“We are only Protestant men unashamed of the Gospel, whose honor and abundant scandal we willingly and patiently carry.”
—Johann Hinrich Wichern, 1861On August 23, 1859, a death occurred in the prison at Moabit, a largely working-class neighborhood in Berlin that housed the largest penitentiary of its time.Footnote 2 An inmate named Jacobi attacked and wounded a fellow inmate, forcing the prison warden, Kügler, and the prison supervisor, Brother Anton, to intervene. When Jacobi showed no signs of calming down, Kügler and Anton tried to force Jacobi into a straitjacket. During the struggle, Kügler shot and killed the inmate.Footnote 3
The news astonished Johann Hinrich Wichern, a conservative Lutheran pastor who oversaw the management of the prison. A rising star within the Protestant establishment and a founding member of the Protestant “Inner Mission,” Wichern had been appointed in 1857 to the Ministry of the Interior by King Frederick William IV to tackle the problem of reforming the Prussian prison system. Wichern envisioned a complete transformation of the Prussian system through the adoption of the Pennsylvania system of complete solitary confinement, with Wichern's own religious organization, the Brotherhood of the Rauhen Hauses, running the prison administration. News of Jacobi's death arrived at an inopportune time—Wichern was in the midst of preparing for a parliamentary debate that would determine the future of his organization's role in the Prussian prison system. The shooting sparked a slew of energetic criticisms from the liberal opposition both in the press and in the Prussian House of Deputies (Haus der Abgeordeneten). After vigorous debate, Wichern's prison reforms were rejected.Footnote 4 This article attempts to recount the story of Wichern's prison reforms from their inception to their defeat in parliament in 1862.
The history of prisons has captured the attention of scholars of many regions since the publication of David J. Rothman's influential 1971 study of American prisons, The Discovery of the Asylum.Footnote 5 Influenced by Michel Foucault's investigation of asylums in Madness and Civilization, Rothman saw the creation of penitentiaries in Jacksonian America as a form of social control in a period when fears of social chaos abounded. Foucault himself would soon turn to a study of prisons in Discipline and Punish.Footnote 6 A flurry of studies covering prisons in Europe and America followed, describing the changes within systems of confinement and providing a fuller picture for understanding the social and political dynamics of punishment and power.Footnote 7
Wichern's battle for the Prussian prisons reflects Rothman's and Foucault's narratives. Wichern certainly was interested in using the prisons as a site of social control and hoped to use the prisons to advance his dreams of a complete moral rehabilitation of society. Yet, I hope to show that a different set of questions—about the appropriate place of religion within state institutions—also animated the arguments surrounding prison reform in Prussia. Even though Wichern and his opponents debated the type of punishment system to which to adhere—the Pennsylvania system or the Auburn system—the more hotly contested topics in the prison debates revolved around the question of who had the right to oversee prisons, and whether private religious organizations such as the Brotherhood of the Rauhen Hauses should be allowed to supervise them.
By studying these debates, I hope to engage the literature of nineteenth-century secularization. In his study of religion and American public life since the 1870s, the sociologist Christian Smith proposes the idea of a “secular revolution” to challenge our traditional notions of the secularization narrative. To Smith, “the secularization of American public life was in fact something more like a contested revolutionary struggle than a natural evolutionary progression.”Footnote 8 Smith argues that this “secular revolution” arose at mid-century out of a “rebel insurgency,” instigated by a network of activists who were “largely skeptical, freethinking, agnostic, atheist, or theologically liberal,” and who opposed the mainline American Protestant establishment.Footnote 9 In some ways, Smith's model can help explain Wichern's story. Wichern's prison reforms lost due to concerted efforts by liberals to oppose the influence of conservative religious reformers and organizations within the Prussian state system. The year Wichern's prison reforms were defeated, liberalism enjoyed a particular potency within the government—the conservative Prussian King Frederick William IV had just died, and liberals had won unprecedented success at the polls, gaining major ground in the parliament. “Secularization,” here defined as the strict separation between private religious groups and state institutions, was not an inevitable or a natural progression of “modernity” and “industrialization,” but rather the result of a much-contested battle and struggle. The prison was one site in this multi-front war.
These “secular liberals” were not part of a systematic program that categorically rejected religious influence within the state, as Wichern's opponents consisted of liberal Protestant pastors as well as atheists. They did belong, however, to a generation that had experienced the disillusionment, as well as the political repression, that followed the failed revolutions of 1848. The failures of 1848 created what Andrew Lees has described as a “spirit of division” among the various liberal camps. Nonetheless, they were united in common cause against reactionary conservatives who continued to guard access to political power.Footnote 10 Liberals opposed, as Konrad Jarausch and Larry Eugene Jones have described, “the unholy trinity of feudalism, absolutism, and religious orthodoxy.”Footnote 11 Wichern thus stood as a cultural and political symbol of the reactionary policies that had thwarted the revolutionary impulse of 1848. Moreover, Wichern's opponents found in his religious pietism a specific grievance that they could exploit. As Michael B. Gross has shown, liberals were deeply anxious and fearful of the Catholic revival that swept across German lands after 1848.Footnote 12 To liberals, Wichern's organization resembled a Catholic order, with its hierarchical structure and charismatic religious message. Liberals thus merged their traditional anti-Catholic antipathy with their larger attacks on reactionary monarchists and thus described Wichern's Brotherhood as royalist, secretive, powerful, reactionary, “fanatical,” exclusive, superstitious, and “Catholic.” Secularization within the Prussian prisons was thus a byproduct of the political battles between liberal and conservative factions to gain control of various state institutions.
