The Politics of Sociability: Freemasonry and German Civil Society, 1840-1918

Citation preview

Page viii → Page ix →

Preface This book grew out of my dissertation, completed at the University of Bielefeld in 1999 and published by Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht in 2000. The German edition was received by and large as a contribution to the expanding literature on nineteenth-century bourgeois culture. My primary motivation in writing this book, however, was actually somewhat different. It was the unexpected renewal in the 1990s of a preoccupation with notions like civility, civil society, a cosmopolitan ethos, and moral justifications for war that spurred my interest in writing on nineteenth-century Freemasonry. I wanted to explore the unintended political consequences of Enlightenment ideas and practices in an age characterized by the advent of nationalism, anti-Semitism, and social discord. The self-image of Freemasons as civilizing agents, acting in good faith to promote the idea of universal brotherhood, was contradicted not only by their sense of exclusivity. For it is my contention that Freemasons also unintentionally exacerbated nineteenth-century political conflicts—for example, between liberals and Catholics, or the Germans and the French—by what I call moral universalism: the grounding of political arguments on universalist pretensions that obscure the legitimate norms and interests of their contenders. The book appeared simultaneously with other critical accounts of the actual workings of civil society in nineteenth-century Europe, notably by Frank Trentmann and Philip Nord, both of whom shared their insights with me. However, this edition includes studies published after 2000 only in those cases where the German edition referred to earlier versions of the argument by the same author, for example, in an unpublished paper. I do discuss much of the more recent literature in what has now become a growing concern among historians with the cultural context and content of the political in my book Civil Society, 1750–1914, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2006. Page x → I wish to thank the editors of this series, in particular Geoff Eley, and three anonymous readers for their valuable suggestions. I did, for example, remove most of the statistics, which, however, can be consulted in the German edition. I also benefited from comments by colleagues, particularly at the Johns Hopkins University, where I submitted my first paper on the subject as an MA thesis, and Bielefeld, where I had the privilege of working with Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Reinhart Koselleck, and conversing with Svenja Goltermann, Christian Geulen, and Till van Rahden. In the end, of course, I alone assume responsibility for any errors in statements of fact or argument. The translation of a book always takes more time than expected, and I thank my editors at the University of Michigan Press, initially Chris Collins and later Jim Reische, for their patience and support. The Stiftung zur FГ¶rderung der Masonischen Forschung kindly sponsored the translation of a sample chapter. Finally, I owe my greatest debt to Tom Lampert, a meticulous translator and keen writer, for working so closely with me on a book that is very much concerned with language. Parts of this book draw on materials that I have published earlier: passages in chapters 2 and 3 were included in “Brothers or Strangers? Jews and Freemasons in Nineteenth-Century Germany,” German History 18 (2000): 143–61; chapter 5 is essentially the same essay that was published as “Civility, Male Friendship, and Masonic Sociability in Nineteenth-Century Germany,” Gender and History 13 (2001): 224–48; the argument of chapter 8 was first presented in The Mechanics of Internationalism: Culture, Society, and Politics from the 1840s to World War I, ed. Martin H. Geyer and Johannes Paulmann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Cambridge, Mass., May 2006

Page 1 →

Introduction Bowling Alone is the title of a best-selling study published in 2000 by the American political scientist Robert Putnam. The title identifies what Putnam regards as one symptom of an alarming development in the United States: Although more Americans than ever go bowling, the percentage of those who do so as part of a club or organized group has decreased significantly. Putnam points out that membership in such diverse organizations as the Boy Scouts, the Red Cross, and Masonic lodges has sunk dramatically over the past thirty years, as has active citizen participation in local community affairs. Only national organizations that merely represent interests and do not cultivate any common social life, such as the American Association of Retired Persons, have flourished.1 Yet what is so alarming, we might ask, about the fact that Americans today do not engage in established forms of sociability, that they bowl or watch television alone, and that they are content to have their interests represented by organizations they know only through letters and e-mails? At stake, according to Putnam, is the very foundation of American civil society and American democracy.2 Drawing on the political theory of Alexis de Tocqueville, Putnam argues that civil society is founded neither on the readiness of individuals to obey their government nor on the calculated pursuit of economic self-interest, but on civic virtue.3 Without civic virtue, there is no civil society—that is the fundamental premise of this political theory—and civic virtue unfolds only through the interaction of citizens with one another, through their sociability. As Tocqueville wrote in 1840, “Sentiments and ideas renew themselves, the heart is enlarged, and the human mind is developed only by the reciprocal action of men upon each other.” According to Tocqueville, this reciprocity, which was subject to rigid rules and regulations in corporative society, has to be produced Page 2 →artificially in civil society. “And this,” he argued, “is what associations alone can do.”4 There is, in other words, a profound connection between the “moral improvement” of individuals and the “civility” of the society they constitute. “Among the laws that rule human societies,” Tocqueville continued, “is one that seems more precise and clearer than all others. In order that men remain civilized or become so, the art of association must be developed and perfected among them in the same ratio as equality of conditions increases.”5 Conversely—and both Putnam and Tocqueville share this concern—when the ties that bind individuals together and guarantee their virtue begin to loosen, the political foundations of civil society threaten to erode.6 The less citizens practice the “art of association,” the more “uncivil” society becomes. Tocqueville employed an apocalyptic image to illustrate what a democratic society would look like when it no longer secured its political foundations through the sociability of its citizens: “I see an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who resolve on themselves without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls. Each of them, withdrawn and apart, is like a stranger to the destiny of all the others: his children and his particular friends form the whole human species for him; as for dwelling with his fellow citizens, he is beside them, but he does not see them; he touches them and does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone, and if a family still remains for him, one can at least say that he no longer has a native country. Above these an immense tutelary power is elevated, which alone takes charge of assuring their enjoyments and watching over their fate. It is absolute, detailed, regular, far seeing, and mild. It would resemble paternal power if, like that, it had for its object to prepare men for manhood; but on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them fixed irrevocably in childhood . . .”7 Putnam may have had this scenario in mind when he described with such alarm the isolation of Americans even when bowling. We could reformulate Tocque-ville’s argument as follows: In civil society, an apparently apolitical sociability has a political dimension. “The new political science,” which Tocqueville wanted to establish as the “basic science of civil society,” was supposed to be concerned primarily with the “art of association,” that is, with sociability. For Tocqueville, the progress of all other sciences was dependent on this one basic science.8 In the debates about German civil society following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Tocqueville’s theses about civic virtue, sociability, and Page 3 →democracy have admittedly played no role whatsoever, although the

German neologism Zivilgesellschaft (literally, civil society) has stood at the center of these debates. There are numerous reasons for this, and the very use of the word Zivilgesellschaft points to one key issue: Germans employed this newly invented term rather than established ones such as bГјrgerliche Gesellschaft or BГјrgergesellschaft in order to emphasize the ostensible novelty of this contemporary political vision. The German neologism Zivilgesellschaft suggests that the English term civil society and its historical traditions have no equivalent in Germany. By dispensing with the German term BГјrger and the “bourgeois” historical connotations that continue to be associated with it, it was easier to cleanse this political vision of past ruptures and ambiguities. “Civil society,” one might suppose, has no past whatsoever in Germany. It has only a future.Introduction Like the term BГјrger, the German word Tugend (virtue) has had similarly pejorative connotations throughout the twentieth century. Although virtue was initially regarded as a central element of the Enlightenment in both Germany and France, the term experienced a dramatic devaluation in Germany beginning in the late nineteenth century through the discourse of the political Right. Leftist discourse only exacerbated this development after 1945. The discussion of specifically German “secondary virtues” that ostensibly contributed to the rise of National Socialism also helped to discredit the concept of virtue in Germany; in Herfried MГјnkler’s words, “Virtue became secondary.”9 Thus contemporary German theorists of civil society or Zivilgesellschaft regard any appeal to an intimate connection between civic virtue and civil society—a standard position today not only among communitarians in the United States—as conservative and antiquated. From JГјrgen Habermas to Ulrich Beck, German theorists of civil society simply disregard the possibility that civil society might require, in addition to free trade and liberal constitutions, a third pillar—the morality of its citizens, who acquire their virtue through interactions with each other, that is, through the “art of association.” As strange as this connection between civic virtue and civil society might appear to German theorists of civil society today, it was in fact quite familiar to the “practitioners” of civil society during the “long nineteenth century.”10 That is the first premise of this study. With the exception of the United States, there was hardly another society in the nineteenth century that was as “sociable” as Germany. Contemporaries in Germany spoke of the “rage for associations,” initially in the transition from corporative society to civil society from the end of the eighteenth century to the Revolution Page 4 →of 1848–49 and then in an even more pronounced form during the era of emergent civil society from the 1860s up to the First World War.11 This sociability of citizens was supposed to raise their “civility,” or in nineteenth-century parlance, “their humanity,” “their morals,” and their Bildung. “The exercise of virtue” and “civic association” appeared to be intimately connected.12 Through their participation in associations, joiners raised an explicitly moral-political claim: “Civilizing” oneself through interaction with others was supposed to produce a civic sense (BГјrgersinn) and, beyond this, a cosmopolitan sense (WeltbГјrgersinn). The fact that participation in the sociable circles of a city was tied to particular restrictive criteria such as education, independence, and masculinity indicates the double-edged nature of this civility. Citizens of the nineteenth century asserted a value system that claimed to be valid for all humans, and yet they identified these values initially only with people who already satisfied these social and moral demands.13 The German term BГјrger, which encompasses both the legal-political connotations of the “citoyen” and the social-moral connotations of the “bourgeois,” indicates this double-edged nature. The tension between universal claims and social-moral exclusivity was part and parcel of this vision of an intimate connection between civic virtue and civil society in the nineteenth century. That is the second premise of this study.14 The “art of association” was not only supposed to produce better citizens and men. This art itself was supposed to be accessible only to those deemed capable of civility. From this sense of moral capacity, German BГјrger derived their claim to lead local communities, to lead the nation, and, in a figurative sense, to lead humanity as a whole. In this regard as well, sociability was political. What effect did this belief in their own civility have on the various political and social conflicts of the nineteenth century? The present study attempts to demonstrate that the connection between sociability and political civility was not as unambiguous as Tocqueville and other liberal thinkers of the time believed. As recent comparative studies have shown, one of the most overriding passions of civic associations in nineteenth-century Europe was excluding and disciplining those who

were not regarded as “civilized.”15 The third premise of this study is that over the course of the nineteenth century the tension between universal claims and social-moral exclusivity increased as civil society developed, as other social groups adopted “civility” as a cultural model. At the end of the nineteenth century, German BГјrger perceived a threat in this diffusion: The intimate connectionPage 5 → between society and civility—and indeed virtue itself—appeared to be in jeopardy. This in turn was understood as threatening the moral foundations of the political vision of civil society. The desire for the “moral improvement” of individuals, of local civil society, of the nation, and ultimately of humanity as a whole has always produced its “other,” which then threatened this political vision.16 Paradoxically, it is precisely this “other” that drives forward the desire to “civilize” completely and yet at the same time prevents this desire from ever being fulfilled. The “other” is supposed to be integrated, “civilized,” to become part of “general humanity,” and yet one’s own superior civility can only be asserted as long as this opposite or “other” exists—in oneself, in local civil society, in the nation, and in humanity as a whole.Introduction Masonic lodges were both the paragon of civic associations and one of its oldest forms. The lodges were a form of sociability peculiar to civil society—indeed were a model of civil society: “Freemasonry is nothing arbitrary, nothing superfluous,” Lessing wrote in Ernst und Falk in 1779. “Rather it is something necessary, which is grounded in the nature of man and of civil society.”17 As an institution, the lodges helped to ensure that the ideas and practices of the eighteenth century survived, albeit with modifications, and remained socially effective up into the early twentieth century. Through the example of Masonic lodges, we can analyze the belief in the connection between civic morality and civil society throughout the course of the nineteenth century. To date scholars have largely ignored the history of Masonic lodges in Europe in the nineteenth century.18 Occasionally historians have even expressed surprise that lodges existed during this period at all. After all, lodges arose during the Enlightenment, as a special part of the emerging public sphere, as a new form of sociability, in which bourgeois and aristocratic elites established a common space for communication on the eve of the French Revolution. The lodges sought to develop a form of sociability beyond existing corporative, religious, and political limitations, beyond the old political order as well as emergent civil society, a space in which the “parity of the purely human” (JГјrgen Habermas) would overcome the particular interests of individuals and encourage Bildung in the sense of a moral improvement of one’s own individuality.19 “Quite contrary to its purpose,” as Lessing noted, civil society creates social, religious, and political divisions. “It cannot, ” he continued, “unite men without parting them; it cannot part them without establishing gulfs among them, without drawing partition-walls through them.” “If a German meets a Frenchman at Page 6 →present, or a Frenchman an Englishman, or vice versa, then it is no longer a mere man, who by virtue of their identical nature will be attracted one to the other, but a particular kind of man meets a particular kind of man,” both of whom are conscious of their differences. For Lessing then, the central purpose of Freemasonry was to “draw together as narrow as possible those divisions through which men become so strange to each other.”20 Lessing anticipated Tocqueville’s arguments here and pointed to the political implications of enlightened sociability. More than any other form of sociability in the eighteenth century, Masonic lodges recast enlightened ideas as rituals and social practices that aimed at “civilizing” lodge brothers. In this figurative sense, Freemasons were “living the Enlightenment,” to use Margaret Jacob’s apt phrase; the lodges were “civil and hence political” in the sense that they served as microcosms of emerging civil society.21 Even if it is mistaken to regard Freemasons as the secret force behind the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror (they were, in fact, among its first victims), the pre-political moral language and the social practices of the lodges did possess a political dimension. It is precisely this dimension of Freemasonry that interested both Reinhart Koselleck in his study of the “pathogenesis” of modernity and JГјrgen Habermas in his book on the public sphere.22 The theoretical premises of these seminal studies as well as the fact that both focus on early modern ideas and practices but implicitly trace their effects into the twentieth century raise the question of the fate of enlightened sociability and its moral language in the long nineteenth century.

The present study is divided into three parts, each of which employs a different but complementary approach to the history of Masonic lodges. While a concise history of German Freemasonry in the nineteenth century (particularly from a comparative perspective) would be a worthwhile undertaking, here the example of the lodges is used to engage in a critical examination of the questions and premises outlined previously. The first part of the book traces the changing significance of Masonic lodges within two local communities throughout the course of the long nineteenth century. The second part investigates language and social practices within the lodges more closely, both of which were supposed to foster “improvement of the self” and thus lead to civic virtue. The third part of the book examines lodge speeches, analyzing the transformation of a moral language into a political, patriotic language in particular during the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71) and the subsequent rapprochements between French and German Freemasons prior to 1914. The book concludes with a brief review Page 7 →of the tumultuous history of Freemasonry during the “new Thirty Years War” (Raymond Aron) beginning in 1914.Introduction The first part of the book investigates the changing significance of the lodges for civil society in Germany between the VormГ¤rz period and the First World War. It also examines their significance in regard to the state, the monarchy, and the church. Almost all studies focusing on the connection between the emergence of the modern self and the flourishing of associations have concentrated on the so-called Sattelzeit between 1750 and 1850.23 It is usually assumed that associations were less significant for later time periods, although the number and the size of associations in Germany increased dramatically in the 1860s and 1870s, and associations ultimately came to permeate all domains of society in imperial Germany.24 In order to investigate both the constancy and change in Masonic sociability, this study will focus primarily on the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century.25 Moreover, in this and other parts of the book, German Freemasons are compared with their French and American brethren in the nineteenth century. French Freemasons are considered political pioneers and social pillars of the Third Republic, while American lodges are generally regarded as the paragon for the numerous associations and secret societies that formed the backbone of American democracy after the Civil War.26 It is also important to determine who had access to Masonic sociability in a particular city and who was excluded, as well as to examine the different criteria—class, gender, religion, and race—used to determine this inclusion or exclusion. I am interested, in other words, in the boundaries lodges drew by means of their moral-political imperatives and in the language they employed to justify these boundaries. In terms of social history, I attempt to determine the social profile and the age groups, as well as the religious and political affiliations of lodge members between 1840 and 1914. Conversely, I also use existing collections of unsuccessful applications for lodge membership and the (often quite protracted) negotiations of individual applications to determine who was not regarded as “respectable” and the justifications for such decisions. Here I pay particular attention to the way in language was used to construct identity and distinction. Even more than the social and gender boundaries (the latter are considered in detail in part 2), religious boundaries blatantly contradicted the humanist language of Freemasonry. Following a recent trend among historians, this study investigates the fundamental significance of tensions between Catholics, Protestants, and Jews in nineteenth-century German Page 8 →civil society.27 The conflict with Catholicism was particularly significant in defining the self-image of the lodges—a conflict that reached its climax during the Kulturkampf, although it existed throughout the entire nineteenth century and into the First World War. Moreover, the question of the inclusion or exclusion of Jews had, since the early 1840s, divided lodges into a liberal camp (e.g., in large trading cities such as Leipzig, Hamburg, or Frankfurt) and a conservative camp (in particular in Prussia, with Berlin and Breslau as its centers). In order to compare these two camps, the present study focuses on Masonic lodges in Leipzig and Breslau.28 It also provides comparative results on a regional level (Prussia and Saxony) and a national one (Germany, France, and the United States). In the second part of the book, the perspective shifts to the inner workings of lodge life. The focus here is on the language and social practices within the lodges, both of which were supposed to help realize the idea of moral improvement.29 The lodges were supposed to be “educational institutions for the humanity of men,” as Johann Caspar Bluntschli explained in his liberal StaatswГ¶rterbuch, schools of civic virtue.30 Even in the

nineteenth century—the era of the public sphere—such an education appeared possible only in confined social spaces, which in the case of the lodges continued to be veiled in secrecy. Such social spaces were removed from civil society and its everyday political life. However, it would be a mistake to regard this withdrawal to “moral introspection” as apolitical escapism. Rather, in these spaces lodge brothers were supposed to learn to govern their individual selves in order to be able to govern society as a whole. In the first chapter of this part, the example of Masonry is used to illuminate the nineteenth-century belief in the connection between civic virtue and sociability. The next chapter investigates in depth the complicated rules and rituals of the lodges, which were quite literally supposed to maintain the brotherhood of men. Here the focus is not only on sociabilitГ© in general31 but also on what might be called the practices of the self. These rituals enabled Masonic ideas about moral and political order to be experienced on a physical level. The rituals were supposed to “civilize” members until virtue became, in Georg Simmel’s words, “a constitution governing from within.”32 The cult of fraternity was a singularly masculine cult. The second chapter of part 2 also examines the extent to which this idea of civilizing the self, of civilizing society, and ultimately of civilizing humanity was constructed in gendered terms. The following chapter addresses a related issue: Does the idea of civic virtue include a specific form of religiosity, a Page 9 →civil religion that is distinguished from the alleged “feminization of religion” in the nineteenth century? What did the civil religion typical of the lodges look like? What made it attractive even in the final third of the nineteenth century, despite the growing predominance of science and the decline in church attendance at the time? Why did the elevated BГјrgertum assembled in Masonic lodges perceive the crisis of modern society prior to 1914 as a moral crisis? Does this moral critique of modernity testify to a “deficit of civility” or to a reformulation of the BГјrgertum’s claims to lead and to reform the society of imperial Germany?Introduction The third part of the book investigates the moral-political language of Freemasonry, focusing especially on speeches by Freemasons within the lodges. In the nineteenth century, the improvement of the self, of civil society and the nation, and ultimately of humanity formed an inseparable triad. In 1840, Tocqueville provided the following explanation for the fact that “American writers and orators are often bombastic”: “In democratic societies each citizen is habitually occupied in contemplating a very small object, which is himself. If he comes to raise his eyes higher, he then perceives only the immense image of society or the still greater figure of the human race. He has only very particular and very clear ideas, or very general and very vague notions; the intermediate space is empty.”33 Here Tocqueville observes how the concern with improvements of the self is closely tied to vague expectations about society, the nation, or humanity. In the first chapter of part 3, the example of Masonic lodges is used to outline the semantic connection between these various levels. The following chapter investigates in greater detail the political consequences of the lodges’ humanist and cosmopolitan self-understanding during the era of nation-states and wars. The central focus here is the tension between German and French Freemasons during the era between the Franco-Prussian War and the First World War. The mixing of nationalist and universalist rhetoric in lodge speeches suggests an ambiguity similar to the one outlined previously in regard to civic virtue and civil society. The utopia of an idealized unity—of the self, of civil society or the nation, and ultimately of humanity—has always produced its “other,” which appears to threaten the welfare of that unity, and this in turn allows that unity to be demarcated and reasserted more strongly.34 The fact that Freemasons in both Germany and France attributed a universal mission to their respective nations even after the outbreak of the First World War does not so much represent a break with the enlightened-liberal tradition as reveal an ambivalence within that tradition. As I argue Page 10 →in the conclusion, the lodges were by no means an exception in this regard. The humanist justification of war in the name of the German or, conversely, the French nation (as well as the intensification of national enmity tied to this) ultimately led to a disavowal of the concepts of civilization and humanity in both countries after the First World War.35 An intrinsic connection between Freemasonry and civil society has existed since the eighteenth century. This is evident in the difficulties lodges experienced in the autocratic Habsburg and czarist empires in the nineteenth century as well in the ban on lodges in the Soviet Union in 1918, in Italy in 1925, and in Germany ten years later.

The persecution of Masonic lodges in Nazi Germany and in the nations occupied by the Germans and their allies had the paradoxical result that an almost complete collection of Masonic documents in Germany survived the Second World War. Today most of these documents are located either in the State Archive in Berlin- Dahlem, in a branch of the University of Poznan’s library in the Ciazen Castle, or in the Central State Archive in Moscow.36 The history of this collection of documents is itself part of the history of Masonic lodges in Germany. Over the course of the nineteenth century and in particular after the First World War, the terms bourgeois, liberal, and Jewish were reduced to stereotypes, which congealed into a distorted image of Freemasonry that haunted the German (and European) political imagination between the two world wars—an image by no means limited to right-wing circles. Between 1933 and 1935, the Nazis confiscated all materials held in local lodge archives. The extensive files that every lodge had kept since its founding, extending in some cases back into the early eighteenth century, were transferred to the central Gestapo archive in Berlin-Wilmersdorf. After 1935, a division in the Reich Security Main Office was established to evaluate the personal files of the lodges and to conduct a series of pseudo-scientific studies that were supposed to prove a Jewish-Masonic world conspiracy.37 During the bombing of Berlin, these files were moved to two castles in Silesia, where the Red Army subsequently assumed control of them. The pamphlets and journals remained in the library of the University of Poznan, while the lodge files were transferred to Moscow—Stalin, too, was obsessed with the idea of a Jewish-Masonic world conspiracy. After Stalin’s death, a portion of the lodge files were transferred to the German Democratic Republic, where they were not accessible to the public; the rest of the files remained in Moscow. They have only recently become available to scholars.Introduction Page 11 →The present study is based primarily on three different groups of documents. The first of these are the government files concerning the surveillance of Masonic lodges, in particular by the Prussian and Saxon Departments of the Interior. Since the late eighteenth century, Freemasonry in Prussia and Saxony—in contrast, for example, to Bavaria or the Habsburg empire—was tolerated by the state but kept under surveillance. These files demonstrate how tense relations were between the state, the monarchy, and the church, on the one hand, and the lodges, on the other. The lodge files constitute the second and largest group of documents. The present study was able to evaluate systematically only the documents of the Leipzig and Breslau lodges and, in part, those of the Berlin and Dresden grand lodges. These files encompass statutes and laws, minutes of lodge meetings, unpublished speeches, and correspondence. Lists of lodge members and extensive biographical material were also examined: personal files, applications for admission, questionnaires, rГ©sumГ©s, vouchers, and brief addresses. The third group of documents is the extensive collection of Masonic pamphlets and journals. The present study provides the first analysis of all significant German lodge journals between 1840 and 1918.38 The numerous lodge speeches are particularly important in tracing a conceptual history of terms and ideas. In contrast, for example, to lodges in English-speaking countries, speeches in German lodges constituted an established part of lodge meetings and were recorded by hand in the minutes or largely verbatim in Masonic journals. In addition, I also examine the anti-Masonic literature of the era (in particular that of the Catholic public), which was collected by government agencies or by the lodges themselves.39 The issues raised in this study could only be addressed through a combination of methodological approaches. Any attempt to write a history of past beliefs about a connection between civil society and civic virtue in terms of ideas and social practices necessarily straddles established fields and methods of historiography—even if such an attempt cannot do without social history and conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte). The conventional separation of historiography into intellectual and social history or into cultural and political history reinforces a depoliticized notion of culture, which distorts the moral and political self-understanding of nineteenth-century “practitioners of civil society.” Such a notion of culture implicitly defines as “pre-political” precisely those questions that were eminently political for early modern political theory.40 In order to grasp this belief in the political importance of civil society’sPage 12 → social and moral

foundations, it is necessary to employ a different approach, one that investigates the political substance of these ostensibly “pre-political” concepts and practices.41 This is precisely what the present study attempts to do. While such an approach might be called a “political history of culture,” this should not be regarded as a new subfield of history with its own concepts and models.42 Rather the approach adopted in this study can be summarized in the form of a question: Which social and discursive practices have transformed ideas about the social and the moral, the national and the universal, the public and the private into objects of politics? Admittedly this question is not entirely new. Reinhart Koselleck and John Pocock have each developed approaches to the historical study of concepts and languages and to issues addressed in the present study.43 However, Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschichte and Pocock’s history of political languages have both been criticized for concentrating on canonical texts and authors and for not adequately investigating the social-political context of speech acts.44 By focusing on diachronic change in the moral-political language of actual practitioners of civil society like the Freemasons, this book attempts to take such criticism seriously. Furthermore, a political history of culture must not only historicize concepts of individual and collective identity such as class or nation. It must also engage in a cultural history of the practices and institutions tied to such identities.45 Individuals are not simply wax figures that passively assume the shape of existing moral or political discourses. The appropriation of identity occurs through a variety of individual and social practices, the results of which can contradict purely discursive concepts and terms. The rituals of Freemasons, for example, often tell us more about the politics of sociability than their speeches do. Changes in the meaning of concepts and terms, in other words, must always be connected to their actual usage in everyday practice. In this way we can historicize the question of the emergence of the modern self, a question that theorists of civil society from Tocqueville to Weber have regarded as particularly significant for politics. Foucault echoed this concern when he called for a “history of the forms of moral subjectivation and the practices of the self that were associated with it.”46 We must recognize that identities are not permanent, unified, or coherent but are instead dependent on practices of political appropriation and usage.47 Finally, we should regard the history of boundaries as yet another dimension of a cultural-historical approach to the political.48 “One could Page 13 →write the history of boundaries,” Michel Foucault wrote, “those obscure gestures, which, as soon as they have been executed, have already necessarily been forgotten—gestures with which a culture rejects something that, from its own perspective, lies outside of it.”49 Foucault refers here to precisely those boundaries that are often regarded as “pre-political,” in particular boundaries between self and other.50 But even those boundaries traditionally considered political, such as those between classes, religions, or nations, become of interest for such an investigation the moment we do not assume that they simply exist objectively in history, but rather begin to examine their gestures, mechanisms, and effects, the descriptions of self and other they invoke. It is also important to take the metaphor of boundaries literally and investigate how social spaces arise (in the case of Masonic lodges, for example, by means of the secret) and which cultural and symbolic practices establish an inside and an outside—whether in social or religious terms, or in political or gendered ones.Introduction The political utopia of the lodges sought to transcend such boundaries and to construct a social space in which “the parity of the purely human” would establish an enlightened universalism. However, the desire to transcend these boundaries, to create “a brotherhood of men” has always produced its opposite as well: the effort to set oneself apart, the desire for social and moral exclusivity, and the authority to determine who is a man and a citizen and who is not.51 Those who would like to revive political ideas of the “long nineteenth century”—its typical preoccupation with the self, civil society, and humanity—cannot avoid the political aporias inherent in those ideas simply by rejecting the notion of the nation-state.52 The binary distinctions of civilized and barbaric, enlightened and backward, masculine and feminine, or more generally, universal and particular are typical not only of the moral and political language and the curious rituals of nineteenth-century Masonic sociability.53 A historical study that investigates ambivalent identities—as a cultural history of the political just as much as a political history of culture—must, therefore, dispense with the false alternatives of universalism and particularism and explore the territory in between.54

Page 14 → Page 15 →

Part I Freemasonry and Civil Society A society rises from brutality to order. Barbarism is the age of the fact, and thus the age of order is necessarily the realm of fictions—for there is no power that would be capable of founding the order of the body solely through bodily force. For this, fictional forces are necessary. —Paul Valéry

Page 16 → Page 17 →

Chapter 1 Secrecy and Enlightenment The conceptual distinction between state and civil society is an invention of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. If the Aristotelian tradition had understood societas civilis as a community of free and equal citizens united in political self-government, the emergence of the modern state and the subsequent concentration of political power in an absolutist ruler and his bureaucracy led to a bifurcation of the term. Civil society was no longer identical with a form of political rule: State and civil society became separate entities. “Civil society” came to designate a political space independent of the state and, at least apparently, removed from politics.1 At the same time the significance of this “civil sphere” expanded. It was not merely “bourgeois society,” the domain of the economy created by the rising middle class or BГјrgertum, as Hegel and after him Marx or Riehl would claim in the nineteenth century with such momentous consequences for the conceptual history of bГјrgerliche Gesellschaft. Rather, one of the criteria of “society” in the eighteenth century was that it be “free from all the limitations that men experience as civil (= political) persons and as private persons (birth, status, profession, business).”2 Society initially encompassed a newly defined domain within the state that was understood as “civil,” a domain that expanded into a societas publica. This new “civil society” was constituted in the private spaces of sociability.3 This conceptual displacement marked not only a transformation of structural conditions, for example, the expansion of communicative networks and the development of market societies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Within these altered structural conditions, a new conception of humans and human nature was also articulated, one that unfolded within the modern polarities of the self and sociability. The older discourse of virtue in the Aristotelian tradition was transformed into the Page 18 →idea of civilizing the individual through the sociability of citizens. In his notion of the “unsociable sociability” of man—the interplay between an inclination to socialize and a tendency to individualize—Kant identified in anthropological terms the actual tension and dynamic, the antagonism of this new “civil society.” The social world appeared to be as natural as nature itself. Like nature, it was not free of conflict and yet was harmonious. “Thus the first steps from barbarism to culture are achieved; for culture consists in the social value of man. Thus all man’s talents are gradually unfolded, taste is developed.” The individual constitutes his individuality in society; society constitutes itself “as a moral whole” in the sociability of individuals.4 The fundamental principle of “civil society” is the formation of society, the association, the voluntary assembly, and interaction of individuals for the purpose of enlightening and developing themselves, society, and humanity itself. Society, or more generally speaking the “social” as a specific field of human experience, is itself historical, a topos of the European Enlightenment. In continental Europe, a temporary abolition of absolutist corporative distinctions occurred within the sociability of these new social spaces. These spaces were initially understood as private and apolitical, an understanding that was not limited to the German language area. The French term sociabilitГ©, which was coined in the early eighteenth century, was evidence of these new social practices and at the same time one factor in their emergence.5 On the one hand, the term described the rise of “European societies,” if “society” in contemporary parlance is still understood as identical with socialitas, the sociable intercourse of men as men.6 In the innumerable sociable unions of the eighteenth century, society could experience itself as society—society, as it were, occurred. In this social-moral sense, society understood itself as egalitarian, as a sphere within the absolutist state where “citizens without sovereignty could be free.”7 On the other hand, the history of society always includes the history of society’s self-description as society. “Strictly speaking, the new civil society existed only to the extent that it was able to assert itself linguistically.”8 Two factors were essential in the constitution of modern civil society: the self-constitution of society as society through concrete cultural practices in the closed social spaces of sociabilitГ©; and the selfdescription of society as society in a new “public sphere.” It is in this sense that Lessing could assert in 1779 that the noble core of Freemasonry—the most popular form of association in the eighteenth

century—was as old as civil society itself and that the two could only have emerged together.9 Page 19 → Freemasonry originated in the political culture of England and Scotland at the end of the seventeenth century, the period following the Civil War and the Revolution of 1688. Twenty years after the four lodges in London merged to form the Grand Lodge of England—Freemasonry’s actual founding date (1717)—the first German “Masonic society” was founded in Hamburg in 1737. The first Masonic lodge on the European continent had already been established in The Hague in 1731. A lodge was founded in Paris in the following year. A network of lodges then spread across the entire European continent at an astounding pace. Before the middle of the eighteenth century, it extended not only from Paris to St. Petersburg, from Copenhagen to Naples, but also to the colonies outside of Europe, for example, in New England.10 The number of lodges rose dramatically as well in the German language area. Masonic lodges were established quickly throughout Protestant northern and central Germany—the core region of the German Enlightenment—as well as in the Rhineland. In Catholic southern Germany, Masonic lodges were limited to a few cities, as Freemasonry in the eighteenth century was in general a purely urban phenomenon. Following the example in Hamburg in 1737, lodges were established in Dresden in 1738, in Berlin in 1740, and in Leipzig and Breslau in 1741. Over the course of the eighteenth century, multiple lodges were established in a number of cities. For example, the first lodge in Breslau, Aux trois squelettes, was founded in 1741 immediately after Friedrich II’s occupation of Silesia. Thirty years later, three additional Breslau lodges were established: Zur SГ¤ule in 1774, Zur Glocke in 1776, and Friedrich zum goldenen Zepter in 1776. In Leipzig, the Aux trois Compas Lodge (1741) and Minerva Lodge (1746) merged in 1747; the Balduin Lodge was established in Leipzig in 1776, and the Apollo Lodge in 1799. Myriad diverse Masonic lodges arose throughout Germany. Compared with their English or French counterparts, German lodges were particularly varied in form, which is not surprising given Germany’s federalism and its fragmented constitutional history. In Masonic lodges, “the social framework of a moral International” was established, a supranational communicative space, in which ideas and practices of the English and the Scottish Enlightenment’s political culture were discussed and implemented.11 Over the course of the eighteenth century, Masonic lodges developed into the most widespread and inclusive form of sociability of the European Enlightenment.12 According to conservative estimates, there were approximately 450 lodges with 27,000 membersPage 20 → in the German language area throughout the eighteenth century. In 1789, there were almost 700 lodges in Paris and in the French provinces, and more than 20,000 Freemasons had been registered and identified by name.13 In 1750, an Amsterdam lodge member estimated that there totalled about 50,000 Freemasons in the larger European cities.14 It is entirely possible that this number had more than doubled in continental Europe by 1789.15 “There are few people,” Baron von Knigge claimed in 1788, “possessing an eminent degree of ability and activity, particularly on the continent, who being actuated by a desire for knowledge, or by sociability, curiosity, or restlessness of temper, have not been for some time at least members of secret associations.”16 How can we explain the enormous appeal of Freemasonry? Who was drawn to the lodges’ cultural practices and new moral values? What was the political significance of Masonic lodges within the absolutist state? In what way is “civil society,” as Lessing conjectured, merely an “offspring” of Freemasonry? Despite the dizzying diversity of European Freemasonry in the eighteenth century, I will attempt to offer general answers here to these questions by emphasizing the basic traits of Masonic lodges. In the past, scholars frequently characterized Masonic lodges as communicative spaces of the socially ascendant, but politically powerless bourgeoisie. According to this traditional understanding, “civil society,” as it was concretized in the lodges, was a product of the bourgeoisie, and the Enlightenment was that class’s “ideology of emancipation.” Recent studies of French and German lodges, however, have corrected this view. Freemasonry’s particular significance lay rather in the fact that aristocratic and bourgeois elites associated with each other in Masonic lodges, with monarchs at times even assuming a leading role.17 Crown Prince Friedrich was admitted to the Prussian lodges in 1738 and was later admired as a guiding figure of

European Freemasonry. In royal residences and garrison cities the percentage of aristocratic lodge members was high, while in the large trading cities such as Hamburg, Frankfurt, or Leipzig it was low. The social structure differed from city to city and from lodge to lodge. In lodges in Berlin, KГ¶nigsberg, or Breslau, aristocrats, civil servants, and military officers long predominated.18 In a university city such as GГ¶ttingen, lodge members were primarily professors. In general, we find that over the course of the eighteenth century lodge membership was composed of the aristocracy and those professional groups classified in social-historical terms as the “new BГјrgertum”: wealthy merchants, factory owners, bankers, administrative officials, lawyers,Page 21 → doctors, scholars, clergymen, and artists. During the 1780s, aristocrats constituted the majority of lodge members in MГјnster. Around 1800, the MГјnster lodge, with General von BlГјcher as its grand master, brought together Prussian officers, senior officials, and businessmen, while the local aristocracy no longer participated.19 Until the middle of the eighteenth century in Frankfurt, aristocrats made up half of the membership of the Zur Einigkeit Lodge. They gradually resigned from the lodge, so that by the end of the century the commercial bourgeoisie in Frankfurt (many of whom were also city council members) and senior civil servants formed the bulk of the membership.20 It was not, therefore, an enlightened counterelite opposed to the absolutist state that met in the social spaces of Masonic lodges. Rather, in both France and Germany, the lodges formed “sites of social compromise” (Daniel Roche).21 The significance of Freemasonry in terms of social history lies in this mixing of traditional aristocratic culture and a new civic culture, of enlightened aristocrats and ascendant BГјrger.Secrecy and Enlightenment Fig. 1. Margrave Friedrich of Brandenburg-Bayreuth’s admission into Freemasonry, presided over by Frederick the Great. (Courtesy of the Freimaurermuseum Bayreuth.) Page 22 → In order to grasp the political significance of this development, we need to examine the cultural practices of Masonic lodges in greater detail. Precisely because the lodges erected social barriers for those below them (e.g., craftsmen), the extent of internal equality embodied in Masonic rituals was astonishing. This exclusion “below” made possible “an egalitarianism вЂabove’” (Wolfgang Hardtwig) to a degree that had as yet been unknown.22 “As soon as we are assembled, we are all brothers. However, the rest of the world is a stranger to us,” one Freemason argued in a lodge speech in 1753. “The prince and his subject, the nobleman and the BГјrger, rich man and poor man, the one is as good as the other. Nothing distinguishes any of them from each other, and nothing separates them. Virtue has made them all equal.”23 In his diary, a Freemason in Wetzlar described the (at least partial) realization of this equality at the beginning of the 1780s, which was the most lasting impression of his admission to the lodge: “The concord among the brothers, where poor and rich, common and noble sat together without rank and without pretension.” He continued, “There my spirit sang with emotions it had not been capable of until then.”24 It is less the enlightened lodge speeches than the immediate experiences of equality in interacting with lodge “brothers” that seems to explain the fascination Masonic lodges exerted.25 Shaking hands and oaths of loyalty, brotherly kisses and drawn daggers on the initiate’s bared chest simultaneously communicated and sensuously strengthened this new community. The language used in the lodges intensified the feeling of brotherhood by borrowing metaphorically from the familial domain. The grand lodges were mothers and the individual lodges were daughters; lodge members were brothers and their wives were sisters. The Masonic cult of fraternity, in other words, made possible a playful appropriation of enlightened ideas. This was one of the central reasons that the lodges became the “strongest social institution of the moral world in the eighteenth century.”26 Such an abolition of the boundaries of corporative society appeared possible only in a world of play and illusion shrouded in secrecy. For this reason, it is essential that we illuminate the connection between secrecy and the public sphere, between enlightenment and Freemasonry in order to uncover the core of the Masonic selfconception.27 Only their emphasis on secrecy distinguished Masonic lodges from other associations. Paradoxically, this transcending of particularity (e.g., differences in status) in the lodges necessitated the delineation of new boundaries. Secrecy created Page 23 →a closed “moral interior” (Reinhart Koselleck),

which promised unaffected sociability and friendship among men and thus allowed the Masonic idea of “civilizing” to be experienced in Masonic rituals. Freemasons regarded themselves as moral elites possessing and embodying a secret religion of virtue. They believed the virtue of individual citizens, their “civility,” to be the guarantee for the moral improvement of society and even of humanity itself. Thus they claimed as their exclusive possession a general humanist idea of civilization. The secret promised an exceptional degree of internal cohesion. Internally it created equality and fraternity among lodge brothers (the “initiated” and “virtuous”), while externally it excluded the “uninitiated” and the “profane.” In this way, secrecy mediated the opposition between general-humanist claims and social-moral distinctions: It was egalitarian within and elitist without.Secrecy and Enlightenment As Georg Simmel has noted, secrecy offered a second world alongside the visible one, and both worlds influenced each other substantially.28 The lodges created a stage on which the world of the European ancien rГ©gime could be presented once again. At the same time, they called this world into question in a “theater of morality” (Norbert Schindler), offering a second world, an outline for a new social-moral order.29 A veil of fictional traditions, myths of origins, and symbolic actions disguised the novelty of this order. The dramatized crossing of the threshold into the harmonious space of morality—a classic rite of passage—formed the center of the Masonic cult of secrecy. Only through the estrangement that the theatrics of Masonic mysteries created could individuals recognize a new morality as the path to “beauty,” “wisdom,” and “strength,” to self-improvement, self-knowledge, and self-control—the three “Masonic lights,” which provided orientation in working the “rough stone,” in perfecting one’s self through sociable intercourse with lodge brothers. The “irrational” enthusiasm for secrecy, playfulness, and mysteries was not exhausted in the esoteric, as a superficial evaluation of the Masonic world might suggest.30 Turning away from the outside world and engaging in playful interaction within the lodges was a necessary prerequisite for creating this free space, in which a new society could unfold, a society in which the most diverse ideas and opinions, imagination and passions could be developed.31 However, secrecy not only allowed for more intense and freer forms of sociability. It also provided a protected space for the process of individualization, the unfolding of individual subjectivity. “Secrecy assumes the function of creating a site for the impulses and claims arising from this expanded and deepened interiority, a site where they could express themselves,Page 24 → but where, at the same time, discretion is maintained regarding civil society.”32 The individual stood at the center of Masonic initiation rites; the attention of the brothers was directed at the applicant being initiated. For most lodge members, the true secret of Freemasonry was the experience of this ritual, that is, the intensification of one’s own experience as an individual on being admitted to the community of brothers. But didn’t the Masonic cult of secrecy contradict the culture of the Enlightenment, which was apparently focused on the public sphere and rationality? As Norbert Schindler emphasizes, Freemasonry, as “a symbolically disguised secret cult, certainly accorded with many playful dimensions of courtly culture, for example, its fashionable tendency to temporary self-mystification expressed in its passion for dressing up, for the theater, and for masquerade.”33 The innumerable secret societies formed a colorful and diverse world of play and illusion, which both reflected the old order and announced the new one. The spectrum reached from secret political brotherhoods such as the Illuminati up to occultism, from Weishaupt to Cagliostro. It is this mixture of reason and play, of rationality and the search for the exotic, that gives the lodges their fundamentally modern appearance. While it is impossible to examine in detail the colorful and in part contradictory diversity that emerged here, we can identify two general tendencies within the world of the lodges: English Blue Masonry with its more simple rituals and symbols and its three moral levels (Apprentice, Fellow, Master); and beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, Scottish Rite Masonry, originating in France, which had an elaborated system of knightly rank with up to thirty-three degrees and which dressed itself in the garb of a new crusade. It would be simplistic to try to distinguish here between a “bourgeois” and an “aristocratic” variety of Freemasonry. Many Scottish elite high degrees such as “Le Chevalier de l’Orient” or “Le Chevalier de la Rose-Croix” evoked a fashionable aristocratism and mysticism. Other high degrees such as the “Symbolic Master” exaggerated the enlightenment itself into a religion.34 Again, the mixture of aristocratic

and bourgeois practices is remarkable. The internal structure of the lodges combined democratic-republican principles with hierarchical-monarchic ones.35 The democratic ballot for the admission of new lodge members and the election of Masonic “officials” stood in stark contrast to the hierarchical structure of the lodges. Even if the adoption of English Freemasonry in the European ancien rГ©gime transformed it in diverse ways (up to the reversal of its original goals), the cultural practices of the lodges remained tied to Page 25 →the context in which they had originated (at times in ways that were not clear to contemporaries): the political culture and the emerging civil society of England following the Revolution of 1688–89.36 The dizzying diversity and the hilarious playfulness of secret societies in the eighteenth century have often distorted the fact that the lodges were a part of this moral and political tradition.Secrecy and Enlightenment Nevertheless, the history of individual lodges in the eighteenth century was in fact quite varied and could at times assume comical dimensions. For example, the Minerva Lodge, founded in 1741, operated initially according to the simple English rituals. Leipzig’s elite made up the membership of the lodge. Members of the Minerva then established not only the other Masonic lodges in the city but other associations as well, including the elite Harmonie Society in 1776. The Minerva Lodge, with its typical mixture of aristocrats and BГјrger (the latter, admittedly, formed the majority), united the prosaic and practical need for business and social contacts with the diffuse yearning for an otherworldly elitism. In order to maintain their advantage in the competition for prestige with newer lodges and associations, the Minerva Lodge adopted the ostensibly aristocratic and more traditional “strict observance” in 1776.37 As the term suggests, strict observance required unconditional obedience to “secret superiors” and was ostensibly derived from the legendary order of the Knight Templars. According to its founding myth, the Templars retreated to Scotland in 1314, after their last grand master, Jacques de Moley, had been burned at the stake, and continued to work there in secret—in the form of Freemasonry. Beginning in the 1730s, these legends spread throughout France. Here Baron von Hund became familiar with them and then introduced them to the German language area. By the middle of the eighteenth century, “strict observance” had become quite widespread, employing a series of rituals and practices that drew imaginatively upon the traditions of the Templars: The world was divided into provinces, the chapter of knights into their prefectures; cities were given their old names, the members of the orders a nom de guerre and their own uniform—white jackets with a red Templar cross as well as purple jackets and light blue vests, daggers, and feathered hats. The passion for dressing up and for a playful aristocratism and medieval myths accorded with the diffuse yearning for a conservative Christian humanity, one that heralded a “growing affront to ecclesiastical rationalism, popular enlightenment, and the spirit of individualism.”38 Attempts to revive the Templar Order were ended only at the Masonic convention in Page 26 →Wilhelmsbad near Hanau in 1782.39 The Minerva Lodge, however, did not want to give up part of the fanciful rituals and even retained them in a modified form, after it had been presented with the simplified rituals drawn up by Friedrich Ludwig SchrГ¶der, a Hamburg theater director. In both form and content, SchrГ¶der’s rituals marked a return to English Blue Masonry and its liberal humanist message. However, the more socially elite the members of a lodge were, the more likely it was that the lodge would retain traditional rituals, as is evident in the example of the Minerva, which was viewed in Leipzig as an “aristocratic lodge.”40 The other two Leipzig lodges, the Balduin and the Apollo, which were more unambiguously bourgeois, adopted SchrГ¶der’s ritual, as did a majority of German lodges outside of Prussia after 1800.41 Another example, that of the Friedrich zum goldenen Zepter Lodge in Breslau, is even more intricate. In 1823, the lodge’s grand master, Johann Wilhelm Oelsner, a factory owner, writer, and Breslau city councillor, provided an indignant summary during a retrospective on the history of Masonic lodges during the 1780s: “Not infrequently the effectiveness of our lodge has been impeded by enthusiasm and numerous foolish opinions introduced by the spirit of the age and spread to a number of lodges.” He also wrote the following about the lodge’s grand master at the time, Gottlieb Friedrich Hilmer, an adherent of “strict observance”: “Devoted to extreme ideas of occultism and spiritism and to foolish principles, he sought in vain to make his opinions general. As a result, divisions arose within the lodge.”42 Hilmer had joined the Rosicrucians in Paris, an anti-enlightenment secret society similar to “strict observance, ” which had gained political influence after the death of Friedrich II in Prussia in 1786. King Friedrich

Wilhelm II was himself a member of the Rosicrucians; his ministers Woellner, Bischoffswerder, and Count Haugwitz were the principal leaders of the order. In Breslau, the Duke of WГјrttemburg was a leader of the Rosicrucians as well as the Zepter Lodge. Hilmer owed not only his professorship at the MagdalenГ¤um Gymnasium in Breslau but also his position as grand master of the Zepter Lodge to the Duke’s influence. The members of the Zepter were primarily aristocrats and officers. It was only in the late 1780s that members of the BГјrgertum joined the lodge, including Georg Gustav FГјlleborn, a professor of classics at the Elisabeth Gymnasium, who assumed the office of lodge speaker. A student of Kant and Christian Wolff, FГјlleborn had apparently attempted to influence lodge brothers in a “more rational” direction. Thanks to his influence, “pure morality, rather Page 27 →than moneymaking and spiritism” first entered the lodge in the middle of the 1790s. As a result, many of the aristocratic lodge brothers resigned. They apparently regarded FГјlleborn’s calls for self-inspection and the fulfillment of moral duty as presumptuous.Secrecy and Enlightenment There had been similar conflicts in many German lodges beginning in the 1760s. Masonic lodges became “publicist sites in which an initial polemic encounter between proto-conservatism, political liberalism, enlightenment, and ecclesiastical orthodoxy occurred.”43 In 1795, the lodges in Breslau were closed down. The lodge chronicle reported, “The unrest in France namely and the discredited notions of freedom and equality have made Masonic lodges . . . suspicious and created a number of disadvantages for them.”44 Like many other Prussian lodges, the Zepter Lodge reopened on a regular basis only after the turn to the nineteenth century, now under royal patronage and subject to the political supervision of the Zu den drei Weltkugeln Grand Lodge in Berlin. The suspicions regarding secret societies and the attacks on them (which arose with the expectation of revolution and not merely with revolution itself) called attention to the political ambivalence of the cult of secrecy, with its mixing of aristocratic and bourgeois, hierarchical and democratic, mystifying and enlightened ideas and practices. The suspicions extended from the enlightened rebuke that Freemasonry was merely “fashionable foolishness” to counterenlightenment myths of conspiracy. Both of these suspicions testified to a politicization of society, which was reproduced in secret societies with the Rosicrucians and the Illuminati on opposite ends of the political spectrum. The Scottish Rite system, with its high degrees and its tendency to idealize the Middle Ages, was not the only link between enlightenment and romanticism. The ostensible contradiction between secrecy and publicity, between occult illusory worlds and enlightened-rationalist ideas is actually typical for enlightenment societies in Europe in the eighteenth century.45 The cult of secrecy was not only an imitation of courtly culture with its fondness for self-mystification and its play with masks. It also imitated the arcana of absolutist politics and competed at least indirectly with it. Secrecy made possible a space in which the moralpolitical imagination could be unleashed. In these spaces suspended from social reality, a mixed elite was socialized according to a recognizably modern civic ethos of self-discipline, virtue, and Bildung, an ethos that always included a transgression of traditional boundaries.46 Even if the brothers in the lodges pledged their loyalty to the state, they also undermined the old order by “offering a new ethically grounded Page 28 →value system, which necessarily implied a condemnation of the principles of absolutism.”47 Not only lodges’ speeches and discussions but also the cultural practices of the lodges acquired a political significance. Both the appeal of the lodges and their explosive political force were based on the fact that they had created a new space removed from the state, in which political reality was suspended and in which a wild variety of ideas and opinions, passions and interests were circulated and discussed. In the lodges, society could invent and experience itself, could live the fiction of an order free of domination, could live the Enlightenment. At the same time, the lodges also anticipated the limits of this new order of civil society and at least attempted to mitigate the sharpness of those limits. Lessing himself was aware that the idea of a sociability based on the “parity of the purely human,” as he described it in his Masonic Dialogues, contained a utopian surplus that would not merely reconcile the divisions in society but eradicate them completely. He warned, “To remove them [i.e., the divisions in society] completely . . . would at the same time destroy the state together with them.”48 The participants themselves may not have been aware of this “subversive” side of Masonic sociability, but the average lodge brother did understand

that the free sociability of aristocrats and burghers—and thus the transgression of corporative boundaries—was politically explosive. In addition, the lodges’ disregard for disputes between the Catholic and Protestant Churches, the decisive domain of politics up to the eighteenth century, was of enormous significance. Members of Le Secret de trois Rois Lodge, founded in Cologne in 1775, included both Catholic city council men and Protestants, who had yet to be granted civil rights in Cologne at the time.49 By around 1750, the Minerva Lodge in Leipzig began to admit Calvinist merchants as members. This enabled Calvinists to socialize with Leipzig’s city elite long before they were granted civil rights in 1811, even if the University of Leipzig with its strong Lutheran orthodoxy opposed such openness.50 In the Zur Einigkeit Lodge in Frankfurt as well, many of the lodge brothers were Calvinist Г©migrГ©s or Catholic merchants. Freemasonry’s claim to transcend confessional differences thus had a concrete significance for the legal emancipation of this section of the nascent bourgeoisie, which had not yet been integrated politically but had become increasingly powerful economically.51 Secrecy stimulated the imagination, cultivated interest in new forms of knowledge, and established a moral authority that competed with the church and the state. In The Constitutions of Freemasons (1723), Anderson Page 29 →stipulates that Freemasonry can only oblige the brethren “to that Religion in which all Men agree.”52 Even if we reject Carl Schmitt’s glorification of the absolutist state and his Jewish-Masonic conspiracy theory (a modified version of AbbГ© Barruel’s theses), Schmitt did correctly recognize that this distinction between internal faith and external belief, between private and public allowed space for the establishment of modern individual freedom of thought and freedom of conscience in opposition to the absolutist state.53 The fact that Freemasonry itself at times assumed dimensions of a civil religion allowed it to transcend religious differences. The deism endorsed by Freemasons—that of an “Architect of all worlds”—contained at least potentially a precept of tolerance.54 In the moral interior of the lodges, brothers regarded the vision of a virtuous civil society—the inheritance of Freemasonry’s English origins—as superior to the ruling political and ecclesiastical order. “Freedom in secret became the secret of freedom.”55 Masonic lodges were ultimately able to disregard not only differences of confession and corporative status but also those of state citizenship. “In the lodges, a brother ceased to be a political subject (Untertan); he was a man among men.”56 Consequently, Freemasons saw themselves not only as subjects or citizens (StaatsbГјrger), but as cosmopolites (WeltbГјrger). The lodges possessed a supranational communicative network. We should not underestimate the significance of this network in promoting the circulation of enlightened ideas. When traveling, Freemasons could visit lodges in other cities, and they often participated in local sociable circles. Membership in secret societies was a kind of “sociable bill of exchange” that could be redeemed anywhere.57 Lodges often corresponded with each other, exchanged representatives (on the level of grand lodges), and circulated printed material and information. In these transnational entanglements, the feeling that one was a cosmopolite assumed a concrete meaning. Masonic lodges were more cosmopolitan than almost any other social institution of the eighteenth century.58 In an 1890 essay, the sociologist Georg Simmel offered a theoretical explanation for the popularity of Masonic lodges as institutions in the eighteenth century: The social process of differentiation caused a shift in emphasis from the corporative significance of subjects to the cultivation (Bildung) of individuality, and this shift was accompanied by an orientation to ideal units, a “cosmopolitan disposition.” “The more attention is focused on man not as a social being but as an individual, and hence on those qualities that are his purely as a human being, the closer the connection must be that Page 30 →draws him away from the particular social group to all that appertains to human beings, suggesting an ideal unity of mankind.”59 Bildung and sociability as the path to the moral improvement of the individual and thus that of the community and of humanity as a whole—this was the utopian core of both Freemasonry and the European Enlightenment. Yet while Freemasonry’s transgression of traditional social, religious, and political limits was astonishing for the eighteenth century, new limits also emerged in the process. As Lessing noted ironically, the cult of fraternity encompassed essentially only the new aristocratic, bourgeois elite.60 Religious tolerance did not yet apply to the Jewish faith. During the “enlightened” eighteenth century, not a single Jew was admitted to an officially

recognized Masonic lodge in Germany.61 Nevertheless, isolated Jewish Freemasons who did not identify themselves as such were tolerated as “visiting brothers.” We should also bear in mind that the “pure” human beings in Masonic lodges stripped of all corporative, religious, and national affiliation were exclusively men. There were lodges for women in France, the so-called adoption lodges, which were subject to the patronage of male lodge brothers. These lodges were not recognized outside of France and were disbanded after 1789.62 While the refusal to admit Jews led to almost no discussion within the lodges, the exclusion of women from the “brotherhood of men” appeared to require an explanation even in the eighteenth century. Herder’s Adrastea (1803) offered one widespread justification for this exclusion. Like Lessing, Herder was himself a Freemason but was critical of existing lodge practices. In Adrastea, Herder attempted to continue Lessing’s Masonic Dialogues with his own dialogue on the “purpose of Freemasonry as it appears from outside.”63 In addition to the two male figures, Faust and Horst, neither of whom are Freemasons, Herder introduced the figure of Linda into the dialogue, a “Freemason by birth.” Although Linda is enthusiastic about Freemasonry, the secret society is not open to her. In response to Linda’s question as to why she is refused admission, Faust answers that women have never required the distinction between purely human duties and civic duties. “Fortunately you are nothing in civil society; you always require a guardian. In human society, nature has entrusted you with the dearest seeds, with its most beautiful treasures.” In other words, since women possessed neither economic nor legal independence, they had no place in civil society. While men “bear the burdens of civic life for themselves and for you [i.e., for women],” women continue to live “in the paradise of domestic society as the educators of humanity.” Men are compelled Page 31 →to develop in civil society, in public space, whereas women can develop in private, in “purely human” spaces. As a consequence, women do not require a sociability that seeks to overcome the divisions of civil society and that aims at the “purely human.” Linda herself defines the lodge as a “closed society of men, effecting in silence and advising on the welfare of humanity, . . . for which its work must remain to a certain degree a secret and upon which they labor as if it were an infinite plan.”64 The new type of citizen propagated by the lodges was perhaps “the first universal humanist social type.”65 However, the partial undressing, the playful humiliation, and the assistance offered by lodge brothers during Masonic rituals implied a rather different message. These practices reminded the initiate that although he had removed all external signs of his origins, he had brought with him the most important presupposition for his Bildung: his male body.66 It is the male citizen who can and should improve himself, improve civil society, and ultimately improve humanity in general. These distinctions between public and private, between masculine and feminine spaces and gender roles that were so fundamental for civility in the nineteenth century were formulated and enacted in advance in Masonic lodges at a time when these distinctions had not yet been established and were not yet generally accepted. It is only in the early nineteenth century that the civic era of German Freemasonry began in the sense that a particular moral-political discourse became prevalent in Masonic lodges and that the BГјrgertum predominated there. This in itself illustrates the ambivalence in Freemasonry’s own self-conception between universal humanist claims and social exclusivity, between the public sphere and the secret. The disputes that now arose regarding the participation of Jews and women in the “brotherhood of men” indicate the lodges’ changing self-conception as well as their altered significance within civil societies of the nineteenth century. The lodges gradually developed “from moving forces and publicist enclaves of civic public spirit to entities that sought, as the very basis of their existence, to distance and separate themselves from the existing public sphere.”67 The “women’s question,” the “Jewish question,” the question of religious tolerance regarding the “dark powers” (i.e., Catholics), the “social question,” the constitutional question, and the justification of national wars—all of these inevitably became central issues for a sociability that claimed to have established a domain beyond status, religion, and nation, a domain of exclusive humanity.

Page 32 →

Chapter 2 The Society of “Civil” Citizens, 1840–70 The tension between universality and exclusivity, between the emergence of the modern self and the rise of modern society—a tension heralded by Masonic lodges of the eighteenth century—expanded and evolved in the plethora of civic associations that arose in the emerging civil societies of the nineteenth century.1 Theorists of civil society from Lessing to Kant and from Tocqueville to Weber have emphasized the fundamental significance of civic associations for civil society. The “workings of sociability” were supposed to help transcend the particularity of corporative society and promote the moral improvement (Bildung) of the self, thereby securing the moral foundations of the body politic. It is clear that Masonic lodges of the Enlightenment era served as the paragon of this discourse and for the corresponding cultural practices. What significance, however, did the lodges themselves have as social spaces in emerging civil societies during the first half of the nineteenth century? There has been little scholarly work focusing on Masonic lodges in Germany for the period after 1840. German lodges are generally classified as a phenomenon of the eighteenth century. Scholars have tended to accept uncritically the assumption that Masonic lodges declined and became increasingly insignificant over the course of the nineteenth century. For this reason recent studies of civic self-organization in cities that include Masonic lodges have frequently ended with the VormГ¤rz period, erroneously assuming that the lodges were no longer a relevant form of civic association during the second half of the nineteenth century and thus had ceased to be a crystallization point of the local BГјrgertum.2 It should become clear over the course of the chapter that this assumption is incorrect. Masonic lodges did experience a temporary crisis after the Napoleonic Wars, a crisis that was exacerbated by an explosive rise in other forms Page 33 →of sociability, from the elite casino and harmony societies to the popular singing and gymnastics clubs.The Society of “Civil” Citizens Scholars have tended to project both of these phenomena—the decline of Masonic lodges and the rise of other associations—onto the entire nineteenth century, positing a false opposition between them, as if these other associations had replaced Freemasonry. Dieter Hein, for example, is incorrect in his contention that “the participation in a specific intellectual and aesthetic culture,” the “purposeless sociable coming together” in a purely male society is “what was specifically new in these general sociable associations in comparison to Enlightenment culture.”3 On the contrary, it was Freemasons who initially formulated these goals, and their lodges subsequently served as social models. These new associations of the nineteenth century developed in part directly from Masonic lodges: reading societies, music clubs, charitable and educational associations, as well as student orders. The dissemination of these goals within local civil societies and the simultaneous differentiation of the forms and social composition of civic associations appear to have been typical for the period of upheaval after 1800. Significantly, Masonic lodges began to recover in the late 1830s; indeed, the civic era of Freemasonry begins only at this point in time. Sociable clubs, in other words, did not replace Masonic lodges as focal points for the elevated BГјrgertum. Rather, the two coexisted as elite forms of sociability during the nineteenth century. Their memberships overlapped, and already in the VormГ¤rz period they were less concerned with being inclusive in the sense of constituting a universal “classless civil society” than with being exclusive in the sense of establishing a society of “civil” citizens.4 There are two basic reasons why scholars have failed to recognize the significance of Masonic lodges for the nineteenth-century civil society. First, Freemasonry’s emphasis on the cult of secrecy has made it difficult for those outside the lodges to acquire more than a vague understanding of lodge sociability.5 Only with the opening of lodge archives a decade ago have we been able to gain a clearer picture. Second, scholars in the Federal Republic of Germany before 1989 concentrated on the BГјrgertum and civil society primarily in the cities in southwestern Germany: Baden, WГјrttemburg, and the Rhineland. However, the core territory of Freemasonry beginning in the eighteenth century was located not in southwestern Germany, which was predominantly Catholic, but in northern and central Germany, which was Protestant: in Prussia and Saxony as well as in the large trading cities such as Hamburg, Frankfurt, and Leipzig. Page 34 →

The lodges constituted a civic form of sociability typical of the nineteenth century—civic here also in the sense that they recruited almost exclusively from the elevated middle classes (the BГјrgertum). Contemporary observers were well aware of the reasons that BГјrger had appropriated exclusive social spaces such as the lodges. Johann Caspar Bluntschli, an expert in constitutional law and a Freemason, argued that their participation in the sociable circles of municipal culture and in the pleasures of the educated world established a common “social education (Bildung)” and common needs. “They understand each other easily, find themselves together socially, have common character traits, and share common basic views; they also have common interests in culture and politics.”6 Bildung and sociability as the path to moral improvement of the self, of society, and of humanity as whole—this was the universalist core of the BГјrgertum’s own self-image, a self-image of civility that had a socially exclusive side as well. In 1851, Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl expounded on these two apparently contradictory dimensions in his best-selling book The Natural History of the German People, in particular the chapter “Civil Society.” The middle-class burgher, according to Riehl, may indeed be responsible for the fact that “the uniform physiognomy of вЂcultivated society’ (die gebildete Gesellschaft) spread across the entire European continent. But while he may endeavor to bridge over the more extreme distinctions within historic society, the burgher has no desire to dissolve or eliminate them entirely, in the manner of the fourth estate. The middle classes incontestably constitute the dominant force of our time, both moral and material. Our entire era bears a middleclass stamp.” Moreover, he continued, the burgher “has been the most dedicated proponent of universalism in modern social life. Many would simply equate the middle class with modern society; they regard the burgher as the rule and everyone else simply as exceptions, remnants of an older society still clinging by chance to the new.” Riehl argued that even the linguistic usage testifies to the universality of the elevated middle class: the term bГјrgerliche Gesellschaft or “civil society” has been reduced subliminally to the BГјrgertum.7 We should not, however, uncritically accept the BГјrgertum’s claims to universality. It is important, on the one hand, to historicize the rhetoric of “civility” by critically examining the discourse about the ostensibly inexorable rise of the BГјrgertum. At what point in time did contemporaries begin to believe in the triumphant victory and the universality of these values? The vagueness of the German term BГјrger,8 which so confused Page 35 →social historians of the twentieth century, proved in fact to be advantageous for the middle class or BГјrgertum of the nineteenth century. Depending on the political context, the term BГјrger could be used to designate society in general as well as to designate the interests of a particular class within that society. These two uses coincided only for the BГјrgertum.9 It is therefore essential to examine critically the moral-political discourse and the social practices of civility in regard to this double-edged nature. The social and political value of civility lay in its capacity to make distinctions. However, civility also had an intrinsic cultural value in the sense of the general Bildung of individuals and society. This tension between social exclusivity and general humanist claims, between particularity and universalism lies at the heart of civility as a system of moral values and practices.10 Like liberalism, this civil culture was also located “between the desire to proclaim a system of values that was valid for all human beings and the tendency to identify these values only with those people who satisfied particular social and moral claims.”11 In what follows, I will examine the moral-political discourse and the social practices of Masonic lodges in terms of both their inclusive and their exclusive dimensions. What social, religious, and political boundaries were used to constitute Masonic lodges beginning in the VormГ¤rz period? What individuals or groups were located beyond these boundaries? What were the effects of the moral and political claims raised by Freemasons? Before answering these questions by turning in greater detail to the scope and the limits of Masonic “civility” between 1840 and 1870, I will briefly outline the crises and structural changes the lodges experienced between 1780 and 1840.

The Era of Doubt The outstanding social significance that Masonic lodges possessed in the eighteenth century declined initially after the Napoleonic Wars. The lodges had already been in crisis, however, in the years before the French Revolution. The politicization of the Enlightenment had driven secret societies beyond the limits of introspection and a sociability free of domination. As the Illuminati Order, the best-known example, illustrates, secret societies had

become “a site of concealed political opposition, or a symptom of the state’s lack of support or its incapacity for enlightenment.”12 The politicization of Masonic lodges led to their prohibition in many German states, in particular in Catholic southern Germany. The lodges in WГјrttemberg Page 36 →were closed in 1784 and did not open again until 1835. As a consequence of the prohibition of the Illuminati, there were no lodges in the territories of the Electoral Palatine and Electoral Bavaria after 1785. When the Bavarian throne gained control of further territories after 1806 and 1810, the government placed Masonic lodges in Nuremberg and Bayreuth under state supervision and prohibited public servants, teachers, and clergymen from becoming Freemasons. In Hessen-Kassel, the Landgrave Wilhelm IX ordered the dissolution of Masonic lodges in 1794. Only after 1808 did they experienced a revival in the Kingdom of Westphalia under the patronage of the new French rulers.13 With the Restoration of 1813–14, Freemasons in Hessia left the Grand Orient de France and joined the Royal York Grand Lodge in Berlin. However, after receiving anonymous threatening letters in 1824, the new Elector Wilhelm II ordered the renewed dissolution of all Masonic lodges in Hessen-Kassel. A similar set of events had occurred in Baden ten years earlier, and it was only in 1846 that Masonic lodges were permitted to open there again, initially in Mannheim. In Austria, all secret societies were banned in 1801. Except for a brief interlude in 1848, this ban remained officially in effect in the Austrian part of the Habsburg monarchy until its dissolution. In other words, already at an early point in time the regional expansion of Masonic lodges in German-speaking states in the nineteenth century was limited to the imperial borders of 1871.14 The political situation was completely different in Hanover, Saxony, and the Duchies of Thuringia, as well as in the large trading cities of Hamburg, Frankfurt, and Leipzig, where lodges were allowed to develop relatively unimpeded. In Prussia, the Hohenzollerns sought to bind Masonic lodges closely to the state. An edict in 1798 forbade all secret societies with the exception of the three Prussian grand lodges and their daughter lodges, and subordinated these directly to the supervision of the king. The two decrees against secret societies that followed and the Prussian Code reaffirmed this. Between 1790 and 1815, a reform-oriented elite gathered in Masonic lodges in Prussia. During this period, Hardenberg (like many Prussian reformers himself a Freemason) commented that the lodges were “a lever for great things.”15 It is impossible to determine the precise contribution that Freemasons actually made to the reform of the Prussian legal code. There was, however, a conspicuous overlapping of Freemasons and reform-oriented officials in Prussia on the threshold of the nineteenth century.16 Nevertheless, there was a slight decline in Masonic lodges even in Prussia after the Napoleonic Page 37 →Wars. The participation of aristocrats declined, while the middle classes gradually moved into the forefront. After 1815, the participation of military officers—a group that had frequented the lodges during the eighteenth century and up to the Napoleonic Wars—declined, as did that of clergymen, at least those affiliated with orthodox tendencies. Despite the political upheavals, there was an increase in both new lodges and overall lodge membership between 1780 and 1815. After the Napoleonic Wars, however, Masonic lodges stagnated. It was not until the late 1830s that there was a gradual increase in Freemasonry, which then accelerated sharply during the 1860s. While only thirty-two new German lodges were founded between 1820 and 1840, the number almost doubled (to sixty-three) between 1840 and 1860.17 The majority of members belonged to the three grand lodges in Prussia. According to a census at the time, 12,815 Freemasons (of a total of ca. 14,900 Freemasons) belonged to 176 Prussian lodges (of a total of 277 German lodges). Even if this census omitted a whole series of lodges outside of Prussia, Prussian Freemasons continued to be numerically dominant throughout the nineteenth century. There must have been more than 20,000 German Freemasons overall around 1840.18 The increase in the 1840s was then followed by a temporary decline during the revolutionary era, so that overall lodge membership in 1850 was only slightly higher than it had been in 1840. There was another clear increase in membership in the 1860s. Around 1870 there were almost twice as many Freemasons as there had been thirty years earlier. Freemasonry thus experienced cyclical growth, as did other associations of the era. Gymnastics clubs, for example, had an increase in membership during the 1840s, which was followed by a period of stagnation during the Revolution of 1848, then renewed growth in the “reform era” and finally continuous growth up to 1871. Nevertheless, the exclusivity of Masonic lodges—their

aversion to opening to those below them and to a public sphere outside—prevented their membership from equaling those of the popular gymnastics clubs. At the beginning of the 1860s, Masonic lodges had approximately 25,000 members, while gymnastics clubs had approximately 135,000.19 “What gymnastics is for the body, that is what Freemasonry is for the mind”—this slogan from a lodge speech in 1851 illustrates the lodges’ claim to social-moral exclusivity.20 In contrast to gymnastics clubs, the lodges never aimed at the “masses” and seldom appeared in public. “Our alliance should be a selection of superior men with more elevated tendencies. We pour our energy into the unity and pureness of our hearts, rather than into the number of our hands,” one lodge Page 38 →brother warned in 1860, as the number of Freemasons began to increase sharply.21 The temporary decline of Freemasonry during the 1820s and 1830s was caused by the social paralysis following the Congress of Vienna, which had been preceded by a politicization of society. During the so-called Restoration, public opinion about Freemasons was divided into two camps. Freemasonry appeared either as an outmoded game of the eighteenth century, a kind of “club” whose “frivolous pleasures” were concealed by “slogans of humanity,” or as a conspiratorial society that aimed at undermining the existing political and ecclesiastical order.22 “No truly intelligent man,” Heinrich Steffens wrote in 1821, “can be a Freemason today, although some would still like to believe themselves so. The entire affair . . . has sunk to a plaything of lower minds, although we see that there are still a few glowing intellects, apparently abandoned, who would like to remain beside the meaningless magical apparatus and who cannot bring themselves to repudiate as merely empty that which they once believed to be something.” According to Steffens, Freemasonry had deteriorated into a kind of “surrogate of true belief” for “intellectual weaklings.” While they do not, he argued, have “bad intentions, indeed might even have in a very limited sense the best of intentions, they have sunk to a great nullity and will continue to sink.”23 Ernst Moritz Arndt, on the contrary, regarded the lodges not as a “nullity” but as a threat to the political order. He called for their prohibition as “a just punishment for their affectations,” for their claim “that they were better than the people and that they did not have to answer for themselves to the people,” in short, for their “secretiveness.” Arndt’s popular nationalism was irreconcilable with Freemasonry’s secrecy and elitist claims. “The lives of citizens belong entirely to the state in which they live.” For this reason the state should not, according to Arndt, tolerate “something that sets itself apart and engages elsewhere in a secret, ostensibly more amusing and better intellectual game than can be found in that state itself.”24 Finally, Friedrich Schlegel—who had been sympathetic enough with Freemasonry in 1804 to have written a sequel to Lessing’s Ernst und Falk—argued in 1828 that even an “intellectual association of esoteric thought” was still a “church within a church.” In this “era, in which worldly interests and public or secret political intentions are much more prevalent than religious beliefs and opinions . . . , a secret directorate for all internal state movements and alterations would necessarily emerge from this parasitically secret church, which has in fact occurred.”25 Page 39 → In addition, a popular literature about the lodges, which revealed the ostensible secrets of Freemasonry and was often written by former lodge brothers, also influenced public opinion about Masonic lodges.26 At the beginning of the 1840s, even well-known Prussian Freemasons such as Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel described the period as an “era of doubt.” Hippel argued that after the turn of the century many Freemasons began to feel that “the order was moving toward its dissolution, because its most profound essence had become the common property of humanity; because its forms . . . were no longer suited to the times; because the daylight of contemporary ideal and material illumination, which demands publicness everywhere, no longer permitted wisdom behind closed doors, but demanded that what is known there become the daily bread of every man.”27 For the remainder of the nineteenth century, public discussion about Freemasonry continued to revolve around these two poles: the decline of the lodges into a purely convivial sociability and the rejection of the lodges as a conspiracy against both church and state.

Civility as a Social Code In the late 1830s, Masonic lodges recovered from their brief decline, although public criticism did continue about their exclusivity and secrecy, as did calls for their prohibition.28 The public reputation and the internal constitution of Prussian lodges, however, changed dramatically after 1840, the year in which Crown Prince Wilhelm was admitted to Freemasonry in an elaborate ceremony. It was tremendously important for German Freemasons in the nineteenth century that Wilhelm headed Prussian Freemasonry for almost fifty years. There were three grand lodges in Prussia, which assumed the function of mediating between the state and regular Masonic lodges from the turn of the nineteenth century onward. Only these grand lodges were legally authorized to establish Masonic lodges in Prussia. The state controlled the grand lodges, and the grand lodges controlled the regular lodges. Although from an external perspective these three Prussian grand lodges formed a unified camp, they did occasionally feud with one another. Parallel to Wilhelm’s admission, an association of the grand masters from these three Prussian grand lodges was established, which was supposed to coordinate the actions of the grand lodges and to settle their conflicts. This association and the officials of the grand lodges, all of whom Page 40 →resided in Berlin, had intimate connections with the Prussian court and the Prussian bureaucracy. Only a few days after his admission as a Freemason, the crown prince requested that he be sent membership registers and annual reports on a regular basis so that he could keep informed about all occurrences in Prussian lodges. Wilhelm’s admission enhanced the status of Masonic lodges, as the state now ensured the continuance of their legal privileges. This signified a politicization of the lodges “from above” in the conservative-monarchic sense, a development that an incipient liberal politicization “from below” sought to forestall.29 In Prussia, where Masonic lodges were granted legal privileges by the state, the grand lodges were predominantly conservative. In Saxony and Bavaria, on the contrary, where the state merely tolerated them, grand lodges were liberal. Beginning in the 1840s, Masonic lodges were split according to the emerging political camps within society as a whole. Public opinion about the lodges was divided into a conservative religious critique and a liberal critique, and this division was reproduced in a more moderate form within the lodges themselves. “Christian conservative” and “liberal humanitarian” lodges—as contemporaries beginning in the late 1830s called them—argued about the meaning of Freemasonry in the newly established internal lodge journals. In these debates, Christian conservatives spoke of the Masonic order (Freimaurerorden), while liberal humanitarians spoke of the Masonic brotherhood (Freimaurerbund). Was Freemasonry an order with romantic, Christianinfluenced rituals, with hierarchies and a pseudoaristocratism, or was it a humanist brotherhood for progress and enlightenment? The politicization of associational life in the first half of the nineteenth century continued within the ostensibly apolitical lodges. The conflict centered on several issues: the significance of Christianity for Freemasonry, the “mysticism” of the Scottish Rites, and the refusal to admit Jews. Before turning to the contours of this conflict in more detail, let us examine briefly the social composition of the lodges in the 1840s. The examples of Breslau and Leipzig illustrate the significance that Masonic lodges had in local societies of the time. Only in this local context can we understand the political interconnections between civility and sociability. Beginning in the VormГ¤rz period, Freemasonry flourished primarily not in the grand lodges in Berlin, which included only a small group of Freemasons connected to courtly society and government officials, but in the lodges of the local societies both inside and outside of Prussia. These municipal Masonic lodges not only served as a model for civic Page 41 →associations in the early nineteenth century but were also significant (as were such associations) in creating a space for different sections of the old and the new BГјrgertum to engage in a purposeless sociability. Existing networks were reaffirmed and new contacts were established; like other associations of the era, Masonic lodges were sites of local selfgovernment. The lodges did not, however, openly engage in party politics. That would have contradicted their own self-image as representing the general interests of the community. During the VormГ¤rz period, Freemasons were primarily adherents of a moderate liberalism, of a “constitutional monarchism,” the intellectual grounds of which oscillated diffusely between reason and religiosity. Both the far Left and the far Right criticized this position.

