Until quite recently, the era of Charles VI has often been treated rather summarily, almost as a mere prelude to the age of Maria Theresa and the Josephine reforms in the later 1700s. Stephan Steiner sets out to make a contribution towards overcoming this deficit by reassessing Vienna's Protestant history in the first half of the eighteenth century. Like Viennese Protestant life at the time, his book is centered on the three loci of tolerated Protestant worship in early modern Vienna: the chapels within the Prussian, Danish, and Dutch ambassadors’ apartments, of which the first two were Lutheran and the third Reformed. While admitting that sources on these legation chapels are more abundant for the second half of the century, Steiner finds that many existing sources have simply not yet been examined thoroughly enough.
Steiner uses a broad range of sources, like the (scarce) material from the parochial archives A.B. and H.B., the Danish embassies’ records in Copenhagen, and Danish and Swedish church registers, the papers of the famous historian of Austrian Protestantism, Bernhard Raupach, and, in addition to other archival sources, also a broad range of ego-documents. Steiner's single most important source is a large corpus of letters preserved mostly in the Franckesche Stiftungen in Halle, which depict the intense personal connections between Protestant Vienna and Pietist Halle. Combined with already well-known, but fruitfully revisited autobiographical texts like Johann Christian Edelmann's Selbstbiographie and Johann Jacob Moser's autobiography, and other contemporary publications, these letters allow not only for detailed biographies of many protagonists of early-eighteenth-century Protestant life in Vienna, but for the reconstruction of a whole milieu.
The book begins by anchoring the three legation chapels in their legal foundations and the slowly developing concept of embassies as extraterritorial spaces. Legation chapels were a European phenomenon; the three Viennese ones were supposed to enable ambassadors and their entourages as well as a select number of officials like the Protestant members of the Aulic Council (Reichshofrat) and their families, visitors from Protestant countries, and especially privileged tradesmen to privately exercise their faith. (“Private,” in this context, meant removed from public view, but as a congregation and conducted by a minister.) One of the major conflicts between this authorised Protestant minority and their Catholic surroundings, however, was the fact that services were regularly attended by clandestine Protestants as well, many of them artisans or peasants who had no legal right to be there. This, in turn, rendered the chapels’ own legal status precarious, as their enemies argued that, as punishment for overdrawing their privileges, they should lose them altogether.
Many aspects of the chapels’ history are covered, gathering all available information and often shedding new light on topics like their various locations over time, their services, charities, special celebrations, funerals in the multi-confessional Schottentor graveyard, and what little information there is for the Caroline era on baptisms and marriages. Although the chapels belonged to the Swedish, Danish, and Dutch embassies, most services seem to have been conducted in German, as the preachers and most of the diplomats originated from the Holy Roman Empire. But the bulk of Steiner's book is dedicated to individuals and their relations as well as to atmospheric impressions of their community – we learn, for instance, that the Swedish congregation was highly critical and thus hard to preach to, or about the bewildered reactions of Halle-educated house tutors when they first encountered baroque Catholicism, or the constant pressure and scrutiny these tutors encountered while waiting for a position as pastors somewhere in the Empire or in Hungary, Transylvania, or Silesia. There are biographies of all known legation preachers and portraits of well-known Protestants in Vienna, like the merchant Johann Heinrich von Palm, the young Johann Jacob Moser, the Reichshofrat and eventual convertite Georg Christian von Knorr, and the Imperial field marshal and diplomat Friedrich Heinrich von Seckendorf, which all gain considerable new detail from Steiner's sources.
Siegfried Kröpfel's Protestantismus in Wien, which is based on his doctoral dissertation, approaches the subject of Vienna's Protestant history from an entirely different angle by utilizing the serial source of the Totenbeschauprotokolle (protocols of the magistrate's inspections of all deceased persons in Vienna), which are preserved in the Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv. While this documentation begins already in 1648, Protestants were only demarcated with categories like “uncatholisch,” “evangelische Religion,” “lutherisch,” “calvinisch,” or “reformiert” from 1736 onwards. Thus, Kröpfel's study is focused on the 1352 explicitly Protestant entries dating from 1736 to the beginning of religious toleration in 1781. For gathering these entries, a Microsoft Excel chart was chosen as an accessible tool that allows for systematic, normalized processing. The promise of open access to the data for future research projects is laudable and enhances the value of the book and its data pool.
The book's theoretical framework lies in confessionalization theory, whose focus on social control and state-building serves as a bridge between evaluating the data's significance for the history of medicine and sanitary policing on the one hand, and for the religious, social, and economic history of the city of Vienna on the other. All these aspects are discussed and embedded in thorough, sometimes maybe even a bit lengthy, surveys of the current state of research and research discussions in the respective fields, leading to a thorough evaluation of the book's data pool. The work's centerpiece is the fifth chapter (over a hundred pages in length) which provides a detailed statistical analysis of the Protestant entries, considering prosopographical data like age, sex, cause of death, residence, place of death (for instance hospitals), place of birth, profession, class, titles, first names, and various interrelations between these attributes.
Based on these evaluations, Kröpfel concludes that the majority of Protestants in Vienna at the time had not been born there, and is able to give a detailed account of the Protestant community's social and professional profile as well as the distribution of Protestants in various parts of the city. These conclusions, however, are necessarily qualified to some degree by the nature of the source they are based on. The data only show people whose Protestantism was officially known, making it necessary to assume an unknown number of clandestine Protestants, many of whom might well have been of autochthonous origin and who may have been living in other parts of the city. Although Kröpfel makes it clear that his subject is the “visible” (15) Protestant population of Vienna and provides some discussion of cryptoprotestantism, his treatment of this subject and his own assessment that fully clandestine Protestants were not very numerous in eighteenth-century Vienna is rather brief and not easy to find within the book.
Both books are well-written, easy to read, and very thoroughly researched. Stephan Steiner's “Das Reich Gottes hier in Wien” offers stringent, yet also entertaining and lively narration and brims with quotations from original sources. It offers many new insights into the lives, worldviews, and relation networks of the small group of Protestants who were entitled to practice their faith in the legation chapels. On the other hand, Siegfried Kröpfel Protestantismus in Wien provides a long-awaited systematic analysis of the otherwise elusive lower ranks of Vienna's Protestant minority, lending them a whole new degree of visibility and also laying a valuable foundation for future research by offering open access to its data pool. Both books root the Viennese Protestant community and its history in the general political, social, and intellectual history of the Habsburg monarchy and the Holy Roman Empire. Although focusing on different social groups and only partially overlapping time periods, these books can be read as complementary contributions towards a fresh appraisal of eighteenth-century Austrian Protestantism and towards a better understanding of “societal conditions in the Imperial residency Vienna” (Steiner, 16).