In Wichern's case, the religious conservatives, not the secular liberals, tried to transform the institutional culture of the prisons and alter the relationship between private religious organizations and state institutions. With Wichern's defeat, the prisons remained institutionally the same as before; the “secular revolution” did not bring about a radical reform of the prison system. In this story, the religious conservatives were the failed “revolutionaries.” Wichern's story thus shows that in Prussia a “religious revolution” existed alongside the “secular revolution.” Christopher Clark has argued that the historiography of post-1848 Europe has incorrectly portrayed the 1850s as an age of reaction, political stasis, and repression. A recent revisionist trend, on the other hand, sees post-1848 European states as dynamic and ambitious, implementing “innovative programs in the spheres of public relations, education, and infrastructural reform” to combat upheaval and revolution.Footnote 13 Wichern's prison reforms were part of this larger movement, and his life reflects this conservative energy that attempted to reorder society. This article hopes to capture the dynamic political culture that existed within the Prussia of the late 1850s and to complicate our notions of the post-1848 era as a conservative, even reactionary, time period.
The battle between Wichern and the liberals can also be seen as a precursor to Otto von Bismarck's Kulturkampf of the 1870s and 1880s.Footnote 14 While Bismarck inflamed anti-Catholic sentiment in his attempt to limit the influence of the Catholic clergy within his new empire, many of his future liberal allies drew on the same prejudices when they labeled Wichern's evangelical brotherhood “Catholic.” Distaste for Catholicism helped mobilize the party of progress for its larger project of secularization, which set out to free public life from the inappropriate influence of both churches. The victory liberals achieved over Wichern in Prussia's prisons would embolden them for the greater battle to come.
More important, Bismarck's Kulturkampf was a conflict over the boundaries between church and state, as Bismarck tried to legally restrict the influence of the Catholic Church within the German Reich. Wichern's struggle less than twenty years earlier traversed similar grounds, as Wichern opponents tried to prevent Wichern's voluntary religious organization from gaining wider influence within the Prussian state. With Wichern's case, the Prussian liberals succeeded in checking the expansion of the influence of Wichern's Brotherhood within state institutions. Twenty years later, on the other hand, Bismarck would fail to curtail the power and popularity of the Catholic Church that he so hoped to suppress.Footnote 15
I. Prisons and Prison Reformers in the Early Nineteenth Century
To begin, what compelled prison reformers such as Wichern to cry out for an overhaul of the prison system? In the late 1790s and early 1800s, Prussia witnessed a massive spike in crime and vagrancy when Junker landlords closed off common land, forcing many landless laborers to wander and roam as a living.Footnote 16 The number of inmates had almost doubled from 9,785 prisoners in 1838 to 16,280 in 1851. That number almost doubled again within three years. By 1854, 26,825 prisoners were imprisoned in penitentiaries and prisons.Footnote 17 Penitentiaries and prisons were overcrowded, unsanitary, and neglected. Combined with shoddy nourishment, hard labor, and strict discipline, high morbidity and mortality rates ravaged the imprisoned population.Footnote 18 Inmates had a life expectancy of about thirty years, less than half that of an individual who lived in society at large.Footnote 19
Prison confinement was mostly collective (Gemeinschaftshaft), while solitary confinement (Einzelhaft) was reserved for special or dangerous prisoners and extraordinary circumstances. Prisoners were not separated by sex, age, or degree of crime. Prisons were not “total institutions”—most prisons made no effort to regulate the daily routines of their inmates.Footnote 20 In the bigger penal institutions, prison personnel usually consisted of a prison director, several wardens (Aufseher) who were responsible to a chief warden (Oberaufseher), a doctor, a teacher, a clergyman, and several inspectors.Footnote 21 The director controlled all facets of the prison's operations. Due to an 1842 Cabinet order, which guaranteed military officers with more than twelve years of service a retirement position in a penal institution, about 80 percent of the wardens were military pensioners (Militaranwärter).Footnote 22 Underpaid, the prison personnel worked brutally long hours, sometimes having to clock in fourteen-hour shifts without a break.Footnote 23 Relations between prisoners and prison personnel were tense. A prison director reported in 1861 that wardens held a “virtually intuitive hatred against everyone, what the convicts stood for, and what they had accomplished.”Footnote 24
Observing these terrible conditions, German reformers drew on the work of other European and American prison reformers for inspiration.Footnote 25 One of the most important early German prison reformers was Nikolaus Heinrich Julius (1783–1862). Julius, along with Karl Anton Josef Mittermaier, is often credited as the founder of German penology (Gefängniswesen or Gefängnisskunde). Julius traveled throughout Europe and North America, learning about the prison systems in twelve different countries. In 1827, Julius conducted a series of public lectures on prison reform that were also published and widely read.Footnote 26 These lectures introduced German readers and listeners to the ideas of the religious reformers John Howard and Elizabeth Fry in England, as well as the work of the Quakers at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. He also translated Gustave Beaument and Alexis de Tocqueville's report on American prisons into German.Footnote 27 In 1839, he published the influential book North America's Moral Condition (Nordamerikas sittliche Zustände) in which he wrote about the advantages of implementing the Pennsylvania system of complete isolation into the German prison.Footnote 28 Julius attracted a large audience with his lectures and writings. Among his audience sat the young Wichern and the future King Frederick William IV.Footnote 29
II. Wichern, the Inner Mission, and Prisons
Wichern had earned a name for himself in religious circles in 1832 when he founded the Rauhe Haus in Horn, a suburb of Hamburg.Footnote 30 Convinced that children could only live morally and spiritually righteous lives when they were separated from the rampant immorality of city life, Wichern used a small farmhouse as the base for his “redemption home” for the younger generation.Footnote 31 The Rauhe Haus functioned as a substitute family for abandoned children, with Wichern as the patriarchal head of the household.
The Rauhe Haus soon became the “most influential social enterprise in Protestant Germany” as it moved its operations beyond Hamburg.Footnote 32 By 1847, sixty-four “Houses of Salvation” existed in Germany, and Wichern's efforts had “become the focal point for Protestant social reform activity.”Footnote 33 In order to support the expanding operations, Wichern employed a team of “lay brothers,” men who had dedicated their lives to Christian ministry but had not obtained theological degrees. The Rauhe Haus became a center for the specialized training of the “Brothers of the Rauhen Hauses,” preparing them for mission work in urban areas or to be supervisors in evangelical orphanages.Footnote 34 The Brothers underwent rigorous, strict Christian training so that they could later become heads of newer, independent branches of the ministry.