A radical-democratic pamphlet entitled “The Masonic Order Presented in Its Present Nothingness” argued in 1847, “The Masonic order is nothing more than a relic, whose mystery no longer impresses anyone. It is about to take the step from the sublime into the ridiculous” and, as it had in England and France, to “degenerate” into a purely sociable association. The pamphlet continued that the Masonic lodge is “an institution contrary to our era, an institution far removed from its own claims of promoting humanity; it is, rather, opposed to intellectual progress.”30 This critique was directed primarily at Prussian Freemasons. Freemasonry’s exclusion of Jews and its vague religiosity, its cult of secrecy and its “medieval” rituals, its metapolitical claims and its ties to the state—these, according to the left wing of the liberal camp, were the causes of the lodges’ “backwardness,” even if “considered numerically, the Masonic order is currently in full bloom.”31 A year earlier, the conservative Christian yearbook Janus had argued that lodges must reform themselves in order to keep up with the times. The argument here, however, was precisely the opposite of that made by radical democrats. According to Janus, it was the lodges’ moderate rationalism, humanism, and liberalism that were responsible for their decline. “Freemasonry must either forgo its influence on life and ossify, or it must rejuvenate itself in a Christian sense within a Christian state, one that does not merely call itself a Christian state but actually is one.”32 The yearbook continued, “Is it humane to admit Jews for humanitarian reasons and thereby make impossible the admission of preachers of the Bible?” Conservatives, too, thought time was on their side and “trusted that the new spirit of the century would either retain the lodges but remove the Enlightenment from them” or that it would “gradually let them die out and sweep church and Page 42 →school clean of Masonic Christianity, which is still present to a great degree.”33 However, the Janus yearbook continued, even if the lodges were a “legacy of the previous century,” they still possessed “a kind of sociable power.” “It cannot be denied that everywhere in those cities where there are lodges . . . their members are drawn from the wealthiest and socially most respectable people. There are now various closed male societies and family societies; among the male societies, the lodges continue to be at the top. This serves as a stimulant to seek admission. Often the lodges are the only way for someone to enter into sociable contact with others. Not infrequently a homo novus who has been fortunate enough to be admitted to a lodge finds further means for worldly progress through acquaintances and recommendations.” While Freemasons claimed freedom and equality to be their fundamental ideals, the yearbook argued that they applied these only to lodge brothers. “They want to claim that differences in status have been abolished in their assemblies, that they regard themselves only as brothers, but they recognize correctly that these differences are valid everywhere in life and they continue to observe them most carefully.” For Freemasons “themselves do not believe the good-natured enthusiastic words of their brothers that their fraternal brotherhood will ultimately encompass all of humanity (as is well known, the fees that must be paid upon admission are prohibitively high).”34 The examples of Breslau and Leipzig illustrate the “sociable power” that the lodges actually possessed in local societies. While Breslau’s lodges provide a nuanced example of the different varieties of the Prussian, Christian conservative tendency within Freemasonry, Leipzig’s lodges offer a nuanced example of the liberal humanitarian tendency. Breslau was the second largest administrative, business, and trading city in Prussia after Berlin. Leipzig was one of the most important trade-fair cities in central Europe, with regional and supraregional connections, and it was also an important metropolis for publishing and newspapers (the most important Masonic journals and pamphlets were produced here). Since the eighteenth century, Masonic lodges had been extremely important in Leipzig’s municipal society. During the VormГ¤rz period, the three lodges in Leipzig had been given nicknames by the public in accordance with their presumed memberships: the Apollo was called the “democrats’ lodge,” the Balduin zur Linde “the schoolmasters’ lodge,” and the Minerva zu den drei Palmen “the aristocrats’ lodge.”35 Given the actual social composition of Leipzig lodges in 1840, these nicknames were in a Page 43 →sense justified. The Minerva was the most conservative and socially exclusive lodge in the city. Only in this sense, however, was it aristocratic. While it did have twice as many aristocrats as the other two lodges in Leipzig, the sum total—eleven members—was only a tiny percentage (3.3 percent) of the entire membership of the

Minerva Lodge.36 This is hardly surprising. In contrast to Breslau, there were not many aristocrats, officers, or court and state officials in Leipzig during the VormГ¤rz period. More than 80 percent of the Minerva Lodge’s membership was drawn from the elevated BГјrgertum, a figure that is significantly higher than in the other two Leipzig lodges (ca. 70 percent). In all three lodges, the bulk of the membership came almost equally from the educated BГјrgertum (primarily professors, headmasters, Gymnasium teachers, pastors, architects, physicians, and lawyers) and the economic bourgeiosie (in particular merchants and entrepreneurs), although the latter was somewhat “overrepresented” in the Minerva Lodge. Scholars have yet to recognize the extent to which Masonic lodges functioned in the nineteenth century as a form of sociability for wealthy merchants and entrepreneurs with transregional connections. The lodges in Breslau and Leipzig had many “foreign” members, who normally visited the lodges of other cities but who also sought out their old lodges for several days in the year, usually during trade fairs. This trend, which began at the end of the eighteenth century as a growing number of merchants joined the lodges, continued on a larger scale beginning in the 1840s. This informal network of contacts, however, was not all that Masonic lodges offered merchants and entrepreneurs. Knowledge of the secret passwords, symbols, and rituals of the lodges also indicated their participation in an elite society and functioned as a kind of badge of social honor and creditworthiness. As soon as a member could no longer pay the high lodge fees or had lost his “entrepreneurial” honor through social deception or bankruptcy, the lodges inevitably expelled him in an elaborate “trial by honorary council.”37 However, this was not necessary in most cases, since the person in question usually forestalled expulsion by resigning voluntarily. Voluntary resignation at least left open the possibility of applying again at a later point in time, whereas expulsion was irreversible and extended to Masonic lodges in other cities as well. If we consider craftsmen to be self-employed—an assumption that appears unclear in light of vocational designations but that is confirmed through random samples—approximately 20 percent of members at the Apollo and Balduin Lodges belonged to the old middle class, whereas only Page 44 →about 14 percent of members at the Minerva Lodge did. The symbolic actions of the lodges did imitate the rituals and ceremonies of craftsmen’s guilds, and craftsmen in Leipzig did constitute the core of the local BГјrgertum in numerical terms during the VormГ¤rz period. However, comparatively few craftsmen were members of Masonic lodges, a disparity that Freemasons themselves observed with concern.38 The old middle class in Masonic lodges was made up of self-employed master craftsmen, a number of retail traders, most of who owned their own businesses, and many booksellers, particularly in Leipzig. While the boundary below was drawn according to the criteria of Bildung and social and economic independence (many of these master craftsmen were among the richest men in the city), the boundary above to the ruling elite was more porous. The particular appeal of Masonic lodges appeared to lie in their ability to mediate contacts above, in particular for midlevel officials and teachers. There were more teachers in the Balduin and Apollo Lodges than in the “aristocratic” Minerva Lodge. The lowest social groups in Masonic lodges during the 1840s were self-employed master craftsmen, BГјrgerschullehrer (grammar-school teachers), musicians (in Leipzig, part of the famous Gewandhausorchester that traditionally belonged to the lodges), lower church employees, and subordinate officials.39 The situation was similar in Breslau, although the percentage of lower-middle-class members was somewhat higher there. In Breslau as well, there was a hierarchy among the lodges. The most exclusive lodge was Friedrich zum goldenen Zepter, which, like the Minerva Lodge in Leipzig, drew more than 80 percent of its members from the elevated BГјrgertum. It was above all wealthy merchants, entrepreneurs, and self-employed men who dominated this lodge. The percentage of aristocrats was highest in the Zepter Lodge (9.2 percent). The percentage of aristocrats in Breslau as a whole was significantly higher than in Leipzig. In 1840, almost one in every ten members of the Zepter Lodge was an aristocratic officer. Although the percentage of military officers in Prussian lodges had been considerably higher around 1800, the Hohenzollerns’ protection of the lodges ensured that they remained attractive for the Prussian military long into the nineteenth century. In contrast to this, a set of statistics from 1847 indicates that in fourteen (of a total of fifteen) lodges in Saxony with a total of 2,000 members there were only eight active officers (most of whom were elder) and nine judge-advocates, military physicians, musicians, and accounting officials—a very small number in comparison with Prussia.40 Page 45 →

Another significant difference between Breslau and Leipzig was the participation of senior and midlevel civil servants in Masonic lodges. In Breslau, 28 percent of lodge members were civil servants, a figure that was typical for Prussian lodges but almost three times higher than in Leipzig. The fundamentally conservative nature of Breslau lodges was due to this comparatively high percentage of aristocrats, officers, and civil servants during the 1840s. In addition, in contrast to the more independent lodges in Leipzig, lodges in Breslau were subject to the supervision of the three grand lodges in Berlin. The Vereinigte Lodge in Breslau was attached to the GroГџe Landesloge, the most conservative grand lodge in Berlin. The Vereinigte Lodge had been established in 1844 from the three oldest Masonic lodges in Breslau, the Zu den drei Todtengerippen, the Zur SГ¤ule, and the Zur Glocke Lodges. The Friedrich zum goldenen Zepter Lodge was subject to the Zu den drei Weltkugeln Grand Lodge. The Horus Lodge, founded in 1813, was subject to the Prussian Royal York Grand Lodge. The Royal York formed the moderate liberal wing of Prussian Freemasonry. In Breslau, in other words, a Freemason could select a lodge in accordance with his own general politics. The high degrees, a relic of the eighteenth century that Prussian Freemasons insisted on retaining, distinguished Prussian lodges from other German lodges. In the Prussian lodge system, the three degrees of the Blue lodges were supplemented with as many as thirty-three Scottish Rites, each of which had its own ceremonies and rituals.41 This created a kind of a lodge within the lodge with greater prestige and its own rituals. Any member who had attained the first three degrees could in principle be admitted to the high degrees. The ascent through these various degrees was supposed to proceed according to merit, but in actuality it functioned according to the principle of seniority. Whoever had been a member long enough and had not acted improperly was eligible for promotion to the next level. If we take into account that the average age of members in Scottish Rite lodges was somewhat higher (because of the seniority principle) than those in Blue lodges, the social differences between these two kinds of Masonic lodges were only minor. The significant difference lay in their respective political orientations and in the Scottish Rite lodges’ aristocratic-mystifying cult. Scottish Rite lodges were more conservative and more traditional. The conservative Breslau lodges functioned as a kind of refuge for the older civility, that “canon of values of the paterfamilias, in which neohumanistic ideas and classical ideals have been fused.”42 These lodges tended, on the whole, to retain traditional rituals and rules of behavior. Page 46 → This led to a certain stolidity and monotony in Breslau lodge life. In 1844, for example, there was an objection to the promotion of a brother at the Zepter Lodge because he had said to other brothers that “he had not found what he was seeking in the [Masonic] Order, that it was all merely ceremonial bustle calculated to illusions.” In addition, he was accused of having fallen asleep during a ritual lodge meeting and of having said—after the person sitting next to him had woken him—that he should have let him continue sleeping.43 In Leipzig, lodge sociability appears to have been much more lively and less traditional. However, at the end of the 1840s, relations in Breslau changed as well. It is important to emphasize that, in social terms, lodge leaders in Breslau and Leipzig did not differ essentially from lodge members as a whole. In contrast to gymnastics clubs and choral clubs, where an educated elite led a much younger, lower-middle-class membership, there was little social hierarchy in Masonic lodges. As we might expect, the educated elite and senior civil servants were lodge officials somewhat more often than members of the economic bourgeoisie. Nevertheless, contrary to the widespread clichГ©, many members of the economic bourgeoisie also served as lodge officials. The lodges were supposed to be sites where Masons acquired Bildung and where they demonstrated they had acquired it, for example, by serving as an official lodge speaker. As one lodge speaker remarked in 1859, it is only natural that “no man can attain even only the lowest degree in Freemasonry without having achieved a certain level of general Bildung.”44 In addition, the percentage of lodge officials from the older middle class was only slightly lower than the percentage of overall lodge members from that class (ca. 23 percent). In terms of age, Freemasons also constituted an astonishingly homogeneous group. A man could seek admission to the lodges on his twenty-fifth birthday. The sons of Freemasons—so-called Luftons—could apply on their twentieth birthday. However, applicants usually waited until they were in their early thirties. In 1840, the average age of lodge brothers in Breslau and Leipzig was forty-four. More than 80 percent of lodge members were older

than thirty and younger than sixty and were thus part of that age group within the BГјrgertum that had the highest income. As a comparison, in 1864, 84 percent of the 105,676 members of German gymnastics clubs were less than thirty years of age, and 33 percent were less than twenty.45 Only men who were established in professional life were admitted to Masonic lodges. In applying for admission, applicants often mentioned Page 47 →that they had postponed their application until they had been able to establish a bourgeois lifestyle. Conditions for admission included material and “intellectual” independence, property, and Bildung. Having a lodge certificate also seemed to function as a document demonstrating one had “made it.” As a result, there was, in contrast to other associations, little fluctuation of membership. The oath of loyalty to the Freemasons, like the oath of marriage, was something that was supposed to be honored for life. This was not simply an empty phrase for many Freemasons. Even if some of them visited their lodges only very infrequently, as a rule they remained Masons for their entire lives. The example of the Clarus family in Leipzig illuminates the specific milieu and the social and familial interconnections typical of Masonic lodges.46 Johann Christian August Clarus was one of the most famous physicians in Leipzig in the first half of the nineteenth century. His uncle Hebenstreit, director of the Clinical Institute at the University of Leipzig and himself a member of the Minerva Lodge, helped Clarus to become a Freemason. In 1800, Clarus was admitted to the Minerva Lodge and began working in Hebenstreit’s institute. He later succeeded his uncle as institute director and was appointed rector of the University of Leipzig in 1839. In the Minerva Lodge, Clarus developed a close friendship with Siegfried August Mahlmann and was also Mahlmann’s physician. Sociable and professional spheres, in other words, complemented each other. Mahlmann, at the time a very popular writer and the composer of many well-known Masonic songs, was grand master of the Minerva Lodge from 1813 until his death in 1826. In 1822, in the preface to his book of Masonic songs, Mahlmann wrote that “the most beautiful hours of his life as a man had been spent” in the lodge.47 Clarus was himself an enthusiastic Freemason and held numerous positions at the lodge before he finally was elected Ehren-Obermeister (honorary overseer) in 1841. His only daughter later married Eduard Stephani, the mayor of Leipzig, a representative of the National-Liberal Party in the Reichstag, and a member of the Minerva Lodge. Johann Clarus had three sons, one of whom died at a very young age. Julius and Hermann Clarus, the other two sons, followed in their father’s footsteps. Both went on to become famous physicians and both became Freemasons in 1851. The father himself carried out the admission ritual and gave the welcoming address. The brothers were active lodge members and were popular speakers at the Minerva Lodge. Hermann Clarus, who together with Stephani, Karl Biedermann, Gustav Freytag, and others Page 48 →belonged to Leipzig’s liberal literary circle during the 1840s, fought against the insurgents as a captain of the communal guard in 1848. After his admission to the Minerva Lodge in 1851, he immersed himself completely in lodge work, a flight to semipublic sociability typical of many liberals after 1850. His wife had two daughters before giving birth to a son, Albrecht, in 1851. Only at the age of twenty-seven, after having established himself as a physician in Leipzig, did Albrecht Clarus finally join the Minerva Lodge, and then not without hesitation. His father had died a few years earlier, but his father’s friends were there to greet him as a “brother.” There were similar “Masonic dynasties” in other lodges. If a son wanted to become a Freemason, he usually applied to his father’s lodge and was usually admitted there. Over the course of the nineteenth century, familial involvement increased rather than decreased, even if sons did not always share their fathers’ unreserved enthusiasm for the lodge world, an issue that will be examined later in detail.48 Masonic lodges were involved in all domains of their members’ lives. Occasionally, a Freemason would name his lodge as a godparent when he had a son. Few Freemasons, however, went so far as Friedrich Meissner, who named his son after the Apollo Lodge.49 Freemasons also celebrated marriages and anniversaries in the lodges, even if lodge membership was not always the guarantee of marital bliss that Masonic literature so frequently claimed.50 Finally, lodges gave their deceased members public funerals and provided financial support for surviving dependents through widow and orphan insurance funds. For many male members of the BГјrgertum, in other words, Masonic lodges were more than merely a supplement to the domestic-familial sphere of women and children; they formed their own masculine world, which employed the language of familial relations in more than a merely metaphorical

sense. Masonic lodges thus functioned as a form of all-embracing sociability. They unified very different groups within the BГјrgertum, from elevated urban elites of the economic and educated BГјrgertum to midlevel officials and employees as well as self-employed craftsmen and retailers.51 Whoever wanted to be a part of respectable local civil society sought to become a Freemason. Bildung, property, and independence marked the closely guarded boundary below. The boundary above, however, was porous. Depending on the social structure of a particular city, the new local BГјrgertum mixed with officials, aristocrats, and officers in the lodges, just as in the eighteenth century Prussian lodges in particular had functioned as an institution providing social Page 49 →mediation between city and state. There were, however, also local differences. In the smaller cities east of the Elbe, a small class of dignitaries traditionally made up the lodge membership. After 1848–49, aristocrats and military officers gradually withdrew from the lodges, and in their place members of the economic bourgeoisie joined.52 The situation was similar in Mannheim, where by the mid-nineteenth century no officers or government officials were Freemasons. Lodge membership in Mannheim was composed almost exclusively of merchants and entrepreneurs.53 In Wiesbaden, where Masonic lodges had been closed down at the end of the eighteenth century, a new lodge was established only in the 1850s, one that—in contrast to the local casino societies and “like no other association in Wiesbaden in the nineteenth century”—represented a cross section of the city’s elevated, liberally oriented BГјrgertum.54 In Wetzlar, a Masonic lodge was reopened in 1843; at the beginning of the 1860s, membership to this lodge was composed of a cross section of the elevated BГјrgertum. A significant number of lodge brothers were active in the new and expanding branches of the economy.55 In Dortmund, on the contrary, senior government officials made up approximately half of the lodge members in the 1850s, despite the fact that these officials were only a tiny percentage of the city’s middle class.56 As mentioned earlier, the percentage of aristocrats, senior government officials, and military officers was comparatively high in Breslau as well. Nevertheless, in comparison with the eighteenth century, the following generalization can be made: While aristocrats and senior government officials continued to participate in Masonic lodges until the middle of the nineteenth century, they no longer dominated them, particularly after 1848–49. In terms of their social composition and social significance, Masonic lodges can therefore hardly be distinguished from other exclusive civic associations. In these associations as well, the core membership was composed of wealthy merchants, factory owners, and bankers, the new professions of the educated BГјrgertum, and, in varying degrees regionally, of representatives of the ruling elite from the military and state bureaucracy, and not craftsmen and petty retailers, who formed the core of the traditional StadtbГјrgertum. Masonic lodges, however, were more inclusive than many associations, such as the Zwinger Society in Breslau or the Harmonie Society in Leipzig (even if the core members of these associations were also Freemasons), but were more exclusive than gymnastics and choral clubs, which consisted almost exclusively of young craftsmen. The lodges, in contrast, were able to attract the “new” BГјrgertum as well as Page 50 →parts of the “old” StadtbГјrgertum, if only to a lesser degree. Thus, the sociable intercourse within the lodges at least approximated the vision of a “classless civil society” that explicitly included the old middle class—admittedly, “classless” only in the sense that the different partial groups of the BГјrgertum met in the lodges. The concrete social practices of Masonic lodges—the exclusion of the lower classes, women, and Jews—made clear the limitations of this vision of civil society. Being a Freemason thus served as a kind of entrance ticket into the established circles of local society and politics. Conversely, being denied admission to a lodge could be equivalent to social ostracism. This is illustrated by the following example. In December 1856, Carl Reclam, age thirty-five, applied for admission to the Apollo Lodge. His application included the standard reasons for applying: “Even if the various dimensions of my professional life—divided between practical medicine, university teaching, writing, and research—satisfy the requirements of my understanding, and even if my marriage, which has provided seven years of unsullied domestic bliss, accords with the desires of my heart, over the course of the years I have repeatedly felt a desire for an exchange of thoughts, convictions, and opinions with other men. The goal of self-education, which every upright and reasonable (in my opinion, the terms are identical) man sets for himself, can only be attained in mutual

acquisition. In public business life, material interests predominate to such an extent that an exchange in this direction is impossible. My various attempts to fill this gap in sociable intercourse by other means have failed. In the circle, in which I now desire to be admitted, I hope to find the desired stimulation for a manly school with likeminded men.”57 It would be difficult to imagine a better formulation of the goals of Freemasonry, and there were no formal obstacles to the admission of this successful physician, Privatdozent at the University of Leipzig, and the wellknown author of popular scientific literature on hygiene. Surprisingly, however, the secret ballot on Reclam’s applications held at the beginning of January 1857 resulted in twenty-nine white balls and seventeen black ones. In other words, seventeen lodge brothers at the Apollo were opposed to his admission (without providing a concrete reason for this). A single black ball would have sufficed for a rejection. Reclam first learned of the ballot from a colleague, who was not a member of the lodge and who told him during a chance encounter on the street in Leipzig “that the whole city already knows about the setback.”58 Christian Hermann HГ¶ck, a colleague and friend of Reclam’s from Page 51 →the university who had sponsored him at the lodge, subsequently resigned from the Apollo. One did not simply apply to become a Freemason; one had to be approached and recommended. If an application was refused, the social stigma also extended to friends and sponsors, who in many cases subsequently submitted complaints or even resigned from their lodges. In his letter of resignation, HГ¶ck referred in detail to the “frivolous campaign” against Reclam.59 There were said to be reservations about Reclam’s popular medical writings among professors at the University of Leipzig, several of whom were lodge members. Reclam’s application was not rejected because his Bildung was in some way deficient, HГ¶ck argued, but rather because of his ostensibly flawed character. In Leipzig’s “better circles,” Reclam was regarded as a radical democrat. During the previous city council elections, he had been accused of moral deficiencies, and the lodge brothers had not forgotten this. Carl Reclam’s dispute with his brother, the well-known publisher Anton Philipp Reclam, also spoke against his character. Years earlier, Carl Reclam had sought admission to the Minerva Lodge, which his brother, himself a member of the Minerva, had prevented in advance. Not the brother, but the son of the publisher, Hans Heinrich Reclam, was admitted to the Minerva Lodge in 1860. The secret elections functioned as a kind of social filter. Whoever got through could then use his lodge certificate as proof of his moral and social credentials for a variety of purposes. The fact that lodge membership facilitated social contacts was an open secret. When asked in 1860 if he would recommend joining a Masonic lodge, Karl Rosenkranz, the Right Hegelian, offered the following response: “I myself have often wanted to become a Freemason. I regard the lodges as one of the most pleasant and best social institutions. I believe that the moral discipline works favorably for those with a certain degree of education (Bildung).” But he did not, Rosenkranz wrote, approve of the lodge’s secrecy and symbolic play. His practical advice was the following: “Since you are now probably past the years in your business [life], in which you could have curried personal favor and assistance through the Masonic [!] handshake during your travels—which is the primary purpose for traveling wine-salesmen and rumor-mongers of all kinds—I doubt that you would find the lodges particularly satisfying.”60 To gain advantages in business was only one of many motives. We find different ones in those admission applications that have survived in their entirety for several lodges. Like Carl Reclam, merchants and entrepreneurs, physicians and lawyers expressed in their applications the desire to Page 52 →overcome the narrowing effects of professional life. In the lodge, the brothers could leave behind for several hours the tensions of an emerging civil society oriented around performance and competition. As Christoph Adolph Wendler, the grand master of the Minerva Lodge, emphasized in his celebratory speech on the lodge’s hundred-year anniversary in 1841, the symbolic cult of fraternity gradually enabled the “eradication of all distinctions of status as well as political and ecclesiastical differences of opinion.” “Freed from the bonds of profane conventions, stripped of every embellishment not touching the purely human, descended from the higher or lower levels of civil society and integrated into a new order, we feel ourselves returned to the purely human, and every distinction of the three degrees, which continue to exist at least symbolically in the lodges, is equalized through the law of fraternity.”61 As in the eighteenth century, the lodges provided a second, playful world of virtue and

sociability, which was supposed to be located beyond emerging market society and yet at the same time was one of that society’s presuppositions: As a space where male citizens could develop themselves, present speeches, poems, or musical pieces and thereby investigate those civilizing inclinations that did not receive enough attention in their everyday lives. This is what Rosenkranz meant when he alluded to Freemasons’ educated conceit. However, many members of the educated BГјrgertum were disturbed by the fact that an increasing number of merchants and factory owners joined Masonic lodges. An anonymous pamphlet written by a “statesman and former lodge official” from Saxony in 1854 claimed, “As a rule, these mercantile, material people lack the attitude, time, and intellectual ability to prepare themselves properly for their role in the lodge world. With great effort and embarrassment, they recite the most quotidian things; they often slip up and become confused, ruin the entire ritual, talk complete nonsense at times or speak, as I was forced to listen too many times during my investigative journey, in a German in which the accusative and the dative forms do not agree and which is a terrible thing for a man of Bildung to listen to.” They force “their unfortunate audience to listen to them for hours at a time, while they ride their hobbyhorses of historical or statistical obsession or affect great dignity and throw about moral phrases.”62 This “scolding of Philistines” was an essential dimension of the BГјrgertum’s self-understanding at the time. It was directed not only at the “mania for associations” (which could be found in other exclusive forms of sociability in the 1840s and 1850s as well) but also at a gradual change in the BГјrgertum’s own self-understanding, which occurred as merchants and entrepreneurs Page 53 →became increasingly important in the process of industrialization and which ostensibly posed a threat to morality and Bildung. Nevertheless, Masonic lodges offered a welcome connection between the market and Bildung, politics and sociability. Of the sixty city councilmen in Leipzig in 1840, no less than twenty-seven were members of a Masonic lodge in the city.63 Many of them were well-known lodge members such as Friedrich Ludwig Meissner, grand master of Apollo Lodge, or Friedrich Gottlieb BГ¤rwinkel, the deputy director of the city assembly and treasurer of the Minerva Lodge. Despite the comparatively high percentage of aristocrats, officers, and government officials in Breslau lodges, 14 of the 102 city councilmen in Breslau in 1839 were members of Masonic lodges in the city.64 Masonic charity funds also demonstrate the dual significance of the lodge membership. On the one hand, the lodges worked for the common good, creating important communal charitable institutions, which also gave lodge members a certain reputation in municipal society. On the other hand, however, lodges also possessed their own widow and orphan insurance funds, which produced—during a period in which state and communal welfare was scant—very practical guarantees and ties within the lodges themselves. Thus, the lodges connected different spheres of civic life in an informal way and also maintained diverse ties within municipal society. In addition, Freemasons worked behind the scenes in establishing a series of municipal institutions and civic associations.65 In short, during the VormГ¤rz period Masonic lodges were an important part of the social fabric of civil society. This tendency became more pronounced over the course of the nineteenth century. However, given the various social barriers erected by the lodges and other civic associations, the rhetoric of universality lacked credibility, and this was sharply criticized in public.66 Masonic lodges, which according to their own self-image were supposed to transcend all boundaries of status, religion, and politics, continued to mark these boundaries very openly. The more civil society was realized in the cities, the more visible the tensions within that society became, as was evident in everyday political and social life as well as in the expectations of its citizens. “Civility” (BГјrgerlichkeit), in the political as well as in the cultural sense, became a social code for the propertied classes, particularly during the second half of the nineteenth century; and Freemasonry, in the eyes of its political opponents, was increasingly regarded merely as “the International of the bourgeoisie.”67 This social and political critique, which sought to identify the “bourgeoisie” with the “lodges,” developed in the second half of the nineteenth Page 54 →century.68 The conflicts, however, were already evident in the VormГ¤rz period. A lodge speech in 1847 offered a dismal prognosis: “However, darker than anything else, there is a cloud floating in the distance threatening serious havoc.” “It is the growing, gaping disparity between the workers and the masters, and the drastically increasing number of people who live from hand to mouth only for the present moment and who have nothing to lose. An element of human society develops with

these people that appears to be extremely dangerous.” Freemasons hoped that the early liberal ideal of a sociability that leveled differences in status and produced a “classless civil society” would in the future avert the dangers of poverty and the conflicts of the emerging class society. “We must only ensure that every community becomes a lodge. Then every danger will disappear and all poverty will be abolished.”69 However illusory this harmonious and utopian image of society might have been, it is nevertheless essential for understanding the political actions of many liberal Bürger, particularly those in Masonic lodges.

The Extent and Limits of Religious Tolerance While the exclusion of the lower classes and women from Masonic lodges appeared self-evident to most Freemasons, the overcoming of confessional boundaries was one of their explicit goals. In light of the religious and political conflicts of the 1840s, Freemasons regarded the lodges as an “asylum in the turmoil of the era.”70 Nevertheless, contrary to what their opponents claimed, Masonic lodges were not secular sites cleansed of all religion, just as the general tendency toward the liberalization of religion in the 1840s did not signify a rejection of religion. On the contrary, the decline in church attendance, to which the popularity of the lodges contributed at least indirectly, unleashed a growing emotional and introspective religiosity in individuals. In addition to Freemasons, the Protestant Lichtfreunde (Friends of Light) and the so-called German-Catholics were also a part of this development.71 The religiosity of Freemasons—the “sole friends of humanity”—had a Protestant slant and was opposed “to the conceit of religious infallibility and the selfishness of ignorant swindlers of freedom,” as well as to religious orthodoxy and political radicalism.72 The lodge brothers believed that the guarantee for progress in both civil society and Freemasonry lay in “the educated BГјrgertum of our German cities,” which had only turned to Page 55 →the lodges over the past fifty years. “Like an ice floe upon the tip of an iceberg, all the zealous strivings of obscurantists break upon the healthy thinking of principled BГјrger,” one lodge speaker stated confidently in 1847.73 This peculiar mixture of reason and religiosity ensured that both the orthodox Lutheran Church and the Catholic Church were bitter enemies of the lodges. However, it also made Freemasonry appealing to religious dissenters. In 1845, the Masonic journal Latomia argued that the “German-Catholic Church” had developed “mostly and most rapidly in those cities where there are lodges, and it is possible, indeed even probable that brothers were active in this development and employed the principles of our alliance here.”74 In April 1847, a Protestant clergyman, a German-Catholic priest, and a cantor from the Free Congregations were ceremoniously admitted at the same time as members of the Apollo Lodge in Leipzig.75 There were also Catholic Freemasons until the middle of the nineteenth century. In 1809–10, for example, fourteen Catholic clergymen were members of the Zu den drei Weltkugeln Grand Lodge.76 The Catholic Church was not strictly anti-Masonic everywhere. For example, Wilhelm von Haw, the liberal mayor, chief administrator, and lodge grand master in the Catholic city of Trier, was permitted a Catholic funeral after his death in 1862. In the Silesian city of Glogau two years earlier, a Catholic clergyman had in contrast refused to allow a Freemason to receive communion and the sacrament before the latter submitted a written resignation to his lodge. “This man of honor,” the journal Latomia recounted, “could not bring himself to make such a declaration and thus passed away without having received the blessing from the Church he so desired.” In the end, the Church refused consecration as well. “The entire case has created much bad blood here, for no one believed it possible that such a thing could happen in enlightened Germany 1,860 years after the birth of Christ.”77 Until the mid-1860s, the Catholic Church seems to have acted more tolerantly in the Rhineland than in Silesia, where it engaged in fierce polemics against Masonic lodges, for example, in the Schlesische Volks-zeitung. While individual Catholic priests had been members of the Friedrich zum goldenen Zepter Lodge until 1827,78 it was almost impossible for devout Catholics to visit Masonic lodges in Breslau during the second half of the nineteenth century. In contrast to this, in 1862, seventeen Catholic men were members of Masonic lodges in Trier.79 Of the 111 members of the Masonic lodge in Cologne who resided in the city in 1853, two-thirds Page 56 →were Catholic.80 There were also occasional Catholics in the lodges in Leipzig. However, they were a tiny minority. Catholics, for example, made up less than 5 percent of the newly admitted members of the Balduin Lodge between 1845 and 1876.81 The more the Catholic BГјrgertum adhered to Ultramontanism over the course of the 1860s and

1870s, the less it participated in Freemasonry. Nevertheless, as the example of Cologne illustrates, after 1850 members of the Catholic BГјrgertum typically had a Masonic family background.82 While the conflicts between Masonic lodges and the Catholic Church could be traced to Freemasonry’s humanist claims, it was difficult to reconcile these same claims with the lodges’ exclusion of Jews. As a result, the emancipation of Jews became the predominant question of Freemasonry beginning in the late 1830s.83 The statutes of most lodges contained a paragraph prohibiting the admission of Jews. For example, the Balduin Lodge’s constitutional book from 1833 states tersely, “Only a man of respectable reputation should be admitted, whose conduct demonstrates honor to God, devotion to fatherland, general love of humanity, and good morality; and who also possesses the level of Bildung necessary for our brotherhood. However, Israelites cannot be admitted.”84 Beginning in the 1780s, there had been repeated efforts to allow the admission of Jews to regular lodges. All such attempts failed, however, before the VormГ¤rz period. As an alternative, lodges composed largely, if not exclusively of Jewish members and modeled on their Masonic counterparts were founded. These so-called tolerance lodges, however, were unable to establish themselves permanently due to stigmatization by regular lodges. The question whether Jews should be allowed to participate in the Masonic domain of humanity arose only after they had been granted civil equality in Prussia in 1812. While the exclusion of Jews had been self-evident before emancipation, it now had to be justified and codified in Masonic lodges.85 The establishment of civil equality was expressly welcomed, but only in order to postpone actual social and moral emancipation into the distant future. Terms such as Bildung, morality, and humanity were not employed unconditionally but instead were inscribed with religious, gender, or social prejudices, which now became apparent. Not only in the theater but in Masonic lodges as well, Jews were criticized for their supposed “insociabilitГ©.”86 Jews’ ostensible lack of “sociability” or even, according to the liberal Karl von Rotteck, their “antisocial” character played an important role in the standard arguments on the need to “civilize” Jews for their “true” moral emancipation.87 In contrast to clubs, casinos, or museum societies, the lodges represented a particularly Page 57 →intimate form of sociability. Precisely because Freemasons removed themselves from the outside world in order to celebrate a cult of brotherhood in spaces protected by secrecy, those who were regarded as aloof and troublesome, who might disturb the intimacy among male equals, were excluded. Such qualities were attributed above all to women and Jews, whereby Jews were called upon to relinquish these qualities, while women were supposed to do precisely the opposite.88 Moreover, the demand that Jews acculturate had an explicitly religious dimension for one segment of the lodges. Only Christians, these Freemasons argued, realized the prerequisite for participating in purely human sociability. In 1818, one author insisted that Freemasonry was a “brotherhood of more noble and better men who seek refuge from the era in order to survive above it. However, Judaism forms a caste that is hostile to the entire human race; and the God of Israel has only one chosen people, for whom the other peoples of the world should serve as a footstool. How can Judaism and Masonry coexist together?”89 A memorandum of the Balduin Lodge in 1829 offers a similar argument: “Do not some men, who are no longer satisfied with their Judaism as they know it, who desire something higher and yet do not have the courage to become Christians, seek entrance to the lodge because they regard it as a surrogate for the church, as a religious institution mediating between Judaism and Christianity, which will make both dispensable for them?”90 Was the humanity of Freemasonry part of or separate from Christian religiosity? From the late 1830s on, this question split the lodges into two camps. For “Christian conservative” Freemasons, Christianity was the “religion of humanity,” and they rejected social intercourse with Jews as long as the latter remained Jewish, arguing that Judaism was a particularist religion alien to everything universally human. For the conservative tendency in Freemasonry, baptism rather than acculturation was the prerequisite for lodge membership. Members of this camp regarded with horror enlightened Jewish BГјrger who were scarcely distinguishable from Christians and who had cast off all traditional religion. “To be sure,” a pamphlet entitled Vote on the Admission of Jews to the Masonic Brotherhood from 1838 noted, any “Jew who approaches his faith with seriousness and zeal deserves our respect; having this faith, however, he will feel more disinclination than inclination for our

lodges. It is rather those who have already cast off their Judaism like an old garment and therefore stand naked and bereft of all religion who, I fear, will be most likely to come knocking on our doors.”91 It was the “assimilated” Jews, who seemed most similar to non-Jews in Page 58 →their morals and manners, without, however, actually being like them, who apparently threatened the identity of the BГјrgertum.92 The Christian conservative camp thus resembled the opponents of emancipation, who, to take one example, believed that a Jewish Freemason could only be a hypocrite, either as a Jew or as a Freemason. A Jewish Freemason, the Christian conservative yearbook Janus argued, could immediately become a Christian, so intimately tied were Christian and Masonic rituals. “If the Jew does not do this, it is simply due to stubbornness, which we should not reward with a sacrifice on our part. Often the Jew has only a loose connection to Mosaic laws, to the Talmud, and to the instructions of the rabbinate—he hangs dubiously between Mammon and the fashion of the day, between adjusting to that which is German and completely unmotivated isolation.”93 The other camp, “liberal humanitarian” Freemasonry, turned the idea of humanity itself into a kind of religion. For its proponents, the emancipation of Jews was a part of their political self-conception. At the same time, however, this camp also understood Freemasonry as the “religion of the mature and responsible man, ” based on Christian moral doctrine.94 As Dieter Langewiesche has noted, “For most liberals, Jewish emancipation meant that Jews had to be prepared to give up their Jewish identity in order to be able to become German BГјrger.”95 At times, liberal Freemasons’ image of the Jewish BГјrger was tinged with antiSemitism. “One can often perceive among you a craving for domination, for prestige, even a striving for a material use of our spiritual association,” Rudolf Richard Fischer, the liberal member of the Saxon Landtag, wrote in a letter to Abraham Ellissen, the speaker of one of the “Jewish” lodges in Frankfurt.96 However, liberals argued that these allegedly Jewish qualities could be overcome once Jews entered the neutral realm of the “purely human,” in this case, the lodges. In his reply to Fischer, Ellissen characterized as typically liberal the combination of public support for the participation of Jews and the delay of its practical implementation into a distant future. This was “the curse of half-measures, that one enunciates principles with a certain ostentation, but saves their practical application for an indeterminate date.”97 Ultimately, both conservatives and liberals demanded that Jews who wished to partake of the sociable culture of Masonic lodges relinquish their Jewish identity in favor of a civic humanism that was in essence nothing other than enlightened Christianity.98 Although German lodges did not admit Jews before the late 1830s, German-Jewish Freemasons did exist, for example, those who belonged Page 59 →to English or French lodges.99 For them, it was self-evident that they could be both Freemasons and Jews. Just as the exclusionary policies of elite associations led to the foundation of Jewish clubs and societies, Jewish Freemasons also founded their own lodges.100 The most important of these, and for many years the only one, was the Zur aufgehenden MorgenrГ¶te Lodge in Frankfurt. Founded in 1808 by the Grand Orient de France, it became an exclusive meeting place for Frankfurt’s Jewish BГјrgertum beginning in the 1830s.101 A second Jewish lodge, Zum Frankfurter Adler, was founded in 1832 and also experienced a rapid rise in membership. The Masonic religion of humanity, with its aspirations to Bildung and enlightened sociability, became an important inspiration for Frankfurt’s Jewish BГјrgertum and for the formation of a modern German-Jewish identity. As Jacob Katz has emphasized, Jewish lodge members regarded Freemasonry as the original religion of humanity, which formed the basis of all historical religious communities.102 This belief was tailor-made for the needs of the Jewish Reform movement, which also sought to rebuild the Jewish religion on principles that were valid for all men. In fact, almost all leaders of the Jewish community in Frankfurt during the VormГ¤rz period were also members of one of these two lodges. The Jewish lodges founded the Philanthropin, Frankfurt’s exemplary reform school, and many of the school’s teachers, such as Michael and Theodor Creizenach, Marcus Jost, and Jakob Auerbach, were Freemasons. Well-known liberal rabbis, such as Leopold Stein in Frankfurt and Gotthold Salomon in Hamburg, were also lodge members, as were the liberal politician Gabriel Riesser and the popular writer Berthold Auerbach. Despite the exclusionary policy of most regular lodges, the Masonic utopia of Bildung, brotherhood, and

enlightened sociability could always be taken literally and invoked on behalf of participation and emancipation. Beginning in the 1840s, Jews were admitted to regular Masonic lodges. The Apollo Lodge in Leipzig played a leading role here. Whereas it had been customary in Leipzig that Jews were permitted in the lodges during the trade fair as long as they did not identify themselves as Jews (and thus demand the recognition of their faith), they were now admitted explicitly as Jews. In a sensational case thirty years earlier, the Apollo Lodge had prohibited Moses Mendel, a Jewish merchant, from visiting in 1810. Two years earlier, in 1808, Mendel and Sigsigmund Geisenheimer, who were both brothers at the Jewish Zur aufgehenden MorgenrГ¶te Lodge in Frankfurt, had applied for admission to the Balduin Lodge in Leipzig. Page 60 →Geisenheimer was admitted, but Mendel was not. When Mendel requested an explanation for his rejection, the brothers at the Balduin told him that they were not permitted to admit Jews to their lodge. On learning of this, Geisenheimer, who had already visited the lodge on numerous occasions, declared that he was also a Jew and resigned from the Balduin.103 The Apollo’s refusal to allow Mendel to visit in 1810 also gave rise to protests. In response, the Apollo Lodge decided in the future “to continue to allow foreign Jews entrance” during services but to exclude Leipzig Jews.104 The Balduin Lodge, which in an internal debate opposed all sociable intercourse with Jews, went a step further. “For,” according to the surprising justification from 1812–13, “if during his admission the aspirant answers that he is Jewish when asked which religion he belongs to, this answer would at the same time be a confession that he could not follow that most excellent fundamental law of Freemasonry, to love every man as a brother.” The argument continued, “At the moment he becomes a Freemason, the Jew would cease to be a Jew, or if he remains one, he is a hypocrite.”105 The discussion of the “Jewish question” in the lodges changed in the 1830s. In 1831, the constitution in Saxony guaranteed freedom of worship. In 1837, Jews were granted civil rights in Leipzig, and in 1839, these were enforced for the first time. In 1836, the Apollo Lodge admitted as an affiliate a Jewish merchant from Frankfurt—like most of the subsequent affiliates, he was member of the Jewish lodge in Frankfurt.106 The intimate social and commercial ties among the largest German trading cities (Hamburg, Frankfurt, and Leipzig) ultimately made it impossible for these cities to continue to exclude Jews during the 1840s.107 In 1847, the first Leipzig Jew was admitted as a regular member to the Apollo Lodge.108 Nevertheless, this continued to be an exception. The lodges’ rhetoric of humanist universality beyond the strictures of existing society made Freemasonry attractive for many Jews. Paradoxically, this same rhetoric also continued to be employed as a reason for prohibiting the participation of Jews in the “brotherhood of men.”

Revolution without Reform The ambivalence in the self-conception and social practices of German Masonic lodges—the coexistence of universal humanist claims and social exclusion, of secrecy and publicity—intensified in the late VormГ¤rz period. Page 61 →Beginning in the late 1830s, a new generation joined the lodges, one that had not come of age during the ancien rГ©gime and that wanted to democratize Freemasonry. The Revolution of 1848 threw Masonic lodges in a new crisis of credibility. Radical democrats and conservative monarchists, “revolutionary subversives” and “reactionary carpers” criticized Freemasonry as untimely and dubious both in moral and political terms. The Handbuch der Staatwissenschaft und Politik (Handbook of Political Science and Politics) (1848), edited by Robert Blum, included a sharp condemnation of Masonic lodges: “They make no sense and have no importance any more in our current era. It is not true that every difference is abolished in the lodges. They do indeed call each other brother, but status, rank, and money have the same importance in the lodges that they have outside. . . . Differences of faith are also evident in the lodges and intensify in many to the point of complete intolerance. Thus Jews, for example, are excluded from many lodges.” In summary, the handbook states that the “humanistic goals” of Freemasonry no longer exist; Freemasonry is merely “empty play with forms, customs, and symbols, which must be declared quite unworthy of a thinking man.”109 The lodges were criticized not only for their hesitant support of concrete social reforms but in particular for their cult of secrecy. In a politically turbulent era that sought to expand freedom and the public sphere, Masonic secrecy appeared anachronistic, if not politically dangerous. Secrecy, which had been regarded as the presupposition for successful politics and intimate sociability in the eighteenth century, became for radical democrats a diametric

pole to the notion of the “public sphere.” Thus Meyers Neues Konversationslexikon argued in 1848 that the term secret had long been “cursed by the elevated among the people. Criminality and treason breed in secret; the murderer whets his dagger in secret, salamanders and snakes lie in wait of their victims; in secret the Inquisition celebrates its bloody executioners’ orgies. Honesty and true convictions, on the contrary, transform a free people in open daylight.”110 Because of their secrecy and their elitist claims, Freemasons appeared to many democrats to be citizens from a past world. If the cult of secrecy in the lodges had possessed a “progressive” significance in the absolutist state, this significance had disappeared, it was argued, because “the race of humans currently living has developed an enlightenment that far surpasses the intellectual possessions that esoteric circles earlier guarded as a secret.” That which everyone could now read, for example, in David Friedrich Strauß’s Leben Jesu, “could in the past only have been discussed in the Page 62 →most restricted circles of the initiated; religious tolerance, which was once taught in these circles in the most expansive scope, is now practiced by the uninitiated as well in every dimension of his life, and quite unexpectedly the principle of humanity is even reflected in the enthusiasm of social systems.”111 In short, the exclusivity of the lodges and their retreat to secrecy no longer appeared to be justified by their possession of special moral or political knowledge. In the face of this apparent tendency of the era, the lodges were confronted with a dilemma. Should they give up their cult of secrecy, their elaborate system of degrees; should they allow political discussions and admit women, Jews, and members of the lower classes? If they did, it would be difficult, if not impossible for them to distinguish themselves from the numerous political clubs and associations that now existed. Should they then refuse to make further reforms; should they uncritically retain their traditions and seek refuge in their secrecy? This would mean a further loss of public prestige and the resignation of radical-democratic lodge brothers. These questions point to a basic problem that Masonic lodges faced in the nineteenth century: They appeared to be victims of their own success. The more the “conceptual firmament” of the lodges was adopted by society as a whole, the less credible the Masonic claim to be society’s vanguard became. The notions of liberty, equality, and fraternity—the mottos of Freemasonry since the eighteenth century—now appeared “to have become what peoples of the world generally strive to attain: Freedom no longer needs to seek refuge in secrecy. It wanders openly in the markets and streets. Equality and brotherhood are no longer limited to the intimate circle of Freemasons: Entire peoples make these words into their motto and attempt to realize them among themselves.”112 In 1849, Johann Karl Ludwig Geissler, the grand master in GГ¶ttingen and a Protestant theologian at the university there, asked if the time had come for the lodges to give up their exclusivity and merge with a general humanitarian alliance or political association. For Geissler, the question was merely rhetorical; he insisted that in addition to “civil freedom”— “the freedom from all external limitations that are not absolutely necessary for the unification of men into a state”—there was also another kind of freedom: internal, “moral freedom.” Civic freedom without moral freedom, he argued, led a people to ruin. According to Geissler, this inner freedom from prejudices, passions, and “selfish aims” could still only be learned within the isolation of Masonic lodges.113 Without the cult of secrecy, this kind of isolation did not appear possible. Page 63 → Even in a political order guided by the principles of freedom, equality, and brotherhood, Geissler continued, it was still necessary to have social spaces for a universal humanist utopianism. Freemasonry, as an “alliance and brotherhood of the heart,” promised “that which those outside will never attain despite all their desire for freedom”: internal, moral freedom.114 Geissler argued that external freedom, without internal freedom, led to the collapse of all moral and political order. “Freedom, equality, and brotherhood, these most noble possessions of humanity,” Geissler argued, can be lasting only “where Bildung and morality go hand in hand with them, can only exist in a state only where the latter have already become the general possession of humanity.” Freemasons concluded from this that the lodges were by no means obsolete, since the individual acquisition of these principles was possible only in Masonic lodges—the path to self-education that must be tread before society can be formed according to these principles.115

The more radical the events of the Revolution became, the more Freemasons adopted this point of view. The revolutionary public was aware of this as well. In a lodge speech in 1849, one lodge brother summarized the opinion of radical democrats regarding Freemasons as follows: “You are among those heroes of freedom in the VormГ¤rz period who demanded freedom for themselves as long as it was exercised under strict discipline. Now, however, as the disciplinary masters have been chased away and you have risen in the echelon of civic hierarchy, you suddenly feel your thirst for freedom quenched and want to know nothing about the consistent establishment of democracy.”116 It is possible to interpret Freemasons’ insistence on maintaining their secrecy and exclusivity as an attempt to hold on to their ideology of a “classless civil society” despite the obvious fissures in society, in other words, as a flight from a politicized society into a metapolitical realm.117 We should bear in mind, however, that the specificity of Masonic sociability was itself intricately connected to, indeed nourished by precisely this metapolitical claim and by these secret practices. The attempt to establish and maintain a sociable association beyond political or religious boundaries had to keep issues of everyday politics out of the lodges, referring them to other institutions, for example, to the press or to parliament. Political discretion was one of the foundations of civic associations. Only in this way could common civic views and interests be formed through sociable intercourse.118 In an address in 1848, August Wilhelm Henschel, grand master of the Page 64 →Zepter Lodge, summarized “Freemasonry’s relation to politics.” Henschel, a liberal, argued that Freemasons “always have to be forerunners of the times, and they must never fall behind it—however, we currently live in an era in which the idea of freedom has burst forth on the level of the culture itself. . . . Masonry should raise itself up to liberalism.”119 Henschel regarded as self-evident the participation of Freemasons in political events and their public commitment to liberal demands. However, he did not believe that either of these belonged in the lodges. Rather, Freemasonry should direct its efforts at the moral interior, at the individual: “Inside, in his heart and mind, the Mason should make himself free through his convictions, which he awakens in the lodges and which he develops within himself.” In doing this, Henschel argued, Freemasons should remain within the circle of inwardness, of one’s own self. “In everything it does, Freemasonry always remains merely an institute of self-education, of self-knowledge, of self-improvement, of self-beautification and ennoblement. . . . Thus it always remains in the domain of the subjective. It develops only convictions and must exclude those unjustified and actual interventions into the objective domain of the world at large and of worldly hustle and bustle everywhere.”120 If it behaved otherwise, Henschel argued, Freemasonry would leave the realm of the purely human, of moral universalism, and would engage in only one kind of politics among many. “When we move from the general domain into specific politics and special definitions of freedom and law, this is where certainty ends and where dispute and the craving for party politics begins.” In the lodges, however, “in the reconciliatory atmosphere of brotherly love, all limits, all distinctions of status, faith, and nationalities disappear: Freemasonry knows no rank other than the internal nobility of an honorable nature. It knows no aristocrat other than aristocrats of the spirit. Since it is the living bond of all men, it is also the true associational impulse of all like-striving and like-minded men.” In short, Henschel argued, the lodge is “true communism of the heart.”121 The metapolitical, moral claims of a “brotherhood of men” were thus by no means “flaccid sentimentality,” as many democrats believed. Rather, these claims continued to contain a concealed political message. “Do not forget that even the king, that even the powerful, that even those upon whom your own external weal or woe depends are only your brothers. Even before them, do not deny the elevated aristocracy of men, in which you are completely equal to them.”122 This apparently apolitical sociability was supposed to push politics in the direction of a gradual liberalization of society according to principles of the BГјrgertum. Reform rather than revolution was the motto of liberal Freemasons. Page 65 → The retention of this claim to be above politics, therefore, should not be understood as another example of the German BГјrgertum’s ostensible distance from politics, of its “failure” in 1848–49, particularly as many Freemasons played a leading role in the political events of the revolution. The lodges in Frankfurt served as

informal meeting places for the delegates. The FГјnfziger-AusschuГџ (Committee of Fifty), which was constituted from the preliminary parliament and was commissioned to negotiate the formation of the National Assembly with the Bundestag, had its headquarters in the rooms of the Zur Einigkeit Lodge in Frankfurt. There were many Freemasons among the more than five hundred delegates of the Frankfurt National Assembly of 1848 from across the political spectrum, from conservatives all the way to democrats. The latter were often critical of Freemasonry, for example Robert Blum, who was a member of the Balduin Lodge.123 However, the majority of Freemasons endorsed the moderate liberalism of the center and progressive parties.124 “Neither upheaval nor standstill”—this was the attitude of most Freemasons.125 In order to examine in more detail the diverse conflicts that arose from this position and the problems that resulted from the lodges’ insistence on remaining an apolitical or rather a metapolitical site within a politicized society, let us briefly examine the situation in Leipzig and Breslau. The extent to which Masonic lodges were affected by the political turmoil of 1848–49 can be seen by examining an internal scandal, which, when the public learned of it, earned the Apollo Lodge in Leipzig its epithet “lodge of democrats.” Rudolf Richard Fischer, the Apollo Lodge’s deputy master, archdeacon, and editor of the Freimaurer-Zeitung (Freemason Newspaper), gave a controversial address during a lodge celebration in April 1849. In this address, Fischer, who was a passionate liberal in the Saxon Landtag and an opponent of the democrats, attempted to demonstrate the actuality of the lodges by claiming that democracy was the child of Freemasonry. Hadn’t the lodges, Fischer argued, renounced distinctions of status and religion, produced constitutions and laws for themselves following free discussion, and chosen their masters in free elections? “Are they surprised when, after one hundred years of loyal work for this cause throughout all of Germany, as quiet and undemanding as it was, a result came to fruition.”126 Although Fischer also condemned the “bad behavior” and “horrifying blindness” of political radicals, a number of Masonic brothers reacted angrily during the address, in particular the celebratory guests from the other two lodges in Leipzig. After Fischer ended, Oswald Marbach, a well-known scholar, grand master of the Balduin Lodge, and editor of the Page 66 →Leipziger Zeitung between 1848 and 1851, gave an impromptu response. Only when democracy had freed itself of its present confusions, Marbach argued, could it be permitted in lodges: The weapon of revolution is violence; the weapon of Freemasonry is self-ennoblement.127 Other speakers then declared that the lodges had nothing in common with the Democratic Party. After the lodge closed, Fischer was heatedly rebuked in private for raising a question of party politics in the lodges and for expounding upon it in his address.128 In the subsequent debate, one brother also contested Fischer’s claim that the lodges were democratically structured. He argued that the key distinction lay in the fact “that in our alliance there is a strict rule that we only admit those men into our circle, or rather should admit such men who have already demonstrated in life that they are morally developed, intellectual talented, and capable of sacrificing material interests for the higher interests of humanity, and that these men, in turn, elect among themselves the members of their government.”129 All political camps criticized a politicization of the lodges. When in the Prussian Zu den drei Degen Lodge in Halle, August Beschoren defended the “constitutional kingdom” and denied any intellectual significance to “democratism with its fixation on immediate sensuous need and its relentless numbers and masses,” there were also objections, because, as his opponents argued, “friends of the republican form of government” may get the impression that they do not belong in the lodges.130 In 1848–49, the lodges’ claim to be above politics led to a decrease in evening visits. Moreover, as one Freemason in Leipzig remarked, the diversity of new political clubs and associations created a reluctance “to visit the lodges as happily and willingly and to devote oneself so completely now as had been the case in the previous year.”131 In May 1848, several Freemasons formed their own political club, the MaГ§onia Association, which, according to its statutes, was supposed to be a democratic site of “parliamentary debate.”132 The twenty-seven members of the association between May and December 1848 all belonged to Masonic lodges, two-thirds alone to the Apollo. In comparison to other lodge brothers, members of the MaГ§onia were very young, in their early twenties. Thirteen of them were clerks or office workers, eight of them students.133 The MaГ§onia appeared to be the meeting place for a new generation, one that felt unable to express itself politically in the established Leipzig

lodges. In the MaГ§onia, everyone was to have his say. There was a conscious absence of traditional rituals, ceremonies, and lodge hierarchy. Emil Apollo Meissner, a twenty-one-year-old medical student, was the head Page 67 →of the club. His father, Friedrich Ludwig Meissner, grand master of the Apollo Lodge, attended club meetings and attempted to exert a politically moderating influence on his son and the other youthful “radicals.” While the Apollo cautiously supported the club, the other two Masonic lodges in Leipzig prohibited their members from participating.134 The competition with the regular lodges, as well as with the scholarly “Inner Circle” or Engbund, which was only open to established Freemasons who had attained the Masonic third degree, was all too evident.135 The MaГ§onia understood itself as a conscious opposition to “Inner Circles” (EngbГјnde). In June 1848, members of the MaГ§onia considered adopting the name “Club of the Wider Circle” (Club des weiteren Bunds) as an ironic reversal. At MaГ§onia meetings, members discussed questions of lodge constitution (“Is the lodge a republic?”), questions of Masonic reform, and, following by the shooting to death of Robert Blum, the question “How can Masonic brothers protect themselves from the threat of political opponents?”136 For the remaining lodge brothers in Leipzig, the activities of the MaГ§onia clearly went too far, and they reminded the youthful “hot heads” of the general humanist goals of Freemasonry. Otherwise, they argued, the separation between Masonic lodges and party politics would be lost. After 1849, the MaГ§onia refrained from discussing issues of party politics. At the beginning of the 1850s, a paragraph was even introduced into its statutes expressly prohibiting political and religious debates. After this, the meetings of the club could hardly be distinguished from discussion evenings at Masonic lodges. In a lecture at the MaГ§onia in January 1851, one member of the Apollo Lodge called explicitly for a retreat from the public sphere and endorsed the metapolitical nature of Freemasonry.137 Thus this attempt at radical reform ended with a return to the Masonic self-conception prior to 1848. There were few radical reforms in Leipzig lodges in 1848–49. The Masonic lodges there, with their moderate liberalism and their social exclusivity, stood at odds with the democratic-republican milieu, which was particularly strong in Saxony. However, many of the reforms that were demanded in the Prussian lodges in 1848–49 had been long established in Masonic lodges in Saxony as a result of their legal independence and their greater liberalism. When, in March 1849, the musical director Canthal reapplied for admission to the Balduin Lodge and there were reservations because he was Jewish, Oswald Marbach, the grand master of the lodge, again raised the “Jewish question.” Marbach spoke in favor of admitting Jews, although Freemasonry was a “Christian institution,” because, he Page 68 →argued, Jews could overcome the ostensible prejudices of their religion through moral force “and in this way arrive at a Christian standpoint.” Another lodge official voted in favor of admission, remarking “that one must distinguish between Talmudist Jews and those Jews who have adopted a free standpoint and accepted the higher ideas of humanity.” He argued that lodges could admit the latter but must continue to exclude “Talmudist” Jews. Canthal’s application was finally accepted with only one opposing vote. He was admitted that year as the first Jewish member of the Balduin Lodge.138 In addition, in the future every Freemason who cast a ball against a candidate during a secret ballot had to justify this to the grand master, a measure intended to compel anti-Semitic brothers to admit their prejudice openly.139 After all, freedom from all prejudice was supposedly the most important virtue of a Freemason. The Minerva, the most exclusive lodge in Leipzig, continued to refuse to admit Jews. The Apollo Lodge, however, as mentioned earlier, had already admitted a Jewish member in 1847. The new joint lodge house for the Apollo and Balduin Lodges—an impressive villa built in 1847—was open to the numerous Jewish Freemasons, for example, from Frankfurt or Hamburg, who wanted to visit a lodge in Leipzig. These two lodges in Leipzig belonged to the liberal wing of democratic Freemasonry that pushed for a “Masonic emancipation of Jews” in 1848–49. In contrast to lodges in Leipzig, Masonic lodges in Breslau were sharply divided between left and right, democrats and conservatives. In Breslau, even before the events of 1848, there had been an attempt at the Friedrich zum goldenen Zepter Lodge to introduce more democratic procedures into lodge sociability. Following the customary ritual address of the grand master and the subsequent ceremonies, two brothers took the floor unannounced and gave speeches calling for the reform of Freemasonry. It is impossible to understand what a provocation this was if

we do not bear in mind the customs of lodge evenings at the time. The meetings were organized according to a strict ritual. Only the grand master and the lodge speaker gave addresses, and these dealt primarily with moral issues and resembled Protestant sermons. Occasionally they merely read a commentary on rituals by well-known Freemasons such as GrГ¤vell and Merzdorf. “No one who has not heard them himself can have any idea of how sober these addresses were, that of the chairman as well as that of the speaker,” one of the two critics at the Zepter Lodge argued. “They consist of either the most banal phrases about fraternal love and fraternal sense, Page 69 →which are repeatedly served up, or they are dry explanations of the so-called symbols and signs, explanations that have been repeated verbatim through decades because the chairmen have neither the intellect nor the good will to provide a new meaning for these randomly invented signs.”140 While this critique was harsh, Prussian lodges were—in contrast to Leipzig and Hamburg—very conservative and traditional during the first half of the nineteenth century. It was regarded as an affront that two ordinary lodge brothers had given “democratic-republican” speeches at a lodge meeting and had demanded a reform of Freemasonry. The resulting tensions in the Zepter Lodge could be covered over only with difficulty. In July 1848, the time seemed ripe for reformers to push again for changes. Twelve lodge brothers in Breslau composed a memorandum that contained a biting critique of Prussian Freemasonry and called for groundbreaking reforms.141 The memorandum contained three general reform goals. First, the lodges should become less exclusive. In the future, they should admit men of all religions, and Prussian lodges should not exclude Jews. They should abolish the rule that “made it impossible for the penniless to participate in the Masonic association,” that is, they should lower the fees, which were “much too high.” Second, the lodges should alter their internal constitutions. The current system of lodges, each different, federally structured, and operating according to its own rituals—a remnant of the eighteenth century—should be unified. There should be a parliamentary “Masonic congress” to determine the goals of the lodges. The central goal should be “self-government” of the lodges. They should abolish the grand lodges, which supervised regular lodges and controlled them on commission of the state, as well as the “system of degrees” and internal lodge hierarchy. The central notion of the reformers was equality. They argued for the simplification of rituals and ceremonies, which were often said to be little more than a “worthless, time-consuming, and dreary game.” They wanted to maintain only the brotherly kiss, the fraternal chain (where all lodge members held hands in a circle), and the Masonic handshake as simple expressions of attachment; and they argued for the abolition of the expensive banquets, the “table lodges,” with their “stereotypical toasting and вЂbombardments.’” Third, the lodges should redefine their relation to the state. The reformers rejected both the Prussian crown prince’s protection and the overall state supervision through the Berlin grand lodges. Freemasonry should exert a political influence insofar as it works against “evils” in the Page 70 →state in Lessing’s sense of the term and should help bring citizens closer to “our ideal of cosmopolitanism.” “However, the state can continue to regard Masons as among the best of its citizens and will not regret that it has dispensed with the surveillance of the great brotherhood in an emancipated era.” Summarizing, the memorandum stated: “If the Mason is free from every petty conception of the supreme being, if he relinquishes as a free man the old distinctions of status that undermine that which is best in society, then his sense of right and wrong will demand imperiously the recognition of the equality of all men, without consideration of religious and political opinions, without consideration of supposed privileges of birth and external riches. The redeeming consequence of these convictions will inevitably be that true fraternity, which permits religious, political, and social discord to be resolved in the harmonious whole of humanity in prosperous unity.” It might appear at first glance as if the memorandum demanded only a liberalization of the Prussian lodge system that was already a part of everyday lodge life in other places, for example, in Leipzig, Hamburg, or Frankfurt. A commission appointed by the Zepter Lodge at the end of 1848 did in fact provide emphatic support for the reform proposals. However, when the commission, which included the liberal grand master Henschel, proposed “partial authorization for visits by non-Christian brothers,” a majority of lodge members voted against the proposal.142 A number of reform proposals went too far even for the liberals, for example, the abolition of lodge

rituals, which would have robbed Freemasonry of a part of its international character. Even with their great variations, the symbolic actions were the lingua franca of the lodge world.143 The memorandum, however, aimed in particular at eliminating an essential dimension of Prussian Freemasonry: its traditionally intimate ties with the state, ties that were supported by the relatively high percentage of aristocrats, officers, and officials in Prussian lodges. As expected, the debates in the lodges were heated. Several members resigned immediately. Justizrat (Councillor of Justice) von Paczensky-Tenczin, the conservative grand master of the Zepter Lodge, resigned from office during the course of the dispute, but not before reminding his lodge brothers that Freemasonry’s sole goal was self-improvement and that this was a prerequisite for finding the “correct religious, cosmopolitan, and social standpoint.”144 Von Paczensky-Tenczin’s successor was August Wilhelm Henschel, the liberal professor of medicine, a well-known botanist of the time, and, as his adversaries emphasized, a converted Jew. As grand master, Henschel Page 71 →engaged in protracted political disputes with his conservative deputy, Major Friedrich Wilhelm von Falkenhausen, who later became a city councillor in Breslau.145 Henschel also attempted to have a moderating effect on the democrats and thereby tone down the radical nature of their demands. In February 1849, the reformers resigned from the Zepter Lodge and formed their own Reformverein Kosmos (Kosmos Reform Association) together with “rebels” from other Breslau lodges.146 A police report noted, “The society consists of democrats and Jews, both converted and unconverted. Among the Jews, however, are several who are not considered democrats.”147 Similar to the MaГ§onia Club in Leipzig, the Kosmos Association was composed primarily of very young lodge brothers. Their leaders were KГ¶rber, Guttmann, and Rath, three senior teachers at the Elisabeth Gymnasium, as well as Carl Wilhelm LaГџwitz, a merchant and, according to a police report, a “red republican,” who went on to become one of the leading left liberals in Breslau during the 1860s. In the fall of 1849, when it became clear that the other lodges in Breslau were opposed to the reform association, the reformers founded the Loge Kosmos im neuen Freimaurerbunde (Kosmos Lodge in the New Masonic Brotherhood).148 The Kosmos Lodge and the Minerva zum vaterlГ¤ndischen Verein Lodge in Cologne, which had also broken with the grand lodges, were the first Prussian lodges that used the National Assembly’s resolution on the equality of all religions as the occasion to admit Jews.149 By the end of 1849, both lodges had joined the liberal grand lodge in Frankfurt. This appeared to be the first step toward the democratization of Prussian lodges. If the conservative grand lodges were initially on the defensive in 1848 (and had even taken up several reform proposals), the change in political tides in the following year led to an alteration of policy. Freemasons in Breslau were prohibited from entertaining sociable contact with the Kosmos Lodge. The ultraconservative GroГџe Landesloge was particularly active. It attempted to exercise political pressure on its Silesian provincial lodge, which, in turn, was subordinate to the Vereinigte Lodge. The head of the Silesian provincial lodge was Kampmann, a conservative Christian supporter of the monarchy and professor and rector at the Elisabeth Gymnasium in Breslau. It was the faculty of the Elisabeth Gymnasium that formed the core of Masonic reformers. This detail illustrates how intimately connected the political, professional, and sociable spheres were. The intimacy of these ties contributed greatly to the fierceness of the conflict. Already in 1847, Kampmann had Page 72 →opposed the reform proposals of his own grand lodge, the conservative GroГџe Landesloge, when the Ordensmeister (warden) there argued in a confidential letter that the admission of Jews was inevitable. Kampmann protested vigorously against this: “In the eastern part of our monarchy, even in Silesia, the Jew has not yet generally attained the level of Bildung that would enable Christians to regard him as equal in all conditions of life. He also does not appear capable of emancipation, and the state (therefore should) not grant it to him. In the western part, he has perhaps attained a higher level and this is certainly the case in France, England, and America. Thus, the view of the brothers is that, since Freemasons in our province generally would not like to see . . . the admission of Jews to the lodges, many brothers, and precisely our best and most dedicated ones, would resign from them because these would longer be a purely Christian enterprise.”150 Here Kampmann expressed antiSemitic prejudices that even many Breslau liberals, including Gustav Freytag, shared.151 It is hardly surprising then that conservatives such as Kampmann used all means at their disposal to prevent the

establishment of a new lodge, whose grand master would be an enthusiastic democrat and which would admit many Jews as members.152 The revision of the Prussian Constitution in January 1850 provided a legal handle for this. Since that time, neither the “law of associations” nor paragraph 98 of the penal code, which forbade all secret societies, applied to Masonic lodges. As long as lodges were affiliated with a Berlin grand lodge, they were again protected by the Edict of 1798 (which had been temporarily rescinded during the Revolution of 1848–49). In a memorandum, the Prussian Association of Grand Masters (officials of the three Berlin grand lodges) reminded the Ministry of the Interior of “the dangerous consequences for the state that can arise when laws regarding associations are applied in an unlimited manner to societies that act as though they were Masonic lodges.”153 As a result, the two renegade lodges in Breslau and Cologne found themselves on legal thin ice. The lodge in Cologne was forced to request admission to the Zu den drei Weltkugeln Grand Lodge. As a precondition, it had to expel its Jewish members. The Kosmos Lodge, however, was not prepared to do this. At the end of 1851, on instruction of the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, the president of Silesia banned the lodge.154 The Jewish members of the Kosmos were forced to apply for admission to Masonic lodges outside of Prussia. Jonas Weigert, a surgeon, the first Jewish member of the Kosmos Lodge and perhaps the first Jewish Freemason in Prussia, joined the Apollo Lodge in Leipzig in 1850. After this, he Page 73 →became the first Jewish “visiting brother” at the “Christian” Horus Lodge in Breslau.155 Heinrich Bernard, a merchant and another Jewish member of the Kosmos Lodge, also joined the Apollo in 1853.156 In that same year, the Apollo admitted one of the excluded Jewish Freemasons from Cologne. “We pride ourselves,” said the speaker of the Apollo Lodge to the new brother, “that we cultivate the original idea of Freemasonry. We do not ask about the form of your religious beliefs nor about the fatherland that produced you, just as we would not, were we in America, consider the color of your skin.”157 Between 1847 and 1851, attempts to institute a democratic reform of Masonic lodges in Prussia failed. Even reforms that were in the process of being adopted were rescinded. In 1849, the Zu den drei Weltkugeln and the Royal York Grand Lodges did allow Jewish Freemasons from lodges outside of Prussia on a visiting basis. However, with the inception of the reactionary era the majority of Prussian lodges appear to have reinstituted their ban on temporary visits by Jewish Freemasons. Jews were not in principle admitted as regular members to any Masonic lodge in Prussia. While there had been a tendency toward liberalization in the lodges during the VormГ¤rz period, conservatives gained the upper hand in the 1850s, before the political winds changed again at the end of the decade. The Weltkugeln Grand Lodge considered a proposal that would have excluded political opponents of the government from the lodges and would have forbidden political and religious discussions even at sociable gatherings. The lodges in the provincial cities, however, were able to avert this conservative backlash.158 “It is the duty of every citizen not to be indifferent to the general affairs of the state, but to take a stand on political issues,” one Freemason argued in response to conservative officials at the grand lodge, and it is “precisely at sociable gatherings here that we should discuss such issues and in this way prevent brothers from being attracted to eccentric beliefs or actions or prevent these from exerting a negative influence on the lodge associations.”159 In the late 1850s, several reformers returned to the Zepter Lodge in Breslau, even in the face of opposition from the very conservative Vereinigte Grand Lodge.160 Many of them would later become wellknown lodge officials, for example, Gustav Wilhelm KГ¶rber, the head of the reformers, who went on to be a leading representative of the National-Liberal Party in Breslau in the 1870s and Obermeister (overseer) of the Scottish Rite lodge, precisely the high degree that he had wanted to abolish in 1848. The lodges’ claim to stand above party politics and to act only in the Page 74 →interest of the citizenry, indeed, of humanity as whole became increasingly untenable during the course of revolutionary events in 1848–49. The universal humanist rhetoric of civility assumed very direct political connotations, as the example of the term freedom illustrates.161 The more sharply the social and political tensions of society moved into the foreground, the more decisively Freemasons maintained that their lodges were a “purely human” space and insisted on a strict boundary separating the lodge and society. It was, however, impossible to keep politics out of the lodge rooms. These political tensions continued into the 1850s, as was evident at the Zepter Lodge in Breslau. Even Justizrat Dietrichs, elected to succeed Henschel as grand master—which suggests a liberal majority in the

lodge—had bitter disputes with conservative lodge members led by von Falkenhausen and Ambrosch, the rector of the University of Breslau. These disputes ultimately forced the liberal grand master Dietrichs to resign. The example of Breslau also demonstrates that the Prussian state attempted to exercise a direct influence via the grand lodges on political disputes in the local lodges of the cities. Legally, local lodges were subject to governmental control at all times. Nevertheless, there were widespread political suspicions about Freemasons in 1848–49. Beginning in 1848, Carl Didler, headmaster of a Berlin school, bombarded the Prussian Ministry of the Interior with petitions and memoranda calling for a ban on Masonic lodges. Didler was obsessed with the idea that there was a Masonic conspiracy to subvert the existing order. Occasionally, his own memoranda read like parodies of Freemasonry’s cult of secrecy. In July 1848, “under the seal of secrecy,” Didler began his flood of “secret writings” under the descriptive title “Uncovering the great Masonic lie that neither politics nor religion is practiced in the lodges.” Here, he attempted to prove “that all measures to save king and fatherland will remain insufficient if we do not direct our attention in particular to the source of all revolutions and if we do not recognize the true enemy,” that is, Freemasons. Behind the “republican” aims of the lodges, Didler suspected the power of Jews—this was the first version of the imaginary connection between a Jewish and a Masonic world conspiracy, a myth that continued into the twentieth century.162 Prussian officials did not take Didler’s assertions seriously, particularly given the fact that many officials were themselves lodge members. As was the case with investigations “against demagogic subversion” in the 1820s, the Ministry of the Interior was convinced of the political loyalty of the lodges in 1848–49.163 “We know too well,” the Berlin police chief wrote Page 75 →in a letter to the minister of the interior, “that Masonic lodges were far removed from all political participation in 1848, and Didler’s assertion that the most notorious revolutionaries have belonged to or still belong to the Masonic order is, at least as far as the Prussian lodges are concerned, a chimera. Given these circumstances, I have not yet given any attention to Didler’s attacks. However, I will now examine the issue more closely.”164 Didler, the police chief continued, had formerly been a devout Catholic and was probably supported by the “orthodox Catholic party, ” and he enjoyed as well the protection of the conservative minister of state, Karl Otto von Raumer. The political suspicions leveled at the lodges in 1848–49, in particular, the belief in a Jewish-Masonic conspiracy, bore no relation to their actual participation in the violent uprisings. Nevertheless, it is hardly surprising that in the 1850s Freemasonry became a symbol for both the liberal threat to the old order and the gradual dissolution of the church and state. The core of this criticism was aimed less at the concrete political actions of Freemasons than at their moral and political self-conception, their desire to stand above political and ecclesiastical conflicts. The next section investigates examples in Prussia and Saxony in order to explore the precarious position of Masonic lodges between church and state during the 1850s and 1860s. It focuses in particular on the political suspicions leveled at Masonic lodges and the measures the state took to ensure its control over them.

A State within a State? A Church within a Church? Freemasonry is a product of English and Scottish political culture at the end of the seventeenth century, an era that had just emerged from civil war and revolution. Lodge sociability aimed at the silent unfolding of civil society and at the prevention of civil war. This explains Freemasons’ moral claim to stand above status, religion, and daily political strife as well as their insistence on neutrality within the protected interior of the lodge. In continental Europe in the middle of the nineteenth century, this early modern conception of Freemasonry acquired an unexpected actuality, as German and French lodges attempted to reconcile the different parties of their respective civil wars. While German lodges were able to maintain their neutrality to a great extent in regard to the radical democratic movement during the Revolution of 1848–49, they found themselves increasingly subject to political pressure from the state and the church during the reactionaryPage 76 → era that followed. Conservatives and Catholic politicians and publicists were troubled not only by the lodges’ actual political and ecclesiastical influence. They also took Freemasonry’s moral and political self-conception literally, regarding it as a threat to the old order.

Drawing upon Lessing’s Ernst und Falk, Johann Caspar Bluntschli, a Freemason and an expert in constitutional law, sought to formulate an up-to-date version of the Masonic self-conception in the 1850s.165 According to Bluntschli, the sociability of the lodges aimed at nothing less than the “humanization” of church and state, that is, at civilizing them. The lodges, he argued, should be pioneers of the true state and the true church, a visionary space of civil society.166 “However, as long as church and state have not become thoroughly humane, Masonry has a principle that it may claim for itself, the principle of humanity. As long as this is the case, it has a right to exist.”167 Like Lessing before him, Bluntschli was aware that the complete “humanization” of church and state, and thus the abolition of all political conflict, remained utopian. Freemasons, therefore, should seek to ensure that in contemporary everyday life, “politics becomes more humane.” They could achieve this goal, he argued, in two regards: internally and externally. Internally they should unite men of the most diverse political and religious parties on the neutral ground of the purely human sociability. Externally they should preserve their neutrality and should not allow themselves to be instrumentalized by any political party.168 Bluntschli argued that the fact that “the police monitor and scrutinize free private discussion among respectable men” was incompatible with civil freedom. A “civilized state,” on the contrary, would leave Freemasons alone—to its own benefit. It is, Bluntschli argued, a “completely foolish idea to imagine that the great reorganization of all governmental, ecclesiastical, and social conditions, a process that has emerged everywhere in Europe for the past century, is the intrigue of a few conspirators. It is even more absurd to ascribe the wild revolutionary form of this reorganizing . . . to Freemasons, all of whom belong to the educated classes and, for the most part, to the wealthy classes as well and who therefore have no enthusiasm for revolution. . . . Precisely because it is primarily of English origins, modern Freemasonry has a lawful character that is opposed to revolutionary maxims.”169 The goal of Freemasonry, according to Bluntschli, was not civil war, but “moral Bildung.” Around 1850, liberal Freemasons as well as their conservative brothers believed that the central goal of the lodges was combating the “furies of hatred.” In 1854, a lodge speaker in Breslau argued, “The eruption of religiousPage 77 → fanaticism—and of religious civil war, which must be all the more horrible the more elements taking part in it do not recognize the law of reason and seek to enforce fanatically on the domain of morality and law propositions transcending the limits of reason—[is] a threat of greater magnitude and horror than any other.”170 Political and religious civil war was the nightmare of the lodges, although beginning in 1848 anti-Masonic pamphlets blamed Freemasonry for the unleashing of precisely such a war. Attacks on Masonic lodges were aimed essentially at their elitist claim of having already realized the ideal society within their own walls. Hermann Schletter, a liberal Freemason, provided a classic formulation of this claim in Rotteck and Welcker’s Staatslexikon: “Thus the task of the Masonic brotherhood, on the one hand, goes far beyond that of the church, in that it is directed at the entire moral and spiritual being of man and not merely at his religious interests. On the other hand, it is a very limited task, as it does not concern everyone but only those who are ethically and socially capable.”171 Conservative critics correctly recognized that the political thrust of lodge sociability centered on this moral claim of having already realized an ideal society within this circle of “capable” men. While Freemasons did consider themselves “citizens of the realm of reason” ready to obey the monarchy, they were prepared to do so as only long as that monarchy was guided by reason. “For us to be loyal Masons and loyal citizens at the same time, we require a master and a sovereign prince who, animated by the same striving for reason, harmonize in their demands upon us.”172 The Masonic goal of civilizing church and state culminated in 1848–49 in the demand “that virtue be placed upon the German throne.”173 It is hardly surprising that Prussian Crown Prince Wilhelm, himself an enthusiastic Freemason, was extremely mistrustful of the lodges’ claim to be a moral corrective to the state, the church, and—at least indirectly—the monarchy. A letter in January 1849 from the crown prince to his sister Charlotte, who was married to Czar Nicholas I, illustrates Wilhelm’s intimate but ambivalent relationship to Freemasonry, which had been put to the test in 1848. In the letter, Wilhelm contradicted rumors that Freemasons in Berlin had removed his portrait from the lodges’ rooms during the revolution. “This accusation cannot be made against the Masons. However, they can be accused of having been overwhelmed by

moral poltroonery and of not acting aggressively on my behalf, although no one was better informed about my character and my actions than they were. I said this to them in my address during my first appearance afterward.”174 Page 78 → The fact that almost all of Wilhelm’s lodge speeches and instructions, even those he later gave as king and kaiser, employed similar rhetorical figures is also evidence of this ambivalence. Wilhelm appears to have been a devout Freemason: In 1840, he reported that he considered the day of his admission to the lodge to be one of “the happiest of my life.” There is much evidence attesting to Wilhelm’s intimate relationship to the lodge.175 However, Freemasons were his brothers only as long as they stood behind him politically. Thus during a visit to the Vereinigte Lodge in Breslau in June 1855, the crown prince warned the brothers “to be on guard” in view of the politicization of the lodges in 1848–49: “No one believed beforehand that such relations were possible before they arose. However, the fact that they did arise is proof that Prussian Masonry cannot be sure that these will not return again at some point.” Wilhelm argued that the secrecy of the lodges threatened them politically; “our darkness, therefore, must be pure.”176 At his coronation in 1861, Wilhelm expressed his faith in the lodges’ loyalty to him as king. However, he also did not miss an opportunity to remind the brothers that this loyalty should be demonstrated outside of the lodges as well.177 As Wilhelm stated in a lodge address, “I will remain the same, if you, my brothers, remain the same.”178 Always lurking openly behind this rhetorical embrace was the threat that a comprehensive democratization of the lodges might suddenly end their intimate relationship with the monarch. Certainly one of the reasons that Wilhelm had his twenty-two-year-old son Friedrich become a Freemason in 1853—ostensibly at Friedrich’s own urging—was to bind the lodges over the long run to the Prussian monarchy. There is much evidence that the broad-minded Friedrich was also an enthusiastic Freemason, if for different reasons than his father. In 1860, Friedrich succeeded General von Selasinsky as the Ordensmeister (warden) of the GroГџe Landesloge. After Wilhelm’s accession to the throne in the following year, Crown Prince Friedrich succeeded his father as deputy protector of Masonic lodges in Prussia and was de facto responsible for their overall supervision. Even as king of Prussia, Wilhelm took every opportunity to present Freemasonry as one of his particular passions, much to the displeasure of Bismarck, who remarked caustically in his memoirs that the king “fulfilled his duties to the brothers with an almost religious loyalty.”179 Bismarck profoundly disliked the lodges’ basic tendency of eroding the distinctions of religion and status, as well as what he considered the lodge brothers’ unpredictable influence on politics. Bismarck also regarded Wilhelm’s and, Page 79 →in particular, Friedrich’s close friendship with the liberal Duke Ernst (an adversary of Bismarck) and Count Usedom as threatening, because the three—Friedrich, Ernst, and Usedom—had all been admitted to the lodge in the 1850s. Thus the enthusiasm of the Prussian ruling house for Freemasonry had a double-edged political nature. On the one hand, it protected the lodges from demands calling for their prohibition, which arose in the wake of the 1848 Revolution. On the other hand, it also restricted the freedom of the lodges to develop independently of the state or even as a corrective to the state. For example, Wilhelm tried to curtail all attempts to open Prus-sian lodges to Jews, repeatedly declaring that he would never permit “an abandonment of Christianity due to Prussian MaГ§onnerie.”180 The strength of the authoritarian state and the monarchy in Prussia forced the liberal BГјrgertum in Masonic lodges to accept a compromise. At the beginning of the 1850s, Freemasons in Prussia appeared to have no other choice, for otherwise they were threatened, as were many other associations, with dissolution. The necessity of the crown prince’s protection is illustrated by the following example. In 1852, the government compiled lists of civil servants in various departments in order to investigate both the ostensibly excessive influence of Masonic lodges and the lodges’ protection within the Prussian state. Almost six thousand Freemasons worked as officials in the various Prussian ministries.181 They were concentrated in particular in the ministries of culture and justice, which is hardly surprising given the lodges’ social composition.

In order to avert a ban on Masonic lodges, Crown Prince Wilhelm wrote numerous letters to King Friedrich Wilhelm IV. “The fundamental idea of the Masonic alliance—which no one who views the matter with an unprejudiced mind can fail to note—is to promote religiosity, morality, and humanity among their members through their characteristic teaching and training, and in this way to promote these in further circles. Their efforts are addressed directly to men. Political and ecclesiastical affairs are excluded from their activities, which however does not mean that they regard them with indifference.” Wilhelm continued in the letter, “In full knowledge of the matter I can assure you of this with great pleasure in regard to the lodge associations under my protectorate, and in the true interest of the development of the state I can only deeply regret the excessive suspicions and slander that have been heaped upon them by those not exactly abounding in Christian tolerance and authentic humility.”182 Given this context, Prince Friedrich Wilhelm’s admission to Freemasonry in 1853 Page 80 →was a clear signal and, for conservatives such as Leopold von Gerlach, a “great misfortune,” as he noted in his diary. Even King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, in an audience with the prince, was unable to dissuade him from joining.183 In the ultraconservative circles of von Gerlach and Hengstenberg, Crown Prince Wilhelm was referred to at the time merely as “the Freemason.” The attacks of Gerlach’s court clique on Freemasonry sought to estrange Friedrich Wilhelm IV from the crown prince and his son, and they were not without success. However, on a more fundamental level the attacks were aimed at the lodges’ moderate liberalism and at their enlightened attempts to balance reason, humanity, and Christianity in the idea of universal humanity. Conservative circles regarded this as a dangerous relic of the eighteenth century. This form of conservatism was not a consolidation of traditional forces but a new tendency in party politics, which understood itself as contemporary and which employed modern political means such as the press. In a sensational series of articles entitled “Freemasonry and the Protestant Parish Office,” which appeared in the Evangelische Kirchenzeitung (Protestant Church Newspaper) in 1853–54, Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg, a professor at the University of Berlin and the theological leader of the new orthodoxy, argued that the basis of Freemasonry was a “caricature of the idea of humanity, an idea existing in its true form only in the church and owing its origins to revelation.”184 He referred here to lodge speeches from 1848 by Giessler, the liberal church historian in GГ¶ttingen. Aiming at liberal theology, Hengstenberg polemicized against the symbolic acts in the lodges, which, he argued, strove only for “mere morality” and not for “specifically Christian virtues.” “The intelligent world will merely smile at anyone who continues to choose virtue as his hobbyhorse. Clever people could do this only so long as one was permitted to engage in an experiment, namely, when the Christian era continued to exert an influence. Now, as the experiment has failed so notoriously, this influence has long ceased to exist and the [Masonic] order finds itself in a bad state morally.” Hengstenberg continued, “The lodges have increasingly become the center of that spirit of the eighteenth century that was driven out of the church. The lodges will increasingly shape themselves as a concentrated world, as an eerie chapel standing next to the church.”185 Conservative social theorists regarded the humanistic universalism of Masonic lodges as something untimely and threatening. In an article for Hermann Wagener’s conservative Staats- und Gesellschafts-Lexikon (Lexicon for State and Society) in 1861, Bruno Bauer offered a pointed formulationPage 81 → of this: “In regard to its present position and significance, Freemasonry is doing as poorly as the humanitarian ideas of the eighteenth century in general. . . . The opposite of everything that the eighteenth century thought and wanted has occurred: war instead of peace; the separation of historical groups instead of a purely human community . . . ; the strengthening of peoples and races in their particular . . . actual nature.” Bauer argued that a renewed pride in Christianity had also emerged, aided by “the state of war of our entire society against the advances of Judaism and against its military strategy of grounding its supreme rule upon humanism.” “In short, pure morality and the humanitarian idea of fraternity—this sole core of Masonic lodge work and the Masonic bond have been eradicated by the development of science, politics, and the church.”186 Two years later, Bauer attempted to demonstrate that “pure man,” the subject of the lodges, was merely a slogan. “The brothers of the lodge alliance feel themselves elevated through the definition of their association. They believe that with their ideal of pure man and of the brotherhood of men they possess a profound secret inaccessible and hidden from the profane world.” Like other conservative theologians, Bauer raised the following objection: “Man is very little when he acts as a mere human and produces that which is merely

human. Then he is only equal to an animal that also produces only its own species—a brotherhood of men who have unified in the name of man is a very empty phrase that abstracts from the contents of history, which is particular and full of life.”187 For Bauer, the politics of constituting “pure man,” of Enlightenment and Freemasonry, was democracy: “Doing away with the monarchs of the world and dissolving the world into sovereign, disobedient individuals.” “This universalist striving seeks nothing more and nothing less than to make the sovereign ego into the lord of all secular and spiritual interests, civil and ecclesiastical interests, so that it holds them all in its power and exhibits a one-sided bias toward none of them.” The lodges’ enlightened morality and their belief in progress, their “slogan of pure man” and their motto “Soon! Soon! ”—all of these aimed, according to Bauer, at the dissolution of state and church.188 “Pure morality,” that “most darling of pleonasms,” was thus the central point of attack for conservative theologians such as Hengstenberg, who rejected the mediation of reason and revelation as an obsolete idea of the eighteenth century.189 Hengstenberg rebuked in particular clergymen who were also Prussian Freemasons for their membership in lodges—he estimated there were two hundred, including many LichtfreundePage 82 → and rationalists—because the foundation of Freemasonry was merely rationalism, deism, and “antipathy toward that which is specifically Christian.” Even if many clergymen among the lodge brothers did not want to recognize this foundation clearly, he continued, “they still inhaled a bad air that did not permit them to attain spiritual health.”190 “And what is the purpose,” Hengstenberg asked, “of this partial denial of him, whom God has given a name that stands above all names? In order to be able to fraternize with Jews and Turks, while one chases after the mere appearance of a general love of man.” He who “does not, in addition to brotherly love, come to know general love, which truly cannot be attained by singing вЂBe embraced all ye millions!’ with a glass of wine at a lodge banquet or by passing out a few talers here and there from his surplus” will never attain true belief.191 Instead of this, Hengstenberg argued, the Masonic brotherhood seeks “to satisfy religious needs without the church or in addition to the church; to have secrets in addition to or against Christianity; to create in addition to the three great associations—church, state, and domestic home—a fourth; and to create a progeny from coarseness and vulgarity.”192 For conservatives, the provocation of Freemasonry, and with it the utopia of civil society, lay in the lodges’ claim to create a space beyond church, state, and family, a space that, at the same time, penetrated all three. Hengstenberg was not the only conservative theologian who participated in the cultural war against Freemasonry during the 1850s. General Superintendent Jaspis, an orthodox Lutheran church politician, led the anti-Masonic movement in the province of Pomerania—his adversary in theological questions, Gustav Adolf Schiffmann, archdeacon in Stettin, was a lodge brother and thus enjoyed the protection of the liberal Hohenzollern Friedrich.193 Influenced by Hengstenberg’s writings, Johann Friedrich MГ¶ller, the general superintendent in Magdeburg and the son of a Freemason, demanded in a pastoral letter that ministers and teachers in Saxony who were Freemasons resign from their lodges. For, he argued, as “God appointed protectors and administrators of the true and profound secrets of our souls,” they should not allow the shadow of the lodge secret to fall upon themselves and their office before “simple and common Christians.” In response to this, eight Magdeburg clergymen composed an open letter defending their lodge membership.194 Even Crown Prince Wilhelm wrote several letters to MГ¶ller, in which he tried unsuccessfully to convince the latter of Prussian Freemasons’ piety and loyalty to the state.195 Crown Prince Wilhelm also exerted direct pressure on the Protestant Page 83 →Oberkirchenrat (Senior Ecclesiastical Council), which had been created in 1850 for the ostensible separation of church and state, to take a stand against MГ¶ller. The crown prince, in other words, employed neoabsolutist methods in his battle against a conservative ecclesiastical neoorthodoxy. With Wilhelm’s assumption of power in 1858, MГ¶ller was finally replaced by a more tolerant ecclesiastical representative. Following Wilhelm’s coronation, Hengstenberg went so far as to issue the warning that “not every work of a prince should be trusted, for he, too, is mortal.”196 Nevertheless, attacks by conservative religious circles on Freemasons were not without consequences: In the second half of the nineteenth century the percentage of Protestant clergymen in Masonic lodges fell to almost nil.197 In 1840, there were still forty-one clergymen (3 percent) in Masonic lodges in Breslau and Leipzig; by 1876, that number had declined to thirteen (0.6 percent), which included many who had been

lodge members since the 1840s. Masonic lodges continued to be protected by Crown Prince Wilhelm and their own intimate ties to the authoritarian state. This protection provided them a certain aura, which the conservative ecclesiastical press angrily denounced in the rampant anti-Freemasonry of the 1850s and 1860s. The churches supported and intensified older prejudices here. The notion of elite and godless Masonic lodges with their devilish cult of secrecy were already part of an established repertoire of Catholic folk piety. It is important to bear in mind the enmity of ecclesiastical conservatives toward the lodges in the 1850s and the protective function exercised in particular by Crown Prince Wilhelm for Prussian Freemasonry during this era in order to understand Wilhelm’s outrage when he became king in 1864 and the liberal BГјrgertum in the lodges opposed him in the constitutional conflict. As king, Wilhelm sought to exercise direct influence on Prussian lodges through the Grand Master Association in Berlin. However, even the Grand Master Association’s call that everyday politics had no place in the lodges and that lodges should remain neutral in political conflicts did not satisfy King Wilhelm.198 In 1865, the Zu den drei Weltkugeln Grand Lodge ordered its daughter lodges to mark the Prus-sian king’s birthday in the future with a lodge celebration.199 The grand lodges, however, were subject not only to political pressure from the king, but also to demands “from below,” from the lodges in Prussian cities, which did not wish to be instrumentalized.200 The context in which this conflict occurred can be illustrated through an example. In the winter of 1863, a “respected elderly citizen, who was well regarded in the entire city but whose political views conflicted with Page 84 →those of the government,” applied for admission to the Zepter Lodge in Breslau. When a majority of lodge members voted to admit him, “several members of the elevated social classes announced they would resign . . . if a recognized democrat were to be admitted.”201 The applicant then withdrew his application. One of his opponents was Colonel von Falkenhausen, who, as mentioned earlier, had already been one of the conservative Masonic supporters of the monarchy in 1848. Falkenhausen had served as adjutant to Crown Prince Wilhelm and had accompanied him on his flight to England in April 1848. During an audience with Wilhelm (who was now king) in 1864, Falkenhausen responded to the latter’s question about lodge life in Breslau as follows: “Ah, they are all democrats!” The king then ordered Karl Friedrich von Messerschmidt, head of the Zu den drei Weltkugeln Grand Lodge (and departmental head in the Prussian War Ministry), to report to him and then to travel to Breslau and “put things in order.” Messerschmidt did travel to Breslau and familiarized himself with the political orientation of the Zepter Lodge through private discussions. Gustav Waxmann, the grand master, arranged a lodge meeting in honor of Messerschmidt, during which the latter reminded the brothers of Freemasonry’s principle of political neutrality. The alliance between the liberal BГјrgertum in the cities and the authoritarian state and the monarch, in other words, was by no means free of tension. However, in the 1850s and 1860s, both sides regarded this cooperation as advantageous. In addition to Wilhelm I and Crown Prince Friedrich, other princes and monarchs also patronized Masonic lodges during this period. Prince Ludwig Wilhelm August von Baden became a member of the Urania zur Unsterblichkeit Lodge in Berlin in 1856. Three years later, he became grand master and thus head of the Royal York zur Freundschaft Grand Lodge and was able to prevent his brother, the grand duke, from issuing a renewed ban on Masonic lodges in Baden, which was under consideration on the basis of a concordat.202 Prince Heinrich von ReuГџ-Schleiz joined the Archimedes zum ewigen Bund Lodge in Gera in 1852, and Duke Ernst II von Sachsen und Coburg joined the Ernst zum Compass Lodge in Gotha in 1857. Duke Ernst II became grand master of his lodge and, along with Crown Prince Friedrich, was one of the luminary figures of liberal Freemasonry. In the Kingdom of Hannover, King Georg V declared himself protector of the lodges in 1852; he became a Freemason himself in 1857, but not before compelling the lodges in his kingdom to include a statute committing themselves to Christianity and excluding all Jews.203 Relations were different in Saxony, where the Catholic monarchs Page 85 →maintained a distance from the lodges. In Saxony as in other German states, it was not the monarchs themselves but their conservative advisers who pushed for measures against Masonic lodges. In a lodge address in 1862, Oswald Marbach stated, “It is a humiliating experience that rulers pay heed to such blandishments, not because they regard Freemasons as dangerous but because one regards them as harmless good-natured dreamers, whom it is not worthwhile to support

against a party that is deemed powerful, indeed, a party deemed wise to strengthen.”204 Marbach continued, “The means of the state is punishment; the means of the church is admonishment and discipline; the means of Freemasonry is social intercourse. The lodges are the only societies that expressly recognize the responsibility of church and state as the foundation of sociability. Is it not apparent that they are the only means of ennobling society at all, and is not ennoblement the generally recognized need of this era?”205 Marbach referred here to experiences of Masonic lodges in Saxony during the 1850s. Beginning in 1850, Eduard Emil Eckert, a journalist and writer in Dresden and editor of the conservative FreimГјthige Sachsen-Zeitung (The Candid Newspaper of Saxony), published a series of articles in the newspaper calling for a ban on the lodges. Eckert was convinced that the lodges determined the fate of the world through a secret conspiracy. In a flood of pamphlets, the contents of which became increasingly extreme, he attributed the most absurd things to Freemasons.206 In 1851, he sent a “Petition for the abolition of the order of Freemasons as incompatible with the welfare of the state both in terms of organism and effect” to state authorities and to the Saxon Diet. When this petition was not immediately successful, he submitted a complaint to the First Chamber of the Saxon Diet in February 1852, about which both chambers of the Diet held proceedings in April and May 1852. Eckert’s claims included the assertion that Masonic lodges controlled the entire judiciary in Saxony. He even refused to recognize the trial against him, as he believed that all judges in Saxony were Freemasons, whereupon the president and vice president of the appeals court in Dresden resigned from their lodges in order to preserve the semblance of judicial independence.207 In addition, Eckert argued that the lodges in essence controlled politics in Saxony. Nothing could have better refuted this claim than the fact that both chambers did not simply reject Eckert’s grotesque petitions (as the few Freemasons among the representatives urged) but submitted them to earnest discussion. A conservative majority continued to regard Masonic lodges with mistrust.208 Page 86 → Freemasons in Saxony who were also state officials bombarded the Saxon Ministry of the Interior with confidential letters and were able to convince the ministry that Freemasonry did not have any tendencies that threatened the state.209 However, Eckert was successful in influencing von Rabenhorst, the minister of war in Saxony, who in April 1852 ordered all officers who were Freemasons to resign from their lodges within three months.210 Subsequently, in addition to military officers, many senior state officials and clergymen also resigned from Masonic lodges in Saxony. In 1852–53 there were only 25 military officers in lodges in Saxony (out of 2,054 total lodge members), but 138 state officials and 69 theologians.211 Up until 1869, all officers in Saxony had to sign a declaration that they did not to intend to join the Masonic brotherhood. The prohibition remained in force until 1908. In addition, in 1854 the government ordered that lodges in Saxony be regulated more closely by the grand lodges, as had occurred years before in Prussia.212 This was supposed to prevent the lodges from becoming overtly political, as had occured in Belgium at the time. In 1854, Pierre Theodore Verhaegen, a leader of Belgium liberalism and a grand master, openly declared Freemasonry’s participation in politics by altering the lodge constitution. The German lodges, first and foremost the Apollo Lodge in Leipzig, protested against this alteration and broke off all contact with their Belgian brothers.213 German conservatives, however, were alarmed by this case and pushed for countermeasures. In public, Freemasonry remained a synonym for enlightenment and liberalism. In a session of the First Chamber of the Saxon Diet in 1858, the conservative delegate von Welck complained that an alteration of the poor-relief laws had been justified through humanitarian language and not the Bible: “The expression вЂhumanity’ smells of the вЂlodges.’”214 Nevertheless, the publicity that Masonic lodges in Saxony attracted because of Eckert’s accusations in the 1850s ultimately brought them more lodge brothers than they lost. In 1863, there were seventeen lodges in Saxony with 2,868 members; approximately half of them (1,335) had been admitted between 1853 and 1863.215 While two editors of the FreimГјthige Sachsen-Zeitung were fined for libel, Eckert was able to flee Saxony to

avoid prosecution. In Berlin, he continued his quixotic battle against Freemasonry. As they had with Didler earlier, Prussian officials responsible for reviewing Eckert’s petitions regarded his campaign against the “society of world conspiracy” as a personal obsession, while conservative circles cautiously investigated which Page 87 →elements in them could be used politically. Only Otto Theodor von Manteuffel, an orthodoxconservative opponent of Crown Prince Wilhelm, gave Eckert an audience in Berlin.216 When Eckert was forced to flee Berlin as well, he traveled to Prague and then Vienna, where he converted to Catholicism. He committed suicide in 1866. Apparently Eckert was mentally disturbed, although his hatred of Freemasonry was more than a personal quirk. Beginning in the eighteenth century, the Catholic Church sharply condemned Masonic lodges. Pope Pius IX, who raised infallibility to a dogma, damned, prohibited, and anathematized the Masonic brotherhood, or as he called it the “Synagogue of Satan,” a total of eight times (in 1846, 1849, 1854, 1863, 1864, 1865, 1873, and 1875); his successor Leo XIII did the same four times (in 1884, 1892, 1894, and 1896).217 Catholic publicists such as Edmund JГ¶rg did distance themselves from the horrific images that Eckert had painted of the lodges. However, Eckert’s claim that Freemasonry was a conspiratorial society directed against church and state reverberated with conservative sensibilities after the traumatic experiences of 1848–49. “For a century in western and northern Europe the effects of a secret force have become increasingly powerful, a force that aims at the gradual dissolution of the church and the social foundations of the state. This operation initially armed itself with the weapons of philosophy and ridicule of the church and with the hypocritical doctrine of a Christian brotherhood, which of necessity leads to an equality of status and possessions opposed to corporative divisions. Seemingly divided into diverse sects but harmoniously united in purpose and in overall control, they quickly penetrated the educated classes throughout the entire world. . . . One tended to designate a so-called liberal principle regarding church and state as the condition for recognizing the educational maturity of a man, i.e., a religious and political indifferentism that initially guaranteed neutrality in attacks on church and state and then was easily induced into becoming part of such attacks.”218 Eckert based his own work in large part on Didler’s pamphlets and, like Didler, drew a connection between the dissolution of the existing state and ecclesiastical order, on the one hand, and the association of the liberal BГјrgertum, Jewish emancipation, and Freemasonry, on the other—a connection that Catholic political thinkers of the twentieth century such as Carl Schmitt adopted as a matter of course.219 After 1848, the idea of a JewishMasonic world conspiracy gained popularity throughout continental Europe.220 For Catholics and conservatives, FreemasonryPage 88 → was a symbol for the alliance between the liberal BГјrgertum and the authoritarian state. Contemporary observers were aware of this: “It is well known that Masonry is composed of the intelligent middle class, and insofar as this class produces the most civil servants. Civil servants are of course also represented in large numbers. However, it is the middle class and civil servants who oppose all extremes including the unreasonableness of reactionaries. Therefore, the battle is directed less at the lodges than at the entire middle class and in particular civil servants, both of whom are the only ones who still stand in the way of these gentlemen’s plans.”221 Even Catholic publicists who were unable to follow Eckert in many respects and found his loathing of Freemasonry ridiculous believed that he had correctly identified the fundamental danger of lodges’ moral claims. Edmund JГ¶rg, for example, published a critique of Freemasonry in the HistorischPolitische BlГ¤tter fГјr das katholische Deutschland (Historical-Political Papers for Catholic Germany) in 1858, in which he sought to delegitimate the moral claims of Masonic lodges.222 JГ¶rg began by sketching a panorama of German Freemasonry in the 1850s. The “central powers” were not, JГ¶rg argued, the leaders of society, the “secret superiors,” as conspiracy theorists believed, but the “stolid bourgeoisie” along with state and municipal officials, who supported each other and thus promoted “corruption” and “creeping servility.” Freemasonry in Prussia, JГ¶rg argued, is “a kind of sacred institute of equal dignity at least with that of the state church.” In contrast to Eckert, JГ¶rg was also aware that the division of Freemasonry into a conservative Christian camp and a liberal humanitarian one corresponded “approximately with the Protestant opposition of pietism and rationalism.” JГ¶rg traced the state’s protection of Masonic lodges in Prussia to their ostensible secret: “the idea of establishing Germany’s political union, parallel to the ecclesiastical union that has already been attained.”

