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How German was the German Home Town?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 October 2014

Christopher R. Friedrichs
Christopher R. Friedrichs*
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia
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Extract

We have loved this book for more than forty years. Age cannot wither its intellectual charms, nor custom stale its endless teachability, especially in graduate seminars. As in any long relationship, there have been moments of vexation and irritation, but we return to this book over and over to be nourished anew by its originality, its insights, and its capacity not just to evoke a certain kind of German community but also to convince us that the values of such communities shaped much of German history right into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Type
Articles
Information
Central European History , Volume 47 , Issue 3 , September 2014 , pp. 488 - 495
Copyright
Copyright © Central European History Society of the American Historical Association 2014 

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References

1 Walker, Mack, German Home Towns: Community, State and General Estate, 1648–1871 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971)Google Scholar.

2 Clark, Peter, European Cities and Towns, 400–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 125Google Scholar.

3 Walker, Mack, Der Salzburger Handel. Vertreibung und Errettung der Salzburger Protestanten im 18. Jahrhundert, trans. Krumwiede, Sabine (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1997)Google Scholar; cf. Walker, Mack, The Salzburg Transaction: Expulsion and Redemption in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

4 Walker, German Home Towns, 35. Walker himself does not seem to have used the term “face-to-face society,” though it figures significantly in discussions of his book by other historians. The term was originally made popular among historians through the classic essay by Laslett, Peter, “The Face to Face Society,” in Philosophy, Politics, and Society, ed. Laslett, Peter (Oxford: Basil Blackwood, 1956), 157–84Google Scholar, which emphasized that “the face to face society is a special society with specific functions and not a universal description of society” (184). Also see Schlögl, Rudolf, “Vergesellschaftung unter Anwesenden. Zur kommunikativen Form des Politischen in der vormodernen Stadt,” in Interaktion und Herrschaft. Die Politik der frühneuzeitlichen Stadt, ed. Schlögl, Rudolf (Konstanz: UKV Verlagsgesellschaft, 2004), 9–60Google Scholar.

5 Walker, German Home Towns, 27.

6 Ibid., 134.

7 Ibid., 55, 133.

8 Ibid., 317.

9 Ibid., 417 and 426.

10 For example, Friedrichs, Christopher R., “Capitalism, Mobility, and Class Formation in the Early Modern German City,” Past and Present 69 (November, 1975): 24–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 31, 47 note 46; Friedrichs, Christopher R., Urban Society in an Age of War: Nördlingen, 1580–1720 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 288–89Google Scholar. (Nördlingen was specifically described as a classic home town by Walker; Walker, German Home Towns, 42–43.) My fundamental admiration for Walker's book was also expressed in my article “But Are We Any Closer to Home? German Urban History since German Home Towns,” Central European History 30 (1997): 163–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Walker, German Home Towns, 1–2, 21–22.

12 For a brief overview of the subject, see Clark, Peter, “Introduction,” in Small Towns in Early Modern Europe, ed. Clark, Peter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1–21Google Scholar.

13 Walker, German Home Towns, 86.

14 Gillion, Kenneth L., Ahmedabad: A Study in Indian Urban History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1968), 23Google Scholar.

15 For a fuller discussion of comparisons between European and Asian urban institutions, see Friedrichs, Christopher R., “What Made the Eurasian City Work? Urban Political Cultures in Early Modern Europe and Asia,” in City Limits: Perspectives on the Historical European City, ed. Clark, Glenn, Owens, Judith, and Smith, Greg T. (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2010), 29–64Google Scholar.

16 Walker, German Home Towns, 35.

17 Cf. Friedrichs, Christopher R., “Urban Elections and Decision-Making in Early Modern Europe and Asia: Contrasts and Comparisons,” in Urban Elections and Decision-Making in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1800, ed. Schlögl, Rudolf (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 300–21Google Scholar; and, more generally, Friedrichs, Christopher R., Urban Politics in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 2000)Google Scholar.

18 For the population of English towns in 1700, see the reliable estimates in de Vries, Jan, European Urbanization, 1500–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 270–71Google Scholar.

19 Halliday, Paul D., Dismembering the Body Politic: Partisan Politics in England's Towns, 1650–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Ibid., 5.

21 Ibid., 343.

22 Farr, James R., Artisans in Europe, 1300–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 6Google Scholar.

23 Walker, German Home Towns, 73–75.

24 See the discussion in Wissell, Rudolf, Des Alten Handwerks Recht und Gewohnheit, 2nd ed., 6 vols. (Berlin: Colloquium Verlag, 1971–1988), vol. 1, 215–25Google Scholar. For a general treatment of the topic, see Stuart, Kathy, Defiled Trades and Social Outcasts: Honor and Ritual Pollution in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

25 Darnton, Robert, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Essays in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 75–104Google Scholar.

26 Walker, German Home Towns, 104.