Wichern published his first writings on prison reform in 1844 in the Fliegende Blätter, the official propaganda newsletter that he founded in the same year. Wichern wrote that Christians needed to turn their attention to the welfare of prisoners. Wichern criticized previous attempts at prison reform, which had all been performed by the state, involved overhauls of the physical system of prison, and were unconcerned with the improvement of the prisoner's moral condition. The Church could fill this gap, and Wichern called on pastors to raise the consciousness among their parishes of the dire situations within prisons.Footnote 35
Wichern was particularly obsessed with the problem of released convicts and their reintegration into society.Footnote 36 Statistics demonstrating the pervasiveness of relapsed cases indicated to Wichern the glaring shortcomings of the current prison system—it had failed to enact any form of true moral rehabilitation. He believed that if the prison system became truly Christian, the problems of moral relapse would disappear; all prisoners, as long as they received the Gospel of Christ, could be reformed. For Wichern, the social problems of poverty, crime, and broken families originated from the increasing secularization of society. The “Social Question” was at heart a moral one. Wichern believed that the miseries of society had to be combated with works of Christian charity and faith; a moral revitalization of the individuals in society would solve society's ills. Wichern saw his work as standing at the front lines of a battle with forces of secularism—the diabolical enemy of atheism and socialism had to be defeated.Footnote 37
In 1844, with approval and support from Frederick William IV, Wichern launched the Inner Mission, an effort to recapture the lost hearts of German Christians who had been baptized but had fallen away from the faith. The Inner Mission targeted the German proletariat.Footnote 38 The Inner Mission functioned as a loose federation that united all of the 1,500 Christian philanthropic societies in Germany. Wichern hoped to use the Inner Mission to foster Protestant church unity among German Protestant states.Footnote 39 Wichern's dream was to create a nationwide German Protestant church that would ultimately revitalize all of Christendom. Having worked among the Hamburg proletariat, Wichern sympathized with socialist concerns for social justice and care for the poor, and he even considered the Inner Mission a form of “Christian socialism.”Footnote 40 Yet he attacked German socialism for its atheism, calling socialism a “caricature of truth.”Footnote 41
III. Eighteen Forty-Eight and the Prison Question
Wichern's fears of socialism seemed to be validated in 1848 when revolutions swept across Europe. Wichern participated actively in a circle of Protestant “elites” that mounted an energetic counter-revolutionary response to the events of 1848.Footnote 42 Conservative Protestant leaders organized the Wittenberg Kirchentag in September 1848 as a platform for exploring Protestant unity in the midst of this revolutionary upheaval.
Wichern became an instant celebrity among Protestants at the Wittenberg conference. Over Luther's grave, he delivered a rousing address—later called “the Protestant Manifesto”—attacking the dangers of revolution and the atheism of the left. Wichern called for Protestant unity and wider moral concern for the poor and the suffering. Protestants needed to win the lost hearts of the German proletariat through Christian charity and individual conversion. Of course, the organization that could best administer this form of social salvation was Wichern's own, the Inner Mission. The assembly accepted the resolution that a temporary organization, the Central Committee for the Inner Mission (Centralausschuss für die innere Mission), be formed to carry out this momentous task of evangelization throughout all the German lands. The Fliegende Blätter became the official news organ for the Central Committee in 1849.Footnote 43 Wichern now possessed a larger platform that could help realize his plans to re-convert German Christendom.
Reform of the prison system lay at the heart of Wichern's vision for the Inner Mission. One of the largest and most neglected sectors of the poor and dispossessed, Wichern believed, dwelled within prison walls. In July of 1851, with the enthusiastic sponsorship of the Prussian king, Wichern embarked on an investigative tour of prisons in Westphalia, the Rhineland, Saxony, and Brandenburg.Footnote 44 Wichern visited twenty-four cities and inspected all forms of penal facilities, including corrections facilities, jail cells, and penitentiary houses. Wichern described his experience of stepping inside prison rooms filled with “women of all ages, incarcerated for infanticide and carnal felonies, serving their sentences against every Godly or man-made law with thieves, swindlers, perjurers, and sinners of all sorts.”Footnote 45 The living conditions were horrendous, as he often saw “more than fifty prisoners sleeping together, accustomed to living without any possible form of moral protection.”Footnote 46 He described the institutions as the “great ruins of Christendom” and “the greatest irony the state has erected against itself.”Footnote 47
IV. Moabit and the Brotherhood
To Wichern and his supporters, then, the first order of reform was to create a new, state-of-the art prison. In 1842, the minister of the interior had ordered that a new prison be built in Berlin's industrial neighborhood, Moabit. Completed in 1849, the Moabit prison was a replication of the “Model Prison” at Pentonville, England.Footnote 48 The Pentonville prison enforced a strict form of solitary confinement—prisoners were isolated from one another day and night, from the moment of their entrance into prison until their release.
In 1846, Georg Varrentrapp, a physician who helped Julius publish some of his writings, organized the First International Prison Reform Conference in Frankfurt. A total of seventy-seven reformers from twelve countries, including Russia, Denmark, France, Britain, and America, attended the conference. At the conference, the reformers debated the problem of solitary confinement and its implementation. The application of at least some form of solitary confinement within the prison system had achieved “ideological dominance” among most prison reformers as the best way to improve prison conditions and enact moral rehabilitation.Footnote 49
Solitary confinement provided an instant benefit of classification, as the mélange of offenders who lived together in collective confinement could now be distinguished from one another, thus allowing for a more systematic application of punishment. The separation of inmates would also help criminologists and moral statisticians with the classification and quantification of the different “moral characters” of the convicts. Just as zoologists were able to classify different types of plants and animals, criminologists likewise believed they could differentiate between “professional” criminals, “casual” offenders, and “born criminals.”Footnote 50 Solitary confinement was thus seen as a necessary step toward creating a more well-ordered, scientific, and “progressive” prison.