JГ¶rg referred here to the lodges’ support for German nationalism during the late 1850s and 1860s, an issue that will be dealt with in greater detail later. JГ¶rg insisted that he had studied “the movement of 1848” in detail, but that he did not recall “ever having encountered the claim that the storming had been instigated by the lodges. Only when the water of the movement had subsided was this opinion considered correct: that the Freemasons had cooked up this revolution as well.” JГ¶rg argued that Eckert’s idea of a “society of world conspiracy” in this sense was ridiculous, even if in many Catholic circles the accusation that “one does not believe in Freemasonry weighs almost as heavily as the judgment that one does not believe in God!” Page 89 → Nevertheless, JГ¶rg considered Freemasonry to be dangerous in two respects. The central point of dispute, according to JГ¶rg, was Freemasonry’s claim to be a religion and a church: Freemasons advocated a “vague Protestantism,” a new religiosity that made the church superfluous. JГ¶rg also argued that Freemasons were politically corrupt. Even if JГ¶rg held Masonry to be a “vacuous game,” he nevertheless believed it to be “an incomprehensible abnormality in an orderly state, and the fact that it is tolerated can only be explained by the terrible unrest that has occurred in society over the past half century and which still today does not allow the state to come to rest.” The goal of the lodges, JГ¶rg argued, is not the dissolution of the state but its corruption. “The Masonic brotherhood is the twin brother of the modern bureaucratic centralized state. . . . The two experienced together the uncouth adolescence of liberalism, rationalism, and radicalism. One cannot get rid of one without the other.” Nevertheless, JГ¶rg argued, “saving society” depended on this. JГ¶rg considered the ties between the authoritarian state and the “elevated bourgeoisie” organized in Masonic lodges to be the political cancer of the era. These ties, he believed, even intensified the social question. JГ¶rg agreed with Hengstenberg that the upper middle class predominated in the lodges, “i.e., the noble and wealthy class of BГјrger,” who eagerly pull themselves up to those above them and who continually hold watch over those below trying to push their way in. “In this way, the bourgeois in the lodge feels himself to be a high aristocrat and finds pleasure in calling the rest of the world вЂprofane.’ The [Masonic] order is his certificate of heritage; communal administration is in particular the domain and monopoly of the new lodge aristocracy.” Eckert had already interpreted the unrest in Saxony in 1830 as a revolution of the “bourgeoisie” predominant in the lodges against the old middle class, the “mass of older tradesmen,” who were reduced to being “slave laborers for the rich factory owners of the elevated BГјrgertum, this constant accessory of the order.” JГ¶rg picked up on Eckert’s social critique here, arguing that the lodges’ moral self-image was an anachronism, “now that the results of their own successes have risen up against them in national-economic materialism. Universal brotherly love, charity, and humanity are the ostensible aims of Freemasonry. Well, its hic rhodus lies at its feet. The chasm cannot be bridged merely by magnificent alms and conference speeches. . . . The more the social question becomes apparent, the more Freemasonry is outstripped by the times.”223 JГ¶rg provides an apt description here of the problems faced by Masonic lodges (and by political liberalism) after the failed revolution: Page 90 →Freemasonry’s vague religiosity, which did not really stand above religious creeds (since it had an unambiguously Protestant tone) and yet was not really Protestant (since it did not identify with the established Protestant church); Freemasonry’s close ties to the authoritarian state, although the lodges considered themselves independent of that state, indeed, opposed to it; Freemasonry’s claim to transcend distinctions of status, which was contradicted by the lodges’ own fundamental regard for such distinctions. Freemasons did not stand above corporative distinctions, religious confessions, or politics but rather participated actively in social disputes, working against the interests of the common good and in the interest of a “bourgeoisie” that was increasingly secular and yet Protestant, that was closely tied to the state and yet liberal—this is fair summary of JГ¶rg’s critique. JГ¶rg set the tone that other Catholic critics of the lodges adopted in the 1860s. In 1862, Wilhelm Emanuel von Ketteler, the bishop of Mainz and a leading figure of political Catholicism in the second half of the nineteenth century, launched an exhaustive and acerbic attack on Masonic lodges.224 Their “castelike nature” and the secret cult, according to Ketteler, raised the lodges above society. It is not difficult, he argued, to imagine what

shape the constitutional state with its ostensible claim to represent all classes of the population would take, “if a general executive power combined with Freemasonry and the parliamentary majority arising from it were to rule the country without opposition.”225 Like JГ¶rg before him, Ketteler demanded more openness and publicness from the BГјrgertum in the lodges, a guarantee of independence from the executive and the judiciary, and religious freedom. In this way, he turned liberal principles against the “aristocratic” liberalism of the lodges. In an article in the Historisch-politische BlГ¤tter in 1862, JГ¶rg agreed with Ketteler: “We cannot in truth speak of a state founded on the rule of law anywhere that a minister or indeed a monarch belongs to the lodges. The state exists primarily only as a partisan support institution for lodge brothers.” “A church of humanity over all churches” as a secret brotherhood is “necessarily a conspiracy against all other churches, the most flagrant disturbance to religious peace.” In light of the secret cult of the lodges, liberalism “must turn red in the face with shame.”226 The Catholic writer Alban Stolz also tried to demonstrate that although Freemasonry did not aim at violent upheaval, it was “an insidious poison for human society.”227 “Many people believe that all subversion, all upheaval in church and state derives from the Freemasons, that Page 91 →they have enveloped the entire world and have everything in their power.” However, Stolz argued that “the vast majority of Freemasons do not want revolution. That would not be intelligent, for they must attend to their own interests. They are men of honor and bon vivants.”228 While JГ¶rg had already designated lodge rituals as “empty play,” Stolz was amazed that grown men “were able to participate in such childishness and farce and do so with a serious mien.”229 For Stolz, the lodges’ exaggerated “secretiveness” served as an ironic reversal of the liberal view of Catholicism. Freemasons regarded independence, Bildung, and faith in progress as masculine virtues, while they ascribed a lack of such virtues, which they considered typically feminine, to Catholicism.230 However, in Stolz’s eyes, the Freemasons’ “charades” gave them an “air of falseness and unmanliness”: “For this reason, the symbol of the apron is very appropriate for the Freemason. He must only put on a lass’ bonnet as well.”231 Stolz adopted a harsher, morally condemnatory tone when he turned to the threat of Freemasonry to the family. Freemasons, he wrote, creep into the lodges “like dissolute men into a brothel”; the “men of honor” in the lodges engage in a kind of adultery protected by secrecy.232 Secrecy, according to Stolz, erects a wall between husband and wife necessarily undermining marital trust. Stolz argued that the exclusion of women from the lodges is immoral and implies sexual excesses, a favorite subject of Catholic pamphleteers about the lodges. Several years earlier, Eckert had already mixed sexual fantasies with political fears: “Sanctioning the Masonic order . . . undermines the state’s purpose, for the ultimate, most secret goal of Freemasonry is the overthrow of all governments in the world, of all church services and the theft of all property for the purpose of creating an empire of the [Masonic] order based on the cult of reproductive sexual powers, the community of life and work, thus based on immorality, based on the most terrible humiliation of all men under the helot’s yoke of the order. All these men sweat and toil for the ruling master race of the [Masonic] order, which reaps the harvest and enjoys the fruits in the name of the common good, while its lustful members seek to utilize the toiling bodies.”233 Like Eckert, Stolz continued to develop the myth of a Jewish-Masonic conspiracy. An anti-Semitic tract entitled “Charges by a Berlin Freemason” in 1862 attacked the lodges harshly after liberal election victories, insinuating a Jewish-Masonic complot.234 While JГ¶rg dismissed the fantasies of the tract simply by pointing out that Prussian lodges did not admit Jews, Stolz took the pamphlet literally and disseminated it in Page 92 →popular writings.235 Although political Catholicism was among the harshest critics of Masonic lodges before 1871, the anti-Semitic demonization that would become so popular later appeared only in isolated cases. JГ¶rg and Ketteler, for example, focused instead on those contradictions, that Freemasons in the 1850s recognized themselves to be entangled in—contradictions that liberal Freemasons now believed were in urgent need of resolution.

Laboratory of Civility The civic awakening that began in the late 1850s led to an enormous upswing in Freemasonry. This is evident in purely numerical terms. Between 1860 and 1870, membership in German lodges rose from 10,000 to 35,000.

Freemasons primarily supported political liberalism and shared its social optimism. For instance, the Prussian grand lodges did, with the exception of the GroГџe Landesloge, cautiously open to liberalism. The reforms of the grand lodges, however, did not go far enough for lodges in the cities. This resulted in various conflicts, including disputes about whether participants of the 1848 Revolution could be readmitted to lodges. As mentioned earlier, Freemasonry’s apparent political neutrality in the constitutional conflict of 1864, which the king regarded as a breach of trust, became an important test case. Nevertheless, the core issue was that of internal reforms in the lodge system, in essence its gradual democratization. Before examining this reform process in more detail, it is helpful to briefly review Freemasonry in France. A comparative perspective will illuminate the significance of this attempt to democratize Freemasonry for civil society’s conflicts with the state during the postrevolutionary era. Like their German counterparts, French lodges were also subject to greater state control after the failed revolution there. In France as well, Masonic lodges participated only indirectly in the radical-democratic movement between 1849 and 1851. However, their moderate republicanism made NapolГ©on III suspicious of them, and he considered banning Freemasonry. Similar to events in Prussia, the compromise that emerged was a quasi-state protectorate. In 1852, Lucien Murat, a member of the Bonaparte family, became head of the Grand Orient, the French grand lodge. Prince Murat used the power he acquired through the new constitution, which the state forced Masonic lodges to adopt in 1854, to close down Page 93 →more than one hundred lodges regarded as politically suspicious. NapolГ©on III then resolved the conflict that had been smoldering for years between Murat and the lodges by declaring Marshal Bernard Pierre Magnan to be Murat’s successor in 1861. This, however, did not satisfy the democratic reform movement within French Freemasonry, which wanted to revise the constitution that had been imposed on the lodges in 1854. The reformers sought to remove passages in the first paragraph of the lodge constitution referring to an allegiance to God and to the immortality of the soul. Freemasons in France regarded secularism and anticlericalism as the central focus of an up-to-date Freemasonry. This tendency toward positivism, however, was also accompanied by the search for a new religiosity.236 French Freemasons adopted a mixture of Kantianism, deism, and liberal Protestantism, all of which were opposed to the Catholic Church and asserted the moral independence of the individual grounded in metaphysical or religious terms. In addition, French Freemasons called for the abolition of the hauts grades, with their emphasis on the Christian Crusades and aristocratic hierarchies. Even if it was only in the 1870s that reformers were able to approach the realization of these goals, they were able to achieve a partial democratization of Masonic lodges before this time, which also affected French society as a whole. In the eyes of reformers, nothing better illustrated the transformation of the Grand Orient than the changes in its leadership. Following Prince Murat, Marshal Megan, and General Mellinet, LГ©onide Babaud-LaribiГЁre, a veteran of 1848 and a republican journalist, was chosen to head the Grand Orient, before the office of grand master was abolished completely in 1871. One Freemason argued that this date marked the end of Freemasonry’s “monarchical era” and the beginning of its “evolution to a genuinely democratic organizational form.”237 In place of aristocrats, who had already resigned from the lodges in the first half of the nineteenth century, the bourgeoisie now dominated the lodges. In France as well, Masonic lodges claimed to stand above differences of class, religion, and nationality. They developed into a gathering point not only for moderate republicans but for radicals as well. French Freemasons pursued a “visionary humanitarianism” (Philip Nord) that had much in common with other social reform movements: republican feminism, solidarism, the league of human rights. In this sense, Masonic lodges formed a connecting bridge—both on the level of institutions and ideas—among the democratic reform currents of the 1830s Page 94 →and 1840s as well as within the republicanism of the 1860s and 1870s. After 1871, Masonic lodges became one of the most important social mainstays of the republic. French and German Freemasonry clearly developed in similar directions during the late 1850s and 1860s. In both France and Germany, Masonic lodges became “laboratories” for civic politics and culture, to borrow a favorite metaphor of Freemasons reflecting their faith in progress and science. In German lodges as well, reformers took up the political demands of 1848: more independence externally in regard to church and state and more democracy internally. As was the case in France, an active minority in German lodges drove the reform

process forward. German Freemasonry, however, was not only politically divided. Its federal structure and the disproportionate regional dispersal made uniform reform difficult. While there was only 1 grand lodge in England or in France during the 1860s, there were 9 in Germany: the grand lodges of Saxony, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Darmstadt, Hannover, and Bayreuth, on the one hand, and the 3 large Prussian grand lodges, which supervised 167 of the 225 German lodges, on the other.238 There were also differences among the grand lodges in Prussia. The GroГџe Landesloge remained extremely conservative even in the 1860s and 1870s, while the Zu den drei Weltkugeln Grand Lodge cautiously opened to reforms, and the Royal York Grand Lodge, beginning in the 1850s, came to resemble increasingly the liberal lodge system outside of Prussia. Not surprisingly Masonic lodges outside of Prussia, which were not subject to government supervision, stimulated the reform movement within Prussia. Reformers sought to modernize the lodge system as a whole, to make it more up to date. They wanted Masonic lodges to be more integrated in the general associational life of the era. For this reason, critique by reformers also focused on the lodges’ “secretiveness.” For example, Jakob Venedey, a well-known liberal and 1848 revolutionary, argued in his response to Alban Stolz in 1862, “We ourselves have long thought and said, вЂThe era of the symbol is past, as is the era of the secret.’ In this regard as well, Masonry should keep up with the times and throw this old rubbish overboard.”239 In that same year, a circular letter of the Zur edlen Aussicht Lodge in Freiburg, which was part of extreme left wing of Freemasonry, argued that while many of the lodges’ rituals and symbols were indeed meaningful, “some symbols, such as slippers, the noose around the neck, the undressing of applicants, and others are, on the contrary, undeniably coarse and tasteless.”240 Page 95 → Behind this criticism of traditional rituals, those “cults of form that have become truly childish and ridiculous, ” was an attempt to democratize the lodge constitution.241 Reformers now thought it possible to realize reforms that had been proposed during the late 1840s: depriving the Prus-sian grand lodges of their power and thereby putting an end to state control; abolishing the “Christian” high degrees, the cult of secrecy, and the lodges’ “aristocratism”; and establishing political and religious liberalism with the admission of Jews as the principal demand.242 At the end of the 1860s, the grand lodges in Frankfurt and Bayreuth drafted new constitutions and rituals. Bluntschli, who had been grand master of the Heidelberg lodge since 1864, was responsible for this in Bayreuth. Those seeking admission no longer had to swear their Masonic oath on an open New Testament but only symbolically on a closed Bible. The conservative grand lodges in Berlin resisted all of these reforms. In 1863, a circular letter from the federal directorate of the Zu den drei Weltkugeln Grand Lodge argued: “In particular, it is the lack of discretion that threatens the brotherhood today. Discretion is the wall that protects our shrine. If that wall is torn down, our shrine is endangered, for then the order is no longer what it should be. The striving for publicity, which is characteristic of our era and which is a blessing in other things, does not suit us. Masonry does not want to be, should not be, and cannot be public.”243 Nevertheless, the Prussian grand lodges also gave in, at least in part, to pressure from the liberal reform movement. The reformers were able to evade the politics of the Prussian grand lodges by creating an internal Masonic public sphere. During this era, new Masonic journals emerged promoting the development and exchange of ideas and opinions outside of the grand lodges. Publishers in Leipzig such as Bruno Zechel, who was a Freemason, printed many of the journals. Like its French counterpart Le Monde maГ§onnique, Die BauhГјtte was a Masonic journal of political reformers within the German language area. Two left liberals, Rudolf Seydel, a professor at the University of Leipzig, and Johann Gabriel Findel, founded the journal in 1858. Findel, a bookseller, writer, and democrat from 1848, went on to become one of the decisive critics of the contemporary lodge system. Findel’s own life history contributed to his polemical sharpness. As a student in Munich during the revolutionary era, he had sat in pretrial detention for ten months. As a result, he was unable to pursue a career as a state official. Findel left Bavaria and the Catholic Church, becoming a member of the Free Congregations and apprenticing in the bookselling trade in Heidelberg with the publisher Page 96 →Mohr, who was himself a lodge member and who later convinced Findel to become a Freemason. Findel finally settled in Leipzig and joined the

Minerva Lodge, from which he resigned in 1859 after the lodge tried to get him to moderate his politics.244 Like other liberal lodge reformers such as Bluntschli and Venedey, Findel was a bitter opponent of the Catholic Church. On the issue of anti-Catholicism, French and German Freemasons adopted similar positions. It was only a slight exaggeration when Bishop Ketteler argued in 1869 that, considered in terms of personnel and ideals, the Protestant Association (which included Masonic leaders such as Bluntschli, Schiffmann, and Seydel) was “an extension of the lodges in the Christian Protestant population.”245 This marked the Kulturkampf of the 1870s. Anti-Catholicism would form a bond that unified the various divisions within German Freemasonry. Findel and other liberal Freemasons regarded themselves as modern enlighteners and as cosmopolites in a very concrete sense.246 Findel, for example, was not only a passionate advocate of Jewish emancipation but corresponded intimately, beginning in the 1860s, with the African-American Prince Hall Grand Lodge in Boston, which named him an honorary member. He demanded equality for the “negro lodges,” which other American lodges refused to grant.247 Findel also wrote the first critical history of Freemasonry in 1861, which was immediately translated into several languages and was enormously successful.248 Here, he was able to build upon preparatory works by Georg Kloss, grand master of the Eklektischer Bund in Frankfurt, a physician, and the founder of scholarly Masonic historiography.249 In his work, Kloss had sought to disentangle the historiography of Freemasonry from the founding myths propagated by the Christian conservative grand lodges in Berlin. Together with Seydel, Bluntschli, and other reformers, Findel founded the Verein deutscher Freimaurer (Association of German Freemasons) in 1861, which challenged the supremacy of the grand lodges. Like the MaГ§onia Association in Leipzig and the Kosmos Association in Breslau in 1848, the Verein deutscher Freimaurer was supposed to be an organization that, freed from a specific lodge constitution, would anticipate a reform of the lodges. The Verein, as expected, polarized within the lodges, attracting support from left-liberal Freemasons in Germany and opposition even from the moderate liberals, who regarded an organization that competed with existing lodges as a provocation. The Zu den drei Weltkugeln Grand Lodge forced the first chairman of the Verein, a Page 97 →general physician from Potsdam named Puhlmann, to resign. Lodges in Leipzig refused to allow the Verein the use of their rooms. As the Balduin Lodge emphasized in a circular letter, Masonic lodges in Leipzig had fulfilled the Verein’s demands long ago: “the admission of applicants without regard to their religious confession, political party, or social position; independence from the grand lodges; abolition of all high degrees; and unrestricted historical research.”250 The only difference, the letter argued, was that lodges in Leipzig did not want to force Prussian lodges to comply with these demands immediately. The minority of radical Masonic reformers pulled more moderate reformers along in its wake. This was true in Prussia as well. Even in Breslau, where lodge life had traditionally been conservative, a number of reformers from 1848–49 rejoined the Zepter Lodge at the end of the 1850s. Some of them even assumed lodge offices. During the 1860s, Masonic lodges in Prussia were important supporters of political liberalism, admittedly less in the Berlin grand lodges, which were closely tied to the state, than in the more vital lodges of the cities, which were embedded in local civic networks. The key question, however, for both liberals and conservatives remained the admission of Jews. As crown prince, king, and kaiser, Wilhelm insisted on the strict exclusion of Jews from Masonic lodges in Prussia. In spite of this, the rigid politics of exclusion gradually loosened on the local level even in Prussia, a visible sign of a democratization of Freemasonry. Since the late 1840s, Prussian lodges had occasionally admitted Jews who had not identified themselves explicitly as such.251 One important step in abolishing the exclusion of Jews from Masonic lodges was the development of an unusual admission practice. Lodges had traditionally regarded themselves as a kind of “moral international,” which consciously sought to transcend territorial boundaries. As a “visiting brother,” a Leipzig Freemason had unimpeded access to local lodge sociability in other European cities as well as in Prussia. In the 1850s, Jewish citizens began to make use of this possibility. The social practice of “visiting brothers” can be best illustrated through an example. Hirsch Joachimsohn, a merchant who had been a city councillor and a representative of the Jewish community in Breslau for many years,

wanted to become a Freemason. In order to be admitted, he had to apply to the Apollo Lodge in Leipzig, because he could not, as a Jew, be admitted officially to a lodge in Breslau, which was part of Prussia.252 His cousin Heymann Naphtali, a factory owner and city councillor in the Silesian town of Reichenbach who had become a member of the Page 98 →Apollo Lodge several years earlier, served as Joachimsohn’s sponsor—a significant detail, for Naphtali in all probability established the contacts in Leipzig for his cousin. Joachimsohn’s name, followed clearly by the word Jew, was then posted on a blackboard for six weeks not only in the Apollo Lodge in Leipzig but in the three Breslau lodges as well.253 There were no objections to Joachimsohn’s application during this time period; on the contrary, Freemasons in Breslau expressly supported his application. Joachimsohn and his sponsor Naphtali then traveled to Leipzig to take part in the Masonic rites of admission, a rather expensive enterprise, even if Leipzig, which had trade fairs three times a year and was the most significant hub of East-West trade, offered an opportunity to combine lodge visits with business. In addition to the high admission fees and travel costs (a single trip to Leipzig was not sufficient), Joachimsohn also had to pay fees to visit the Horus Lodge in Breslau, which was affiliated with the moderate liberal Royal York Grand Lodge. Only then was he permitted to participate as “permanent visiting brother” in lodge life in Breslau. In this way, the number of Jewish Freemasons in lodges located in the German states increased sharply, particularly during the 1860s. Beginning in the 1870s, two Prussian grand lodges, the Zu den drei Weltkugeln and the GroГџe Landesloge, permitted Jews to be admitted as “visiting brothers.” Already in 1854, the Royal York zur Freundschaft, the third Prussian grand lodge, had officially accepted Jewish Freemasons as “visiting brothers” (although it had “tolerated” them since 1849) and even admitted Jews as regular members beginning in 1872. However, it was particularly in the large trading cities outside of Prussia such as Frankfurt, Hamburg, and Leipzig that Jews became members of Masonic lodges. A German-American Freemason reported in 1868 that during trade fairs not only Freemasons from German lodges “but also those belonging to foreign orients and grand lodges—French, Belgium, Swedish, English, American, recently also Italian” met in lodges in Leipzig.254 Many of them were German merchants and factory owners who had joined foreign lodges, some because they lived in a foreign country, others because they were Jewish and could not be admitted to Prus-sian lodges. Still others, however, had joined a Leipzig lodge during a trade fair. The first Jewish “visiting brother” became affiliated with the Apollo Lodge in Leipzig in 1836, and the first Jewish Freemason was admitted to the Apollo according to standard Masonic rituals in 1847. By 1876, almost one-third of the members of the Apollo Lodge were Jewish, and of these Page 99 →Jewish members, more than two-thirds of them lived in Prussian cities, that is, were “visiting brothers” of the lodges there.255 The other two Leipzig lodges hesitantly followed this example. Between 1846 and 1855, the Balduin Lodge admitted only one Jewish Freemason. Between 1856 and 1865, it admitted thirty-one (17.6 percent) and between 1866 and 1875, forty-eight (22.6 percent). Even the conservative Minerva Lodge admitted a Jewish member for the first time in 1869, one who lived in Breslau and wanted therefore to be a “visiting brother” at a Prussian lodge—despite the alteration in Minerva’s statutes on the matter, which explicitly stated that every new member should strive to perfect “his inner essence in the sense of Christian moral doctrine.”256 In the liberal lodges of Hamburg, there were only isolated Jewish members in 1840. By 1880, Jews constituted one-third of lodge members there; more than half of these were Prussian citizens.257 In social terms, both Jewish and non-Jewish lodge members belonged to the BГјrgertum. Jewish merchants and factory owners in particular but also physicians and lawyers joined the lodges. The wealthy and educated elite of the city assembled in the lodges. For many Jews, becoming a Freemason was proof of their ascent in municipal society and politics. Participating in the sociable culture of a city was one of the motivations for joining a Masonic lodge. We can deduce other motivations from applications and lodge presentations by Jewish Freemasons. Heyman Naphtali, to continue with his example, tried to describe his emotions in 1851 after becoming a Freemason in Leipzig: “Before I joined the lodge, I knew that brotherly love was the fundamental principle of the Masons. However,

I did not suspect that it was actually realized in such an elevating manner. In particular, the brotherhood teaches humanity, and this consists, according to my entire way of thinking, in the striving for love . . . However, the spirit of love can only become active in me when feelings of virtue and morality are predominant within me. Freemasonry revealed itself to be the intensification and strengthening of love, that most humane of all emotions, for I have never left a lodge without being able to say to myself that today my heart had attained more in terms of spirit and morality than what was ever offered in profane life.”258 Many Jewish Freemasons were attracted to the lodges by the civic utopia of self-improvement through sociable intercourse, Bildung, and the “humanization” of men as such. In the mid-1860s, Jewish Freemasons could feel that they were an important part of the German lodge world without having to give up their Jewish identity. This is also evident in the Page 100 →fact that almost no Freemasons left the Jewish community after being admitted to Masonic lodges. Many even became part of the lodge leadership, as an investigation of lodges in Hamburg has demonstrated.259 Others, for example, the father of Victor Klemperer’s childhood friend Meyerhoff, who represented for Klemperer the quintessence of civility, left the Jewish community without converting to Christianity. Klemperer suspected that precisely for this reason, “his entire soul [was dedicated] to the Masonic ideals of humanity.”260 The lodges appeared to be the neutral site, where humanitarian religiosity and civility fused into cosmopolitanism without fundamentally abolishing the distinctions of the status, religion, and nationality in civil society, but instead gradually wearing them away. In this sense, the nineteenth century appeared to be the authentic era of enlightenment. Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm, the liberal heir to the throne, placed himself at the head of lodge reforms. At the celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the GroГџe Landesloge in June 1870, he gave an address that sought to take stock of the past century of lodge history. In this address, the crown prince identified the simple English Blue Masonry as the unified core of the lodges and questioned the historical foundation myth of the GroГџe Landesloge and the high degrees. He called for a simplification and purification of the rituals and declared openly that Freemasonry served some members “merely as a means to satisfy their own vanity, thus ruining them instead of elevating them morally.” This was a provocation for conservative lodge officials close to his father and sensational support for liberal reformers in municipal lodges.261 Liberal Freemasons regarded Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm as the personification of the promise of future social reform. Like his father, Friedrich had intimate ties to Freemasonry. He frequently visited Prussian lodges and declared himself in favor of liberal reforms. In 1876, Berthold Auerbach reported on one of these lodge visits in Bonn. Between two other celebrations in his honor, the crown prince briefly visited the Masonic lodge in Bonn, where an assembly of selected brothers awaited him. Friedrich Wilhelm appeared in Masonic ceremonial dress. Auerbach wrote that he had never seen a more beautiful man: “His head was like the ancient bust of Theseus, and his entire bearing resolute, healthy, youthful, and heroic.” After a celebratory address by a teacher in Bonn, Friedrich responded that he felt happy at every location in the lodge and that it was “comforting” for him to know that he had friends and brothers here; “he asked us to remain resolute despite external enmity and internal slackness.” Page 101 →When a toast was also made to Auerbach at the closing banquet, he responded by reminding the crown prince of the difference between being born to a throne and “earning, in addition to this, the crown of humanity”—a clear reference to the crown prince’s liberal reform efforts.262 The enlightened self-image of the lodges converged with the liberal spirit of the age in the political vision of a society built on the virtue of its citizens. One lodge speaker in Breslau argued in 1863 that church, state, and family were currently unable “to satisfy man’s need for self-ennoblement through intercourse with others.” Brothers, he continued, have been drawn to the lodges by “the need to have a place in our lives where we can interact with like-minded fellow men striving for the good and the true and living together as equals, without worrying about the hairsplitting dogmatic disputes of the church and far removed from disagreements in state life.”263 In associations such as Masonic lodges, the BГјrger of local societies could come together to work on themselves and, through this, work on a gradual reform of church and state, thereby “humanizing” them. Outside of the lodges, progress in overcoming social, religious, and national differences appeared inexorable as

well. “Today there is only one human society, not separated as before but only distinguished by languages, political borders, religious creeds, and forms of government. This fusion is so deep and profound that every calamity, whether intellectual or material, that affects one civilized people will necessarily be felt more or less by all the others. There are no longer any particularistic ecclesiastical or political regimes, except where those leaders and their supporters require such exclusivity for their personal aims and where those idiots and dreamers have been unaffected by the fresh and freshening breath of the times and where their dim eyes cannot bear the light. That which occurred earlier by tearing asunder tender familial and human ties through bloody and prolonged battles now occurs silently and quietly with individuals in ecclesiastical and political life. From the larger sections of the different religious and political communities, an invisible church, an invisible state has developed through the fusion mentioned above, which, without any kind of internal organization or external association, have strength, power, and continuity in individuals’ commonality of views, in their shared convictions, and in the solidarity of their legal and moral sense.”264 The cultural practices of the lodges aimed at establishing this kind of invisible state, this kind of invisible church, in short, this kind of cosmopolitan society. Freemasons were aware that this was a utopia that could only be realized gradually. “Between ourselves,” a lodge speaker from Page 102 →Saxony stated in 1861, “who are all members of the middle class, the BГјrgertum, there can be no talk of a sociable mixing of the different classes in civil society.”265 Unaffected sociability with Jews was not yet a matter of course in all German lodges; Masonic brothers continued to regard the Catholic Church as a threatening “dark force”; and a cosmopolitan understanding extending beyond national borders was still in an incipient phase, although it appeared to be inevitable in the future. Nevertheless, liberal Freemasons regarded the goal of a cosmopolitan society to be within reach. While a reform of Freemasonry had failed in 1848, liberal Freemasons believed that its goals could now be realized in the wake of the contemporary civic awakening. Can we speak in this sense of the “secret” success of the BГјrgertum assembled in Masonic lodges? In the 1860s, the lodges became an important catalyst in German and French civil societies and—after the end of its civil war—in the United States as well.266 To contemporary observers such as Lorenz von Stein or Otto von Gierke, associational life as a whole appeared to be the true structuring principle of the new era.267 Precisely in German and American society, associations permeated all domains of life and were, as Tocqueville had maintained, an essential feature of civil society and its tendency toward democratization.268 A comparison of other European societies in the 1860s and 1870s, however, suggests that civil society, even when it possesses a dense and active network of associations, is not necessarily identical with political democracy.269 Nevertheless, there was a fundamental tendency everywhere toward liberalization and democratization, toward a fusion of the “social and civic roles of citizens,” of “corporative and constitutional ideas,” ultimately of state and civil society, which Riehl supposed the BГјrgertum would achieve.270 Freemasons believed that the lodges were entities within civil society, which had set themselves off from that society in order be able to influence it all the more effectively. Even if Masonic lodges in Germany retained their elitist dimensions, they remained convinced that the politics and culture of the BГјrgertum could be generalized. They regarded as indisputable the universality of their own cultural practices and guiding values. The increasing acceptance of these practices and values throughout society as a whole seemed to demonstrate their universality, a trend that conservatives such as Riehl or JГ¶rg also acknowledged. Despite the conflicts between municipal self-organization and the authoritarian state—which have often obscured the issue for later observers—the institutions and values of the BГјrgertum did permeate all levels of German society. Liberal Freemasons did not see a Page 103 →contradiction between civic self-organization in the cities, a centralized state, and admiration for aristocratic rulers, particularly when these appeared to contribute actively in Masonic lodges to the realization of the utopia of a brotherhood of humanity, for example, Wilhelm I and Crown Prince Friedrich in Prussia, Georg V in Hannover, or Ernst II in Saxony-Coburg. The “powerful spirit of associations,” the power of the market and of laws, progress in Bildung and science, the domination of nature, and finally the unification of both the nation and humanity—all of these were ideals of the BГјrgertum that seemed to be realized anonymously and inexorably. The more invisibly the BГјrgertum dominated society, the more inevitably historical progress appeared to be on its side and the more

successful it became.271 Masonic lodges were undoubtedly one of these invisible and successful institutions of German civil society during the 1860s. However, more than perhaps any other civil institution, the lodges also symbolized the limits of this success, limits that would become more visible in the future. The belief in the inevitable improvement of individual citizens, local governments, nations, and indeed humanity itself was increasingly clouded by fears, doubts, and frustrations about the erosion of that which the Freemasons regarded as the moral foundations of society.

Page 104 →

Chapter 3 Civic Worlds, Civic Politics, 1871–1918 Beginning in the late eighteenth century, each successive generation in Germany perceived itself and the world in a process of transition. From the turn of the nineteenth century up to the First World War, the educated and propertied elites in particular were plagued by a sense of crisis and upheaval. An optimistic faith in progress and a pessimistic critique of culture, the belief in having scaled the highest peaks of humanity and the fear of an imminent and profound collapse seemed to form two sides of the same coin. At both the beginning and the end of the nineteenth century, German BГјrger believed that they stood on the threshold of a new era.1 In imperial Germany, the belief in progress and anxiety about the future were intimately intertwined. Paradoxically there is no era in German history in which the BГјrgertum had less reason to be plagued by a sense of crisis. The German nation-state, so desired by the BГјrgertum, provided a framework in which the different realms of society—the market economy, the legal system, and a public sphere—were able to develop. There is hardly any dissent among scholars today that German society was just as “civil” in all of these realms as, for example, French society. Only in the domain of political rule do some historians still assert that the German BГјrgertum was only of secondary importance.2 There was indeed a profound discrepancy in Germany between civic power in the cities and the rather limited influence of parliament on national politics. Nevertheless, in imperial Germany “all social classes outside of the BГјrgertum became so fascinated with civility (BГјrgerlichkeit) that they gradually acceded to its hegemonic claims.”3 “We can speak of a hegemony of the BГјrgertum. For the first time in Germany, the age and the society were both bГјrgerlich.”4 How can we account for these simultaneous scenarios of success and decline? In order to capture the specificity of political culture in imperial Germany,Page 105 → it is essential to contrast the dissemination and establishment of the BГјrgertum’s values and practices in German society as a whole with the crisis of the German BГјrgertum’s self-image. What consequences did the generalization and democratization of, for example, self-governing associations and the idea of Bildung beginning in the 1860s have for German society and for the identity of German civic elites? Only after addressing this issue can we turn to the question whether the idea of Bildung had since the 1880s “been watered down at an enormous pace” and “degenerated” into a certificate for professional advancement5 or whether such analyses were always merely a form of cultural criticism typical of the educate elite, which prove if anything precisely the opposite. Even today scholars tend to accept uncritically the BГјrgertum’s self-image prior to 1914—the belief that while it influenced society as a whole, its own culture was inevitably headed toward the decline and ultimate destruction of civility.6 Perhaps no cultural institution in imperial Germany united this juxtaposition of prosperity and pessimism, the maintenance of social power and the discourse of cultural loss so clearly as Freemasonry. The upswing of the lodges, which began the 1860s, continued almost unbroken after 1871. The social backbone of the new German nation-state—the propertied and educated elites—continued to meet in the lodges; indeed their predominance there increased. It appeared as if Freemasonry’s time had come. With the War of 1870–71, Freemasons considered themselves to be “citizens of a German Reich that had awoken from the dead and been given a new life; and our life-task is certainly to make ourselves worthy of this citizenry. But we Freemasons have long had a calling to a much higher citizenry, namely to a world citizenry (WeltbГјrgertum). Our calling is the same, regardless of whether Italy, Spain, France, or Germany becomes the leading nation.” Nevertheless, the world citizens in the German lodges were convinced that Germany had won the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 because of the superior moral qualities of the German people and that the Germans had quite simply become the “people of humanity.” They believed as well that Freemasons in Germany were responsible for the unfolding of these national and humanist qualities: “Our task is to disseminate the improvement (Bildung) of the mind and of the heart through noble example, so that the purest blossom of noble humanity spreads initially among the German people and then produces the fruits of freedom based upon the lawful ordering of all life

relations. That is the sublime task of German Freemasonry, not only so that the German Empire can assert its position as the leader of the cultural nations, but also to promote Page 106 →humanity as a whole through this, so that humanity increasingly fulfills its eternal destination.”7 However, these claims to have developed universal cultural norms and to be capable of leading civil society, the nation, and ultimately humanity—claims that the events of 1870–71 appeared to legitimate—resulted paradoxically in a profound sense of insecurity immediately after the war. It became clear that there were ostensible “internal cultural enemies,” who were not prepared to accept the leading position that the BГјrgertum claimed for itself. The limits of the BГјrgertum’s moral universalism—which before 1870 could still be deferred to a distant triumphal future—became evident in the face of “angry howls from the enemies of humanity.”8 Freemasonry, as “a purely human and cosmopolitan society,” as “the art of unifying humanity through morality,” was supposed to establish a “bond of community” that transcended the social, confessional, and political divisions of civil society.9 The discourse and cultural practices of Masonic lodges were based on this vision of society. After 1871, the national and liberal BГјrgertum found it increasingly difficult to assert in a credible way its leading role in German society. The BГјrgertum’s moral vision of society—Masonic lodges represented a heightened expression of this—appeared irreconcilable with the “base conflicts of interest” and the “preferential treatment of everyone against everyone else,” which contemporary liberal observers believed rampant in imperial Germany.10 Conversely, the BГјrgertum’s own claims to exclusivity, to possess an elite Bildung and morality, also appeared increasingly incredible. Even if society in the Kaiserreich was unable to realize the moral utopia of the BГјrgertum, there was a successful diffusion of civic values and practices—for example, the idea of Bildung—within the new nation-state. This, however, resulted in a blurring of the boundaries of civility. The BГјrger assembled in Masonic lodges attempted to redraw these boundaries—in the name of progress and Bildung, the nation and humanity. It was not, therefore, a “deficit of civility” that caused the crisis, but an intended excess of civility, that is, the desire that the values of the civic elite be recognized as universal, but at the same time that they guarantee social distinction. These values were supposed to be simultaneously popular and exclusive.11 In other words, this apparently anachronistic claim to represent universally valid values and to be a moral elite and the leader of society was both the cause of this sense of crisis and the particular appeal of Masonic lodges among German BГјrger prior to 1914. In imperial Germany, the lodges Page 107 →served as a refuge for the elevated middle class, which reaffirmed its moral and political ambitions as well as its cultural fears in the intimate sociability of Masonic lodges.

Conservatory of Civility? Between the 1860s and the First World War, voluntary associations permeated all realms of European and North American societies. “We live in an era of joint efforts and organizations,” a German Freemason exclaimed with delight in 1888.12 The euphoria for associations in the 1860s and 1870s, however, was merely a prelude for the “associational rage” that erupted in all European societies at the end of the nineteenth century.13 Despite the fact that occasional restrictive associational laws were still in force (in France until 1901, in Germany until 1908), associations for every imaginable purpose were established in the urban societies of Europe. In 1910, Max Weber acknowledged with some indignation that the modern “last man” is “an associational man to a terrible, never imagined degree.”14 Like Tocqueville before him, Weber was fascinated by “any number of вЂorders’ and clubs of every conceivable kind” on the other side of the Atlantic as forms of self-organization in civil society. However, neither Tocqueville nor Weber expended more than a cursory glance on the rich associational life in his own respective society, France in the early nineteenth century or Germany at the turn of the twentieth century.15 Paradoxically the explosive growth of secret societies and the modern public sphere occured simultaneously beginning in the 1870s. As the North American Review noted in 1897, the final three decades of the nineteenth century were considered the “golden age of fraternity.” It has been estimated that in the same year every eighth, or perhaps even every fifth man—a total of more than five million—belonged to one of the 75,000 secret societies in North America, the Odd Fellows or the Knights of Pythias, the Red Man or the Druids. In an era

in which factory workers earned approximately five hundred dollars a year, the members of these fraternal orders spent fifty dollars on annual fees and two hundred dollars on admission.16 Secret societies were, in other words, a sociable pursuit of the (white) middle-class male in America. These societies functioned as supposedly sacred spaces for a moral cult of fraternity within a disenchanted world organized according to the rules of capital and markets, achievement and competition.17 Page 108 → We do not have exact figures either for secret societies or for associations in general in Germany during this period. To date few scholars have even registered the fact that beginning in the 1860s Germany was the classic nation of joiners after the United States. This development has been overlooked perhaps because it contradicts the well-known thesis that German civil society declined after 1848–49 and because it suggests a greater similarity between German and American societies than the thesis of Germany’s Sonderweg would allow.18 However, there are at times even direct lines of connection between the two societies. The establishment of popular secret societies in the United States, for example, the Odd Fellows and the B’nai B’rith Order, can be traced to German immigrants. Conversely, a kind of “cultural transfer” developed with the spread of these American secret societies (as well as civic reform associations such as the Good Templar Order) into Germany beginning in the 1870s. Masonic lodges remained the model for these various secret societies and reform associations. Not surprisingly the popularity of Freemasonry also increased during this era. Between 1860 and 1910, the number of American Freemasons rose from 221,000 to 1,317,000.19 German lodges did not expand at the same pace, but they also registered astounding growth rates. Like the North American Review, the Berlin newspaper TribГјne expressed surprise in 1881 about the “very conspicuous and remarkable fact” that there had been an “enormous increase in Masonic lodges.” “Over the past twelve years, these have almost doubled and thus have in this limited time span increased as much as they did in the first century and a half of their existence (1717–1867).” The newspaper then asks: “Why this conspicuous increase during an era in which one so often hears the assertion that secrecy is foreign to it [i.e., this era], that it is favorable only to the public sphere, and that secret societies have thus become obsolete? There must be something else involved here, and we do not believe that we are incorrect in presuming that it is the numerous social evils that drive many of the elevated classes, dissatisfied with this state of affairs, into the lodges, people who hope that such secrets will improve the fate of man. We say the вЂelevated classes’ because it is customary for Masonic lodges to limit themselves to such classes and to charge their fees accordingly.” Secrecy, according to the article, exerts a particular fascination: “Despite all of the enlightenment and despite all of the talk about light and progress, [secrecy has] by no means disappeared from the world, but instead continues to exercise its magic upon people who regard the world or themselves as too insignificant without such fantastic additions.”20 Page 109 → The intimate sociability of Masonic lodges and their high entry fees distinguished them from the plethora of associations that arose during this era. As a Freemason argued in 1897, faced with this “fever for associations” it was important to preserve the specific advantages that Masonic lodges “enjoyed over all other associations in civil society.”21 In an era in which associations had permeated all social classes, even previously excluded ones, the intimacy and exclusivity of Masonic sociability made the lodges particularly appealing. Those who wanted to distinguish themselves and were able to afford it sought admission to a Masonic lodge. In both the United States and Germany, the professional groups that joined Masonic lodges were those least affected by the crises beginning in the 1880s. Nevertheless, in both countries it was precisely these groups that were plagued by a sense of crisis.22 As mentioned earlier, beginning in the 1860s there had been an upswing in Freemasonry, which was not limited to the United States but was evident throughout the world. In the expanding British Empire, Freemasonry spread quickly and gained enormously in significance as an imperial network reinforcing British hegemony on a global level.23 The growth of German lodges was somewhat more modest. Between 1860 and 1914, the increase in

membership in Germany (24,714 members in 1860–61; 44,506 in 1889; 54,093 in 1908) was roughly parallel to that in France (10,000 members in 1862; 20,000 in 1889; 32,000 in 1908). In both France and Germany, membership doubled over this fifty-year period.24 Quantitative figures, however, are not decisive for an exclusive form of sociability such as Freemasonry. While there were fewer Masonic lodges in France than in Germany, the significance of French lodges as an informal network of Republicanism before the First World War is uncontested.25 There are also conspicuous parallels between Germany and other European societies. Beginning in the late 1850s, Masonic lodges in Italy were revived as meeting places for the national, anticlerical, and liberal bourgeoisie. They developed into an important pillar of Italian liberalism until their ban in 1925.26 In the Habsburg Empire after 1866 a paradoxical situation developed. Masonic lodges were permitted in Hungary but were forbidden in the remaining territory of the monarchy. A number of Viennese Freemasons were accepted in Hungarian lodges. In 1869, Humanitas, an association similar to a Masonic lodge, was established in Vienna. Two years later, the association was then transformed into a regular Masonic lodge and its residence was relocated just over the border in Hungary. Other Austrian Freemasons, the majority of whom were either self-employedPage 110 → businessmen or merchants (including many Jews), followed this example and held their ritual meetings regularly in Hungarian border cities or in Pressburg. Through this detour, these “border lodges” were able to circumvent the ban and to cultivate a lively, liberal lodge life in Austria before 1918.27 Even in Russia, where Freemasonry had long been prohibited, new lodges were established after 1905, initially in St. Petersburg and Moscow. They recruited their members from the elevated liberal bourgeoisie (which in Russia was represented by the Constitutional Democratic Party or Cadets). Many of them were already members of Masonic lodges in Paris. In 1913, there were forty Masonic lodges in Russia with approximately four hundred members. By 1915, this had increased to forty-nine lodges with about six hundred members—not an insignificant number considering their elite status.28 In February 1917, Masonic lodges assumed a leading role in the bourgeois-liberal government. However, at the beginning of 1918, the victorious Bolsheviks banned Freemasonry along with all other civic associations. On an international level, Masonic lodges can be divided into two camps. In the Anglophone countries and in Scandinavia, there were the strongly Protestant, more conservative lodges; and in France, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Austria, and other Catholic countries as well as in Eastern Europe, there were the secular, more liberal lodges. Only in Germany did these two camps coexist in close proximity. The upswing of German Freemasonry that began in the 1860s eroded to some degree regional differences in the distribution of Masonic lodges. The essential features of these differences, however, remained.29 Traditionally the lodges encountered more opposition in Catholic southern Germany than in Protestant northern Germany. In 1870, the percentage of Freemasons in terms of overall population was lowest in Bavaria, WГјrttemberg, and Baden. Freemasons in these southern German states were concentrated in individual cities that often had a majority of Protestant inhabitants, such as FГјrth or Bayreuth. In southern German states, Masonry was banned for long periods of time; when it was legally tolerated, government officials often made clear that the participation of civil servants and military officers in Masonic sociability was frowned on (for example, in Bavaria after 1850).30 In Munich, where Freemasonry had been banned since 1784, a new Masonic lodge was not established until 1871. However, during the Kaiserreich, Masonic lodges gained in appeal and influence in southern and southwestern Germany as well. In Hessia Page 111 →and Prussia, Masonic lodges traditionally had large memberships. The predominantly Catholic provinces in Prussia—Rhineland, Westphalia, Posen, and Silesia—had the lowest percentage of Freemasons in terms of overall population, while the Protestant provinces in Prussia—Saxony, Brandenburg, Pommeria, and Hannover—had the highest. The central German states—the Kingdom of Saxony, the Saxony Duchies, Anhalt, and Brunswick—had an even higher percentage of Freemasons. The small northern state of Mecklenburg also had an unusually large number of Masons. In the small cities of northeastern Germany, the local class of notables participated actively in the lodges. In northeastern Germany we find the highest percentage of Freemasons in the city-states of Hamburg, LГјbeck, and Bremen. However, if we consider all larger cities in Germany in 1872, the percentage of Freemasons was

highest in Frankfurt am Main (1.24 percent of the total population), followed by Leipzig (1.05 percent) and Hamburg (0.89 percent). Breslau was thirteenth with 0.35 percent. In addition to religion, the type of city appears to have played an important role. Trading cities, royal capitals, and university cities had a higher percentage of lodge members, while industrial cities had a lower percentage.31 With the growth of cities at the end of the nineteenth century, these differences disappeared as well. In 1871, Leipzig had only 107,000 inhabitants; in 1914, it had 625,000 and was the fourth largest German city after Berlin, Hamburg, and Munich. Breslau did not grow as quickly, but its increase was also impressive. Between 1861 and 1910, Breslau’s population quadrupled from approximately 120,000 to 500,000. The rapid growth of these cities also affected lodge sociability. Individual lodges, including in Breslau and Leipzig, often had more than four hundred members.32 On average German lodges had two to three hundred members. This increase in size made it difficult to maintain the intimacy of Masonic sociability. Between 1871 and 1914, the greatest increase in membership occurred in the left-liberal Grand Lodges of Bayreuth (+206.9 percent), Frankfurt (+161.7 percent), and Hamburg (+113.5 percent). These were followed by the ultraconservative GroГџe Landesloge (+92.2 percent), which caught up over the course of time with the moderately conservative Weltkugel Grand Lodge (+48.3 percent). These two national-conservative grand lodges constituted a narrow majority of Freemasons in Germany, 57 percent in 1871 and 53.8 percent in 1914. The increase in membership in the Royal York (+75 percent), the third grand lodge in Prussia, and the Grand Lodge of Saxony (+80.1 percent) was lower. These two grand lodges represented the Page 112 →national-liberal center. The Grand Lodge of Darmstadt, which had less than one thousand members, continued to decline, while the five lodges not affiliated with a grand lodge—including the Minerva and the Balduin Lodges in Leipzig—were able to maintain their memberships.33 In sum, the grand lodges located on the political margins—Bayreuth, Frankfurt, and Hamburg on the one hand, and the GroГџe Landesloge on the other—experienced the most rapid increase in membership, a clear indication of the politicization of Masonic lodges in imperial Germany. There was an enormous surge in Masonic membership during the 1860s and 1870s. Membership then stagnated during the 1880s and 1890s (the period of the “anti-Semitism debate”), although it actually declined only in 1892. Beginning in 1900, membership then increased again until 1914. Between 1860 and 1914, the total membership in Masonic lodges in Germany more than doubled (+150.2 percent), from 24,714 to 61,832. Between 1871 and 1914, the Verein deutscher Freimaurer (Association of German Freemasons), the liberal organization founded in the 1860s in opposition to the established grand lodges, increased from 862 members to 16,595.34 Who found Freemasonry appealing in imperial Germany? A comparison of lodge memberships in Breslau and Leipzig indicates that the trend beginning in the VormГ¤rz period continued: Wealthy merchants, entrepreneurs, and factory owners, as well as self-employed men with large incomes (physicians, lawyers, and architects) composed the bulk of Masonic membership. While the elevated BГјrgertum already constituted the majority of lodge brothers in 1840 (72.6 percent) and in 1876 (73.6 percent), this figure increased in 1906 to 80.9 percent.35 There was not, in other words, a social decline of any kind in Masonic lodges. On the contrary, the percentage of lower-middle-class lodge members continued to decline (23.6 percent in 1840, 22.7 percent in 1876, and 17.9 percent in 1906), a development that was discussed at length in the lodges. One lodge speaker emphasized in 1882 that craftsmen and the “class of small merchants, small farmers, and subaltern officials are unsuited [for Masonic lodges] not only because of the poverty of these circles, but also because of their lack of Bildung.”36 In his autobiography, another Prus-sian Freemason, looking back at the period before 1914, regretted that “the craftsmen class (which, as a result of growing industrialization, has mixed with the class of lower employees, technicians, and foremen)” was hardly represented in Masonic lodges at all. “Several lodges that I came to know imagine themselves far too noble to admit craftsmen and fitters. If Page 113 →other lodges were less prejudiced and as a result—for they recruit primarily from personal acquaintances—admitted a significant percentage of this decent lower middle class, the more exclusive neighboring lodges sometimes treated these lodges with great reservation, contemptuously regarding them as inferior.”37 The irony that Oskar Posner, the editor of the Freimaurer-Lexikon (Freemason Lexicon), used in 1911 to describe

lower-middle-class motives for applying to lodges also testifies to this social distance: “Brother Meyer in (let us say) Schmargendorf . . . is able to increase his own sense of personal importance if he can emphasize to the profane that Johann Wolfgang was also a Mason. This is also the entire tragedy. For this вЂalso’ implies the eradication of all sense of distance. Meyer and Goethe. Goethe as the model for Meyer from Schmargendorf, Goethe as the police-approved certificate of conduct for the civically (bГјrgerlich) well-behaved owner of the general store.”38 Within the lower middle class, relations between craftsmen, on the one hand, and midlevel employees and civil servants, on the other, shifted clearly in favor of the latter after 1876. For employees and teachers, however, participation in Masonic conviviality was not unproblematic. In his petition for admission in 1913, a teacher in Breslau reminded his future lodge brothers that “the address вЂdear brother’ [must not] remain empty words.” He feared that his vocation as a teacher would make him a “second-class brother.”39 Employees and teachers represented the lowest level of social respectability in Masonic lodges. The lower classes, which constituted more than half of gainfully employed men in Breslau between 1876 and 1906, continued to be excluded from Masonic lodges—with isolated exceptions such as musicians, subaltern postal and railway officials, church employees, and younger craftsmen who were not yet independent. The most significant change in the social composition of Masonic lodges beginning in the 1860s was the continued withdrawal of the old elites: aristocrats, senior officials, military officers, and feudal estate owners. This decline was more dramatically evident in the three conservative Breslau lodges (7.4 percent in 1840, 3.6 percent in 1876, and 1.2 percent in 1906) than in the liberal Leipzig lodges, where there had hardly been any aristocratic members already in the VormГ¤rz period. As a result, Prussian lodges lost their significance as meeting grounds where local and state elites interacted. This, if anything, was a social cause for Prussian Freemasons’ sense of decline. “One complains that the so-called upper ten thousand no longer belong to the lodges. The reason for this lies in the fact that a rigidly Page 114 →conservative spirit predominates among senior officials, officers, and landowners etc., while Freemasonry is essentially liberal. The good German educated BГјrgertum constitutes our core. Among the upper ten thousand, Casino societies and other clubs have emerged that serve merely social purposes.”40 An examination of sociable circles in Breslau confirms this. Silesian aristocrats traditionally joined the Zwinger Society, which was not unlike a club or Casino society. The political conservatism of the Zwinger Society, its social exclusivity, and its exclusion of Jews made it particularly suitable as a meeting place for Prussian elites with strong ties to the state. A comparison of the memberships of the Zwinger Society and Masonic lodges in Breslau in 1876 indicates that Masonic lodges had more members from the BГјrgertum, but only half as many civil servants and military officers. While there were some double memberships, Freemasons were only a small minority in the Zwinger Society.41 This minority was distinguished from the bulk of the Zwinger membership by the fact that it was almost exclusively “bourgeois”: wealthy merchants, factory owners, physicians, and lawyers. For the conservative-aristocratic Breslau elite with ties to the state, contacts in the Zwinger Society and student dueling societies appeared more valuable than a lodge certificate. Breslau’s civic elite did not meet in the Zwinger Society, but in the Bezirksverein and the Humboldtverein—the two most important associations of the city supporting the Liberal Party. In 1876, merchants composed approximately two-thirds of the membership of the Bezirks and Humboldt Associations, while there were hardly any senior officials and only very few members of the educated BГјrgertum. If the Zwinger Society was a conservative-aristocratic form of sociability closely allied to the state, the Bezirksverein and the Humboldtverein were a liberal-bourgeois form. Both in political and social terms, Masonic lodges lay somewhere between the two. Contemporary statisticians were aware that throughout the nineteenth century the aristocracy withdrew from Masonic lodges in Prussia. In 1809–10, the Zu den drei Weltkugeln Grand Lodge had a total of 4,431 members and 831 aristocrats (18.8 percent); in 1894–95, total membership was 13,572, but there were only 192 aristocrats (1.4 percent).42 A survey in 1831 of 49 Masonic lodges registered a total of 4,658 members and 374 aristocrats (8 percent). In 1890, the same lodges had 7,714 members, but only 154 aristocrats (2 percent).43 In the Zepter Lodge in Breslau in 1831, for example, there were a total of 286 members and 28 aristocrats (9.8 percent); in 1890, the total number of lodge members had increased to 340, Page 115 →but there were only six aristocrats

(1.8 percent). A survey of the three grand lodges in Prussia in 1900 produced similar results. Of the 13,356 registered lodge members, there were only 229 aristocrats (1.7 percent); there were 210 officers, only 80 of whom were aristocrats. Most of these officers had become Freemasons when Wilhelm I was emperor, and most of them were senior officers—the percentage of lieutenants was disproportionally small. Apparently Masonic lodges had little appeal for the new generation of Wilhelmine officers.44 The participation of Protestant clergymen in Masonic lodges declined to almost zero. During the 1850s the vast majority of them had resigned from their lodges. The Protestant Church continued to regard Freemasonry as a kind of pseudoreligion that sought to influence the Church from outside and that competed with it.45 This explains why, for example, in 1906 there were only between ten and twenty clergymen among approximately 15,000 members of the daughter lodges of the Zu den drei Weltkugeln Grand Lodge.46 The percentage of clergymen in Masonic lodges in Breslau and Leipzig was similarly small (0.6 percent in 1876 and 0.4 percent in 1906). Many clergymen were suspicious of Freemasonry’s “divisive” social exclusivity that “separated the community according to property,” its appeal to a “vague humanity,” and its “self-satisfied paraphrases” of Christian religiosity.47 As a result of these trends, Freemasonry’s influence in ecclesiastical and state institutions declined. The elevated BГјrgertum in the cities was the unambiguous mainstay of German Freemasonry. Differences, however, existed among the lodges. In 1906, the percentage of self-employed merchants—the core liberal group in imperial Germany48—was approximately twice as high in the liberal Breslau lodges as in the conservative ones. In 1876 and 1906, there were also more independent merchants in Leipzig lodges than in the conservative Breslau lodges. Drawing on a set of statistics from 1880–81, we can make the following generalization: The percentage of merchants and entrepreneurs was significantly higher in the liberal grand lodges—Hamburg (55.5 percent), Frankfurt (57 percent), and Bayreuth (49.7 percent)—than in the conservative grand lodges in Prussia—Zu den groГџen Weltkugeln (36.6 percent), the Landesloge (36.4 percent), and the Royal York (38.6 percent). The Grand Lodge of Saxony (which was not affiliated with the Balduin and Minerva Lodges in Leipzig) occupied a middle position (43.6 percent), in both political and social terms. The reverse is true for government officials and military officers. The Page 116 →Prussian grand lodges had the highest percentage of officials and officers: the Zu den drei Weltkugeln (16 percent), the Landesloge (11.4 percent), and the Royal York (11.3 percent). These were followed by the Grand Lodges in Saxony (5.5 percent), Hamburg (5.2 percent), Bayreuth (4.1 percent), and Frankfurt (3.2 percent), which all had significantly lower numbers.49 To sum up, there was a decline of senior officials and military officers in Masonic lodges. The Prussian grand lodges, where professional groups close to the state had traditionally exercised power and influence, were particularly affected by this trend. However, in comparison to the more liberal grand lodges, Prussian grand lodges remained close to the state. This partial withdrawal of the old elites from Masonic lodges in Prussia was either celebrated or bewailed, depending on one’s political orientation. Conservative Freemasons regarded the withdrawal as a sign of decline. Liberals, on the contrary, celebrated it as an indication of the strength of the German BГјrgertum. “Not the aristocrat by birth” but the “aristocrat of conviction,” not the “nobleman” but the “gentleman” was suited to be a lodge brother, one liberal Freemason proclaimed.50 In an address at the Zepter Lodge in Breslau in 1877, the National Liberal Wilhelm KГ¶rber made the following statement about “Freemasonry’s cultural historical task today”: “In contrast to that golden age of Masonry, namely, when men of science lavished care and attention upon it, the majority of brothers are now, in accordance with the spirit of the times, men of business, men of that labor that has reshaped the world with the weapons of technology.” Freemasonry’s greatest task, according to KГ¶rber, is “to combat among these businessmen the all too easily prevailing materialistic trend of the era, and to protect and preserve the ideal of pure humanity.”51 The issue of Masonic virtues in an allegedly materialistic era dominated numerous lodge speeches prior to 1914. Alexis Schmidt, one of the most influential conservative Freemasons, set the tone for the way this issue was framed: “In our current generation, Freemasonry truly fulfills its mission as a society within civil society,

which radiates virtue, loyalty, friendship, and honor.” “In the previous century, it [Freemasonry] was essentially still a domain of the ruling, aristocratic, and most finely educated classes.” In the nineteenth century, Schmidt argued, it has been adopted by the BГјrgertum and fulfills a “sacred mission” there. “For all the progress in culture and civilization as well as in public life, about which our era can truly be proud, also leads to difficult moral and social evils: the rise of self-interest, the increase in commercial competition, arrogance about knowledge,Page 117 → neglect of ideal goods, increase in social inequality, rebellion by the less independent classes, the presumptions of individualism, the habitual lies of society, the contempt for authority, materialism, and the lack of faith.” Only in the lodges and with the lodges, Schmidt continued, was it possible to stop this decline: “Here alone in these rooms are the ideal goods of humanity honored; here alone is human nature explored at its most profound level.”52 Another finding illustrates the relatively homogeneous composition of Masonic membership. The social profile of lodge officials in Breslau and Leipzig was almost identical with that of regular lodge members. In 1876, the vast majority of lodge officials were educated elites and senior civil servants. By 1906, this was no longer the case. The economic bourgeoisie now occupied half of all official lodge positions. This was a significant change from the VormГ¤rz period, when the educated elite alone often regulated lodge affairs. We find a similar trend in the lodge leadership, in the position of “grand master.” In 1840 and 1876, the majority of grand masters in Breslau and Leipzig were professors, physicians, and lawyers. By 1906, there were also bank directors, factory owners, and wealthy merchants who were grand masters. The position of lodge speaker, however, remained primarily the domain of the educated elite. Furthermore, in all three of the survey years (1840, 1876, and 1906), there were no Jewish lodge officials in Masonic lodges in Leipzig or Breslau.53 The only exceptions were the Hermann and Settegast reform lodges in Breslau. Religion rather than class defined the boundaries within Masonic lodges. This is also evident in the social profile of members of Scottish Rite lodges, which traditionally assumed aristocratic airs. Although Scottish Rite lodges claimed to be more exclusive than Blue lodges (which had only three degrees), the social profile of the memberships of these two forms of Masonic lodges differed only in minor ways.54 The Pallas Athene in Leipzig, which was part of the Minerva Lodge, was the only Scottish Rite lodge that had a disproportionately high number of members from the educated elite, including senior civil servants. The educated elite made up two-thirds of the Pallas Athene membership but only approximately 20 percent of the entire membership of the Minerva Lodge. However, due to the limited number of cases available, we should not overestimate the significance of this finding. At the end of the nineteenth century, the social profile of Scottish Rite and Blue lodges became even more similar. The higher degrees evoking aristocratic titles and rituals had long become a domain of the Page 118 →educated and the propertied BГјrgertum. Only Jewish Masons continued to be barred from these inner circles of Freemasonry. The fact that the average age of Freemasons in Leipzig and Breslau was fifty years also underlines the social homogeneity of Masonic lodges. Lodge brothers under thirty years of age were a tiny minority (3.1 percent in 1876, 1.9 percent in 1906). The vast majority of lodge brothers were between thirty and sixty years old and thus were part of that age group of the BГјrgertum with the highest income (81.0 percent in 1876, 74.9 percent in 1906). Many brothers were even older, had retired, and lived from their savings and assets (15.8 percent in 1876, 23.2 percent in 1906). Only men who had established themselves as part of the elevated BГјrgertum of a city could afford to become lodge members. Freemasons were admitted to their lodges at a comparatively advanced age. Between 1872 and 1876, the average of those admitted to lodges in Leipzig and Breslau was thirty-six; between 1902 and 1906, it was thirty-eight.55 The majority of Freemasons were already married when they were admitted. Many of them had studied at a Gymnasium or university or were financially independent. All of them were established in professional life.56 How did Masonic lodges achieve this homogeneity? If we examine the lodges’ admission process, the criteria for selection become clear. In addition to Bildung, independence was regarded as a basic presupposition for lodge membership. Independence referred, on the one hand, to the social status of lodge brothers. They had to be economically independent and earn a corresponding income. “Whoever is forced to sell his convictions and the courage to articulate them for money and bread is not ready for our alliance, is not even capable of organizing

his own life according to free knowledge, let alone to contribute to the elevation of the human race.”57 This criterion appears to have gained greater significance over the course of time. In 1890, a lodge brother complained that even many educated men (Gebildete) could no longer afford the high lodge fees. Less than 2 percent of people required to pay income tax in Prussia, he argued, had an annual income of more than three thousand marks, the sum that was necessary in order to be able to afford lodge expenses; annual fees of one hundred marks or more were difficult, if not impossible for them to pay.58 Another Freemason argued in 1892 that the heavy financial demands of Masonic lodges, which were far greater than those of other associations, were turning them into an organization for the upper ten thousand (not in the “aristocratic” but in the “plutocratic” sense): “The truly enormous Page 119 →admission and promotion fees, which together amount to more than 100 marks in the least expensive case and can be as high as 300 or 400 marks in individual lodges, prevent many capable members from joining. This is no less true of lodge fees themselves, which we estimate at 10 to 40 marks and which on average probably amount to 20 marks per person. This, however, is by no means everything. There are also voluntary payments, contributions to the poor, etc., as well as the cost of participating in sociable festivities, which many members can hardly afford any more.”59 Fees varied from lodge to lodge. It was not uncommon for lodge brothers to pay 300 marks or more for admission, and 50 marks or more for annual fees. If we calculate as well the additional costs for charity, banquets, and celebrations, expenditures could approach 500 marks a year, approximately half the annual income of a skilled laborer around 1900. The membership of the Masonic brotherhood was composed primarily of the wealthy BГјrgertum. Even if Masonry, as one observer noted very aptly in 1906, “is not intended exclusively for the upper ten thousand, it does not extend far beyond the upper hundred thousand.”60 The notion of independence, however, also referred to the “moral-intellectual” and “manly” freedom of lodge brothers.61 Neither the “power of another person” nor one’s own passions and prejudices were supposed to determine a Freemason’s actions.62 Due to their ostensible lack of independence, women were excluded from Masonic lodges in imperial Germany, although the modern women’s movement made repeated efforts to tear down this barrier. The exclusive and intimate contact with other men was one of the particular appeals of Masonic sociability.63 Freemasons were supposed to possess a “masculine” and independent mind, a fact that contributed to the advanced age at which brothers were admitted to the lodges. Freemasons were required to lead “morally virtuous” lives, and their behavior was scrupulously observed. Adultery led to expulsion; a divorce had to be justified to the lodge.64 The elaborate procedures before admission to a lodge functioned as a process of social-moral selection: “One moves in a thrice-screened society”—this was the public perception of Masonic lodges, and this was how the lodges wished to be perceived.65 How did one become a Freemason? As mentioned earlier, one could not simply submit an application, as one did with other associations. A lodge brother had to approach an aspiring candidate, propose his candidacy to the lodge, and then—this was decisive—personally vouch for him. As a rule, it was presumed that the two had known each other for a number of years and were connected by professional, familial, or personal ties. If Page 120 →all these prerequisites were met, the name of the candidate was then placed on the blackboard of the lodge for several weeks. During this time, objections to his admission could be raised. After this waiting period, the lodge brothers voted in a secret ballot. Occasionally, as in the aforementioned case of Carl Reclam, virtual campaigns for and against admission took place. Rejection by one Masonic lodge meant that the candidate was prohibited from applying to any other lodge in Germany. Nor could a rejection be appealed. Often a candidate was advised in advance to withdraw his application or at least to wait for a year to prevent defeat. The reasons for rejection could be of a purely private or business nature, but they could also be political, social, or religious (an issue that will be discussed later in detail). The lodges had at their disposal an extensive network of sources enabling them to gather exhaustive information about a candidate. In Leipzig, for example, the grand master of the Apollo Lodge, Willem Smitt, became so involved investigating the application of a school director from Crimmitschau that he traveled to the small town in Saxony in order to discuss the applicant with local notables. They expressed doubt about the honor and character

of the candidate, and his application was subsequently rejected.66 Lodge brothers often knew more than enough about local applicants, and they made inquiries at the respective lodges about nonlocal ones. Before 1914, some lodges even went so far as to commission private detective agencies to investigate candidates. In other words, in most cases the brothers were very well informed about a candidate even before he had set foot in the lodge. What motivated someone to seek admission to a Masonic lodge? The general public was convinced, as it had been during the VormГ¤rz period, that the hope of professional advancement and business contacts constituted an unspoken motive for admission. For example, the author of an article published in the PГ¤dagogisches Wochenblatt in 1892 suspected that the conspicuous increase of teachers in Masonic lodges in Silesia was due to the fact “that the Protestant inspector of schools is an enthusiastic Freemason, that a number of Freemasons have been promoted to school directors, and that the two school directors responsible for the pedagogical seminar are also lodge members.”67 The Masonic certificate offered numerous advantages during business trips to foreign countries. It lent the traveling lodge brother respectability and credibility as a business partner—the higher his lodge degree, the greater the trust it afforded. However, when a wine retailer from Leipzig Page 121 →requested on short notice that he be promoted to lodge master because he was about to travel to America on business and only lodge masters were admitted to the more important lodge meetings there, his brothers felt this was a bit overzealous. He was promoted to lodge master only after his return.68 In 1884, a pharmacist in Breslau complained that his expulsion from the lodge after a trial by the lodge’s honorary council had ruined his “business reputation—in particular in circles of former lodge brothers. I have been cast out like a pariah.” His expulsion, he continued, had been “discussed in detail in other local lodges, and from there it has also found its way into public establishments.”69 Myriad similar examples could be cited for various professional groups. Catholic and antiSemitic opponents of the lodges were only too eager to exploit them.70 However, the symbolic significance of being a lodge member appears to have outweighed the concrete professional advantages. The lodge badge lent its members social prestige or, to use Bourdieu’s term, “symbolic capital,” which could be extremely valuable in the public domain. It is difficult to overestimate the “status profit” that was accrued through lodge membership. Particularly men with social ambitions sought to make use of this. “The self-made man [English in the original] is a conspicuously frequent phenomenon in German lodges,” a Freemason from the Kaiserreich wrote in retrospect in his autobiography.71 In fact, the increase in lodge membership beginning in the 1860s can in part be traced to the numerous success stories of the time narrating an individual’s rise to the elevated circles of a city. These individual narratives, with their emphasis on hard work and self-improvement, fit well with the self-image of the BГјrgertum as a meritocratic elite. For example, in his application for admission to a Masonic lodge in 1907, Heinrich GГ¶tz, a well-known photographer in Breslau, explained that he had initially heard about Freemasonry from his former employer, who had been a lodge brother. Now that he had established his own successful business, GГ¶tz continued, he wanted at last to fulfill the “long held desire” to become a Freemason himself. One of GГ¶tz’s sponsors literally describes him as a “self-made man” [English in the original], who acquired his wealth and Bildung on his own and who was known in the best circles for his public lectures.72 There were no objections to GГ¶tz’s candidacy. It appears that lodge membership gave “self-made men” the certainty that they had finally made it. Many prominent Freemasons in Leipzig, such as the piano maker Julius BlГјthner, the zoologist Alfred Brehm, or the architect Clemens Thieme, had humble beginnings and worked their Page 122 →way to the top. Thieme’s biography is exemplary in this respect.73 Thieme was born in 1861 of lower-class origins (his father was a prison guard). In 1875, after graduating from the primary school, Thieme began an apprenticeship in the building trade. In the evenings after work, he took classes at the newly established Municipal Trade School in Leipzig. In 1877, Thieme transferred to the Royal Building Trade School for four years. After graduating, he worked as a building engineer. Finally, in 1891, after graduating from the Polytechnic in Dresden, he worked as a self-employed architect and certified master builder. After establishing himself as an architect, Thieme began to look for new challenges. He became a member of the Apollo Lodge and the Verein fГјr die Geschichte Leipzigs (Association for the History of Leipzig), which had been founded in 1868. At a meeting of the Verein, he heard about an old

plan to construct a monument commemorating the VГ¶lkerschlacht (Battle of the Nations) in Leipzig. Thieme was taken with the idea. During a club evening at the Apollo Lodge in 1894, he was able to win the enthusiastic support of his lodge brothers for the monument.74 Thieme dedicated himself completely to the project, subordinating everything else in his life, including starting a family, to building the monument. At a critical phase in the project, he even advanced a large amount of his own assets in order to complete the construction. Although Thieme was “rewarded” for his engagement—in 1906 he became a Kammerrat (councillor of the Board of Finance), in 1911 a member of the Leipzig City Council for the Free Conservative Party, and in 1913 he was named a Geheimer Hofrat (privy councillor) as well as an honorary citizen of Leipzig—we should not trivialize Thieme’s efforts here solely as “the accumulation of symbolic capital.” Rather, Thieme was driven by the specific ideal of Bildung, an ideal he devoted his life to; in constructing the monument he attempted to transfer the ideal of moral Bildung onto the German nation.75 In addition to Bildung and independence, a proper sense of charity was also considered essential for Freemasons. As a rule, the giving of charity occurred discreetly and without public ado. It was enough for the lodge brothers to know that they had contributed to the welfare of the community. In any case their civic engagement in municipal society was well known. In 1816, the Balduin Lodge in Leipzig founded the first secular Sunday school in Germany for children of the lower classes. Freemasons not only served as teachers at the school but also provided a large part of the funding. Occasionally lodges maintained their own charitable associations, which then worked not only for the municipality but also for the Page 123 →families of deceased or impoverished lodge brothers. In many cases, lodge brothers bequeathed their assets to the lodges for charitable purposes, in order to secure, as one Freemason in Breslau put it in 1895, the social and moral improvement of “the poor and the uneducated, the immature, the weak, the ill and those killed in battle.”76 Beginning around 1900, an association called Bruderhilfe (Fraternal Assistance) was established in Leipzig, which set up a home for sick children.77 Individual grand lodges also had well-endowed foundations that contributed to the public good. Another reason that men sought admission to a Masonic lodge was more specifically bourgeois. In a modern world oriented around achievement and competition, lodge brothers yearned for a social space that could function as a kind of luminous moral counterworld. They believed that a domain should exist beyond profession and family life, a domain in which middle-class men could seek to improve and perfect themselves. There is much evidence suggesting that we take this desire seriously and not dismiss it merely as ideology or camouflage for the “actual” material motives of professional advancement. Moreover, the professional and “ideal” spheres were intertwined in various ways. For example, in 1907 the departmental head of a Breslau bank explained his desire to join a Masonic lodge as follows: “So as to have an opportunity in the free hours that my profession, which is oriented around material life, leaves me to pursue higher goals.” The bank director joined the Zepter Lodge that year, emphasizing “my action springs solely from my desire to work with like-minded men for the ennoblement of themselves and humanity and to cultivate noble friendship and sociability within such a circle.”78 The particular intimacy of Masonic lodges—their secret rituals, emblems, and imaginative titles—offered their members a self-contained “ideal” space within society. This exclusivity and intimacy was what distinguished Masonic sociability within the wide-ranging associational landscape of imperial Germany. “As an opponent of those forms of sociability that unfortunately have become common,” Richard Greupner, one of the leaders of the National Liberal Party in Silesia, argued in his application for admission to a Masonic lodge in 1910, “I have found in my intercourse with lodge brothers over many years that true sociability and the great ideals of humanity are represented nowhere more purely than here.”79 In 1902, a Leipzig grand master promised a new brother immediately after his admission ritual, “In your intercourse with the brothers, you will find it very valuable to leave behind the uniformity of social life in the metropolis and enter a neutral domain, where sociability experiences a certain ennoblement.”80Page 124 → Several years later, a Freemason in Hamburg argued, “The lodge is the refuge for all those who have had enough of the daily nerve-wracking hustle and bustle of making a living and who long for peace and quiet.”81 In other words, the lodges promised bourgeois men protection from a society that they themselves had played a central role in establishing. Late nineteenth-century Freemasons believed that materialism was the great menace to civil society. Materialism

resulted in the “drive for profit and the addiction to pleasure, the bitter confessional conflicts, and the inequality of the classes,” and “a gradual civil war [seemed to] develop, which threatened to eradicate contemporary culture as a whole.”82 It was precisely this sense of crisis—to return to the thesis formulated at the beginning of the chapter—that made Masonic lodges so popular among the Bürgertum before 1914. The fact that in the modern world Masonic lodges appeared to be relics of a better era of civic virtue and moral ritual made them all the more appealing to many Bürger. The common rhetoric about the crisis of German society, which arose around 1900 both inside and outside of Masonic lodges, indicates the extent to which society was still understood as “civil” (bürgerlich), as a society that was supposed to embody and realize the aspirations of the Bürgertum. The German Bürgertum assembled in Masonic lodges continued to feel that it was the “general class,” that it represented the nation and indeed humanity itself, even if other social forces increasingly contested these claims.

The Politics of the Apolitical “Civil society is the quintessence of those relations of mutual dependence, which arise with the natural inequality of man and with the distribution of property and Bildung, and which are reshaped every day in a neverending process of human intercourse. . . . The civil society of a wealthy people is always an aristocracy, even if it has a democratic constitution. Or to formulate this dryly with a deeply hated but nonetheless true expression, class rule. Or more correctly, class society arises as necessarily from the nature of society as the opposition between rulers and ruled arises from the nature of states.”83 Few Freemasons would have endorsed this description of German society by Heinrich von Treitschke, even if they implicitly agreed with its message, that both society and the state require a propertied and educated elite in order to ensure order and progress. Freemasons, however, did Page 125 →not seek to confront the political issue of social inequality by employing the new language of class conflict and social antagonism but rather clung to the older discourse of Bildung, civic virtue, and social harmony, a discourse that increasingly acquired a nationalist undertone. For this reason, Freemasons never regarded social democracy as a regular political opponent but merely as a kind of moral confusion or “degeneration.” Socialism was seen as a pathetic counterutopia of the Masonic ideal of society. Both Social Democrats and Freemasons claimed for themselves the notions of freedom, equality, and fraternity. In 1878, Alexis Schmidt, a spokesman for conservative Freemasons, argued that this triad, when shorn of its moral substance, produces “distorted images, as every revolutionary phenomenon has shown us.” Masonic lodges, he continued, were the social space, in which “there is a secure and solid moral ground upon which to practice these terms. They are thus models for a future, improved, and perfected society.”84 The rise of social democracy and its “distorted” appropriation of civic ideas and practices repeatedly led Freemasons to engage in self-critique. Individualism, the pursuit of profit and pleasure, and the materialism of the era, they argued, contributed to the rise of social democracy. “Our brotherhood draws its members from the wealthy classes of society, but precisely these classes rarely demonstrate the energy, enterprise, and concord necessary to ensure the common good in the face of destructive elements. Frequently our BГјrgertum has remained ignorant or has simply looked on while the political and social order was undermined. Given this circumstance, we cannot be surprised if only a feeble humanism is voiced in the lodges as well.”85 Anton Eckstein, a member of the Apollo Lodge in Leipzig, argued in 1906 that increased wealth has made the elevated BГјrgertum recklessly egotistic, decadent, and “overly showy.” “They have no tact in giving, no noblesse oblige; they lack taste and artistic understanding and adopt anything that the goddess вЂfashion’ can dream up in her most insane fantasies.—Just like Social Democrats, they flaunt and fish for effects.”86 Society can only be regenerated, Eckstein argued, if the BГјrgertum, no matter whether liberal or conservative, fends off the growing influence of social democracy, and not only in political terms. They must also oppose this moral decadence within the BГјrgertum itself, in particular within Masonic lodges. At the turn of the twentieth century, there were also isolated calls to open Freemasonry socially, or at least for more cordial relations between employers and employees.87 In 1907, Diedrich Bischoff, a bank director in Page 126 →Leipzig, declared himself opposed to the transformation of Masonic lodges into “Casino societies for the вЂelevated BГјrgertum.’” Rather, Bischoff argued, the lodges must retain their claim to transcend

class difference and must support the admission of workers. However, “only those who think and feel in an unprejudiced manner and who place the general—the construction of humanity—above the particular, above political parties and above class, are truly worthy of lodge membership. Members of the Socialist Party, for example, would not be appropriate comrades in the battle for our great ideas of freedom and fraternity.”88 Freemasonry, however, did not open itself to other classes during the Kaiserreich. Neither Social Democrats nor workers became members of Masonic lodges prior to 1918. Ironically, because Freemasons refused to think in terms of class society, they continued to accept as natural the distance between themselves and those below them. The fixed points in the Masons’ self-image remained social harmony and a fundamental belief that individual Bildung and achievement were the only paths leading to the moral improvement of society. As a result, Freemasons regarded conflicts between the classes primarily as the result of rampant materialism. Masonic lodges located themselves beyond the notions of higher and lower, or Right and Left. Consequently, they understood the deepening political rift within society merely as the expression of a moral crisis. How did the political boundaries within the lodges change during the Kaiserreich? In the decades before the First World War, the liberal and national BГјrgertum struggled to define its own political identity. This was evident in Masonic lodges as well. The division into liberal humanitarian and Christian conservative lodges, which had existed since the VormГ¤rz period, intensified after 1871. This division, however, did not correspond precisely with the general division of the BГјrgertum as a whole into liberal and conservative camps. In terms of party politics, “conservative Christians” in Masonic lodges were closely affiliated with the conservative National Liberal Party and the moderate (Free) Conservative Party. It was difficult, if not impossible to reconcile the basic moral and political ideas of Freemasonry with the conservatism of Junkers east of the Elbe, with orthodox Catholicism and Protestantism, or with populist anti-Semitism. Conversely, we cannot simply identify “liberal humanitarians” in the lodges with left liberals in German party politics. While in southwestern Germany this may have been the case, in Saxony, where “liberal humanitarian” lodges had traditionally been dominant, the BГјrgertum primarily supported the National Liberal Party and the Conservative Party.89 This in turn affected Page 127 →the political language employed by “liberal humanitarian” Freemasons in Saxony. As in the decades prior to 1870–71, Freemasons continued to believe that lodge sociability was supposed to be above party politics. Lodge brothers were united in their belief in the power of reason and Bildung; in the improvement of the self and thus of civil society, the nation, and humanity itself (led by the moral elite in the lodges); in achievement rather than birthright; in the market, the monarchy, and God (even if one complained about materialism, sycophancy, and clericalism); and in the principle of freedom within reasonable limits. This set of beliefs was “liberal,” not necessarily in terms of party politics, but in terms of its intellectual origins. It was an identity located beyond Left and Right, committed to an early modern vision of “civil society,” if not necessarily to democracy. An address by Oswald Marbach in 1873 offers an exemplary expression of Freemasonry’s moral-political language, which was essentially that of a moderate liberalism: “We Freemasons have dedicated ourselves to spiritual illumination. Thus wherever a party fights for light against darkness, that is where we belong! We Freemasons take the side of life against death. Life, however, is movement and progress. Thus wherever a party of movement and progress exists, that is where we belong! We Freemasons reject hatred and harbor a love for humanity. Thus wherever a party has raised the banner of human love, that is where we belong!” Every individual, Marbach continued, should participate in politics, not as a Freemason but as the citizen of a nation. In the lodges, on the contrary, they should focus their attention on “striving for the moral perfection of the individual,” “for ultimately this alone produces the true progress of humanity, a progress that is more obstructed than promoted by the discord and battle of political parties.” Freemasonry, Marbach argued, “does not seek to produce bliss through violence, but through freedom, that is, we want a growing number of people to become masters over their own selves.”90 This understanding, which was tied to an earlier vision of “civil society,” persisted even when existing civil society had already assumed quite a different form. One Freemason described this vision in glowing terms during a speech at the Apollo Lodge in 1905: “By disregarding everything that separates—for example, the

divisions of political life, which continue in part to be glaring—Freemasonry makes it possible to establish true friendships with a profound commitment to mutual support among people who would otherwise have remained distant in profane life. In this respect, the Masonic brotherhood always works to connect. It weaves the web of the Page 128 →state organism ever more densely. As a result, the power of sociability, which the state requires, steadily increases.” Ultimately, the speaker argued, lodge sociability will extend beyond “the intimacy of the bonds of human sociability,” even beyond the framework of the state, and will lead to the “interconnection of even the most distant states,” in present-day parlance, to a global civil society.91 Again, Freemasons could perceive this vision of society built on sociability and civic virtue not as anachronistic, but as utterly modern and future-oriented. Prior to 1914, they continued to believe that the world would become inexorably more “civilized,” that despite all internal and external conflicts a single world society would emerge, whose moral elites around the globe would be the cosmopolites in Masonic lodges. This fundamentally apolitical language had eminently political consequences. Before turning to this issue, however, it is important to note that in imperial Germany Masonic lodges continued to strive to unite the different political groups within the BГјrgertum. Thirty-six of the electors for Prussian Landtag elections in the district of Breslau in 1876 were also Breslau Freemasons. Three of them were conservatives, twenty-six were national liberals, and seven were left liberals. For the elections in 1882, there were twenty-two conservatives, six national liberals, and twenty-two left liberals. For elections in 1903, in 1908, and in 1913, the number of conservatives remained more or less constant (fourteen in 1903, sixteen in 1908 and in 1913), while the number of the left liberals declined somewhat (twenty-four in 1903, twenty-three in 1908, and seventeen in 1913).92 However, what is even more surprising than the approximate parity that emerged between conservative and liberal Freemasons here is the fact that the total number of electors who were Freemasons was small (even if we take into account the fact that neither Social Democrats nor members of the Center Party could nominate a Freemason). This contrasts starkly with the very active participation of Freemasons in municipal politics. In 1876, 21.4 percent of all Breslau city councilmen were members of a Masonic lodge. In 1908, the figure was 18 percent. More than half of them were members of the Zepter Lodge, yet another indication of its elevated position within Masonic life in Breslau. In 1876, the majority of Freemasons who were city councilmen were national liberals. In 1906, onethird of them were conservative and two-thirds were liberal, which is perhaps typical for Masonic party politics during the Kaiserreich. The percentage of lodge brothers among Leipzig city councilmen was also very high. In 1876, they made up exactly one-third of all councilmen, and in 1906, 16.9 percent.Page 129 → Twelve of the fifty-seven members of the Harmonie Committee, which was responsible for nominating candidates for the first segment of city council election, were also Freemasons (21.2 percent). Before 1914, the Harmonie Committee was composed of Leipzig’s local notabilities.93 In his application for admission to the Zepter Lodge in 1910, the National Liberal politician Richard Greupner argued that “the worldview that forms the basis of the Masonic idea is entirely compatible with my own political convictions.” He knew this, he continued, because he was already acquainted with several brothers at the Zepter Lodge through his “activities as a political party official.”94 On the national level, however, Masonic lodges exercised little direct influence on party politics. More typical is the example of Prince Heinrich zu SchГ¶naich-Carolath (president of the Reichstag, leader of the Berlin National Liberals, and grand master of the Royal York Lodge during the 1890s). In an address at a lodge celebration, he called on the Freemasons gathered in Berlin as members of parliament always to respect their brothers in political disputes and to provide the public with an example of how Freemasons treat each other despite their political differences.95 Mass politics, as it developed in Wilhelmine Germany, was not easily reconcilable with the political understanding of the BГјrgertum in Masonic lodges. While the BГјrgertum remained politically powerful in the municipalities, it never utilized its local power bases (e.g., Masonic lodges) for national politics. As is well known, one essential feature of civic associations is that they are anchored in local politics and culture. The German BГјrgertum’s failure to exercise political power on a national level, in other words, was not the result of their ostensible distance from politics in the Kaiserreich but rather of their specific understanding of politics. This understanding was shaped by the BГјrgertum’s hold on political power in the municipalities and their

exclusive sociable circles. Beginning in the 1870s and 1880s, it was also shaped by a nationalist discourse ostensibly beyond everyday politics, which was supposed to legitimate the BГјrgertum’s leading role in society in general.96 The fact that the exclusive and well-connected lodges hardly engaged in national political life confused the friends of Freemasonry in the German public, while the lodges’ political opponents—the Center, Social Democrats, and anti-Semites—regarded it with disbelief. For example, in an article in the conservative newspaper Berliner Neueste Nachrichten in 1908, Heinrich von Puttkamer expressed regret that Masonic lodges did not participate directly in political life given the success of the Social DemocratsPage 130 → in the previous Reichstag elections. “According to their own principles, the German lodges are as far removed from Ultramontanism as from the strivings of Social Democrats. There is no question that they are one of those political parties supporting the state and that given their wide distribution and good organization they could have a beneficial effect on political elections!”97 However, in contrast to French lodges but similar to English and American lodges during the century prior to 1914, German lodges did not engage in open party politics. With a bitterness reminiscent of Theodor Mommsen’s famous political testament, Bluntschli announced in 1870 that he was abandoning his attempt to reshape German Masonry into a powerful national political organization. “I had hoped, even if I was never confident, to make the brotherhood, which has an excellent organization and which illuminates a variety of ideas in its symbols, into an effective force for strengthening the moral powers of the nation; to do credit to ideal goods rather than mere materialism (in the middle classes as well); to work better for intellectual freedom without licentiousness and coarseness; and to practice humanity in regard to the lower classes as well. My illusion has been destroyed. The instrument is unusable.”98 Bluntschli’s goal of creating a “national lodge,” which would standardize the German lodge system and lead the fight against “the enemies of humanity” in everyday political life, failed after 1871 not only because of a lack of engagement by the majority of lodge brothers.99 It also proved to be illusory given the central features of German Freemasonry that attracted the politically diverse BГјrgertum in Germany. Freemasonry’s division into a conservative nationalist camp and a liberal humanitarian one intensified after the founding of the Reich, particularly beginning in the late 1870s with the rise of political anti-Semitism. This division continued to run—if no longer so unambiguously—between Prussian and non-Prussian Freemasons. The negotiations between the various grand lodges after 1871, which were filled with diplomatic gestures and acrimonious disputes, reveal a grotesque overestimation of their own importance. However, as these are only of marginal interest here, a broad outline will suffice. The wars of 1866 and 1870–71 raised the general question whether grand lodges in Germany should adopt a uniform constitution or maintain their federal structure. Initially, the grand lodges in Prussia did not appear averse to disposing of their liberal counterparts with the assistance of the state. After 1866, the Grand Lodge of Hannover was dissolvedPage 131 → at the direct instigation of the Prussian king. Its daughter lodges became affiliated with the Royal York Grand Lodge, while the lodges in Schleswig-Holstein joined the GroГџe Landesloge. However, after 1871, Prussian Freemasons adopted the model of the new federal state and sought to maintain the federal structure of the Masonic lodge system in Germany. Thus, the Grand Lodges of Hamburg, Frankfurt, Darmstadt, Bayreuth, and Saxony were able to retain their independence. Only the Zur aufgehenden MorgenrГ¶te Lodge, which was affiliated with the Grand Lodge of England, was ordered to join a grand lodge in Germany (in this case, the Grand Lodge of Frankfurt). The GroГџmeistertag (Grand Master Convention), an annual meeting of the leaders of the grand lodges in Germany, was established in 1868. Immediately after the founding of the German Empire in 1871, it was proposed that this GroГџmeistertag be transformed into a GroГџlogenbund (Grand Lodge Alliance). After protracted negotiations, this proposal was adopted in 1872. In a memorandum, Bluntschli demanded, without success, that this loose alliance be reorganized into a centralized “Imperial Grand Lodge.” The individual grand lodges, however, were not willing to agree to more than an annual meeting at the GroГџlogentag, where leaders of the grand lodges attempted to establish some standardization of lodge policies. While this federal

structure was able to diffuse conflicts of everyday lodge life, it was irreconcilable with the liberal hopes of the 1860s that Freemasonry would become a unified and politically effective force. The hope that the liberal Crown Prince Friedrich III would be able to reform Prussian Freemasonry against the will of his father also remained unfulfilled. In 1874, Friedrich even resigned from his position as Ordensmeister (warden) of the GroГџe Landesloge, although he remained the deputy protector of all Prussian lodges. With his resignation, Friedrich acknowledged the consequences of lodge officials’ opposition to his attempts to reform the GroГџe Landesloge. As long as the Berlin grand lodges remained under the influence of Wilhelm I and his entourage, the conservative Christian camp had the whip in its hand, even if the majority of Freemasons were liberal. However, the liberals believed that it was only a matter of time until, under the leadership of Friedrich III, they would gain the upper hand in the grand lodges as well. Friedrich’s death in 1888, only a few months after that of his father Wilhelm, brought a sudden and definitive end to these hopes. Friedrich III had tried in vain to interest his own son, Wilhelm II, in Freemasonry.100 Wilhelm II, however, exhibited no inclination for Freemasonry,Page 132 → either in the conservative Christian form embodied by his grandfather Wilhelm I or in the liberal-humanitarian “English” form embodied by his father Friedrich III. Wilhelm consciously broke with the Hohenzollerns’ traditional preferential treatment of the lodges, in part to distance himself from his father’s world of ideas. Only at the urging of conservatives at the Berlin grand lodges was Wilhelm II prepared to appoint his cousin Prince Friedrich Leopold of Prussia (who had become a Freemason in Berlin in 1888) as the new protector of Prussian Freemasonry in 1894. Wilhelm, however, made no secret of his own aversion to Freemasonry. For example, in 1911 he ordered that all allusions to Freemasonry be removed from the new production of the Magic Flute at the Berlin State Opera.101 It is no coincidence that Freemasonry lost the privileged position it had enjoyed in the Prussian state and in the empire prior to 1888 at approximately the same time that the political alliance between the authoritarian state and the moderately liberal BГјrgertum came to an end. Fig. 2. (left) Kaiser Wilhelm I in Masonic regalia. (Courtesy of the Freimaurer-museum Bayreuth.) Fig. 3. (right) Kaiser Friedrich III in Masonic regalia. (Courtesy of the Freimaurer-museum Bayreuth.) The deaths of the two royal supporters and protectors of Prussian Page 133 →Freemasonry in 1888 also marked a turn in another regard. Wilhelm II’s public distance to Freemasonry was an expression of and the catalyst for a new attitude toward Masonic lodges. Conservative monarchists and, beginning in the 1880s, anti-Semites regarded the lodges with suspicion. This caused a temporary crisis in conservative Prussian lodges.102 It was no coincidence that an article entitled “Freemasonry and Judaism” appeared in Theodor Fritsch’s Antisemitische Korrespondenz (Anti-Semitic Correspondence) in 1888, initiating a new campaign against the lodges: “The existence of Freemasonry is justified neither on moral nor on pragmatic grounds. That which reaches the public about the lodges is not exactly edifying, and only Freemasons themselves have an interest in the Masonic clique getting their brothers appointed to as many offices as possible in the state and municipal administration.” Anti-liberalism and anti-Semitism congealed here into a distorted image of the lodges: “However, the worst thing remains the influence that the Jew has acquired in the lodges. The fact that the socalled groГџe Landesloge does not admit Jews alters little in the matter. The Jews from other lodges cannot be denied access as guests, and thus they too go in and out of the reputedly anti-Semitic Landesloge and use it as an information center for business and political espionage.” The article demanded a ban on Masonic lodges in order to protect the constitutionally guaranteed equality of citizens before the law.103 The conservative newspaper Kreuzzeitung also made the absurd accusation that Masonic lodges were a “branch” of the alliance israГ©lite. It is obvious, according to the article, “that international Freemasonry is a stronghold of international Judaism, and that beneath the mask of humanity it is merely the business of the latter that is taken care of in the lodges.”104 It was not only in the Habsburg Empire that the anti-Semitic slogan “Jews and Freemasons” gained so much currency that anyone who spoke out in support of Judaism was regarded either as a Jew or a Freemason.105 Even opposition to anti-Semitism within Masonic lodges remained trapped in the strictures of this slogan, for such opposition almost always insisted on distancing itself rhetorically from Judaism.

