Among the first initiatives of the reconstituted Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of the Sciences in 1989 was the revival of Acta Borussica, the critically edited documents on Prussian administrative and economic history, first begun by Gustav Schmoller in the 1890s. After unification, the Academy launched the “Acta Borussica, Neue Folge,” a series that began with an annotated twelve-volume inventory of the Prussian State Ministry's protocols—the discussions and decisions of the executive council—between 1817 and 1934. These superbly annotated guides mapped a vast microfiche collection of 5,200 state council meetings, thereby providing historians with an array of indispensable material. (The Academy has recently placed the inventories online as PDF documents, and one hopes that the same spirit of accessibility will organize a digitized, online version.) “Preussen als Kulturstaat,” the second initiative of the Acta Borussica, now focuses on an under-researched area of Prussian history, the Kultusministerium and its impact on the cultural and intellectual life of Germany.

The title's syntax, “Prussia as a Cultural State,” is significant. This locution, notes Wolfgang Neugebauer in his discerning introduction, expressly seeks to avoid any revisionist claim of viewing Prussia preeminently as a Kulturstaat. The editors view Prussia instead as a military and administrative entity that acquired additional cultural assignments over the modern era. In 1817, growing out of the ideals of the Reform Era, Karl von Hardenberg's government created the Ministry for Religious, Educational, and Medical Affairs (better known as the Kultusministerium) to supervise religion, medicine, schooling, higher education, academies, museums, institutes, and state-supported artistic and scientific societies. This ministry was one of the first of its kind in central Europe. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the ministry's roles expanded considerably, especially in the field of education, reflecting Prussia's overall tendency toward state interventionism. The first volume, Darstellung, amounts to a compact administrative history of the Kultusministerium and its fields of cultural activity. To supplement this narrative, the second volume, Dokumente, offers sources—letters, memoranda, reports, instructions, press articles—that outline the ministry's breadth of concerns between 1808 and 1933. The 139 documents, which mostly stem from various repositories in the Geheimes Staatsarchiv, serve nicely as an empirical handrail to the Darstellung, thus inviting simultaneous reading.

The first volume, Darstellung, should become a standard reference work for historians of Prussian history. This primer on the Kultusministerium's origins, evolution, and development clarifies the ministry's manifold spheres of jurisdiction, from its first stirrings in 1808 to its formal constitution in 1817 to its dissolution in 1933 and its incorporation into the Nazi-designed Reichsministerium für Wissenschaft, Erziehung und Volksbildung in 1934. The Darstellung's first section traces the ministry's organizational structure, with chapters devoted to its spheres of authority, debates about reform measures, ministerial expansion, subdivisions of ministerial labor, budgets, and physical space. A tripartite periodization of 1817-66, 1866-1918, and 1918-34 organizes thematic analyses of ministerial administration, whereby the reader is brought from 1817 to 1934 in three successive chapters. While this organizational format impedes narrative flow, its virtues are clear: information on a specific decade or era is quickly located. Turning from structure and organization, the volume's second half focuses on ministerial leadership with chapters that use the same three time blocks to marshal biographical information of ministers, deputy secretaries, directors, and councillors into broader patterns about social background, training, political leanings, and career trajectories. Collectively, the volumes pose a number of provocative questions. To what degree was the state an agent of cultural production? Can one understand the sciences, university development, or the networks of art patronage without the influence of the Prussian state? How did the state augment and shape the associational cultural life of civil society: what were the tensions between state-orchestrated culture and the free market? Can one properly explain the synergy of the so-called Wissenschaftswunder in Berlin around 1900 without the state's multidimensional influences? These volumes throw light on dimly illuminated corners of the Prussian state history and set forth the administrative logic of a ministry that superintended pedagogy, theology, medicine, public building, and the scientific and aesthetic programs of academies and societies.

Above all, the volumes delimit the scale and scope of the ministry's operations. The ministry's three original sections encompassed religion, medicine, and education. For education, the ministry's responsibilities included state-supported art and scientific societies, the Academy of Sciences, the Bauakademie, monuments (Denkmalpflege), and most forms of schooling and education, from elementary schools to Bürgerschule to Gymnasia to industrial and art schools to, of course, universities and institutes of higher learning. Using 1820, 1851, 1873, and 1913 as sample years, a useful appendix lists the growing number of institutes, boards, academies, schools, and universities for which the ministry was responsible (Bd. 1.1, pp. 330-35). Significantly, the section for the arts became its own ministry in 1907, attesting the growing importance of art, museums, and the institutes of learning outside the university (Bd. 1.2., pp. 125-36). Theater—hardly a minor subject—also came within its purview, just as did the censorship of nonpolitical texts, a much under-researched component of Prussia's “universal” system of censorship. By the end of the century, education became the largest section of the ministry. It not only oversaw the expansion of both universities and museums but also the explosive growth of Volksschulen, whose budget rose from 4 million marks in 1870 to 181 million in 1914 (Bd. 1.1, p. 164). Expanding higher education to accommodate social groups beyond the bourgeoisie became a central goal in the Weimar era.