Yet, the most heated disagreements between contemporary penologists came between supporters of the Auburn system and the Pennsylvania system. Both systems had the stated goals of reforming prisoners but employed drastically different methods of punishment. The Pennsylvania system instituted complete isolation day and night for prisoners as prisoners would work in their individual cells. The Auburn system also proposed the use of solitary confinement, but only at night. During the day, prisoners performed hard physical labor under total silence, enforced through corporal punishment.Footnote 51
At the center of the debate between the two systems lay a contest between “physical” and “moral” concepts of reform.Footnote 52 As Thomas Nutz argues, supporters of the Pennsylvania system, such as Wichern, took the soul as the starting point for reform. These supporters thus hoped to inculcate Christian morality through total solitary confinement, as prisoners would receive biblical instruction and engage in penitential reflection within the confines of their cells. On the other hand, the Auburn system took the physical body as the starting point for punishment. Supporters of the Auburn system hoped to inculcate external markers of “good conduct marked by industriousness, cleanliness and order.”Footnote 53 The Auburn system regarded the prison as primarily a place for behavioral correction, rather than moral rehabilitation.
The Pennsylvania system also represented a radical departure from previous forms of punishment. Implementing the Pennsylvania system would require a complete upheaval in not only prison architecture, but also in institutional culture, bureaucratic training, and administrative oversight. The Auburn system, in principle, resembled European prison practices that had been used since the end of the eighteenth century.Footnote 54 Supporters of the Auburn system argued that existing institutions could be presented as a modern “penitentiary system” with little change and upheaval.Footnote 55
Frederick William IV supported the Pennsylvania system enthusiastically and wanted to implement it throughout Prussia. He enlisted Wichern's help.Footnote 56 Frederick William assigned Wichern the task of preparing an investigative report on the effects of solitary confinement in Moabit.Footnote 57 This report, submitted to the king four months later in October 1854, signaled Wichern's first official foray into what would turn out to be a prolonged battle for control of the Prussian prison system. Wichern blamed the failure of Moabit to implement solitary confinement on the prison personnel. The prison directors, clergy, and doctors “spoke unanimously against complete isolation, or the Pennsylvania system.”Footnote 58 Yet, Wichern observed that the prison directors and supervisors were not categorically opposed to solitary confinement, as they spoke openly of their support for “partial solitary confinement” (Halbisolierung) and were more than willing to place rowdy and difficult prisoners in solitary confinement. Wichern thus wrote that the “difference between the Pennsylvania system and the Moabit way of treatment was that prisoners in the former stood under the order of law while prisoners in the latter were subject to the arbitrary will of the prison directors.”Footnote 59
What was really needed in prisons, Wichern argued, was a radical change in prison administration and personnel. The staff must act as “one organism, and its work over the prisoners must be an organic, unified whole that presents itself in all ranks of the organization.”Footnote 60 Individual visitations from Christian citizens were no longer adequate to provide for the growing prison population and its needs. Instead, the prison population now required a systematized form of spiritual care and help for its prisoners. The personnel needed to be “familiar with the living quarters of sin, apostasy, and misery in the commoner's life” and to be “as well prepared as teachers and preachers are for their jobs.”Footnote 61
Here lay the essential difference between Wichern and his opponents. For Wichern, the prison needed trained Christian ministers, not state bureaucrats, to run the prisons. The prisons needed the Brothers of the Rauhen Hauses. Wichern also hoped to radically transform the prison system into a training ground for good Christians. Under Wichern and the Brotherhood's administration, a successfully rehabilitated inmate released from Moabit would not only never commit a crime again but also would be a committed Christian convert.
Frederick William IV accepted Wichern's recommendations and three days later decreed that the Pennsylvania system had to be instituted throughout Moabit by the beginning of 1857.Footnote 62 A new set of personnel would be equipped with the training necessary to run the system.Footnote 63 Wichern called this news a “birthday gift that had truly been sent from God.”Footnote 64 Wichern recognized that this would drastically alter the relationship between church and state, writing that it would be “the first time that the State would have formally entitled a Protestant body to administer prison care.”Footnote 65 He further called for a disciplined, orderly, and detailed reconfiguration of Moabit's education system. Wichern drew out floor plans for the classrooms, with thirty-six to forty-two seats in the classroom cells; he planned for six classes of about sixty-six inmates, each receiving between five and six hours of instruction a week, primarily based in religious instruction. The instruction would last for the entirety of the prisoner's sentence.Footnote 66
Wichern's Brotherhood was installed into the prison system with little resistance. On July 5, 1856, a cabinet decree announced that the Brothers of the Rauhen Hauses had been called to take over the administration of the Moabit prison. The cabinet also appointed Director Schück of Schweidnitz, whom Wichern had recommended, to the post of prison director.Footnote 67 Schück was “familiar with the Pennsylvania system and convinced of its advantages.”Footnote 68 Brother Anton, a member of the Brotherhood, was appointed as prison supervisor. Elated and “surprised,” Wichern wrote to his wife that the “Brotherhood had earned a great victory.”Footnote 69 In total, the Prussian state employed thirty-nine Brothers at Moabit—twenty-five as wardens (Aufseher), eight as vice wardens, two as work masters (Werkmeister), two as superintendents (Oberaufseher), and one as the police inspector.Footnote 70 By the end of 1856, the Brothers had been fully integrated into Moabit.
The start of 1857 also signaled a new beginning for Wichern's career. Ever since 1854, the King had mentioned the possibility of bringing Wichern into the Prussian Ministry of Internal Affairs. With the Brothers installed in Moabit, Frederick William IV approved Wichern's appointment to the Prussian civil service on December 3, 1856. Wichern would receive a three thousand Thaler salary, almost a thousand Thaler more than his fellow colleagues in the civil service.Footnote 71 Wichern earned the title of “Referee for the Office of Penal Institutions and Poor Relief” (Vortragender Rat der Strafanstalten und des Armenwesens).Footnote 72 He earned a permanent home in Berlin but continued to split time between his work in Berlin and in Hamburg. He was also appointed to the Prussian Oberkirchenrat, the governing body of all Protestant churches in Prussia.