Dietrich von Oertzen, the editor of the Allgemeine Konservative Monatsschrift, published a critique of Freemasonry in 1882.106 Oertzen followed Hengstenberg’s and Bauer’s critiques from the decades after 1848. He did not, however, adopt the Jewish-Masonic conspiracy theories that had been expounded by Catholic and anti-Semitic publicists, and he rejected Eckert’s writings as worthless. Oertzen, who was one of the most important conservative publicists in Saxony, directed his central critique at Page 134 →the lodges’ “claim, as foolish as it is ridiculous, . . . to be a moral institution.” Instead, he argued, they should reorganize into an international club with purely sociable goals. After all, he continued, the Masonic brotherhood has not come any closer to its goal of becoming an “ideal brotherhood of men.” “On the contrary, although according to its original definition it is supposed to be emphatically democratic, it has for the most part developed into a club more for aristocrats of money than of birth, a club that desires nothing more than access to the great and powerful of this world and that has only played with democratic ideas as long as these did not threaten its money bags.” In general, Oetzen continued, “the lodge [is] the darling of the third estate”; “liberalism and the lodge system are in essence synonymous”; “вЂliberal’ representatives fight in parliaments for the lodges’ most precious ideas”: civil marriage, the separation of school and religion, and the state’s cultural battle (Kulturkampf) against the Church. The lodges place “themselves beside and above the Church and claim to be something more general and thus something higher insofar as they stress only natural religion, which is supposedly common to all men, but which otherwise allows them to retain their own opinions.” Thus, Oetzen argued, Masonic religiosity—for example, in Bluntschli’s FreimaurergesprГ¤chen (Masonic Dialogues)—develops “in a vapid and trivial language” a worldview excluding all religion and is for this reason so appealing to the “third estate.” “Freemasonry is simply a comfortable religion; in fact, it is more comfortable than religion.”107 A critique of Freemasonry published in 1896 in the Deutsche Adelsblatt, the journal of the Deutsche Adelsgenossenschaft, also caused a sensation. The article declared “that Freemasonry, as such and in principle, is our enemy, that is, the enemy of the Christian-monarchical hierarchical society that has developed historically according to the principle of authority. Indeed it is one of our most dangerous enemies.” This critique was aimed primarily at conservative lodge brothers, who were accused of political blindness, as the ultimate goals of Freemasonry were “the democratization and republicanization of the peoples of the world, and the dissolution of the Christian-monarchical state through a naturalist, international вЂMasonic empire’ of вЂfreedom, equality, and fraternity.’”108 There is some irony in the fact that anti-Semites, Catholics, and conservatives all portrayed Freemasons as political conspirators, while left liberals such as Bluntschli were driven to despair by the political inertia of Page 135 →lodge brothers. In 1882, Michael Georg Conrad, a naturalist writer and publicist and an enthusiastic left liberal and anticleric, said of German lodges: “Rubber-band morality and intellectual cowardice threaten to reduce the morals of our brotherhood to a linguistic shell of decency, to a soulless shadow theater of pettybourgeois romantic rhetoric, and to displace all ethical standards. To form an opinion about the essence and strivings of a man, one no longer investigates the core of his knowledge and sensations, his desires and abilities, but rather is satisfied . . . to ask: does he have the good-natured miniature virtues that fit into our charming framework; does he play a social role that flatters our vanity; do we feel no embarrassment at his improvised speeches; in short, is he a perfect example of the mediocrity of intellectual, moral, and social conventionality?” At another point, Conrad stated laconically, “The lodge is not a laboratory of new ideas, but a conservatory of old ones.”109 Although Conrad did establish a German lodge in Naples, he was skeptical or even negative about the German lodge system. Critics such as Conrad believed that the self-satisfaction of German Freemasons was a sign of decadence and imminent decline. Freemasonry, according to Conrad, could demonstrate its modernity only if the lodges were actively involved in “political and ecclesiastical progress,” in “the Kulturkampf that has ignited everywhere.”110 While these left-liberal intellectuals were a minority in the lodges, they were nonetheless effective publicists. In Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain, the figure of Settembrini, the Italian “literati” and political Freemason, is a caricature of this kind of intellectual. The real Luigi Settembrini, a professor of literature

and a Freemason, was in fact one of Conrad’s university instructors in Naples. Left-liberal Freemasons such as Conrad, Findel, or Bluntschli called for a politicization of the lodges as an escape from the crisis of liberal identity. The Kulturkampf against the Catholic Church offered Freemasons even more of an opportunity than the battle against Social Democracy to take a stand for the “cause of humanity.” An embittered antiCatholicism was the most conspicuous and significant bond uniting lodge brothers in imperial Germany despite their political differences.111 Beginning in the 1860s, religion became a central moral and political issue for Freemasons as well as for German civil society as a whole. The aggressive language of the liberal KulturkГ¤mpfer in Masonic lodges indicates how intimately the idea of the progress of humanity was tied to fears of degeneration and fantasies of violence. Page 136 →

Progress or Barbarism? Catholics and Freemasons The politicization of Catholicism, which gained momentum after the revolution of 1848, included a staunch opposition to Freemasonry. Conversely, Freemasons portrayed the Catholic Church, in particular the Jesuit Order, as a secret opponent of progress. Beginning in the 1860s, a polemical battle developed in journals and newspapers between Catholic politicians and scholars such as von Ketteler and Stolz and their liberal counterparts such as Venedey and Bluntschli. This opposition intensified as the conflict between the new nation-state and the Catholic Church developed after 1871.112 Masonic lodges and the Catholic Church now regarded each other as ultimate metaphysical enemies. German Freemasons, who according to their own statutes were supposed to prohibit any discussion of politics and religion in their lodges, proved to be embittered KulturkГ¤mpfer. The anti-Catholicism of German Freemasons was no less strident than that of their French or Italian brethren, even if German lodge brothers, unlike the latter, were not secular but predominantly Protestant.113 Like their French and Italian counterparts, German Freemasons employed a language here that was surprisingly violent, far exceeding the political calculus of Bismarck. It was the liberal-enlightened, vaguely Protestant language of moral universalism, which mixed the older metaphoric of light and darkness with the more recent language of scientific-technological progress. This language transformed the conflict between church and state into an existential opposition.114 Admittedly, even before 1871 Freemasons such as Bluntschli regarded Catholicism as an existential enemy. For Bluntschli, who succeeded Robert von Mohl as a professor at the University of Heidelberg in 1861 and who became grand master of the Masonic lodge in Heidelberg in 1864, the papal encyclical against Freemasonry was evidence of the “nocturnal darkness of intolerance,” of “how far Rome has remained behind the moral progress of humanity.”115 Bluntschli’s hatred of Catholicism was nourished by a belief in progress and by a sense of crisis that many liberal Freemasons shared. In 1869, he warned about the self-satisfaction and overconfidence of the BГјrgertum, which now stood on “eroded ground.” While the Masonic brotherhood remains powerful, Bluntschli argued, as “the only free association of educated men that extends across the entire globe,” educated BГјrger feel more secure than they should. “They trust Bildung, the truth, and the spirit of the century, but they underestimate the opposing forces. That dark authority finds most dangerous and enormous approval in the highest courtly circles and in the depths of the ignorant Page 137 →crowd, particularly among the rural population. Through clever calculation of human weaknesses and passions and through the enthusiasm of religious fanaticism, it prepares for the imminent world war.” If “this powerful force” were to succeed in reassuming power, not only Freemasonry but “the highest goods of humanity would suffer immediate destruction, and a horrible barbarism would be established. It would be a hundred times better to die than to endure this.”116 In a lodge speech in 1873, Bluntschli again claimed that Ultramontanists were “criminals against humanity, ” whom Freemasons, as the trustees of humanity, must oppose.117 For Bluntschli, the issue boiled down to a simple Manichaean question: “Should the progress that humanity has made over the centuries be preserved? If humanity wants to rescue its own progress, then it must defend itself against this terrible power, which attempts to undermine that progress with every permissible and impermissible means. Masonry itself must assume the intellectual dimension of this battle in the service of humanity. It would be condemned if it did not fulfill this task.”118 The lodges, according to Bluntschli, should march as the moral elite at the head of this cultural battle

for progress, humanity, and freedom of belief. While Freemasonry was not the only power that supported these ideas, it was “the only world organization that represented these ideas in institutional form.”119 Like a broad section of the liberal public, Bluntschli regarded the Jesuits—of whom there were hardly more than two hundred in imperial Germany before the order was banned in 1872—as the sinister opponent of Freemasonry. “The brotherhood that works on the future temples of an ennobled humanity cannot fold its arms and peacefully fall asleep, when it knows that the foundations of these temples are being undermined and that people from the Order of Darkness are making arrangements to explode its buildings and transform the progress of humanity into its decline.”120 A lodge speech in the same year by the historian Wilhelm Oncken contained a similar mixture of these two elements, the belief in progress and the fear of decline. It is obvious, Oncken argued, that society as a whole has accepted the lodges’ humanist ideas, indeed, that “modern humanity has become a single enormous colony of the Masonic Order.” Modern Bildung, he argued, is at war with the “sinister powers,” and the lodges are the “advance guard,” an “army” that requires its own General von Moltke. This, according to Oncken, was Freemasonry’s new challenge. The lodge assembly received Oncken’s speech enthusiastically, regarding Bluntschli as the right general for this final battle.121 Two further citations indicate how profoundly entrenched this rhetoricPage 138 → of war against the “enemies of humanity” had become. The first is an excerpt from a poem by Emil Rittershaus, the bestknown Masonic poet of the second half of the nineteenth century. The nocturnal ghost of the Middle Ages, Now in tonsure, now untonsured, Here in robes, there in a habit! Stock up, you German Masonry, Take up the Knight Hutten’s sword.122 In the second example, the grand master of the Apollo Lodge dramatically summarized the feelings of his lodge brothers: “We do not believe those who say that Jesuit Ultramontanism is also an ecclesiastical party or sect, which must be respected, whose supporters must also be tolerated and who could perhaps even be admitted to our order like anyone else with honest convictions. We regard this Jesuit Ultramontanism as an obvious conspiracy against all political, religious, and social progress, as the notorious enemy of all modern culture.”123 In the early 1870s, there were still occasional speeches by moderate conservative Freemasons against this intensified opposition to Catholicism. For example, in the aforementioned address from 1873, Oswald Marbach reaffirmed the Masonic claim to be above politics and argued that the lodges would be caught in a dilemma if they took a stand in the name of humanity. After all, Marbach argued, “all conflicting parties claim that they, and they alone, are fighting for light, life, and love, in sum for true freedom,” even Catholic parties.124 The more that Freemasonry’s conflict with political Catholicism intensified, the more Marbach’s position appeared to be precisely the “rubber-band morality” and “intellectual cowardice” that left liberals such as Michael Georg Conrad argued would “reduce the morals of our brotherhood to a linguistic shell of decency, to a soulless shadow theater of petty-bourgeois romantic rhetoric.”125 For Conrad, it was clear that the lodges should take the step to overt politics. This is why left-liberal Freemasons such as Bluntschli and Conrad tried in vain to establish a unified grand lodge in Germany. Left-liberal Freemasons also regarded the enlightenment of “backward” people to be an urgent goal. Many lodges supported the Gesellschaft zur Verbreitung von Volksbildung (Society for the Spread of Public Education) or the Dresdener Erziehungsverein (Dresden Educational Association). Catholic publicists, however, were derisive about Freemasons’ occasional attempts to open to the lower classes, regarding it as inevitable “that Masonry, which Page 139 →recruits so completely from the bourgeoisie, will suffer a pitiful fiasco in this enterprise.”126 It is perhaps surprising that liberal Freemasons, who had long been accused of being a “state within a state” and conspirators against the political order, should appropriate the very arguments of Catholic publicists and apply them to Ultramontanism, in particular to the Jesuit Order. Already in 1871, Ketteler recognized this when he

accused “Masonic liberalism” of embracing the same state absolutism it had opposed in the past now that the political powers worked in the interests of liberalism. According to Ketteler, this liberalism, which was based on the “theories of the lodges,” was a caricature of Christian religiosity. “With an indescribable naivety, this liberalism now claims for itself that which was claimed for the propositions of divine revelation in previous eras. It assumes that its propositions about the state, about marriage, about schools, and about a unified Christianity are infallible, and that it will realize them through compulsion, through state laws, and through a general staff ostensibly led by a Moltke.”127 It was not difficult for Catholic politicians to play these two issues against each other, that is, the state protection of Masonic lodges, on the one hand, and the liberal belief in the separation of church and state, on the other. Already in 1870, a Professor Michaelis in Brandenburg submitted a petition to the Upper Chamber of the Prussian Parliament, in which he issued the following call: “It should please the high house to institute an act of law directly disavowing the illusion of an identification of the state with the lodges, or the fact that the lodges enjoy the protection of the state.”128 In 1876, the Berlin division of the Center Party submitted a petition, also unsuccessful, to the Chamber of Deputies, which demanded, in light of the ban on the Jesuit Order in 1872, the “revocation of the illegal privileges and the position of Masonic associations granted in the Prussian Civil Code,” on the basis of their “secrecy,” their “religious character,” and their “political tendencies.”129 Two years later, a representative of the Center Party presented similar arguments in the Bavarian Diet: While “Masonic lodges, which threaten the people and the state, are not under surveillance,” Catholic associations are subject to strict police supervision. Although the interior minister, von Pfeufer, assured the representative that Freemasons did not participate in politics, “as in general the lodges in the kingdom have never been known to engage in anything disadvantageous,” another representative of Center Party pointed to the clear inequality in treatment between Masonic lodges and Catholic associations, although only the latter,Page 140 → he argued, were truly apolitical. He was “firmly and unshakably convinced that Freemasonry is an eminently political association, indeed a political association that has engaged almost exclusively for an entire century in large-scale politics (merriment on the left).” Freemasonry, he continued, aims at a general secularization of humanity; German national politics is also “an essential part of lodge politics (tumultuous merriment).”130 There is no more convincing proof of Catholics’ claims that relations between the state and Freemasonry had changed than the fact that every parliamentary motion against Masonic lodges after 1871 aroused only merriment. In 1853, Eckert’s petitions, filled with crude anti-Masonic conspiracy theories, had led to discussions in the Chambers of the Saxon Diet and ultimately resulted in state sanctions against the lodges. If we bear in mind that in southwestern Germany there was a clear affinity between Masonic lodges, liberalism, and reformist Old Catholicism—the three “bourgeois mortal enemies” of political Catholicism—the intensity of this conflict is perhaps less surprising. In 1871, 12 percent of the liberal election committee in DГјsseldorf were also members of Masonic lodges, and three of the six executive members belonged to the Liberale Verein (Liberal Association). Franz LГјtzeler, the grand master of the Masonic lodge in DГјsseldorf, was a leader of the Old Catholic parish there for many years.131 There were also a number of Old Catholics in Cologne’s lodges.132 Old Catholics had good reasons to view Freemasonry sympathetically. They too were opposed to “witchmania and paganism” and regarded the Masonic brotherhood as a “civic counter” to the Jesuit Order.133 Nevertheless, the political conflicts of the Kulturkampf were not the sole reason that the Catholic Church began to regard Masonic lodges in the 1860s as an “ultimate” enemy. The numerous papal encyclicals against Freemasonry beginning in the eighteenth century indicate that the Catholic Church regarded Masonic lodges as a kind of political cipher for the modern world. Jesuits such as Michael Georg Pachtler or Hermann Grube considered the humanist claims of the lodges to be an “idol of humanity.” The lodges are the “true center of modern ideas”; “They are behind liberality. They have produced it, raised it, and organized it. They lead it into battle against the Church and against the Christian state.”134 In 1880, the anti-Semitic publicist Otto Glagau published a fierce polemic against Masonic lodges in the journal Der KulturkГ¤mpfer, in which he criticized their “sweet sincerity” and their “mania for enlightenment . . . necessarily leading to the humanist вЂKulturkampf’ state.”135 The Page 141 →lodges, Glagau

continued, “deny revealed religion and emphasize exclusively natural religion. As a result, they embrace the rationalist-humanist ideas of the previous century, which have been long surpassed by science. Under pretense of realizing the completely impossible ideals of вЂfreedom, equality, and fraternity’ on earth, they seek to establish the political domination of the bourgeoisie and the political impotence of the state.” In Germany, Glagau argued, the lodges are a “social power” representing the interests of the “bourgeoisie” and liberalism. “Whoever supports them is set for life; whoever opposes them is lost. That is why the rush to the lodges is so great; that is why they are able to select so carefully and to reject so frequently. Whoever wants to have a career, to get ahead, or to make progress seeks to become a Freemason.” The lodges, Glagau concluded, do not contribute to moral improvement but rather are “dangerous to the public.”136 For many Catholics, the figure of the secular Freemason represented the intersection of liberalism and the bourgeoisie, moral-political corruption and social corruption. The Catholic Kirchenlexikon (Ecclesiastical Lexicon) of 1886 claimed that Freemasonry had not sought to “connect its members, drawn from the most diverse Christian confessions, through the bonds of civic and sociable concord and of social virtue, and thus to establish humane and sociable intercourse in external life, but had placed itself instead as вЂthe church of churches’ above the latter, yearning for the time when all confessions would collapse so that the religion of reason could arise like a phoenix from the ashes as a surrogate for positive Christianity.” The “humanist spirit” of the lodges, the article continued, dictates that the opposing doctrine is tolerated, but only as long as it is regarded as an “opinion” and not as revealed, infallible truth.137 In addition to this theological opposition, popular legends also existed about the “satanic cult” of Freemasonry. Catholics’ image of the world as Manichaean became as that of the enlightened lodge brothers. For many Catholics, the lodges represented the political alliance between the liberal BГјrgertum and the Prussian state. Beginning in the 1860s, liberal candidates for elections in Catholic Rhineland or Westphalia had no chance of winning if it became known that they were members of a Masonic lodge.138 Following a ban on the Jesuit Order in 1872, there was a rebellion in Essen that climaxed with an attack on the residence of a prominent lodge brother and merchant. When the police appeared, the crowd yelled, “Off to the lodge!”139 Already in the 1850s, Catholic publicists had claimed that Masonic Page 142 →lodges enjoyed protection, for example, within the legal system.140 In the 1870s, Catholic newspapers such as the Bamberger Volksblatt regularly published lists of local lodge members, often without commentary. Conversely, Masonic lodges excluded “ultramontanist” Catholics. The few Catholics who were members of Masonic lodges, for example, in Breslau and Leipzig, were often themselves “anti-Ultramontanists.” The Catholic Church refused to grant Catholic Freemasons absolution. Only if a Catholic Mason disavowed Freemasonry on his deathbed and was credibly repentant was he permitted a church burial.141 Even the wives of Freemasons were threatened with excommunication if they participated in lodge celebrations. If we believe the self-testimonies of Freemasons, it required a good deal of courage to visit a Masonic lodge in a small Catholic city. In 1897, the grand master of the Masonic lodge in MГјnster argued that as a result of popular Catholic fantasies about the satanic cult of Freemasonry combined with the stigmatization of the Pope and the Church, it was possible in MГјnster “only for an absolutely independent person, someone who occupies a secure position in life” to consider joining the lodge. This was his justification for rejecting the application of a teacher at a Catholic boys’ school.142 There was hardly an accusation that was considered too bizarre to be leveled at the respective opponent.143 One sure recipe for success proved to be a combination of sex and crime. Gabriel Jogand-PagГЁs, who called himself Leo Taxil, attained notoriety as the author of a series of sensational books.144 Up to the early 1880s, Taxil had been a spokesman for the French Anti-Clerical League. He was well-known for his sensational novels, for example, the Love Affairs of Pope Pius IX, which Taxil simply invented for the amusement of anticlerical circles. Taxil was a member of a Masonic lodge for a brief period of time in 1881, before being expelled. Taxil’s politics changed abruptly shortly thereafter, although it remains unclear whether this was motivated by his expulsion from the lodge, by his love of fraud and deception, or, as Theodor Lessing has suggested, by his “fanaticism for enlightenment.”145

After Pope Leo XIII demonized Freemasonry as “the synagogue of Satan” in his Encyclical “Humanum genus” in 1884, Taxil publicly disavowed anticlericalism and began to publish anti-Masonic writings. As he had done in his anticlerical novels, he gave his imagination free rein here as well and struck a similar chord with the other side. In just a few years, his book The Three-Point Brothers became an international best seller. It was followed by further “revelations” about Masonic rituals, most of which Page 143 →combined sexual excess, satanic cult, and political conspiracy theories.146 In 1897, one year after the bishops had honored him at an international anti-Masonic convention in Trient, Taxil caused a scandal by admitting that his “revelations” about the lodges had merely been intended to fool the Catholic Church and make it look ridiculous. It is only possible to understand the hysteria caused by Taxil’s “revelations” in Germany, France, Italy, and Belgium if we take into account the contemporary political conflicts between the church and the state. Taxil’s horror stories were well suited for an era in which people yearned for otherworldly experiences beyond the disenchanted modern world. During the final third of the nineteenth century, European societies vacillated between modern occultism and the belief in miracles, on the one hand, and belief in Bildung and progress, on the other.147 Taxil’s writings initially satisfied the needs of anticlerics and subsequently those of clerics. In this way, he popularized the conflict between liberalism and political Catholicism, appropriating many ideas that had long circulated among the Catholic population about the “satanic” lodges, as well as ideas about “sinister” Catholicism held by the secular and Protestant BГјrgertum in Masonic lodges. In occupying both liberal and Catholic positions, Taxil mobilized and intensified the prejudices of both sides. Only in this way can we explain his enormous success, as well as the general popularity of anti-Masonic and anti-Catholic pamphlet literature between the 1880s and the First World War. In the accusations they raised against Jesuits, liberals essentially repeated the rebukes that Catholics had leveled against Freemasonry. They argued that Jesuits were an “immoral” society of conspirators “without any fatherland.” For lodge brothers in imperial Germany, “Ultramontanists” remained the opponents of everything that Freemasons believed in: independence and morality, Bildung and progress. For both left liberals and moderate conservatives, the “black danger” of Catholicism was a portent of their own sense of crisis. In 1879, a Freemason in Leipzig composed an imaginary dialogue, in which he discussed his own doubts about the idea of humanity: “And then that person who was once perhaps loyal to truth, goodness, and beauty shows you the fanatic masses who, as the blind tool of ambitious priests, only need to take into battle the power of religion against the friends of our fatherland and the culture of this century in order that once again, as centuries before, the world . . . is subjected to the flock of Roman priests. He shows you the flocks, whose leaders have rendered them enthusiastic for battle Page 144 →against everything that exists, for a war of extermination against everything that is sacred to us and that has proved to be the most powerful pillars of the political and social order. And after he shows you these brutish, bloodthirsty masses and those eerie, black masses, he asks you derisively, вЂDo you still believe in humanity?’”148 A quarter of century later, a speaker at the Zepter Lodge in Breslau offered similar arguments in a celebratory address on the emperor’s birthday. “Under the glittering surface of our national life, undercurrents and countercurrents have developed that constitute a serious threat to our people and to our fatherland.” The gravest threat is “the black danger, through which the Jesuits have reentered our fatherland.”149 According to the speaker, the ultimate goal of the “Jesuitdom” of “obscurantists” and “retrogrades” is “to conquer and rule the world,” to establish a “world rule” undermining the individual virtues of citizens and their “morality” through violence. This accusation reads like a satirical reversal of Catholic conspiratorial fantasies.150 In the eyes of Freemasons, the Catholic Church was the “the worst cultural enemy, ” an enemy that wanted to lead the German nation, indeed humanity as a whole, back into barbarism. “The cravings of the Roman Church aim at no less than reducing to nothing the cultural work of all great cultural forces since the Renaissance, the successes of the English, French, and German Enlightenment, the successes of scientific research.”151 The public was well aware of the enmity between Freemasonry and the Catholic Church, and attributed the continuing popularity of Masonic lodges among the national and liberal BГјrgertum to this opposition.152 The situation was similar for French Freemasons as well. In both countries, anti-Catholicism was a significant catalyst

that fostered Masonic identity. In both countries, the Manichaean discourse of conspiracy, of Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment, enjoyed a surprising renaissance in the late nineteenth century. In both countries, this discourse sought to discredit its opponent’s claims to universality, those of the Catholic Church as well those of the liberal and republican bourgeoisie, by “revealing” the particular interests behind these claims and by tracing these back to the machinations of secret powers—in one case, the Freemasons, in the other, the Jesuits. As Geoffrey Cubitt has argued, the Masonic belief in Catholic infiltration and the Catholic obsession with a Masonic conspiracy instigated a politics of suspicion in both French and German political culture, a politics that dramatized and intensified the religious, social, and political boundaries within the civil societies of both Page 145 →countries.153 Over the long run, the cultural battles of the liberal BГјrgertum in Masonic lodges in Germany after 1871 against Catholics, Social Democrats, and other “enemies” of the new order proved to be complete failures. Political Catholicism and organized labor emerged strengthened from the conflict. Their influence prior to 1914 was greater in Germany than in any other European nation. The greater the influence of political Catholicism and organized labor became, the more doubts arose about the enlightened-liberal claim that the moral vision of “civil society” would bridge social, religious, and political differences. At least since the Kulturkampf, the rejection of Freemasonry was part of the ideological fabric that bound together a heterogeneous Catholic milieu, particularly beginning in the 1870s, as Freemasonry was linked to the stereotype of the “Jew.” The stereotype of the Jewish Freemason was extremely important for political Catholicism in imperial Germany.154 For this reason, the rise of anti-Semitism in the 1880s subjected Freemasonry to additional pressure. It was no coincidence that both Masonic lodges and political liberalism experienced a crisis of credibility during the 1890s. However, unlike political Catholicism and Social Democracy, anti-Semitism was an opponent of Freemasonry that found a sympathetic ear even within the lodges.

Brothers or Strangers? Jews and Freemasons The question whether Jews should be allowed to participate in the “brotherhood of men” had divided Freemasonry into a liberal humanitarian and a conservative Christian camp since the 1840s. In the 1860s and early 1870s, however, differences between these two camps began to diminish. While on the level of the grand lodges, the two were ultimately unable to find any common ground, individual lodges in cities, for example, in Breslau and Leipzig, became increasingly similar in both social and confessional terms. The membership of these local lodges was composed of the moderately liberal BГјrgertum, which was predominantly Protestant, and a growing Jewish minority. Many German Jews participated as “visiting brothers” in the Masonic sociability of Prussian cities. During the 1860s and 1870s, for example, numerous Jews living in Prussian cities applied for admission to the Apollo Lodge in Leipzig. In most cases, these applicants had initially inquired at a local lodge in Prussia, which had then suggested the detour through Page 146 →Leipzig. In the previous chapter, we briefly examined the application of the Jewish merchant and Breslau city councilman Hirsch Joachimsohn for admission to the Apollo Lodge. Joachimsohn’s file at the Apollo included not only his admission application but also letters of recommendation from two business partners as well as from the conservative Colonel Baron von Falkenhausen and the liberal Justizrat (Judicial Councillor) Horst. The letter writers were all gentiles and well-known Freemasons in Breslau. Horst was effusive in his letter of recommendation: “Any lodge would be lucky to have this universally recognized man of honor as a member. He would have been received here with delight long ago were it not for the fact that all privileged systems in Prussia unfortunately make a principle of not accepting Jews.”155 Through this detour in Leipzig, Joachimsohn was finally able to participate in lodge life in Breslau as a “visiting brother.” There were numerous similar cases. Many Jewish Freemasons were also active in the Jewish communities of their cities.156 In contrast to Catholic Freemasons, Jewish Freemasons were not necessarily estranged from their religious communities.157 By the mid-1870s, almost a third of the members at Masonic lodges in Leipzig and Hamburg (and presumably in Frankfurt as well) were Jewish.158 Prominent German-Jewish rabbis and writers publicly endorsed Freemasonry. Ludwig Philippson, who was critical of Freemasonry’s exclusive tendencies, nevertheless wrote the following about Masonic lodges in the

Allgemeine JГјdische Zeitung in 1871: “An institution that has spread throughout almost the entire civilized world, that professes as its substance and purpose the highest principles of humanity, and that claims in particular to strive for the brotherhood of all men without consideration of class, nationality, and religion, if it is not to undermine or counteract these claims in any way,” must possess from the beginning the support of an excluded religious community such as the Jews.159 In 1877, on the hundredth anniversary of Lessing’s Ernst und Falk, Jakob Auerbach argued that Freemasonry, as labor for Bildung and humanity, is “the mother of civil society, insofar as it is the hidden and inexhaustible source of all culture. It seeks to make men human, to reconcile the contradictions in them, to produce harmony among all beings possessing the same rights, needs, and strivings, and in this way to promote the happiness of every individual in his own particularity as well as the common good in its unconditional generality.”160 Auerbach argued that even the best constitution for civil society could not prevent it from erecting social, religious, or national boundaries that ran contrary to the need of individuals to associate. The Page 147 →Masonic lodge, he concluded, is that precious space for the “humanization of men” beyond such boundaries. From this perspective, Judaism and Freemasonry were not mutually exclusive. A Jewish Freemason wrote in 1878: “Judaism is Masonry. The two have the same principles. In our opinion, we can assert this with the same justification that Christian brothers can claim this for Christianity. Indeed, in the lodge Jewish Masons are often overcome with the feeling that they are in a synagogue, and conversely in the synagogue they are reminded of the lodges—and these points of contact are a triumph for both, for Judaism and for Masonry. These points are not merely external—drawn from the Temple of Solomon, biblical expressions, or numerous symbols, formulae, and forms—but are internal as well.” He continued, “Jews do have their own humanitarian associations, but it is not enough to have associations that are limited to people of one’s own faith. We need joint sites of Bildung. Jews and Christians should not practice their respective humanity by themselves. For this reason, they must move closer together, in particular socially. Like-feeling and like-minded people must cultivate a noble sociable intercourse. The lodges have opened their doors for this.”161 Non-Jewish supporters of Jewish emancipation in the lodges, however, did not regard the issue in quite the same light. To be sure, they believed—to take a typical view from the period around 1860—that “the more Jews who wish to join the order and who are found worthy of admission, the better.” In the same breath, however, the author cites this as evidence “that as human beings they, too, are equal to Christians and that despite their religious views they can also possess Christian manners and morals.”162 However, if they remained Jews, it would be “almost impossible for them to join with Christians in intimate friendship.”163 There was never a lack of such voices among liberal Freemasons demanding that Jews undergo a cultural conversion to Christianity. However, these calls became more common beginning in the mid-1870s. Only a few years later, a segment of the lodges began to foster the encroaching “anti-Semitic social mood” (Friedrich Naumann), even if antiJewish sentiment in Masonic lodges was rarely justified in “racial” terms but was expressed primarily in traditional forms of religious prejudice.164 Nevertheless, the discursive transitions were fluid here, as were those between “Christian” opponents and proponents of anti-Semitism. In 1875, for example, a liberal Freemason argued that Jews must be admitted to the lodges so that they might “cease to be вЂJews’ (in the bad sense of the term) Page 148 →in order to become вЂhuman beings.’”165 While the fear of admitting Jews, he continued, was not unjustified, Jews did possess a “chutzpah” that included both “sharpness of understanding and industriousness of drive.” What is more, the author argued, “the Jew, as his opponent imagines him, is the splitting image of the true Yankee and a very remarkable competitor in the great battle for existence.” However, it is now time to overcome this “fear,” in political life as well as in lodge life. “In both the state and the lodges, the emancipation of the Jews will also be, in a certain sense, an emancipation from the Jews.” This slogan, which is reminiscent of Marx’s notorious dictum, provides an accurate expression of liberals’ understanding of the “Jewish question.” In 1880, another Freemason smugly called for understanding for Jewish lodge brothers: “We have emancipated the Jews, but it is difficult to demand that they emancipate themselves from their own religious and cultural peculiarities in the relatively short period of time that has passed.” He continued, paradoxically

addressing anti-Semites: “I admit that from time immemorial there has been a chasm between the Occidental and the Semitic character. But should we draw from this the hopeless conclusion that a merger of the two can never take place? That would be to deny progress. . . . In the majority of our lodges, non-Jews and Jews sit and work together harmoniously. Why shouldn’t this be possible in profane life as well? Certainly Jews should also be tolerant and learn to forget the injustices once done to them, because these have finally been atoned for by granting equal human and civil rights. And we must not commit any new injustices. We, too, do not want double nationality on German soil. We seek to tear down national and regional limits even beyond the boundaries of our fatherland. However, this desire is justified only when the Jew is not perceived by his fellow citizens first and foremost as a Jew and when the Jew also learns to regard himself in the same light.”166 Open expressions of anti-Semitism in the lodges were rare. In a controversial article entitled “Reasons for the Aversion to Jews” published in 1876, the author argued that the “domination of cosmopolitan phrases [has corroded] the bond of humanity” and “filled it with inappropriate, mutually repulsive elements,” merely for the purpose of granting access to a Jewish minority. “If, however, the lodge is to be an institution promoting culture, then the elements that make up the brotherhood are by no means a matter of indifference, for only like elements can truly create something—not professors together with brother tailor and glove maker, not Christians together with Jews of the ordinary kind. A man who has Page 149 →had a completely different education and who differs from us even more ethnically has a way of thinking that deviates from our own and has a completely different morality.” In light of Jewish history and tradition and given the “exclusivity that Jews exercise so strictly,” it is “absolutely inconceivable that people of such a nature could truly adopt humanity as we understand it.”167 Freemasons, frequently Jewish Freemasons, immediately refuted such statements. Alphonse Levy, a Freemason from Dresden, secretary-general of the Centralverein deutscher StaatsbГјrger jГјdischen Glaubens (Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith) and as such editor of the association’s journal Im deutschen Reich, felt compelled to refute the article by pointing to his own happy marriage to a Protestant woman.168 This kind of argument was hardly able to convince anti-Semites. They dismissed the accusation of anti-Semitism, indeed, regarded it as an insult for a Freemason. Claude DГ©nervaud, a practicing Catholic schoolteacher and a brother at the Apollo Lodge in Leipzig, offered a typical rebuttal: He claimed to have many “friends and good acquaintances among the Jews.” Fritz Auerbach responded that it was nevertheless populist anti-Semitism when DГ©nervaud argued that Jews themselves were responsible for anti-Semitism. In an article in the Frankfurter Zeitung, DГ©nervaud had written: “And when anti-Semitism continues to spread, when the wind of general revolt against modern Bildung’s goods of tolerance and the equality of all races blows through all countries, then it is time to ask if there are not profound reasons, hidden ulcers on the social body that have caused this phenomenon.” DГ©nervaud believed that the “profound reasons” were obvious: “Jews’ lack of assimilation” has led to antiSemitism. “Has he [the Jew] truly become blood of our blood and flesh of our flesh in our country? Does he not live his life for himself as he did 2,000 years ago? Does he not still have exactly his father’s customs and traditions in both public and private life? In particular, the tendency to haggle, the worship of Mammon, the strutting arrogance of wealth, the craving to push himself forward and to attain as much recognition as possible? Does he not dress the most conspicuously and act the most forwardly everywhere, in the theater, at concerts, at balls, and during walks?”169 From this hodgepodge of anti-Semitic stereotypes, DГ©nervaud concluded that only a Christian could be a “noble cosmopolitan man”; a practicing Jew could not.170 Both “Christian” opponents and supporters of opening Freemasonry Page 150 →to Jews agreed on this point. They argued that Judaism lacked universality, that it was exclusive. For example, the National Liberal Wilhelm KГ¶rber, who had supported the admission of Jews in 1848, remarked in a lecture at the Zepter Lodge in Breslau in 1877, “As long as the Jews persist in their egotistic notions, the portals of our temple must remain closed to them.” Similarly, another well-known Freemason, the WГјrttemburg left-liberal August von Reinhardt, demanded in 1893 that Jews be willing to “dispense with their special position in law and custom, ” because “making the Jew a companion to our culture means opening for him the way to Christian thought, and gaining him as a companion in our common cultural progress.” This was intended as an explicit

defense of Jewish Masons against anti-Semites in the lodges.171 An anti-Semite could not possibly be a Freemason, a cosmopolite, or a “humanist”—the majority of German lodge brothers agreed on this.172 Nevertheless they were also convinced that “the cosmopolitanism of Freemasonry demanded that all of its followers develop a certain broad agreement, a common, indeed an identical philosophy of life, in the domain of religion as well.” Furthermore, “the educated, impartial Jew who truly turns to Freemasonry from the most profound impulse and makes its teachings his own ceases to be a Jew, a Jew by religion. . . . One can give a Jew no better advice than that he should endeavor to cast off all that is specifically Jewish.”173 Findel, who had earlier been a left-liberal champion of Jewish emancipation, adopted an even sharper tone. The “threatening mass production of Jewish Freemasons” must stop, he demanded in 1893. “The stuff required for Freemasonry has been sown thinly, very thinly among the Jews. For as the Jewish character has been ruined over centuries, it will, of course, take centuries as well to improve it and humanize it.”174 The idea of “improving” or “humanizing” Jews implicitly contained the potentially anti-Semitic message that Jews lacked not only Bildung but humanity itself. Was this attitude a further sign of the “educated BГјrgertum turning away from the Enlightenment,” as Georg Bollenbeck and others have argued with respect to Germany in the 1880s? Did this mark a rejection of the universalist language of civility, which now turned against its last cultural pillar, the Jewish BГјrgertum, as George Mosse has suggested?175 At the turn of the century, such terms as humanity, Bildung, Volk, and morality assumed a new significance in the critique of culture, a significance that will be discussed in detail later in the book. In this context, however, it is important to note that these terms were reinterpreted in a Page 151 →way that continued to draw upon their original meanings and that did not mark a clear-cut repudiation.176 The ambivalence of these terms—an ambivalence that runs through the language and cultural practices of civility (BГјrgerlichkeit) throughout the entire nineteenth century—unfolded in a new way. The liberal idea of religious tolerance was supposed to dissolve the differences between Jews and Christians into a (Protestant-tinged) universal humanity. The tension between equality and difference in the humanist language of the lodges, the simultaneous struggle for inclusion and desire for exclusion, remained politically explosive in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Nationalism and anti-Semitism did not simply replace the older moral universalism of the lodges during the 1880s. On the contrary, this universalist discourse had always been tied to nationalism as well and had always contained implicit notions of difference, which, particularly at times of conflict, could acquire a political, social, or moral edge. From this perspective, the nationalization of civic identity before 1914—a process that has been frequently described by historians and sociologists—does not appear to be a wholesale rejection of humanist moral ideals or as a “lack of civic sense,” but the continuation of a fundamental ambivalence within the German BГјrger’s system of moral values, of which the lodges were the classic embodiment.177 The sense of crisis that Freemasons experienced in terms of their moral and political identity—a crisis that was perceived both in the lodges and in the public at large beginning in the 1880s—was rooted in this ambivalence. It was not, as scholars often used to argue, the result of economic and social upheavals. On the contrary, in the period prior to 1914 Masonic lodges became a refuge for the local propertied and educated BГјrgertum to such an extent that this exclusivity aroused public criticism of Freemasonry, in particular its claims to transcend class, religion, and politics. This, in turn, provoked new crises of credibility for the humanist self-image of Freemasons. Many of the younger generation of the German BГјrgertum, including Max Weber and other liberals of the 1890s, were plagued by the fear that they were merely epigones of their fathers’ generation, which had succeeded in establishing the German nation-state. This fear exacerbated the general sense of crisis. An excess of bourgeois security and “political boredom,” as the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums (General Newspaper of Judaism) argued in 1893, the ennui of a generation that believed that the great events of the nation had already occurred, contributed to the rise Page 152 →of anti-Semitism.178 This same sense of crisis also inspired many of the new social and moral reform movements. Particularly among the educated and propertied BГјrgertum, the “anti-Semitic social mood” gained in popularity, as the political reforms and the internal unification of the nation that were supposed to follow external unification appeared increasingly remote.

Many Freemasons projected the accusations of materialism, greed for profit, class hatred, and the lack of religiosity and patriotism—all of which were seen as undermining the moral foundations of civil society—onto the Jewish minority. “In Germany, we consider a вЂJew’ simply to be a person, whether of the Christian or Jewish faith, whose entire actions are calculated toward material gain, toward use and profit.”179 For German BГјrger, Jews symbolized the shadow side of their own successes, the distorted image of the “bourgeoisie.”180 Even those among them who continued to struggle for Jewish equality regarded Judaism as a symbol of egotism, materialism, and exclusivity. There were, however, other reasons why Masonic lodges in Prussia balked at admitting Jews. In 1872, the Royal York became the only Prus-sian grand lodges to abolish adherence to the Christian faith as a precondition for lodge membership. The GroГџe Landesloge remained the most conservative grand lodge. There were attempts to reform the Zu den drei Weltkugeln Lodge, the grand lodge with the largest membership in Germany, but these failed repeatedly, in particular due to pressure from above. In 1876, Kaiser Wilhelm I once again prevented the Zu den drei Weltkugeln Grand Lodge from voting to admit Jews to its daughter lodges. Every time the Grand Lodge Assembly voted on the “Jewish question,” it was a few votes short of the two-thirds majority required for the admission of Jews. Still, a surprising number of lodge representatives supported admitting Jews, given the fact that the kaiser had declared categorically that “he did not want to see the day when non-Christians . . . could be admitted to the Masonic order” and threatened to withdraw all state privileges of the Prussian grand lodges if this should occur. Disappointed by the inflexibility of the kaiser and his entourage of Masonic officials in regard to the “Jewish Question,” Franz August von Etzel, the grand master of Zu den drei Weltkugeln, a liberal general, and director of the War Academy, resigned from his post as grand master and left Freemasonry in 1876.181 Although the conservative grand lodges repeatedly emphasized that their exclusion of Jews was based on their Christian understanding of Page 153 →humanity and not on anti-Semitism, there were also incidents of racial anti-Semitism in their lodges.182 In 1906, a Protestant theologian and member of the GroГџe Landesloge argued that even baptizing Jewish Freemasons could not make them Christians: “We are separated from our Jewish brothers neither by religion and religious questions in general nor by Christianity and its doctrines in particular. Rather . . . we are different races, we have different blood. . . . The dispute between вЂChristian’ and вЂhumanitarian’ lodges, i.e., between German and Jewish lodges, must be considered on the basis of this racial difference and not on that of religion.”183 The article was provocative not only because the author reduced liberal humanitarian lodges, which were composed of both Christians and Jews, to “Jewish” lodges, but also because he denied that Jewish Freemasons were German. Hugo Lissauer, one of the spokesmen of left-liberal Freemasonry, responded, “We Jews in Germany are German insofar as we were born in Germany. We are Jewish Germans or German Jews, as you please, but we are not вЂJews’ without a homeland and without rights; we are not Jews whose German-ness can be called into question.”184 One consequence of the sense of crisis among the German BГјrgertum during the 1880s was that Masonic lodges, particularly in Prussia, began to refuse to admit Jews as “permanent visiting brothers” or denied them admission in secret ballots, as was the case with daughter lodges of the Royal York Grand Lodge.185 Although the Royal York was the only grand lodge in Prussia to abolish adherence to the Christian faith as a condition for admission, its daughter lodges in Berlin and Breslau admitted very few Jews, as is evident if we compare the membership lists of the Jewish communities and Masonic lodges in both cities. In 1892, there were only 12 Jews among the 499 members of the Berlin daughter lodges of the Royal York. Nine of these 12 had joined between 1872 and 1876, and 1 in 1882. Two of them became affiliated with the Berlin daughter lodges in 1887 and 1888 (that is, they had already been Freemasons in other cities). Between 1888 and 1892, all Jewish applications for membership to these lodges were rejected.186 Hermann Settegast, the grand master of the Royal York and a well-known professor of zoology in Berlin, tried to stop this practice of exclusion by reforming the admission process. While in the old system three black balls cast against a candidate in a secret ballot had been sufficient to exclude him automatically, votes against a candidate now had to be justified before the lodge and reference to the applicant’s faith was not considered a valid criterion. Settegast also tried to reform the internal structure of Page 154 →the lodges. He called for an abolition

of the so-called Christian high degrees, which, with their rituals evoking the Christian Crusades, remained closed to Jews.187 Oddly enough, Settegast’s rejection of anti-Semitism was based on the theory of breeding. He believed that his own writings on agriculture and the works of Darwin demonstrated the mutability of the “races.” All races, he argued, were equally capable of development. Kant and Darwin were the authoritative figures for National Liberals and natural scientists such as Settegast.188 Finding no majority for his reform agenda in the existing Masonic system, Settegast founded a new grand lodge in 1892, the Kaiser Friedrich zur Bundestreue Lodge (Friedrich III had pushed for liberal reforms of Freemasonry during his lifetime). In 1893, the Higher Administrative Court in Berlin, acting on Settegast’s initiative, abolished the Edict of 1798 and the legal privileges the conservative grand lodges in Prussia had enjoyed. Masonic lodges were now subject to associational laws in Prussia. Consequently, any association in Prussia “that sought to promote the welfare and happiness of human society” could call itself a “Masonic lodge.”189 Masonic lodges were no longer required to seek permission from the grand lodges in Berlin. In the years that followed, new so-called Settegast lodges were established in numerous Prussian cities, in particular in Berlin and Breslau. Their memberships were predominantly Jewish. Not surprisingly, the established grand lodges in Prussia used every means available to combat these new lodges.190 The political explosiveness of the “Jewish question” for Masonic lodges during the 1880s and 1890s becomes clearer if we examine the issue on the local level. Breslau and Leipzig provide a good basis for comparison. The differing religious composition of the two cities had an enormous influence on their respective political cultures. Approximately two-thirds of Breslau’s overall population was Protestant, one-third was Catholic, and a tiny minority was Jewish (ca. 5 percent). Leipzig, on the contrary, had only a tiny Catholic minority. In the entire century before 1914, Catholics made up less than 5 percent of the overall population in Leipzig. In contrast to Breslau, Leipzig was more homogeneously Protestant. This encouraged a polarization of Leipzig’s political culture between the BГјrgertum and Social Democrats. The Jewish community in Breslau was one of the three largest in Germany during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while the Jewish percentage of Leipzig’s citizenry remained comparatively small. A further difference between the two cities lay in the composition of their respective Page 155 →Jewish communities: In Leipzig more than 50 percent of the Jewish community was of Eastern European origin, whereas in Breslau only 10 percent was. More than half of the Jews in Breslau were members of the BГјrgertum. There were brief anti-Semitic movements in both cities during the 1880s and 1890s. However, the anti-Semites’ greatest successes in the elections of 1893 in Saxony did not occur in Leipzig, but in small cities and towns such as Bautzen, MeiГџen, and Pirna, which had hardly any Jewish residents.191 There were few open supporters of anti-Semitic parties in Masonic lodges in Leipzig and in Breslau. However, a “respectable” form of antiSemitism was present in the lodges, a diffuse, barely articulated resentment typical of the national and liberal Protestant BГјrgertum even before the 1880s. Beginning in the 1840s, the lodge system in Breslau developed in a way that was typical for Prussian cities.192 There were three Masonic lodges in the city, a conservative, a moderately conservative, and a liberal lodge. In Breslau with its large Catholic population, all three of these lodges were united by a strong anti-Catholicism. It was not an accident that the Vereinigte Lodge, the most conservative Masonic lodge in Breslau, erected its impressive neo-Renaissance lodge house in 1870 near the Dominsel, traditionally the Catholic part of the city. The ground plan of the villa, with its exotic gardens in the form of a cross, was also symbolic. The Vereinigte Lodge, which was affiliated with the Christian conservative GroГџe Landesloge, had never admitted Jews even as “visiting brothers.” When there was an election at the GroГџe Landesloge in 1879 on a proposal to allow the admission of Jews, eighty-three brothers of the Vereinigte Lodge who were present voted against the proposal and only one voted for it.193 The Zepter Lodge in Breslau pursued a more moderate course. During the 1870s, the Zepter admitted a few “visiting brothers” who were Jewish. In 1873, the majority of the Zepter Lodge voted against a proposal at the Zu den drei Weltkugeln Grand Lodge on admitting Jews as regular lodge brothers.194 A frequently mentioned justification for this refusal was the fear that “elevated social circles,” particularly in smaller cities, would

resign from their lodges as soon as Jews were permitted to join. The only lodge in Breslau that admitted Jews as regular members was the Horus Lodge, which belonged to the moderately liberal Royal York Grand Lodge. The Horus Lodge began admitting Jewish members in 1872. Between 1872 and 1876, the Horus Lodge initiated eight Jewish Freemasons, the same number it admitted over the next twenty years. For the most part, these Page 156 →were extremely wealthy and prominent members of the Jewish community in Breslau, for example, Henry and Louis Schaps, two brothers who were among the richest merchants in the city. Unlike their Christian counterparts, who could occasionally come from the lower end of the middle class, Jewish applicants to Masonic lodges had to be prominent members of the elevated BГјrgertum. Beginning in the late 1870s, Jewish stereotypes, which had been common among the Breslau BГјrgertum during the VormГ¤rz period and which Gustav Freytag had popularized in his best-selling novel Soll und Haben, were remobilized in opposition to the admission of Jews to Masonic lodges. As a conservative lodge brother explained, the admission of Jews to the Horus Lodge occurred “with great caution,” for “in Breslau relations in this regard are very peculiar. Through the influx from Poland and Russia, we receive firsthand that peculiar Polish Jewish element that Germans do not befriend so easily. This element makes unusual efforts to raise itself up and as a result many people apply to the lodges who do not yet belong there. If the lodges of the Weltkugeln system in Silesia are then opposed to the admission of Jews, as for example, the majority of brothers at Zepter Lodge is, this occurs more from reasons of utility than from a dogmatic insistence on the element of Christian belief in the lodge. For the brothers are not so ignorant that they are unable to comprehend that Masonry is an issue of humanity and not of confessional belief. In short, the same thing is not appropriate for everyone, and even if there are no disadvantages in admitting Jews, for example, in western Germany and even in Berlin, we still have reservations here in Breslau.”195 By the late 1870s, the Horus Lodge differed little from the other Masonic lodges in Breslau in this matter: It admitted very few Jews either as “visiting” or regular brothers. This trend, combined with the abolition of the Edict of 1798 and Settegast’s reform grand lodge, the Kaiser Friedrich zur Bundestreue, led to the establishment of a new Masonic lodge in Breslau in 1893, the Hermann zur BestГ¤ndigkeit Lodge. Five years later, a second reform lodge was founded in Breslau, the Settegast zur deutschen Treue Lodge.196 Both lodges had a very high percentage of Jewish members. Alfred Oehlke, the head of one of these two new lodges, editor-in-chief of the liberal Breslauer Zeitung, and one of the leading left liberals in the city, emphasized that the members of these lodges sought to understand Freemasonry as a “brotherhood of humanity” freed from the “fetters of confessionalism.”197 The liberal humanitarian lodges explicitly adhered to the ideal of a nonconfessional sociability. The non-Jewish members of these lodges were Page 157 →either left-liberal Freemasons or people who been rejected by established Masonic lodges. An example of the former was the school director Heinrich MaaГџ, who had opposed anti-Semitism during the 1880s as a speaker for the Progressive Party. Before being transferred to Breslau, MaaГџ had belonged to a Masonic lodge in Hamburg for many years. In Breslau, he did not want to join one of the conservative lodges in the city and went on to become the first speaker of the Hermann Lodge.198 Oskar Poppe, on the other hand, also belonged to the Hermann Lodge and was a lawyer: His father had been a well-known member of the Vereinigte Lodge in Breslau. Due to a legal dispute between father and son, Oskar Poppe had not been admitted to the Vereinigte Lodge.199 The new Hermann Lodge offered him the opportunity to become a Freemason despite his father’s opposition. These two new Breslau lodges encountered difficulties in gaining recognition from the German GroГџlogenbund. The issue was formally resolved with the Hermann Lodge joining the Grand Lodge of Frankfurt and the Settegast Lodge joining the Grand Lodge of Hamburg. However, after conservative Freemasons in Breslau insinuated that Jewish brothers at the new lodges were lacking in respectability, a judge at the GroГџlogenbund reviewed each of the new members to ensure their civic uprightness.200 Nevertheless, conservative Freemasons in Breslau boycotted the two new lodges. An examination of the social profile of the new lodges indicates why conservative Freemasons in Breslau had such difficulty uncovering “incriminating evidence” against these new Freemasons. By 1906 at the latest, these new lodges were more socially exclusive than the conservative lodges. All Masonic lodges in Breslau recruited their members primarily from the elevated middle class, the BГјrgertum. The percentage of the members from the lower middle class—the lowest level of social respectability in Masonic lodges—in the three

conservative Christian lodges was approximately 20 percent, twice as high as in the two new liberal humanitarian lodges (7.3 percent and 10.5 percent). Conversely, the percentage of wealthy merchants, entrepreneurs, and professionals was much higher in the two new lodges. Jewish Freemasons such as the department store owner Artur Barasch, the Breslau city councilman and lawyer Paul Honigmann, or the factory owner Hermann Neustadt who was active in many Jewish charitable societies were clearly part of the city’s elite. Many, if not all were active in the Jewish community, belonged to the Centralverein deutscher StaatsbГјrger jГјdischen Glaubens (Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Belief), Page 158 →and were members of Jewish associations. One indication of the Hermann Lodge’s social exclusivity was its modern representative lodge house, built in 1913 on Museumplatz, the best location in the city. Along with the building of the VaterlГ¤ndische Gesellschaft (Patriotic Society), this new lodge house was the most impressive club building in Breslau before 1914. The facade was monumental in the style of a Greek temple with two allegorical groups of figures, on the right, friendship, and on the left, charity. The inscription on the facade, “Humanitati,” was a public declaration of the building’s purpose. The membership of the new liberal humanitarian lodges was also younger than that of the “Christian” lodges in Breslau. In 1906, the average age of members at the new lodges was forty- five, while at the “Christian” lodges it was fifty-two. The moderately liberal Horus Lodge was the only “Christian” lodge in Breslau that admitted Jews. The average age of Jewish members at the Horus was even higher, fiftyseven years. The majority of these Jewish Masons had belonged to the Horus Lodge since the 1870s or early 1890s. After 1900, however, almost no Jews joined the Horus Lodge. Instead, they became members of the new Hermann Lodge and the Settegast Lodge. In short, the new liberal humanitarian lodges surpassed the older lodges in Breslau not only in terms of social exclusivity, but also in terms of ostentatious civility, charity, and patriotism, despite the fact that they were ostracized by their “Christian” brothers prior to 1914. Like Breslau and other large cities in Germany, Leipzig had three Masonic lodges up into the 1890s. We have already examined the different political and social nuances of these three lodges. In contrast to liberal humanitarian lodges in Hamburg or Frankfurt, lodges in Leipzig experienced a marked decline in Jewish membership. In Hamburg, the percentage of Jewish members in Masonic lodges rose from 21.3 percent in 1871 to 31 percent in 1890. It stagnated at 31.1 percent around 1900 and then fell conspicuously to 24.8 percent in 1910, possibly as a result of the expansion of the B’nai B’rith Order.201 In 1876, almost one-third of the members of the Apollo Lodge in Leipzig were Jewish. Thirty years later, this figure had declined to merely 6 percent. However, this decline was not necessarily the result of anti-Semitism. Of the sixty-three Jewish Freemasons at the Apollo Lodge in 1876, only fourteen lived in Leipzig; two of them lived outside of Germany and forty-seven of them lived in Prussia. In other words, 75 percent of Jews at the Apollo were “visiting brothers” at Prussian lodges. With the abolition of the Edict of 1798, Page 159 →liberal humanitarian lodges could be established anywhere in Prussia. As a consequence, many Jewish Freemasons joined local liberal humanitarian lodges. The detour through Leipzig was no longer necessary. Several Jewish brothers at the Apollo Lodge also took part in the Settegast reform lodges in Berlin. As no grand lodge in Germany recognized these reform lodges, the Apollo Lodge initially prohibited its members from visiting them, although largely without success. The tension caused by the Berlin debate on anti-Semitism also poisoned local lodge sociability. One Catholic Freemason resigned from the Apollo Lodge in 1891, claiming that he was unable to reconcile his beliefs with the fact “that Freemasonry includes Semites as members, because the moral-ethical beliefs (and not the religious beliefs) that they learn from the Talmud contradict Freemasonry.”202 In 1894, the school director and later Grand Master Franz KieГџling gave an address entitled “On the Jewish Question,” in which he supported the “principle of humanity,” that is, the admission of Jews, but also opposed attempts “to terrorize the German Masonic world for the benefit of Judaism.” Rather, KieГџling argued, the solution to the “Jewish question” lay in the hands of Jewish lodge brothers, who should shed their own prejudices. Jews, he continued, had “lived in isolation in the ghetto for centuries and thus under despicable pressures that necessarily had pernicious effects on their character. Decades do not suffice to bring about a fundamental transformation of the character of such a people and to assimilate them completely into the German people.” After the address,

Joseph Danziger, a merchant and a Jewish Freemason, read aloud an article on anti-Semitism published in the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums and sought to refute KieГџling’s emphasis on Freemasonry’s fundamentally Christian characteristics. Afterward, Willem Smitt, the lodge’s grand master, dismissed the accusation of anti-Semitism, calling the lecture completely objective.203 For years Danziger then “refused in a conspicuous and insulting manner” to greet Smitt and KieГџling, “turning away from them whenever they tried to greet him.” Finally, lodge officials initiated a trial of the honorary council against Danziger. Only after KieГџling assured him that he was referring to “Jews of the past” and not to Danziger himself did the latter relent.204 This process of politicization in the 1890s occurred parallel to an organizational “democratization of Freemasonry,” a phenomenon also noted by contemporaries.205 In addition to established lodges, numerous new lodges were founded during this time. While there had been three Masonic lodges in both Breslau and Leipzig up to the 1890s, five new Page 160 →lodges were established in Breslau and two new lodges in Leipzig before 1914. The reasons for this were diverse, including political motives, as in the case of the Hermann and the Settegast Lodges or the PhГ¶nix Lodge in Leipzig. The PhГ¶nix Lodge was founded in 1892 by a group of liberal lodge brothers from the Minerva Lodge, including the publisher Anton Philipp Reclam and the merchant Henry Settegast, the son of the well-known reformer. These liberal lodge brothers had been seriously troubled by proposals to reintroduce the Christian high degrees at the Minerva Lodge, an issue that Julius Victor Carus, the conservative grand master of the Minerva, a professor of zoology at the University of Leipzig, and the first person to translate Darwin into German, had supported since 1888 with backing from the Weltkugeln Grand Lodge in Prussia. Many lodge brothers regarded the return to the “medieval” high degrees, which the Minerva Lodge had abolished in the 1870s, as the sign of a new conservative turn in the lodge, for example, in regard to the “Jewish question.” When protests by liberal members against this “retrograde” step to an aristocratic “Christian” Freemasonry were ineffective, they resigned from the Minerva and founded the PhГ¶nix Lodge in the face of bitter opposition from their former lodge brothers.206 The abolition of the Edict of 1798 initiated by Settegast’s legal dispute led to the establishment of daughter lodges in Breslau affiliated with the liberal Grand Lodges of Hamburg and Frankfurt. Conversely, the conservative grand lodges in Berlin now made greater efforts to establish their own daughter lodges in cities outside of Prussia. The Stern zur Treue Lodge and the Goethe Lodge, for example, were founded in Leipzig around 1900. The former was affiliated with the GroГџe Landesloge, the latter with the Weltkugel Grand Lodge. Neither lodge admitted Jews. The democratization and the expansion of the lodge system also resulted in undesired competition. “The exclusive character of the Masonic brotherhood in Germany, which, in contrast to other nations, did not seek to recruit its members from the tradesmen class and the lower middle class, but predominantly from the wealthy middle class and elevated circles,” along with high lodge fees, led to an explosive increase of “more affordable” secret societies and fraternal orders resembling Masonic lodges beginning in the early 1890s.207 Many of these societies originated in the United States. In addition to B’nai B’rith lodges, the Odd Fellows, the Good Templars, and the Druids had established organizations in Germany at the beginning of the 1870s. All of these fraternal orders were in fact imitations of Masonic lodges, although they did not regard themselves as Page 161 →such. They quickly established lodges of their own in almost every large city in Germany, including Breslau and Leipzig. Another consequence of the abolition of the Edict of 1798 was that a multitude of irregular Masonic lodges were founded, as grand lodges were stripped of their exclusive right to establish Masonic lodges. In most cases, these irregular lodges were also imitations of Masonic lodges. After several years, they were either dissolved or became affiliated with recognized grand lodges, often after protracted negotiations. The memberships of these irregular lodges, like other new secret societies, were composed primarily of small business owners and midlevel civil servants and employees with no access to regular lodges, including many Jews. At times, these irregular lodges resembled parodies of the established Masonic system. In 1895, for example, “Grand Master” Nathan Perls, a Berlin merchant, founded an UnabhГ¤ngiger Freimaurer-Orden (U.F.O.)

(Independent Masonic Order) in Berlin and held a lodge assembly in an apartment on Unter den Linden. During the assembly, he introduced a well-dressed elderly gentleman he claimed was an English grand master. Ostensibly as a result of the exhausting journey, this elderly gentleman was silent during the entire assembly. Later it was discovered that Perls had dressed up his father-in-law in order to impress the other lodge brothers.208 When Perls told a business partner a number of rather fantastic lodge stories (for example, that he had worked together in the lodge with Kaiser Wilhelm I, Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm, and the English King Edward) in Breslau in 1911, he wound up in court. The business partner happened to be a member of the regular Settegast Lodge and was not amused.209 One reason for the angry reaction might have been that the Settegast Lodge had emerged from a daughter lodge of the U.F.O. in Breslau and, as a former irregular lodge, had been forced to exert enormous efforts to be recognized by a grand lodge.210 The Vesta zum heiligen Feuer Lodge (1906) and the Zur grГјnenden Eiche Lodge (1911) in Leipzig also arose from irregular lodges. The latter was a daughter lodge of the Symbolische GroГџloge des Schottischen Ritus in Deutschland Grand Lodge in Leipzig, which was founded by another swindler, Theodor ReuГџ, who had also tried to reactivate the Illuminati Order in 1890.211 After the established lodges in Leipzig had forced the expulsion of several “unrespectable” members from these two new lodges, both were permitted to continue as regular Masonic lodges affiliated with the Grand Lodge of Saxony.212 However, neither of the two ever attained the respectability of an established Masonic lodge. More than two-thirds Page 162 →of their members came from the lower middle class. While there were hardly any master craftsmen in the other Masonic lodges in Leipzig, craftsmen made up approximately 20 percent of the members of these new lodges. It was impossible for new lodges to accumulate the symbolic capital of traditional lodges over the course of a few years. The fact that members of irregular lodges could not participate in general lodge life detracted from the appeal of establishing irregular lodges over the long term.213 One exception was the Freimaurerbund zur aufgehenden Sonne (Masonic Brotherhood of the Rising Sun), which the Monist Karl Heinrich LГ¶berich established in Nuremburg in 1906 as a kind of counterlodge, in particular to the neighboring left-liberal Zur Sonne Grand Lodge in Bayreuth.214 In his call to establish the new lodge, LГ¶berich focused his critique on the religiosity of regular Masonic lodges. Enlightened Jews would be welcome in his new lodge. Only with a scientific, monist basis, he argued, was it possible to oppose the “black force of darkness and reaction,” that is, the Jesuits. LГ¶berich announced that lodge fees would be reduced drastically and that free discussion and exchange of ideas would replace religiously influenced rituals. This new Masonic brotherhood was decidedly left liberal.215 The wellknown chemist Wilhelm Ostwald was also a Monist as well as a Mason. However, this overlap between Masonry and Monism (also founded in 1906) in terms of personnel and ideas declined somewhat over the years. LГ¶berich’s Freimaurerbund sought to recruit members though advertisements in journals. “Religiously liberal or freethinking men of the BГјrger class, in particular teachers, clergymen, civil servants, and merchants” were encouraged to apply for “admission to an international organization that was strictly neutral in terms of politics.” The new brotherhood proved successful. Although it was never recognized by regular Masonic lodges, it spread quickly throughout Germany, with approximately fifty lodges (including in Leipzig and Breslau) and more than one thousand members prior to 1914.216 However, not only the left-liberal margins but other grand lodges and daughter lodges also had ties to the freethinking reform movements at the turn of the century, in particular to the Monist Bund and the Gesellschaft fГјr ethische Kultur (Society for Ethical Culture). Ernst Horneffer, one of the best-known Masonic publicists, was affiliated with the Tat circle of Eugen Diederich’s (himself a Freemason) and was one of the most important lecturers of the freethinking movement in Munich after 1909. Competition rather than cooperation, however, ultimately prevailed between Freemasonry and these moral reform movements around Page 163 →the turn of the century, in particular as many of these movements, for example, the Gesellschaft fГјr ethische Kultur, considered themselves the modern heirs of Freemasonry. Lodges of the B’nai B’rith Order, which were first established in Germany in 1882 and subsequently experienced a rapid growth in membership, provided serious competition for liberal humanitarian Masonic lodges.217 The B’nai B’rith Order had been originally established in 1843 in New York as an exclusive form of sociability for Jewish immigrants. The creation of B’nai B’rith lodges in Germany was a direct

reaction to the anti-Semitism of conservative Masonic lodges in Berlin. Around 1900, Prussian Freemasons regarded it as an open secret “that the majority of B’nai B’rith members today, however well suited they may be in terms of lifestyle, Bildung, and station to join our circle and however much they might strive to do so, will undoubtedly never attain this goal.”218 B’nai B’rith lodges in Germany, however, initially competed with liberal humanitarian Masonic lodges in cities such as Hamburg, Breslau, and Frankfurt. There is much evidence that Jewish Freemasons sought to prevent the establishment of B’nai B’rith lodges in cities with liberal Masonic lodges. A B’nai B’rith lodge was founded in Hamburg in 1887, in Frankfurt in 1888, and in KГ¶nigsberg only in 1910. The Lessing Lodge was founded in Breslau in 1885, and the Leipzig Lodge in Leipzig in 1900—these were the only B’nai B’rith lodges in Breslau or Leipzig during the Kaiserreich. In a number of Germany cities including Hamburg, many members of the elevated Jewish BГјrgertum were Freemasons. For this reason, the B’nai B’rith Order had great difficulty recruiting from these circles and drew its members instead from the Jewish lower middle class.219 In Brunswick, for example, leading members of the Jewish community had belonged to Masonic lodges since the 1860s. In 1902, these Jewish Freemasons still openly opposed the establishment of a B’nai B’rith lodge, because, they argued, “the creation of a confessional lodge . . . does not appear compatible with the civic position of Jews.”220 When the Jewish merchant Heinrich Urbach was set to become the new grand master of the Hermann Lodge in Breslau in 1898, there were protests at the Grand Lodge of Frankfurt because Urbach was also a member of the Jewish Lessing Lodge. As a result, Urbach was forced to resign from the Hermann Lodge along with seven other B’nai B’rith members. In 1887, the German GroГџlogentag adopted a petition submitted by the liberal humanitarian Grand Lodge of Hamburg, which prohibited simultaneous membership in a Masonic and a B’nai B’rith lodge. This rulingPage 164 → was loosened only in 1906. Individual grand lodges were then allowed to determine whether they would admit members of B’nai B’rith lodges. As the Hermann Lodge in Breslau was affiliated with the Grand Lodge of Frankfurt, which did not prohibit double membership, Urbach was subsequently readmitted as a member.221 Nevertheless, double membership remained the exception. After 1900, a new generation of Jewish BГјrger turned increasingly to Jewish lodges, although these adhered to a moral universalism similar to Freemasonry and even copied the latter’s rites and secret practices. The only difference between the two was that established Masonic lodges claimed to be nonconfessional (a claim they seldom realized) while B’nai B’rith lodges openly pursued a moral universalism that was tied to a religion and was therefore particular, as only Jews were admitted as members. This retreat to a Jewish identity in separate lodges can be interpreted as an attempt to resolve the aporia between the promises of a universal humanism and the rigid demands of assimilation. Another segment of the Jewish BГјrgertum, however, continued to participate prominently in established lodge life. It is therefore an oversimplification to assert that Jewish Freemasons did not participate in the reinterpretation of the discourse and cultural practices of civility discussed earlier. One of the paradoxes of the interplay between appropriation and distinction was that both the excluding and the excluded parties employed the same language: Around 1900 German Jews invoked precisely the values of civility and Bildung, Volk and humanity that were used also to exclude them.222 Jewish Freemasons, in other words, were not the last outmoded proponents of the Enlightenment prior to 1914. A Jewish Freemason in Breslau such as Hermann Elias—the father of the famous sociologist Norbert Elias—was no less bourgeois, monarchist, and nationalist than his “Christian” lodge brothers, even if the latter did not want to recognize him as a Freemason.223 Only anti-Semites drew strict boundaries here. This ambivalence between universalism and particularism in liberal-bourgeois culture created a discursive aporia for Jewish BГјrger, or to put this in the language of sociology, it placed them in a double bind. The more Jewish BГјrger adopted universalist values as their own, the more these values could be interpreted as particular and used against them, for example, by claiming that Jews did not have their own culture and tradition, that they were simply WeltbГјrger. The reverse was true as well. The more German Jews retreated into their own particularity, for example, into their own explicitly “Jewish” lodges, the more they were accused of lacking a sense Page 165 →for universal brotherhood.224

The development of civil society over the course of the nineteenth century revealed the boundaries delimiting that society and also produced new boundaries, in Germany as well as France. In both of these countries, we find an intrinsic connection between the moral-political utopia of “civil society,” its historical realization in civil societies in the nineteenth century, and the rise of nationalist and racial categories. The nationalism and antiSemitism of German society, particularly that of the propertied and educated classes of imperial Germany, did not contradict their own sense of “civility.” On the contrary, the liberal ideas of “civil society” and “civility,” of “nation” and “humanity” were based on the political construction of a “stranger” or “outsider.” The stranger, as Georg Simmel has noted, “is close to us, insofar as we feel between him and ourselves common features of a national, social, occupational, or generally human nature. He is far from us, insofar as these common features extend beyond him or us, and connect us only because they connect a great many people.” This, according to Simmel, gives rise to the following tension: “The consciousness of sharing only the quite general places a particular emphasis precisely on that which is not shared.”225 The “stranger”—however the term might be understood at any given time—is always an integral part of one’s own self-conception. In this particular case, the figure of the “stranger” reminded the liberal Protestant BГјrgertum of what constituted its own particularity (despite its universalist language), thereby unleashing new crises of credibility. For this reason, we can interpret the demand raised by liberal Freemasons that everything “Jewish” be absorbed into the “generally human” as an attempt to cover over their own particularity and contingency, to claim their own values and norms as morally superior and universally human. Only in this way could they justify the claim to be a moral elite. Only in this way as well could they displace their own fears and doubts onto an external element. The Masonic bourgeoisie projected onto a Jewish minority the accusation of exclusivity and materialism, of a ruthless striving for profit that destroyed the moral foundations of civil society.226 The slogan Verjudung or Judaization revealed the bourgeoisie’s own cultural fears, which appeared inextricably tied to its successes. A second tension arose here as well. That which is located outside marked the shifting boundary between the universal promise of inclusion and the elite desire for distinction. As Sander Gilman argues, the promise “Become like us—abandon your difference—and you may be one with us” Page 166 →produces the following limitation: “The more you are like me, the more I know the true value of my power, which you wish to share, and the more I am aware that you are but a shoddy counterfeit, an outsider.”227 Extrapolating from this, we can formulate the following thesis: The more liberal universalism and the language of civility gained currency over the course of the nineteenth century and Jews became part of that discourse, the more the universalist dimension of the language of civility and the practices associated with it came to be used as an instrument of exclusion. This helps us to understand the paradox that anti-Semitic sentiment emerged most sharply in those countries of continental Europe in which the process of the embourgeoisement of Jews was most advanced (that is, in Germany and France), and the fact that this occurred at a point in time when the culture of civility had attained its apex and suggested that hatred of Jews would disappear in the imminent future.228 Over the course of the nineteenth century, seemingly apolitical differences in morality, religion, ethnicity, or gender became politicized. This process of politicization produced particularly stringent forms of exclusion precisely because they invoked moral-political concepts such as Bildung and civility, nation and humanity. The liberal and national BГјrgertum assembled in Masonic lodges believed that they had identified a moral crisis in German society: The order and homogeneity of civil society appeared to be in danger. The cultural strategy of this elite for resolving the crisis was to identify those groups that appeared to threaten the moral order, in particular, Jews and Catholics, women and workers. Civil society was an idea, a “moral vision” of society connecting an abstract universalism with a moral-ethical particularity.229 The tension between universality and exclusivity so typical of Masonic lodges in the nineteenth century pointed to the fundamental problem of civility as a moralpolitical idea, a civility that was believed to be the prerequisite of civil society. To avoid misunderstandings, we should emphasize that the faith in civility and the belief in the progress of humanity, in overcoming the divisions of classes, confessions, and nations did in fact contribute to the partial overcoming of such barriers. In many regards, Social Democracy drew its ideas and terms from the “moral

vision” of civil society, and this was not limited to the Masonic trinity of “freedom, equality, and fraternity.”230 In the final decades of the nineteenth century, women, pointing to their own Bildung and morality, demanded that they be allowed to participate in the “brotherhood of men.” When they were denied access, they founded their own associations with moral and political goals.231 Political CatholicismPage 167 → turned the liberal notion of the separation of state and society against Freemasons, arguing that Masonic lodges should relinquish the political privileges they enjoyed in regard to Catholic associations and orders. In general, we can interpret the explosion of Catholic associations that began with the Kulturkampf as a “civic” response to state repression, that is, as a response that employed the means of civil society.232 Beginning in the 1850s, Masonic lodges became one of the important forms of sociability for the Jewish BГјrgertum, not only as a path to embourgeoisement and acculturation but also to a distinct German-Jewish identity.233 Jewish Freemasons could believe that on the threshold of the twentieth century “the sun of the Enlightenment” would rise ever higher and “its rays would pierce ever farther into the darkness that continues to exist.” What did it matter to inexorable progress “if the brilliant cultural landscape still reveals a few dark stains every now and then?” Racial hatred and class hatred, anti-Semitism and nationalism were indeed regarded as such stains, but it did not require “an incorrigible optimist to prophesy the imminent end of these short-winded trends.”234 The allegiance to apolitical moral goals and values as practiced by the BГјrgertum in Masonic lodges prior to 1914 thus possessed a double-edged political nature. On the one hand, it contributed to the continuation of an older moral discourse of civility and universality centered on concepts such as Bildung, humanity, and the belief in progress—despite the increasing and increasingly apparent frictions and conflicts of civil society between classes, confessions, and political parties. This moral language could always also be taken literally and be used to justify demands for inclusion, as was done by Jews in the nineteenth century. On the other hand, the insistence on the apolitical moral foundations of society was unable to disguise the limits of this promise of universality and threw Masonic lodges into new crises of credibility. Both the Left and the Right denounced the civil religion and cosmopolitan ethics of Freemasonry as “faded idealism” and “sentimental humanitarianism,” which could not conceal the “real” political and social interests of the “bourgeoisie.”235 To this extent, the ostensible crisis of civil society prior to 1914 was first and foremost a crisis of the self-image of the BГјrgertum.