Religious affairs also played a central, dominant role in this ministry. All questions of confessional and sectarian freedom, writes Bärbel Holtz, belonged to this ministry, including Jews' freedom to worship (p. 24). In 1841, the ministry added a “Catholic Section” to its organizational structure, which was dissolved in 1871 with the coming of the Kulturkampf. Although the ministry continued to handle Protestantism and Catholicism as discrete divisions, Catholic affairs received short shrift, just as Catholic personnel were underrepresented. In spite of Protestantism's dominance in Prussian public life, the difficulty of coordinating local consistories, sectarian conventicles, regional officials, and central authorities into a semblance of uniform policy was always difficult, and following these tensions over the long nineteenth century is instructive. Although the Weimar constitution formally separated church and state, the older habits and dispositions of ministry officials persisted into the 1920s and failed to conform to constitutional prescription. Continuity, far more than abrupt change, generally characterized the ministry's transformation from the Kaiserreich to the Weimar Republic.

Finally, the ministry's section for medicine underwent a great degree of change; its claims of authority and growth as a state agency tell a larger story of the modern era. If the cholera epidemic of 1831 raised the question of which branch of government should police sanitation, this era nonetheless marked a growing respect for medical knowledge, psychiatry, and the growing competency of science. The first Kultusminister, Karl Freiherr vom und zum Altenstein, struggled to wrest areas of jurisdiction from Kaspar Friedrich von Schuckmann's Ministry of the Interior. Altenstein argued, for example, that insane asylums should no longer be treated as appendages of poor relief but, rather, as a branch of science in his ministry. In the second half of the nineteenth century, medicine became an incontestable branch of science and education, but the struggle over which ministry should administer the medical welfare of German society (e.g., inoculations, instructions for hygiene, salubrious housing, etc.) remained a problem. In 1911, after much debate and deliberation, the ministry transferred its medical section to the Ministry of the Interior (Bd. 1.2, pp. 149-76).

The editors' research on ministry personnel is clearly presented and well argued. It will surprise few readers that upper-middle-class Protestant Bildungsbürger dominated the upper echelons of this ministry. Nobles served in the ministry, too, but were less of a presence after unification; merely one Catholic served as a minister—and only in the Weimar period. Speaking about the last decades of the nineteenth century, Hartwin Spenkuch aptly notes that these higher officials were diligent, knowledgeable, religiously oriented men with free-conservative and national-liberal sensibilities (p. 228). They often came personally recommended, confirming the importance of such networks as dueling fraternities by which the habitus and social composition of Beamtentum was reproduced. Although conflicts among liberals, conservatives, and Catholics took place, the ministry's moderate conservative juste milieu sustained itself over the century. Neither the liberals' aspiration for an independent ministry for education (thus separating it from religion) nor the Catholic demand for the return of its own section was realized. Pious Protestantism remained entwined with education, public culture, and Prussian patriotism, which perhaps explains why so few ministry officials—in spite of the Preußenschlag of 1932 and the Gleichschaltung of 1934—participated in active resistance against the National Socialist regime (Bd. 1.1, p. 327). Overall, the analysis on geographical breadth, type of education, and mobility within and beyond the ministry sharpens our understanding of the ministry's social composition. In doing so, these volumes also reveal the need for future research on the personalities and social groups directing cultural policy. There is surprisingly little written on these cultural brokers.

Because the Darstellung is primarily an administrative history, the enormous worth of this information for social, political, and cultural historians lies in the hands of readers. Clearly a historian of medicine will consult these volumes differently from those investigating schooling, architecture, the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft, or any other niche of this capacious ministry. But the clarity with which these volumes present the reach of the state into cultural affairs should aid all scholars in thinking about modern cultural formations and the role of the state therein. The ability of Prussian universities, academies, and institutes to achieve so much in the arts, humanities, and the sciences necessarily poses the question of how state engagement advanced initiatives stemming from individuals and groups outside government. Neugebauer calls attention to the social networks that brought together state officials with cultural and scientific elites, which facilitated among other things explosive advances in scientific research during the Wilhelmine period. In spatial terms, the linkages among salons, universities, institutes, academies, and learned societies underscore the neat dovetailing of governmental and cultural elites. The Academy has, in fact, addressed the question of Kulturstaatlichkeit in a comparative framework in another collection of essays, but surely the volumes under review invite additional work on the penetration of the state into other cultural realms of civil society.Footnote ¹ On a global level, concretely locating state presence and initiatives with the archaeological, philological, historical, and theological dimensions of Orientalism might sharpen and complicate this terminological abstraction. Closer to home, the porous relationship between state agencies and bourgeois associational life also challenges long-standing models based upon the state-society dichotomy. The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed a third great wave of cultural self-organization (by both bourgeois and working classes), and how this era of voluntary associations accommodated itself with the virtues and vices of Staatlichkeit warrant closer analysis.

These two volumes enable scholars interested in the interplay between the state and culture to pose their questions with greater acuity. Overall, the volumes' editors and authors—Bärbel Holtz, Hartwin Spenkuch, Christina Rathgeber, Reinhold Zilch, and Rainer Paetau—have rendered yeoman's work in providing historians with a trenchant assessment of the ministry's remit and its cultural tasks. With their expertise in research and editing, this team's cogent synopses of ministerial developments successfully lay the groundwork for future research.