In two speeches celebrating his induction into the Ministry of the Interior, Wichern tied together all of his thoughts in a triumphant pronouncement. The Germans stood at a new historical juncture where the gospel and Christian love could completely transform the prison system and improve the welfare of prisoners. Christians had neglected the prison question for centuries, and it was only now that “prisoners had become for Christian folk a great and holy challenge of love.”Footnote 73 Wichern's life's work and ambitions seemed to be unfolding successfully before his eyes—he now had a complete, state-supported institution to enact his plans, a national platform to institute his envisioned reforms, international connections with other reformers, and a king that supported his every move. Little did he know that he was also standing at the apex of his career and influence. There was nowhere to go but down.
V. The Liberal Opposition
Wichern's grand plans were soon put on hold. On October 6, 1857, Frederick William IV suffered a stroke, paralyzing him and rendering him unable to govern. His brother William took over as regent and officially became prince regent a year later. Moreover, the November 1858 elections signaled the beginning of the New Era of liberal confidence. As a result, in the Prussian Landtag, the number of conservatives decreased from two hundred to fewer than sixty while liberal candidates increased from sixty to about two hundred and ten.Footnote 74 The Kölnische Zeitung wrote that a “joyful feeling of deliverance” among the liberals accompanied the change.Footnote 75
The failures of the 1848 Revolutions, coupled with almost a decade's worth of state repression, had left liberals in disarray, divided both ideologically and socially. Yet, despite the fragmented nature of the liberal program, they were united in their “common hostility” to two groups—monarchists and Catholics.Footnote 76 During the 1840s, religion had become an increasingly political issue, as Frederick William IV, a pious man, embarked on a concerted effort to revitalize Christianity and strengthen the ties between monarchical power and religious belief.Footnote 77 During the 1848 revolutions, the Camarilla, a counter-revolutionary group surrounding Frederick William IV, systematically set out to restore monarchical power and frustrate liberal attempts at constitutional reform.Footnote 78 The Camarilla became closely tied with the newspaper Kreuzzeitung, which became the main conservative news organ. Liberals viewed these conservative efforts with suspicion, as they believed Frederick William IV was trying to create a theocracy. Instead, they hoped that religion would be maintained within the private sphere, outside of politics. Wichern had deep ties with the Kreuzzeitung and became a symbol for both the restoration of monarchical power and conservative efforts to bind “throne and altar.”
Moreover, for liberals, Wichern's Brotherhood, with its pietistic rhetoric and hierarchical structure, looked suspiciously like a Jesuit order. Protestant liberals and conservatives were traditionally anti-Catholic, and the decade after 1848 saw a widespread Catholic revival throughout German lands as Catholics engaged in an energetic attempt of evangelization. Protestant liberals and Catholics both feared the Catholic revival that swept throughout Prussia, and they ratcheted up their anti-Catholic rhetoric in response.Footnote 79 To liberals, Wichern's rhetoric of “revival” and “pietism” sounded exactly like the fire and brimstone homilies that Catholic revivalists preached in their missionary crusades.Footnote 80 Moreover, with Wichern at its head, not only did the Brotherhood have access to the center of Prussian political power, it also had a charismatic figure who maintained a rigid patriarchal hierarchy, which liberals also viewed as resembling a Catholic order. Wichern and his Brotherhood thus became an obvious political enemy, as he simultaneously stood for both reactionary monarchist politics and the threat of pietistic, “Catholic,” revivalism.
When the prison warden, Kügler, a member of Wichern's brotherhood, shot and killed the inmate Jacobi in August 1859, liberals got the scandal they wanted. The event became a flashpoint, because now liberals had a concrete instance of Wichern's misuse of power. The news made a great splash in the liberal press, which lambasted the Brotherhood for its abuse of prisoners. To liberals, the event proved the unchecked nature of Wichern's power within the state system and further demonstrated the problem of unchecked monarchical expansion. The Hamburger Reform called for the removal of Wichern from the Prussian State Department.Footnote 81 One of the most vicious attacks against the Brotherhood appeared in the Kölnische Zeitung. In an editorial on October 18, 1859, the editors wrote that they supported solitary confinement and had awaited with “joy” for the improvement of the prison system. The Kügler case exposed the “arrogant and imperious” nature of the Brothers, who, through a “sad abuse of power,” had shot and killed the victim.Footnote 82 Solitary confinement was not the problem here, the editors claimed, but rather it was the arrogant Brothers, who had abused the system and operated without checks and balances.Footnote 83
In a personal meeting with Wichern, the historian Theodor Mommson made his “violent antagonism” (heftigen Widerspruch) toward Wichern's Christian evangelicalism clear.Footnote 84 Karl Anton Mittermaier, an influential law professor at Heidelberg, wrote in his short pamphlet, The Current Condition of the Prison Question (Der Gegenwärtige Zustand der Gefängnißfrage), that “the Kügler case demonstrated little against solitary confinement, but rather that the wardens had amassed great power, and that a danger existed—an abuse of power could occur in the absence of necessary self-restraint.”Footnote 85 In another tract Mittermaier called the Brotherhood a Protestant “Order.” He criticized their “mystical, impractical outlook,” their one-sided education, their “soul hunting” (Seelenjägerei) and “fanatical proselytizing fury” (fanatische Bekehrungswut).Footnote 86 Even though Mittermaier supported the general program of instituting solitary confinement within the prisons, as well as Wichern's larger project of providing stronger moral rehabilitation for prisoners, he made it clear that Wichern's Brotherhood was not suited for the job. Wichern's Brotherhood had operated outside the boundaries of legality within the Prussian state system.