Page 168 → Page 169 →

Part II Improving Men There is no doubt that man is getting “better” all the time. —Friedrich Nietzsche

Page 170 → Page 171 →

Chapter 4 Civic Virtue and Sociability Does modern society undermine its own moral foundations—the political virtue of citizens—by rendering impossible the moral improvement or Bildung of the self, that is, the unfolding of human subjectivity and civility through sociability? This fear, which Putnam and other political scientists influenced by Tocqueville have subsequently invoked, lay at the heart of the sense of crisis prevailing among Freemasons in the nineteenth century and was, at the same time, a leitmotiv for Masonic sociability. The latter was supposed to serve as the “art of association” that Tocque-ville and other political thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were convinced would moralize citizens and, through this, the political society they constituted. In the Enlightenment and in early liberalism, the older republican notion of virtue underwent a transformation. It was now believed that political virtue was realized in that sociability in which individuals attained their own humanity.1 If, according to this conception, “civil society” is understood as a social constellation in which citizens establish their “civility” through their own moral actions, the question of whether a society diminishes the individual virtue of its own citizens—in the language of the turn of the twentieth century, their humanity—is of central political import.2 According to recent studies of early German sociology, these questions also constituted a central motif in the work of Max Weber and Georg Simmel. However, no attempt will be made here to determine whether German society of the Kaiserreich did in fact decimate the virtue of its citizens, for this would mean uncritically accepting the moral-political premises of the “practitioners of civil society.” Instead the discourse and identity of these practitioners will be historicized.3 What were the effects of this belief about the impending loss of virtue? What was the “intellectual firmament” and what were the Page 172 →concrete social practices that Freemasons hoped would secure the political virtue of citizens? In order to illuminate the intellectual context of this issue, let us briefly examine the relevant concern of Weber and Simmel. Both regarded the state of the individual’s “soul” in modern society as an issue of central importance. It was no coincidence that at the first German Sociologists Convention in 1910, each of them formulated initial reflections about a sociology of sociability. “My central interest was not the increased expansion of capitalism,” Weber responded to critics of his Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, “but rather the development of the humanity created by a coincidence of religiously and economically conditioned components,” a certain “ethical lifestyle,” as he wrote elsewhere, “which was spiritually вЂadequate’ to the economic level of вЂcapitalism’ [and which] signified its victory in the вЂsouls’ of human beings.”4 At the end of his Protestant Ethic, Weber offered an impassioned description of the kind of “humanity” that would inhabit the steel-hard shell of future capitalist life: It was those “last men” that Nietzsche also saw on the horizon, “specialists without spirit, hedonists without a heart.”5 Like Nietzsche, Weber also raised the question of how to resist this tendency of modern life: “What can we oppose to this machinery in order to preserve a remainder of humanity from this parceling of the soul, from this dictatorship of the bureaucratic ideals of life?”6 However, in contrast to Nietzsche, Weber included civic associations in his examination of the (de)formation of modern subjectivity. Like Tocqueville before him, Weber believed that the key to a political understanding of sociability was located not in the expansion, connection, and composition of associations like Masonic lodges but rather in the “influence that the various associational activities exerted on the overall human bearing.”7 “How does belonging to a particular association affect the inner life of a person as such?” Weber asked. “What specific ideal of вЂmasculinity’ [is] cultivated, consciously or intentionally or even unintentionally?” “What kind of relation exists between an association . . . and that which one could call, in the broadest sense of the term, a worldview?”8 What human type, in other words, does a modern democracy based on free associations produce? With this classically Aristotelian question, Weber raised anew the issue of the influence that the political form of rule had on the “souls” of its citizens, an issue that was central to liberal thinkers of the nineteenth century such as Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill.9

Georg Simmel raised similar questions, and he also shared Weber’s Page 173 →resignation about the “last men” of the late nineteenth century, believing the moral improvement of the self to be threatened by modern capitalist culture. Simmel, however, not only dispensed with contemporary social doctrines of progressivism and evolutionism and their expansive notions of state and society. He also dissolved the abstract opposition between the individual and society into concrete forms of sociability, which he then investigated. In this way, Simmel was able to describe the mechanisms of sociability, which applied as well to the concrete practices of Masonic lodges. According to Simmel, the basic problem of all possible forms of sociability or socialization (Vergesellschaftung) lies in the fact that individuals can only constitute themselves as individuals through interaction with others: “We are all fragments, not only of the universal human, but also of ourselves. . . . The fragmentary, however, supplements the view of the other to that which we never purely and wholly are.”10 In his essay “The Stranger,” Simmel explicated this epistemological apriority of his sociology through an extreme case. In sociological terms, the stranger marks precisely that ambivalence of proximity and distance that is in principle the basis of all socialization.11 According to Simmel, individuals are not merely the products of society but are also its producers. They are at once part of the social and independent of it. They socialize themselves and yet remain necessarily strangers to each other.Civic Virtue and Sociability This helps to explain Simmel’s theory of sociability as a specifically modern “play-form of socialization.”12 Simmel understands sociability as free of specific interests and focused entirely on individuals—here he followed the classic notions of the Enlightenment. Simmel recognized that there are also concrete needs and interests that lead humans to join associations. Nevertheless, it is, according to Simmel, the pleasure of sociability, the “feeling, among their members, of being sociable and the satisfaction derived from it,” that characterizes all forms of associations.13 For Simmel, sociability is grounded in an anthropological need of individuals for interaction with others, a need that promoted both sociable exchange and mutual improvement. How is this form of interaction established? Simmel distinguishes between “upper and lower thresholds of sociability.” On the one hand, the individual casts off all external fetters and enters into this form of sociability only as “a human”; on the other hand, however, this structure does not impinge on that which is entirely subjective and purely internal for an individual. In his “Theory of Social Conduct” from 1799, Friedrich Schleiermacher called for a very similar balance between subjectivity and sociability.14Page 174 → For Schleiermacher and for Simmel a century later, this kind of interaction appeared possible only among people who were equally privileged. The fiction of equality, in other words, was part of the rules of sociability. “Sociability is the game in which one вЂdoes as if’ all were equal and at the same time as if one honored each one of them in particular.”15 Sociability is thus an artificially created world, in which, as Simmel puts it, democracy can be played.16 It is composed of individuals who find an equilibrium between an emotional, unqualified opening of themselves and a controlled closing of themselves. “Sociability transfers the serious, often tragic character of these problems into the symbolic play of its shadowy realm which knows no frictions, since shadows, being what they are, cannot collide.”17 Simmel recognized secret societies as an embodiment of this principle. All forms of sociability are constituted through a border between inside and outside. In the Masonic secret, this assumed merely an intensified expression. The secret provides for the creation of a self-contained “shadow world” of sociability—the Masonic rituals of admission artfully dramatize crossing over the threshold into this shadow world. The special meaning of sociability for both individuals and society lies not only in its concrete contents (for Masonic lodges, the secret), but in its formal structure. “A superficial rationalism always looks for this richness among concrete contents only. Since it does not find it there, it dispenses with sociability as a shallow foolishness. Yet it cannot be without significance that in many, perhaps in all European languages, вЂsociety’ simply designates a sociable gathering. Certainly, the political, the economic, the purposive society of whatever description is a вЂsociety.’ But only the вЂsociable society’ is вЂa society’ without qualifying adjectives. It is this, precisely because it represents the pure form that is raised above all contents such as characterize those more вЂconcrete’ вЂsocieties.’ It gives us an abstract image in which all contents are dissolved in the mere

play of form.”18 Since the Enlightenment, Freemasons had regarded the sociability of the lodges not as a “shallow foolishness” but as an art, indeed as the “royal art.” For Freemasons, the “art of association” enabled the moral improvement of virtuous individuals in the community of “brothers” and thereby created the moral foundations for civil society, indeed, for humanity as a whole. Lodge brothers expounded on this notion in countless speeches and pamphlets in the nineteenth century. For example, in a pamphlet from 1859, the author argued that Freemasonry “should bring about that which neither state nor church can; through it [i.e., Freemasonry], inner virtue Page 175 →and uprightness should be developed and spread. The ultimate goal of civil society (of state and church) as well as how that goal should be attained must be prescribed and commanded through positive laws. Virtue, however, cannot be commanded. It recognizes no law other than its own. Thus, civil society cannot make inner virtue its ultimate goal without setting itself up as the judge of convictions and thoughts, something which would result in the most awful tyranny and be directly opposed to the true ultimate purpose of human society.” The lodges, on the contrary, provide a social space in which the “inner morals” of individuals can be developed in order “to promote that good that civil society itself cannot produce, to maintain wisdom, freedom, and virtue in their essential purity, and to overcome those separations and divisions that the interests of states, religions, classes, and all arbitrary relations produce, and to reunite men merely through the universal bond and according to the rule of reason’s law. According to this law, we are men—nothing more.”19 Masonic lodges promised not only a convivial sociability. They were also supposed to “civilize” individual members, to anchor within them civic virtues until these became, in Simmel’s words, “an inner constitution.”20 While human nature did already contain the seeds of virtue, the protected space of the lodge was, according to the Masonic self-conception, necessary in order for virtue to grow and unfold within individual brothers. As a speaker at the Minerva Lodge in Leipzig argued in 1855, the fraternal name was “a patent of nobility for our souls, a guarantee that we are not merely in the lodge, but that the lodge is in us as well.”21 “The true lodge lies in the breast of men,” a Freemason wrote elsewhere. The secret, he continued, enables individuals to open themselves to a brotherhood with like-minded men, “as here the human soul dares to come out in its original naked beauty and move with unfettered grace.”22 “Only where no one shies away from letting others see his heart completely can a man dispense without danger with the barriers that birth, rank, and wealth have drawn around him in civil society. He can be a man among men, a brother among brothers.” From this the author concluded, “Thus if you take Masonry away from humanity, you remove the only asylum, to which it can flee in order to appear once more in its authentic essence.”23 The secret provided an “inner space of virtue,” a sociable realm in which morality could be unbounded.24 Even in the emerging public sphere of the nineteenth century, Freemasons retained this claim from the Enlightenment. In response to initial attempts to abolish the Masonic secret, a memorandum was circulated in the Balduin Lodge in 1848, which Page 176 →stated in dramatic language: “While general human society can in principle also recognize brotherly love, it is not possible for such love to attain perfection there because it excludes the secret. Namely, the human soul is in its truth the shyest and most timid of all beings, which when faced with any unholy or unclean encounter withdraws far back behind all sorts of deception and illusion, which in their entirety constitute conventional tone and common morals.” Only the lodges provided a free and aesthetic space for virtue. “Good men, who find pleasure in the beauty of the soul, who need truth for themselves and for others, come together for an hour at a location that excludes everything relating to conventional existence, to common morals, and to the foolishness and wickedness of man that could disturb them, and they presuppose of one another that they are as they ought to be and ultimately to be themselves in the moments of enthusiasm as they should always and unchangingly be if they had achieved salvation and perfection.”25 The lodge brothers saw themselves as the moral elite of civil society, as an “aristocracy of the heart.” The “true art of sociability, the art of sentiment,” which Masons located in the lodges, was supposed to go beyond the purely convivial sociability of casinos and clubs, beyond an “ordinary society of entertainment and distraction.”26 Only Masonic lodges appeared to be social spaces of an “aesthetic sociability,” where

one did not interact with others “through the wire netting of a rigid etiquette,” “where we should appear without masks. Here we want to see true men, but not men with their ugly weaknesses who surround us enough in our daily lives. Rather, with the word вЂtrue’ we mean at the same time the beautiful substance of personality.”27 “Since natural law has determined,” the article continued, “that we reach our highest cultivation only in associational life with others, and furthermore since the powerful instinct for self-preservation planted in us by nature absolutely causes and also justifies a not insignificant degree of selfishness in us, we must attempt, as artists of life, to bring the one into harmony with the other. This pursuit of harmony will bring us happiness.”28 This claim by the lodges that humans were by their very nature destined to sociability can also be found in the definitions of sociability in the relevant lexica of the nineteenth century. “Man, that riddle of nature,” the Allgemeine EncyklopГ¤die der Wissenschaften und KГјnste (General Encyclopedia of the Science and Arts, 1856) stated, “enters the world completely naked and rough. That which is human—humanity—must first be instilled in him. Procreation is only the act that produces bodies; it is education alone that creates man and a human existence. The education of man into Page 177 →human existence, however, does not consist of all parental nourishment and development, which is probably performed by animals as well, but rather of every improving influence that the social intercourse of man produces on all individuals, on their way of being, of thinking and feeling.” All “culture and civilization” thus presupposes sociability and—in political terms—civil society.29 Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, German Freemasons believed that the connection between virtue and sociability was in crisis and remained incomplete. It was a connection that always had to be established anew, since the process of individual Bildung also had no logical end. Whoever claimed that he did not need to improve and educate himself any more, that he was educated enough, merely exposed himself as uneducated.30 Since the foundations of society rested on the virtue and Bildung of its citizens, society necessarily stood on a wavering ground. The language of virtue and sociability was based on a vision of civil society that permanently sought to surpass the level it had already attained. Standstill, stability, and security appeared to corrupt the morality of citizens and thus that of society as well.31 In this sense, Masonic sociability went beyond the convivial sociability of many other clubs and assocations. It was based on a political anthropology that was supposed to utilize, in a moral-political sense, an apparently natural “striving for sociability,” as one lodge speaker called it in 1844. Freemasons believed that this “noble sociability” stood in sharp contrast to mere amusement, which they regarded as a symptom of the crisis.32 The “associations, guilds, and cooperatives established for particular purposes as well as [private] societies for pleasure, for вЂleisurely’ sociability after work”—none of these, according to a lodge brother in 1867, constituted the “noble sociability” that many BГјrger would miss. Only the lodges, he argued, provide an ideal interaction between sociability and humanity. “Every member can and should work for the whole as much as he is able. . . . As a result, the participant feels himself to be a fully valid and fully justified part of the whole, sees himself in that which makes him a man, recognizes and finds himself, even if he is not fully aware of it at every moment amidst a human association that represents for him no more and no less than humanity.”33 Freemasons regarded the lodges as an anticipation of the future, of an “empire of reason,” and believed that they themselves were already the citizens of this empire and spoke its language. “Only when humanity has raised itself up to such spiritual heights that no passion and no prejudice separates it anymore, when it is so mature that church and state have Page 178 →attained their lofty purposes, and the time comes when humans unite in love and concord into a peaceful and happy herd, only then is Masonry’s mediation no longer necessary . . . for then humanity is that which it should be.”34 Freemasons were painfully aware that this vision of a united humanity in a world without social, confessional, and political boundaries was as yet a moral and political utopia. However, they believed that only with such lofty expectations could a partial improvement of humanity be brought about, initially among the “citizens of the empire of reason,” the lodge brothers themselves.35 In chapter 3, we investigated the significance of Masonic lodges for nineteenth-century civil society and the social

and moral boundaries that the lodges drew in regard to society outside. In part two, we will begin by examining in greater detail the practices connected with the utopia of lodge sociability. Thus we will turn from the exterior to the interior in order to observe the mechanisms at work in the social spaces of Masonic lodges.36 The example of lodge sociability allows us to examine the interplay between the “forms of subjectivation and the practices of the self,” on the one hand, and the “practices of the social,” on the other.37 The Bildung of the self in the society of lodge brothers occurred according to particular rules and rituals that were supposed to establish a “bond of brotherhood.” The lodges’ cult of secrecy made possible a particular form of sociability, a sociability that allowed lodge brothers to share emotional experiences and relations with other men. The lofty ethical principles of Freemasonry were intimately connected to this emotional world of brotherhood. It was these emotional ties that guaranteed the appeal of Masonic lodges prior to 1914. Following this, we will investigate the lodges’ civil religious credo, which was connected to the utopia of improving the self. Was Freemasonry a new secular religion based on virtue, reason, and Bildung and realized within a secret cult? Did the significance of this new religiosity decrease with the general progress of science and secularism in society, or can we observe, on the contrary, a religious reinterpretation of older fundamental concepts such as Bildung and humanity? To return to a central question of the previous chapter, if this was the case, does the Masonic religiosity of Bildung testify to a turning away from the Enlightenment by the educated elites beginning in the late nineteenth century, to a retreat to the apolitical? Or does it testify rather to a will to reform society according to moral and political imperatives still based on an early modern understanding of politics?

Page 179 →

Chapter 5 Rites of Masculinity The vision of “civilizing” the self through sociability required a social space within civil society, a space that was separate from that society but that could exert an influence on it. It appears to be a characteristic of nineteenth-century civic culture that such spaces were created within society, a second world beyond everyday life where men could enjoy sociability, friendship, and moral improvement. Within these spaces, society experienced itself as society: Civic values and virtues were practiced and displayed. This is true of other sociable spaces of the nineteenth century as well, such as museums, theaters, salons, zoos, parks, promenades, festivals, baths, and spas.1 All of these social spaces were structurally similar. The Masonic lodge was merely an early model, exceptional in its exclusiveness and degree of intimacy. The most significant aspect in this regard was that lodges admitted only men. Like other voluntary associations of the nineteenth century, they served as social spaces where male identity was exercised and experienced.2 Before we engage in a detailed examination of the rules and rituals that ordered the inner life of Masonic lodges in Germany, let us turn to the space of the lodges in the literal sense, to their buildings, which served as stages for the playful appropriation of virtue. While lodge life in the eighteenth century still occurred primarily within the back rooms of taverns and inns, Freemasons began at the turn of the nineteenth century to build representative lodge houses in the most exclusive locations in German cities. This trend became particularly accentuated during the growth phase of Freemasonry after the 1860s. Prior to 1914, there was hardly a respected lodge in Germany that did not own its own villa. The high lodge fees as well as the fact that many architects and master builders were themselves Freemasons enabled Masonic lodges to erect a visible sign of their “sociable power” in the metropolitan landscape. Page 180 →While the architectural forms and ornaments of lodge buildings varied, they shared, in accordance with their purpose, basic traits. This can be illustrated through an example. The Minerva zu den drei Palmen, the most exclusive Masonic lodge in Leipzig, erected an imposing building in the city center near the Thomas Church in 1816. Over the subsequent decades, this lodge house was repeatedly expanded.3 The house itself was surrounded by a garden with exotic plants and a high wall, which ensured the lodge’s separation from the outside world. The two sphinxes standing guard on the left and right of the front door were supposed to remind the brothers of their duty to silence. The lodge “requires the silence of the pyramids,” the Leipzig Freemason and naturalist Alfred Brehm argued, relating Freemasonry to a recent journey to Egypt. “Silence and secrecy in the lodge as well, although the noise and bustle of everyday life resound about it.”4 Sculptures of the goddess Minerva, after whom the lodge was named, and of John the Baptist, the patron saint of Freemasonry, designated the purpose of the lodge house, as did the motto above the front door, “Know thyself.” The lodge house had a series of business and social rooms, an archive and a library with a reading room, as well as a banquet hall with a wine cellar tended by a castellan and lodge personnel (the “serving brothers”). The central staircase led to the “sacred hall,” the lodge temple. On lodge evenings, the hall was artfully illuminated. Even during the day, the windows were hung with black or blue curtains (the colors of “English” Freemasonry). The decoration of the windows and walls changed frequently according to the ritual. The lodge was also a sociable shadow world in the literal sense: The muted candles, and later the gaslight, threw shadows that were part of the ritual performance. With the introduction of electricity at the end of the nineteenth century, this play of shadows threatened to disappear.5 The “orientalism” of lodge decoration and symbols was an inheritance of the Enlightenment. The grand master sat elevated in the east of the oblong quadrangle of the lodge room, often with the sun shining on his back. The location of the lodge itself was called the “Orient.” The fact that many Jewish Freemasons were reminded of a synagogue on entering a Masonic lodge was due in part to the Talmudic and old Testament founding legends, which had ignited the imagination of Freemasons in the eighteenth century and which,

ironically, conservative Freemasons—who often wanted to exclude Jews from their lodges—in particular struggled to retain up into the twentieth century. Almost all of the secret passwords of the Page 181 →Masonic degrees were Hebraic. Like Judaism, Freemasonry did not register the date beginning with the birth of Christ, but rather with the creation of the world. King Solomon was regarded as the founding father of Freemasonry; Freemasons believed that when they assembled in the lodges, they continued to build on Solomon’s Temple. Like Jews in synagogues, Freemasons were required to keep their hats on in the lodges. The decorations of lodge houses, for example, painting the ceiling with a starry canopy, were also similar to those of synagogues.6 Fig. 4. Masonic Temple of the Minerva Lodge in Leipzig, built in 1905. (Courtesy of the Freimaurermuseum Bayreuth.) Lodges combined the most diverse styles in eclectic ways. Ionic columns, Egyptian ornaments (e.g., the zodiac) on the walls and the beams, the image of a winged ball above the door as a sign that lodge brothers were “children of their era,” geometric figures, allegorical paintings on the walls, a blue starry sky on the ceiling—hardly a style or an effect was omitted in the temple interior in order to emphasize that this was a sacred location, a space in which the knowledge and the art of all of humanity was present. The eclecticism of the symbolic forms, their ambiguity and indeterminacy were intentional. Freemasons regarded themselves as “friends of humanity” and citizens of the world, who bridged time and space in the Page 182 →sense that they could turn to antiquity as well as to the art of distant continents to improve themselves, appropriating what was ostensibly best from all eras and locations.7 Fig. 5. The interior of the Masonic Temple of the Minerva Lodge. (Courtesy of the Freimaurermuseum Bayreuth.) Like other Masonic lodges, the Minerva’s old villa proved too small for its increased membership during the 1860s and 1870s—on some evenings, as many as four hundred brothers were present. Between 1884 and 1886, a new lodge house was built on the old property, which itself proved too small only a few years later.8 The redesigning of the Leipzig city center after the demolition of Pleissenburg Castle provided an opportunity to build a new representative lodge house directly across from the new city hall and, as was emphasized at the lodge house’s official inauguration, in direct view of the most important Catholic church in the city.9 It was no coincidence that city hall and the lodge house were officially opened in 1905 and were built in similar architectural styles. The decoration and furnishings of the 1886 and 1905 lodge houses continued to be oriented around the old lodge house villa. The three-thousand-square-foot hall for the rituals was a copy of an Egyptian temple hall and filled with allegorical images. There was a clear connection here Page 183 →between aesthetics and morality, a connection presupposed by the notion of Bildung and typical of nineteenth-century civility. There were, for example, three freestanding columns in the middle of the lodge temple, representing the “three great lights” of Freemasonry: beauty, wisdom, and strength. These were supposed to remind lodge brothers of their tasks: selfimprovement, self-control, and self-knowledge. However, only the rituals—the practices of the self—filled this symbolically overloaded stage with life. Only in the rituals did the connection between aesthetics and morality (the “art of association”) unfold completely.

All Men Are Brothers Since the eighteenth century, the admission ritual had formed the center of the Masonic cult. The ritual was imaginatively performed as a rite of passage.10 After the prospective lodge brother had gone through the complicated, time-consuming process of formal admission, he appeared in the lodge house in the early evening with an intimate friend who was a lodge brother and his sponsor. The rituals, which took up to three hours, often ended with a celebratory banquet with further addresses or music, so that the lodge visit was seldom over before midnight.11 At the entrance, a warden or a serving brother would check the right of the guests to enter the lodge. Nonlocal Freemasons had to show their Masonic certificate and to identify themselves through secret signs. Great attention was paid to every detail, including clothing. The candidate had to appear in black tails and a top hat, as

did all of the lodge members. Around the middle of the nineteenth century, brothers occasionally appeared in the lodges dressed in “house caps in all the colors of the rainbow” and in overcoats, much to the despair of traditionally minded Freemasons.12 Brothers were not permitted to remove their top hats at the beginning of the lodge meeting, thereby providing a visible demonstration of their equality: No one had to take off his hat to another, even if the latter were a prince. On entering the lodge, the applicant left behind all of the insignia of his worldly existence. Money, jewelry, and weapons were symbolically removed as a sign that the candidate did not seek wealth, honor, or power in the lodge, that he was prepared to cross the threshold into this pure space of moral improvement merely as a human being. Now undressed to his shirt and pants, he was led into a windowless black chamber for internal reflection and self-examination, often in the lodge’s cellar, which occasionallyPage 184 → contained a human skeleton. The “quiet shudder caused by the isolation in the cool chamber” made the candidate uncertain and pushed him out of the “world of the familiar.” Instead, “one feels delivered to an unknown, translucent world, ” as one lodge brother described his emotions in the “black chamber.”13 Another Freemason even claimed that the black chamber had put him in a state of hypnosis and confusion.14 Following this solitude—a test of the initiate’s capacity to be silent and to exercise patience—the journey then proceeded to the community of lodge brothers. A little while later, the candidate was led blindfolded into the actual lodge room. In some lodges, he first made a detour through the entire lodge house. As a sign of his incompleteness, the newcomer had to go through the admission ceremony hindered by a trampled felt shoe on his left foot.15 There were other tests as well. The experience of crossing a threshold and the intentional shock therapy were once again supposed to ensure the exclusion of the external world from the candidate’s consciousness and to strengthen his trust in the new community. The candidate, supported by his friend and sponsor, then undertook an allegorical journey from adolescence to adulthood. The examinations varied according to the lodge system.16 In the admission ceremony to the Third Degree, the prospective master was placed in or on a coffin and then led away several times supported by his brothers. The rituals also occasionally included clever surprises. In one case, for example, the grand master would effortlessly lift a person lying prone on a coffin, apparently through the power of his magical words and not that of mechanical levers.17 Birth and death, light and darkness were always present in the iconography of the lodge. The candidate’s self—his inadequacy and lack of masculinity having been cast off at the beginning of the rituals—was thereby overcome: He died a metaphoric death within the community of his brothers, a death that, at the same time, enabled his rebirth. The blindfold was finally torn from the newcomer’s eyes and his gaze accustomed itself only with difficulty to the brightly lit lodge room. The future brothers threatened him with drawn daggers (or with compass points) aimed at his heart, while rays of light appeared to emanate from brothers themselves. In the end, the lodge brothers included the “morally newborn” member in the “chain of brothers.” They sang and formed a circle around him and then took him by the hand. The new brother swore to strive for self-ennoblement, self-knowledge, and self-mastery as well as to be silent in the Page 185 →future about what he experienced and learned within this “community of equals” (e.g., the passwords and signs of recognition). In some lodges, this oath was reinforced by the applicant mixing his blood in a dish with that of his brothers.18 The ceremony ended with the words, “The bond of life is closed,” followed by a brief address from an older lodge brother, which again dealt with moral issues.19 Even this address was intended primarily to evoke an elated mood. It was supposed to “call to mind in the listeners, through an association of ideas, a series of related notions that accorded with high moral ideals, which provided a certain elevation, a movement upward for the Freemason’s emotions.”20 Rituals were held not only for new admissions but also in an altered form for promotion to higher Masonic degrees. The more degrees a lodge system had, the more often an individual could enjoy the pleasures of such ceremonies. As these ceremonies were similar in their basic traits, it is not necessary to describe in detail here the different variants. Fig. 6. Rituals related to the initiation of a neophyte. On loosening the blindfold, the candidate is struck by a flash of light. (Steel engraving by Henry Winkles, 1849. Courtesy of the Archiv fГјr Kunst und Geschichte.)

Liberating and mastering the emotions formed the core of this drama centered on the new “brother” and his self, a drama that was entertaining Page 186 →for all the participants. Many Freemasons regarded the admission ceremony to be among the most impressive moments of their lives. Several even felt that their “inner being had probably never been shaken so profoundly.”21 In the lodge, individuals were “transferred for several hours into an abstract ideal life.”22 As with other rites of passage, the conflicts of everyday life were symbolically transcended and removed. In 1896, a Jewish Freemason from the Apollo Lodge in Leipzig provided a vivid description of this removal from the everyday world and of the doctrine of the rituals: “As the blindfold fell from my eyes and I saw the Masonic light for the first time, I believed that I was in another world. Removed from the hustle and bustle of life, it appeared to me as if I had suddenly become clairvoyant and as if everything which I had experienced up to that point was so petty that I felt in this moment as if my entire past, which now lay behind me, appeared as a building constructed by a layperson of some talent, a building that, considered superficially, did not make a bad impression. Upon entering this building, however, one noted that openings for Page 187 →windows had been forgotten in the construction, and that one was now forced to grope about in the dark. And when I examined the stones from which the building had been made, they proved to be composed largely of completely unusable materials.” The author’s former life had been determined by selfishness, self-interest, and an exaggerated desire for recognition. Now, however, following admission to the lodge, he wrote: “I had a peculiar feeling of security; I noticed that I had now been taken up into a community of men, of brothers, of magnanimous souls who seemed to me to desire the best and to want to attain the highest. I had become a different human being. Yes! Was I this already? My most inner self said to me that I had not yet actually become it, but that I was on the best way there.”23 Fig. 7. Rituals related to the initiation of a neophyte. Blindfolded, the candidate is asked to let himself fall, without knowing that his future brothers will catch him. (Steel engraving by Henry Winkles, 1849. Courtesy of the Archiv fГјr Kunst und Geschichte.) Fig. 8. Rituals related to the initiation of a neophyte. The skeleton reminds the candidate of his mortality. He will swear the Masonic oath on the open Bible. (Steel engraving by Henry Winkles, 1849. Courtesy of the Archiv fГјr Kunst und Geschichte.) As Alexis Schmidt conceded in 1880, the lodge rituals and their inflated symbols—for example, using one’s own blood to seal the brotherhood and to signify one’s willingness to make sacrifices for the new community—went far beyond the “everyday and the usual, beyond what is Page 188 →regarded as normal in bourgeois society,” and demanded “nothing trivial from educated men of our era.”24 It was this realm beyond everyday life produced by the Masonic rites of passage that made the lodges so appealing to their members. The Masonic ritual offered men of the BГјrgertum a drama of self-exploration in which fears, hopes, and desires could be articulated and for which there appeared to be no space outside of the lodges. The secret made it possible to open oneself to this emotional world, and, at the same time, it protected that world from the world outside. Before being admitted, new brothers of the Apollo Lodge had to fill out a form in which they were reminded that “garrulousness” was harmful to men. The form read: “You are therefore certainly also firmly determined to observe the strictest silence regarding the subjects of Freemasonry and the lodge at all times and in regard to everyone, regardless of sex.”25 The form used by the Zepter Lodge in Breslau also required new members to commit themselves to silence about the secrets of the lodge. If they violated this, they would, according to the form, call for their own “complete exclusion, and desire also to be called a traitor and an unworthy man who does not keep his word; this should be made know in public to all Masonic lodges in the entire world.”26 The secret playfully established a bond of brotherhood by marking the boundaries of a space for intimacy. Trust and the capacity to remain silent were, as Georg Simmel recognized, the cement that held the secret society together. Consequently, the playful education to silence was a central focus of lodge sociability. It is therefore hardly surprising that the secret rituals were retained against attempts by left-liberal Freemasons to institute reforms during the 1860s. While the secret no longer fulfilled the function of political protection that it had had in the eighteenth century, it remained a fundamental condition of lodge sociability, of Masonic intimacy and exclusivity.

Friendship and Love

But what then was the true secret of Freemasonry? Although the rituals and symbols of the lodges were supposed to be subject to secrecy, they had, since the eighteenth century, been aired repeatedly in public in dime novels and Catholic pamphlet literature. According to Freemasons, these symbolic forms did not constitute the real substance of their secrets. The actual arcanum of Freemasonry was the emotional experience of the rituals,Page 189 → the avowal of brotherhood among men, the “Befreundung des Feindlichen” (befriending the hostile), as the well-known Freemason August Horneffer wrote in 1913. “Who can decipher for us,” he continued, “the magic of this experience? In the stillness it overcomes us or steals up on us; it makes us still and silent. When men, who were strangers before, who even regarded themselves as natural enemies or rivals, decide at once to put their hands together in friendship, when in the hour of this decision the disharmonies in one’s own soul also seem to dissolve and the world gains a new, meaningful, and joyous appearance, then men feel that something inexpressible has occurred, that they now possess a secret, which cannot be made known through the spoken word or through writing. There is only one way to communicate the secret: the path of the gesture, of artistic and archaic play.”27 Another Freemason described the experience of male friendship as a “sacred shudder” and a “sweet secret.” It is, he continued, “not communicable” but “can only be experienced” (the inflationary use of the term Erlebnis or “experience” began only after the turn of the twentieth century) and appears to some to be “the attraction that draws me into the lodge.”28 According to August Wolfstieg, one should “not attempt to investigate [such rituals and symbols] through human understanding and reason. Rather, one must experience them oneself. Then they affect us like a fairy tale from our childhood and their value lies in the improvement of the self.”29 Sociable contact with the brothers in the lodge and the experience of lodge rituals satisfied emotional needs, needs that seemed impossible to still outside of the lodge. Thus, around 1900, the Breslau writer Paul Barsch described the rituals as “a meaningful cult that speaks with its romantic poetry to the free souls of free men, bringing hidden emotional sides into resounding vibrations, which cannot be attained through mere words, be they so forceful, so noble, and so poetic.” For “with our rituals in the temple, we—brothers among brothers—will celebrate the noble and gladdening mysteries of the heart.”30 The spaces, rituals, and rules of the lodges existed in order to produce a fundamental emotional attitude, which made individuals feel that they were part of a community of brothers. “This will not be the case for every brother in every temple work,” another Freemason argued. “But when the electric spark springs through the chain during a celebratory meeting, and the master or the speaker finds the words to ignite a brother’s most intimate experiences, then his soul awakens, then warm passion and new life arise.”31 It was not only a violation of a Freemason’s obligation to silence for Page 190 →him to describe lodge rituals in public, but in particular for him to ridicule publicly “the ways in which a brother has expressed enthusiasm or emotion in the lodge,” for this denied both himself and others unconditional intimacy. “Just as we do not reveal our most intimate feelings to everyone, the essence of our royal art requires that we employ this fraternal language only within our own circle, that we protect it as a secret—not because we are compelled to conceal something secret, but rather because otherwise we would lose something that is cherished and dear to all of us: the language of the heart, which we alone can understand and which speaks more clearly and says more than words do. . . . We must understand ourselves without saying much. Friends must be able to feel each other’s emotions.”32 These emotional relations among men lacked their own semantic, oscillating since the late eighteenth century between love and friendship.33 Before the middle of the nineteenth century, the discursive line between love and friendship had not yet been firmly drawn. The concept of love encompassed as a matter of course the emotions that brought lodge brothers together. This is evident in a lodge poem from 1845. I love you Can one say anything more beautiful? Is love not the happiness of earthly existence? I feel your heart beat upon my breast, And mine beats back upon yours. I love you!

You love me! I believe your words And offer my breast to you happily! We are brothers, sons of the order, To whom love is, remains, and always was the rule You love me! We love each other and all of our brothers With the same yearning, so fervent, warm, and pure, And lock ourselves firmly, as true members of the order, Within the great chain of brothers. We love each other! Who doesn’t feel profoundly moved in his innermost self, When the spirit of love flutters above us Page 191 →And together hand in hand and breast on breast One brother stands right next to another! So we love.34 However, the love that lodge brothers shared was “moralized” in the sense that it was supposed to serve a higher purpose: the brotherhood of humanity. A year later, the speaker of the Minerva Lodge formulated this even more clearly. Bring with you to the temple’s hall True fraternal sense, Let the barriers of life fall, Give yourself over completely to your brother. Take your brother up with you Upon the wings of enthusiasm, Let the words penetrate your heart, Or lend an open ear!35 What purpose was this emotional opening up supposed to serve? With beating hearts the brother awaits the happy minute, Which calls him to the temple within the desired circle. Is it that beating, which the meal solicits without quenching his hunger? Which the sweet kiss of dallying women promises? Which society offers to vain and silly fops, Or the trickling wine, or the glittering game?— No! It burns passionately in the breasts of men of more noble fire! Yet does he know that man here has intercourse with men, That in the brotherhood of intimate friendship he devotes himself To higher purposes, to the Divine itself; that in the beautiful association He strives only for the interests of the entire human race, That he raises himself up in a manly way, in a manly way, with men in the brotherhood?36 This “brotherly love”—intimate emotional relations among men—was not a vague notion propagated by lodge speakers, but stood at the center of the Masonic cult. As one Freemason wrote in 1867, brotherly love was not a dream, but “the pure practice of Freemasonry.” It shares, he continued, Page 192 →none “of the effusiveness or sentimentality of so-called Platonic love” nor “the lasciviousness and commonness of sexual desire, which is so frequently concealed by the word вЂlove.’ It is also not that all too general love, which is so incomprehensible and impracticable and which has aroused so little interest in the call for вЂhuman

love.’ Rather, it is a masculine, clear, and friendly striving to bring about the greatest possible perfection of existence. Just as in the family, brothers stand side by side.”37 According to the moral-political vision of the lodges, the Mason became perfected through the love of his lodge “brothers,” leading not only to the gradual overcoming of his own weaknesses, but the ills of society, indeed, of humanity as a whole. Freemasons also retained this connection between “brotherly love” and the love of humanity, when, starting in the middle of the nineteenth century, they began to use the term friendship exclusively for emotional relations between men in the lodges. “If we already perfect ourselves through the intimate land of friendship, through the exchange and correction of our ideas, through rescuing a friend from embarrassments . . . , if through this we move closer to the moral standpoint that we have set for ourselves, how much more do we do this through the common striving with a like-minded person for the lofty ideal of truth and virtue that our brotherhood prescribes for us.”38 Love, it is now claimed, tends to be located in marriage, while friendship is located outside of marriage, for example, in the lodge. This in no way signified a revaluation of love between the sexes, that is, between marital partners. On the contrary, the ideal of masculine friendship in the lodges appeared “more noble and more complete than love itself, which would be completely preposterous without sensuousness.” The purpose of the union between two friends was said to be “mutual ennoblement and perfection. Such a union, however, can never arise from the weaknesses of human nature. Rather we have every reason to understand true friendship as a perfection of this and to prefer it to love.”39 If love between the sexes was regarded as natural and thus imperfect, the friendship between men appeared as the path to the moral improvement of humanity. Love between the sexes was regarded as “surging,” “effusive,” “unconscious,” and based only “on appearances.” Friendship between men, on the contrary, was regarded as “serious,” “well considered,” “ethical,” and built on “inner values.” Such friendships demonstrated “that a band has been placed around men, who, confronted with the seriousness of life, have learned to recognize and to value the same Page 193 →moral principles and thus have raised each other up to increased perfection.”40 The more frequently friendship and love were understood as opposites, the more superior friendship appeared to be. “If love is the summer of life with its magnificent flowers and blossoms, then friendship is autumn with its precious, fragrant fruits, the mature love that knows what it wants, the serious man in contrast to the ardent, radiant youth. Masonry seeks to produce such serious friendship, to educate men to it.”41 The uncertainty about where the boundaries between love and friendship ran was characteristic of the discursive situation around 1900. Even if “an intimate community of individuals, who are not connected on a sexual basis and who are not related” was generally called friendship rather than love, a number of Freemasons argued that love was the appropriate term to describe the emotions that lodge brothers shared. “Let us call the child by its correct name. The lodge does not seek simply to unite us in love, but to improve (bilden) us to love in the highest sense.”42 In a lodge speech in Dresden in 1904, one Freemason argued, “Friendship, and not love, is the most noble emotion of which the human heart is capable.” However, he also added, “Real love is itself friendship.”43 Contemporary Freemasons believed that this “moral friendship” was in no way opposed to passion, as long as that passion was not of a sexual nature (as the term sexual was understood at the time). In 1900, a Freemason from Breslau defined the friendship among lodge brothers as “an indissoluble bond that ties them together for their entire lives and that is stronger than understanding and reason.”44 “Brotherly love,” as friendship in the lodges was often called, explicitly included physical contact between men. Contrary to the widespread clichГ©, the male body was as little subject to taboos among men in the nineteenth century as the female body was among women.45 The forms of contact were multiple and were in part ritualized in Masonic ceremonies and customs. The handshake and the oaths of loyalty, the fraternal kisses and the drawn daggers on the naked breast of the initiate mediated and strengthened the new community in a sensuous manner.46 The significance attributed to male bodies in these rituals is evident in the fact that not only social and moral deficiencies, but also physical deficiencies—such as blindness, deafness, lameness, mental illnesses, as well as “emasculation”—made it impossible for a person to be admitted as a lodge brother.47 Even a “man who is somewhat repulsive in appearance, but who also has a heart open to all goodness and beauty, and who with better acquaintance is just as friendly as anyone else” could not be admitted to Page 194 →the lodge. “It is

not always principles and universal norms that are decisive for admission, but often a feeling of aversion experienced by all (or many) of the brothers.”48 This emotional evaluation was based in part on the external appearance of the prospective brother and in part through whether he was known to have an “open sense for friendship” and would be receptive to the emotional world of the lodge.49 Conversely, only such openness guaranteed the friendship of another lodge brother. “Like a Morgengabe [the gift from a husband to his wife on the morning after their wedding night], we bring friendship to our younger brothers when we admit them [to the lodge].”50 Even a well-known publisher such as Eugen Diederichs had difficulty being admitted to the Balduin Lodge in Leipzig in 1897–98, because there were rumors that he was an “odd person,” who might not be able to adapt to the specific atmosphere of lodge sociability.51 A civil tone prevailed in the lodge, one that was supposed to be neither overly formal nor overly familiar. In 1872, Major-General Reinhold Weber was elected as grand master of the Zepter Lodge in Breslau. It became evident very quickly that Weber had not been able to adopt the specific tone of the lodge. Within the lodge, he acted stiffly and uncertainly; outside the lodge he hardly associated with the brothers, keeping his wife from mutual outings—all of this was recorded with disapproval in the lodge annals. His lodge brothers also disapproved of his militaristic ideas about discipline. “When the brothers once stood up at a lodge banquet too leisurely following his [Weber’s] call to order, he commanded them to be seated again and to rise like men at his new call to order.” After this, evening visits to the lodge declined. A few years later, Weber was not reelected. The lawyer and notary Martin August Ludwig LГ¶we replaced Weber in 1878. LГ¶we, too, had difficulties in gaining respect in the lodge, although for quite different reasons. If the major-general had acted too aggressively in the lodge, the lawyer was lacking in dignity: “This was due in part to his external appearance, which was not imposing. A recurring case of gout made him appear clumsy in his movements, and this greatly disturbed the lodge brothers. . . . The lack of importance that he attached to matters of appearance could be seen, among other things, by the fact that he appeared at admissions and promotions wearing a low black felt hat and a dark frock coat. His intention here—to rid the lodge of the outmoded top hats—failed and, in fact, had the opposite effect. A substantial number of the brothers soon appeared in the lodge in hats of every kind and even in light-colored suits. This greatly obstructed the celebrations, which gave rise Page 195 →to strong displeasure.”52 LГ¶we also did not remain in office long. Physically and intellectually imposing, independent and strict but also “sociable” and friendly in nature—this was how the brothers imagined the ideal Freemason. This was the kind of man with whom they wanted to have intimate contact. Many BГјrger of the nineteenth century considered such same-sex intimacy to be a natural part of their identity, indeed proof of their respectability, which affected their status in professional as well as familial life. What was true for relations among men was also true for love and friendship among women: A different emotional landscape existed in the nineteenth century, in which these were not taboo. Despite the ostensibly prude, repressive, and destructive Victorian sexual morality, a broad spectrum of passions existed between explicit heterosexuality and uncompromising homosexuality. A gradual change emerged only in the 1880s, as three overlapping and mutually reinforcing processes unfolded: the “scientization” of sexuality, such as in medical theory; the use of “deviant” sexual behavior as a metaphor for social and political decline; and the emergence of a specific homosexual identity. The fears that arose with the “discovery” of “the third sex” substantially affected emotional relationships among men.53 In the face of the scandal around Oscar Wilde, there were concerns that all forms of male camaraderie—including those in Masonic lodges—would become suspect: “Street gossip must not be allowed to desecrate these rooms.”54 If the idea of male friendship had until this time been regarded as spiritual and moral and thus as the highest form of love, higher than love between the sexes, sociability and intimacy between men now became increasing suspect among the general public. Freemasons condemned all the more harshly the “unhappy poet,” a “decadent man, afflicted in his sexual center,” who disrupted “healthy eroticism” and “the polar tension between the sexes.” “Such people poison our healthy desire for women.”55 Beginning in the 1880s, Freemasons attempted to mark off their specific form of male friendship, which had hardly required any definition before this, from “dubious inclinations,” as they were now called.56 The new forms of same-sex communities, such as the Wandervogel youth movement (founded in 1895), propagated

different notions of sexuality and the body. Beginning around the turn of the twentieth century, the antibourgeois character of many youth and reform movements focused precisely on the rejection of what they regarded as the older generation’s fatuous “culture of masculinity,” for example, the “sentimental humanitarianism” of Page 196 →Masonic lodges. Shortly after the First World War, a lodge brother held an almost desperate address against the “modern eroticist,” arguing that there was not only an “erotics of the boy”—which included the Wandervogel movement—but also an “erotics of the man,” which was represented by Masonic lodges and which accorded with the “solid, strong, and clear persistence” of the “BГјrger type.” “This BГјrgerlichkeit,” he continued with resignation, “is rejected by a great part of our youth. They prefer the gypsy type to the BГјrger type.”57

Father and Sons It has frequently been pointed out that masculinity can only be understood relationally.58 Along with family and professional life, sociability constitutes the third important sphere for the cultural negotiations and the construction of masculine subjectivity. For this reason, the issue of kinship is particularly important for Masonic lodges and for the history of friendship among men in general. This is true in two respects: first, as touched upon earlier, for the relationship between fathers and sons; and second, for the relationship between marriage and male friendship, or, as the lodge brothers called it, their relation to their “sisters” (their wives). Freemasonry had always employed metaphorical references to the family. A newly established lodge was the “daughter” of an older “mother lodge”; the lodge members were “brothers,” and their wives were “sisters.” “We would like to be to one another that which brothers are, to live in the most intimate relations that men can have with one another,” one Freemason stated in a lodge address in 1848. He continued: “The Masonic bond should support the intimate relations that the family supports among biological brothers, only transferred onto a broad circle of men. It should be the mother who provides me with more brothers than my paternal home did.”59 Why did Masonic lodges make such extensive use of the metaphor of kinship? One hypothesis might be that for men around the age of thirty who joined the lodges, the cult of brotherhood mediated a particular intimacy among men, an intimacy that was lacking in everyday life. These men had well-established professional careers, had few if any direct connections to masculine-adolescent forms of sociability such as the university or gymnastics club, and many of them had recently married. Often they now assumed public offices of some kind. Beyond their secure professional, familial, and communal existence, they longed for another world as well, a Page 197 →world in which masculinity and self-improvement could be playfully connected. For the sons of Freemasons, the admission rituals in the lodge were also significant in another respect: They functioned as a kind of rite of passage from the domestic-familial sphere of women and children into the male world of associations and the public sphere.60 Crossing this threshold marked admission into the paternal world of the lodge. One had to be twenty-five years of age to be admitted to a Masonic lodge, or, if one were the son of a Freemason—a so-called Lufton—twenty years of age. The admission ceremonies, with their somber atmosphere, ensured a ritualized succession of generations. In the nineteenth century, it was customary that over a number of generations fathers introduced their sons into a Masonic lodge. In fact this trend increased over the course of the nineteenth century: In 1840, only four sons of Freemasons were members of the Apollo Lodge (3.6 percent of the total membership), in 1876 the number was 28 (12 percent), and in 1906 it was 46 (18.4 percent).61 Occasionally a lodge assumed the role of a godparent with the birth of a Freemason’s son. Leipzig was not the only city in which there were veritable Masonic dynasties such as the aforementioned Meissner and Clarus families, in which sons and sons-in-law were recruited over several generations beginning in the early nineteenth century.62 Even Goethe, himself a Freemason but a skeptic about the overall lodge system, encouraged and supervised his own son’s admission to a Masonic lodge in 1815.63 The admission of a Freemason’s son to a lodge was considered a special occasion. It is reported that numerous lodge brothers at the Apollo shed tears in 1861, when, on the fiftieth anniversary of his admission to the lodge, the well-known Freemason Ernst AnschГјtz was met by his four sons and his two sons-in-law. They stood together holding hands in a Masonic chain, and AnschГјtz’s eldest son assured him that they, too, would dedicate themselves with love and loyalty to Freemasonry.64 Likewise the members of the Hermann zur

BestГ¤ndigkeit Lodge were deeply moved when the Jewish factory owner Louis Kaliski of Breslau succeeded in having the last of his six sons admitted to the lodge in 1910.65 Before 1914, only a minority of German Freemasons did not have a male relative of some kind who was or who had been a lodge member. It seems that the emotional bond between father and son was established anew in the lodges, as well as the bond between actual male relatives. This was also the case metaphorically between the older lodge members and newly admitted ones. “The lodge is the Mason’s parental home,” one Page 198 →Freemason stated in a lodge address from 1856, “the true home of noble humanity.” “With us, you are, so to speak, spiritually reborn. Just as your mother’s gaze lingered upon you as an infant with endless love, the love of your Masonic brothers, ennobled into friendship, is the christening gift that you receive upon admission to the lodge. And just as in your parental home you were educated through example and instruction, here in the lodge you will be educated through symbol and work—in the parental home you should work for the narrow circle of your parents and siblings, and here you should work for the family of man. Just as you can care for your own family through the work of your civic calling—your calling in Masonry lies in the work for the welfare of man.”66 The following address by a Freemason, given immediately after his son’s admission to the lodge, indicates the emotional significance that the admission of a son could have for a father. Thus the time has come For your initiation into the Masons, My dear, good son! Today you have become a brother To me in the order of brothers;— Something that I have long desired . . . So come, o come to thy father’s breast! My heart beats for you with sweet desire, My dearly beloved son! United let us live as Masons; united let us act as Masons! Beautiful is loyalty’s reward! You lie in my arms as my brother And the brothers offer me Their fervent congratulations for this: Thus I celebrate in the brotherly bond The most beautiful hour of a Mason’s life!67 The familiar “you” (Du) with which Freemasons addressed one another, the fraternal name and brotherly kiss that they gave each other, all of these were symbols of a masculine sense of belonging, an emotional bond supported and supplemented by the actual network of relatives. The stereotypical image of the emotionally distanced authoritarian father of Page 199 →the nineteenth century thus proves to be untenable as soon as we examine forms of sociability such as Masonic lodges. In the second half of the nineteenth century as well, close emotional relations between fathers and sons were by no means the exception—however, increasingly they were located not in the family, but in all-male associations. The addresses that older lodge brothers made to newly elected brothers and the admission rituals themselves demonstrate how the internalization of values and norms, and thus the emotional meaning of certain notions, were passed on from one male generation to the next. “You sons, your father lives in you, / Give your father youthful life,” Marbach wrote, when the two sons of the Leipzig pharmacist TГ¤schner were admitted to the Balduin Lodge in 1864.68 For fathers, the education of sons into brothers also had a political dimension. Freemasons were convinced “that we must first learn to govern ourselves, before we attempt to intervene in the greater relations of life, that we demonstrate in the smallest, most intimate circles that we are suited to participate in the leadership of things before we try to help govern the world.”69 As Bluntschli noted in 1858,

the lodge was supposed to be a “school of humanity for men.”70 In particular, young men were supposed to learn to govern themselves, to know themselves, and to improve themselves, so that they could assume their responsibilities outside of the lodge in civil society. The young initiates must have had mixed emotions when their blindfolds were removed at the end of the admission rituals and their fathers and their fathers’ friends—who might have included a son’s teacher or employer—stood before them in the blazing light with daggers pointed at their hearts.71 There was also a “tyranny of virtue” in the father’s offer that his son call him a brother—the hidden warning that he could not afford to fail in proving himself within the circle of virtue, masculinity, and moral decorum, now that “games of children, the foolishness of boys, the dreams of youth” lay behind him.72 Often a father reminded his son that the latter owed his admission to the father alone.73 Many sons of Freemasons sought to avoid this pressure. A number left the lodge after their fathers died; others would enter only afterward.74 However, the fathers’ desire that their sons join the lodge as a matter of course was so great that they always considered the number of sons who were lodge brothers to be too low. They sought to explain this dissatisfaction through the moral crisis of society as well as the family, in particular through the excessive influence of mothers. Page 200 →

Brothers and Sisters The rituals of the lodge can be interpreted as an attempt to replace the education from females that young men had received within their families with an education for masculinity and virtue within the brotherhood of the lodge. Recent studies of nineteenth-century English, American, and French men have demonstrated that education from females within the family gave rise to a pronounced cult of masculinity, a cult intended to overcome the ostensible dangers of a “feminization” of the self.75 This might have been the case in Germany as well. The fact that, as one Freemason recalled, adolescent sons who missed their absent fathers “easily [formed] a bond with their mothers,” which was directed against the lodges, would seem to support this hypothesis.76 This might in turn explain why women continued to be excluded from Masonic lodges even at a point in time when a mixed sociability of the sexes was no longer unusual within the BГјrgertum. Neither in the German nor in French and Anglophone Freemasonry were women admitted as regular members prior to 1914. We can best understand the social practices of the lodges by turning again to the issue of civic virtue, which the “art of association” was supposed to produce. Since the late eighteenth century, an abstract notion of individuality was one of the basic presuppositions for the cultivation of political virtue and civility. However, as soon as this abstract notion of individuality assumed a concrete form, it was clearly based on masculine virtues. These masculine virtues were defined in opposition to feminine characteristics. In order to unite all men as brothers, Freemasons believed that it was necessary to disregard the class, confessional, and national divisions of civil society in order to form “pure men.” In Part I, we examined the various ways in which this universal claim was repeatedly realized in an exclusive form that remained closed to Jews, Catholics, or workers. However, if these groups were always able to invoke, at least with partial success, the universality of civic values such as Bildung, humanity, or individuality, women were not; or as Joan Scott has demonstrated with the example of French feminism since 1789, women maneuvered themselves into a paradoxical position when they invoked universal values. Women who demanded that they be allowed to participate in the “brotherhood of men” did so precisely as women. They declared the differences between the sexes to be irrelevant and yet confirmed these differences, however unintentionally, by speaking as women, by demanding rights for women, and by invoking feminine virtues.77 Page 201 → In this regard, Masonic lodges were only an exemplary embodiment of the fundamental ambivalence of nineteenth-century civic values and practices: the identification of masculinity with political civility. If the apolitical sociability of salons allowed women to be the center of focus, the sociability of the lodges—like that

of gymnastic clubs and choral societies—was oriented around the cultivation (Bildung) of masculinity, of virtuous citizens, and thus possessed a political dimension.78 The lodges sought to utilize the male passions for the improvement of the self. Women, it was argued, must be prevented from “seeing the incompleteness that we have to wrestle with, as well as the disruptions in the world that we men must battle against, since we cannot and must not shirk our duties as citizens of the world.”79 It was claimed that women lacked the humanistic, cosmopolitan ideals of Freemasonry. “Their [social] circles are narrower; their thoughts, emotions, and actions—however comprehensive they might be—are always directed only at minor things, at minor parts and groups of society, and not at the greater whole.”80 “A woman would never have composed the words вЂBe embraced all ye millions!’”81 It was women’s ostensible lack of a “cosmopolitan vision,” of a profound sense for moral universalism that excluded them—only apparently paradoxically—from the “brotherhood of men.” As one Freemason argued in a lodge address in 1853, the goal of Freemasonry was to cultivate “the original image of humanity and, accordingly, true masculinity together with like-minded brothers.”82 The cult of brotherhood was a cult of difference. However, since mothers assumed primary responsibility for the education of males during childhood and adolescence, the wife of a Freemason was also supposed to possess her own sense of freedom and virtue.83 A wife was supposed to develop an understanding for her husband’s “working sociability” and to support him without really participating herself in that sociability. “How joyously she awaits the hour when he returns from working [вЂworking the rough stone’ in the lodge], as each time he had scaled another stage toward individual perfection. Her emotions become idealized through the fact that she raises herself above the usual level of a wife’s relations to her husband.” This was written by the wife of a Freemason in 1876, and it accorded well with the lodge brothers’ feminine ideal.84 One typical Masonic narrative presented precisely such an ideal wife. In this narrative, a “Frau Doctor Pure” embroiders the secret sign on her husband’s lodge bag. One of her friends, the wife of a senior civil servant, sees her doing this and warns her about the secret society, as she has heard rumors about it. In the lodges, the friend says, men are “вЂlaid in Page 202 →coffins lined with a thousand daggers during admission rituals; and these daggers then suddenly disappear as if by magic. They are then forced to walk upon and traverse chasms bridged only with weak boards covered with golden nails. Skeletons surround them during their meals, and they drink from the skulls of dead brothers. For as you must know, there is a dagger hanging over the picture of each Mason on the wall. If one of the brothers reveals something about the order, then the picture falls and the traitor dies immediately. When the Masons work, ghostlike figures in long coats with fiery eyes keep guard in the forecourts and no one is permitted to approach the dreadful workshops!’ вЂOh, that terrible secret, Frieda! ’ the civil servant’s wife continues, вЂI dread the Masons, yes I even dread the image with the magical sign that you are embroidering there. You appear to strengthen your husbands sinister inclinations, instead of freeing him from the magician’s nets.’ The young woman listens to her older friend with a smile and then answers gently but with conviction, вЂMy dear! Do you seriously believe the fairy tales that you have recounted here? Certainly not! You’re only put off by the Freemasons’ secret. If you could only see and understand their work, your opinion would change instantly.’” The young woman then explains to her friend the approximate meaning of Masonic symbols, while her husband, the physician, secretly watches her with contentment.85 For the most part, Freemasons demanded of their wives virtues that had been given a feminine twist, such as morality, honor, and love, which were supposed to have a different meaning for women than for men. The emancipation of women was regarded as “defeminization” and thus as a loss of “the most precious thing that they possess,” their feminine virtues.86 An applicant could be rejected or a lodge brother expelled if his wife were found lacking in these virtues. Julius Louis Hauser, a banker in Leipzig, a Protestant, and the son of a Freemason, appeared to be a highly desirable candidate when he was nominated for admission to the Apollo Lodge in 1880. However, black balls were cast against him in the secret ballot. Since such negative votes were recognized only in combination with subsequent written justification, one lodge brother later offered a detailed description. “The rebuke that I make, and that the entire city of Leipzig makes as well, is that he married a divorced woman, Frau Catarius, a woman whose scandalous life has not been forgotten even today, a woman who

was accused in court by her first husband of infecting him [with a sexually transmitted disease] and who sought to refute this by responding that he had infected her, a women who is said to dally about the entire night with other men.”87 Page 203 → Women were regarded either as “good” or as “depraved” by nature. This understanding of women as eternally and naturally virtuous (or as hopelessly depraved) meant that it was impossible for them to improve themselves morally or for lodge brothers to help them “improve.” The citation from Goethe’s Faust, “The eternal feminine draws us forward,” served as a kind of leitmotiv for lodge addresses on the “woman’s question” in the nineteenth century.88 It is, one Freemason argued in 1846, a well-known fact “that womanhood, like the papacy, is complete, closed, and unchanging, and incorrigible as well (of course in the best sense of the term!).”89 The calling of Freemasons, on the contrary, was improving oneself and society. Freemasons were supposed to account for their individual process of Bildung, their path to virtue “before the court of our own selves.”90 “It is our task to master ourselves, and we can and will do this only if we strive to combat one inclination within ourselves through another, until finally our inclination for evil has been weakened and in this way we elevate ourselves, we progress in Bildung.”91 Like wars between nations, the war with oneself was an issue for men: “To battle oneself is the most difficult battle / To be victorious over oneself is the most beautiful victory.”92 “Without the battle for existence, happiness is not imaginable, at least for a man,” one Freemason argued in a lodge address in Leipzig in 1913.93 While men were supposed to practice “combating their own selves,” women were supposed to remain that which they had ostensibly always been.94 For even if the legal and professional emancipation of women was to be welcomed, another Freemason argued at a sister assembly, women’s contribution to the perfection of humanity remained the family and “the maternal vocation.”95 If lodge sociability corresponded in this regard to the standard gender polarizations of the nineteenth century, it reversed them in other regards.96 It was not women but men who, according to Freemasons, were passionate and incomplete. Women were said to be Freemasons by birth, whereas men had to become Freemasons.97 Only within the refuge of the Masonic lodge were men able to free themselves from the compulsions of society and to develop into complete human beings, to work on the “rough stone” of their selves. Thus it is hardly surprising that the popularity of Masonic lodges as a refuge from the “strenuous life” of industrial society did not decline at the end of the nineteenth century, but rather increased. Gender stereotypes were reinforced with this development: Around 1900, the separation of masculine and feminine social spaces and moral virtues was much more rigid than it had been a century earlier. “The modern women’s movement,Page 204 → in particular the socialist women’s movement, often simply presumes that men and women are beings of completely the same kind in terms of inner life,” a speaker argued at a sister celebration in Hamburg in 1912. “This presumption, however, is false. It misconstrues the actual situation. Men and women are not equal to one another, nor do they resemble each other. They are, in fact, opposites. Only because they are opposite are they able to supplement each other in cohabitation and through the cohabitation of marriage, and in this way form a unity. What is impressive in a man is the power of his body and the sharpness of his mind. What is appealing in a woman is the fineness and delicacy of her figure, the depth of her character and the pureness of her heart.”98 A number of lodge brothers were aware of the contradiction between Freemasonry’s claim to abolish all barriers of class, confession, and nationality and its strident insistence on the differences between men and women. As part of the reform movement in the 1860s, several left-liberal Freemasons pushed for the admission of women in the lodges. Beginning in the 1890s—parallel to the growing women’s movement in Germany—an increasing number of women demanded that they be allowed to participate in the “brotherhood of men.” Rosa Feist, the wife of a Freemason in Berlin, argued in 1913: “But if we may demand of any circle that it voluntarily forgo antiquated privileges of power for the sake of a higher idea of justice, it is that brotherhood based exclusively on the love of mankind, which draws its entire justification for existence from that love. If this brotherhood wants to be what it appears to be, then it must encompass not only

one of the two sexes, but all of mankind. Every man and every woman who feels the need, every person who wants to serve mankind with body and soul must have a place in this house and have this place as a full-fledged participant and not merely as someone who is tolerated.”99 Women were tolerated in lodge sociability as “sisters,” that is, as wives, unmarried daughters, or widows of Freemasons. Only through male relations were they admitted to the lodge and then only on special occasions, at the so-called sister celebrations. These celebrations became popular in the 1860s, despite opposition from conservative Freemasons, who feared that the presence of women would interfere with lodge sociability and its particular form of masculine intimacy. They wanted to distinguish sharply between the lodge’s “art of association” and the convivial sociability with women. A memorandum of the Weltkugel Grand Lodge issued in the mid-1850s illustrates how difficult it was to distinguish sharply between these Page 205 →two forms of sociability. The memorandum, which rejected a mixed sociability of men and women, called on lodges to engage in nothing “that [could] be regarded as an introduction of sisters into the lodge or as a Masonic work with the sisters.” Otherwise, the memorandum argued, the dignity of Freemasonry would be threatened. For “wise and easily comprehensible reasons,” it should be evident that the lodge “cannot admit the female sex to our meetings, and, since we all undoubtedly recognize and feel that females certainly do not belong in a serious brotherhood of men, we are justly astonished that a true brother would even want to allow or establish the admission of the female sex. However sweet this pleasure might seem, it must yield to the primary spirit of the order, or we will all become traitors to that spirit.”100 The more frequently sister celebrations were held after this, the sharper the criticism became, however, to no avail. What did sister celebrations look like? Lodge brothers and their female relatives—the sisters—met annually in the lodge house. During the celebration, the women were shown the interior of the lodge temple (but not the socalled working rooms, in which the rituals took place). A special ceremony was held for them, which was only a pale reflection of the actual rituals, followed by an address by a lodge brother justifying both the exclusion of women from the lodge and the cult of secrecy. The brothers, in other words, made clear to the women that they had a secret, but insisted that keeping this secret posed no threat to marriage or domesticity. On the contrary, the sister celebration, which included not only the wives but also the unmarried daughters of Freemasons, even served as a kind of marriage market. Marriages and anniversaries often provided an opportunity for celebratory banquets with the “sisters.” In addition to lodge sociability, Freemasons engaged in an unaffected, convivial sociability of the sexes, which was also practiced by other civic associations of the time and included concerts, theater performances, balls in the lodge house, and excursions. However, these events were intended merely as a form of amusement and were not regarded as advancing the ambitious moral goals of the rituals. Sister celebrations occurred only once or twice a year. For the rest of the time, the men remained among themselves. The fact that wives were excluded from participating in lodge sociability stood “like a ghost between married couples. . . . If a wife felt that her husband had had experiences in the lodge that deeply moved him, she was bound to see an impenetrable wall separating them, if the husband did not share his Masonic secrets with her—and this all the more profoundly the more value her husband placed Page 206 →upon that which he gained from such secrecy.”101 “No one who is unable to keep secrets, in particular in regard to women, is a worthy Mason,” one Freemason stated in 1906, repeating a basic rule of the lodges.102 Frequent visits to the lodge, however, do not always appear to have been the guarantee for marital happiness ascribed to them by Masonic literature. An English traveler to Germany remarked in 1889 that “German husbands,” above all those from “the elevated middle class . . . spend more time in the society of men without their wives than we do.”103 The lodge took up a large part of the brothers’ free time. We have already examined the conflicts that arose between fathers and sons. The merchant Adolph TГ¤schner—the son of the aforementioned Leipzig Freemason—was one of the few Freemasons who resigned from the lodge because his professional life and Freemasonry made such enormous demands on his time. In his letter of resignation, TГ¤schner stated openly that as a result of these demands he had hardly any time for his own family.104 A number of admission requests were withdrawn at the

last minute because the applicant’s wife was opposed to it.105 In other cases, local notables who were also “brothers” (often including a pastor) were called in to convince an applicant’s wife that Freemasonry served a noble cause.106 According to a popular Masonic clichГ©, lodge brothers frequently emphasized the social advantages of being a Freemason to their wives, while playing down their ostensibly true motives, the moral improvement of the self within a society of men, because women could only regard the humanist aspirations of the lodge as “sentimental enthusiasm” but were well able to appreciate its practical advantages.107 The poems and toasts that women offered in response to the addresses by lodge brothers at the sister celebrations occasionally contained a satirical critique of male sociability. In the evening when the tower bell rings six times, It seems to me as if a Masonic wind blows; Nimbly the brother grabs his hat and his cane— And hides a blue packet in his pocket; Always taking his house key with him, (For seldom does he return from the feast before midnight) . . . And if one asks the brothers in a room at home, Where pray tell is your work?—They know how To offer clever excuses, for they always say, “Yes, ’tis such a spiritual work that one cannot see it.” Page 207 → In 1847, the wife of a Freemason wrote the following lines, which referred to the fact that Freemasons warned other lodge brothers that a woman had entered the lodge rooms by calling out “it is raining.” What’s more, the brothers often see ghosts And they imagine everything in altered form;— If they see one of us from the window, They call out “it’s raining!” and that’s not true at all; I have often caught them doing this And thought sometimes to myself—they are crazy.108 These satirical poems, however, were the exception. Women’s presence in the lodge during sister celebrations was usually limited to the mute acclamation of male sociability. One Freemason argued in 1846 that “only the valuable presence of our sisters in our temple can actually give us Masons the full pleasure of consciousness that we are working for a matter that is certainly good, since it is compatible with the strict judicial judgment, the judgment of authentic German femininity.”109 Nevertheless, as Charlotte Frischauer, the wife of a Freemason, argued, it was unpleasant for women “if, as frequently occurs, the brothers withdraw to Masonic discussions, leaving their wives to converse about trivial things (in the opinion of many brothers, the only suitable issue for their dear sisters).”110 Like open anti-Semitism, open antifeminism was rarely expressed in the lodges. Women, like Jews, were allotted their own separate role in the “brotherhood of men.” However, while Jewish lodge brothers were supposed to give up their particularity in order to become “whole men,” women were supposed to emphasize their ostensible particularity even more sharply.111 The sister celebrations served this purpose. They were also supposed to demonstrate that a secret bond existed, a bond that connected the brothers to each other and that possessed an emotional quality, a passion beyond marriage.

The View from Outside As the example of the sister celebration demonstrates, the Masonic practice of secrecy necessarily included a public display of the existence of a secret brotherhood. There was therefore nothing contradictory about the fact that the Masonic cult of secrecy did not disappear during the era of the public sphere. As Aleida Assmann and Jan

Assmann argue, “Rather Page 208 →than assuming that the public sphere ultimately exhausts the secret, we should presume a structural interdependence between the public sphere and secrecy.”112 Masonic signs of recognition are another example of this. These secret signs initially served to protect lodge brothers and to ensure their cohesiveness in public. Freemasons recognized each other by the fact that they removed their hat with two fingers and a thumb, shook hands by locking the right and left thumbs and touching each wrist three times with an index finger on the pulse, or by turning the glass they had been drinking upside down.113 Over the course of the eighteenth century, the playful dimension of this public cult of secrecy already began to predominate, and this continued with some modifications in the nineteenth century. The practice of “brothers trying to cause a sensation in public with their membership, . . . of announcing their presence through knocking signals in order to be admitted by another brother, or greeting each other publicly with Masonic signs” was apparently so widespread that the grand lodges in Berlin felt compelled to issue a call for more restraint from their members at the beginning of the 1860s.114 These public and playful demonstrations of honor and respectability were also evident in the pretentious titles that Freemasons acquired as they rose through the meritocratic hierarchy of the lodges and that they often used to addressed each other in public.115 This practice was also so widespread that the grand lodges issued a call for moderation. It might appear at first glance to have been a bourgeois imitation of the aristocracy when lodge brothers, in accordance with the lodges’ meritocratic hierarchy, addressed an ordinary physician or a factory owner as “Most Supreme Master” or “Knight of the Tabernacle.” However, as Alain Corbin has pointed out, the rise of meritocracy—which accompanied the emphasis on the moral improvement of the self—as well as the “temptation to self-glorification, the hypertrophy of reassuring vanity” were all evident in other domains of civil society in the nineteenth century as well.116 Again, Freemasonry was only an exaggerated, playful variant of a general trend. The innumerable Masonic orders and titles were one expression of Freemasons’ claim to be a moral elite. Left-liberal Freemasons frequently criticized this as a “caste spirit.” For example, one Freemason wrote in 1870, “One enters a well-frequented lodge night in a capital city or a greater provincial city and sees the brothers with their various Masonic stars and crosses and their many-colored ribbons; one considers the different ranks—from the first up to God knows how many degrees—and the different appropriate forms of address: вЂhonorable,’Page 209 → вЂmost honorable’ up to the superlative вЂsupreme’ or вЂmost supreme.’”117 Between the middle and the end of the nineteenth century, the number of honorary memberships at Masonic lodges in Germany nearly doubled. The awarding of honorary memberships was particularly popular in liberal German lodges, lodges avoided by the aristocracy, the military, and senior civil servants. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Apollo and Balduin Lodges in Leipzig had together four times as many honorary members as the conservative Zepter Lodge in Breslau.118 The awarding of titles was even more popular in American and French lodges. Nothing appeared to be more bourgeois at the end of the nineteenth century than acquiring prestigious titles and decorations. “The plain citizen sometimes wearied of his plainness and, wanting rites as well as rights, hankered for the ceremonials, grandiloquent titles, and exotic costumes of a mystic brotherhood,” as Arthur M. Schlesinger has observed.119 Masonic lodges in America even held celebratory processions in public. However, this public display of a secret society is remarkable only on a superficial level, for the parades were merely a visible form of acclamation for the nimbus that the lodges had acquired in society. While German lodges no longer held celebratory processions in the nineteenth century, they did appear from time to time in public as well. For example, Leipzig Freemasons gathered at a train station in 1860 to meet the corpse of the aforementioned Freemason Friedrich Ludwig Meissner, who had died a few days earlier in the Dresden lodge house. Lodge representatives from other cities in Saxony also participated in the joint funeral procession through Leipzig. They were dressed in the usual lodge apparel, white gloves, white top hats and black tails; many of them wore the white “Masonic apron,” some with blue trim and embroidered with symbols. They were, in other words, recognizable as Freemasons. The carriage with the coffin was accompanied by twelve men carrying palm fronds. A Mason, carrying the lodge hammer on a silk pillow as a symbol of Meissner’s dignity as the grand master of all Masonic lodges in Saxony, led the procession. Prominent Freemasons held the four corners of the pall and were surrounded by

brothers adorned with Masonic insignia. Approximately four hundred Freemasons and fifteen wagons followed the hearse. They proceeded to the cemetery, where Meissner was given a Masonic funeral.120 Into the early twentieth century, such Masonic funerals were common, often assuming the place of religious rituals of mourning.121 Freemasons also held public ceremonies to celebrate the laying of foundation stones for urban institutions and national memorials (e.g., for Page 210 →the Battle of the Nations Monument in Leipzig in 1900)—and they frequently participated in financing such projects as well. The public almost always followed such spectacles with perplexed fascination. The lodges were enveloped in a veil of secrecy and yet remained publicly visible. They had embittered enemies (particularly in predominantly Catholic cities) but had their own peculiar magic as well. As a result, wild fantasies and rumors circulated about lodge sociability. “I remember quite well,” one Freemason wrote in retrospect in 1920, “as a child looking up with lustful horror at the windows of the Masonic lodge hung with blue curtains. Soon there were other participating souls as well who helped to incite my curiosity. Yet it was impossible to gather more precise information from them. Thus it remained a secret! But the insinuations about what one person or another claimed to have seen through the keyhole gave rise to exciting ideas of exotic and somber customs centering around a coffin. In addition, there were also mysterious insinuations about the fate of individual Freemasons who had dared to violate the statutes or had betrayed something to outsiders. All of this made a profound impression on me and carried more weight than the harmless things that I occasionally heard from others. For if there was nothing more significant to hide, why the blue curtains in front of the windows? I must have thought something along these lines.”122 The rumors circulating in the general public about Masonic lodges were also stimulated by so-called traitor writings (publications of former Freemasons) as well as by dime novels.123 Many of these novels were directed at a female readership. A number of dubious businessmen also found ways to profit from rumors about the lodges.124 However, it was above all the Catholic Church and the anti-Masonic pamphlet literature—first and foremost the writings of Leo Taxil—that made use of such popular fantasies and occasionally contributed new, even more extreme ones. As might be expected, such rumors were popular primarily in Catholic and rural regions. They arose only after 1800, gradually becoming part of popular folklore. Scholars of folklore recorded these rumors in detail at the end of the nineteenth century, and their work provides an excellent source for reconstructing public fantasies about Masonic lodges.125 In these rumors, we find details about lodge rituals that had become public, many of them colorfully embellished and then combined with older notions and legends. As one Freemason conceded, these rumors caused “a certain anxiety” about Freemasonry; and Masons themselves consciously played with these uncertainties and fears about Page 211 →lodge membership both before and during admission ceremonies.126 As Simmel noted, “The secret puts a barrier between men, but, at the same time, it creates the tempting challenge to break through it, by gossip or confession.”127 For Freemasons, vague insinuations about the lodge to their own wives, sons, and business partners were the public part of the pleasures of lodge membership. This in turn spurred many of the rumors about Freemasonry. What were the essential components of these rumors? The general public was convinced that lodge brothers were connected by a secret bond that provided support for them even in difficult situations. Indeed, this was often the reason why Freemasons were accused of corruption, the negation, as it were, of the Masonic claim to virtue.128 In 1854, a young woman wrote a letter to officials of a Masonic lodge in Leipzig requesting admission. She did so, she explained, because she wanted to calm her husband, who was ill and concerned about her future. She had heard that Freemasons “did not desert each other, and thus, since she now had the money for it, had decided to become a member of the Masonic order.”129 In a number of (unsuccessful) applications for admission to Masonic lodges in Breslau, applicants expressed the hope that admission to the lodge would free them from all financial difficulties, and they claimed that they were prepared “to stop at nothing” to achieve this. The Masonic press occasionally reported about such applications as curiosa. When someone in Silesia attained great wealth under mysterious circumstances or successfully extricated himself from an extremely difficult situation, the public often assumed that he was a Freemason. They explained the

lodges’ wealth through the fact that Freemasons had made a pact with the devil. The lodges, it was claimed, were a heathen alliance, a place of spiritual and sexual excesses. “When the devoutly Catholic sister of a Freemason [in Breslau] learned that her beloved brother had joined a lodge and could not be made to change his mind, she decided to join the Franciscan nuns as a lay sister, requesting before her death that she be laid in the coffin clad in her habit. Through this pious measure, she hoped to compensate for her brother’s вЂmortal sin.’”130 Freemasons were said to have power over others through their pact with the devil; they were regarded as dangerous and best avoided. Jewish-Masonic conspiracy theories later took up this anxiety. There were rumors that Catholic maids gave notice as soon as they discovered that their employers were Freemasons. It was reported that one maid refused to touch or carry the lodge bag of a Freemason, probably because she believed that her employer had made a pact Page 212 →with the devil. In Breslau as well, the folklorist and Freemason Karl Olbrich frequently observed that pedestrians changed to the other side of the street or crossed themselves when they walked past the lodge building. There were numerous eerie stories involving Masonic lodges, for example, one about a messenger who came to deliver something and then got lost in the lodge rooms, finally arriving in a hall with a coffin in the middle of it. “Being curious, he went over to the coffin, where he suddenly received such a terrible ear boxing from an invisible hand that he not only flew out of the hall, but down the stairs as well.”131 This example demonstrates how elements of popular religious superstitions (e.g., a devil who can deliver invisible ear boxings) and clichГ©s about lodge rituals (e.g., coffins and skeletons) combined into fantastic narratives. This pact with the devil was said to be the reason why Freemasons died prematurely, often at the hands of their own lodge brothers when they revealed lodge secrets, if the devil did not come and get them himself. It was also claimed that they were denied a Christian burial. One popular story told of a woman who did not want to allow her husband to join a lodge. Freemasons called her to the lodge house and led her into a large hall with pictures of all the lodge brothers on the wall, including a picture of her own husband. In order to free him from the spell of the lodge, she must, the brothers told her, stick a needle through the picture. When she returned home, she found her husband dead with a nail through his temples.132 It is also possible, however, to read this story the other way around: It was not Freemasonry that killed the husband, but his own wife’s misguided fears and overzealousness. Such rumors about Freemasonry reproduced the basic traits of lodge life discussed here as if reflected through a kind of distorting mirror. Seen from outside, the “brotherhood of men” often appeared to be merely a corrupt network for the elite BГјrger, which ultimately undermined the state and local politics. The sacralizing atmosphere of the lodges’ rooms, rules, and rituals appeared to be the blasphemy of a counterchurch, and the rituals themselves to be devil worship, while Masonic male camaraderie seemed to undermine the family. The Masonic secret undoubtedly made the lodges vulnerable to attacks in the nineteenth century. The selfmystification of Freemasonry’s moral and ethical claims, dramatically expressed in the Masonic secret, made it possible to demonize the lodges in public, in particular for political purposes. However, at the same time, the secret also secured the special social-moral nimbus that the lodges had within civil society. Freemasons Page 213 →regarded themselves as the moral elite of society. “Our alliance should be a selection of better men who possess higher tendencies,” one Freemason argued in exemplary fashion in 1860.133 The secret drew a moral and social boundary through civil society. It guaranteed intimacy within and exclusivity without. As Simmel noted, secrecy and mystification “amount to heightening the wall to the outside, and hence to strengthening the aristocratic character of the group”—it was, we should add, a glass wall, erected only by the gaze from outside, from public scrutiny, and from “sister celebrations.”134 The lodges’ universal moral claims justified the necessity of drawing such a boundary to exclude the “uneducated”: women, Catholics, and the lower classes. In the hostile rumors that circulated about the lodges, we find an unintentional recognition of the Masonic claim to be elite.

Page 214 →

Chapter 6 The Mystery of Bildung “There was a time, and it was not long ago, when one could not utter the word вЂGod’ in educated society without receiving a pitying smile for one’s backwardness. This time has passed.”1 A leading spokesman of the left-liberal Freemason camp offered this description of a change in mentality in fin-de-siГЁcle Germany. Both liberal and conservative Freemasons regarded religiosity as central to lodge sociability. Although the lodges did not constitute a religious community, a certain kind of civil religiosity had been part of Masonic identity since the eighteenth century, and this dimension intensified beginning in the 1860s. In the final third of the nineteenth century, German society in general was characterized by a “vitalization of religiosity,” a “partial increase in religious energies,” despite the decline in church attendance.2 In addition, as Lucian HГ¶lscher and others have shown, there was a long-term surplus of religious ideas and practices, which continued to exert an influence on the bourgeois culture of reflection and which only faded very slowly, if at all.3 The ultimate example of this is the term Bildung, which had theological and Pietistic origins.4 “For all Bildung,” Wilhelm von Humboldt argued, “has its origin solely in the interior of the soul; external events can merely provide the occasion for Bildung, but can never produce it.” Anticipating a leitmotiv of many lodge addresses of the nineteenth century, von Humboldt insisted that “moral man” forms himself “in the image of divinity through the intuition of the highest idealistic perfection.”5 Human Bildung without religiosity appeared to be inconceivable. Over the course of the nineteenth century, a self-reflective understanding of Bildung was superimposed on these theological origins, without, however, ever entirely replacing its religious substance. “The cult of Bildung,” as Harry Graf Kessler recalled, contained “something mystical.”6 Page 215 → Moreover, there was a close proximity between what Max Weber called “the disenchantment of the world” and attempts to “re-enchant” the modern world.7 The progress of science and its sacralization formed two sides of the same coin when the belief in moral improvement, science, and progress assumed religious traits. The scientization and sacralization of bourgeois values combined into a specifically civil religion, which understood itself as distant from the church, as undogmatic, educated, and yet still religious. Such a civil religion—“not actually a religion, but a religious mood,” according to Thomas Nipperdey, a “vagranting religiosity”—determined the discourse and the cultural practices of Masonic lodges between the 1860s and the outbreak of the First World War.8 This religious mood was a catalyst for Masonic sociability and provided the cult of brotherhood with an intensity and a mystical quality beyond everyday life. It combined civil religious, cultural hegemonic, and elitist political elements. Ultimately, this civil religion unintentionally intensified the very tensions, conflicts, and crises in German society that it was supposed to overcome.9

The Religion of Humanity The civil religion of the lodges, the “religion of humanity,” did not in fact stand above all religious confessions, as Freemasons claimed, but was essentially Protestant. This fundamental bias was evident in the debates within the lodges about the admission of Jews, as well as in the lodges’ anti-Catholicism and the rejection of Freemasonry by both Catholic and conservative Protestant organizations. In addition, Freemasonry’s sacralizing cult of brotherhood and its civil religious credo can also be understood as alternatives to an ecclesiastical piety that was especially appealing to women.10 The gender divide between masculine and feminine religiosities was particularly pronounced in the elevated Protestant Bürgertum. Women participated more intensively in church life and, since the middle of the nineteenth century, were often the only familial tie to the church.11 To formulate this pointedly, what women found in the church, men sought in Masonic lodges.

Thus the establishment of a civil religion beyond the traditional doctrinal beliefs of the churches can be interpreted as a countermovement to the “feminization” of religion over the course of the nineteenth century.12 Freemasons regarded as feminine the maintenance of dark dogmas—this Page 216 →was not limited to those of the Catholic Church—and they believed that the lodges’ bright “religion of humanity” embodied a masculine, progressive morality.13 Since the middle of the nineteenth century, the desire for new religious experiences coincided with the growing appeal of all-male social spaces such as Masonic lodges. The significance of such sociable and moral spaces for male BГјrger increased as women claimed public recognition for female charity, morality, and religiosity. In this chapter, we will examine the particular form that the religiosity of Bildung assumed beginning in the 1860s. This religiosity was supposed to be beyond both ecclesiastical doctrinal beliefs and the secular belief in science. It was fostered in new associations of the era as well as in older ones such as Masonic lodges. The desire for a spiritual reform of society independent of church and state was one essential reason for the continuous increase in lodge membership and for the explosive growth of associational life in general in imperial Germany. What did this new religiosity look like? Bluntschli, certainly the most influential Masonic author of the second half of the nineteenth century, defined “reverence for God” as an essential part of the Masonic selfconception. According to Bluntschli, this reverence maintained “the belief, common to all Christian and nonChristian peoples, in one personal God, who Masons faithfully approach as a creative and conserving artist, as the Architect of the world, and they develop this idea in a cultlike form.” Such a religiosity, Bluntschli wrote, stands above religious confessions. “Masonic morality emphasizes everywhere the dignity of human nature and calls for brotherhood.” However, Bluntschli continued, “It is, in its essence, a Christian morality.”14 The fact that Bluntschli initially referred to a perspective beyond religious confessions, which he then retracted by defining Freemasonry as grounded in a Protestant moral doctrine—and thus, at least potentially, closed to Jews, Catholics, and Social Democrats—not only confirms the ambivalence of Freemasonry’s moral universalism.15 It also indicates why the predominant majority of lodge brothers did not consider abandoning Christian religiosity, even if they wanted to understand themselves as being above ecclesiastical and confessional disputes: Civic virtue appeared inseparable from religious belief. “Whoever feels responsible only to humans and not to God cannot be a moral person.”16 Freemasons assumed as a matter of course that liberal Protestantism was the “most moral” form of religiosity. Freemasons were supposed to improve themselves without reference to a concrete, dogmatically determined religious confession. “Religion is a Page 217 →matter of the soul and the most intimate consciousness,” one lodge speaker argued in 1848.17 Freemasonry, as the “religion of humanity,” he continued, does not call for the Bildung and virtue of individuals through the threat of a punishing god, but rather through the “devastating sense of their own lack of worth, the self-contempt that their consciences give them.”18 “We visit the lodge so as to give and to receive in our human relations that which the most humane sociability can offer!” In the church, on the contrary, one merely receives; one acts passively and obediently.19 Lodge speakers insisted repeatedly that the sensuousness of Masonic rituals and ceremonies was much more appealing to bourgeois men than either church orthodoxy or secular culture. “Neither science and its institutions nor the naked, dogmatically overloaded sermon will ever attain the goal of self-ennoblement, because these affect exclusively or almost exclusively the intellect. What we need for selfennoblement is intimate experience.”20 It was after all, another Freemason wrote in the PreuГџische JahrbГјcher in 1911, “the tragic mistake of the Reformation that it sought to clarify religion in concepts, instead of making it sensuously evident in symbols.” In contrast to this, he continued, “we also seek consolation, edification, and community in free parishes or even in a symbolic cult that doesn’t pretend to be more than it is: a cult of yearning! I mean the вЂroyal art,’ Freemasonry—and thus await a future that we do not see but that we believe in.”21 Freemasonry promised “to redeem from compulsory belief” a free, subjective “religiosity,” which was conceptually distinguished from “religion.”22 There was agreement between liberal and conservative Freemasons on this issue, as well as between Jewish and Protestant Freemasons. When the well-known Jewish Freemason Paul Rosenberg declared around 1900 that individual religiosity had to be strictly separated from

polemic religious opinion tied to the different confessions, he could be sure to have the approval of Franz Kiessling, the grand master of the Apollo Lodge, although the latter understood this religiosity as essentially Protestant and thus did not want to recognize Jews as Jews in the lodges.23 Thus the division of Freemasonry into a liberal and a conservative camp did not accord with the distinction between “cultural Protestantism” and “national Protestantism,” a conceptual distinction that was made only after 1918 in reference to the theology of the turn of the century.24 Typical for liberal and conservative Freemasons was a skepticism regarding the freethinking belief in science as well as the belief in church dogmas. The sole point of contention—as we have seen in regard to the “Jewish question” as well—Page 218 →was how much positive Christianity should be retained in this nebulous understanding of God. Conservative Freemasons as well as many of their liberal counterparts sought to give this new humanist religiosity a specifically Christian turn. This was evident even in the symbolic forms this religiosity assumed. A lodge assembly usually ended with a prayer; the most important annual lodge celebration occurred at the end of June in honor of John the Baptist, the patron saint of Freemasonry (lodge sociability then remained largely dormant until autumn). One swore the Masonic oath on the Bible—conservatives on an open New Testament, liberals on a closed Bible (which was also supposed to enable Jews to testify to a general belief in God). Only the extreme leftliberal Masonic lodge in Freiburg replaced the use of the Bible in their rituals in 1870 with an empty “white book consecrated by God.” No other lodge emulated this attempt to adopt a standpoint consistently above all confessions.25 Prior to 1914, the predominant majority of German Freemasons regarded enlightened Christianity as the “religion of humanity” and considered all other religions to be exclusive and thus “inhumane.”26 They believed that only “Christian humanity” promised an “ethical religion,” a “religion of reason” based on “moral-religious Bildung,” and they were convinced that the future belonged to this religion alone.27 Since the 1860s, not only Social Democrats, Catholics, and women, but also natural scientists had called into question Freemasons’ ethical claims, their specific mixture of reason, morality, and Protestant religiosity. In 1878, a few years before his death, Bluntschli attempted to answer this new challenge. In his FreimaurergesprГ¤chen (Masonic Dialogues) on “God and nature” and on “immortality,” he tried to provide an outline of the “religion of humanity.” Bluntschli’s civil religious credo is based on a “macrocosmic notion of God,” “which simultaneously satisfies the mind and the soul, combines spirit and nature into one being and establishes the proper relationship between God and man.”28 Both the pantheism of the modern natural sciences and the theism of the churches, according to Bluntschli, obstruct free religiosity. “The former sinks into unbelief and becomes godless, the latter falls prey to superstition and the domination of priests. For the former, the moral order of the world loses its hold and its authority, while the latter sacrifices its own intellectual powers. These two tendencies can be seen very clearly in contemporary European society. Crude socialism and black Jesuitism are only the extreme wings of these two one-sided and aberrant mass phenomena.”29 Page 219 → Bluntschli argued that the “macrocosmic notion of God” united the modern belief in an animate nature with the belief in God. According to Bluntschli, nature is not ruled by chance but by a spirit that animates the “body of the world”; this spirit, however, cannot exist independent of God: “the body of the world can only be God’s body.”30 This does not lead to an apotheosis of man but instead separates all the more sharply the many “microcosmic” humans from “macrocosmic” God. “Macrocosmic God is at once nature and spirit. Theistic God was only God, without nature and without a body, without development, without true life.” In this way, Bluntschli attempted to transform notions such as progress, Bildung, and virtue—the Masonic “firmament of ideas”—in a specific religiosity that stood above traditional religions and yet retained a belief in God. “The macrocosmic notion of God actually excludes the ancient dispute between religions and philosophical systems and works to reconcile the rift between spirit and soul, head and heart. It produces harmony between the religious and moral needs of humans, on the one hand, and their unencumbered observations about external nature and their logical thoughts, on the other. It preserves complete freedom for the microcosmic human world to fully develop its faculties, and it supports the belief in divine world governance

through the confirmation of scientific knowledge.”31 Atheism was not an alternative for Freemasons. The “general principles” of the Grand Lodge Convention of 1878, which Bluntschli coauthored, established the belief in an undetermined God as the condition for admission to all Masonic lodges in Germany. In addition, in response to the elimination of a similar paragraph from the statutes of the Grand Orient de France in the same year, Bluntschli called for a resolution by the Grand Lodge Convention—which was adopted with enthusiasm—that a Masonic lodge that denied the existence of God should not be recognized as such.32 Like their English, American, and Scandinavian counterparts, German Freemasons then broke off the few ties they still had with the Grand Orient. Despite all official approaches, the division between Protestant and secular lodges remained sharp before the First World War. Between the VormГ¤rz period and the First World War, the majority of German Freemasons, in contrast to their French counterparts, attempted to adopt the middle course proposed by Bluntschli between institutional religion and modern natural science.33 “The religion, in which we perceive the heart of humanity, is sacred and dear to us, and a mocker of religion is as unsuited to be a Freemason as a fanatic zealot. However, we do not dispute and argue about doctrine. Indeed, we insist Page 220 →that all of Masonry is ultimately itself religion.”34 Modern science, as Freemasons conceded, had undoubtedly called into question a narrow confessional piety. “And yet every ethically educated man is religious!” one speaker argued during a celebratory address at the Settegast Lodge in Breslau in 1909. This humanist religiosity apparently went hand-in-hand with science, for, the speaker continued, “progress rests upon humanist thoughts, and the ennoblement of the human race and the coming paradise rest upon progress.”35 German Freemasons also accepted almost unanimously the belief in the immortality of the human soul. Bluntschli, too, had sought to place the immortality of the soul on a new reflective basis in his FreimaurergesprГ¤chen. Despite all the doubts raised by modern science, Bluntschli regarded as unquestionable the “idea of a continuous immortality, which the symbols and rituals of the lodges also figuratively illustrate and entrust to us,” the belief in “the continuation of an individual spirit, which, drawn on by the divine spirit, strives for perfection.”36 This insistence on the belief in an undetermined God and in the immortality of the soul signified Freemasonry’s distance from Monism and the “Society for Ethical Culture,” organizations that in other respects pursued goals similar to Freemasonry and had to some extent overlapping memberships. The lodge brothers’ distaste for “materialism” did not, however, prevent them from exploring the new idea of evolution. On the contrary, evolution and progress were fundamental components of Masonic selfunderstanding. There were also repeated attempts to establish close ties between Masonic religiosity and modern science. Even “racial hygiene,” one Freemason argued in 1910, aimed at “improving man” and thus not only strove for “the same lofty goals” as Freemasonry but also worked according to similar principles: “Know thyself, master thyself, and ennoble thyself. This new science seeks to know the conditions that will lead mankind forward. It demands that we control the harmful generation of inferior human beings. It attempts to ennoble the whole [of humanity] through the increased creation and the improved education of physically and spiritually industrious human beings.”37 Nevertheless, this intimate connection between science and the religiosity of Bildung was always precarious. The lodge brothers, many of them well-known zoologists such Carus and Settegast, regarded Freemasonry above all as a kind of regulative ethical force, which should guide the progress of the sciences. It was typical for Masonic lodges before 1914 to distance themselves from the Catholic and Protestant churches as well as from contemporary Page 221 →liberal theology. Lodge speakers who addressed the issue of religion frequently cited Lessing, Kant, or Fichte, indeed even Goethe, but rarely the well-known theologians of the era, neither “national Protestants” such as Otto Pfleiderer nor “cultural Protestants” such as Adolf von Harnack. “Those who seek out the lodges seek in them something other than the church. They are first and foremost ethically and aesthetically oriented natures,” one lodge speaker stated in 1912.38 This also accords with the findings in part 1 of this book, namely, that the number of Protestant clergymen in Masonic lodges sank to almost zero during the second half of the nineteenth century. The best-known lodge authors who addressed the

issue of religiosity, such as Bluntschli, Otto Philipp Neumann, Heinrich Wanner, and Diederich Bischoff, were lawyers, physicians, secondary school teachers, and bank directors. They did not include those theologians who had exercised an important influence on Masonic opinion up to the 1870s, such as Fischer and Schiffmann, the archdeacons from Leipzig and Stettin. Many lodge brothers regarded Freemasonry as the “religion of the future.”39 They believed that progress in Bildung and in religiosity were not contradictory, but interdependent. “Culture progresses inexorably,” one Freemason argued in an address at the Horus Lodge in Breslau in 1900. “It becomes greater and more effective with each new human era. It is to be expected that in time men will associate so intimately with one another that ultimately they will all communicate with each other in one spoken and in one written language. Why shouldn’t it also be possible that ultimately they have only one religion as well?”40 Prior to 1914, lodge brothers agreed that Freemasonry could be this religion, grounded in the ideal of Bildung and aimed at the improvement of men. The lodge promised a utopian space in a society perceived to be in crisis, a refuge for BГјrger and their “humanity.” “If however we are honest for once,” a Freemason argued in 1887, “and we ask ourselves, what is the central motive that leads so many aspirants to precisely us, to us, aspirants who in truth we do not fail to warn about disappointments in every direction?—The answer to this is the dissatisfaction with life in all its different forms, and the hope of finding reconciliatory compensation in the Masonic brotherhood, something we seek in vain elsewhere.—Yes, yes! The dissatisfaction with life! Be it now—and this is perhaps the most frequent form—in regard to the church, or in regard to social relations or one of the all too sober professions, or even in regard to an unsatisfactory domestic life, etc. In short, this dissatisfaction is probably always present as a consequence of Page 222 →an emptiness of the soul that one experiences, of a pressure upon that soul in some direction or another, the dissatisfaction and yearning for an ideal compensation for a reality that we experience as oppressive.” The ideal world of the lodges was regarded as “that mysterious, fabulous alliance, about which so many people dream the most wonderful things and which is also repeatedly persecuted and contested.”41 It seems that precisely those groups within the BГјrgertum whose professional everyday life did not accord with the traditional ideal of Bildung (self-employed merchants, entrepreneurs, physicians, and lawyers) were attracted by the civil religion of Masonic lodges. The rush to the lodges expressed, as the Vossische Zeitung argued in 1912, a “profound yearning for an ideal worldview beyond time, politics, and confessional conflict.”42 This search for a new, free, and emotionally sensitive religiosity was by no means limited to members of Masonic lodges. It also included the majority of the elevated BГјrgertum before 1914. Attentive observers such as Hermann Bahr or Walter Rathenau regarded it as the “most profound characteristic of the era.”43 Masonic religiosity made the lodges attractive to those BГјrger who, as a liberal theologian observed around 1910, “were no longer interested in religion tied to the established confessions and who were repulsed by the dogmatism of individual churches.” At the same time, he continued, Freemasonry formed “a kind of surrogate for religion in regard to the hollowing out of life ideals and the descent into a vapid materialism.”44 In imperial Germany, the bourgeoisie assembled in Masonic lodges had successfully mastered the rules of a modern competitive market society but wanted to create a second world beyond everyday life, in which they could satisfy their “metaphysical needs,” as the Freemason and lawyer Johann Conrad Schwabe wrote in 1912 in the well-known Breslau cultural journal Nord und SГјd. Schwabe continued, “Beyond the proud doctrines and dogmas of the naturalists, of the materialists and Monists, beyond the battles for scientific worldviews and ecclesiastical dogmas, modern man yearns for a support. The вЂreligion, in which everyone can agree,’ will be this support! Freemasonry has the power to fill in the gaps in our вЂculture,’ gaps every thinking and seeking man experiences so profoundly today. As the protector of German idealism’s heritage from its heyday, Freemasonry possesses that which our civilization, oriented around the external and the superficial, is lacking. It is able to work on the perfection of man’s interior. And with this, it possesses the magical means that are necessary to raise our people to a higher cultural level, to redeem our yearning.”45 Page 223 →

In other words, the civil-religious credo of the lodges appeared not only to express the hopes, fears, and yearnings of the elevated BГјrgertum. It also promised to resolve the general crisis of society, a crisis that appeared to threaten the ethical values of the BГјrgertum and its ambitions for social and political reform.

