace there, as was the case in Paris, Madrid or London. And in that case they would have attended in person more often. But with an itinerant Reichstag, a large proportion of participants had sent their councilors or envoys. And they would rarely have the authority to commit their prince on matters not previously discussed.
That rendered stirring speeches rather useless. The audience could not really decide matters on their own. So they would ask for a written copy of the speech they could send to their boss with a suggestion on how to vote. They would receive a letter back, which they would read out to their fellow deputies, who would in turn ask for a copy of this letter to send to their bosses and then receive a letter back, that would be read out and copied so forth, and so forth and so forth. This made the process very slow and, I think the polite word is, lifeless.
However, it had a couple of advantages. The public could follow the debates almost in real time even if they were hundreds of miles away. And given that waving arms and rhetoric flourishes were effectively pointless, the debate became more focused on facts and the thorough review of competing arguments.
I do not have a source for this, but I believe this tradition of written debate aimed at the rational weighing of arguments has been embedded into German political discourse. Debates in the Bundestag are shockingly dry and dour, in particular when compared to the intellectual sparring at Prime Minister’s question time or at Senate Hearings.
That can of course be because Germans have come out of the 20th century with a strong suspicion of stirring speeches. But even before 1933, Germany did not have debating societies like the Oxford Union that rates rhetoric over content. The Lesegesellschaften or reading societies of the 18th and 19th century tried to find a deeper understanding of politics, poetry and philosophy, not to crown a winner.
So maybe 300 years of swapping written memoranda had left an imprint on the German political culture that we now refuse to shake.
Summary
If we pull it all this together, the Reichstag was verbose, slow, unexciting, all about status, not representation and not as effective as one would have wanted. And it slowed down the consolidation of the German lands by effectively guaranteeing the continued existence of its smaller members. All this is true. But one could look at it in another way, even though it was more bureaucratic than the EU, less able to prevent war than the UN and had more freeriders than Nato, it ensured the empire remained together as an entity for another 300 years. If we look to the southern part of what had once been the medieval empire, Italy. They did not have a co-ordination mechanism like the Reichstag. They consolidated into five large and maybe a dozen smaller states. But throughout these 300 years plus another 50 or so, Itay’s states were vassals of Spain and Austria, unable to determine their own destiny.
I expect we will spend quite a lot more time with the Reichstag as the Podcast winds its way through the 16th, 17th and 18th century. It is hence far too early to come to a conclusion on whether the Reichstag of the holy Roman Empire was good or a bad, or just the best possible solution to a complex situation. I hope you will stick around until we get to 1806 and can really take stock.
And if you want to make sure we get to the end of the empire without advertising and undue haste, you can do so by going to historyofthegermans.com/support and make a contribution, just like Matt B., Hilary R., Michael P., Chris, Henrietta B. Shawn S. and Alexander D. have already done.