The most fervent and vocal critic of Wichern and the Brotherhood was Franz von Holtzendorff, a young professor at the Friedrich-Wilhelm University in Berlin. Holtzendorff was extremely close with Mittermaier, as he had studied at Heidelberg with Mittermaier in 1849, and Mittermaier would later recommend him for a post upon completion of his Habilitation.Footnote 87 Holtzendorff shared Mittermaier's hatred of the Rauhe Haus Brothers. In a letter to Mittermaier, Holtzendorff described Wichern's Brotherhood as “a Church sect” that was “generally hated.” Holtzendorff criticized Wichern's Brotherhood for monopolizing the administration of prisons and for its desire to censor public dissent over their practices.Footnote 88
In a brochure, Holtzendorff criticized Wichern's Brotherhood for being a burden on the state's finances.Footnote 89 Under Wichern's administration the cost of each prison cell rose to an ungainly one thousand Thaler, due to the high salaries and training costs the Brothers incurred.Footnote 90 Holtzendorff compared Wichern's Brotherhood with “religious orders in the Catholic Church, who usurp the direction and rule of the institution.”Footnote 91 Holtzendorff further criticized the Brotherhood for its narrow religious outlook, referring to its members as “zealots who tortured the consciences of the inmates (Gewissenspolterer).”Footnote 92
Even though they did not support the Pennsylvania system, Mittermaier and Holtzendorff did agree with Wichern that some form of solitary confinement would be beneficial to the moral rehabilitation of the prisoner. They also agreed that some form of religious education was necessary in the prisons. What they did oppose, however, was the specific type of religious conservatism that Wichern and his followers brought into the prisons. Wichern's religion was pietistic and evangelical, a far cry from the cultural Protestantism that Mittermaier and Holtzendorff supported. Moreover, they were particularly offended by Wichern's undemocratic and anti-liberal politics. The tightly disciplined, patriarchal, highly secretive character of the Brotherhood seemed particularly worrisome to Mittermaier and Holtzendorff, and they feared that the Brotherhood, if left unchecked by legal regulations, would be able to wield its power without oversight and accountability.
VI. Parliamentary Debates and “Brochure Wars”
In January 1861, Frederick William IV died, leaving Wichern without his greatest source of support. The government, under pressure from the upper house, decided to resolve the debate over whether Wichern's Pennsylvania system should be implemented systematically throughout Prussia.Footnote 93 Wichern thus entered into his first protracted parliamentary battle on June 3, 1861. Progressive members of parliament, such as Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch, immediately attacked the Brothers, questioning whether a religious organization such as the Brotherhood should remain in the prison system.Footnote 94 Schulze himself had been persecuted and harassed by police after 1848, and he viewed conservative reactionaries with contempt. Deeply anti-Catholic, Schulze was suspicious of all types of superstitious belief and hoped to inculcate more scientific belief into the state administration. He thus wondered if allowing the Brotherhood into the prisons would be equivalent to permitting the Jesuits to run a prison administration.
Wichern defended the Brotherhood, claiming that his opponents had mischaracterized the nature of his organization.Footnote 95 Wichern declared that religious orders indeed did not belong in penal institutions because religious orders were subject to the authority of the church, not the state.Footnote 96 Wichern argued that a real difference existed between the Brothers of the Rauhe Hause and a Catholic religious order.Footnote 97 The Brotherhood consisted of lay, non-ordained, voluntary members, independent of any church institution, and, in the case of the Moabit prison, the state had complete oversight over the Brotherhood. Catholic orders that served in prisons, on the other hand, were part of the Catholic Church; a parallel situation between Protestant and Catholic relief services would only arise if the Catholic Church developed religious relief organizations independent of the Catholic hierarchy.Footnote 98 Nonetheless, Wichern proclaimed, his followers were not unafraid to bring their religion into state service, as they were “Protestant men, unashamed of the Gospel.”Footnote 99 Wichern thus employed the same amount of anti-Catholic rhetoric that the liberals used to attack him. He agreed with liberals that Catholic orders, if allowed into the Prussian state department, would be a pernicious influence. However, he rejected the liberal characterization of his Brotherhood as an “order.”
The proposal soon came to a vote. Both parts of the proposal passed, meaning that solitary confinement would eventually be regulated and instituted throughout the whole Prussian system. Wichern was delighted, calling it “a great victory for solitary confinement and for the Rauhe Haus.”Footnote 100 Yet, the victory was brief and illusory. The proposal had been vague, and the House of Representatives needed to decide on the specifics of how solitary confinement should be regulated and whether Wichern's Brotherhood would be entrusted with administering the prisons.
Several weeks after Wichern's parliamentary victory, Holtzendorff published a new pamphlet, The Brotherhood of the Rauhen Hauses, a Protestant Order in the State Service.Footnote 101 In this pamphlet, Holtzendorff dedicated the entire text to exposing the dirty secrets of Wichern and the Brotherhood.Footnote 102 Holtzendorff portrayed the Rauhe Haus as a strictly controlled, disciplined, and secretive patriarchal organization that forbade dissenting voices within the ranks. Holtzendorff compared Wichern's communications with the brothers with the pope's pastoral letters and encyclicals; they were similar in that they both “sought to assert a certain higher authority over Order brothers and a monopoly over truth.”Footnote 103
Holtzendorff concluded that the Rauhe Haus Brotherhood was a “Protestant Order,” a “Church community grounded on peculiar principles and subordinate to specific rules and exercises, deviant from the general Protestant church communities.”Footnote 104 The Order presented a danger of the “highest degree” because the “Oberconvictmeister of the order” also stood “at the pinnacle of the Prussian prison administration.”Footnote 105 Employing even more fervent anti-Catholic rhetoric, Holtzendorff wrote that the Brothers were just as dangerous to the Prussian state as the Jesuits. Material interests prevented these “hypocrites” from leaving the state services, since they enjoyed numerous government benefits—high salaries, protection, staff, and cheap housing. He cited numerous luminaries of the prison reform world, including Mittermaier and Julius, as having spoken out against the Brotherhood.Footnote 106
Holtzendorff's pamphlet ignited a public relations firestorm. Wichern denounced Holtzendorff's claims as “lies and treacheries” in the Fliegende Blätter.Footnote 107 A “brochure war” ensued, as Wichern enlisted several of his friends to defend him in print. Wichern beseeched the aging Julius to pen several pieces of support in the Hamburgischer Correspondent and in the Allgemeine Preußische Zeitung.Footnote 108 The conservative Kreuzzeitung supported Wichern in several editorials in July 1861.Footnote 109 In quick succession, Friedrich Oldenberg, a member of the Brotherhood and Wichern's later biographer, Professor Hugo Böhlau, law professor at Halle, and Hermann Ortloff, a Privatdozent of law, produced brochures defending the Rauhe Haus.Footnote 110 Further articles summarizing these brochures appeared in the Allgemeine Preußische Zeitung and the Neue Evangelische Kirchenzeitung.Footnote 111 All of the brochures and articles, with Oldenberg's being the most defiant, attacked Holtzendorff for his gross mischaracterization of the Brotherhood's nature, further claiming that the Brotherhood was in no way similar to a Catholic order.