The “Afflicted Age” “All political culture must be based on moral Bildung.”46 Even a century later, Masonic lodges adhered to this dictum by Wilhelm von Humboldt from 1789. The core of the “art of association” consisted in the “moral improvement” of Freemasons, which served to justify their claim to political leadership in society and in the state. However, beginning in the 1880s, the intimate connection between Bildung and political virtue that formed the basis of Masonic identity seemed to fall apart. While Bildung did appear to become generalized throughout society as “knowledge,” morality seemed unable to keep pace. Since the early nineteenth century, the connection between Bildung and morality had appeared to be fragile. However, if Freemasons believed up to the 1870s that the idea of Bildung could be generalized and that scientific progress was a panacea for immoral materialism, beginning in the 1880s Bildung no longer appeared to be a guarantee for moral virtue. A chasm emerged between Bildung as knowledge and Bildung as virtue, between “external” and “internal” education. “The hustle and bustle of our present day, so influenced by steam and electricity, ” one Freemason in Leipzig argued around 1900, “very easily and often permits moral education to atrophy at the expense of intellectual education. State, school, and church toil in vain to keep morality at pace with the incessant advance of science, technology, and art; the assertion that all progress in science necessarily also elevates morality simply cannot be maintained in practice”—a view that many German BГјrger, both inside the lodges and outside, shared at that time.47 It was not scientific education, but rather “education of the heart” (and with this virtue) that appeared to “degenerate.”48 “Bildung that is exclusively external, where the heart does not have a lively and warm say, easily leads to luxury and can end in bleak materialism,” a speaker argued at the Minerva Lodge in 1874.49 According to the celebratory speaker at a Masonic lodge in GГ¶ttingen thirty years later, it was conspicuous “that the upswing of general intellectual education was accompanied by a decline in Page 224 →the average person’s education of the heart.”50 In a very similar manner, the well-known left-liberal Freemason August Benvenuto Cramer argued in 1890: “We now live in chaos. Today we Germans no longer have a unified, generally recognized ideal of Bildung at all. There is sufficient drive for Bildung and sufficient means and opportunities to acquire it, but there is no clear type of personal perfection, according to which an individual should improve himself.” “Responsible for this,” Cramer continued, are the evils of modern life: “this unrest, the hurry for profit, the craving for sensuous pleasure, the worship of success, this entire illusory world, in particular the deceptive phrases, the incessant sacrifices that are made to the idols of vanity—particularly regrettable is the hardening of the heart, which is caused by competition and which makes us moderns as well ruthless to the point of being contemptuous of humanity. Our era bears the pronounced character of disintegration.”51 Four years later, in 1894, Willem Smitt, the grand master of the Apollo Lodge, imagined a time traveler from the beginning of the nineteenth century observing contemporary life: The traveler would acknowledge with envy “the gigantic progress” in the realms of science, art, and technology but then would say, “I certainly admire you contemporaries at the end of the nineteenth century in all realms of material and intellectual progress! In this regard, your age is incomparable with the age in which I lived. But—have you also become better? Better in acting and changing, better in thinking and feeling, better in the convictions and emotions of the soul? Do you still honor the realm of those ideals that were broadly accepted in my age among my people? Do you have moral progress now as well as real and intellectual progress?” Prostitution, patricide, gambling, suicide, and modern “gutter art,” Smitt continued, make the time traveler apprehensive about the German people, even if “in addition to the broad current of materialism that unmistakably floods through our era, the sense for ideal goods has not been extinguished, namely, not in the elevated circles of our nation’s BГјrgertum.”52 The polemic against materialism thus had a social-political edge. “It is ironic,” Fritz Stern has noted, “that the German bourgeoisie often hid its massive materialism behind idealism, while the socialists hid their

passionate idealism behind a facade of scientific materialism.”53 Precisely the bourgeoisie assembled in Masonic lodges regarded themselves as a bulwark against capitalism and materialism, against the pursuit of profit and the craving for pleasure, and believed that they detected these vices primarily in the “higher circles” (i.e., the aristocracy) and in the “common people,”Page 225 → those groups in society that were no longer or had never been affiliated with Freemasonry. The social composition of Masonic lodges and the influx they experienced beginning in the 1860s can also be explained by the fact that the lodges constituted, for sections of the elevated BГјrgertum, a kind of inner moral space within a society in which they appeared increasingly to lose their cultural claim to leadership. The slogan “materialism” became a cipher responsible for all possible cultural errors. However, the central issue was the loss of “inner man,” of “humanity,” which modern Bildung no longer seemed to guarantee. In this sense, Freemasons believed they were living in an “afflicted age.” “In our nineteenth century—the century of steam—restless and feverish activity in the pursuit of happiness has emerged everywhere. A gloomy shadow has settled over our entire cultural life. The body and spirit of today’s cultural man is afflicted. Everyone knows that today’s refined craving for pleasure damages the human organism and results from generation to generation in increasingly poor descendants. But even our modern spiritual direction is afflicted. Our emotional life has been undermined. Humanity has become poorer in originality of emotion, has fallen prey to skepticism, obsessive doubt, pessimism, lack of trust, and the contradiction between intimate emotions and external reality.” Through materialism and class envy, the author continued, the “century of humanity” has been revealed to be a lie.54 Another Freemason summarized this sense of crisis in the following way: The “moral thermometer of the world” indicates “an increasingly high degree of immorality.”55 Concern about the moral constitution of society was a predominant theme of lodge addresses beginning in the 1880s. There were an increasing number of voices in this era calling for the lodges to exercise an “improving” influence on society in the sense of cultural reform even outside of their own social realm, for example, on the “immoral masses.” As the Leipzig Freemason Wilhelm RГјnger argued at the official inauguration of the Minerva’s new and imposing lodge house in 1905, the goal of Freemasonry is a “unification of moral forces, not a flight from the world but rather mastery of the world in the spirit of humanity.”56 The moral improvement of the self should be expanded to include “popular education” and “popular enlightenment,” so that Freemasonry could secure its “place in the sun” in “the great battle of the age.”57 This did not mean, however, that the lodges should be open to the common people, but that Freemasons should provide education outside of the lodges. The Verein deutscher Freimaurer (Association of German Freemasons) became Page 226 →increasingly significant in imperial Germany, because it functioned within the lodge system as “a kind of вЂrepublic of letters,’” which was supposed to unite reform efforts and represent them to the outside world.58 For example, in 1906 the association sponsored prize competitions on the issue “How can popular education in the spirit of humanity promote a healthy social life? ” and organized interregional public lectures by Freemasons. The Verein also paid these “traveling speakers” for their services all over Germany. Another example of this concern was the Comenius Society for Science and Popular Education, which was founded by Ludwig Keller in 1893 and was initially independent of Masonic lodges. The Comenius Society was composed of a cross section of the propertied and educated BГјrgertum as well as a variety of reform associations, from the Verein fГјr ethische Kultur (Society for Ethical Culture), the Deutscher Verein gegen den MiГџbrauch geistiger GetrГ¤nke (German Association against the Abuse of Alcoholic Beverages), and the Verein fГјr die Verbreitung guter volkstГјmlicher Schriften (Association for the Spread of Good Popular Writings) to the Kant Society and the Eucken Bund. Many Masonic lodges also joined as corporative members. Prince Heinrich zu SchГ¶naich-Carolath, a well-known Freemason, was deputy chairman of the society. However, like countless other cultural associations of the era, the Comenius Society did not have an associational life in the narrower sense of the term. Ludwig Keller, the prolific founder of the society and its chairman, ran the organization almost singlehandedly, while a Berlin banker managed the society’s financial matters. The general membership was hardly more than a list of names. Keller, who was also a controversial church historian and director of the state archive in

MГјnster from 1881 to 1895 (before his transfer to Berlin because of his bitter anti-Catholicism), became a Freemason only in 1897. Over time the Comenius Society, oriented around the classical ideals of humanity and Bildung, developed into a public association of lodge brothers. Like Masonic lodges, the society sought to stand above political parties and religious confessions, although the religion of Bildung it championed had explicitly Protestant dimensions. If Freemasons regarded themselves as a counterorganization to the Jesuits, the Comenius Society countered the scholarly Catholic GГ¶rres Society. Comenius and Lessing, Herder and Kant, Fichte and Schiller were the cultural heroes of the society and were supposed to provide answers to the current social crisis. Like many other cultural associations of the era, the impressive rise of the Page 227 →Comenius Society ended with the society becoming a mouthpiece for its founder and his friends. The significance of the society for Freemasons declined, in particular as Keller, in attempting to demonstrate that the fashionable mixture of neohumanism and Protestant mysticism in Masonic lodges was scientifically untenable, insisted on locating the origins of Freemasonry in the Middle Ages.59 While numerous and diverse ties existed between Masonic lodges and cultural associations such as the Comenius Society, these remained purely an affair of educated elites. Concrete projects of moral reform, on the contrary, targeted groups outside the lodges, in particular the urban youth. These projects sought to combat the “alarming craving for pleasure and enjoyment,” in particular for “trashy literature and dime-store novels.”60 At an assembly of all Leipzig lodges on precisely this issue in 1910, the Freemason and lawyer Heinrich Welcker cited stories about secondary-school students who had committed suicide after reading Nick Carter, Buffalo Bill, or Sherlock Holmes stories. Welcker fearfully invoked the terrible damage that young people, women, and the lower classes in particular suffered from reading such “trashy literature.” He demanded that the state prohibit pulp fiction and that lodge foundations promote the free distribution of belletristic literature among the “people.”61 It was not surprising that Heinrich FrГ¤nkel, the secretary-general of the Verein fГјr Massenverbreitung guter Schriften (Association for the Mass Dissemination of Good Writings) in Weimar, was himself a well-known lodge brother, as in general “the issue [lay] essentially in Masonic hands.”62 The publications and pamphlets of such educational and reform movements circulated in Masonic lodges throughout Germany and the Habsburg Empire, and the lodges themselves supported them in various ways. “Concern among the educated and propertied [classes] for the welfare of the people,” FrГ¤nkel argued, has been lacking long enough. He demanded that “the massive circulation of trashy literature be displaced by the provision of healthy and yet phenomenally inexpensive intellectual and emotional sustenance for the people.” Otherwise, FrГ¤nkel continued, it is only natural that “the wrong individuals will provide the people with contemporary ideas that are in part one-sided and in part distorted, with the result that unrealizable demands, impracticable raptures, and finally wild aimless desire take hold of the broad masses.” Drawing on his own experience, FrГ¤nkel reported that lectures sponsored by cultural associations were unlikely to lead to an improvement of the people, since it was not the “people” who attended these lectures, but “educated” BГјrger. Even public Page 228 →libraries, FrГ¤nkel continued, were not suited for this because they transmitted contagious diseases through their books. The only solution, he concluded, was to sell belletristic books as cheaply as pulp fiction.63 As the example of the Reclam publishing house in Leipzig—which was owned by the Freemason Anton Philipp Reclam and published inexpensive editions of the classics—demonstrates, this position did not imply a rejection of mass culture in and of itself. The educated and propertied BГјrgertum in Masonic lodges simply wanted to define what kind of culture the “people” consumed. For this reason, it would a mistake to regard this discourse of crisis and the attempts at cultural reform simply as a kind of bourgeois antimodernism.64 Many Freemasons regarded themselves as “modern” in the emphatic sense, as citizens who lived, in the words of the left-liberal lodge reformer and publisher Carl Heinrich Georgi, “in an era of transition from a withering worldview to what we hope and believe will be a religiously and humanly elevated modern worldview.”65 Lodge brothers were convinced that, as the cultural and moral elite, they had to assume the leading role in society. “By the slogan вЂmodern,’ we understand a condition that has not yet become common knowledge among the masses. A modern man, in other words, not an everyday run-of-the-mill

person.”66 Even if the “masses” were to become educated, it would remain superficial; they would not attain true Bildung, which crystallized in the notion of “personality” and which every Freemason should strive to “rescue”: “Do not sink into the crowd; maintain your freedom, and make yourself into a personality!”—This was the categorical imperative of the lodges.67 In the Grenzboten in 1908, Dietrich Bischoff argued that education and the unfolding of “humanity” in the lodges were the highest goals of Freemasonry. “Here the liberal understanding prevails that in the education of fellow Germans the external compulsion of the state and other ruling organizations must be rendered unnecessary to the greatest degree possible through a proper culture of personality, since this kind of imposition of the will obstructs the progress of individual morality and welfare. . . . The representatives of humanity regard вЂselfennoblement’—the education of one’s own personality and one’s own values, which with proper вЂself-knowledge’ and proper вЂenlightenment’ our conscience demands should be our most intimate calling—as a fundamental precept of the moral world-order, the centerpiece of all morality.”68 “Barriers of Bildung and the culture of taste are,” as Max Weber recognized, “the most intimate and difficult of all status differences to transcend.”69Page 229 → Around 1900, the concept of Bildung attained a new power of distinction. Older meanings of the term, encompassing, for example, the notion of personality, were reemphasized. The culture of the BГјrgertum, in other words, did not dispense with its orientation around the ideal of individual Bildung. On the contrary, contemporaries spoke of a “new idealism,” which opposed the ideas of Kant, Fichte, and Goethe to the “materialism” of the age. Around 1900, these three developed into cult figures of the bourgeoisie. On the threshold of the twentieth century, the general use of the terms personality, humanity, and Bildung was virtually ubiquitous. They were also invoked in almost every lodge speech. In 1901, one Freemason submitted the following as a written response to a question posed by his lodge in a test of his “human education” before his promotion to the next “level of knowledge” in the lodge system: “How often one hears talk today about the educated and the uneducated! In the present generation, hardly a word is used so frequently as the word вЂBildung.’ If one previously divided men into aristocrats and burgher, believers and nonbelievers, Protestants and Catholics, Christians and Jews, in our current era one speaks primarily of the educated and the uneducated.”70 Another lodge speaker adopted a very similar position. Humanity, the speaker argued, had divided into two classes, those people “whose intellect is developed only to a lower power, where it is indeed sufficient for the performance of the necessary, but merely common requirements of daily life,—and those people with a surplus of intellect beyond the requirements of limited personal existence.” Workers, farmers, and petit bourgeois, even if they demonstrated “stolid uprightness” and “moral rectitude,” could not be admitted to Masonic lodges, “because they are still too much men of nature, are still not much more than products of nature. Only where man claims for himself a specially human principle of Bildung, where his spirit has developed beyond the lower spheres, only here is it compatible with an ideal measure, only here does he cease to lead an elementary existence.”71 “Heaven preserve us from the obsession with popularity!” another Freemason exclaimed in 1913, summarizing the lodges’ claim to exclusivity. “The immature masses are a fermenting poison,” he continued, the “lascivious people,” “the bondage of human slaves,” “the unbridled licentiousness of instinct” should all be kept far removed from the lodges.72 The ideal of Bildung was supposed to retain its exclusivity and nevertheless serve as a regulative idea for society in general—a balancing act that required considerable rhetorical effort on the part of Freemasons. They Page 230 →had to attract public support for the idea of Bildung without at the same time “profaning” it. The enemies of Bildung, as a Freemason argued in 1901, “the obscurantists and sinister figures, who fear that the enlightenment and the Bildung of humanity will lead to the eradication of their rule, should not be allowed to sully the good and pure ideal and decry the sacred task we call Bildung, which promises immeasurable blessings.”73 Even when the ideal of Bildung was formulated in a socially open and inclusive way, it always possessed potentially discriminatory dimensions, which made it possible to draw moral and social boundaries and thereby deny Bildung and reason, morality and humanity to certain excluded social groups. For this reason, the lodges’ civil religious credo, oriented around the notion of Bildung, remained politically ambivalent.

The religiosity of Bildung shaped the elevated BГјrgertum prior to 1914 both inside and outside of Masonic lodges, although there were also repeated attempts to criticize it. Such critique had been inconceivable within the lodges for many years. As a result, a controversy about Freemasonry and religion that arose two years before the outbreak of the First World War caused something of a sensation. The controversy was initiated by an article entitled “Freemasonry and the Current Religious Crisis,” written by the cultural philosopher and Freemason Ernst Horneffer and published in October 1912 in Die Tat, a journal that Horneffer edited.74 Like his brother August Horneffer, Ernst Horneffer was part of the generation that had not experienced firsthand the founding of the German Reich in 1871 and who, in Max Weber’s words, considered themselves to be “epigones of a great era.”75 Like many of their generation, the Horneffers were greatly influenced by Nietzsche’s work. They were close to the Tat circle and Eugen Diederich’s publishing house.76 As literary bohemians and adherents of an antibourgeois philosophy of life, the Horneffer brothers were outsiders within the Masonic system of the late Kaiserreich. It was only after 1918 that the mystical-religious understanding of Freemasonry advocated by the Horneffer brothers gained influence among Prussian Freemasons—and then infused with a ChristianvГ¶lkisch dimension.77 Like many other cultural philosophers before 1914, Ernst Horneffer regarded the “opposition between individual spirit and social spirit” to be the fundamental contradiction of the era, a contradiction that, according to Horneffer, had emerged with a sharpness as yet unknown and had left both the individual and society without orientation. “Our entire spiritual air is pregnant with an unbearable sultriness. The ego asserts itself with a Page 231 →pride never known. Simultaneously, however, it is reminded by the social spirit thousands and thousands of times of its limits and weaknesses. For general life roaring forth from the social spirit . . . has never before drawn the individual so mercilessly into its web, into its bonds. Thus there is a war between the two of them.”78 In his article, Horneffer employed all the tropes of contemporary cultural pessismism. He identified the lodges’ “art of association,” which he stylized into the “art of life,” as a solution to the crisis, one that would allow individuals “to experience the great wonder of being bound and free at the same time.”79 Horneffer was well aware that the cult of Bildung and the Masonic brotherhood possessed an emotionmystifying dimension. However, the central issue for Horneffer was not the improvement of the self through sociability (i.e., the Masonic ideal in the nineteenth century, for which the rituals of brotherhood were merely the means and not the ethical goal). Instead, Horneffer reduced Freemasonry exclusively to a religious-mystical experience embodied in the ritual melting together of ego and the world, to the idea of a quasi-religious male brotherhood, an idea that gained popularity around 1900. Even in his memoirs, Horneffer invoked the primitive, religious “primordial emotions” that he claimed Masonic rituals were capable of awakening. Most candidates for admission were “merely surprised at having been derailed. Some even vigorously rejected attempts to interpret the unusual state of excitement in which they found themselves as a religious phenomenon. For as a rule, modern man knows religion only as an authoritative structure from the past. . . . Here, however, it is not a matter of commandments and declarations of belief, which we are supposed to accept and to recite. We have only to endure or to execute actions, which appear to be purely formal but which create in receptive minds a state of agitated tension, an unusual spiritual condition oriented toward the вЂmiraculous.’”80 According to Ernst Horneffer, the emotionality of lodge rituals, located beyond everyday life, prepared the ground for a new mystical religiosity that critically surpassed the “sentimental-moralizing” religion of humanity found in Masonic lodges prior to 1914. His brother August Horneffer pronounced a similar verdict on nineteenth-century Freemasons: “One succumbed to the intimate poetry of Freemasonry, enjoyed the happiness of feeling safe in the world, ideally and in a certain sense materially as well. One became intoxicated with the well-intentioned talk about virtue, fraternal love, and humanity. In short, the ideal of humanity was watered down and robbed of its power.”81 While Ernst Horneffer did adopt individual elements from Freemasonry’sPage 232 → cult of brotherhood and its civil religion, he rearranged them in a way that emphasized the similarities between Masonic lodges and (anti)bourgeois reform movements. Not surprisingly, his fellow lodge brothers, particularly those from the older generation, sharply criticized this reinterpretation of Freemasonry. Conservative Freemasons pointed to the fact that Ernst Horneffer had briefly been a member of the Monist Bund and, like his brother, was an enthusiastic Nietzschean, and they dismissed as “nebulous,” “fantastic,” and “romantic” his attempt to

develop ideas of social reform from a reinvented Masonic-religious brotherhood.82 Liberal lodge brothers, who continued to adhere to the moral-political utopia of Freemasonry, were equally critical. One liberal Freemason argued that even in the future this utopia would continue to embody “the idea of fraternal love beyond the limits of property, education, political parties, and political perspectives beyond the limits of nations and religions and to contain the ultimate and highest goals of humanity in its belief in the realization of the temple of humanity on earth.”83 “Our era seeks a new relationship of man to man, and this yearning is rooted in a new idealism, in the powerful belief, conscious and unconscious, in a higher mankind,” he continued, adding that this higher mankind should be bound to civil religion. The lodges’ religiosity of Bildung, he argued, does not shy away from science and is at the same time grounded in “Protestant modernism,” in the demands of the Sermon of the Mount: the love of God, love of man, and a purity of heart.84 Franz Staudinger, a professor in Darmstadt and a well-known Masonic publicist, also criticized Horneffer sharply: “For all their bustle, there is something rather aged in the souls of our youth.” This was true as well, Staudinger continued, of Horneffer’s mystifying notion of brotherhood. Staudinger, who was born in 1849, argued that there had been more religion in his own youth, although one had not talked much about it. “A happy, lively breeze blew through life, regardless of whether one contemplated the lofty thoughts of the fatherland that young people took into battle in 1870, or the cultural and scientific undertakings that everywhere gave rise to the hope of overcoming every difficulty, or even social ideas that initially emerged in a weak, underdeveloped, and often distorted form and then developed among the workers and among part of the BГјrgertum. Even the new phenomenon of Ultramontanism had a fresh, youthful character then. Everywhere there was the belief in the progress of life, the hope that everyone would soon unite in unanimity, and that the golden age of peace would now begin. That was—religion, the most lively religion pulsing through our souls.”85 August Horneffer’s answer to such accusations Page 233 →against his brother and his entire generation—as he added in a note of self-irony, the “à la mode men of the twentieth century”—was to concede the “affliction of the age” and of the younger generation but to locate the causes of this affliction in the outdated cultural values of civility (BГјrgerlichkeit) and its “tyranny of virtue.” “Who knows if the oft bemoaned character traits of the new generation are not in part the results, the constitutional or nervous symptoms of a reaction to an excessive application of those principles! Self-mastery and the suppression of uncomfortable needs can turn into their opposite!” We can only comprehend the sharpness of Horneffer’s critique here if we bear in mind that mastery, knowledge, and improvement of the self had been the very foundations of Freemasonry. August Horneffer claimed that the values of the BГјrgertum and lodge practices had themselves produced the moral crisis in society. With this, he anticipated the popular antibourgeois critique of Freemasonry that arose after the First World War. The older generation, according to August Horneffer, “has, through its abstinence toward everything beyond the acquisition of tangible vital goods, provoked such a hunger for the non-tangible, for the most distant and lofty things, that the cure through appeasement and diversion no longer functions. Why the aimless accumulation of wealth, why the boundless branches of science and economy, why the unanimity of life breathtaking but fettered in indestructible chains!—Contemporary humanity raises these questions and will no longer be fobbed off with calls to self-mastery and rebukes about the affliction.”86 “The heart is destitute. Emotional life becomes barren and is robbed of its power. Neither hygiene nor ethics suffice to create this power anew.” Even religious terms and systems, Horneffer continued, are powerless here; only “emotional experiences,” such as those promised by the Masonic cult, are sufficient.87 Horneffer argued that if Masonic rituals could be stripped of their ethical significance, they would cease to function as a “civilizing” force in the sense of self-mastery or control; and this would, in turn, free them from the strictures of civility and hence from modern civilization and all its afflictions. While in light of later cataclysmic events, this idea might appear to be dangerously antimodern, we should bear in mind that before 1914 the supporters of such a position were articulating a diffuse yearning for a release from the moral corset that the elevated BГјrgertum in the lodges had constructed for itself. In other words, to be opposed to civility (BГјrgerlichkeit) prior to 1914 was an essentially modern and bourgeois position. This crisis of identity in the German BГјrgertum prior to 1914 was not Page 234 →limited to Masonic lodges. Max Weber’s polemic against the flight of the “last and most sublime values” from the public sphere

into the domain of mystical experience or into a “brotherhood of immediate personal relationships” and his impassioned diagnoses of an emerging “world domination of unbrotherliness” were also expressions of this general sense of crisis.88 However, the emphatic tone in which such analyses had been formulated since the 1880s appears to refute them unintentionally. At least among the elevated BГјrgertum, these critiques testified to the growing emphasis of moral improvement through intimate and religious experience for the self-image of educated elites. Masonic lodges were supposed to serve as precisely this kind of intimate and sacred space beyond everyday life. In the lodges, the propertied and educated BГјrger, who in everyday life had mastered the parlance and rules of capital and the market, ostensibly transformed themselves into “better men” when in the lodge and lamented the “harshness” and “coldness” of capitalism and materialism. This work on the self assumed religious traits. Contrary to simplifications of Max Weber’s thesis about the “disenchantment of the world” in modernity, we could argue that BГјrger elites’ search for a more intimate and intensified religiosity was part and parcel of a “re-enchantment of the world” in the late nineteenth century.89 It was this specific amalgamation of intimate sociability and sentimental religiosity that Lovis Corinth, himself a Freemason, captured in his painting “The Lodge Brothers” (1898–99). The crisis of Masonic identity and Freemasons’ call for a cultural reform of society were part of their attempt to maintain the Masonic vision of “a brotherhood of men” and at the same time to assert their own claims to moral and political leadership, despite a general tendency toward democratization. Even at the turn of the twentieth century, the moral alarmism accompanying this claim had a slightly ridiculous ring. All too often historians have interpreted this moralizing cultural critique as an almost incomprehensible fear of modernity, as the German BГјrgertum’s pathological flight from politics to morality. The BГјrgertum’s critique of materialism and mass culture certainly did contain elements of such a moralizing of politics. However, we can only explain the intensity of this critique if we bear in mind that Freemasons believed that modern society was grounded in the individual virtue of its citizens. Freemasons regarded the moral improvement of the self and the reform of society as indissolubly connected. Only together did they lead to progress for the individual, for society, indeed for humanity. As Heinrich Wanner argued in 1909, the Page 235 →sociability of the lodges was oriented around the “fullest education of one’s own person into a mature, complete human being who acts in moral freedom, and the education of every association of human beings into a perfect instrument for the creation of humanity. The first and most immediate task is always the Bildung of personality, the individual education of one’s self, work on the raw stone; after this, the Bildung of society, social education, work for the creation of perfect societies and for the creation of relations among societies that promote the general welfare—both of these, however, with regard to the finite unification of humanity.”90 Fig. 9. Lovis Corinth, “The Lodge Brothers,” 1898–99. (Courtesy of the StГ¤dtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich.) Freemason’s adherence to sociability and civic virtue, despite contemporary social, confessional, and political tensions, was tied to this moral-political vision. The moral alarmism of the lodges prior 1914 was rooted in the belief that a polity must be grounded in the virtue of its citizens, a belief that was part of the inheritance of enlightened liberalism and not its rejection.

Page 236 → Page 237 →

Part III Nationalism as Moral Universalism No doubt every great nation represents an idea important to the human race. But great God! how much more true is this for France! —Jules Michelet The German spirit alone is universal, directed toward binding a spirit of lawfulness and conciliating compromise, and therefore destined to create a culture that is to unify everything that was, is, and will be great on earth. —Karl Lamprecht

Page 238 → Page 239 →

Chapter 7 The Individual, the Nation, and Mankind Since the 1840s, the Masonic vision of constituting a moral-political order through improving individual virtue, civil society, and ultimately mankind had appeared to be realized through the nation. The nation came to stand between the individual and mankind, located, as civil society was, beyond the old state and the church. In the language of nationalism, individuals perceived themselves as part of a body politic, understanding their individual virtue as a guarantee for the moral order of the state.1 Tocqueville as well as the lesser-known practitioners of nineteenth-century civil society regarded the nation as the great band connecting individuals to one another in a democracy.2 Between the VormГ¤rz period and the First World War, Freemasons were convinced that moral and political progress depended on the intersection of these two trajectories: the continuous improvement of the self and that of the political community moving in the direction of a brotherhood of all men. In what follows, the example of Masonic moral-political discourse will be used to investigate how this correlation was repeatedly invoked in the international crises of the second half of the nineteenth century, in particular during the FrancoPrussian War of 1870–71. Such an approach stands at odds with two widely accepted theses about German nationalism in the nineteenth century. The first of these imputes a model of linear progress to history. According to this thesis (influenced by modernization theories of the postwar era) there has been a gradual and continuous rise in nationalism since the late eighteenth century.3 As will be demonstrated in detail, this position remains within the parameters of nineteenth-century nationalist discourse. It transfers the notion of development—prescribed by the imperative of moral improvement of the self and popularized in the final third of the century Page 240 →through the reception of Darwinian evolutionary thought—onto the domain of politics. In 1858, Bluntschli and Brater had already argued in their liberal Deutsches Staats-WГ¶rterbuch that “Bildung for patriotism and Bildung for morality” were inseparable.4 The idea of Bildung, in other words, could be transferred to other political subjects or units: the nation, civil society, or mankind. “All these units of action or subjects capable of Bildung turned into derivatives of self-formation (Selbstbildung). They all live off the primary meaning that all Bildung is the self-formation of an individual.”5 In German, the very term Nationsbildung continues to retain this older meaning of Bildung. While the English term nation building does not necessarily include this aspect of Bildung in the sense of moral improvement, it does contain an implicit teleology. Older versions of modernization theory (e.g., Karl Deutsch) as well as socioanthropological models (Ernest Gellner) interpret nationalism as a functional ideology promoting the integration of modern societies. Both evaluate historical phenomena in terms of their proximity to the nation and as a stage on the road to national integration.6 This perspective, however, ignores the contingency and violence inherent in the process of “nation building.” Even in the garb of modernization theory, talk about building the nation, about its historically inevitable development and its identity-creating power, proceeds according the mechanisms of a “political technology of individuals” described by Foucault, collapsing the process of selfformation and the formation of community and presuming cultural homogeneity where political conflicts dominate. In correlating individual virtue (Selbstbildung) and political strength (Nationsbildung), nineteenth-century nationalist discourse also adopted both the progressive temporality inherent in the idea of Bildung and the moment of permanent crisis particular to it. Individual Bildung and virtue, on the one hand, and the moral-political order, on the other, were conceived not as a fixed state or condition but as a process. The discourse of the nation itself was able to absorb this moment of permanent crisis and change, in part through the subsequent adoption of Darwinian motives. In the vision of a purifying improvement of the nation, the idea of crisis intensified nationalism, because the nation was understood as a political unit requiring permanent action for survival.7 Drawing on Hobsbawn’s notion of an “invented tradition,” numerous scholars have in recent years pointed to the constructed nature of the nation. These critiques, however, which often implicitly seek to

demonstrate that national identity is a fiction Page 241 →or kind of “false consciousness,” can obscure the fact that it was not in spite of but rather because of its fictions and crises that the nation was able to make individuals believe that the survival of the nation depended on individual virtue and the readiness of individuals to make sacrifices.8 Thus the discourse about the rise and fall of the nation and nationalism, about their development and dissolution, and about their crisis and rebirth corresponds with historical tropes typical of the nineteenthcentury nationalist discourse and is essentially derivative of the notion of Bildung and popular Darwinian thought.The Individual, the Nation, and Mankind The second thesis that will be questioned here is closely related to this. This thesis claims that over the course of the nineteenth century nationalism dissolved traditional identities, causing them to disappear: National identity replaced older religious and social, regional and cosmopolitan identities.9 However, the opposite appears to have been the case.10 Nationalism did not dissolve traditional identities, as older modernization theories claimed, but continuously mixed and overlapped with them in new and different ways. This seems to have been the key to nationalism’s success. Nationalism transformed pre-political beliefs and norms into political ones in such a way that these determined national identity as well as conceptions of the “enemy.” One of the distinctive features of nationalist discourse in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is that it produced a politics that presumed national identities to be all-embracing, fixed, and continuous. As Geoff Eley has noted, “The issue then becomes: on what bases . . . does identity’s non-fixity become temporarily fixed in such a way to enable individuals and groups to behave as a particular kind of agency, political or otherwise?”11 These two theses—the assumption that nationalism developed as a linear progression and that it successfully displaced traditional identities—form the basis of another influential (but erroneous) premise about German nationalism, namely, that over the course of the nineteenth century the German bourgeoisie shifted its allegiance from universal moral values to an intensified national identity antithetical to this moral universalism. Depending on their political perspectives, scholars have regarded this transition either as reasonable or as catastrophic. However, both perspectives have accepted this shift as unquestionable and almost natural, indeed so unquestionable that there are almost no historical studies actually focusing on the transition itself. Friedrich Meinecke’s book Cosmopolitanism and the National State, originally published in 1907, still serves as a point of reference. In his book, Meinecke attempted to show how “an act of divisionPage 242 → came about in the development of the concept of the nation in the nineteenth century. This concept was gradually separated from the universalistic and universally ethical ideals that were originally attached to it. By means of this separation it first became usable for the purpose of the state.”12 More recently Norbert Elias attempted to demonstrate, from a radically different political perspective, a similar line of development: a shift in priority “from humanist to nationalist middle-class elites.”13 In part 3, a different perspective will be proposed, one that uses the example of Masonic lodges to demonstrate the continuing connection between nationalist and universal humanist ideas. The concept of the nation unified a double, paradoxical moral canon: a universal humanist canon, whose highest values were individual “man” (Mensch) or collective “humanity” (Menschheit); and a particularist nationalist canon, whose highest values were the “nation” or the “people” (das Volk). On the one hand, the concept of the nation contained the promise of universal human equality. It was committed to an egalitarian morality, whose highest value was the individual as “man.” However, while this universal equality was supposed to be realized within the modern nation-state, it asserted its universality in a particular form; it distinguished itself from other particularities, each of which, with its universal assertions, mutually excluded the others.14 In other words, the “nation” became a modern concept, “which despite its universal ideals contained through the force of its language a strict criterion for inclusion and exclusion.”15 The idea of nations with equal rights, which was tied to the collective concept of mankind, always threatened to turn into a “moral” hierarchy of nations and into the universalist belief of a nationalist mission.16 This was the case during the years before the establishment of the German Reich (which will be sketched briefly here), and even more so in the years after the FrancoPrussian War of 1870–71 (which will be examined in the subsequent chapter), during which German and French Freemasons regarded the other nation as the enemy of mankind and their own nation as guardian of “civilization.”

We need to reexamine these tensions between nationalist and humanist claims. The example of Masonic lodges in Germany contradicts the thesis that beginning with the Napoleonic Wars German nationalism was no longer legitimated in terms of universal humanist values. While the concept of the nation had assumed an important role in lodge addresses since the early nineteenth century, this emphasis on the nation was always supposed to be merely an intermediate step in the Bildung of the self into a higher humanity. Even a central adherent of German nationalism such as Page 243 →Fichte was convinced that cosmopolitanism and patriotism were not contradictory. “Cosmopolitanism is the prevailing will that the human race’s reason for existence will actually be achieved in the human race. Patriotism is the will that this goal be achieved in the very first place in that nation that we ourselves belong to, and that success spreads from this to the entire human race.”17 In his Vorlesungen Гјber Freimaurerei (Lectures on Freemasonry), Fichte issued the following call to every lodge brother as a citizen of the state and of the world: “Your deeds should be love of the fatherland; your thoughts should be cosmopolitan sense.”18 This became a leitmotiv of lodge addresses in the nineteenth century.The Individual, the Nation, and Mankind “Patriotism should permeate our actions, cosmopolitanism our desires,” one lodge speaker stated in an exemplary address at the Zepter Lodge in Breslau in 1838. “Whoever strives and desires merely as a patriot is petty and timid; whoever acts solely as a cosmopolitan is overly ambitious.”19 “Patriotism is the citizen’s highest virtue,” the lodge speaker Wilhelm Foerster argued. It cannot be separated from “cosmopolitan sense.” On the contrary, he argued, the two can only exist together. “Advancing civilization,” Foerster continued, has overcome “sheer patriotism, which is contemptuous of everything foreign and thus avoids it.” “The great events of the world, general scientific education, business, and travel have eradicated the petty views of small-town wise men lacking in knowledge and experience of the world. The cosmopolitan sense has become a partial expression of the noble liberalism of humanity.”20 However, Foerster insisted that the other extreme had also been overcome: a cosmopolitan sense that wanted to bring “light into the night of foreign nations, while one’s own fatherland still tapped about in the dark.”21 Foerster argued that only the permanent Bildung of the self toward civic virtue would produce a rational connection between patriotism and cosmopolitanism. “One educates students in every art; however, only rarely for the most noble science—that of being a citizen.” “A good political constitution [can] keep good men in good condition; however, men can be made good only through the active development of the more mature spirit for those higher convictions.”22 This was what “the royal art” of Masonic sociability was supposed to do. It represented “orderly enlightenment as the most secure path to the most pure civic virtue and thus to true human welfare.” Through the Bildung of the self, Foerster argued, Masonic sociability led to patriotism and civility, and ultimately to cosmopolitanism.23 During the Revolution of 1848–49, discourse about the nation was Page 244 →couched almost invariably in terms of mankind. Masonic lodges defended themselves against the accusation (which was also raised against Germans in general) “that due to an excess of cosmopolitanism they were bad citizens of the state and communities.”24 The Germans, one author argued, are far removed from the “national egotism” of other nations, such as England. Since the foundations of a people are its morality, he continued, the Germans should seek first to improve themselves, to become citizens in order to be effective ultimately as world citizens. The author worried that “moral degeneration” had already penetrated deeply enough into the German people. In 1848, a lodge speaker from Leipzig argued: “Just as it is my duty to learn to govern myself before I have the audacity to try to contribute to the construction of mankind, I must also dedicate my powers initially to the services of the fatherland before I seek to extend my influence beyond it.”25 Cosmopolitanism without patriotism, another speaker of the same lodge argued, ceased to be a virtue, as did patriotism without cosmopolitanism.26 The allegiance to “mankind,” in other words, did not disappear with the national awakening of 1848–49. On the contrary, Freemasons were convinced that universalism and nationalism could be combined politically. In addition, liberal lodge brothers believed that the German nation and German Freemasonry were superior in combining national and humanist aspirations. For example, the Frankfurt Freemason Heinrich Weismann argued in 1863 that it is “the ideal cosmopolitan sense of the German man that has made him into an authentic Mason.

This cosmopolitan sense is the life breath of our nation.”27 We also find this sentiment in the Masonic recasting of Ernst Moritz Arndt’s well-known national hymn. That is the Mason’s fatherland: Where hatred and discord are banished, Where everyone strives only for the good, And humanity raises the banner, Where one detests all that is common! That should be the Mason’s home! That is the Mason’s fatherland! . . . Its borders are not narrow.—Oh no! They should encompass the entire earth!28 Page 245 → At the end of the 1860s, Freemasons believed a “Masonic-cosmopolitan era” to be imminent as “the necessary final link in the chain of the gradual developments of the human race.”29 One Freemason summarized the lodges’ political self-understanding just before the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War as follows: “Civic sense and national feeling [lead] to cosmopolitan sense, to universal human love.”30 Freemasons were not alone in believing that this connection of national and humanist allegiances was not only possible but politically desirable. An examination of the most widely read encyclopedia of the era confirms this. In 1851, Meyer’s Conversations-Lexicon stated that the term cosmopolitanism means that “every people develop freely, without impairing others and without being impaired by others. Cosmopolitanism does not strive to eradicate the natural national differences, which allow mankind to appear in such enormous diversity, in favor of some abstract unity. Instead it allows all peoples of the world to freely unfold the talents and powers they possess. It demands only that this does not occur at the expense of other peoples. Thus cosmopolitanism is by no means opposed to a sensible patriotism firmly defending the rights of the fatherland, but only to unjust, arrogant, and prejudiced national fanaticism.”31 Even Wagener’s conservative Staatslexikon (1866) argued that cosmopolitan sense and patriotism were by no means opposites, insisting that both were opposed only to “particularism” and “egotism.” On the contrary, the encyclopedia insisted, “cosmopolitan sense” is the “fundamental premise of every virtue, namely, insofar as it defines and presumes an equality of all and thus even the subjection of one’s own interests to the general interest. It does not, however, exclude patriotism, since it has moral value only if it also takes into account those duties and considerations that every man must fulfill as . . . a citizen of the state. Whoever believes that he is, as a cosmopolitan, relieved of the moral duties that love of the fatherland places on him in regard to the social order to which he belongs sinks into a moral degeneration that necessarily undermines every political order.”32 In an article for his liberal Staatslexikon (1862), Bluntschli examined the problems inherent in the concept of the nation and its politically explosive potential. He argued that this “modern national principle” had provided a political justification for the forcible reorganization of the European system of states. The universal principle of the nation, Bluntschli continued, disregards treaties of international law, “possesses enormous spiritual power, ” and moves “the masses with torrential violence.”33 As Page 246 →soon as language and culture (i.e., genuinely apolitical ideas) form the basis of the nation-building process, they become political factors. Every nation is entitled to make itself into a state, in other words, to become a people in the political sense. Bluntschli argued that the “territory of the state and the expansion of the nation should coincide.”34 For Germany, “the Cinderella of European nations,” he proposed a balance between particularism and universalism so that the German nation could “extricate itself from political poverty and fulfill its mission as a state.”35 Bluntschli argued explicitly against an excessive inflation of the “national principle.” He emphasized that while civilization “cannot do without the support of the nation, neither can it remain limited to the nation if the highest human goals are to be realized.”36 However, in the same article Bluntschli also wrote: “The more

gifted and more mature nations are surely entitled to make use of their spiritual and moral superiority when dealing with the coarser, lower nations and to guide the education of those nations.”37 This would, he believed, result in “progress for individuals who now obtain a share in a higher cultural life, and in progress for mankind at large whose destiny is not the preservation of all barbarism but civilization.”38 Despite or rather because of this moral universalism, national liberals in Germany—whose most prominent representatives included Freemasons such as Bluntschli and Venedey—were not free of a moral sense of civilizational superiority with racist undertones.39 Belief in the universal mission of “civilized” nations was widespread within liberal circles in the 1860s. “Und es mag am deutschen Wesen / Einmal noch die Welt genesen” [And may the world someday recuperate / Through the German character]. The contemporary poet Emanuel Geibel penned these lines in 1861. The fact that they became popular during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 and were cited by Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1907 as a justification of German world politics indicates the dynamics inherent in the conflation of universalism and nationalism.40 In an address in Karlsruhe in 1869, Bluntschli argued that the lodges were a “moral association,” a “bond that loops through the different states and the different churches and, in contrast to political egotism and religious pettiness, connects them all as parts of a single mankind.” Nevertheless, Bluntschli continued, German nationalism is necessary in order for Germany to “catch up again with the other civilized peoples of the world, who experienced political unification earlier, and to assume its place among them as one of the great civilized peoples.” Bluntschli believed that the Page 247 →dream of civilizing both individual man and mankind was realized in the form of the nation. The special “characteristic” of the German nation, he continued, is “that its most authentic essence is satisfied especially in the service of mankind. Masonry also contains this cosmopolitan trait, which does not obstruct the development of peoples but drives it forward in a humane direction. Thus as Masons we may take part with all our hearts in the national awakening of our people and help develop all the virtues and advantages it is capable of, but we must never forget that the peoples of the world are brothers in the family of man.”41 Bluntschli formulated here a common credo for European Freemasonry prior to 1870, a blending of nationalist longings and universalist claims that appeared to determine the future. Bluntschli’s work is just one example of the metamorphoses that moral universalism or “cosmopolitanism”—the liberal inheritance of the Enlightenment—underwent in response to two historical tendencies during the final third of the nineteenth century: the division of European societies into individual nation-states, on the one hand, and the international entanglements between those nation-states, on the other. As nations came to resemble each other more and more in both economic and social terms, older cosmopolitan notions of a brotherhood of man were used to establish new mechanisms of political inclusion and exclusion. The promise of human equality was now supposed to apply only to members of one’s own nation. In addition, the desire for distinction, which constituted the basis of national self-definition, became totalized as soon as a political unit was legitimated in the name of all mankind.42 The doctrine “all men are brothers” could be transformed “all too easily into the dogma вЂonly my brothers are men, all others are animals.’”43 Or, according to Derrida’s variation of this thesis, the language of brotherhood was disarming but not disarmed.44 This elitist claim to universality or to a superior humanity, however, was applied not only externally to other nations and peoples. It was also used domestically. By claiming the discourse of moral universalism for itself, the elevated BГјrgertum assembled in Masonic lodges asserted itself as superior, claiming to possess a higher morality. Whoever did not fulfill the demands of this “higher morality” was regarded as “the enemy of his fatherland, indeed an enemy of humanity,” as Foerster had argued in his lodge address in 1838.45 In a similar vein, Bluntschli labeled the Jesuits thirty years later as “the enemies of the progress of mankind.”46 The universalist rhetoric of Freemasonry not only obscured existing Page 248 →social-political boundaries but also worked, however unintentionally, to intensify them. The example of Masonic lodges can therefore be used to trace the politicization of moral ideas and the simultaneous moralization of politics (both national politics and international power politics) between the 1860s and the First World War. The following chapter will focus on the

moral-political discourse within Masonic lodges as well as the history of Freemasons’ relations to their brethren in other nations. The central focus will be relations between German and French Freemasons during and after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Freemasonry was regarded as an international, indeed transnational institution. However, the more that nations came to be interconnected, the more evident it became that this process did not result in the moral progress that lodge brothers had hoped for.

Page 249 →

Chapter 8 The Fatherland of Man Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, lodge brothers continued to believe that Freemasonry constituted a “moral International.” However, the extent of actual contacts between Freemasons beyond national borders remained limited, in part due to police supervision.1 This changed gradually during the 1860s. Correspondence among the grand lodges, the exchange of representatives, and individual visits to lodges in foreign countries (for example, during business trips) all made Freemasonry more international. However, the closer the lodges of different nations became over the course of the nineteenth century, the more visible were their differences in terms of discourse and social practices. This gave rise to repeated conflicts within the Masonic world. In the 1860s, American Freemasons rebuked their German brothers in Hamburg for the exclusion of Jews, arguing that this was a violation of Freemasonry’s universal principles and therefore immoral—apparently unaware that the members of the Grand Lodge of Hamburg were active supporters of Jewish emancipation within German Freemasonry.2 The American Freemasons probably made these accusations against the Grand Lodge of Hamburg because the latter had employed similar arguments in the 1850s to denounce the refusal of Masonic lodges in the United States to recognize African-American lodge brothers. At the time, however, the Grand Lodge of Hamburg had not gone as far as the Grand Orient de France, which responded to the American lodges’ discrimination by breaking off all relations with them in 1858. Like their liberal lodge brothers in Germany, French Freemasons were “enthusiastic supporters of the emancipations of blacks.”3 The moral doctrine of Masonic lodges in the United States and Germany had a Protestant-religious tone, which brought them into conflict with France’s stridently secular Freemasonry. In addition, Page 250 →French Freemasons believed that the exclusion of Jews on the basis of religion contradicted the principles of Freemasonry, which they pointed out to their Prussian brothers in impassioned appeals.4 As these examples suggest, there was a chasm between Freemasonry’s self-image as a “moral International” and the actual unity and brotherhood between the lodge systems of different nations. Paradoxically, this chasm grew as individual national societies became increasingly connected. Only with the advent of internationalism did the question arise as to how Masonic principles should be implemented beyond one’s own borders, along with the ensuing moral rebukes and national sanctions. In short, the internationalization of European societies exposed the particularist nature of national lodge systems and their universalist pretensions. The factual universalism of global economic and social ties intensified the tendency to national exclusion, exerting political pressure on the normative universalism associated with the concept of humanity. In Etienne Balibar’s words, the more “humankind as a single web of interrelations is no longer an ideal or utopian notion but an actual condition for every individual,” the more “distorted images or stereotypes of all the others, either as вЂkins’ or вЂaliens’” multiply and take root, “thus raising gigantic obstacles before any dialogue.” Identities, Balibar continues, become “less isolated and more incompatible, less univocal and more antagonistic.”5 The example of Freemasonry’s moral-political discourse illustrates how moral universalism in the nineteenth century did not prevent political conflicts and even on occasion intensified them. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 played a central role here. In just a brief period of time, the diverse informal contacts and ideological affinities between Masonic lodges in the two countries were rendered obsolete or transformed into enmities.

Friends and Foes: The Franco-Prussian War By inflating their respective national causes into the question of the ultimate welfare of civilization in 1870–71, both French and German Freemasons transformed the duality of national self-definition into an absolute. German

lodge brothers believed that the war against France was “basically about safeguarding Western civilization, the triumph of justice, education, and humanity.”6 Similar arguments emerged mutatis mutandis on the French side. In September 1870, leaflets thrown from Page 251 →balloons over the Prussian lines called on Freemasons to think about progress and to join the French as brothers after civilization had been victorious over barbarism.7 In the same month, ten Parisian lodges issued a manifesto to the international lodge world, denouncing the patrons of German Masons, that is, the Prussian king and the crown prince, as “monstres Г figure d’homme” (echoing the older republican opposition of kings to citizens and animality to humanity) and calling for their immediate expulsion from Freemasonry and ultimately from mankind.8 A little later, more than fifteen hundred French Freemasons gathered in Paris to try Wilhelm and his son before an honorary court. Masonic lodges in other countries, including Belgium and Switzerland, issued similar manifestos. In September 1870 as well, the Alpina Lodge, the Grand Lodge of Switzerland, adopted a manifesto emphasizing the “higher significance of France and Germany, of the Latin and German races for human society.” According to this manifesto, the war was an anachronism in the modern era, explicable only by recourse to those “old bastions of militarism” in Germany. Liberal German Freemasons such as Findel heatedly rejected this claim, arguing that the German nation was the true “bastion of world peace, of civilization and humanity,” an “Areopagus of genuine morality.” Signifi-cantly, Findel also protested against the use of “race” in connection with Freemasonry.9 In the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, each side sought to disparage the civilizational status of the enemy. French lodge brothers believed that the German conduct of war was the morally reprehensible consequence of militarism and the authoritarian state, of backwardness and barbarism. Germans also accused the French of backwardness. For German Freemasons, the deployment of black African soldiers and France’s “uncivilized” conduct of war were proof that the French had regressed behind a common European standard of civility. “The many examples of vices and misdeeds in the French army, its inclusion of half-wild, barbaric hordes from strange parts of the world, the shooting at parliamentarians, the attacks on wounded and defenseless people, the burning down of open cities, the abomination of Laon, the ambush on Ablis, the murder of German soldiers by waylaying franc-tireurs and farmers, the brutal expulsion of Germans from France and other violations of international law testify to the profound moral decline of a people that has for centuries dreamed of world domination, that has sought to subjugate all the other peoples of Europe.”10 The War of 1870–71, the author continued, has demonstrated the moral bankruptcy of the French nation’s universalism. “The tenacity Page 252 →with which the people and its leaders cling to the idea of France’s spiritual, political, and military superiority over the German people . . . testifies to the blindness of an entire nation, which believes its natural destiny to be the dissemination of civilization among the peoples of Europe and the guidance of their talents according to notions of freedom that they do not recognize, according to intelligence and culture that they do not have, and according to a happiness of peoples that they lack.”11 Nevertheless, contrary to claims by Norbert Elias and others, culture and civilization were rarely understood as diametrical opposites in German nationalist discourse of the time.12 Both of these concepts implied a common European self-understanding and a racist sense of superiority, a discourse couched in categories of moral development and a civilizing mission.13 What was new and confusing about the War of 1870–71, not only for many German and French Freemasons, was that for the first time two “civilized” nations (and their respective Masonic lodges) fought a war against each other. This was antithetical to the developmental thought of the era and its belief in gradual moral progress. In spite of this, a longing for brotherhood beyond national borders continued to exist. This is evident, for example, in the numerous war stories relating acts of fraternity between the two sides. One German Freemason told the following story: On the battlefield, a French lieutenant is able to identify himself as a Freemason through the secret Masonic distress signal. A German captain spares the French lieutenant’s life but is then struck in the heart by an enemy bullet. The Frenchman is shot in the head and collapses beside his savior. He seizes the German by the hand and utters the following words before dying: “Thank you, my brother!”14 Faced with death, the distinctions between friend and foe disappear; the two are simply brothers. The agonies of war created a new sense of fraternity beyond everyday life.

These sentimental images of brotherhood also inspired Masonic poetry. The Jewish Freemason Elias Ullmann composed the following lines. He struck him well, The courageous August Krohn; “There’s no hope for you at all, You son of a Frenchman, you shall die!” Sinking down on fallow field The other man is battle weary, Page 253 →What does it help him that He has fought bravely and valiantly? The wounded French soldier begs for mercy, but the German soldier does not understand him. However, despite national and linguistic barriers, a secret bond connects the two opponents. He forces himself up, His face turned toward the East. His hand gropes for something Hidden under his jacket. All-powerful God, the other man cries, And with horror he embraces him. He sees the blue band Soaked red with blood; . . . And they who never knew each other In life, even as enemies, Now as Masons give each other The fraternal handshake in death!15 This desire for fraternity despite the horrors of the war is evident not only in Masonic poetry. Shortly after the war, in early June 1871, a joint “field lodge” was established near Vesoul, where withdrawing German soldiers and French prisoners of war returning home crossed paths. A total of approximately three hundred Freemasons—German and French officers as well as local lodge members—visited the lodge. Field lodges had existed during the war as well. At Vesoul, German Freemasons were assigned to groups of French officers and civilians. They stood in a circle together and formed a “Masonic chain.” When the newcomers’ blindfolds were removed, they must have believed they were witnessing a tableau vivant of Freemasonry’s humanist ideals.16 Such fraternal gatherings, however, remained the exception. For the most part German and French Freemasons in 1870–71 harbored an intense moral bitterness toward each other, arising from a disappointed sense of a shared civility. Both sides issued calls and proclamations intended to morally repudiate their opponent. In February 1871, the Grand Orient de France officially denied any participation in the manifesto of the Paris lodges but also refused to condemn the manifesto explicitly. The Prussian Page 254 →grand lodges then broke off all official contact with the French grand lodge in May 1871, a largely symbolic gesture as the Grand Orient had already passed a similar declaration at the outbreak of war and there had been little subsequent contact between the lodges. The Prussian grand lodges did continue to allow French Freemasons to visit Prussian lodges.17 In contrast to the Napoleonic Wars, however, French prisoners of war made little use of this.18 Efforts to coordinate joint humanitarian aid, which had existed since the outbreak of the war, now collapsed.19 During the war, Freemasons on both sides volunteered in establishing and financing military hospitals, which were frequently located in lodge houses, although this significantly constrained lodge sociability.20 In many locations, lodge life temporarily came to a standstill, not least because both French and German Freemasons were drafted into military service.

A lodge speech by the historian Wilhelm Oncken, which was addressed to “the brethren of the world,” illustrates the difficulties German Freemasons faced in refuting accusations from their French brethren that they had abandoned the universalist dimension of Masonic principles: “We only wanted to exercise the human right to live for ourselves, to be masters of our own house, and to cease being the Cinderella on the racetrack of great nations.” However, Oncken continued, when the Germans took up arms for “mankind’s greatest assets, ” “brothers in foreign countries”—including in the neutral lodges of Belgium and Switzerland—turned against them. “The cosmopolitanism and the fraternal love of our order were put to their first great test,” he concluded, “and they failed that test.”21 German lodge brothers believed that the reasons for this failure lay in an exaggerated “national hatred” in France directed against “the fatherland of man,” that is, the German nation.22 For their part, German Freemasons continued to regard “national hatred” as morally reprehensible. It is, Carl Pilz, the Leipzig editor of the Freimaurer-Zeitung, argued, a “poison,” particularly for Freemasons, whom “we call the friends of mankind.” Pilz continued: “Our glorious dream of the brotherhood of men will not be attained as long as national hatred divides peoples, as long as the flames of hatred are artificially nourished and maintained for selfish reasons, as long as despotic rulers use national hatred as a weapon for their wars of conquest, as long as peoples of the world do not have the maturity to decide about war and peace for themselves.”23 Pilz insisted, however, that this did not mean that the “dream of cosmopolitanism” was over. He connected it instead to the newly established German nation-state, which was supposed to realize the liberal Page 255 →values of Bildung, humanity, and morality—even against the enemy, against “the Babel on the banks of the Seine.”24 The images of domestic and foreign enemies at times converged and were intensified precisely because the enemy now was understood in universalist moral categories. Liberal German Freemasons were convinced that the “moral decline” of the French nation was rooted in Catholicism and the doctrines of that “aged childish man” in Rome. “The nation we have defeated, vanquished, and conquered is ruled by a completely different spirit, which in a merely artificial way gave that nation its superficially brilliant position among other nations before the outbreak of this major war. It was not the spirit of light and truth but a spirit of mere illusion and lies. . . . Lies, gullibility, superstitions, hypocrisy, and a boundless recklessness intensified to the greatest immorality have brought a nation equipped with beautiful talents up to the abyss of ruin.”25 In the new German nation-state, in particular in the Prussian provinces, rhetorical axes were already being whetted for the imminent Kulturkampf against the Catholic Church. Liberal Freemasons in Baden undoubtedly played a forerunner role in this regard during the 1860s. Beginning in 1870, the lodges’ claim to a superior morality contributed to an intensification of political conflicts such the Franco-Prussian War and later the Kulturkampf, as they regarded their opponents simply as “enemies of mankind.” It was not, in other words, a rejection of “mankind” or “civilization” in favor of “Volk” or “Kultur,” but the retention of a universal discourse and the idea of a civilizing mission that contributed to the escalation of these conflicts.

A “Moral International”? Franco-German Rapprochements Beginning 1870–71, the French concept of the nation was defined not only in sharp contrast to its military enemy but in ethnic categories as well. This is evident, for example, in the work of Ernest Renan.26 The situation was similar in Germany. Nevertheless, even after 1871 German and French Freemasons adhered to a universalist ideology and continued to regard their own nation as the “fatherland of man.”27 In an address at a French lodge in 1899, one speaker argued: “It was France’s responsibility to develop the idea of human progress for the world. . . . To love France, to serve her, and if necessary to die for her [means] to love mankind, to serve it, and to die for it.” This was a claim that German lodge brothers also Page 256 →raised for Germany.28 Oswald Marbach composed the following lines for a lodge celebration at the Balduin Lodge in Leipzig in 1880, referring to the German nation: “Through you mankind will partake of / True freedom some day, hail!”29 A year later, the deputy master of the Zu den drei Kronen Lodge in KГ¶nigsberg announced that he was proud to be “not merely a German but a world citizen as well.”30 Man, citizen, world citizen—like concentric circles these three concepts described the moral-political identity of German and French Freemasons. This also meant that each side accused the other of harboring an exaggerated nationalism unworthy of cosmopolitans. As one German Freemason argued, the most educated nation is the one “that, in addition to

possessing most emphatically its own character and having developed its own powers to the greatest degree, has absorbed the most elements from foreign nations and assimilated them in such a way that these foreign elements become a particular and characteristic element of that nation.”31 Of course, the speaker insisted that the German nation alone fit this description. Another Freemason offered a similar argument: “As comparative histories demonstrate, the German nation has always proved by and large to be more humane than all other nations. Free of that systematic cruelty that the Spanish, for example, have been guilty of in America in regard to the indigenous population and at home in regard to Moors and вЂheretics,’ that the English are guilty of in Ireland, and that the French are guilty of in regard to the Huguenots, the German character possesses a strong sense of justice, which compels Germans to adopt and defend the standpoint of equality, to treat others as they treat themselves. This character trait forms the primary basis of Germans’ civilizational responsibility, which they realize among themselves, as individuals in foreign countries, and as a people among the peoples of the world.”32 In contrast, the author continued, the French people, in particular French Freemasonry, exhibit a “petty,” “fanatic national hatred.”33 Both the concept and the idea of nationalism are French in origin, the school director Reinhard Michel wrote in his apprentice work for the Apollo Lodge on the subject of “Nationality and Humanity” in 1904.34 Only German Freemasons, he insisted, have retained “the belief in mankind.” The rupture between German and French lodges that arose during the War of 1870 was profound and proved difficult to mend after the war. This problem was exacerbated by the moral bitterness about the respective enemy’s behavior during the war. Fourteen German Freemasons belonging to French lodges were immediately excluded from participation in 1870. The Page 257 →Grand Orient also closed down the Germanspeaking Concordia Lodge in Paris.35 In June 1871, the Reich’s chancellor in Berlin issued a decree ordering the eight Masonic lodges in Alsace-Lorraine affiliated with the Grand Orient to join a grand lodge in Germany. The lodges in Alsace-Lorraine dissolved, and their members joined French lodges in Belfort and Nancy. Newly arrived German Freemasons established their own lodges in Alsace-Lorraine. The first of these was the Zum Tempel des Friedens Lodge in Metz in 1871, which French Freemasons avoided. Two lodges were then established in Strasbourg, along with one in Mulhouse and one in Colmar. Around 1900, these lodges had a total of five hundred members, approximately half of what the membership had been in French lodges in AlsaceLorraine before 1870.36 In 1872, French Freemasons from the lost provinces established the nationalist Alsace-Lorraine Lodge in Paris, which consistently agitated within the Grand Orient against a rapprochement with German Freemasons. In 1889, the grand master of the Alsace-Lorraine Lodge proudly announced that under the leadership of his lodge numerous patriotic associations had been founded. The establishment of shooting clubs and gymnastics clubs can be traced back to this lodge, and the leaders of these clubs were frequently Freemasons. Many French lodge brothers also participated in the Patriotic League, which was founded in 1882. The first two presidents of the Patriotic League, Henri Martin and Anatole de la Forge, were well-known Freemasons. At every lodge banquet at the Grand Orient, honorary salvos were fired for the lodge brothers in Alsace-Lorraine, and toasts were made for a speedy reunification with the lost provinces.37 In 1885, a lodge speaker in Reims, to cite but one example, argued that “no colonial empire is worth that part of the French body that has been cut out by the Teutons.”38 These tensions also help to explain the ultimate failure of all attempts by so-called Latin Freemasonry (in particular in France, Belgium, Italy, and Switzerland) prior to 1914 to transform international Freemasonry into an effective organization promoting understanding and peace among nations. The hostility between German and French lodges blatantly contradicted the idea of a universal Freemasonry, and there were numerous attempts to initiate a rapprochement. Freemasonry was after all one of the earliest nongovernmental organizations with a transnational scope. From the eighteenth century onward, traveling Freemasons visited lodges in other countries as a matter of course, thus gaining access and insight into the social life of foreign towns and cities. Masonic lodges also provided a Page 258 →forum for international communication through correspondence and the exchange of representatives. There was a hiatus in these important interactions between French and German Freemasons in the years after the War of 1870–71, at a time when organizations within the labor movement, and later the peace movement, began to establish international networks.39 The break between German and French lodges was so all-

encompassing that it was not until 1895 that a German Freemason was allowed to visit a Paris lodge again, and then only with great difficulty.40 Before that time, German requests were routinely rejected.41 It was only after 1900, when right-wing political parties increasingly monopolized the issue of nationalism in France, that French Freemasons began to seek a rapprochement with their German lodge brothers.42 Around the turn of the twentieth century, hardly any official contacts existed between the grand lodges in France and Germany. International Masonic congresses resumed in 1900. However, these initially took place without German participation. In 1904, a resolution calling for reconciliation between French and German Freemasons was passed at a congress in Brussels. Professor Heinrich Kraft, a radiologist with left-liberal political leanings and the grand master of the newly founded An Erwins Dom Lodge in Strasbourg, was one of the first Germans to participate in such a congress and an enthusiastic advocate of rapprochement. Kraft, a German-speaking Alsatian, had proposed the Brussels resolution himself, thereby setting in motion the process of rapprochement.43 German lodges located near the French border, in Baden as well as Alsace-Lorraine, had a great interest in a reconciliation of the two national lodge systems. Intimate contacts had existed in the border region before 1870–71. In both spatial and ideological terms, Masonic lodges in southwest Germany were not much closer to the grand lodges in Berlin than they were to the Grand Orient in Paris. Before 1907, however, the policy of rapprochement remained purely informal. At least on the German side, it was pursued solely by individual lodge members who had little political influence. The mistrust that many conservative Freemasons in Prussia harbored against a liaison with the Grand Orient was also fueled by French Freemasons’ hope that an understanding among nations would lead to a unified democratic Europe under French leadership, which would ultimately compel Germany to return the conquered provinces to France.44 Nevertheless, it would be mistaken to attribute the difficult relations between French and German lodges solely to a nationalism parading in universalist garb. Many conservative Freemasons also feared that a rapprochement with republican Page 259 →Freemasons in France would strengthen the left-liberal wing of Freemasonry in Germany. Thus the issue of closer contact with French lodges—like the issue of admitting Jews—was also influenced by domestic political disputes. In addition, the Grand Orient was influenced by French positivism and laicism. In the eyes of German Freemasons as well as those of their American and British brothers, the Grand Orient lacked a “moral-religious” foundation. When in 1877 the Grand Orient deleted from its statutes the religious formula referring to a belief in a “Grand Architect of the Universe,” English-speaking lodges broke off all contact. This resulted in a division of the lodge world into a politically radical, laicist Freemasonry in Catholic countries and an ostensibly apolitical, religiously tinged Freemasonry in Protestant countries. Despite all outward commonalities, this remained a decisive difference between German and French lodges. German Freemasonry, however, was unique in that it belonged to both Masonic worlds. Lodges in the Catholic territories in Germany, in particular in the southwest, were no less anti-Catholic and radically liberal than Latin lodges. Prussian Freemasons opposed to a Franco-German rapprochement thus warned in particular about the laicism and positivism of French Freemasonry, contemporary tendencies that they fought in Germany as well. It only exacerbated the situation when the Grand Orient refused even after the fact to condemn the manifesto issued by Parisian lodges against the Prussian royal family. The special importance that lodges in Germany attached to Freemasonry’s religious foundations is also evident in the full recognition that grand lodges in Germany granted in 1907 (despite political misgivings) to the Grand Lodge de France, which had been founded in 1879 and pursued a more moderate course in religious issues than the Grand Orient de France. In 1907 and 1908, representatives of the Grand Lodge de France and the Prussian grand lodges visited each other in Paris and Berlin. Newspapers in both countries hailed this as indicative of a more general trend toward Franco-German rapprochement. After all, a significant number of the political elite in both countries were Freemasons—although not nearly as many as the general public believed.45 The fact that the rapprochement between French and German Freemasons had political ramifications is evident in the correspondence in April 1908 between Prince von BГјlow, the German Reichskanzler, and Prince Friedrich Leopold, the protector of German Freemasonry. The policy of the conservative Prussian grand lodges was granted

official Page 260 →approval here: partial reconciliation between the lodges of the two countries without greater acceptance of the republican and laicist program of the Grand Orient.46 As a result, a rapprochement between French and German Freemasons remained controversial within German lodges. Every move toward rapprochement was regarded as a political triumph for liberal lodge brothers.47 When the German-speaking Goethe Lodge was opened in Paris in December 1906, Heinrich Kraft optimistically invoked in his inaugural address “the imminent union of these two great nations in true human love.” The Goethe Lodge quickly attracted the attention of Dreyfus opponents, anti-Semites, and nationalists in France, in part because, as the Revue MaГ§onnique noted, the lodge’s membership was composed primarily of Hungarian and Romanian Jews, who thus belonged to the Austro-Hungarian lodges; consequently, the Revue concluded, this could not be regarded as a rapprochement between the German and French grand lodges.48 Nevertheless, we should not underestimate the symbolic significance of the finale at the opening ceremony of the Goethe Lodge, at which the elected grand master of the Goethe Lodge drew together the hands of the grand masters of the Grand Lodge de France and the Prus-sian Royal York Grand Lodge. Two years later, a partial reconciliation with the Grand Orient de France followed, only a year after the Grand Orient stopped publishing in its yearbook the “black page” containing the names of former French lodges in Alsace-Lorraine, as it had done every year since 1871. It is not necessary in this context to examine in detail the complicated history of lodge diplomacy leading to the formal mutual recognition of German and French lodges, a history replete with a grotesquely exaggerated sense of self-importance. It suffices to note that the moderate liberal wing of German Freemasonry was victorious here despite the resistance of the three grand lodges in Prussia.49 Depending on their political beliefs, members of the public regarded this mutual recognition either as an important step in the rapprochement of the two countries or as yet more evidence of a Jewish-Masonic world conspiracy.50 Regular meetings between individual lodges in France and Germany also became an established institution. The origins of such meetings can be traced back to the early nineteenth-century tradition of Masonic festivals for universal brotherhood held in southwest Germany. Pacifist Freemasons from other countries took part in these meetings as well. The first large-scale meeting of this kind (“For World Peace and International Brotherhood”)51Page 261 → was held in Alsace near Colmar in 1907, not far from the Franco-German border. Similar meetings followed in Basel and Baden-Baden. However, in 1911, influenced by the Moroccan crisis and public opinion, French Freemasons refused to allow three hundred German lodge brethren, who had traveled to Paris explicitly for this purpose, to attend a meeting at the Grand Orient. For many conservative Freemasons in Germany, this refusal was a warning to those “exaggerated dreamers who inhabit utopias” and who as a result have forgotten their “sense of German nationality.”52 The Paris meeting, like those in Luxembourg in 1912 and in The Hague in 1913, included an extensive international attendance, at least from Latin lodges. The next meeting, which was scheduled to take place in Frankfurt in 1914, had to be cancelled because of the outbreak of the First World War. Like the international peace movement in general, the pacifist and internationally oriented wing of European Freemasonry was able to exercise little influence on political decision making in France or in Germany—or even within Masonic lodges in both countries.53 Well-known representatives of the Deutsche Friedensgesellschaft (German Peace Society), established in 1892, such as Ludwig Bangel in Frankfurt (deputy master of the Zur aufgehenden MorgenrГ¶the Lodge) or Alfred Fried (a member of the Sokrates Lodge in Vienna) represented only the extreme left-liberal margins of German-speaking Freemasonry. Attempts by Fried and other peace activists to gain influence within the lodges ultimately failed. The International Bureau of Masonic Relations, established in NeuchГўtel in 1903 with the goal of uniting international Freemasonry, led only a shadowy existence. It united the politically radical, secular lodges in France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Hungary, and Switzerland. The grand master of the Swiss lodges, Quartier-la-Tente, was director of the bureau. The English-speaking lodge world, which had a much larger membership, avoided enterprises of this kind. In Germany, only the five independent lodges (in particular, those in Leipzig) and the Grand Lodges of Frankfurt and Bayreuth (i.e., the left-liberal wing of German Masonry) took

part in the bureau’s activities. Not surprisingly the bureau did not survive the First World War.54 The actual leadership of Masonic lodges in France and Germany participated only hesitantly in pacifist activities, in Paris more readily than in Berlin. They regarded themselves as political guardians of their respective nations and as the true champions of the Masonic idea of humanity.55 Page 262 →As one German lodge brother complained in 1914, German Freemasons were rarely able to convince their French lodge brothers “that we Germans do not always march in slow goose-step under police supervision or that something along the lines of voting rights exists for the Reichstag.”56 Conversely, French Freemasons were unable to assuage their German brothers’ reservations about the Grand Orient’s “socialist” and “chauvinistic” tendencies, which they believed were fostered in the name of pacifism. The ambitious plans once associated with a rapprochement between German and French lodges proved impossible to realize.57 This was true as well of the rapprochement between the German and English grand lodges before 1914. Prior to 1914, Freemasonry did not exist as a uniform international organization, despite or rather because of the fact that lodges in individual countries clung to their universalist pretensions.

“Volkstum” and “Humanity” before 1914 Despite their repudiation of French lodges, most German Freemasons continued to adhere to their universalist principles, regarding themselves as the “legitimate heirs of the cultural tasks and objectives of the Enlightenment.”58 The Freemason, one German lodge brother argued, stands “above political parties of the day; he works for all ages and for all peoples; he is a cosmopolite. His goal is mankind. This lies not behind us but before us and will be realized slowly and gradually through the steady progress of history.”59 Moreover, Freemasons believed that the political and economic Europeanization of the world beginning in the 1880s was a confirmation of their moral universalism. Institutions such as the Red Cross, the Universal Postal Union, and the World Fair were regarded as cosmopolitan and “ultimately authentic Masonic tendencies as well.”60 Cosmopolitanism now appeared to be “a fundamental feature of the age,”61 the “age of humanity striding forward to victory.”62 The citizen of this new age, another Freemason argued, “is not just a citizen of a state but also a citizen of the world; he is aware not only of the rights and duties of his particular nation but also of the rights and duties of world citizenry, which unites the citizens of all nations into a peaceful and lively community on one ground and soil without robbing them of their particularities and peculiarities.”63 At least the moderate liberal wing of German Freemasonry believed that universalism and nationalism could be connected in a politically Page 263 →meaningful way. The most important debates within German lodges prior to 1914 revolved around this issue. German Freemasons were particularly concerned with distinguishing their own moral notions associated with cosmopolitanism from the ideological internationalism of the labor movement. One Freemason argued, “It is possible and indeed essential to be a world citizen without being international.” This was the general position of Freemasons in Germany prior to 1914.64 Nevertheless, the retention of this cosmopolitan identity remained controversial both inside and outside German lodges. Around the turn of the twentieth century, a new word for mankind, Menschentum (instead of Menschheit or HumanitГ¤t), gained currency, which formed a semantic parallel to the concept of Volkstum (for nationality, instead of the term NationalitГ¤t). In this process, the concept of HumanitГ¤t was denounced as “sentimental humanitarianism,” “pseudo-humanity,” or “humanitarian fraud.”65 This redefinition was fueled by several factors: the nationalism of the radical right in the 1890s, the revival of confessionalism, and the popularization of science. As had been the case in the 1850s and 1860s, the political critique of “humanity” as an outmoded idea found an easy target in Masonic lodges. Still, Freemasons continued to adhere to their humanist discourse, although not without modifications. In 1895, one Freemason in Breslau rejected Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and its ridicule of the Masonic concepts of progress and humanity, insisting that the current social crisis could be resolved only through moral improvement.66 Two years later, another Freemason, drawing upon Lessing’s Ernst und Falk, argued “that everyone who is called to assist in the development of culture must seek to prepare the way for this idea of elevating mankind to the heights of ideal Bildung, where everyone is good and does good, so that individual

good deeds are no longer required because each person carries his own legislator and judge in his head and his heart and understands how to master himself without external compulsion.”67 “The essence of Freemasonry is nothing other than the essence of mankind itself,” the renowned Handbuch der Freimaurerei (Handbook of Freemasonry) claimed in 1900.68 “According to Freemasonry’s essence and purpose, the Mason must recognize every person as a human being, regardless of his race or heritage, regardless of his rank or status, and regardless of his religion. In order to connect its members as brothers of the human race and bind them together in human love, freedom, and concord, Freemasonry excludes from its lodges all religious and political conflict.” The article then pronounced the Masonic Page 264 →credo: “Make man human! Freemasonry should serve the humanization of man through the improvement of his aptitudes and the development of true humanity.”69 “The humanization of man” and thus of society, the nation, and ultimately mankind had been the goal of Freemasonry since the 1840s. At least superficially, nothing had changed in this respect. After 1900, brothers at the Minerva Lodge in Leipzig were still required during their promotions to write about Freemasonry’s concept of humanity. The majority of their responses emphasized the fundamental dimension of humanity ostensibly located beyond social, confessional, and religions barriers and portrayed Masonic lodges as social spaces of a “better mankind.” Precisely the ritualization of these answers suggests a vigorous retention of Freemasonry’s humanist identity despite opposing tendencies during the final third of the nineteenth century, such as the politicization of society, the revival of confessional religions, and the spread of science throughout society.70 The Catholic critique of Freemasonry’s concept of humanity was directed in particular at its undifferentiated universal claims, which were accused of being indifferent not only to religion, but to the nation as well.71 Catholics thereby leveled the same accusations at Freemasonry that Freemasons had raised against the Catholic Church in the 1860s, that it was not only an “enemy of humanity” but also a cosmopolitan power that placed itself above national allegiances. Lodge brothers were baffled by the rebuke that the Masonic idea of a brotherhood of man was too vague and that Freemasons were indifferent about their fatherland. “Do you really believe that we are so foolish,” a Freemason from Silesia asked at a birthday celebration for the kaiser in 1895, “that we will begin by loving the Hottentots? That we will put the Douala, Africa’s Swahili, the Papua in Kaiser-Wilhelmsland, the redskins of North America before our German brothers?”72 For Freemasons, men were not equal; they differed depending on their stage of civilization. Civilized individuals and civilized nations were the judges who determined the degree of humanity that others had attained. “You will not place a Xhosa negro on the same level as a true Christian, nor indeed on the level of a Chinese or a Mohammedan Arab, although the religions of the latter two do contain noble moments of human morality,” one liberal Freemason argued in 1902. “Humanity presents itself to us in different shapes and forms in mankind, and in these we can detect a development of phases from the lowly to the elevated. There is not a single humanity, but different forms of it.”73 Freemasons did not doubt that the “charming belief in the brotherhoodPage 265 → of peoples” should be retained, but they insisted that this was limited “at least initially to cultured peoples.”74 Who was civilized and thus truly human, and who was not? Which nations were truly civilized, and which were not? The answers to these questions always depended on the moral criteria employed. For this reason, the imperative to civilize offered a gateway not only for cultural anti-Semitism, but also for racism in general. In both cases, assimilation was simultaneously demanded and abhorred, as is evident in the repudiation of assimilated Jews or Africans, so-called negroes in pants (Hosenneger). Both cultural anti-Semitism and colonial racism profited from the tendency to create hierarchies within humanist semantics, a tendency that was by no means peculiar to German political discourse.75 In the 1890s, a number of conservative Freemasons adopted arguments against “sentimental humanitarianism” and called for an “up-to-date” conception of Freemasonry, by which they meant a new conception of mankind as well. In 1900, August Wolfstieg, the Berlin director of the library at the Chamber of Deputies and a prolific Masonic author, published an article in the Preussische JahrbГјcher that initiated a heated debate between conservative and liberal Freemasons.76 Wolfstieg argued that it could not possibly be the

intention or purpose of Freemasonry to realize “an absurd idea like the brotherhood of man”—a claim that was certain to provoke his liberal lodge brothers. According to Wolfstieg, the task of Freemasonry was not to establish a brotherhood, but to educate humanity.77 “One sees everywhere,” he argued, “that those differences that are produced by the fortuitousness of birth, Bildung, and law, but that are practically impossible to erase in humanity do damage to men in a number of ways, the most serious of which is our tendency to see in our fellow man only the prince or the worker, the negro or the German, the Christian or the non-Christian, the educated or the noneducated, and to completely forget the man beyond this.” Wolfstieg insisted on the contrary that the “education of the human race,” which made individuals a part of human society and educated them as individuals, was the most urgent task of Freemasonry and ultimately represented the true progress of humanity. He insisted, however, that only secular Protestantism, and not Judaism, Catholicism, or Monism, would lead to the perfection of mankind.78 On the surface, Wolfstieg’s polemic was aimed at the Catholic and conservative identification of Masonic lodges with a “shallow rage for enlightenment.” However, Wolfstieg also sought to define a new conception of humanity, one that would, for example, allow for the exclusion of Jews from Masonic lodges and for a revival of Protestant religiosity within Page 266 →“Germanic lodges” (i.e., within German and Anglophone Freemasonry) in opposition to secular Latin Freemasonry.79 The ensuing debate not only focused on Wolfstieg’s veiled anti-Semitism but also sought to redefine the relation between individual, nation, and humanity. In this context, the discourse about the moral crisis of civil society and the disappearance of “mankind” prior to 1914 proved to have a double-edged political nature: Appeals to the “quality” of individual men, to their virtue and morality were articulated here through visions of morally purifying both the nation and humanity. This became clear a decade later in another article by Wolfstieg entitled “Personality and Universalism.”80 In this article, the political implications of Masonic humanitarianism became evident in Wolfstieg’s emphasis on moral distinction. Wolfstieg insisted that the improvement of the self and of the nation were but two sides of the same coin. “The nation treads along the same path as the individual,” he argued, referring to Friedrich Meinecke’s book Cosmopolitanism and the National State.81 Wolfstieg criticized attempts to “humanize the personality ideal, to see in it only the brotherhood of nations and individual men,” insisting that it could not be the goal of Freemasonry “to practice humanity toward all men, to secure concord and freedom among nations, and to be tolerant to the religious opinions of individuals and religious confessions.” The central issue, Wolfstieg argued, was not the brotherhood but “the ideal of perfected mankind.” Later in the article, he stated: “Life is a battle, and moral values certainly emerge only through the victory, the assertion of great personalities and culture-bearing nations. Whatever provides them with serious opposition along this path must be forced out of the way or knocked down. For the real value of a man and of a people lies not in the objective recognition of universal life rules and moral laws, nor in the considerate treatment of others.”82 To be sure, Wolfstieg continued to adhere to the idea of improving the self, the nation, and humanity. He emphasized that this battle of individuals and nations only became balanced through the ideal of humanity. Nevertheless, this definition of Freemasonry spoke a new, aggressive language. “Humanity as an element of education carries a sword. It begins fighting in one’s own breast and ends perhaps by giving one’s dear brother a moral ear-boxing.”83 A year later, another conservative Freemason argued: “The nation can be elevated only through the perfection of individual personality and the accomplishments arising from this. Humanity as a whole will then be promoted through the interaction of peoples advanced in Bildung Page 267 →and morality.”84 The boundary between these conservative positions within Masonic lodges and a vГ¶lkisch nationalism remained fluid. With increasing frequency in the years prior to 1914, conservative lodge brothers identified a “racial” dualism between “Latin” and “Germanic” Freemasonry, the latter of which (still) included English and American brothers.85 A rapprochement between the two camps seemed to be impossible. In an article published in 1912 entitled “Deutsches Logentum und weltbГјrgerliche Freimaurerei” (The German Lodge World and Cosmopolitan Freemasonry), which explicitly addressed only “German-thinking German brothers, ” Otto Dreyer articulated this extreme position in the German lodges.86 According to Dreyer, true humanity,

the “highest development of mankind,” can be attained only in a unification of the “Germanic” and the “Christian” essence.87 The idea of the brotherhood of man, he argued, is a dream that “AngloSaxon” Freemasonry had “sensibly” rejected, refusing to admit blacks to the lodges and rejecting the laicism of French Freemasonry.88 The idea of perpetual peace, Dreyer continued, would “lead to psychic and physical fatigue and thus to the degeneration of humanity.”89 This mixture of nationalist Protestantism and racial Darwinism was by no means original and can be found in more eloquent form in the writings of Chamberlain, de Lagarde, ClaГџ, and other vГ¶lkisch authors. Dreyer was simply one of the first Freemasons who openly attempted to introduce modern “scientific” racism into the Masonic credo and to abandon the liberal nationalism still prevalent in the lodges. The VГ¶lkerschlachtdenkmal (Battle of the Nations Monument) in Leipzig represents a monumental expression of this search for a new understanding of nationalism and universalism within Masonic lodges in Germany prior to 1914. The memorial was built between 1893 and 1913 by the privately established Patriotenbund (Brotherhood of Patriots), whose core members were Freemasons from the Apollo Lodge. Freemasons made up most of the Patriotenbund’s executive committee (six of nine members) and more than a quarter of the general committee (23 of 84 members). Freemasons also initiated the memorial project itself. Many of them belonged as well to other associations and groups that financed the memorial.90 The construction of the VГ¶lkerschlachtdenkmal—the largest war memorial in Europe before 1914—is a demonstration of the social power that Masonic lodges continued to exercise in local society. The memorial project appears paradoxical in two respects. In the first place, the enterprise, which was clearly aimed at a broad public, seemed to Page 268 →contradict the Masonic idea of working on one’s self within the moral sanctuary of the lodge enveloped by the Masonic secret. Freemasons in the Patriotenbund justified this kind of “outside” work, which was controversial within the lodges, by appealing to the history of the Napoleonic Wars. While the lodges themselves had not served as sites of organized resistance against French occupation, Freemasons such as BlГјcher, Fichte, Hardenberg, RГјckert, Scharnhorst, and Schenkendorf had been important participants in the “national uprising” against Napoleon. When approximately six hundred lodge brothers, including the grand master of all German grand lodges, met in Leipzig on 18 October 1913 to celebrate the inauguration of the VГ¶lkerschlachtdenkmal, Franz KieГџling, the conservative grand master of the Apollo Lodge, told them: “Yes, the idealists of Masonic lodges, which cultivated warm-hearted intimacy, friendship, and moral freedom, were men of action in the realm of life. They became heroes who drew their national comrades along with them.” KieГџling maintained that the Masonic civilizing idea should again exert a moralizing influence on the nation, as it had done a century earlier, and that lodge brothers should Page 269 →again serve as a moral elite.91 Fig. 10. Monument of the Battle of the Nations in Leipzig, erected between 1898 and 1913. (Courtesy of the Deutsche BГјcherei, Leipzig.) Second, there was clear tension between the Masonic belief in a brotherhood of man and the construction of a war memorial. “Why do Freemasons celebrate a war?” KieГџling asked rhetorically and answered: “The war of 1813 was not merely a historical event like so many other battles. No, it was a moral deed. Yes, my brothers, it was not a war as monarchs know it; it was a crusade, a holy war. It was a war concerned with the most ideal, most sacred possessions of the nation. Every insightful person who is familiar with the history of our brotherhood can see this clearly: There is an intimate connection between the powers that were active in our people a hundred years ago and the spirit of Freemasonry.”92 The Patriotenbund—like the Tugendbund (Brotherhood of Virtue) of 1808, which was also initiated by Freemasons—had been established for the very same reason: as an alliance located outside of the lodges in the public sphere and fighting for the moral-political “improvement” of the nation. This did not, however, imply a straightforward renunciation of Freemasonry’s humanist aspirations. KieГџling continued: “We do not cultivate cosmopolitanism, but the idea of humanity in all its beauty, truth, and delicacy. This, however, in no way obstructs our sense of firm civic and national affiliation or our patriotism. Humanity is something completely different than internationality. Both Social Democrats and the universal church with its confessional hatred are international and thus threaten the continued existence of the Reich.”93

In 1913, other Freemasons also invoked the idea of a moral crisis affecting the German people prior to 1813, one that was similar to the crisis a century later and that had been overcome only through a “moral rebirth” of the sense of sacrifice and community.94 “A people united! Are we that? Dogmatism and confessionalism separate us and create unbridgeable chasms within our people. Are we a free people? A false craving for guardianship seeks to restrict all freedom, and freedom of belief and conscience exist in reality only on paper. Are we a moral and religious people? In order to be that, our spirit of truth, our spirit of community must be stronger and more powerful, while superficiality and lack of character, partisanship, and intolerance must diminish. In a word, the idea of humanity must have a greater effect on the moral depth of individual personality as well as on the harmonious education of the people as a whole.” Typical of Freemasons prior to 1914, the author combined here the belief in the “people” (das Volk) with the belief in “humanity.” It is the concept of humanity, he argued, “that gives the people its moral power and the authorities their Page 270 →philanthropic sense. It is the wall that protects against spiritual industrialism and life-killing materialism. Military power can be important to a people, but it is not everything. Only moral power arising from the idea of humanity provides the people with the proper support.”95 Freemasons were convinced that the VГ¶lkerschlachtdenkmal was not the expression of an exaggerated, warmongering nationalism. On the contrary, Julius Haarhaus, the grand master of the Balduin Lodge, insisted that it was a monument to “reawakened German idealism.” Alfred Fried hoped that it might even be a monument to peace.96 A brother from the Apollo Lodge argued, “The construction of this monument was a faithful reflection of German peace activities.”97 The monument, he continued, testifies to the “unleashing of the inner spiritual-moral power of our people” and signifies “a revitalization of German idealism, of Bildung and humanity.”98 In this sense, he argued, the VГ¶lkerschlachtdenkmal serves the cause of peace between nations. Another Freemason argued: “It may appear paradoxical to some that a monument of victory celebrating the act of liberation a hundred years ago should serve the idea of peace.”99 He insisted, however, that the memorial stood in clear contrast to the older Hermann Monument, where a “joyous, cheery attitude” prevailed. “The melancholic VГ¶lkerschlachtdenkmal emphasizes very different traits. In every individual detail, it exhibits a profound moral earnestness fully conscious of its great responsibility.” This is vividly articulated, he argued, in the memorial’s crypt, where mourning warriors and masks of fate bear witness to the death throes of the wounded. The granite columns of the enormous windows and the “dehumanized, horrifying faces” of the Furies on the facade relief by Christian Behrens illustrate the atrocities of war. “If you searched throughout the entire world for a victory memorial, in which the consequences of war are dealt with in such an emphatic and earnest way, you could not find it.”100 In France, the VГ¶lkerschlachtdenkmal had been criticized as an example of “la maniГЁre germanique,” as a monument of a bellicose and barbarian nation (one French observer argued that the masks of Fate and the figures of the guards came “straight from the Stone Age”). This criticism might be justified aesthetically; politically, however, it misconstrued the intended meaning of the memorial.101 A comparison of the iconography of European war memorials before 1914 reveals that the VГ¶lkerschlachtdenkmal is the only one to incorporate representations of violent death.102 This also distinguishes the VГ¶lkerschlachtdenkmal from the other national memorials in Germany. It lacks the gesture of national triumph evident in the Hermann Monument in the Page 271 →Teutoburger Forest and the Germania Monument in Niederwald on the Rhine, as well as the Wilhelminian attitude of the Siegesallee in Berlin. The VГ¶lkerschlachtdenkmal is an exception within imperial Germany’s “rage for memorials”: a war memorial erected by citizens, which invokes a war of the people and the sovereignty of the people as way of supporting the BГјrgertum’s claim to reform German society in moral terms. Fig. 11. Monument of the Battle of the Nations. (Crypt with the masks of Fate by Franz Metzner. Courtesy of the Deutsche BГјcherei, Leipzig.) This was evident as well in the official inaugural address of the memorial, held by Clemens Thieme, the founder and spiritus rector of the Patriotenbund, on 18 October 1913. The kaiser had refused to speak himself about a memorial that celebrated the German people and not the monarch. Wilhelm II had also never made a secret of his aversion to Freemasonry. Thieme demonstratively omitted addressing the princes in attendance, referring simply

to “Your Royal Highness, German brothers, Page 272 →German sisters” (i.e., kaiser and his people). This evocation of the semantics of brotherhood was not only a reference to the memorial’s Masonic connections (which included two sphinxes located at the base of the staircase). Thieme also invoked this semantic in a national-democratic sense, implicitly criticizing the phenomenon of “Wilhelminism,” the cult surrounding the Kaiser. Thieme’s address closed with a call for Germans to become “a people of brothers” again, consciously echoing the words of the rebellious Swiss citizens in Schiller’s William Tell. This call remained politically restrained: It was not yet directed in an aggressive manner at the outside world but was supposed to promote moral integration domestically.103 In its national pathos of sacrifice and suffering, the VГ¶lkerschlachtdenkmal constituted a visible expression of the BГјrgertum’s desire to reunite the Bildung of the individual with the Bildung of the nation as a way of resolving the moral crises of the Wilhelminian era. The historical appeal to the age of national decline prior to the Napoleonic occupation functioned as a warning sign for the crises of Wilhelminian society a century later. The monument and the memorial celebration of 1913 testify not to a glorification of war but to an indefinite expectation of war that combined the fear of war with an eschatological hope of a moral “rebirth,” the release from one’s own doubts with a new “war of liberation.” It appeared that the crisis of the individual, of his “humanity”—one of the predominant issues of the BГјrgertum prior to 1914—could only be resolved through an invocation of the German Volk, an invocation formulated paradoxically in humanist terms. The Masonic adherence to universal humanist values, however partial and compromised it might have been, was not simply the isolated position of a lunatic fringe within German society. This is demonstrated by one of the most influential works of German historiography before the First World War, Friedrich Meinecke’s WeltbГјrgertum und Nationalstaat (Cosmopolitanism and the National State). In this book, Meinecke presented modern German history not only as a transition from universalism to the nation-state, but also (and inconsistently) as an incorporation of universalism into the nation-state.104 “For if the modern state is to remain capable of rejuvenating itself,” Meinecke argued, “it needs a source of life in the universal sphere and a constant justification before the bench of the highest human ideals.”105 A few years before the outbreak of the First World War, Meinecke reformulated the idea of expanding the Bildung of the self into the Bildung of the nation. “The nation drank the blood of free personalities, as it were, to attain personality itself.” The national state, accordingPage 273 → to Meinecke, is a “supraindividual personality,” and “self-improvement” is one of the signatures of civilized nations.106 Meinecke’s study was also an expression of the liberal moralpolitical vision of the Bildung of the self in the service of the nation and contributing to the development of a humanity united in the future.107 In his influential book, Meinecke invoked the typical connection between national and universal values endorsed by a significant segment of the German BГјrgertum prior to 1914. It is, therefore, an untenable oversimplification of nineteenth-century German nationalism to argue, as scholars frequently do today, that this new orientation toward the Volk implied an abandonment of the Enlightenment’s universalist perspective.108 The liberal camp within German nationalism prior to 1914 explicitly endorsed a connection between “nation” and “humanity,” a connection that was continually redefined and adapted. The BГјrger assembled in Masonic lodges used this connection to legitimate anew their moral-political claims to lead society, in particular in regard to their domestic opponents, for example, social democracy and political Catholicism.109 As Tom Nairn has pointed out, moral universalism or (to use a parallel concept) internationalism “was the reverse of the medal of nineteenth- and earlier twentieth-century nationalism.” The two existed “in a permanent, uneasy tension with one another, the Siamese twin brothers of a single world-historical process.”110 Nationalism backed by moral universalism, however, was always at risk of veering into a nationalist or racist justification for violent exclusion, even (indeed, especially) in the name of humanity.

Page 274 → Page 275 →

Epilogue: The War of World Citizens In the real world, however, we repeatedly see the proponent of the “ethics of conviction” suddenly turning into a chiliastic prophet. Those who have been preaching “love against force” one minute, for example, issue a call to force the next; they call for one last act of violence to end all violence. —Max Weber Nobody can be a citizen of the world as he is the citizen of his country. —Hannah Arendt Both German and French Freemasons initially regarded the First World War not as a repudiation but as a confirmation of their universalist identity. This changed, however, over the course of the war, as the traumatic rupture that the war represented undermined the belief in the idea of civilization, for the French and even more dramatically for the Germans. The connection between nationalist and humanist discourse typical of the nineteenth century lost dramatically in credibility. Between the First and the Second World Wars, a variety of political camps openly rejected this humanist identity and came to regard Freemasonry as the negative embodiment of it. The concluding chapter of this book focuses on these two related developments. As the ambivalence inherent in the moral-political identity of Freemasons became increasingly apparent, there was a gradual reevaluation of that identity within Masonic lodges, on the one hand, and a growing repudiation of it among the German public, on the other. Page 276 → After the outbreak of the First World War, German and French Freemasons sought to attribute a universalist mission to the war, as they had done during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870–71. The Grand Orient and the German grand lodges again broke off all contact immediately. The Goethe Lodge in Paris was banned. In 1914, French Freemasons regarded a victory for their nation as part of their own humanist mission, as they had in 1870–71. For them, it was again a war of civilization against barbarism, although this time they increasingly regarded Germany as the enemy of humanity not only on the basis of political rule but also on the basis of “race.” The German enemy was “ethnicized,” as the opposition of French civilization to German cultural barbarism became an idГ©e fixe of French nationalism.1 This mixture of universalist and nationalist discourse during the First World War, however, was by no means specific to French nationalism. It was evident on the German side as well. This was true not only in Masonic lodges, where one might have expected such a connection. In 1914, for example, the well-known German-Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen insisted, “Germany is and remains a direct descendant of the eighteenth century and its cosmopolitan humanity.” From this, Cohen derived Germany’s position as a leader of “world history in the ethical sense.”2 One year later, Leopold von Wiese argued that it was the German nation that was cosmopolitan, while the enemy preached national egotism and xenophobia. Nationalism, von Wiese continued, had moral value only when it referred to something higher than itself, that is, to the idea of humanity. “The great responsibility of German man in the future,” he argued, will be “to reconcile nationalism and cosmopolitanism.”3 In a similar vein, the liberal political economist Johannes Plenge, who coined the slogan “the ideas of 1914,” continued to argue in 1916 that these ideas would “determine the life goals of humanity.”4 Finally, Friedrich Meinecke claimed that the world war would transform the Germans into a true “Weltvolk,” which, in contrast to England, would not become mired in egoistic nationality but would unite the former with humanity.5 Similarly one lodge speaker asserted in September 1914 that the German nation had the mission of leading the world to the goal of humanity. “Only when the world is reborn in the German spirit will that great day dawn

when the nations of the world offer each other their hand in brotherhood for cosmopolitanism and perpetual peace.”6 According to another German Freemason, the war constituted a moral rebirth, as the German nation had “rediscovered its ancient moral traditions and comprehended Page 277 →that it must bring a moral culture to humanity.”7 At the beginning of the war, culture and civilization were not yet understood as oppositional terms. For example, the left-liberal Freemason Ludwig MГјffelmann wrote after the outbreak of the war that the German people “has been called to preserve civilization, to defend all great accomplishments of an ethical and moral nature, and to be a pioneer for mankind’s greatest possessions: truth, justice, and freedom.” He concluded, “The justice of our cause is guaranteed by our position as the bearers of civilizational thought.”8 At least until 1916, German Freemasons believed that the war had actually confirmed their concepts of virtue and Bildung, culture and civilization, humanity and brotherhood. MГјffelmann, for example, argued: “What we have come to embody in these days is nothing other than the spirit of brotherhood in action. Today there are no longer any barriers that separate us from one another. Through thick and thin we are all equal, men who stand beside one another for lofty ideals, brothers who feel themselves carried by a single conviction!”9 According to MГјffelmann, everything that had separated the nation prior to 1914 now seemed to have been overcome, at least domestically, and to accord with the Masonic utopia of a world without social, confessional, or political boundaries. Liberal Freemasons now demanded the removal of the remaining barriers excluding Jews and were even able to partially realize these demands.10 There is evidence that many of the restrictions regarding Jewish Freemasons were abolished before 1916, when the JudenzГ¤hlung, the survey conducted by the War Ministry on Jewish participation in military service on the front, triggered a sudden change of mood. In Breslau, where seemingly irreconcilable differences had existed between conservative and liberal lodges (Jewish Masons made up a large portion of the latter’s membership), mutual lodge visits were initiated after the outbreak of the war. In November 1914, more than two-thirds of the membership of the conservative Zepter Lodge voted in favor of social contact with “Jewish” lodges, a practice that was abandoned only in 1918 following the German defeat.11 In 1914, the Jewish Freemason Alphonse Levy described his emotions after the outbreak of war in a poem. Encircled by deceit, mendacity, and guile, And threatened from all sides, Jews and Christians stand together united as brothers To fight as men for the fatherland.12 Page 278 → Elsewhere Levy wrote, “Before the majesty of the mass grave, the value difference of individuals pales; torrents of heroes’ blood cement together prejudices that had earlier opposed one another.” Against what he called the French invention of “German militarism,” which sought to divert attention away from French chauvinism, Levy appealed to Germany’s cosmopolitan tradition with a citation from the 1848 revolutionary Johannes Scherr, evoking the continuity of the humanist identity of the German nation: “Germans are the most human men; we alone know and value human freedom.”13 Even at the front German Freemasons, who now met in “field lodges” in the confiscated buildings of their French brethren, continued to believe that their basic humanist ideas were confirmed by the war. In one such field lodge in St. Quentin, for example, the well-known left-liberal Wilhelm Ohr claimed that the universal values of Freemasonry would not be abandoned as a result of the war but would be “infinitely deepened and transfigured.” The Masonic ideal of brotherly love, Ohr argued, does not exclude all hatred; rather it permits a “loving hatred,” which ultimately lies in the interest of the enemy as well. After the war, he continued, “a new humanity must be constituted,” and the enemies of the German people would also benefit from being defeated and conquered, “for the German notion—the notion of world leadership according to moral ideas—will establish the rule of that which has bound together the best of all nations in all ages in the name of humanity.”14

In April 1916, the senior military physician and grand master of a field lodge in Kovno argued that Germans must assume the role of “spiritually elevating the peoples of the world.” The war, he continued, was a new war of reformation, in which darkness battles light, in which “the hordes from around the world” battle enlightened mankind.15 For German Freemasons, nothing seemed more absurd than accusations that they themselves were the barbarians. One Jewish physician, who was member of the Hermann Lodge in Breslau, wrote in a letter that he was convinced that his work in a field hospital on the Eastern front would demonstrate to the enemy how a “German barbarian assists his mortally wounded prisoners of war” and brings the light of Enlightenment to the melody of “Deutschland, Deutschland Гјber alles!” into their hearts.16 “It is claimed that Germany wanted war, that Prussian militarism had desired it for some time. It is said that German barbarism has once again committed murder and arson on other peoples to satisfy its own brutal egotism through robbery and conquest. It is claimed that the rest Page 279 →of mankind has for this reason risen up against this robber nation in order to annihilate it and eradicate it from the earth, so that all the rest of the peoples of the world can finally live in peace and quiet and create works of culture!”17 For many German lodge brothers, who were convinced that Germany was responsible for civilizing humanity, this description of Germany by its enemies, particularly in Masonic lodges, must have appeared grotesque. Hjalmar Schacht, the future president of the Reich’s bank, believed that Germans “had never harbored in their midst any kind of exaggerated nationalist emotions,” while the Entente powers pursued base, chauvinistic, and economic interests during the First World War.18 Another German Freemason could not imagine a “brotherhood with those who have debased themselves by fighting side by side with savages, half-savages, and criminals”—a reference to the French use of colonial troops.19 German Freemasons now began to abandon the idea of a common European civilization, an idea that had Page 280 →already proved tenuous in 1870–71. The longer the war lasted and the more Germany become politically isolated, the more openly German Masons expressed doubts about their humanist identity. Fig. 12. Members of the Field Lodge “Zum aufgehenden Licht an der Somme” in St. Quentin, France, 1916. (Courtesy of the Freimaurermuseum Bayreuth.) As one German Freemason wrote in 1915, the contrast between war and humanist ideals now sounded “like a cruel derision.”20 Indeed, the question arose whether there was anything at all shared by all men. Another Freemason argued in a lodge address in 1915 that it was understandable that “the notion of mankind has driven many sensitive souls insane.” He continued: “Those peoples of the world destined to be the carriers of culture and to cultivate and realize the ideals of mankind now battle one another to the point of extermination, and this flies in the face of all efforts to promote the development of mankind.”21 The author went on to criticize the moral hypocrisy of Germany’s enemies, in particular that of the English, who, he insisted, regard war merely as a profitable business. In Germany, he continued, the moral connection between individual, nation, and mankind had as well been reestablished during the war. Prior to 1914, it was frequently claimed that “we could not move forward with the principles of morality, because the ego had to come first. Today our people has rediscovered its old moral traditions and has understood that it must bring a moral culture to mankind. This, however, means nothing other than the renewal of the belief in mankind, initially restricted to the belief in one’s own people.”22 Over the course of the war, however, the terms volk and mankind came increasingly to be regarded as opposites, as did Kultur and civilization. Even the belief in progress and development, so typical of Masonic lodges prior to 1914, was called into question or limited to the moral development of the German Volk.23 The humanist identity of German lodges as a whole appeared doubtful, particularly given Germany’s looming defeat and the moral condemnation of the victors. The numerous addresses in German lodges in 1917 celebrating the two hundredth anniversary of European Freemasonry testify to this. One brother at the Apollo Lodge articulated his own self-doubts through a dreamlike image. The ground sways, on which the columns stand, Devised by lofty fraternal sense to erect the temple. Freezing icy storm winds blow And tear along splendid blossoms and tender fruits

The dream that our best men dreamed Dies beneath laurel and cypress trees. Page 281 →Once all mankind was to become A single herd upon this earth, And perpetual peace to be the seneschal Against war and the pains of war. Millions of fresh graves lament mankind On those days after the battle has raged . . . Once upon a time our brotherhood was Supposed to cover the entire globe like a chain. But all those yearnings have evaporated into air, And ship and wave are swallowed by the whirlpool’s abyss.24

In 1917, the cultural historian Ernst Schultze, another Leipzig Freemason, assumed a similarly desperate tone: “The idea of mankind cannot be eradicated—only a nation prepared to condemn itself to barbarism can abstain from it. How could the Germans—the people of poets and thinkers, who have prided themselves on the spiritual mastery of things for more than one hundred years—forget completely that the roots of our spirit also slope down into foreign soil?” Nevertheless, Schultze now saw the moral-political enthusiasm of the initial war years in a different light. “There was so much talk both by the enemy and by ourselves about the moral renewal the war would necessarily bring that this deceptive hope is still occasionally opposed to the ideal of peace.” Schultze insisted that the war had in fact “led to a moral degeneration . . . , which we can expect to continue among the civic population for many years after the peace settlement.” Only allegiance to the lodges’ humanist identity, he argued, could limit this moral coarsening and brutalization.25 The universalist moral justification of the war in the name of the German or, conversely, the French nation and the resulting intensification of national enmity contributed to a devaluation of universalist concepts such as humanity and civilization in both countries during and after the war.26 This was especially true in Germany, where the “brutalization” of society over the course of the war as well as the Entente’s war propaganda and the Treaty of Versailles led to a repudiation of the belief in a common European civilization and the values of Western political humanism.27 Entente war propaganda—including that of social scientists with their “scientific” demonization of the enemy28—depicted Germans increasingly as aberrations of modernity and “enemies of mankind” (Josiah Royce). The German public as well came to believe that Germany was fundamentally different than Western democracies. Concepts such as humanity and civilization Page 282 →and the ideas of liberalism and universalism were now said to be foreign to Germans, who, it was claimed, had always pursued a particularist volkisch social and political ideal. This ideological interpretation of the First World War, which drew on national stereotypes from the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, spawned the antithesis between “culture” and “civilization” and provided a new persuasiveness to the thesis of the German Sonderweg. Both the victors and the defeated attempted to use these rhetorical tropes to justify their own war efforts. German Masonic lodges thus found themselves in a paradoxical situation. While Freemasons in France and Germany had abandoned their humanist identity over the course of the war, the German public now more than ever regarded Masonic lodges precisely as the symbol of this political humanism and thus attacked them sharply as the secret bridgehead for the enemy within their own country. The lodges’ traditional cosmopolitan claim was now used against them: The myth of an international Masonic conspiracy was invoked to explain Germany’s military defeat. Especially after Italy’s entry into the war in 1915, Freemasonry had attracted the attention of the German public.29 Even before 1914, Italian lodges had made clear that they regarded the separation of Freemasonry and politics to be outdated. Beginning in August 1914, they issued public calls saturated with nationalist pathos urging Italian participation in the war against Germany and the Habsburg Empire. Initially the German public blamed the war only on the Masonic lodges of those nations opposed to the German Reich, exempting Germany Freemasonry from such criticism. However, this changed over the course of the First

World War, as the myth of a Jewish-Masonic world conspiracy—which ostensibly included German Freemasons—became increasingly popular among Catholic and right-wing circles.30 Older Catholic antiSemitism, which was obsessed with Masonry, played an extremely important role in this development. As in 1848–49 and in the Kulturkampf of the 1870s and 1880s, Freemasons and Jews were again regarded as the secret agents of the cosmopolitan bourgeoisie that wanted to do away with church and state in order to establish its own world domination. In 1915, an article entitled “Freemasonry and the World War” appeared in the Historisch-politische BlГ¤tter fГјr das katholische Deutschland (Historical-Political Newspaper for Catholic Germany). The article publicly accused Freemasonry, along with Judaism and international finance capital, of causing the decline of the German Reich. “The lodge is the true and most profound reason for this horrifying bloodbath,” the Page 283 →author wrote. “It is the instigator of the most terrible worldwide fire that mankind has ever seen. The lodge provoked war among nations because it believed that the time had come for it to play its double game and to inaugurate a new era devoid of thrones and altars.”31 Conservative and anti-Semitic pamphlets contributed to the further popularization of such myths.32 The German defeat in 1918 and the collapse of the old political order made these myths increasingly credible to a wide variety of political groups. After the war, Kaiser Wilhelm II wrote in his memoirs that an “international Grand Orient Lodge” had started the world war in order to destroy the Hohenzollern and Habsburg monarchies.33 While the well-known conservative publicist Dietrich von Oertzen had merely smiled in the 1890s at Catholic fantasies of a Jewish-Masonic world conspiracy, even politicians outside of the Catholic milieu now increasingly regarded Masonic lodges as the central enemy.34 Prince Otto zu Salm-Holstmar, for example, caused a sensation when he evoked this myth at an address in the Prussian Upper Chamber on 9 July 1918. Salm-Holstmar described the world war as the metaphysical battle between a Western “Jewish-democratic” worldview and a “German-aristocratic” one.35 “It is the nature of the Jewish race, which has spread across the entire world,” he argued, “that it increasingly loses its sense of home and fatherland—of course with some exceptions—and that it thus develops more sense for cosmopolitanism and the International.” In their “striving for world domination,” “far-sighted Jews, ” Salm-Holstmar continued, had found a useful instrument in Freemasonry, “where they play a leading role.” It is impossible, he conceded, to determine “the extent to which the aims of international Freemasonry coincide with the aims of the international Jewry.” Salm-Holstmar was certain, however, that the “Jewish-Masonic International” sought a universal “domination of large-scale capital” and a democracy under an Anglo-American diktat.36 Hermann Adolf Trenckmann, the mayor of Mulhouse and grand master of the local Masonic lodge, indignantly responded in the Upper Chamber that the prince’s remarks were groundless and resembled “Jesuit pamphlets,” in particular given the clear distinction between German Freemasonry and Latin Freemasonry.37 The journal of the “Centralverein deutscher StaatsbГјrger jГјdischen Glaubens” (Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith) pointed out that two-thirds of German Masonic lodges refused to admit Jews as members.38 These arguments, however, had little effect. The vГ¶lkisch camp had “discovered” Jews and Freemasons as political scapegoats for the world war. Hadn’t Masonic Page 284 →lodges themselves claimed to be a “moral International”? Hadn’t the humanist identity of the lodges proved to be a grievously flawed doctrine? “The experiences of the world war should have cured us completely of this childhood delusion of a вЂuniversal brotherhood of men,’” the anti-Semite Theodor Fritsch argued in support of Salm-Holstmar’s accusations about the lodges. “Others don’t want to avow brotherhood with us. They demand that we be excluded from humanity and struggle to destroy us, to eradicate us. Should we still continue to chase after them? Others think only of themselves and then proclaim their national selfishness to be sacred (sacro egoismo). We must learn from this!”39 To be sure, Jewish-Masonic conspiracy myths were popular not only in Germany, but in the Habsburg Empire and in the conservative-nationalist milieus in Russia and France as well. There is perhaps no other era that was so convinced of the machinations of secret powers. In 1919, Friedrich Wichtl, a member of the Austrian National Council, published a book entitled Weltmaurerei, Weltrevolution, Weltrepublik (World Masonry, World Revolution, World Republic), which subsequently served as a model for almost all anti-Masonic pamphlets of the

1920s and 1930s.40 Jewish-Masonic conspiracy myths were widely disseminated by intellectual desperados such as Gregor Schwartz-Bostunitsch, a Russian immigrant. As a traveling speaker throughout Germany, SchwartzBostunitsch popularized the political-pornographic obsessions he had acquired during the years of revolution and civil war in Russia.41 The Protocols of Zion also originated in Russia. Ludwig MГјller von Hausen, who translated the first German edition of the Protocols, supplemented them with his own anti-Masonic delusions.42 The Baltic German Alfred Rosenberg probably read the Protocols before emigrating from Russia in 1918. He, too, translated the Protocols, as well as another “classic” of Jewish-Masonic conspiracy theory written by the Frenchman Gougenot de Mousseaux.43 In his monthly journal Der Weltkampf, Rosenberg repeatedly invoked the Jewish-Masonic threat, referring in particular to the German foreign minister and Freemason Gustav Stresemann, whom Rosenberg regarded as its embodiment. Later, Rosenberg was primarily responsible for the fact that opposition to Freemasonry remained a permanent, if vacillating element of Nazi ideology. Rosenberg was surpassed in his tirades against Masonic lodges only by General Erich Ludendorff. “The secret of Freemasonry everywhere is the Jew,” Ludendorff wrote in a best-selling pamphlet entitled Vernichtung der Freimaurerei durch EnthГјllung ihrer Geheimnisse (Eradication of FreemasonryPage 285 → through the Revelation of Its Secrets).44 Ludendorff argued that Freemasons were “artificial” Jews. The striving for a “brotherhood of men,” for “humanity” and “human bliss” was, he insisted, identical with a “Judaization” of the peoples of the world and with establishing Jewish world domination. During the First World War, the concept of the bourgeois became tied to anti-Semitic stereotypes, which consolidated into a grotesquely distorted image of Freemasonry. This was not lost on Carl Schmitt, who himself later perpetuated the myth of a Jewish-Masonic conspiracy: “The history of this image of the bourgeois is just as important as the history of the bourgeoisie itself.”45 In the first half of the twentieth century, the terms bourgeois, cosmopolitan, and Jewish came to be regarded as synonyms that served as a kind of ideological burning glass even beyond extremist political parties. As Schmitt noted, “A common spiritual enemy can produce the most remarkable alliances; thus, for example, the Fascists’ battle against Freemasonry parallels remarkably the Bolshevists’ hatred of the Freemason, whom Trotzky [at the Fourth World Congress of the Third International in 1922] called вЂthe most perfidious deception of the working class by a radicalized bourgeoisie.’”46 However, during the postwar era, bad-mouthing Freemasonry was not limited to conservatives and anti-Semites, nor later to National Socialists and Communists, but also included liberals, Catholic centrists, and Social Democrats—the political pillars of the Weimar Republic. All political camps now regarded Freemasons as representatives of a civic humanism from a previous era, which they considered mendacious. An article by Arno Voigt in the left-liberal journal Die Hilfe provoked a heated response from lodge brothers, precisely because it stemmed from a milieu that was traditionally sympathetic to Masonic ideas.47 Freemasonry, according to Voigt, is “most certainly a harmless thing and not a cutthroat society, as the dull-witted Dr. Wichtl argues.” Nevertheless, Voigt sharply criticized Freemasonry’s social exclusivity and its exaggerated moral claims. These testified, Voigt argued, to a “fattening of the soul” within the German BГјrgertum, to a “nostalgic attachment to those older forms that gave rise to their bourgeois respectability.” The humanist morality of the lodges, he concluded, is implausible. “The ground upon which Freemasons develop their morality is the commercial world with its domains.” However, Voigt continued: “One does not become an ethicist simply by checking one’s utilitarianism at the cloakroom for several hours.”48 Hatred of the bourgeoisie, the belief that it had committed “spiritual Page 286 →treason” (Walter Rathenau) prior to 1914, was characteristic of the era between the two world wars.49 However, only at first glance did this hatred come from outside: the denunciation of the bourgeois often originated within the bourgeoisie itself. As FranГ§ois Furet has noted, “Hatred of the bourgeois was only in appearance hatred of the other: it was in fact self-hatred.”50 As in the nineteenth century, Masonic lodges again functioned as a convincing symbol for this hatred. There is hardly another civic (bourgeois) institution that represented more clearly the discrepancy between the lofty moral claims and the social exclusivity of civility (BГјrgerlichkeit), the desire to be equal and

the wish to elevate oneself above others. It is, therefore, by no means coincidental that Masonic lodges played a prominent role in two successful novels published between the First and Second World Wars, Heinrich Mann’s The Loyal Subject and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. In these novels, the Mann brothers presented two very different pictures of Freemasonry.51 Both novels claimed to be a “history of the soul” of the German BГјrgertum prior to 1914: the former was originally subtitled “History of the Public Soul under Wilhelm II”; the latter was a history of the predominant ideas of the nineteenth century, of collectivism and “ideological BГјrgerlichkeit,” embodied by the Jesuit Naphta and the Freemason Settembrini in The Magic Mountain as they wrestle for the soul of the novel’s young hero Hans Castorp. An examination of both novels indicates how in the aftermath of the First World War Freemasonry became the symbol of an ostensibly outmoded nineteenth-century bourgeois civility. Even the location of the Masonic lodge in The Loyal Subject is revealing. As a bourgeois counterbalance to existing authority, the lodge is located directly across from the government building on Kaiser-Wilhelm-Strasse, where president of the provincial council von Wulckow, a caricature of Prussian Junkerdom, rules the small city of Netzing. The Freemasons of the city, however, remain politically powerless against an alliance of the old ruling elite and the new type of “loyal subject” represented by the factory owner HeГџling. The moderately liberal educated and propertied BГјrger are members of the Masonic lodge, which in the novel is identified with the Freisinnige Wahlverein (Liberal Election Association) embodied by the elder Buck, who was part of the revolutionary generation of 1848. Shortly before his death, the elder Buck desperately invokes the liberal “spirit of humanity” against the new spirit of the loyal subject.52 Loyal subjects such as Diederich HeГџling regard the lodge as an obsolete, yet dangerous institution. These loyal subjects join the Veterans AssociationPage 287 → rather than the Masonic lodge. “вЂWe shall have to keep an eye on the people who take part in that Masonic humbug. His Majesty most decidedly disapproves of it.’ . . . вЂThe worst of all,’ declared Jadassohn, вЂis Fritsche, the County Judge, who dares to show himself in the company of Jews. Imagine, one of His Majesty’s judges, arm in arm with Cohn, the moneylender.’” The lodge brothers, Diederich added, always win their cases in court. “вЂThey stick together and hatch sinister plots.’” The pastor, obviously influenced by the tales of Leo Taxil, “muttered something about orgies which were said to be celebrated in that building, and at which unspeakable things had happened. But Jadassohn smiled significantly: вЂWell, it is fortunate that Herr von Wulckow can see right into their windows.’ And Diederich nodded approvingly at the government building on the opposite side of the street. Next door stood the regional militia headquarters, in front of which a sentinel was marching up and down. вЂIt does your heart good to see the glint of the rifle of one of those fine fellows,’ cried Diederich. вЂWith them we can hold that gang in check.’”53 In The Loyal Subject, Freemasons exemplify the failure of the German BГјrgertum, which, in contrast to their French counterpart, was unable to assume political control of the state. The lodge brothers in Netzing are outraged by the violent death of a young worker at a demonstration, at which Wulckow orders the troops to open fire. “Just who did the military and Junkers think they were, giving such orders to shoot? They acted as if they were in a conquered country! When the Masons had become more heated they went so far as to demand that the conduct of the State be in the hands of the civilians, who, as a matter of fact, did all the work.”54 This outrage, however, remains merely words. It was the Wulckows and their loyal subjects who controlled the state, not the BГјrgertum. The Kaiserreich was a military and authoritarian state; unlike France, it was not a civil society. The moral verdict of the novel—and one that many historians adhere to even today—is that attempts to connect politics and civility (BГјrgerlichkeit) in Germany prior to 1914 failed miserably. While Heinrich Mann offers a left-liberal critique of Masonic lodges and the BГјrgertum assembled in them, his brother Thomas portrays Freemasons from a moderate conservative perspective. In his book Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, Thomas Mann had already identified the “World Lodge” with its political humanism as the chief offender responsible for the outbreak of the First World War. “Germany’s enemy, in the most intellectual, instinctive, venomous and deadly sense, is the вЂpacifistic,’ вЂvirtuous,’ вЂrepublican’ bourgeois rhetorician and fils de la rГ©volution; this born three-pointPage 288 → man,” he wrote, with an eye on his brother Heinrich, who was reputed to sympathize with these “three-point men”

(Freemasons).55 In his Reflections, Thomas Mann rejected the civic humanitarianism so prevalent among the German BГјrgertum prior to 1914. Influenced by Allied war propaganda, which denied the “civility” of the German enemy, Thomas Mann now insisted on the opposition of “culture” to “civilization,” of “spirit” to “politics,” and of the “cosmopolitan” to the “international.” “The democratic bourgeois is international, even though he may drape himself everywhere ever so nationally; the burgher . . . is cosmopolitan because he is German, more German than princes and вЂnation’: this man of the geographical, social, and spiritual вЂmiddle’ has always been and remains the bearer of German intellectuality, humanity and antipolitics.”56 As we have seen, speakers in German lodges during the First World War did not argue very differently. Nevertheless, Thomas Mann also regarded Freemasonry as the symbol of enlightenment political humanism and moral hypocrisy. In The Magic Mountain, Hans Castorp traverses a narrative of Bildung, accompanied by the Freemason Settembrini and the Jesuit Naphta. Through Naphta’s ironic remarks about his opponent Settembrini, Thomas Mann issues a harsh political judgment on Masonic lodges. Freemasonry, according to Naphta, is something “terribly old-fashioned and backward, an attempt at bourgeois enlightenment.”57 Over the course of the nineteenth century, Naphta continues, it has been cleansed of all mysticism. “The lodges were modernized, humanitarianized—good God. They were led back from their aberrations to reason, usefulness, and progress, to the battle against prince and priest—in short, to social happiness. The conversations inside them are once again about nature, virtue, moderation, and the fatherland. And, I assume, about business as well. In a word, it is bourgeois misery organized as a club.”58 With obvious relish Naphta points out to his young friend the apparent contradiction between the moral claims of the lodges and their social exclusivity. It was not easy, Naphta tells Hans Castorp, for Settembrini “to be admitted to the site where the temple of humanity is being built, because he’s as poor as a church mouse, and they not only demand higher education, humanistic education, but, beg your pardon, one must also be well-to-do just to afford the hefty initiation fees and annual dues. Education (Bildung) and property—behold the bourgeoisie! There you have the foundations of the liberal world republic!”59 Yet despite his irony, Naphta also warns about the “political ideology of civic humanitarianism,” the “satanic rule of Page 289 →business,” and the Freemasons’ “arrogant moralizing of reason.” In order to reach their virtuous aims, he continues, they have not shied away from the ultimate means, from violence against the “enemies of humanity”; “civilization’s pedagogic policeman” is then roused “to the point of drawing his sword.”60 In a dispute with Settembrini, Naphta argues: “The heroic age that вЂwrested’ your ideals came to an end long ago—those ideals are dead, or at best lie twitching in their death throes, and those whom they had hoped to finish off have got their foot in the door again.” Announcing his own political credo, Naphta says: “The mystery and precept of our age is not liberation and development of the ego. What our age needs, what it demands, what it will create for itself, is—terror.”61 Between these two extremes of Settembrini’s ideology of virtue and Naphta’s collective terror, Thomas Mann’s alter ego Hans Castorp searches in vain for a middle ground. By the end of the nineteenth century, a profound crisis had developed within the two predominant ideals of the era—enlightened-liberal humanism and theocratic-dogmatic conservatism—which Mann reduced in the novel to a Freemason and a Jesuit. It is a crisis that, in the words of Detlev Peukert, “pushes both [ideals] back to totalitarian claims and to terrorist methods, driving them toward technical mass extermination.”62 At the end of the novel, Castorp leaves the world of the sanatorium to take part in the world war, that “worldwide festival of death,” as does Settembrini, himself “a humanitarian, and yet at the same time . . . a man of war.” “Whenever his [Settembrini’s] enthusiasms blended humanity and politics for the ideal of civilization’s ultimate victory and dominion, whenever the citizen’s pike was consecrated on the altar of humanity, it became doubtful whether, on a more personal level, he remained of a mind to hold back his sword from shedding blood.”63 Thomas Mann’s political writings during the First World War revealed his sympathy for Naphta’s position, while his public political statements in the 1920s approached the “republicanism of reason” represented by Settembrini in The Magic Mountain. Nevertheless, Mann clearly recognized himself most readily in the figure of Hans Castrop, who sought a path beyond politics. After 1919, the majority of lodge brothers doubtless yearned for such a path as

well, even if a minority of Freemasons identified with Naphta’s political views and an even smaller minority with those of Settembrini. However, we should not accept uncritically either Heinrich Mann’s or Thomas Mann’s depiction of finde-siГЁcle bourgeois culture. Masonic lodges were by no means outmoded institutions of a past civility (BГјrgerlichkeit) Page 290 →whose glory days ended in 1848, as Heinrich Mann suggested. The rebuke that Masonic lodges were apolitical and embodied a self-satisfied civility can be traced back to the early nineteenth century and is thus as old as the attacks on Freemasonry for diametrically opposite reasons. Throughout the entire century, conservative critics had agitated against the lodges as a “secret power” of liberalism, as “bourgeois misery organized as a club” and as the “pedagogical policeman” of civic virtue and political humanism, as did Thomas Mann and others in the early twentieth century. If Heinrich Mann regarded Masonic lodges as exemplifying a lack of political humanism within the bourgeoisie prior to 1914, his brother inverted this thesis and used the caricature of the Freemason Settembrini to represent the dangers of collapsing politics and civility. During the First World War, both of these positions were exaggerated to an extreme, which subsequently distorted the German public’s image of Freemasonry and nineteenth-century civic humanitarianism over the long term. This does not mean, however, that the two novels exaggerated the symptomatic significance of Masonic lodges. On the contrary, Freemasonry illuminates the politically double-edged nature of civic humanitarianism. The moral and humanist claims that Freemasonry had raised since the eighteenth century were always tied to an elitist social practice that aimed at establishing and maintaining distinction. Over the course of the nineteenth century, this contributed to the intensification of social divisions, the very divisions that moral universalism was supposed to overcome. As a result, the secret of the lodges—which drew a new, invisible wall through society, a wall that was egalitarian within and elitist without—often looked like an unintended parody of these universalist claims. As modern society became increasingly complex, the utopian dream of a future in which all social barriers had been transcended through the Bildung of the self, of a “classless civil society,” and finally of a “brotherhood of men,” obscured and distorted the limitations of that utopian dream, limitations that were continually being drawn anew. In this respect, the Masonic vision was not unlike competing political utopias. The universalism connected to concepts such as man, citizen, and world citizen always included specific social or confessional, political or gendered limits. The more universal civility (BГјrgerlichkeit) was articulated as a social and moral paragon, the more sharply the limitations of this model emerged over the course of the nineteenth century. The more broadly the values and practices of the BГјrgertum were disseminated throughout German society, the sharper the criticism of this moral-political model became. At an early Page 291 →point in history, this critique of the limits of bourgeois civility was linked to Freemasonry’s “ideology of virtue,” in Germany as well as in France. The fact that adversaries of enlightened-liberal ideas and, since the middle of the nineteenth century, opponents of civil society regarded Freemasonry as a cipher for everything they rejected also demonstrates how intimately Masonic lodges were connected to civil society. What Tocqueville called “the art of association”—citizens’ attempts to improve civic virtue through sociability in newly created social spaces such as lodges and clubs—was vital to the emergence of civil society in Germany, France, Italy, and America in the nineteenth century. In all of these countries, civic associations such as Masonic lodges experienced an upswing in the 1860s and 1870s and then again around the turn of the twentieth century. Bluntschli did not exaggerate when he argued in 1858 that only countries of the “civilized world” permitted Masonic lodges to exercise their beneficial influence.64 The ban on Freemasonry in the first half of the twentieth century—first in Soviet Russia in 1918, then in Fascist Italy in 1925, ten years later in Nazi Germany, and finally in 1940 in Vichy France—unambiguously confirms this.65 “In reality no political вЂsocieties’ or вЂassociations’ exist; there is only one political entity—one political community.” This is how Carl Schmitt, in his book The Concept of the Political, articulated the totalitarian rejection of the “politics of sociability” in the name of the racial state.66 The core of this identity, “the whole moth-eaten classicistic-bourgeois ideology of virtue,” as Naphta says disparagingly of Freemasonry in The Magic Mountain, was the vision of a political society based on the formation

and improvement of the individual self.67 The enlightened-liberal utopia of sustaining civic virtue through sociability, through human interaction without the constraints of class, confession, or nationality, was supposed to improve society, the nation, and ultimately humanity itself. The vision of “civilizing” the self required a social space that was removed from and yet part and parcel of civil society. One of the specific characteristics of nineteenth-century civility appears to have been the creation of such spaces within society, a second world beyond everyday life, in which one could enjoy sociability, free exchange, and Bildung. In these social spaces, citizens experienced themselves as society, practicing and displaying civic values and virtues. In Masonic lodges, the elevated BГјrgertum, who in everyday life complied with the rules of capital and the market, of achievement and competition, transformed themselves into “better men,” who knew how Page 292 →to govern the self. Masonic rituals and the emotional cult of brotherhood permitted the articulation of fears, yearnings, and hopes as well as the “civilizing” or mastering of these, a process that the individual was supposed to accomplish himself in interaction with others. The search for a new civil religiosity occurred in this civic space of lodges and clubs far removed from both the church and the state—contrary to the widespread clichГ© about the German BГјrgertum’s authoritarian deference to the state prior to 1914. The civil religion of the lodges, the “religion of humanity,” did not stand above religious confessions, as Freemasons believed, but was essentially Protestant. This fundamental ambiguity in Masonic identity was evident in discussions within the lodges about the admission of Jews, in Freemasons’ anti-Catholicism, and in the rejection of Freemasonry by the Catholic Church and the conservative Protestant Church. However, at the same time, this civil religion was at least partially able to bridge confessional barriers, as the example of Jews particularly during the 1860s and 1870s demonstrates. The sacralizing cult of brotherhood and the civil-religious credo of the lodges can be understood as an alternative to a religiosity tied to the churches that was particularly attractive to women at the time. The lodges combined a civil religion of virtue with a sentimental masculinity directed against an ostensibly “feminine” Catholicism thought to be hostile to progress. In addition, the Masonic civil-religious credo also promised to resolve the crisis of society as a whole, a crisis that appeared to threaten the moral values and the social and political reform ambitions of the liberal national BГјrgertum. As Freemasons believed that society was grounded in the “civility” of its own citizens, it is hardly surprising that they regarded the social conflicts at the end of the nineteenth century as a moral crisis and felt that the most important goal was to elevate “morality,” initially that of the lodge brothers themselves, but also that of the “immoral masses” outside the lodges. If the foundations of society were based on the virtue and Bildung of its citizens, both of these stood on an unstable, wavering ground that was ultimately subject to crisis. The language of virtue and sociability was grounded in a vision of civil society, whose fragility became increasingly clear not only in the political tensions within the state but also in light of its own moral claims. The belief in progress and in the power of Bildung contained a “tyranny of virtue”: the compulsion to a permanent improvement of self and of society, which was supposed to edify the “un-educated” Page 293 →and at the same time keep them at a distance. The moral-political values of Freemasonry were supposed to maintain this social exclusivity and yet function as a regulative idea for society as a whole. The fact that the liberal BГјrgertum lost part of its moral and political hegemony in German society at the end of the nineteenth century by no means signified a decline of civil society, as Freemasons and subsequent historians have argued. The growing participation of Social Democrats and women, of Jews and Catholics transformed German society for the first time into a truly civil society in the political, as opposed to the social-moral sense of the term. The social and political fragmentation of German society (along with the disintegration of the utopian vision of a “classless civil society”) was the result of the advent of democracy, not its disappearance. For this reason, it is essential that we historicize the connection between associations and democracy proposed by Tocqueville, a connection that Putnam and others would like to revive today. We need to examine how civic associations were actually constituted, the specific moral and political claims that they articulated, and the often contrary and unintended results arising from these claims.68 Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, the nation appeared to guarantee the moral connection between the individual self, society, and humanity by creating new bonds of belonging. German Freemasons were not alone in

believing in the virtues of national identities. In Germany as well as in France, Freemasons employed the language of nationalism to relegitimate their claims to hegemony in their respective societies, in particular against domestic adversaries such as political Catholicism. The vision of a civilized humanity was supposed to be realized first within one’s own nation. Yet as national societies moved closer economically and socially over the second half of the nineteenth century, the political conflicts within the “moral International” of Freemasonry became increasingly apparent. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, during which German and French lodge brothers accused each other of betraying Freemasonry’s humanist identity, briefly shook the belief in a European civilizing mission. Prior to 1914, Masonic lodges in Europe regarded their own nation as the “fatherland of man.” For this reason, all attempts to unify Freemasonry into an effective “moral International” ultimately failed. Nevertheless, the belief in the improvement of the self, the nation, and humanity exerted an enormous influence on Masonic identity in both Germany and France. It was only during the course of the First World War Page 294 →that this identity lost its legitimation—in Masonic lodges and, to a much more dramatic extent, in German society as a whole. This loss of legitimacy was also rooted in the fundamental ambiguity of the moral-political claims of Freemasons. Whoever introduces moral hierarchies into the realm of politics should not lose sight of this ambiguity.

Page 295 →

Abbreviations ArS Am rauhen Stein AZJ Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums Bh. Die Bauhütte CStA Central State Archive DL Dresdener Logenblatt FZ Freimaurer-Zeitung GStA Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz HL Hamburger Logenblatt HPBl Historisch-politische Blätter für das katholische Deutschland HZC Circel-Correspondenz/ Hamburgische Zirkel-Correspondenz Mitt. Mitteilungen MittVdF Mitteilungen aus dem Verein deutscher Freimaurer ML Mecklenburgisches Logenblatt NF Neue Folge (New Series) R. Am Reißbrete PJ Preußische Jahrbücher SHStA Sächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Dresden SL Schlesisches Logenblatt StA Staatsarchiv (State Archive) StadtA Stadtarchiv (City Archive) UT Der unsichtbare Tempel ZC Zirkelcorrespondenz unter den St. Johannis-Logenmeistern der Großen Landesloge der Freimaurer in Deutschland ZMittVdF Zwanglose Mitteilungen aus dem Verein deutscher Freimaurer

Page 296 → Page 297 →

Notes Introduction 1. R. D. Putnam, “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital,” Journal of Democracy 6 (1995): 65–78; idem, “The Strange Disappearance of Civic America,” American Prospect 24 (1996): 34–48; idem, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000). 2. Putnam had already argued in his classic study of the difference in political culture between northern and southern Italy that democracy depends on the historical tradition of civic engagement through voluntary associations. R. D. Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). 3. See especially Putnam, Bowling Alone, as well as, for example, M. Walzer, “The Civil Society Argument,” Dimensions of Radical Democracy, ed. C. Mouffe (London: Verso, 1992), 89–107. For a more critical stance see the articles in A. Gutmann, ed., Freedom of Association (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), and, most recently, M. E. Warren, Democracy and Association (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 4. A. de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. H. C. Mansfield and D. Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 491. 5. Ibid., 492. 6. On the Republican concept of civic virtue see H. MГјnkler, “Zivilgesellschaft und BГјrgertugend: BedГјrfen demokratisch verfasste Gemeinwesen einer sozio-moralischen Fundierung?” inaugural lecture, Humboldt-UniversitГ¤t Berlin, May 10, 1993; idem, “Politische Tugend: Bedarf die Demokratie einer sozio-moralischen Grundlegung?” in Die Chancen der Freiheit, ed. H. MГјnkler (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1992), 25–46; idem, BГјrgerreligion und BГјrgertugend: Debatten Гјber vorpolitische Grundlagen politischer Ordnung, ed. H. MГјnkler (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1996), and, of course, J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975); idem, “Civic Humanism and Its Role in Anglo-American Thought,” in Politics, Language, and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 80–103; for a good summary of the argument see D. T. Rodgers, “Republicanism: The Career of a Concept,” Journal of American History 79 (1992): 1–38.Page 298 → 7. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 663. 8. Ibid., 492. W. Hennis, “Tocquevilles вЂNeue Politische Wissenschaft,’” in Aspekte der Kultursoziologie, ed. J. Stagl (Berlin: Reimer, 1982), 385–407. 9. MГјnkler, “Zivilgesellschaft,” 8. 10. The term practitioners of civil society is drawn from I. V. Hull, Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany, 1700–1815 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 2. 11. S.-L. Hoffmann, Civil Society, 1750–1914 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 12. C. T. Welcker, “BГјrgertugend und BГјrgersinn,” in Das Staatslexikon: EncyklopГ¤die der sГ¤mmtlichen Staatswissenschaften fГјr alle StГ¤nde, ed. C. von Rotteck and C. T. Welcker (Altona, 1846), first suppl. vol.: 748. 13. See especially D. Blackbourn, “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,” in D. Blackbourn and G. Eley, The Peculiarities of German History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 159–292; and J. Kocka, “The European Pattern and the German Case,” in Bourgeois Society in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. J. Kocka and A. Mitchell (Oxford: Berg, 1993), 3–39. 14. Theda Skocpol, for example, critiques Putnam’s argument as a romantic idealization; see “The Tocqueville Problem: Civic Engagement in American Democracy,” Social Science History 21 (1997): 455–79. 15. C. E. Harrison, “Unsociable Frenchmen: Associations and Democracy in Historical Perspective,”

Tocqueville Review 17 (1996): 41–42; idem, The Bourgeois Citizen in Nineteenth-Century France: Gender, Sociability, and the Uses of Emulation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); P. Nord, Introduction to Civil Society before Democracy: Lessons from Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. N. Bermeo and P. Nord (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), F. Trentmann, Introduction to Paradoxes of Civil Society: New Perspectives on Modern German and British History, ed. F. Trentmann (Providence, R.I.: Berghahn Books, 2000), 3–45. 16. J. C. Alexander, “Citizen and Enemy as Symbolic Classifications: On the Polarizing Discourse of Civil Society,” in Cultivating Difference: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality, ed. M. Lamont and M. Fournier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 289–308. 17. Lessing’s Masonic Dialogues (London: Baskerville Press), 26. 18. There is hardly any research on the history of nineteenth-century German Freemasonry. Some information is provided in the excellent study by J. Katz, Jews and Freemasons in Europe, 1723–1939 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970). 19. J. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 36 (translation altered). 20. Lessing’s Masonic Dialogues, 46–47, 48. 21. M. C. Jacob, Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); idem, “The Enlightenment Redefined: The Formation of Modern Civil Society,” Social Research 58 (1991): 495. 22. R. Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Page 299 →Modern Society (1959; trans., Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988); Habermas, Structural Transformation. For an excellent commentary on Koselleck and Habermas, see A. J. La Vopa, “Conceiving a Public: Ideas and Society in Eighteenth-Century Europe,” Journal of Modern History 64 (1992): 79–116, as well as D. Goodman, “Public Sphere and Private Life: Toward a Synthesis of Current Historiographical Approaches to the Old Regime,” History and Theory 31 (1992): 1–20; J. Cohen and A. Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), chap. 5, “The Historicist Critique: Carl Schmitt, Reinhart Koselleck, and JГјrgen Habermas.” 23. See, in particular, the influential essay by T. Nipperdey, “Verein als soziale Struktur in Deutschland im spГ¤ten 18. und frГјhen 19. Jahrhundert,” in his Gesellschaft, Kultur, Theorie (GГ¶ttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1976), 174–205; and the works inspired by the research project on civic elites and associational life by L. Gall, summed up in D. Hein, “Soziale Konstituierungsfaktoren des BГјrgertums,” in Stadt und BГјrgertum im Гњbergang von der traditionalen zur modernen Gesellschaft, ed. L. Gall (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1993), 151–81. 24. K. Tenfelde, “Die Entfaltung des Vereinswesens wГ¤hrend der industriellen Revolution in Deutschland (1850–1873),” in Vereinswesen und bГјrgerliche Gesellschaft in Deutschland, ed. O. Dann (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1984), 55–114, and, more generally for the “civic moment” in Europe in the 1860s: Nord, Introduction to Civil Society before Democracy. 25. There is not even a rudimentary social history of German lodges for this period. 26. See, e.g., P. Nord, “Republicanism and Utopian Vision: French Freemasonry in the 1860s and 1870s,” Journal of Modern History 63 (1991): 213–29; and idem, “Freemasonry,” chap. 1 in The Republican Moment: Struggles for Democracy in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995); A. Halpern, The Democratisation of France, 1840–1901: SociabilitГ©, Freemasonry, and Radicalism (Atlanta: Minerva Press, 1999); S. Hazareesingh and V. Wright, FrancsMaГ§ons sous le Second Empire: Les Loges provinciales du Grand-Orient Г la veille de la TroisiГЁme RГ©publique (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2001); L. Dumenil, Freemasonry and American Culture, 1880–1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); A. D. Fels, “The Square and Compass: San Francisco’s Freemasons and American Religion, 1870–1900,” Ph.D. diss., Stanford, 1987; M. A. Clawson, Constructing Brotherhood: Class, Gender, and Fraternalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); M. C. Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). 27. See, in particular, the contributions to H. Walser Smith, ed., Protestants, Catholics, and Jews in Germany, 1800–1914 (New York: Berg, 2002). 28. On Breslau see T. van Rahden, “Mingling, Marrying, and Distancing: Jewish Integration in

Wilhelminian Breslau and Its Erosion in Early Weimar Germany,” in JГјdische Leben in der Weimarer Republik, ed. W. Benz et al. (TГјbingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1998), 197–222; idem, Juden und andere Breslauer: Die Beziehungen zwischen Juden, Protestanten und Katholiken in einer deutschen GroГџstadt, 1860–1925 (GГ¶ttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2000); and M. Hettling, “Von der Hochburg zur Wagenburg: Liberalismus in Breslau von den 1860er Jahren bis Page 300 →1918,” Liberalismus und Region: Zur Geschichte des Liberalismus im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. L. Gall and D. Langewiesche (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1995), 253–76; idem, Politische BГјrgerlichkeit: Der BГјrger zwischen IndividualitГ¤t und Vergesellschaftung in Deutschland und der Schweiz von 1860 bis 1918 (GГ¶ttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1999); on Leipzig see R. Beachy, The Soul of Commerce: Property, Power, and Politics in Leipzig, 1750–1850 (Leiden: Brill, 2004); on Saxony more generally the review article by J. Retallack “Society and Politics in Saxony, 1763–1990,” Archiv fГјr Sozialgeschichte 38 (1998): 396–457. 29. See especially Carnes, Secret Ritual; idem, “Middle-Class Men and the Solace of Fraternal Ritual, ” Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America, ed. M. C. Carnes and C. Griffen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 37–66. 30. J. C. Bluntschli, “Freimaurer,” in Deutsches Staats WГ¶rterbuch, vol. 3, ed. J. C. Bluntschli and K. Brater (Stuttgart, 1858), 753. 31. On the historiographical concept of sociabilitГ© see especially M. Agulhon, Le cercle dans la France bourgeoise, 1810–1848: Etude d’une mutation de sociabilitГ© (Paris, 1977); idem, PГ©nitents et Francs MaГ§ons de l’ancienne Province, 2d ed. (Paris, 1984), idem, “Vers une histoire des associations,” Esprit 6 (1978): 13–18; idem, “L’histoire sociale et les associations,” Revue de l’économie sociale 14 (1988): 35–44; and Г‰. FranГ§ois and R. Reichardt, “Les formes de sociabilitГ© en France du milieu du XVIIIe siГЁcle au milieu du XIXe siГЁcle,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 34 (1987): 453–72; for a comparative perspective see Г‰. FranГ§ois, ed., SociabilitГ© et sociГ©tГ© bourgeoise en France, en Allemagne et en Suisse, 1750–1850 (Paris: Edition Recherches sur les Civilisations, 1986). 32. G. Simmel, Soziologie: Untersuchungen Гјber die Formen der Vergesellschaftung (1908), ed. O. Rammstedt (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1992), 653. 33. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 464. 34. H. Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 139–70. 35. M. Jeismann, Das Vaterland der Feinde: Studien zum nationalen Feindbegriff und SelbstverstГ¤ndnis in Deutschland und Frankreich, 1792–1918 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1992). 36. See Freimaurerische BestГ¤nde der UniversitГ¤tsbibliothek Posen (Hilde-sheim, 1990); G. Aly and S. Heim, Das Zentrale Staatsarchiv in Moskau (“Sonderarchiv”). Rekonstruktion und Bestandsverzeichnis verschollen geglaubten Schriftguts aus der NS-Zeit (DГјsseldorf: Hans-BГ¶cklerStiftung, 1992); R. Endler and E. Schwarze, Die FreimaurerbestГ¤nde im Geheimen Staatsarchiv PreuГџischer Kulturbesitz, 2 vols. (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1994–96). 37. See, for example, R. Melzer, Konflikt und Anpassung: Freimaurerei in der Weimarer Republik und im Dritten Reich (Vienna: BraumГјller, 1999); and H. Neuberger, Freimaurerei und Nationalsozialismus: Die Verfolgung der deutschen Freimaurerei durch vГ¶lkische Bewegung und Nationalsozialismus 1918–1945, 2 vols. (Hamburg: BauhГјtten, 1980). 38. See the bibliography M. HГ¤nsel-Hohenhausen, Die deutschsprachigen Freimaurer-Zeitschriften des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt: R. G. Fischer, 1988). 39. A. Wolfstieg, Bibliographie der freimaurerischen Literatur, 3 vols. (Burg, Page 301 →1913–25); supplementary vol. and vol. 4. by B. Beyer (Leipzig, 1926; reprint, Hildesheim, 1964). 40. MГјnkler, “Zivilgesellschaft,” 8. 41. G. Eley, “Is All the World a Text? From Social History to the History of Society Two Decades Later,” in T. J. McDonald, ed., The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 193–244. 42. P. Jelavich, “Method? What Method? Confessions of a Failed Structuralist,” New German Critique 65 (1995): 75–86. 43. J. G. A. Pocock, Politics, Language, and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1971); R. Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985); idem, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002); and M. Richter, “Reconstructing the History of Political Languages: Pocock, Skinner, and the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe,” History and Theory 29 (1990): 38–70. 44. See, for example, W. Steinmetz, Das Sagbare und das Machbare: Zum Wandel politischer HandlungsrГ¤ume: England 1780–1867 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1993); and D. Wahrman, Imagining the Middle-Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c. 1780–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 45. Cultural history, in the poignant words of Dena Goodman, “focuses on social and discursive practices and institutions: both the ground on which particular discursive actions take place and those actions themselves. Ideas are not of a different order from the practices and institutions that constitute them, and those practices and institutions are not without meaning. The job of the cultural historian is to understand the ways in which human beings have shaped and been shaped by the social and discursive practices and institutions that constitute their lives and actions.” D. Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 2. 46. M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 2, The Use of Pleasure (New York: Vintage Books 1990), 30–32. 47. R. Chartier, “Le monde comme reprГ©sentation,” Annales E.S.C. 44 (1989): 1505–20. 48. Similarly, D. Herzog, Intimacy and Exclusion: Religious Politics in Pre-Revolutionary Baden (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 17. 49. M. Foucault, Preface to the German edition of Madness and Society, Wahnsinn und Gesellschaft (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981), 9. 50. See, for example, C. Geulen, Wahlverwandte: Rassismus und Nationalismus im spГ¤ten 19. Jahrhundert (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2004). 51. J. Wallach Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996); idem, “Universalism and the History of Feminism,” differences 7 (1995): 1–14. 52. This holds true for J. Habermas’s idea of a postnational political cosmopolitanism as one can see in his “BestialitГ¤t und HumanitГ¤t,” Die Zeit, 29 April 1999, and idem, “The Postnational Constellation and the Future of Democracy,” in The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 58–112; but also for R. Putnam, whose claim that northern Italy today is more Page 302 →“civilized” than southern Italy because of its civic tradition appeals to racial stereotypes. 53. “Just as there is no developed religion that does not divide the world into the saved and the damned, there is no civil discourse that does not conceptualize the world into those who deserve inclusion and those who do not.” Alexander, “Citizen and Enemy,” 291. 54. S. Moyn, “German Jewry and the Question of Identity,” Yearbook of the Leo Baeck Institute 41 (1996): 308.

Chapter 1 1. M. Riedel, “Gesellschaft, bürgerliche,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, ed. O. Brunner et al., vol. 2 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1975): 746; more generally, K. Tester, Civil Society (New York: Routledge, 1992); A. B. Seligman, “The Fragile Ethical Vision of Civil Society,” Citizenship and Social Theory, ed. B. S. Turner (London: Sage, 1993), 139–61; J. A. Hall and F. Trentmann, “Contests over Civil Society,” in Civil Society: A Reader in History, Theory, and Global Politics, ed. J. A. Hall and F. Trentmann (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 2. Riedel, “Gesellschaft, bürgerliche,” 747–48. 3. Compare the classic studies of Habermas, Structural Transformation, and Koselleck, Critique and Crisis. While Habermas has placed emphasis on the new principle of the public, Koselleck analyzed the new sociability, taking Freemasonry as an example. The new public sphere was also a product of popular

critiques of courtly arcane politics by rural protesters since the late seventeenth century, as A. WГјrgler has shown in Unruhen und Г–ffentlichkeit: StГ¤dtische und lГ¤ndliche Protestbewegungen im 18. Jahrhundert (TГјbingen: Bibliotheca-Academica, 1995). 4. I. Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with Cosmopolitan Intent (1784),” in Basic Writings of Kant, ed. A. W. Wood (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 122–23. 5. D. Gordon, Citizens without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French Thought, 1670–1789 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). 6. See H. Medick, Naturzustand und Naturgeschichte der bГјrgerlichen Gesellschaft: Die UrsprГјnge der bГјrgerlichen Sozialtheorie als Geschichtsphilosophie und Sozialwissenschaft bei Samuel Pufendorf, John Locke und Adam Smith (GГ¶ttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1973). 7. Gordon, Citizens without Sovereignty, 6. 8. R. Koselleck, “Three bГјrgerliche Worlds? Preliminary Theoretical-Historical Remarks on the Comparative Semantics of Civil Society in Germany, England, and France,” in The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 215. R. Koselleck and K. Schreiner, eds., BГјrgerschaft (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1994); J. Van Horn Melton, “The Emergence of вЂSociety’ in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Germany,” in Language, History, and Class, ed. P. J. Corfield (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 131–49. 9. Lessing’s Masonic Dialogues, 26.Page 303 → 10. See S. C. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730–1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). 11. Koselleck, Critique and Crisis, 79. 12. See Jacob, Living the Enlightenment. 13. W. Dotzauer, “Zur Sozialstruktur der Freimaurer in Deutschland im 18. Jahrhundert,” in AufklГ¤rung und Geheimgesellschaften: Zur politischen Funktion und Sozialstruktur der Freimaurerlogen im 18. Jahrhundert, ed. H. Reinalter (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1989), 111; D. Roche, “Die SociГ©tГ©s de pensГ©e und die aufgeklГ¤rten Eliten im 18. Jahrhunderts,” in Sozialgeschichte der AufklГ¤rung in Frankreich, ed. R. Reichardt and H.-U. Gumbrecht (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1981), 78–79. 14. Jacobs, Living the Enlightenment, 49. 15. J. M. Roberts, “Freemasonry: Possibilities of a Neglected Topic,” English Historical Review 84 (1969): 323. 16. Baron Knigge, Practical Philosophy of Social Life or The Art of Conversing with Men, vol. 2 (London, 1794), 255. 17. See, for example, W. Dotzauer, Freimaurergesellschaften am Rhein: AufgeklГ¤rte SozietГ¤ten auf dem linken Rheinufer vom Ausgang des Ancien Regime bis zum Ende der napoleonischen Herrschaft (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1977); M. Agethen, “AufklГ¤rungsgesellschaften, Freimaurer, Geheime Gesellschaften,” Zeitschrift fГјr Historische Forschung 14 (1987): 439–63; Geheimbund und Utopie: Illuminaten, Freimaurer und deutsche SpГ¤taufklГ¤rung (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1984); W. Hardtwig, Genossenschaft, Sekte, Verein in Deutschland, vol. 1: Vom SpГ¤t-mittelalter bis zur FranzГ¶sischen Revolution (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1997), 304–59; for France, D. Roche, Les rГ©publicains des lettres: Gens de culture et LumiГЁres au XVIIIe siГЁcle (Paris: Fayard, 1988); La siГЁcle des lumiГЁres en province: AcadГ©mies et acadГ©miens provinciaux, 1680–1789, 2 vols. (Paris: Г‰cole des hautes Г©tudes en sciences sociales, 1978); R. HalГ©vi, Les Loges maГ§onniques dans la France d’Ancien RГ©gime: Aux origines de la sociabilitГ© dГ©mocratique (Paris: Colin, 1984); for England, P. Clark, British Clubs and Societies, 1580–1800: The Origins of an Associational World (New York: Clarendon Press, 2000); for a comparative perspective, see FranГ§ois, ed., SociabilitГ© et sociГ©tГ© bourgeoise; Jacob, Living the Enlightenment; for Russia, D. Smith, “Freemasonry and the Public in EighteenthCentury Russia,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 29 (1995): 25–44; and idem, Working the Rough Stone: Freemasonry and Society in Eighteenth-Century Russia (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1999); for North America, Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood. 18. See K. H. Gerlach, “Zur Sozialstruktur der GroГџen National-Mutterloge вЂZu den drei Weltkugeln’ 1775–1805 in Berlin,” Quator Coronati Jahrbuch 28 (1991): 105–24; “Die GroГџe Landesloge der Freimaurer in Deutschland 1769–1807 in Berlin,” Quator Coronati Jahrbuch 30 (1993): 79–98; “Royal York zur Freundschaft in Berlin 1762–1806: Ein Beitrag zur

Sozialgeschichte der Freimaurerei in Brandenburg-PreuГџen,” Quator Coronati Jahrbuch 31 (1994): 51–79; F. Maurice, Freimaurerei um 1800: Ignaz Aurelius FeГџler und die Reform der GroГџloge Royal York in Berlin (TГјbingen: Niemeyer, 1997), 166ff.; K. Gudladt, “Zur Geschichte der AltpreuГџischen Logen,” in Schlaglichter PreuГџen—Westeuropa, ed. U. Fuhrich-Grubert and A. H. Johansen (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1997), 295–318.Page 304 → 19. H. Reif, WestfГ¤lischer Adel 1770–1860 (GГ¶ttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1979), 407. 20. K. Demeter, Die Frankfurter Loge zur Einigkeit 1742–1966 (Frankfurt: Kramer, 1967), 52; R. Roth, Stadt und BГјrgertum in Frankfurt am Main (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1996), 124–25; similar for Nuremberg: R. Habermas, Frauen und MГ¤nner des BГјrgertums: Eine Familiengeschichte 1750–1850 (GГ¶ttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1999), 147; for Cologne: G. Mettele, BГјrgertum in KГ¶ln 1775–1870: Gemeinsinn und freie Assoziation (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1998), 56–57. 21. Roche, “SociГ©tГ©s de pensГ©e,” 115. 22. W. Hardtwig, “Eliteanspruch und Geheimnis in den Geheimgesellschaften des 18. Jahrhunderts,” in AufklГ¤rung und Geheimgesellschaften, ed. H. Reinalter (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1989), 66. 23. Der sich selbst vertheidigende FreymГ¤urer, Sammlung unterschiedlicher wohlverfaГџten Schriften, welche einige Mitglieder dieses Ordens selbst zu dessen Vertheidigung herausgegeben . . . (Frankfurt, 1744), 205, quoted in N. Schindler, “Freimaurerkultur im 18. Jahrhundert: Zur sozialen Funktion des Geheimnisses in der entstehenden bГјrgerlichen Gesellschaft,” in Klassen und Kulturen, ed. R. M. Berdahl et al. (Frankfurt: Syndikat, 1982), 210. 24. Quoted in M. Espagne, “Welches sind die Bestandteile der AufklГ¤rung? Aus dem Pariser NachlaГџ eines Wetzlarer Freimaurers,” Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft 32 (1988): 33. 25. This is the main argument of Schindler, “Freimaurerkultur.” 26. Koselleck, Critique and Crisis, 79. 27. See Koselleck, Critique and Crisis; Schindler, “Freimaurerkultur,” and the classic interpretations by G. Simmel, “The Secret and the Secret Society,” in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. K. H. Wolff (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1950), 307–78, and E. Manheim, AufklГ¤rung und Г¶ffentlichen Meinung: Studien zur Soziologie der Г–ffentlichkeit im 18. Jahrhundert (1933) (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1979). 28. See Simmel, “The Secret and the Secret Society.” 29. See Schindler, “Freimaurerkultur.” 30. As, for example, in M. Neugebauer-WГ¶lk, Esoterische BГјnde und BГјrgerliche Gesellschaft: Entwicklungslinien zur modernen Welt im Geheimbundwesen des 18. Jahrhunderts (GГ¶ttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1995). 31. Thus, as Niklas Luhmann has observed, secrecy was kept paradoxically “with communicative intent.” N. Luhmann, “Interaktion in Oberschichten: Zur Transformation ihrer Semantik im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert,” in Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik: Studien zur Wissenssoziologie der modernen Gesellschaft, vol. 1 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1993), 157. 32. Hardtwig, “Eliteanspruch und Geheimnis,” 75. 33. Schindler, “Freimaurerkultur,” 210. 34. Jacobs, Living the Enlightenment, 146. 35. R. Koselleck, “Freimaurerei im 18. Jahrhundert zwischen Politik und Moral,” Der Tau 1 (1982): 5. 36. This is the central argument of Jacob, Living the Enlightenment. 37. C. L. Stieglitz, Geschichte der Freimaurerloge Minerva zu den drei Palmen im Orient Leipzig und Bescheibung ihrer SГ¤cularfeier am 20. MГ¤rz 5841 (Leipzig, 1841).Page 305 → 38. Manheim, AufklГ¤rung und Г¶ffentlichen Meinung, 111. See also by E. Manheim, “The Communicator and His Audience: Liberals and Traditionalists in Eighteenth Century Germany,” in Sociology and History: Theory and Research, ed. W. J. Cahnmann and A. Boskoff (New York, 1964), 503–16. 39. L. Hammermayer, Der Wilhelmsbader Freimaurer-Konvent von 1782: Ein HГ¶he- und Wendepunkt in der Geschichte der deutschen und europГ¤ischen Geheimgesellschaften (Heidelberg, 1980). 40. In 1787, 26 out of 137 members of the Minerva Lodge were aristocrats (19 percent). R. van DГјlmen, Kultur und Alltag in der FrГјhen Neuzeit, vol. 3: Religion, Magie, AufklГ¤rung 16.–18. Jahrhundert

(Munich: C. H. Beck, 1994), 250. In 1816, 37 out of 247 Minerva brothers were aristocrats (only 15 percent). R. Beachy, “Club Culture and Social Authority: Freemasonry in Leipzig, 1741–1830,” in Paradoxes of Civil Society, ed. Trentmann, 163. 41. For a detailed study of the change in rituals of the Prussian Grand Lodges, taking Ignaz Aurelius FeГџler as an example, Maurice, Freimaurerei um 1800. 42. Kurze Geschichte der Loge Friedrich zum goldenen Zepter im Orient zu Breslau, aus den Documenten, welche sich im Archiv der Loge befinden, herausgegeben und vorgetragen am 47ten Stiftungs-Feste der Loge den 10. December 1823 von Br. Oelsner (Breslau, 1823), CStA Moscow, Fond 1412–1, no. 4985. 43. Manheim, AufklГ¤rung und Г¶ffentlichen Meinung, 97. 44. Kurze Geschichte der Loge Friedrich zum goldenen Zepter. 45. Roche, “SociГ©tГ©s de pensГ©e,” 115. 46. La Vopa, “Conceiving a Public,” 92; Schindler, “Freimaurerkultur,” 211–16. 47. R. Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 166. 48. Lessing’s Masonic Dialogues, 59. 49. Mettele, BГјrgertum in KГ¶ln, 57. 50. Beachy, “Club Culture and Social Authority”; K. Middell, “Leipziger SozietГ¤ten im 18. Jahrhundert: Die Bedeutung der SoziabilitГ¤t fГјr die kulturelle Integration von Minderheiten,” Neues Archiv fГјr SГ¤chsische Geschichte 69 (1998): 125–58. 51. Demeter, Loge zur Einigkeit, 124–25. 52. The Constitutions of Freemasons, 1723 (London, 1923), 49. 53. C. Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1996), 56–63. 54. At times even Catholic clergymen became Freemasons. In 1742, the Breslau abbot Philipp Graf von Schaffgotsch felt “a burning desire to be admitted to the lodge.” The application was granted and silence maintained about his membership in public. Pope Clemens XII had condemned the Freemasons in 1738 and 1739. As prince-bishop, Schaffgotsch later acknowledged publicly his lodge membership and came close to excommunication. J. S. Martin, Geschichtliche Darstellung der St.-Johannis-Freimaurerloge gen. zu den drei Todtgerippten (Breslau, 1841), 7; O. Frenzel, Aus vergangenen Tagen. Zum Jubelfeste der Vereinigten St. Johannis-Loge genannt zu den drei Totengrippten, zur SГ¤ule und zur Glocke in Breslau am 18. Mai 1891 (Breslau, 1891), 11–12. 55. Koselleck, Critique and Crisis, 75. Koselleck’s argument follows not just Page 306 →Schmitt but also Augustin Cochin who argued that Freemasonry was the casting mould of the new civil society. See Cochin’s posthumously published Les sociГ©tГ©s de pensГ©e et la dГ©mocratie, Г‰tude d’histoire rГ©volutionnaire (Paris: Plon Nourrit, 1921); and F. Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); F. Schrader, Augustin Cochin et la RГ©publique FranГ§aise (Paris: Seuil, 1992). 56. Koselleck, Critique and Crisis, 72. 57. “Etwas Гјber geheime Verbindungen,” in A.L. SchlГ¶zers Staatsanzeigen 8, no. 31 (1786): 278, quoted in Hardtwig, “Eliteanspruch und Geheimnis,” 73. 58. Jacobs, Living the Enlightenment, 143. 59. G. Simmel, “Über sociale Differenzierung,” (1890) in AufsГ¤tze 1887–1890, ed. H.-J. Dahme (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989), 24. 60. Lessing’s Masonic Dialogues, 78. 61. The only exception is the Order of Asiatic Brothers, founded around 1780 in Berlin, which explicitly accepted Jews but remained outside the established Masonic circles. Compare C. F. Boscamp (this is H. K. Frh. v. Ecker und Eckhoffen), Werden und kГ¶nnten Israeliten zu Freymaurern aufgenommen werden? VeranlaГџt durch die zur Beherzigung fГјr Freymaurer von einem ungenannten hgg. Schrift (Hamburg, 1788); and more generally Katz, Jews and Freemasons, 26–53. 62. J. Burke, “Freemasonry, Friendship, and Noblewoman: The Role of the Secret Society in Bringing Enlightenment Thought to Pre-Revolutionary Women Elites,” History of European Ideas 10 (1989): 283–93; J. Burke and M. C. Jacob, “French Freemasonry, Women, and Feminist Scholarship,” Journal of Modern History 68 (1996): 513–49; D. Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History

of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). 63. J. G. Herder, “Freimäurer,” in Sämtliche Werke, ed. B. Suphan, vol. 24 (Berlin, 1886; reprint, Hildesheim, 1967), 132. 64. Ibid., 131. 65. R. Vierhaus, “Kultur und Gesellschaft im 18. Jahrhundert,” in Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert als Epoche, ed. B. Fabian and W. Schmidt-Biggemann (Nendeln: KTO Press, 1978), 84. 66. Hull, Sexuality, State, and Civil Society, 3. 67. Manheim, Aufklärung und öffentlichen Meinung, 98.

Chapter 2 1. See Nipperdey, “Verein als soziale Struktur”; idem, Germany from Napoleon to Bismarck, 1800–1866 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 233–36; C. Lipp, “Verein als politisches Handlungsmuster: Das Beispiel des wГјrttembergischen Vereinswesens von 1800 bis zur Revolution 1848–49,” in SociabilitГ© et sociГ©tГ© bourgeoise, ed. FranГ§ois, 275–96; O. Dann, ed., Vereinswesen und bГјrgerliche Gesellschaft in Deutschland (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1984); and the case study by L. Gall, “BГјrgerliche Gesellschaften und bГјrgerliche Gesellschaft,” in Frankfurter Gesellschaft fГјr Handel, Industrie und Wissenschaft—Casino-Gesellschaft von 1802, ed. L. Gall (Frankfurt: SocietГ¤ts-Verlag, 1995), 11–36; for France: Harrison, BourgeoisPage 307 → Citizen; idem, “Unsociable Frenchmen.” 2. See, for example, R. Roth, Stadt und BГјrgertum in Frankfurt am Main (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1996), 323, and H.-W. Schmuhl, “StГ¤dtische Eliten in NГјrnberg und Braunschweig,” Habilitationsschrift (University of Bielefeld 1996), 592, who both claim that the lodges lost significance in the nineteenth century without researching the post-1850 period. 3. Hein, “Soziale Konstituierungsfaktoren des BГјrgertums,” 160, who follows Nipperdey in underestimating the lineages between Enlightenment sociability and civic associations in the early nineteenth century. 4. See the critique by D. Langewiesche, “Kommentar,” in Stadt und BГјrgertum beim Гњbergang von der traditionalen zur modernen Gesellschaft, ed. L. Gall (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1993), 229. 5. Therefore, we have primarily Masonic literature on the history of nineteenth-century German Freemasonry. 6. J. C. Bluntschli, “Dritter Stand,” in Deutsches Staats-WГ¶rterbuch, ed. J. C. Bluntschli and K. Brater, vol. 3 (Stuttgart, 1858), 179; similarly, on associations as constitutive for civic elites, H. v. Treitschke, Die Gesellschaftwissenschaft (Leipzig, 1859), 26. 7. W. H. Riehl, The Natural History of the German People, ed. D. J. Diephouse (Lewiston: Edwin Mellon Press, 1990), 204–5. 8. See Introduction, this vol. 9. Harrison, Bourgeois Citizen, 14; Koselleck et al., “BГјrgerliche Welten”; and Wahrman, Imagining the Middle-Class, chap. 1. 10. Kocka, “The European Pattern and the German Case,” 8. 11. J. J. Sheehan, “Wie bГјrgerlich war der deutsche Liberalismus?” in Liberalismus, ed. Langewiesche, 43; and D. Langewiesche, “Liberalism and the Middle Classes in Europe,” in Bourgeois Society in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Kocka and Mitchell, 40–69. 12. Hardtwig, Genossenschaft, Sekte, Verein in Deutschland, 346. 13. S. Brakensiek, FГјrstendiener—Staatsbeamte—BГјrger: AmtsfГјhrung und Lebenswelt der Ortsbeamten in niederhessischen KleinstГ¤dten 1750–1830 (GГ¶ttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1999), 299–303. 14. In 1822, after the congress of the Holy Alliance in Verona, Alexander I followed Metternich’s example and ordered the dissolution of Masonic lodges in the Russian Empire. See Smith, Working the Rough Stone, as well as the famous literary depiction of Russian Freemasonry in the Napoleonic period in Leo Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace (1868–69). In the United States, the Anti-Masonic Party formed in the 1820s, which advocated the persecution of Freemasons because of their elitist corruption of

Republicanism and Christian piety. Lodge life basically ceased to exist and recovered only the 1850s and 1860s. See P. Goodman, Towards a Christian Republic: Antimasonry and the Great Transition in New England, 1826–1836 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). 15. E. Lennhoff and O. Posner, Internationales Freimaurerlexikon (Zurich, 1932), 671. 16. See, for example, G. KrГјger, †. . . grГјndeten auch unsere Freiheit’: SpГ¤taufklГ¤rung, Freimaurerei, preuГџisch-deutsche Reform, der Kampf Theodor von Page 308 →SchГ¶ns gegen die Reaktion (Hamburg: BauhГјtten, 1978). 17. W. J. v. Bebber, “Zur Logenstatistik,” Bh. 30 (1887): 29. 18. Compare the table in S.-L. Hoffmann, Die Politik der Geselligkeit: Freimaurerlogen in der deutschen BГјrgergesellschaft, 1840–1918 (GГ¶ttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2000), 350–52. 19. S. Goltermann, KГ¶rper der Nation: Habitusformierung und die Politik des Turnens 1860–1890 (GГ¶ttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1998), 62. 20. GStA Berlin, Logen, 5.2. L 23: Freimaurerklub “MaГ§onia,” Leipzig, no. 35: Protokollbuch der vorgetragenen Reden, 1851–53, Vortrag “Turnerei—Maurerei,” 5 June 1851, 99. 21. Meissner, “Ueber die hohe Bedeutung der BГјrgschaft und der Ballotage im Freimaurerbunde,” Bundesblatt 18 (1860): 37. 22. “Gedanken Гјber die Freimaurerei, ihren politischen EinfluГџ und ihre ZuverlГ¤ssigkeit; und freimaurerische Literatur der letzten drei Jahre,” Literarisches Conversations-Blatte (1823), no. 255: 899. 23. Sechs Stimmen Гјber Geheime Gesellschaften und Freimaurerei von Joh. Struve, Ernst Moritz Arndt, Adolph Freiherr von Knigge, Heinr. Steffens, Joh. Fr. Meyer, J.A. FeГџler (Solothurn, 1824), 82, 85, 91. 24. Ibid., 57–58. 25. F. Schlegel, Philosophie der Geschichte, vol. 2 (Vienna, 1829): 290ff., quoted in Hardtwig, Genossenschaft, Sekte, Verein in Deutschland, 358. 26. See, for example, the anti-Masonic pamphlet by a former member of the Apollo lodge in Leipzig, F. W. Lindner, Mac-Benac, Er lebet im Sohne, oder das Positive der Freimaurerei (Leipzig, 1818). 27. T. G. v. H[ippel], Gelegenheitsworte in verschiedenen Freimaurer-Logen gesprochen (Bromberg, 1842), 112. 28. “Theilnahme der Staatsdiener an dem Maurerbunde,” Allgemeiner Anzeiger und Nationalzeitung der Deutschen 102 (1841): 3822–25, 3974–76, 4267–68, 4508–10. 29. On the politicization of associational life in the VormГ¤rz period see W. Hardtwig, “Strukturmerkmale und Entwicklungstendenzen des Vereinswesens in Deutschland 1789–1848,” in Vereinswesen, ed. Dann, 26ff. 30. Freimaurerorden in seiner gegenwГ¤rtigen Nichtigkeit, 26. 31. Ibid., 25. 32. “Über Freimaurerei,” Janus. JahrbГјcher deutscher Gesinnung, Bildung und That 1 (1846): 114. 33. Ibid., 401. 34. Ibid., 395–96. 35. R. R. Fischer, “Am silbernen Jubelfeste der Loge Apollo zu Leipzig (1849),” Bh. 22 (1879): 69–73. 36. See, in much greater detail, the numbers, tables, and explanations in Hoffmann, Politik der Geselligkeit, 354–55. 37. In most cases lodge members were expelled for financial reasons. See, for example, GStA Berlin, Logen, 5.2. B 141, Vereinigte Loge, Breslau, no. 38: Protokoll Гјber Aufnahme und Ausscheiden von Logenmitgliedern, 1844–1884. 38. FZ 1 (1847): 237ff.; similar for Frankfurt: Demeter, Loge zur Einigkeit, 7. 39. Musicians did not have to pay the high admission dues if they performed Page 309 →regularly as “Musical Brothers” in the lodge. 40. “Beitrag zur maurerischen Statistik,” FZ 1 (1847): 339–42. 41. The Minerva in Leipzig belonged to the few lodges outside the Prussian Grand Lodges that had Scottish rite degrees. 42. See W. Kaschuba, “Zwischen Deutscher Nation und Deutscher Provinz: Politische Horizonte und

soziale Milieus im frГјhen Liberalismus,” in Liberalismus, ed. Langewiesche, 91. 43. CStA Moscow, Fond 1412–1, no. 5002 (Freimaurerloge “Friedrich zum goldenen Zepter,” Breslau): Conferenz-Protocolle der Meisterschaft 1844–1850, 20 February 1844, 10–11. 44. L. Bechstein, “Das Maurerthum eine Schutzmauer gegen den Materialismus unserer Zeit,” AstrГ¤a 21 (1859–60): 6. 45. Goltermann, KГ¶rper der Nation, 63. 46. GStA Berlin, Logen, 5.2. L 24, Freimaurerloge “Minerva zu den drei Palmen,” Leipzig, no. 191: A. Clarus, “RГјckblick auf die ZugehГ¶rigkeit der Г„rztefamilie Clarus in Leipzig zur Loge Minerva z. d. 3 Palmen, 1808–1918,” unpublished manuscript (Leipzig, 1918). 47. A. Mahlmann, Liederbuch der Freimaurer-Loge Minerva zu den drei Palmen in Leipzig (Leipzig, 1822). 48. See chap. 5, this vol. 49. GStA Berlin, Logen, 5.2. L 17 (Apollo), no. 203, Personalakte E.A. Meissner. 50. See, for example, [K. Pilz], “Die Maurerbraut: Eine ErzГ¤hlung aus dem Leben,” FZ 15 (1861), suppl. 51. While in Frankfurt during the eighteenth century “exclusive circles had to a certain extent regarded it as good form to belong to a lodge,” during the VormГ¤rz period it was “more the solid middle class that was gradually admitted to them . . . Midlevel businessmen, teachers, craftsmen, midlevel civil servants were no longer excluded. Status differences gradually disappeared.” B. Reges, Geschichte der Loge zur Einigkeit zu Frankfurt a.M. 1742–1892 (Frankfurt, 1892), 37, quoted in Roth, Stadt und BГјrgertum, 318–19. 52. See P. Franke, “Freimaurer in Prenzlau—Zur Geschichte der Loge вЂZur Wahrheit’ 1796–1935,” Mitt. des UckermГ¤rkischen Geschichtsvereins (1995), no. 4: 37. 53. “Aus dem Logenleben SГјddeutschlands,” FZ 12 (1858): 158–59. 54. T. Weichel, Die BГјrger von Wiesbaden: Von der Landstadt zur вЂWeltkurstadt,’ 1780–1914 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1997), 248ff. 55. H. W. Hahn, AltstГ¤ndisches BГјrgertum zwischen Beharrung und Wandel: Die Reichsstadt Wetzlar 1689–1870 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1991), 443–44. 56. K. Schambach, StadtbГјrgertum und industrieller Umbruch, Dortmund 1780–1870 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1996), 183. 57. GStA Berlin, Logen, 5.2. L 17 (Apollo), no. 84: ZurГјckgewiesene AufnahmeantrГ¤ge 1850–1861. 58. Ibid. 59. GStA Berlin, 5.2. L 17 (Apollo), Personalakten, no. 181. 60. Quoted in M. MГјller, Eigenes und fremdes Гјber meine geistige ThГ¤tigkeit, dargestellt fГјr Freunde und alle diejenigen, welche derartiges interessiert (Pforzheim, 1892).Page 310 → 61. Stieglitz, Geschichte der Freimaurerloge Minerva zu den drei Palmen, 65–66. 62. [H. Klencke], Die Gegenwart und Zukunft der Freimaurerei in Deutschland: Offener Brief zur Warnung und Rettung von einem Staatsmanne und ehemaligen Logenbeamten (Leipzig, 1854), 81, 90. 63. “VerzeichniГџ der Stadtverordneten,” in AdreГџbuch fГјr die Stadt Leipzig (Leipzig, 1840), 107–8. 64. “Stadtverordnete,” in AdreГџbuch fГјr die Stadt Breslau (Breslau, 1839), 505–6. 65. In Leipzig, for example, with the establishment of the famous Gewandhausorchesters and the elitist club Harmonie. See Beachy, “Club Culture and Social Authority.” 66. Blackbourn, “Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,” 226. 67. M. Bakunin, “Lettres aux internationaux du Jura (1869),” in Oeuvres, vol. 1 (2d ed., Paris, 1895), 210, quoted in P. Friedemann and L. HГ¶lscher, “Internationale, International, Internationalismus,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, ed. O. Brunner et al., vol. 3 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1982), 385. 68. As Riehl argued, only by estranging the German term BГјrgertum by translating it into the French bourgeoisie was it possible to engage “without embarrassment” in a linguistic-political campaign against the middle class in Germany. Riehl, Natural History, 209. See also W. Steinmetz,”Die schwierige Selbstbehauptung des deutschen BГјrgertums,” in Das 19. Jahrhundert: Sprachgeschichtliche Wurzeln des heutigen Deutsch, ed. R. Wimmer (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1991), 33; and, in comparative perspective, Koselleck et al., “BГјrgerliche Welten.”