On October 12, 1861, another incident broke out in Moabit that further fueled opposition to the Brothers. An unsupervised convict named Brose drank an unknown quantity of alcohol, became drunk, and called for a drink of water. The supervisor Brother Anton, also involved in the Kügler incident, transferred him to a different prison cell but ignored his pleas for water. The wardens found Brose dead the next morning.Footnote 112
News of the mishap further galvanized Wichern's opponents, who now included the entire liberal establishment—the liberal press, important penologists such as Mittermaier and Holtzendorff, and famous prison directors from Baden and Saxony.Footnote 113 Holtzendorff himself responded with another brochure in January 1862, repeating his accusations of the Brother's negligence and misuse of power.Footnote 114 The radical Westfälische Zeitung in Dortmund published an article on “the Propaganda of the Rauhen Hauses,” exaggerating in its report Wichern's salary as six thousand Thaler, double what he actually received, and falsely reporting that he had taken a six-month paid vacation.Footnote 115 The liberal press was thus not so much interested in criticizing the presence of religion within the prison but rather what they saw as the collusion between religious pietism and political privilege. The liberal press did not engage Wichern's Brotherhood in a debate over policy issues. Instead, the debate was waged over whether Wichern's ideological temperament, and its character as a group, belonged within the Prussian prison system.
Wichern himself was unmoved by these attacks and remained convinced both of the nobility of his message and the integrity of the Brotherhood. He saw the prevalence of these attacks as further proof of the de-Christianization of German society. He called his opponents a “coalition of democracy, liberalism, bureaucracy, and skepticism, along with hypocrisy and Jesuitism.”Footnote 116 In the Fliegende Blätter he explained that for years the press had donned an increasingly hostile stance toward “things that freely and wholeheartedly professed the Gospel.”Footnote 117 Despite his “expectation” of these attacks, Wichern was nonetheless heartbroken by the criticisms. In his diary, he wrote, “As I stand in the state service, I myself am a prisoner. As I remain loyal and fastidious, the more I have silenced myself and come to tolerate these accusations and lies against the Brotherhood and myself.”Footnote 118
VII. Parliamentary Defeat
It was with this mindset that Wichern entered into his second parliamentary battle on October 2, 1862. Wichern knew that his chances of prevailing were slim. On May 19, Prussian liberals in state election had won a resounding victory, winning more than two-thirds of the seats in parliament in a coalition with the center left and progressive parties. In August 1862, the Budget commission proposed that Wichern's contract to oversee Moabit be terminated for the upcoming year.Footnote 119
Wichern took the floor and launched into a two-hour defense of the Brotherhood. Wichern argued that his accusers had never clarified what they meant when they called the Brotherhood “Pietists.” Pietism, to Wichern, had always stood for the principles of the Protestant Reformation, in which the Christian enjoyed a direct personal relationship with God; in this sense, “Pietism would be nothing else other than a living, vibrant Christianity.”Footnote 120 The representatives reacted loudly when Wichern commented, “if the men of the Rauhen Hauses were Pietist, then the whole Landeskriche, along with the state institutions with which it was associated, should be considered Pietist as well!”Footnote 121
After Wichern's speech, representative Heinrich Krause, a Protestant theologian, attacked the whole idea behind the Inner Mission. Krause explained that the Inner Mission was a “fanatical” attempt to convert a “pagan world” (Heidenwelt) to Christian behavior, and that the propagators of the Inner Mission assumed that a “great mass of immorality” existed and needed to be rectified.Footnote 122 Allowing this type of religious conviction to run penal institutions, Krause argued, “is extremely dangerous.”Footnote 123 The prisoners were already disaffected when they entered prison, Krause argued, and he further claimed that the prisoners should be allowed to choose the type of religious instruction they desired, rather than having a particular religious outlook imposed on them.Footnote 124
Representative Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch pressed even further, arguing that prison personnel should consist of bureaucrats who worked for the state, not members of a religious organization such as the Brotherhood. Schulze hoped to remove religion from the prisons altogether but continued his attack by questioning the nature and character of the Brotherhood. Schulze asked the House if it was willing to allow this “foreign establishment” (ausländische Anstalt), over which the state had no true control, such an influential position within the Prussian prison system.Footnote 125 Schulze thus argued that the Prussian state had to promote its own training systems so that it could completely oversee, control, and direct the prisons.
Wichern's final defense caused a sensation in the House. Wichern argued that the only way to ensure that released prisoners would not break the law again was to enact some type of “improvement” (Besserung) in their character. This type of “improvement” was only possible through the “creation of a new life, which can only be born in the freedom of Christian faith.”Footnote 126 Only Christianity, Wichern maintained, could prevent criminals from breaking the law again. This type of effective ministry existed in Moabit, through the help of the Brotherhood of the Rauhen Hauses.
The atmosphere in parliament had grown increasingly unruly, as several representatives continued speaking for and against the Brotherhood. Finally, the vice president called the motion to a vote. The Budget Committee's Report passed by a majority; the Brotherhood's contract was not extended. Wichern's Brotherhood was removed from the Prussian prisons.
VIII. Conclusion
Wichern's parliamentary defeat demonstrated that liberals cared more about limiting the influence of a particular kind of religion in the Prussian civil service than they did about attacking the Pennsylvania system. Holtzendorff, for example, disagreed with Wichern's support of the Pennsylvania system but focused his attacks on the secretive, Pietist, and “Catholic” qualities of the Brotherhood, rather than on the actual policies that Wichern proposed. Thus, many of Wichern's reforms remained an integral part of the prison system. Even by the turn of the century, solitary confinement remained unregulated by definite laws. In a 1906 assessment of Wichern's prison reforms, the lawyer Dr. G. von Rohden wrote, “Many of Wichern's stances on solitary confinement remain entrenched within the German prison system.”Footnote 127
The removal of the Brotherhood from the Prussian prisons thus signaled a temporary end to Wichern and Frederick William IV's “religious revolution.” In 1857, with Frederick William IV active and the conservatives in power, Wichern and his Brotherhood seemed unstoppable. Yet, within a short span of five years, Wichern's star had fallen and his prison reforms were discredited. Wichern's defeat attests to the vitality of the Prussian parliamentary system in the 1850s. Prussian political culture was by no means stagnant or backward but rather was a dynamic exchange, and a battle of ideas and opinions existed between liberals and conservatives. The story also demonstrates the confidence that liberals exuded in the New Era as they challenged the Prussian conservative establishment without fear or remorse.
Yet, this liberal victory represented a “path not taken” in Prussia's attempts at modernizing its prisons. In defeating Wichern's Brotherhood, the liberal opposition rejected the option of modernizing the state apparatus through the reliance on independent, voluntary organizations. Instead, the state retained full control of the prison system, and all of the prison personnel remained as state employees.
Wichern's approach to religion was in many ways a fundamentally modern one, as he developed the Brotherhood of the Rauhen Hauses into a voluntary organization separate from traditional Church institutions.Footnote 128 Whereas one's participation in the religious organization was traditionally determined by birth, or by the parish one was born into, Wichern's Brotherhood transformed religious participation into something based on individual choice, instead of traditional or birth ties to a religious community.
The debates in parliament thus clarified the need to demarcate, in the case of prisons, the boundaries between the private and the public sector and, more specifically, the boundaries between church and state. These lines were not always so clearly delineated in other states at the time. In America, for example, voluntary religious societies continued to assert themselves within the administration of state prisons. The Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons, which consisted largely of Quakers, advocated the building of Eastern State Penitentiary and the implementation of solitary confinement. After the building was completed, the Quakers became outside overseers and tended to the penitentiary.Footnote 129 In America, then, the prison system had a mixed character, where private religious organizations and state institutions combined to administer the prisons.
A different model that Prussia could have considered was Jeremy Bentham's proposal of privatizing the prison system. Bentham had proposed the complete removal of state influence from his Panopticon, arguing that the Panopticon “was to be run entirely by private contract management.”Footnote 130 In the Panopticon, these private organizations would don a religious guise. Bentham believed that religious education was an integral part of the reform curriculum, and prisoners would be required to receive a moral education. He wrote that the “necessity of a Chapel is a point rather to be assumed than argued.”Footnote 131 Bentham's model was eventually rejected, and the British government remained in control of the administration of the British penal system. Yet, through the influence of Elizabeth Fry and the Society for the Improvement of Prison Discipline and for the Reformation of Juvenile Offenders, private religious groups had a heavy hand in the reform of the British penal system.Footnote 132
In Prussia, the defeat of Wichern's Brotherhood signaled an end to this mixture of state and private religious administration within the prison system. Prison administration would remain solely within the jurisdiction of the state, and prison inspectors would be state bureaucrats. Without a doubt, Prussian prisons continued to display many “religious” characteristics, such as the use of solitary confinement and the employment of prison chaplains. Even though liberals' opinions varied on the amount of religious influence that should be allowed in the prisons, they did agree that the prison administration should remain solely within the hands of the state and not be controlled by voluntary religious organizations such as Wichern's Brotherhood. Thus, prison administrators retained their status as state employees, and the line between church and state was thus demarcated clearly within the Prussian state system.
Only a decade later, during the Kulturkampf, liberals and conservatives forged an alliance that would have seemed impossible in the 1860s. Secular liberals maintained their stance of removing what they deemed inappropriate forms of religion from public life, as they opposed any form of “superstition.” Conservatives, on the other hand, fueled by their anti-Catholicism, rejected the synergistic relationship between church and state that they had supported only two decades previously.
As he tried to limit the influence of Catholicism within state institutions such as schools, Bismarck's ethos echoed that of Holtzendorff and the liberals in the 1850s and their attempts to eliminate the influence of certain types of religious observance within state prisons. The liberals in the 1860s and Bismarck both hoped to use the state, as well as parliamentary politics, to rein in religion that they deemed subversive and dangerous to the state's interests. Furthermore, much of Bismarck's Kulturkampf drew on the battles waged in the 1860s. Anti-Jesuit rhetoric, which permeated the parliamentary rhetoric of Wichern's time, prefigured Bismarck's Jesuit Law of 1872, which banned the Jesuits from the German Empire.Footnote 133
Whereas the liberals in the early 1860s hoped to remove Wichern from power as a defensive check against further conservative control of Prussian institutions, Bismarck's Kulturkampf was offensive in nature, as he hoped to use the Kulturkampf to destroy the Catholic strongholds in the south in newly unified Germany. Unlike the liberal success ten years earlier of preventing Wichern from gaining control of Prussian prisons, Bismarck's attack on the Catholic Church ultimately failed. The Catholic Church was able to mobilize a deeply rooted popular resistance to Bismarck's attacks, and Bismarck's Kulturkampf became unpopular.Footnote 134 Wichern's Inner Mission, on the other hand, was never able to muster the same type of popular response to liberals the way the Catholic Center party was able to mobilize popular Catholicism in the 1870s. With the removal of the Brotherhood from the prisons, Wichern's hopes of a Protestant revivalism, sweeping through every corner of German society, would soon fade into memory.