69. R. R. Fischer, “DaГџ das menschliche Geschlecht eine Bruderkette werde!,” FZ 1 (1847): 10–11. 70. Vortrag, gehalten vom Br. KnГјttell . . . in der zur Feier der Anwesenheit des Hochw. NationalGroГџmeisters Br. O’Etzel angesetzten Loge, Breslau, 4 September 1843, CStA Moscow, Fond 1412–1, no. 5050 (Zepter): Reden, vol. 4, 1827–62, 135. 71. See especially H. Greive, “Religious Dissent and Tolerance in the 1840s,” in Revolution and Evolution: 1848 in German-Jewish History, ed. W. E. Mosse (TГјbingen: Mohr, 1981), 337–52; and D. Herzog, “Anti-Judaism in Intra-Christian Conflicts: Catholics and Liberals in Baden in the 1840s,” Central European History 27 (1994): 267–81; and, more generally, idem, Intimacy and Exclusion. 72. Trauerfestrede von Ober-Redner Foerster, in Denkmal dankbarer, unvergaenglicher, bruederlicher Liebe den Manen des Hochwuerdigen Ferdinand Schiller I. dargebracht von der St. Joh. Loge Friedrich zum goldenen Zepter (Breslau, 1839), 30, 34. 73. “Wer ist ein freier Maurer?” Latomia 9 (1847): 255. 74. “Der Freimaurerbund und die kirchlichen Wirren,” Latomia 6 (1845): 92–95. 75. Latomia 9 (1847): 99. See also the pamphlet by the lodge activist J. G. Findel, Der Deutschkatholizismus in Sachsen: Ein Menetekel fГјr das deutsche BГјrgertum (Leipzig, 1895). 76. A. W. Sellin, “Die Mitglieder der Logen nach Berufsarten,” Bundesblatt 10 (1896): 20.Page 311 → 77. “Neues Beispiel von Intoleranz,” Latomia 19 (1860): 139–40. A similar case was reported in 1871 from Pforzheim. See Bayreuther Tageblatt, 3 July 1871. 78. See the list of five hundred Catholic clergymen who were German Freemasons in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in R. Taute, Die katholische Geistlichkeit und die Freimaurerei (Berlin, 1909). 79. “Freimaurerei und Loge in Trier,” Kurtriersches Jahrbuch 7 (1967): 77–78. 80. T. Mergel, Zwischen Klasse und Konfession: Katholisches BГјrgertum im Rheinland 1794–1914 (GГ¶ttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1994), 61–62. 81. The following list indicates the proportions of new members of the Balduin Lodge by confession. 82. Mergel, Zwischen Klasse und Konfession, 62. 83. Fundamental for the themes addressed here are Jacob Katz’s studies Jews and Freemasons and “The Fight for Admission to Masonic Lodges,” Yearbook of the Leo Baeck Institute 9 (1966): 129–71. Katz did not, however, have access to the extensive lodge archives housed in the Geheimes Staatsarchiv PreuГџischer Kulturbesitz Berlin-Dahlem (GStA) and the Central State Archives in Moscow (CStA), upon which the following account is based. These archives have only recently become open to the public. 84. F. Fuchs, “Die Loge Balduin zur Linde in Leipzig in ihrer Stellung zur Frage Гјber die Aufnahme der Juden in den Freimaurerbund,” R. 10 (1883): 65. 85. See, for example, GStA Berlin, Logen, 5.2. B 130, Provinzialloge von Schlesien, Breslau, no. 9: Bestimmungen Гјber die Nichtaufnahme von Juden, 1815–79, Brief von Louis Lazarus, Moritz Perez und im Nahmen der Abwesenden Br; Sina Heymann, B. J. Badstein, Marcus Ehrlich, Abraham Salomon, Arnold LГјschwitz an den LandesgroГџmeister (der GroГџen Landesloge), Breslau, 25 January 1815. 86. H.-J. Neubauer, Judenfiguren: Drama und Theater im frГјhen 19. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt: Campus, 1994). 87. Quoted in D. Langewiesche, “Liberalismus und Judenemanzipation im 19. Jahrhundert,” in Juden in Deutschland: Emanzipation, Integration, Verfolgung und Vernichtung, ed. P. Freimark (Hamburg: Christians, 1991), 152. 88. FZ 1 (1847): 56; Herzog, Intimacy and Exclusion, 171; J. Carlebach, “The Forgotten Connection: Women and Jews in the Conflict between Enlightenment and Romanticism,” Yearbook of the Leo Baeck Institute 24 (1979): 107–38; U. Frevert, “Die Innenwelt der AuГџenwelt: ModernitГ¤tserfahrungen von Frauen zwischen Gleichheit und Differenz,” in Deutsche Juden und die Moderne, ed. S. Volkov (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1994), 75–94.Page 312 → 89. H. L. Albanus, KurzgefaГџte Charakteristik der heutigen Israeliten und ihrer WГјrdigung zur Freymaurerey. Ein Beytrag zur Geschichte des Tages (Leipzig, 1818), 8. 90. GStA Berlin, 5.2. L 18 Leipzig, Freimaurerloge Balduin zur Linde, no. 54: Drucksachen der Loge 1778–1876, Rundschreiben (1829), 54.

91. [K. Klop], Votum Гјber die Zulassung der Juden zum Maurerbund. Abgegeben in der vollkommenen und gerechten St.-Johannis-Loge zur Ceder im Orient von Hannover (Hannover, 1838), 17ff.; for a liberal reply see W. Blumenhagen, Wo ist der Platz der Freimaurerei in der Menschheit? Eine Beleuchtung . . . Гјber die Zulassung der Israeliten zum Maurerbund (Hannover, 1838). 92. See S. Aschheim, “вЂThe Jew Within’: The Myth of вЂJudaization’ in Germany,” in The Jewish Response to German Culture, ed. J. Reinharz and W. Schatzberg (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1985), 212–41. 93. “Über Freimaurerei,” Janus. JahrbГјcher deutscher Gesinnung, Bildung und That 1 (1846): 115. 94. [G. KloГџ], “Stellung der Freimaurerei zu den Hauptfragen unserer Zeit,” Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift 4 (1841): 121. 95. Langewiesche, “Liberalismus und Judenemanzipation.” See also Herzog, Intimacy and Exclusion, 82–83: “The very terms in which liberals advocated emancipation contributed to the persistence of anti-Jewish sentiment throughout the supposedly liberalizing period. Liberalism itself was part of the problem. . . . It was not, then, the impotence of liberalism in Germany that caused difficulties for those who were disenfranchised, but rather liberalism’s own fundamental duality: its simultaneous tolerance and intolerance—the elastic, always potentially inclusive aspects, and the continually contested and renegotiated exclusions which characterized it as well.” 96. FZ 1 (1847): 56. 97. Ibid., 116. 98. For example, [R. R. Fischer], “Christenthum und Freimaurerei. Ein Vortrag in der Loge Apollo,” Die Maurerhalle 4 (1845): 408–24; M. Brenner, “вЂGott schГјtze uns vor unseren Freunden’: Zur Ambivalenz des Philosemitismus im Kaiserreich,” Jahrbuch fГјr Antisemitismusforschung 2 (1993): 178. 99. Between 1806 and 1813 the Grand Orient de France also founded branch or daughter lodges in the German-speaking region that accepted Jewish members. These included the “l’Etoile ansГ©atique” lodge founded in 1812–13 in OsnabrГјck, of which Karl Marx’s father Heinrich was a member. Most of these lodges closed after the withdrawal of the French, and Jewish Freemasons were generally denied entry to the regular German lodges. See N. Sandmann, “FranzГ¶sische Freimaurerlogen in OsnabrГјck wГ¤hrend der napoleonischen Annexion,” OsnabrГјcker Mitt. 98 (1993): 127–59. 100. See D. Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780–1840 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). 101. G. Salomon, “Sind alle Logen im deutschen Vaterlande emancipiert,” in his Stimmen aus Osten. Eine Sammlung Reden und Betrachtungen Maurerischen Inhalts (Hamburg, 1845), 115.Page 313 → 102. See Katz, Jews and Freemasons, 82ff.; A. Hopp, JГјdisches BГјrgertum in Frankfurt am Main im 19. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1997), 123–34; Roth, Stadt und BГјrgertum, 317ff. 103. Fuchs, “Aufnahme der Juden in den Freimaurerbund,” 55ff. 104. GStA Berlin, Logen, 5.2. L 17 (Apollo), no. 81 Zulassung des jГјdischen Freimaurers Moses Mendel als besuchender Bruder 1810–1811; BeschluГџ der Meisterloge, 14 September 1810. 105. GStA Berlin 5.2. L 18 (Balduin), no. 287: AuszГјge aus den Protokollen des Engbundes u. Abschriften von Briefen Гјber die Zulassung von Juden, 1812–13. AufГјhrungen des Deputierten Meisters vom Stuhl, Carl August Gottlieb Samuels. 106. E. Meissner and A. Wenck, Geschichte der g. u. v. St. Johannis-Loge Apollo im Orient Leipzig (Leipzig, 1905), 33–34. 107. See, for example, [J. F.] Siemers, Die maurerische Emancipation der Juden in Hamburg, in HZC (1847), no. 125: 117–58. 108. FZ 1 (1847): 231. 109. “Freimaurer,” in VolkstГјmliches Handbuch der Staatswissenschaften und Politik, ed. R. Blum, vol. 1 (Leipzig, 1848), 370. 110. Quoted in L. HГ¶lscher, Г–ffentlichkeit und Geheimnis: Eine begriffsgeschichtliche Untersuchung zur Entstehung der Г–ffentlichkeit in der frГјhen Neuzeit (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1979), 128. 111. “Die Freimaurerei in Deutschland,” Die Grenzboten 20 (1850): 248.

112. [J. K. L.] Giessler, “Einleitende Worte zu der Johannisfeier im Jahre 1848 in der Loge August zum goldenen Zirkel im Orient zu GГ¶ttingen,” AstrГ¤a 14 (1849): 14–15. 113. Ibid. 114. (A. W. E. T. Henschel), Die Forderungen der Gegenwart an die Freymaurerey: Ein Vortrag, geh. bei der Uebernahme des Hammers in der Loge Friedrich z. gold. Scepter (Breslau, 1849), 6ff. 115. “Freiheit, Gleichheit, BrГјderlichkeit,” Latomia 12 (1848): 226. 116. “Bauen die Maurer noch an Г¤chter Freiheit?” FZ 2 (1849): 105. 117. This has been a standard interpretation of the German BГјrgertum since the VormГ¤rz period. Compare, for example, the critique by Riehl: “Though he may wax eloquent in verse about cosmopolitanism and the toppling of all class barriers for the sake of unadorned humanity, the German burgher is impervious to any sort of political or social enthusiasm that forces itself on him in the form of systems and dogmas. The arch-reactionary philistine who in fact has absolutely no use for liberty or equality, will applaud until his hands are raw when Don Juan sings, вЂHere there is no class, no name,’ and the chorus shouts in joyfully resounding trumpet tones, вЂLong live freedom.’” Riehl, Natural History, 212. 118. Harrison, Bourgeois Citizen, 38. 119. [A. W. E. T.] H[enschel], Das VerhГ¤ltniГџ der Freimaurerei zur Politik (Breslau, 1848), 11. 120. Ibid., 9–10. 121. Ibid., 14–15. 122. “Die VerbrГјderung des Freimaurers mit der Menschheit,” BruderblГ¤tter fГјr Page 314 →Freimaurer 12 (1848): 78. 123. See G. Siegert, “Blum als Freimaurer,” R. 34 (1907): 90–94. 124. Among the Freemasons who belonged to the Frankfurt Parliament were: the short-term President GrГ¤vell (Frankfurt-Oder), of the Extreme Right: Ernst Decke (LГјbeck), Prince Felix von Lichnowsky (Ratibor), lynched in September 1848 by the insurgents, Frank Scholz (Neisse); of the Right: Carl RГ¤ttig (Potsdam), Carl von Scheuchenstuel (Loeben-Steiermark), von Wegern (Lyk, Province Prussia), Wernich (Elbing); of the Right Centre: Ernst Kunth (Bunzlau), Laudien (KГ¶nigsberg), Carl RГ¶denbeck (GrГјnberg), Anton Schauss (MГјnchen), Friedrich Carl Stieber (Bautzen); of the Left Centre: Ambrosch (Breslau), Minister J. H. Detmold (Hannover), Carl Munchen (Luxemburg), Vice-President Gabriel Riesser (Hamburg), Schwetschke (Halle); of the Left: Gottlieb Wilhelm Freudentheil (Stade), Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Reden (Berlin), Jakob Venedey (Cologne), Ernst Vogel (Guben), F. Wigard (Dresden); of the Extreme Left: Robert Blum (Leipzig), Guido Pattay (Graz). See Reges, “Maurer-Erinnerungen,” Bh. 23 (1880): 85–86. 125. FГјГџlein, “Die Stellung des Maurers in der politischen Bewegung der Zeit,” AstrГ¤a 14 (1849): 283–92. 126. R. R. Fischer, “Am silbernen Jubelfeste der Loge Apollo zu Leipzig,” FZ 3 (1849): 111–17; “Nachtrag zu der beim silbernen Jubelfeste der Loge Apollo zu Leipzig gehaltenen Rede,” FZ 3 (1849): 129–33; “Neuer Beitrag zur Geschichte seiner Jubelfestrede,” FZ 3 (1849): 193–207. 127. O. Marbach, “Die Freimaurerei und die Revolution (1849),” in Arbeiten am rauhen Stein (Leipzig, 1862), 1–10. 128. See SHStA Dresden, Ministerium des Innern, no. 11172: Freimaurerangelegenheiten, vol. 1: 1851–52, Schreiben der VorstГ¤nde der Dresdener Freimaurerlogen an die Kgl. Kreisdirektion, Dresden, 31 April 1852, 84. 129. “Meine Ansicht zu Br. Fischer’s Jubelfest-Vortrag in der Loge Apollo,” FZ 3 (1849): 162. 130. A. Beschoren, “Festrede, in der Loge zu den 3 Degen in Halle zu Ehren der Geburt Friedrich Wilhelm IV. den 20. Okt. 1848 gehalten,” FZ 2 (1848): 364, 366. 131. “Politik in der Loge,” FZ 3 (1849): 98. 132. GStA Berlin, Logen, 5.2. L 23 (MaГ§onia), no. 10: Protokolle, 1848, 3. 133. Ibid., 4. Also see “Notizen Гјber den Vortragsklub вЂMaГ§onia’ im Or. Leipzig und sein 5jГ¤hriges Stiftungsfest am 22. Mai 1853,” FZ 7 (1853): 217–19; W. Smitt, “Der Maurerclub Masonia in Leipzig,” FZ 21 (1867): 409–11. 134. Meissner and Wenck, St. Johannis-Loge Apollo, 40; GStA Berlin, 5.2. L 18 (Balduin), no. 46: Protokolle der Direktorialversammlungen, 1848–52, Direktorials-Versammlung, 13 June 1848.

135. The Engbund was founded around 1800 by Friedrich Ludwig SchrГ¶der to improve the research on Freemasonry and to abolish the mysticism of the Scottish rite degrees. The headquarters in Hamburg was in close contact by correspondence with its local branches like the “Engbund” Leipzig. The EngbГјnde were dissolved in 1868 by the Grand Lodges. See Lennhoff and Posner, Internationales Freimaurerlexikon, 419–20. 136. GStA Berlin, Logen, 5.2. L 23 (MaГ§onia), no. 10: Protokolle, 1848, 14, 16, Page 315 →28. 137. GStA Berlin, Logen, 5.2. L 23 (MaГ§onia), no. 35: Protokollbuch der vorgetragenen Reden, 1851–53, Vortrag von Br. Foedisch, 30 January 1851. 138. GStA Berlin, Logen, 5.2. L 18 (Balduin), no. 46: Protokolle der Direktorialversammlungen, 1848–52, Direktorials-Versammlung, 13 March 1849. 139. Fuchs, “Aufnahme der Juden in den Freimaurerbund,” 66. 140. Freimaurerorden in seiner gegenwГ¤rtigen Nichtigkeit, 17. 141. See GStA Berlin, Logen, 5.2. B 130 (Provinzialloge), no. 76: Antrag von 12 Mitgliedern der drei Vereinigten Logen in Breslau auf Reformierung, 1848–49; StA Breslau, OberprГ¤sidium Breslau, no. 345: Acta betr. die Freimaurerloge “Kosmos” 1849–1851; [B. Goedecke], Festschrift zur Feier des 150jГ¤hrigen Bestehens der Loge Friedrich zum goldenen Zepter im Orient zu Breslau 1776–1926 (Breslau, 1926), 77ff. Similarly, see Bericht, gutachtlicher, Гјber Reformen im Logenwesen. Abgefasst von den durch das Meistercollogium der Loge Friedrich August z.d. 3 Zirkeln in Zittau hierzu ausgewГ¤hlten BrГјdern: Wilh. Jahn, Friedr. KГјchenmeister, Edmund Oberreit (Zittau, 1849). 142. CStA Moscow, Fond 1412–1, no. 5002 (Zepter): Conferenz-Protocolle der Meisterschaft 1844–50, Protokoll 5 May 1849. 143. “Die Reformbewegungen im Freimaurerbunde. Ein Wort zur gegenseitigen VerstГ¤ndigung,” AstrГ¤a 14 (1849): 56ff. 144. CStA Moscow, Fond 1412–1, no. 5005 (Zepter): Arbeitsprotokolle des I. Grades 1846–50, 65. 145. CStA Moscow, Fond 1412–1, no. 5053 (Zepter): Protokolle der Beamtenkonferenz 1844–77, 6ff. 146. See CStA Moscow, Fond 1412–1, no. 5002 (Zepter): Conferenz-Protocolle der Meisterschaft 1844–50. 147. StA Breslau, OberprГ¤sidium Breslau, no. 345: Acta betr. die Freimaurerloge “Kosmos” 1849–1851, Das PolizeiprГ¤sidium Breslau an den Kgl. Ober-PrГ¤sidenten Herrn v. Schleinitz, den 10. Dezember 1849, betr. die hiesige neu konstituierte Gesellschaft “Kosmos.” 148. See “Erstes Rundschreiben der eklektischen St. Johannis Loge Kosmos in Breslau,” FZ 4 (1850): 377–79. 149. See Katz, Jews and Freemasons, 129ff. Apparently, we find similar cases in other Prussian cities. Several members of the lodge Todtenkopf und PhГ¶nix in KГ¶nigsberg, for example, who belonged “to the political and religious opposition,” founded a new lodge that accepted Jewish members. The lodge was dissolved by the Grand Lodge shortly afterward. Berlin, Bestand Ministerium des Innern, Rep. 77, Tit. 267, no. 1, Acta betr. die hinsichtlich der Freimaurer Gesellschaften ergangenen Gesetze und Bestimmungen, vol. 2, 1840–1868, Bericht des Polizei-PrГ¤sidiums zu KГ¶nigsberg an den OberPrГ¤sidenten der KГ¶nigl. Provinz PreuГџen Eichmann, die GrГјndung einer neuen Loge hierselbst betreffend, 22 December 1852. 150. GStA Berlin, Logen, 5.2. B 130 (Provinzialloge), no. 9: Bestimmungen Гјber die Nichtaufnahme von Juden, 1815–79, Brief von Kampmann an Busch, Breslau, 15 November 1847. 151. Compare G. Freytag, “Die Juden in Breslau,” Die Grenzboten 1849, no. 30, 145.Page 316 → 152. Kampmann kept close contact with the Grand Master of “Zu den drei Weltkugeln” in Berlin, von Selasinsky, who informed the crown prince of the Masonic reform movement. For his loyalty, Kampmann enjoyed the protection of the government in his career. GStA Berlin, Logen, 5.2. B 130 (Provinzialloge), no. 76, Brief von v. Selasinsky an Kampmann, Berlin, 14 June 1852. 153. C. Wiebe, Die Grosse Loge von Hamburg und ihre VorlГ¤ufer (Hamburg, 1905), 266–67. 154. StA Breslau, OberprГ¤sidium Breslau, no. 345: Acta betr. die Freimaurerloge “Kosmos” 1849–1851, Das PolizeiprГ¤sidium von Breslau an den Kgl. Ober-PrГ¤sidenten Herrn v. Schleinitz, Breslau, 23 December 1851. 155. The unusual lodge practice of “visiting brothers” will be examined in greater detail later in the book.

156. GStA Berlin, Logen, 5.2. L 17 (Apollo), 1.2.6. Personalakten, no. 151. 157. “Bei der Affiliation eines, seines Glaubens halber von seiner Loge dimittirten Bruders in der Loge Apollo zu Leipzig am 9. Mai 1853,” FZ 7 (1853): 183. 158. J. G. Findel, Geschichte der Freimaurerei von der Zeit ihres Entstehens bis auf die Gegenwart (Leipzig, 1893), 293. 159. GStA Berlin, Logen, 5.1.4: Grosse National-Mutterloge zu den 3 Weltkugeln in Berlin, no. 7296: Unmittelbarer Schriftwechsel mit dem Protektor der altpreuГџ. GroГџlogen Гјber ihre polit. LoyalitГ¤t, vol. 1, 1845–64, Protokoll-Auszug der Quartal-Conferenz, Berlin, 4 December 1851. 160. GStA Berlin, Logen, 5.2. B 130 (Provinzialloge), no. 76: Antrag von 12 Mitgliedern der drei Vereinigten Logen in Breslau auf Reformierung, 1848–49, Schreiben der Vereinigte Loge an die Loge Friedr. z. gold. Zept., Breslau, 25 July 1855. See also Peuckert, “Die Loge вЂKosmos’ in Breslau, ” SL 21 (1901): 173. 161. See Steinmetz, “Selbstbehauptung des deutschen BГјrgertums,” 27. 162. GStA Berlin, Bestand Ministerium des Innern, Rep. 77, Tit. 267, no. 13, Acta, betr. die politischen Umtriebe in dem Freimaurer-Orden 1849, anon. Brief (von Carl Didler), n.D. (February 1849). Later compiled in K. Didler, Freimaurer-Denkschrift Гјber die politische Wirksamkeit des Freimaurer-Bundes als der unter verschiedenen Namen und Formen unter uns im Finstern schleichenden Propaganda zum Sturz des legitimen Throne und des politischen Christenthums (Berlin, 1864–67); See Katz, Jews and Freemasons, 147–59. Conspiracy theories targeting Jews or Freemasons emerged around 1800. For example, A. Barruel, MГ©moirs pour servir Г l’histoire du jacobinisme (Hamburg, 1800). On Barruel see A. Hofman, “Opinion, Illusion, and the Illusion of Opinion: Barruel’s Theory of Conspiracy, ” Eighteenth-Century Studies 27 (1993): 27–60. 163. GStA Berlin, Bestand Ministerium des Innern, Rep. 77, Tit. 267, no. 1, Acta betr. die hinsichtlich der Freimaurer Gesellschaften ergangenen Gesetze und Bestimmungen, vol. 2, 1840–68, Der Schulvorsteher Didler und dessen Anklage gegen die Freimaurerei betreffend, 80–82. 164. GStA Berlin, Bestand Ministerium des Innern, Rep. 77, Tit. 267, no. 1, Acta betr. die hinsichtlich der Freimaurer Gesellschaften ergangenen Gesetze und Bestimmungen, vol. 2, 1840–68, Schreiben des PolizeiprГ¤sidenten von Berlin an den Innenminster Ritter v. Westphalen, Berlin, 1 November 1851; 6 March 1852. 165. J. C. Bluntschli, “Freimaurer,” in Deutsches Staats-WГ¶rterbuch, ed. J. C. Bluntschli and K. Brater, vol. 3 (Stuttgart, 1858), 745–55; “Das VerhГ¤ltnis der Page 317 →Maurerei zu Staat und Kirche,” in VortrГ¤ge, gehalten bei der Stiftung der Schweizerischen Logenvereins (Zurich, 1844), 3–14. 166. Ibid., 6. 167. Ibid., 8. 168. Ibid., 12–13. 169. Bluntschli, “Freimaurer,” 754–55. 170. [K. L. Lichhorn], Die Tendenz und der wahre Standpunkt der Freimaurerei den neuesten Angriffen gegenГјber. Eine Rede zur Feier des Geburtsfestes Sr. MajestГ¤t des KГ¶nigs von Preussen Friedrich Wilhelm des Vierten, am 15. October 1854 in der Provinzial-Grossloge von Schlesien genannt Royal York zur Freundschaft (Breslau, 1854), 11–12. 171. H. Schletter, “Freimaurerei im VerhГ¤ltniГџ zu Staat und Gesellschaft,” in Staats-Lexikon, ed. Rotteck and Welcker, vol. 5 (3d ed., 1861), 680. 172. “Maurer, Licht und Welt,” Latomia 3 (1843): 176, 180. 173. Lodge speech by the above-mentioned Archdeacon in Leipzig R. R. Fischer, “Sorge fГјr’s Vaterland,” FZ 2 (1848): 333. 174. Prinz Wilhelm von PreuГџen an Charlotte: Briefe 1817–1860, ed. K.-H. BГ¶rner (Berlin: Akademie, 1993), 323–24. 175. J. A. Fitzner, Kaiser Wilhelm I. als Freimaurer in Wort und That (Hannover, 1897), 6. 176. Ibid., 48–49. 177. GStA Berlin, Logen, 5.1.4 (Zu den 3 Weltkugeln), no. 7296: Unmittelbarer Schriftwechsel mit dem Protektor der altpreuГџ. GroГџlogen Гјber ihre politische LoyalitГ¤t, vol. 1, 1845–64, Referat Гјber die am 4ten Dezember stattgehabte Audienz bei Sr. MajestГ¤t dem KГ¶nige, Seitens der drei GroГџ-Meister

der drei PreuГџischen GroГџ-Logen, Behufs Ueberreichung eines Adresse in Folge der KrГ¶nung Sr. MajestГ¤t, Berlin, 19 December 1861. 178. Fitzner, Kaiser Wilhelm I. als Freimaurer, 62. 179. Quoted in A. Wolfstieg, “FГјrst Bismarck und die Freimaurer,” ArS 7 (1910): 390. 180. GStA Berlin, Bestand Ministerium des Innern, Rep. 77, Tit. 859, no. 13: Kabinetts-Order an den Minister des Inneren vom 18 August 1857, betreffend den Zutritt von Nichtchristen in den Freimaurerlogen, VerhГ¤ltnis der PreuГџischen MaГ§onnerie zum Christenthum. The officers of the Grand Lodge followed Wilhelm in this. Graf Henckel v. Donnersmarck, who headed the GroГџe Landesloge and was crucial in leading Wilhelm 1840 into this grand lodge, regarded “even in the visiting admission of Jewish Freemasons a violation of the principles of the order.” Shortly before his death in 1849 he declared he would “resign immediately if ever external force brings about the admission of Jews into our lodges.” [C. F.] v. Selasinsky, “Vortrag am 3ten Sept. 1849 bei der Trauerfeier fГјr den . . . Ordensmeister Graf Henckel v. Donnersmarck,” in Zwei VortrГ¤ge, geh. im groГџen Ordenskapitel der GroГџen Landeslogen von Deutschland (Berlin, 1849), 24. 181. GStA Berlin, Bestand Ministerium des Innern, Rep. 77, Tit. 343 A, no. 67, Acta betr. die FreimaurerOrden, 1843–1858, Nachweisung von den dem Freimaurerorden angehГ¶rigen Beamten (fГјr das Jahr 1852), 33. 182. GStA Berlin, Bestand Ministerium des Innern, Rep. 77, Tit. 343 A, no. 67, Acta betr. die FreimaurerOrden, 1843–1858, Brief des Kronprinzen an den KГ¶nig, Page 318 →Berlin, 30 January 1855, 164–65. 183. DenkwГјrdigkeiten aus dem Leben Leopold von Gerlachs, vol. 2 (Berlin, 1892), 85–86. 184. Evangelische Kirchen-Zeitung, 11 March 1854, no. 20. 185. Ibid. 186. [B. Bauer], “Freimaurerei,” in Staats- und Gesellschaftslexikon, ed. H. Wagener, vol. 7 (Berlin, 1861), 682ff. 187. B. Bauer, Freimaurer, Jesuiten und Illuminaten in ihrem geschichtlichen Zusammenhang (Berlin, 1863), 4. 188. Ibid., 12–13, 18. 189. Even former Freemasons like the theologian Georg Eduard Steitz blamed the lodges in the 1850s for their “one-sided humanitarianism,” which eventually will make the Church “completely superfluous” for Freemasons. G. E. Steitz, “Freimaurer und Freimaurerei,” in Real-EncyclopГ¤die fГјr protestantische Theologie und Kirche, ed. J. J. Herzog, vol. 4 (Hamburg, 1855), 587, 589. But compare ten years earlier, when still a Freemason: G. E. Steitz, “HumanitГ¤t, Religion und Christentum,” Archiv fГјr Freimaurerei 3, no. 2 (1845–46): 25–55. 190. Evangelische Kirchen-Zeitung, 8 January 1853, no. 3. 191. Evangelische Kirchen-Zeitung, 11 March 1854, no. 20. For the evolving debate, see C. F. Selasinsky, Freimaurerei und Christentum: Letztes Wort Гјber die Angriffe des Prof. Hengstenberg gegen den Freimaurer-Orden vom Verfasser der “Beleuchtung der Angriffe der Evangel. Kirchenzeitung u.s.w.” (Berlin, 1854); K. T. A. Wernicke, Beleuchtung der Angriffe der Evang. Kirchenzeitung gegen den Freimaurer-Orden und den Eintritt evangelischer Geistliche in denselben von einem Freimaurer (Berlin, 1854); H. W. Sausse, Die Freimaurerei und Prof. Hengstenberg in Berlin: Offene Antwort auf dessen Angriffe gegen den Orden der Freimaurer (Leipzig, 1855); J. J. Misipporus [E. Meyer], Ueber Alter und sittlich-religГ¶sen Charakter der Г¤lteren und eigentlichen Freimaurerei. Sendschreiben an . . . August Knobel . . . Auf AnlaГџ der deistenriecherischen Hengstenbergischen Angriffe auf dieselbe (Bremen, 1855). 192. Evangelische Kirchen-Zeitung, 9 March 1853, no. 20. 193. “Stettin,” Latomia NF 9 (1886): 30. Schiffmann fell victim to a conservative intrigue because he, after much encouragement by the crown prince, had debunked many founding myths of the GroГџe Landesloge. He was excluded in 1876; his lodge, which supported him, suspended. The exclusion was canceled only six years later. See also G. A. Schiffmann, Das VerhГ¤ltnis der Freimaurerei zum Christenthum und zur Kirche (Stettin, 1857). 194. See “Oberhirtliches Schreiben des General-Superintendenten Dr. MГ¶ller zu Magdeburg,” FZ 10 (1856): 226; and “Erwiderung auf den Hirtenbrief des Generalsuperintendenten Dr. MГ¶ller in Magdeburg,” FZ 10 (1856): 233–46.

195. “Briefe des Prinzen Wilhelm von PreuГџen an den Generalsuperintendenten Moeller in Magdeburg,” MittVdF NF (1928), no. 44: 18–22. 196. Quoted in H.-U. Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 3 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1995), 382. 197. A. W. Sellin, “Evangelische Geistliche im Freimaurerbunde,” Der Herold 17 Page 319 →(1906), no. 17: 1–2. 198. See GStA Berlin, Logen, 5.1.4 (Zu den 3 Weltkugeln), no. 7296: Unmittelbarer Schriftwechsel mit dem Protektor der altpreuГџ. GroГџlogen Гјber ihre polit. LoyalitГ¤t, vol. 1, 1845–64. 199. “Die freimaurerischen Befehlshaber,” Bh. 8 (1865): 197–98. 200. See GStA Berlin, Logen, 5.1.4 (Zu den 3 Weltkugeln), no. 7296: Unmittelbarer Schriftwechsel mit dem Protektor der altpreuГџ. GroГџlogen Гјber ihre polit. LoyalitГ¤t, vol. 1, 1845–64, Brief des GroГџmeistervereins an den KГ¶nig, 27 December 1864. 201. See [Goedecke], Loge Friedrich zum goldenen Zepter, 101–2; “Zur Genesis des Rundschreibens der drei Berliner Grosslogen vom 14. Juni 1864,” Bh. 8 (1865): 285. 202. F. Kneisner, Geschichte der deutschen Freimaurerei in ihren GrundzГјgen (Berlin, 1912), 190. 203. R. Daniel, “Die GroГџloge des Eklektischen Freimaurerbundes,” MonatsblГ¤tter der Freimaurerloge “Hermann zur BestГ¤ndigkeit” 4 (1914): 120. See, more generally, A. W. MГјller, Die FГјrsten Deutschlands in ihrer Beziehung zum Freimaurerbunde (Sondershausen, 1864); P. Fischer, “Die deutschen FГјrstenhГ¤user und die Freimaurerei,” Latomia NF 22 (1899): 59–61, 67–68, 75–77, 83–84, 93, 108–10, 124–26. 204. O. Marbach, “Die Heimsuchung der Freimaurer in Sachsen,” in Arbeiten am rauhen Stein (Leipzig, 1862), 52. 205. Ibid., 64. 206. See, for example, E. E. Eckert, Der Freimaurer-Orden in seiner wahren Bedeutung (Dresden, 1851); and the material at GStA Berlin, Logen, 5.2. L 17 (Apollo), no. 453: Angriffe gg. die Freimaurerei in Sachsen 1851–1857; GStA Berlin, Bestand Ministerium des Innern, Rep. 77, Tit. 267, no. 14: Acta, betr. die von dem sГ¤chsischen Advokaten und Notar Eckert gegen den Freimaurer-Orden vorgebrachten Beschuldigungen, 1858. On Eckert see Katz, Jews and Freemasons, 131ff., 149ff. 207. Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 26 November 1852. 208. “Verhandlungen des sГ¤chsischen Landtags Гјber die Beschwerde des Adv. Eckert in Dresden, wegen Versagung genГјgender Resolution auf seine Forderung, die Aufhebung des Freimaurerordens betr.,” FZ 6 (1852): 81–87, 169–75, 177–83, 210–15. 209. See, for example, the letters of Friedrich Salomon Lucius, since 1851 Grand Master of the Apollo Lodge and director of the Leipzig District Court, to the Minister of the Interior v. Eberhard: SHStA Dresden, Bestand Ministerium des Innern, no. 79, Das Freimaurerwesen betr. 1852. 210. SHStA Dresden, Bestand Ministerium des Innern, no. 11172: Freimaurerangelenheiten, vol. 1: 1851–52, Schreiben des Kriegsministeriums (v. Rabenhorst) an das Innenministerium, Dresden, 15 April 1852. Die Zahl von zwanzig Offizieren in den sГ¤chsischen Logen nennt Lucius, Die gegenwГ¤rtige Lage der Freimaurerei in Sachsen,” FZ 6 (1852): 163. See, moreover, “Vortrag Гјber die VerdГ¤chtigungen des Bundes der Freimaurer, geh. in der Grossen Loge zu Dresden den 28. Jan. 1852, Page 320 →Dresden 1852,” FZ 6 (1852): 129–35, 140–43; G. KloГџ, “Eckerts VerdГ¤chtigungen. Vortrag am Johannisfest der Gr. L. des eklektischen Bundes in Frankfurt a.M.,” FZ 6 (1852): 241–47, 249–54. 211. R. MeiГџner, “Active Mitglieder der Logen im KГ¶nigreich Sachsen,” FZ 7 (1853): 192. 212. SHStA Dresden, Bestand Ministerium des Innern, no. 11173, Freimaurerangelenheiten, vol. 2: 1854–1915, Entwurf zu einer Verordnung die VerhГ¤ltnisse der Freimaurer-Logen im KГ¶nigreich Sachsen betr. (1854), 8–18. 213. “Offener Protest der Freimaurerloge Apollo im Or. Leipzig gegen den Umsturz der alten Grundgesetze der FreimaurerbrГјderschaft von Seiten des Grand Orient de Belgique,” FZ 8 (1854): 361–68. 214. Quoted in FZ 12 (1858): 256. 215. Habenicht, “Statistische Notizen Гјber die sГ¤chsische Maurerei,” FZ 17 (1863): 253–56. 216. GStA Berlin, Bestand Justizministerium, 2.5.1, no. 6991: Freimaurerei. Allgemeines, 1797–1858, Brief von Eduard Emil Eckert an den (KГ¶nigl. Staats- und Justiz Minister Simons), Berlin 18.4.1858; Brief

des (KГ¶nigl. Staats- und JustizMinister Simons) an den KГ¶nigl. Staatsminister und Minister des Inneren, Herrn v. Westphalen, Berlin, 22 April 1858. 217. See Taute, Die katholische Geistlichkeit und die Freimaurerei. 218. FreimГјthige Sachsen-Zeitung, 6 December 1851. 219. See Schmitt, The Leviathan. 220. See Katz, Jews and Freemasons, 148–59; J. v. Bieberstein, Die These von der VerschwГ¶rung 1776–1945 (Flensburg: Flensburger Hefte, 1992). 221. SГ¤chsische Constitutionelle Zeitung, 25 February 1852. 222. [E. JГ¶rg], “Die Freimaurerei und die Gegenwart,” HPBl 41 (1858): 756–800, 821–66. 223. Ibid., 765, 767, 779, 785, 790, 800, 821, 824, 864ff. 224. See W. E. v. Ketteler, “Die Freimaurerei,” in Freiheit, AutoritГ¤t und Kirche: ErГ¶rterungen Гјber die groГџen Probleme der Gegenwart (Mainz, 1862); R. Seydel, Katholicismus und Freimaurerei: Ein Wort zur Entgegnung auf die vom Freiherrn von Ketteler, Bischoff von Mainz, wider den Freimaurerbund erhobenen Anklagen (Leipzig, 1862); and the reply by von Ketteler, Kann ein glГ¤ubiger Christ Freimaurer sein? Antwort auf den Herrn Dr. Rudolph Seydel (Mainz, 1865). 225. v. Ketteler, “Freimaurerei,” 229. For Ketteler, the lodges were nothing else than a “conspiracy against all other churches.” “Brief von W. E. v. Ketteler an J. G. Findel, 20.12.1864, ” ZMittVdF 1 (1911), no. 12, 186–87. 226. [E. JГ¶rg], “Alban Stolz und der Freimaurer-Orden,” HPBl 50 (1862): 408, 414, 424. 227. A. Stolz, MГ¶rtel fГјr die Freimaurer (Freiburg, 1862); and the reply by J. Venedey, Dankschreiben eines Freimaurers an seinen Bruder in Christo Alban Stolz (Lahr, 1862). 228. Stolz, MГ¶rtel fГјr die Freimaurer, 7–8. 229. Ibid., 12. 230. See M. B. Gross, The War Against Catholicism: Liberalism and the Anti-CatholicPage 321 → Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004). 231. Stolz, MГ¶rtel fГјr die Freimaurer, 10. 232. Ibid. 233. GStA Berlin, Bestand Justizministerium, 2.5.1, no. 6991: Freimaurerei. Allgemeines, 1797—-1858, Brief von E. E. Eckert an den (KГ¶nigl. Staats- und JustizMinister Simons), Berlin 18 April 1858, Anlage: Sendschreiben an Se. MajestГ¤t, den KГ¶nig von Hannover, Se Kgl Hoheit, den GroГџherzog von Baden, Se. Hoheit, den durchlauchtigsten Herzog von Gotha-Koburg, als allerhГ¶chste Mitglieder des FreimaurerOrdens, die ehrfurchtsvolle Forderung des RГјcktritts dieser hГ¶chsten Personen von dieser WeltverschwГ¶rungs-Gesellschaft betreffend (Sulzbach, 1857). 234. Printed in the appendix of E. JГ¶rg, “Alban Stolz und der Freimaurer-Orden,” HPBl 50 (1862): 427–34. The “Charges” contain so many inaccurate details on Prussian Freemasonry that the author could hardly be a former Freemason. The main argument of the pamphlet, that Freemasonry’s “revolutionary zeal” is the “republicanization of peoples in the interest of the Jews,” evokes Didler’s writings, and it is likely that he wrote the “Charges” himself. Ibid., 434. The “Charges” were highly influential and employed numerous articles in the conservative and Catholic Press of the 1860s and 1870s. See, for example, “Die Juden und die Freimaurer in den letzten Berliner Wahlen,” Berliner Revue 29 (1862): 401–4; “Das Streben der Freimaurerlogen nach Weltherrschaft und sein VerhГ¤ltniss zu den FГјrsten,” Berliner Revue 33 (1863): 142–44, 199–204; “Die freimaurerische Bureaukratie,” Berliner Revue 33 (1863): 267–68, 325–28. 235. [E. JГ¶rg], “Alban Stolz und der Freimaurer-Orden,” HPBl 50 (1862): 423; as well as, for example, A. Stolz, Akazien-Zweig fГјr die Freimaurer (Freiburg, 1863); Naturgeschichte der Freimaurer (Vienna, 1869). 236. See Nord, “Republicanism and Utopian Vision.” 237. Quoted in Nord, Republican Moment, 20. 238. “Gesamtzustand der Freimaurerei zu Ende d.J. 1861,” Latomia 21 (1862): 97–106. 239. Venedey, Dankschreiben eines Freimaurers, 5. 240. “Sendschreiben der St. Joh.-FrMr(Loge) вЂzur edlen Aussicht’ im Or. Freiburg i.Br.,” Bh. 5 (1862): 380. 241. [H. NГјtten], Die Gegenwart und Zukunft der Maurerei in Deutschland: Von einem alten Logenbruder

(Leipzig, 1870), 21. 242. Ibid., 52ff. 243. CStA Moscow, Fond 1412–1, no. 4952: Zirkulare u. Korrespondenz der GroГџen-National Mutterloge “Zu den drei Weltkugeln” mit der Loge Friedrich zum goldenen Zepter, 1863–70, Rundschreiben des Bundes-Direktoriums an sГ¤mmtliche Tochterlogen, Berlin, am Tage St. Johannis des TГ¤ufers 1863, 12. 244. HL 62 (1928–29): 29–31. 245. W. E. v. Ketteler, Das Allgemeine Konzil und seine Bedeutung fГјr unsere Zeit (1869), 66, quoted in A. M. Birke, Bischof Ketteler und der deutsche Liberalismus (Mainz: Matthias-GrГјndewald, 1971), 53.Page 322 → 246. The more the ancien rГ©gime drifted into history, the more enlightened and liberal became the image of eighteenth-century Freemasonry. Frederick the Great, Lessing, Goethe, Fichte, and Herder were worshipped as Masonic icons, even though they had not been typical or enthusiastic lodge brothers. 247. See, for example, L. Hayden, Masonry among Colored Men in Massachusetts: Letter to the Right Worshipful J. G. Findel, Honorary Grand Master of the Prince Hall Grand Lodge and General Representative thereof to the Lodges upon the Continent of Europe (Boston, 1871). 248. Findel, Geschichte der Freimaurerei. 249. See G. KloГџ, Die Freimaurerei in ihrer wahren Bedeutung (Leipzig, 1845); Geschichte der Freimaurerei in England, Schottland und Irland (Leipzig, 1848); Geschichte der Freimaurerei in Frankreich aus Г¤chten Urkunden dargestellt 1725–1830, 2 vols. (Darmstadt, 1852–53). 250. GStA Berlin 5.2. L 18 (Balduin), no. 709: Schriftwechsel mit VdF 1869–1931; Rundschreiben der Loge “Balduin,” Leipzig, 3 July 1869. 251. CStA Moscow, Fond 1412–1, no. 4949: Zirkulare u. Korrespondenz der GroГџloge zu den drei Weltkugeln und der Loge Friedrich zum goldenen Zepter 1844–1850 and 1857–1862. 252. GStA Berlin, Logen, 5.2. L 17 (Apollo), 1.2.6. Personalakten, no. 185, Hirsch Joachimsohn. 253. GStA Berlin Logen, 5.2. B 130 (Provinzialloge), no. 9: Bestimmungen Гјber die Nichtaufnahme von Juden, 1815–79; Protokoll der Sitzung, 16 October 1861. 254. E. Roehr, “Reisebilder,” FZ 22 (1868): 238–40, 276–78, 282–84. 255. The following list indicates the proportions of new members of the Apollo Lodge by confession. Nonetheless, the proportion of Jews among rejected applicants for membership in the Apollo lodge between 1851 and 1880 was disproportionately high: 47.3 percent. Twenty-nine Lutherans, one Catholic, fifty-three Jews, and twenty-eight aspirants for whom no religion is mentioned were rejected. Two-thirds of the rejected Jews came from the Prussian towns and thus wished to become “visiting brothers.” These were almost exclusively Jewish merchants, manufacturers, and commercial travellers who were accused of wishing to join the lodge for purely materialistic reasons. GStA Berlin, Logen, 5.2. L 17 (Apollo), no. 84, 85, 87: ZurГјckgewiesene AufnahmeantrГ¤ge 1850–84. See also GStA Berlin, 5.2. L 18 (Balduin), no. 46: ProtokollePage 323 → der Direktorialversammlungen, 1848–52, Direktorials-Versammlung, 27 September 1851. The following case is also telling: An applicant from Offenbach approaches the Balduin Lodge in 1851. The report from Offenbach states that the applicant is a citizen of high reputation. Only his Jewish faith had prevented admission. The secret ballot of the Balduin lodge brought about only one black ball. Nevertheless, the Grand Master Marbach declares the ballot to be successful since the one black ball was not justified openly and thus based on prejudice. However, Marbach was outvoted and the applicant advised to approach the Offenbach lodge again. 256. FZ 23 (1869): 55–56. See also GStA Berlin, Logen, 5.2. L 24 (Minerva), no. 176: Material zum Gesetz Гјber die Aufnahme von Nichtchristen, 1868. 257. 1849: 12 (3.3 percent), 1860: 44 (9.3 percent), 1871: 104 (21.3 percent), 1880: 150 (27.9 percent), 1890: 148 (31 percent), 1900: 142 (31.1 percent), 1910: 105 (24.4 percent). See T. Held, “Juden und Freimaurer in Hamburg,” M.A. thesis, University of Hamburg, 1983, 69ff. 258. GStA Berlin, Logen, 5.2. L 17 (Apollo), no. 209. 259. Held, “Juden und Freimaurer in Hamburg,” 90–93. 260. V. Klemperer, Curriculum Vitae, vol. 1 (Berlin: RГјtten und Loening, 1989), 154. 261. Quoted in B. Peters, Die Geschichte der Freimaurerei im Deutschen Reich 1870–1933 (Berlin: Heinicke, 1986): 289, who also records in great detail “corrections” of the speech in subsequent

publications of conservative Masonic historians like Friedrich Runkel. 262. B. Auerbach, Briefe an seinen Freund Jakob Auerbach, vol. 1 (Frankfurt, 1884), 350–51. 263. GStA Berlin, Logen, 5.2. B 141 (Vereinigte), no. 265: Logenreden und AufsГ¤tze 1859–1886; Der Standpunkt des Maurers in der Kirche, dem Staate und der Familie. Festrede zum Stiftungsfest, 18 March 1863. 264. [NГјtten], Gegenwart und Zukunft der Maurerei, 9–10. 265. O. E. FunkhГ¤nel, “Die negativen und die exklusiven Seiten der FrMrei. IV. Standes- und VermГ¶gensunterschiede. Politik,” Bh. 3 (1860): 217. 266. See Nord, Republican Moment. Lodge membership in the United States: 1850: 66,000; 1860: 221,000, 1870: 446,000. Dumenil, Freemasonry and American Culture, 225. 267. O. v. Gierke, Das deutsche Genossenschaftsrecht, vol. 1 (Berlin, 1868); L. v. Stein, Die Verwaltungslehre, part I/3: Das Vereinswesen (1869; reprint Aalen, 1962). 268. See Tenfelde, “Entfaltung des Vereinswesens”; G. Eley, “Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Calhoun, 298–99; for the United States: S. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760–1900 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), chap. 6, “Coming to Order: Voluntary Association and the Organization of Social Life and Consciousness”; J. S. Gilkeson, Middle-Class Providence, 1820–1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); M. P. Ryan, Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City during the Nineteenth-Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); for France Harrison, Bourgeois Citizen; idem, “Unsociable Frenchmen.” 269. See Nord, Introduction to Civil Society before Democracy.Page 324 → 270. Riehl, Natural History, 227. 271. Blackbourn, “Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,” 204.

Chapter 3 1. J. J. Sheehan, German History, 1770–1866 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 781. What Peter Pulzer noted for German liberalism—“it is difficult to think of a time when German liberalism was not in crisis”—also holds true for the self-image of the BГјrgertum. P. Pulzer, Jews and the German State: The Political History of a Minority, 1848–1933 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 324. 2. Wehler, Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 3, 1250–95; and the critique by G. Eley, “Is There a History of the Kaiserreich?” in Society, Culture, and the State in Germany, 1870–1930, ed. Eley (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 1–42. 3. Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 3, 766; following the earlier assertions by Blackbourn, “Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.” 4. T. Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte 1866–1918, vol. 1 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1990), 421. 5. H.-U. Wehler, “Wie вЂbГјrgerlich’ war das Deutsche Kaiserreich?” in Aus der Geschichte lernen? (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1988), 272–73. 6. Compare, for example, A. Assmann, Arbeit am nationalen GedГ¤chtnis: Eine kurze Geschichte der deutschen Bildungsidee (Frankfurt: Campus, 1993), and G. L. Mosse, German Jews beyond Judaism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), with the more nuanced account of S. Volkov, “The Ambivalence of Bildung,” in The German-Jewish Dialogue Reconsidered, ed. K. L. Berghahn (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1996), 81–97. 7. “Die deutsche Freimaurerei und ihre nationale Aufgabe,” R. 1 (1874): 77–78. 8. Ibid., 78. 9. “Freimaurerei,” in Allgemeines Handbuch der Freimaurerei, vol. 1 (Leipzig, 1863), 408, 410. 10. L. Bamberger, “Die Sezession (1881),” in Schriften, vol. 5 (Berlin, 1897), 118, 129, quoted in D. Langewiesche, “BildungsbГјrgertum und Liberalismus im 19. Jahrhundert,” in BildungsbГјrgertum im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. J. Kocka, vol. 4 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1989), 101. 11. See J. Jenkins, “The Kitsch Collections and The Spirit in the Furniture: Cultural Reform and National Culture in Germany,” Social History 21 (1996): 123–41; idem, Provincial Modernity: Local

Culture and Liberal Politics in Fin-de-SiГЁcle Hamburg (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002). 12. Enke, “Ist ein Fortschreiten auf dem Gebiete der Sittlichkeit in der Geschichte nachweisbar?” DL 18 (1888–89): 1494. 13. See Tenfelde, “Entfaltung des Vereinswesens”; Nord, Introduction to Civil Society before Democracy; for Russia: J. Bradley, “Subjects into Citizens: Societies, Civil Society, and Autocracy in Tsarist Russia,” American Historical Review 107 (2002): 1094–1123, and the contributions to E. Clowes et al., eds., Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia Page 325 →(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), and H. Stekl et al., eds., BГјrgertum in der Habsburgermonarchie, vol. 2 (Vienna: Verl. fГјr Geschichte und Politik, 1992). 14. M. Weber, “GeschГ¤ftsbericht,” in Verhandlungen des Ersten Deutschen Soziologentages vom 19. bis 22. Oktober 1910 in Frankfurt/M. (TГјbingen, 1911), 53. 15. M. Weber, “Churches and Sects in North America (1906),” in The Protestant Ethic and the вЂSpirit’ of Capitalism and Other Writings, ed. P. Baehr and G. C. Wells (New York: Penguin Books, 2002), 207. 16. Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood, 1–2. 17. See, for example, Dumenil, Freemasonry and American Culture; Fels, “The Square and Compass”; Clawson, Constructing Brotherhood; Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood. 18. Eley, “Nations, Publics, and Political Culture,” 298–99. The sole exception is Tenfelde, “Entfaltung des Vereinswesens.” The recent research on civic elites conducted by Lothar Gall et al. does not fill this gap, since it only looks for associational life before the 1860s. Likewise, the two standard histories of the Kaiserreich in German by T. Nipperdey and H.-U. Wehler do not address civic associations but only national interest groups. See Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 3, 335–55; Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte 1866–1918, vol. 2, 576–95. These national pressure groups were eager to attract large subscription numbers and to influence public opinion and national politics. They did not, however, work like local civic associations. Exceptions are some nationalist pressure groups like the Alldeutschen. See the classic study of R. Chickering, We Men Who Feel Most German: A Cultural Study of the Pan-German League, 1894–1914 (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1984). A sense of the dramatic surge in associational activity can be obtained from the example of scientific societies. See A. Daum, Wissenschaftspopularisierung im 19. Jahrhundert: BГјrgerliche Kultur, naturwissenschaftliche Bildung und die deutsche Г–ffentlichkeit, 1848–1914 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1998). 19. Dumenil, Freemasonry and American Culture, 225. 20. TribГјne, 8–9 July 1881. 21. R. Fischer, “Die Eigenart der Logen gegenГјber andern Vereinen,” Latomia NF 20 (1897): 122. 22. See T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981); S. Mar-chand and D. Lindenfeld, eds., Germany at the Fin de SiГЁcle: Culture, Politics, and Ideas (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004). 23. J. Harland-Jacobs, “Hands Across the Sea: The Masonic Network, British Imperialism, and the North Atlantic World,” Geographical Review 89 (1999): 237–53; idem, “All in the Family: Freemasonry and the British Empire in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” Journal of British Studies 42 (2003): 448–82. 24. For France: M. J. Headings, French Freemasonry under the Third Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1949), 86. 25. About 40 percent of all civilian state ministers of the Third Republic between 1877 and 1914 were Freemasons. Nord, Republican Moment, 15. 26. See, for example, G. Padulo, “Contributo alla storia della massoneria da Giolitti a Mussolini,” Annali dell’ Istituto Italiano per gli studi storici 8 (1983–84): 219–347.Page 326 → 27. R. Hubert and F. ZГ¶rrer, “Die Г¶sterreichischen Grenzlogen,” Quatuor Coronati Jahrbuch 20 (1983): 143–66, 152; L. Hass, “The Socio-professional Composition of Hungarian Freemasonry (1868–1920),” Acta Poloniae Historica 30 (1974): 71–117. 28. L. Hass, “The Russian Masonic Movement in the Years 1906–1918,” Acta Poloniae Historica 48 (1983): 114, 123; B. Norton, “Russian Political Masonry and the February Revolution of 1917,” International Review of Social History 28 (1983): 240–58. 29. In 1918, Prussia still accounted for most lodges in Germany (347), followed by Saxony (42), Bavaria

(25), Hamburg (23), Baden (15), and Mecklenburg-Schwerin (11). F. Kneisner, “Zur Statistik der deutschen Freimaurerei,” MittVdF 56 (1918–19): 135. 30. [H. Hahn], KГ¶nnen Bayrische Beamte und MilitГ¤rpersonen Mitglieder der Freimaurer-Logen werden? Vortrag, gehalten in der Sitzung des FrГ¤nkischen Bezirks des V.d.F. zu NГјrnberg, am 9.3.1874 (FГјrth, 1874), 16. 31. Cramer, “Der deutschen Freimaurer Zahl und VerhГ¤ltnis,” Bh. 15 (1872): 203–5. The number of lodges was highest in Berlin (1863: 16; 1878: 17; 1894: 22), followed by Hamburg (1863: 13; 1878: 14; 1894: 15) and Frankfurt (1863: 6; 1878: 6; 1894: 6). R. Fischer, “Zur Statistik der Freimaurerei,” Latomia NF 17 (1894): 205. 32. Bh. 26 (1883): 75. 33. See the table in Hoffmann, Politik der Geselligkeit, 353. 34. Bh. 15 (1872): 391; MittVdF 59 (1920–21): 104. 35. See the tables in Hoffmann, Politik der Geselligkeit, 354–59. 36. Bleich, “Die Bedingungen der Aufnahme in den Freimaurerbund,” Bausteine 2 (1882): 64. 37. E. Horneffer, Aus meinem Freimaurerleben (Hamburg: Akazien, 1957), 142. 38. O. Posner, “Goethe als Freimaurer,” SL 31 (1911): 23. 39. CStA Moscow, Fond 1412–1, no. 5059 (Zepter): Aufnahmegesuche II, no. 1, Vol. 47, 1910–1913, Aufnahmegesuch E. Werner, 14 October 1913, 181. 40. [O. P.] Neumann, “Weshalb ist das Logenwesen zurГјckgegangen?” Der Herold 19 (1908), no. 34, 1. 41. For 1840: 14.3 percent; 1876: 16 percent; 1906: 14.2 percent. In 1906 only 1 out of 111 Freemasons who belonged to the Zwingergesellschaft was a noble. Verzeichnis der KaufmГ¤nnische Zwinger- u. Ressourcen-Gesellschaft 1846, 1875, 1906. 42. A. W. Sellin, “Die Mitglieder der Logen nach Berufsarten,” Bundesblatt 10 (1896): 16–23. 43. R. Taute, “Der Geburts-Adel in den deutschen Logen,” AstrГ¤a 10 (1891): 114–18. 44. Gemoll, “Die Teilnahme des Adels und der Offiziere in den 3 preussischen Grosslogen,” SL 20 (1900): 68. 45. See, for example, “Die letzten Ziele der Freimaurerei,” SГ¤chsisches Kirchen- und Schulblatt (1884): 430–34; “Freimaurerthum und Christenthum,” SГ¤chsisches Kirchen- und Schulblatt (1885): 125–29; and GStA Berlin, Logen, 5.2. L 17 (Apollo), no. 454: Schriftwechsel Гјber die im SГ¤chs. Kirchen- und Schulblatt enthaltenen Angriffe 1884–1886.Page 327 → 46. A. W. Sellin, “Evangelische Geistliche im Freimaurerbunde,” Der Herold 17 (1906), no. 17: 1–2. 47. Zeitschrift fГјr die evangelische Geistlichkeit ThГјringens 1883, no. 7, quoted in FZ 37 (1883): 406. 48. Hettling, Politische BГјrgerlichkeit. 49. FZ 35 (1881): 174. 50. Roegglen, “Das demokratische und aristokratische Prinzip der Freimaurerei,” MittVdF 35 (1897–98): 38. 51. CStA Moscow, Fond 1412–1, no. 4601: Acta betreffend den Schriftwechsel mit der Delegierten AltSchottischen-Loge Friedrich zum goldenen Zepter im Orient Breslau 1877–91; Jahresbericht 1877–78, 23. 52. A. Schmidt, “Die heutige Stellung der Freimaurerei im Г¶ffentlichen Leben,” ZC 9 (1880): 302, 309. 53. Compare the tables in Hoffmann, Politik der Geselligkeit, 361–63. 54. Ibid., 366–67. 55. Ibid., 372–73. Similar numbers can be obtained from lodge statistics of the time. The average age of 2,437 new lodge members in 1882 was 36.5 years (under 21: 2; 21–30: 588; 31–40: 1,183; 41–50: 515; 51–60: 123; over 60: 25). R. Taute, “Ein weiterer Beitrag zur Statistik,” Bh. 25 (1882): 14. 56. Of the 23 new members of the Zepter lodge admitted in 1906–7, 17 (81 percent) were married, the same number had a higher education (Gymnasium). Between 1910 and 1914, 25 (49 percent) of 51 new members had visited the Gymnasium, and 39 (76.5 percent) were married. CStA Moscow, Fond 1412–1, no. 5126 (Zepter): Aufnahmegesuche II, no. 1, vol. 44, 1906–7; dass., vol. 47, 1910–1913; dass., vol. 48, 1912–1914. For comparison: About one-third of all brothers of the Apollo lodge had gone to the

Gymnasium, and this number surprisingly did not change much over the course of time. However, fewer and fewer lodge brothers had a university degree (1840: 35.1 percent; 1876: 18.4 percent; 1906: 13.6 percent). These findings sit well with the increase in members of the economic bourgeoisie since the 1860s. Overall, the numbers are certainly even higher since not all application forms state the education of the neophyte. See the table in Hoffmann, Politik der Geselligkeit, 369. 57. BГјchle, “Die FrMrei im Lichte der Zeit,” Bh. 14 (1873): 9. 58. G. v. Hoeselin, “Aufnahme, BefГ¶rderung und Leben in der Loge—eine Geldfrage!,” Bh. 33 (1890): 2–7. In 1879, a girls’ school teacher in Leipzig complained about the doubling of lodge dues within one year. Only a few years later he left the lodge. GStA Berlin, Logen, 5.2. L 17 (Apollo), no. 151: Personalakte E. Beyer. 59. G. Maier, “Das preussische Einkommenssteuer-Gesetz und die Freimaurerei,” Bh. 35 (1892): 9. In Breslau around 1900 admission fees alone were 136.50 marks. Compare CStA Moscow, Fond 1412–1, no. 5126 (Zepter): Aufnahmegesuche II, no. 1, vol. 44, 1906–7. 60. W. Unseld, “Bruderliebe,” Bh. 49 (1906): 27. 61. R. Fischer, “Der freie Mann von gutem Rufe,” FZ 40 (1886): 4. 62. O. Marbach, “FragestГјcke fГјr Freimaurer-Lehrlinge,” R. 1 (1874): 69. 63. See chap. 4, this vol.Page 328 → 64. When rumor spread in Breslau in 1871 that Major von Schlichting, member of the Zepter lodge, “deliberately committed adultery to get divorced after fifteen unhappy years of marriage” his lodge brothers formed an honorary council to exclude him from the lodge. Even though his friends in the lodge claimed that a dishonorable discharge would drive von Schlichting into despair, and brotherly love was the ultimate goal of Masonry, the majority of the lodge was unimpressed. Von Schlichting was discharged with the comment that the honor and reputation of the lodge is more important than compassion for a fallen brother. CStA Moscow, Fond 1412–1, no. 4954 (Zepter): Schriftwechsel mit dem Bundes-Direktorium, 1871–84, 4–8. 65. “Die Freimaurer in Berlin,” National-Zeitung, 25 December 1904, suppl. For example, of the 645 applications between 1864 and 1891 the Minerva lodge dismissed 76 (11.8 percent). Since an application could only be advanced with a lodge sponsor, applicants were already scrutinized. In other words, the dismissed applicants all fulfilled the formal requirements to become a Freemason. J. V. Carus, Bausteine zu einer Geschichte der Freimaurerloge Minerva zu den drei Palmen in Leipzig 1841–1891 (Leipzig, 1891), 24. 66. GStA Berlin, Logen, 5.2. L 17 (Apollo), no. 87: ZurГјckgewiesene AufnahmeantrГ¤ge, 1873–84. 67. Quoted in SL 12 (1892): 182–83. 68. GStA Berlin, Logen, 5.2. L 17 (Apollo), no. 177: Personalakte W. Heffter. 69. GStA Berlin, Logen, 5.2. B 141 (Vereinigte), no. 38: Protokoll Гјber Aufnahme und Ausscheiden von Logenmitgliedern, 1844–1884; Brief von E. Stoermer an die “Vereinigte Loge,” Breslau, 25 April 1884. 70. For example, “We have to bring attention to an interesting fact. The majority of Jewish traveling wine merchants . . . are lodge brothers. To be sure, they do not join for love of вЂhumanity’ or such higher purposes of Masonry but merely out of plain material interest. Brother Itzig or Cohn from Mainz is in possession of all German lodge calendars, i.e., membership lists. During the train or car ride the calendars provide him not only a pleasant reading but also an orientation within the city of his destination. He knows that the Prussian lodges only accept well-to-do members—and thus a lodge brother might вЂbe good’ for 100–500 bottles of wine. By knowing who is a lodge brother, Itzig can make easily contact with these gentlemen. . . . To the honor of the lodge members of our Heimat province Silesia we can say—and we know this firsthand—that the Silesian lodges do not appreciate the visits of such вЂbrothers’ and like to see these вЂuncles’ rather extra than intra muros, i.e., please close the door from the outside!” A. Kulik, “Der jГјdische Commis voyageur,” Schlesische Volkszeitung, 26 October 1879. 71. Horneffer, Aus meinem Freimaurerleben, 75. 72. CStA Moscow, Fond 1412–1, no. 5126 (Zepter): Aufnahmegesuche II, no. 1, vol. 44, 1906–7, BГјrgschaftsschreiben fГјr H. GГ¶tz von G. Thuns, Breslau, 1 Feb. 1907 and 18 Feb. 1907, 123, 128–29. 73. See the Festschrift: Clemens Thieme—zum siebzigsten Geburtstag am 13. Mai 1931, ed. Deutscher Patriotenbund (Leipzig, 1931).

74. [R. Bachmann], “MГ¤nner der Tat,” FZ 17 (1913): 330–31. 75. Koselleck, “On the Anthropological and Semantic Structure of Bildung.” 76. G. Schauer, Ansprache, geh. am 20. Januar 1895 in den RГ¤umen der Loge Page 329 →Hermann zur BestГ¤ndigkeit in Breslau (Breslau, 1895). 77. Kneisner, Geschichte der deutschen Freimaurerei, 17; E. Brettmann, Die Freimaurerische Werk- und WohltГ¤tigkeit (Berlin, 1913). 78. CStA Moscow, Fond 1412–1, no. 5126 (Zepter): Aufnahmegesuche II, no. 1, vol. 44, 1906–7, Aufnahmegesuch A. Burghardt, Breslau 8 Dec. 1906, 56; Aufnahmegesuch O. Grossmann, 10 Feb. 1907, 133. 79. CStA Moscow, Fond 1412–1, no. 5059 (Zepter): Aufnahmegesuche II, no. 1, vol. 47, 1910–13, Aufnahmegesuch R. Greupner, Breslau, 23 June 1912, 159. 80. Arnold, “Ansprache an einen Suchenden,” Latomia NF 25 (1902): 34. 81. A. F. O. Heise, “Was bezwecken und erhoffen wir mit unserem Eintritt in den Maurerbund,” HL 39 (1905–6): 37. 82. Hertzberg, “Die Stellung der Freimaurerei in der Gegenwart und ihre Gegner,” Latomia NF 16 (1893): 123. 83. H. v. Treitschke, “Der Sozialismus und seine GГ¶nner [1874],” in AufsГ¤tze, Reden und Briefe, ed. K. M. Schiller, vol. 4 (Meersburg, 1929), 129, 137. 84. A. Schmidt, “Die Freimaurerei und der Socialismus,” ZC 7 (1878): 330–31. 85. “Der Kampf gegen die Sozialdemokratie,” Latomia NF 1 (1878): 98. 86. A. Eckstein, “Wie soll der Frmr die jetzige Zeit beurteilen?” FZ 60 (1906): 113–17. 87. C. Bachmann, “Das VerhГ¤ltnis des Freimaurers im profanen Leben gegenГјber seinen Untergebenen, seinen Arbeitern,” Latomia NF 19 (1896): 10. 88. D. Bischoff, “Sollen wir AngehГ¶rige des Arbeiterstandes in unsere Logen aufnehmen?” Bh. 50 (1907): 387. 89. See Retallack “Society and Politics in Saxony.” 90. O. Marbach, Die Freimaurerei und der Streit der Parteien um Tagesfragen: Stiftungsfestrede am 2. MГ¤rz 1873 (Leipzig, 1873), 275–76, 280–81. 91. J. K. Teupser, “Warum wird die Frmrei niemals den Staatsinteressen zuwiderhandeln oder sie gefГ¤hrden kГ¶nnen?” FZ 59 (1905): 271. 92. These figures are based on a comparison of the 1876 membership lists of the Breslau lodges and the sample of WahlmГ¤nner of the Breslau constituency for the Prussian Landtag elections, compiled by Manfred Hettling. 93. Leipziger Tageblatt, 30 October 1910. 94. CStA Moscow, Fond 1412–1, no. 5059 (Zepter): Aufnahmegesuche II, no. 1, vol. 47, 1910–1913, Aufnahmegesuch R. Greupner, Breslau, 23 June 1912, 159. 95. “Ansprache des liberalen Grossmeisters Prinz Heinrich zu SchГ¶naich-Carolath,” FZ 49 (1895): 92–94. 96. See van Rahden, Juden und andere Breslauer, chap. 5; Hettling, Politische BГјrgerlichkeit; and the contributions to L. Gall and D. Langewiesche, eds., Liberalismus und Region: Zur Geschichte des Liberalismus im 19. Jahrhundert (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1995), in particular by M. Hettling on Breslau and K. H. Pohl on Leipzig. 97. H. v. Puttkamer, “Freimaurer,” Berliner Neueste Nachrichten, 30 January 1908, suppl. 98. J. C. Bluntschli, DenkwГјrdiges aus meinem Leben, vol. 3 (NГ¶rdlingen, 1884), 441.Page 330 → 99. Compare G. Schauerhammer, “Johann Caspar Bluntschli als Mensch und Maurer,” R. 35 (1908): 24. 100. After Friedrich’s death, a telling anecdote circulated among Freemasons about Wilhelm II and his strained relationship to his father’s Masonic ambitions. “His father, at this time of course still crown prince, introduced the young Prince Wilhelm to the Grand Master of the GroГџe Landesloge. The two older men discussed the formalities of an initiation of Wilhelm into the lodge in private. Meanwhile, the Prince, left to himself, became impatient and finally left with the indignant words: вЂA Hohenzollern does not wait.’” Horneffer, Aus meinem Freimaurerleben, 38. 101. Compare J. Minor, “Freimaurer in Sicht,” Deutsche Rundschau 150 (1912): 43–54;

“Kaiser Wilhelm II. und die Freimaurer!,” FZ 67 (1913): 100. 102. Quoted in FZ 42 (1888): 241–43. 103. “Freimaurerei und Judentum,” Antisemitische Correspondenz 3 (1888), no. 32: 3. See also, for example, “Das Judentum in den deutschen Freimaurer-Logen,” Hammer 1912, no. 233, 123–25. 104. Quoted in Latomia NF 11 (1888): 118. 105. H. Graf Coudenhove-Kalergi, Das Wesen des Antisemitismus [1901] (Vienna, 1929), 45, quoted in A. Levenson, “Philosemitic Discourse in Imperial Germany,” Jewish Social Studies 2 (1996): 29. 106. D. v. Oertzen, Was treiben die Freimaurer? Kurzer Wegweiser fГјr Laien, 3d ed. (GГјtersloh, 1892). 107. Ibid., 12, 27, 40, 74, 78–79, 85. 108. “StreifzГјge durch das Reich der Freimaurerei,” Deutsches Adelsblatt 14 (1896): 667, 686. See also the critique by the rival paper: “Das Freimaurerthum, ein Angriffsobjekt des вЂDeutschen Adelsblattes,’” Adels- und Salonblatt 4 (1896): 589–90. 109. M. G. Conrad, Flammen: FГјr freie Geister (Leipzig, 1882), 8, 224. 110. M. G. Conrad, “Mehr Licht!” Kritische Betrachtungen Гјber die Freimaurerei (Zurich, 1877), 30–31. 111. See, for France: G. Cubitt, The Jesuit Myth: Conspiracy Theory and Politics in Nineteenth-Century France (Oxford, 1993); “Catholics versus Freemasons in Late-Nineteenth-Century France,” in Religion, Society, and Politics in France since 1789, ed. F. Tallett and N. Atkins (London: Hambledon, 1991), 121–36; similar observations for the Kaiserreich in Blackbourn, Marpingen, 250; more generally, R. Healy, The Jesuit Specter in Imperial Germany (Leiden: Brill, 2003). 112. Compare M. L. Anderson, “The Kulturkampf and German History,” Central European History 29 (1996): 82–115; idem, Windthorst: A Political Biography (Oxford, 1981), especially chap. 7; D. Blackbourn, “Progress and Piety: Liberalism, Catholicism, and the State in Imperial Germany,” History Workshop Journal 26 (1988): 57–78; idem, Marpingen; J. Sperber, Popular Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 207–52; H. Walser Smith, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict: Culture, Ideology, Politics, 1870–1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Gross, War Against Catholicism; Healy, The Jesuit Specter. 113. On Masonic anti-Catholicism in France: Cubitt, Jesuit Myth; for Italy: A. Page 331 →Lyttelton, “An Old Church and a New State: Italian Anticlericalism, 1876–1915,” European Studies Review 13 (1983): 225–48. 114. Blackbourn, Marpingen, 250. 115. J. C. Bluntschli, “Rundschreiben der Loge Ruprecht zu den fГјnf Rosen in Heidelberg, 14.10.1865, ” in Bluntschli, DenkwГјrdiges aus meinem Leben, vol. 3, 124–25. 116. J. C. Bluntschli, “Ein dreifaches Feuer: Bei Einweihung des neuen Logenhauses in Karlsruhe ausgebracht,” Bh. 12 (1869): 346. 117. Zur Erinnerung an das 100jГ¤hrige Stiftungsfest der Loge Modestia cum Libertate (Zurich, 1873), 10. 118. Ibid. 119. Ibid., 6. 120. “Brief Bluntschlis an die Loge Modestia cum Libertate in ZГјrich,” Bh. 16 (1873): 23. 121. “Rede des Br. Prof. Oncken Гјber den Aufruf des Br Ficke in Freiburg, geh. in der Festloge der Loge вЂLudwig zur Treue’ in Giessen,” FZ 27 (1873): 113–16. Bluntschli declined to accept the honor. 122. Bh. 16 (1873): 65. 123. W. Smitt, “Wir und die Ultramontanen,” Bh. 16 (1873): 310. 124. Marbach, Die Freimaurerei und der Streit der Parteien, 275. Similarly A. Schmidt, “Freimaurer und Ultramontane: Rede am Stiftungsfest des Johannis-Loge zu den drei goldenen SchlГјsseln,” ZC 1 (1872): 73–78. 125. Conrad, Flammen, 8. 126. J. B. Kissling, Geschichte des Kulturkampfes im Deutschen Reiche, vol. 2 (Freiburg, 1913), 269–70. 127. “Erwiderung des Freiherrn von Ketteler an Professor Bluntschli,” in Freiheit und Kirchenregiment. Meinungsstreit zwischen von Ketteler und Bluntschli (Heidelberg, 1871), 28–29, 30–31. 128. GStA Berlin, Bestand Justizministerium, 2.5.1, no. 6992: Freimaurerei. Allgemeines, 1861–1876,

Dritter Bericht der Petitions-Kommission; Petition des Professor Dr. Michaelis zu Braunsberg, die gesetzliche Stellung der Loge in unserem Staate betreffend, PreuГџ. Herrenhaus, Sitzungsperiode 1869–70, no. 87, Berlin, 4 Feb. 1870. 129. “Die Freimaurer vor dem Gesetz,” Periodische BlГ¤tter zur wissenschaftlichen Besprechung der grossen religiГ¶sen Fragen der Gegenwart 5 (1876): 230–39. The ban on the Jesuits was abolished only in 1917. 130. Stenographischer Bericht Гјber die Verhandlungen der bayrischen Kammer der Abgeordneten, no. 37, Munich, 25 Jan. 1878. 131. N. SchloГџmacher, DГјsseldorf im Bismarckreich: Politik und Wahlen, Parteien und Vereine (DГјsseldorf: Schwann, 1985), 77. 132. Mergel, Zwischen Klasse und Konfession, 297. 133. “Die pГ¤pstliche Encyklika gegen die Freimaurerei,” Deutscher Merkur: Organ fГјr katholische Reformbewegung 15 (1884): 138–40. 134. M. G. Pachtler, Der GГ¶tze der HumanitГ¤t oder das Positive der Freimaurerei (Freiburg, 1875), iv; H. Gerber [H. Gruber], Der вЂgiftige Kern’ oder: Die wahren Bestrebungen der Freimaurerei (Berlin, 1899).Page 332 → 135. [O. Glagau], “Von der KГ¶niglichen Kunst,” Der KulturkГ¤mpfer 1, no. 19 (1880–81): 5, 8. 136. [O. Glagau], “Politik und Loge,” Der KulturkГ¤mpfer 1, no. 20 (1880–81): 10. 137. [J. M.] Raich, “Freimaurer,” in Wetzer und Weste’s Kirchenlexikon oder EncyklopГ¤die der katholischen Theologie und ihrer Hilfswissenschaften, 2d ed., vol. 2 (Freiburg, 1886): 1984, 1982. 138. Such cases are mentioned, for example, in Sperber, Popular Catholicism, 163, 165, 190. In 1908, still, it was regarded as a sensation that a Protestant Freemason could run successfully as candidate for the Zentrum. The archbishop himself had to publicly endorse the candidate to dispel the concerns of the Catholic electorate. “Zentrum und Freimaurer,” Berliner Neueste Nachrichten, 23 May 1908. 139. Sperber, Popular Catholicism, 218, 230. 140. “Intimes aus der Freimaurerei,” Die Wahrheit 42 (1908): 162–63. 141. See, for example, the following report: “A priest was called to the death-bed of Br[other] Finke in Berlin (Catholic) to give last comfort and the sacraments of the church. When the priest was alone with the dying man he tried to convince him to renounce Freemasonry. Br[other] Finke declined under protest and the Clergymen left the room without giving the sacrament, as did the nurse. The latter came back and tried to persuade Frau Finke of the wicked convictions of her husband. Only the devil, in this case, Freemasonry, has to be blamed for the fatal sickness of the husband!” Allegedly, Finke’s final words were “I shall die as a Freemason!” SL 10 (1890): 124. 142. H. Knobel, “Ultramontanismus und Freimaurerei,” BstF 16 (1907): 44. 143. Some Catholic newspaper even claimed that the Prussian lodges murdered Catholic state officials. Bismarck’s anti-Catholic politics were explained by declaring him to be a Freemason. “Freimaurerisches aus PreuГџen,” Das Bayrische Vaterland, 2 Aug. 1871. 144. E. Hieronimus, “Leo Taxil: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Antifreimaurerei,” Quatuor Coronati Jahrbuch 13 (1976): 99–118; E. Weber, Satan franc-maГ§on: La mystification de LГ©o Taxil (Paris: Julliard, 1964). 145. T. Lessing, Geschichte als Sinngebung des Sinnlosen (Munich, 1919), 111. 146. L. Taxil [G. Jogand-PagГ©s], Les FrГЁres Trois-Points, 2 vols. (Paris, 1885); in German: Die DreiPunkte-BrГјder. VollstГ¤ndige EnthГјllungen Гјber die Freimaurerei, 2 vols. (Freiburg, 1886—-87). More than 100,000 copies were sold in a short time. 147. See, for example, U. Linse, Geisterseher und Wunderwirker: Heilssuche im Industriezeitalter (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1996); Blackbourn, Marpingen; and, most recently, C. Treitel, A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of the German Modern (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). 148. Pache, “Der Glaube an die Menschheit,” Latomia NF 2 (1879): 165. 149. CStA Moscow, Fond 1412–1, no. 4980 (Zepter): Jahresberichte, Vortrag Br. Leschhorn Гјber die “StГ¤rkung des deutschen Volkstums,” 27 Jan. 1905. 150. O. KuntzemГјller, “Christentum und Freimaurerei,” Wartburgstimmen 1 (1903), no. 6, 553. 151. C. Notter, “Der freimaurerische HumanitГ¤tsgedanke,” Die Leuchte 1 (1910): 15.

152. “Antiklerikale Reserven,” Vossische Zeitung, 20 May 1906; “Der Kampf gegen die Freimaurer,” National-Zeitung, 2 June 1911, suppl.; “Papstum und Page 333 →HumanitГ¤tsgedanke,” National-Zeitung, 8 Sept. 1911. 153. Compare Cubitt, Jesuit Myth, 314; similarly for the liberal-Protestant obsession with Jesuit “infiltration” and “conspiracy,” Healy, The Jesuit Specter. 154. O. Blaschke, Katholizismus und Antisemitismus im Deutschen Kaiserreich (GГ¶ttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1999), who argues against the earlier assertion by Katz, Jews and Freemasons, that such conspiracy theories were not common in Germany before 1914. For a more nuanced picture of Catholic anti-Semitism see Smith, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict; idem, “The Learned and the Popular Discourse of Anti-Semitism in the Catholic Milieu of the Kaiserreich,” Central European History 27 (1994): 315–28. 155. GStA Berlin, Logen, 5.2. L 17 (Apollo), no. 185: Personalakte H. Joachimsohn. 156. For example, in the 1860s and 1870s the preacher of the Jewish community in CГ¶then, Falk Cohn; the head of the Jewish community in Berlin, the famous medical doctor Julius Blumenthal; the head of the Jewish community in Dessau and city council member Salomon KГ¶nigsberg; and, also in Dessau, the dentist Georg Hirschfeld, committee member of the Jewish charitable society Chebrah all joined the Apollo Lodge. Ibid., no. 152, 156, 191, 180. 157. This finding supports the thesis of van Rahden, Juden und andere Breslauer. 158. See the figures in the previous chapter. 159. [L. Philippson], “Wieder einmal die Freimaurerei,” AZJ 35 (1871): 818. 160. [J.] Auerbach, “Festrede,” Bh. 20 (1877): 396. 161. “Das Judenthum und die Freimaurerei,” Latomia NF 1 (1878): 110. 162. FZ 2 (1859): 262. 163. S. Jablonsky, “Zur Abwehr,” Bh. 8 (1865): 167. A similar example is the following statement of the liberal reformer A. Schiffmann: “We will have to acknowledge that a Jew, as envisioned by Lessing, is not impossible. However, we will also have to acknowledge that such a Jew would not be possible without Christianity.” “Die Aufgabe der Loge. Festrede vom 3.3.1860,” ZC 32 (1903): 15. 164. For this distinction see U. Tal, Christians and Jews in Germany: Religion, Politics, and Ideology in the Second Reich, 1870–1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), especially chap. 5; “Liberals, Protestantism, and the Jews in the Second Reich, 1870–1914,” Jewish Social Studies 26 (1964): 23–41. 165. A. Pietscher, “Die Judenfrage,” FZ 29 (1875): 68. Another liberal Freemason claimed that the lodge provides “certificates of humanity for Jews” [sic!]. Moltmann, “Die Judenfrage in der Freimaurerei,” HZC NF 32 (1898–99): 27. 166. C. v. Gagern, “Zur Judenfrage,” Bh. 23 (1880): 75–76. 167. “Die GrГјnde der Abneigung gegen die Juden,” FZ 30 (1876): 149. 168. FZ 30 (1876): 198. 169. [C.] DГ©nervaud, “Eine neue Loge zu Keulen,” FZ 23 (1889): 174–75, 180–83; F. Auerbach, “Zur Abwehr!,” Bh. 32 (1889): 201–2. 170. [C.] DГ©nervaud, “Eingesandt,” FZ 23 (1889): 263–64. 171. CStA Moscow, Fond 1412–1, no. 4601: Acta betreffend den Schriftwechsel mit der Delegierten AltSchottischen-Loge Friedrich zum goldenen Zepter im Orient Breslau 1877–91, Vortrag von Wilhelm KГ¶rber Гјber “Judenthum und Maurerei,” 4 June 1877; A. v. Reinhardt, Die Judenfrage und der Freimaurerbund (Ulm, 1893), 51, 58.Page 334 → 172. Even conservative Freemasons viewed “anti-Semitic Freemasons to be contradictio in adjecto.” O. Hieber, “Zur Abwehr,” Bundesblatt 6 (1892): 455. 173. [F. Lang], “Gedanken Гјber Freimaurerei, Christenthum und Judenthum. Von einem sГјddeutschen Logenbeamten,” Bh. 23 (1880): 383. 174. J. G. Findel, Die Juden als Freimaurer: Zur Beleuchtung der Krisis innerhalb des deutschen Maurerthums (Leipzig, 1893), 21–22. Findel became quite isolated within German Freemasonry; since 1894 he published his own journal, Signale fГјr die deutsche Maurerwelt, which contained several antiSemitic articles by his pen. 175. G. Bollenbeck, Bildung und Kultur. Glanz und Elend eines deutschen Deutungsmusters (Frankfurt:

Insel, 1994); idem, “Die Abwendung des BildungsbГјrgertums von der AufklГ¤rung: Versuch einer AnnГ¤herung an die semantische Lage um 1880,” in Nach der AufklГ¤rung, ed. W. Klein and W. Naumann-Beyer (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1995), 151–62; Mosse, German Jews Beyond Judaism. 176. See C. Groppe, Die Macht der Bildung: Das Bildungsprinzip des deutschen BГјrgertums und der Stefan-George-Kreis 1890–1933 (Cologne: BГ¶hlau, 1997), 61–70. 177. See Langewiesche, “BildungsbГјrgertum und Liberalismus”; Blackbourn, “Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie”; similarly, for Austrian liberalism, Pieter M. Judson, Exclusive Revolutionaries: Liberal Politics, Social Experience, and National Identity in the Austrian Empire, 1848–1914 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996). 178. “Warum blГјht der Antisemitismus in Sachsen,” AZJ 57 (1893): 246. 179. [A.] Lachmund, “Der Antisemitismus und die Freimaurerei,” Bh. 36 (1893): 262. 180. S. Aschheim, “вЂThe Jew Within’: The Myth of вЂJudaization’ in Germany,” in The Jewish Response to German Culture: From the Enlightenment to the Second World War, ed. J. Reinharz and W. Schatzberg (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1985), 212–41. 181. CStA Moscow, Fond 1412–1, no. 4954 (Zepter): Schriftwechsel mit dem Bundesdirektorium der GroГџloge Zu den drei Weltkugeln in Berlin, 1871–84; Quotation: Letter of the Kaiser to von Etzel, Berlin, 2 June 1876, 94. 182. For Jewish Freemasons, the insistence by conservative lodges on the Christian faith of applicants appeared to be just a disguise for anti-Semitism. One example seemed proof of their point. The conservative GroГџe Landesloge, which excluded Jews on the basis of religion, had no qualms toward participating in the initiation of a Muslim prince from Persia in November 1884 into the Royal York Grand Lodge. P. Rosenberg, “Christenthum, HumanitГ¤t und Frmrei: Eine Antwort auf die in den preussischen JahrbГјchern erschienene Arbeit,” Bh. 44 (1901): 36. 183. Diestel, “Einigkeitsbestrebungen in der deutschen Freimaurerei,” Der Herold 17 (1906), no. 41, 2. Similarly, for example, [O. P.] Neumann, “Housten Stewart Chamberlains Ansichten in seinen Grundlagen des 19. Jahrhunderts und die Judenfrage in der Frmrei,” Mecklenburgisches Logenblatt 33 (1904–5): 207–10, and the article by a conservative Freemason in an explicitly vГ¶lkisch journal: Athenos [P. Koethner], “Freimaurerei und Judenthum,” Die Nornen: Monatsschrift fГјr deutsche Wiedergeburt und ario-germanische Kultur 1 (1912), no. 4, 14. 184. H. Lissauer, “In Sachen der ErГ¶rterungen zur Einigkeitsfrage im вЂHerold,’” Page 335 →BstF 16 (1907): 6. 185. Such cases are reported, for example, in “Die Angriffe gegen die Freimaurerei,” Latomia NF 11 (1888): 117–19; “Die Gr. L.-L. und die вЂbesuchenden Brr,’” Bh. 33 (1890): 182–83; “Antisemitismus in den preussischen Logen,” Latomia NF 16 (1893): 47. 186. J. Levy, “Freimaurerei und Antisemitismus,” BstF 3 (1894): 17–18; [A.] Lachmund, “Der Antisemitismus und die Freimaurerei,” Bh. 36 (1893): 278. 187. Compare H. Settegast, “Das christliche Prinzip in der Freimaurerei,” Mitteilungen aus dem Verein zur Abwehr des Antisemitismus 3 (1893): 359–60. 188. A. Oehlke, Hermann Settegast: Sein Leben, Walten und Wirken (Berlin, 1904). 189. “Der Sieg liberaler Freimaurerei in PreuГџen,” Mitteilungen aus dem Verein zur Abwehr des Antisemitismus 3 (1893): 351–52. 190. Compare GStA Berlin, Bestand Ministerium des Innern, Rep. 77, Tit. 1053, no. 3, Beiakten 3, Verhandlungen Гјber die Zulassung von Freimaurerlogen des Hamburger Systems in Preussen als Tochterloge der GroГџen Logen von Hamburg, insbes. die Verwaltungsstreitsache des Geheimen Regierungsrats Dr. Settegast gegen den Berliner PolizeiprГ¤sidenten, 1891–1894; StA Breslau, Regierung Breslau, Allg. Abteilung, Polizeiakten, no. 352. 191. R. S. Levy, The Downfall of the Anti-Semitic Political Parties in Imperial Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 94. 192. For KГ¶nigsberg, see S. SchГјler-Springorum, Die jГјdische Minderheit in KГ¶nigsberg-Preussen, 1871–1945 (GГ¶ttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1996), 77. However, in KГ¶nigsberg a liberal Royal York lodge, which was open to Jewish applicants, was founded only in 1863. 193. GStA Berlin, Logen, 5.2. B 130 (Provinzialloge), no. 9: Bestimmungen Гјber die Nichtaufnahme von Juden, 1815–79, Schreiben der Provinzialloge an die GroГџe Landesloge der Freimaurer von

Deutschland, Breslau, 25 June 1879. 194. CStA Moscow, Fond 1412–1, no. 4954 (Zepter): Schriftwechsel mit dem Bundes-Direktorium, 22. 195. “Notizen zum Breslauer Logenleben,” Bh. 17 (1874): 58–59. 196. Compare Regierung Breslau, Allg. Abt., Polizeiakten, no. 352; Aktenmäßige Darstellung der VorgГ¤nge gelegentlich der Einsetzung der Loge Hermann zur BestГ¤ndigkeit im Or. Breslau, Bh. 40 (1897): 41–48. 197. A. Oehlke, “Christenthum, HumanitГ¤t und Freimaurerei,” BstF 9 (1900): 55. Oehlke himself was a courageous opponent of anti-Semitism. As a student, he had fought duels against members of antiSemitic student fraternities. One of his opponents died, and Oehlke went to prison for several years. 198. “Trauerfeier der Johannisloge Hermann zur BestГ¤ndigkeit Or. Breslau,” BstF 6 (1897): 99–101. 199. GStA Berlin, Logen, 5.2. B 141 (Vereinigte), no. 304: Nichtanerkennung der in Breslau installierten Bundesloge “Hermann zur BestГ¤ndigkeit” des Eklekt. Freimaurerbundes in Frankfurt sowie Stellung zu den Settegast-Logen 1894–1897, Briefentwurf von Fiedler an die Provinzialloge von Schlesien, 27 August 1894. 200. Compare “Schiedsspruch betr. die Neukonstituierung der Loge Hermann zur BestГ¤ndigkeit,” HZC NF 32 (1899): 111–20. CStA Moscow, Fond 1412–1, no. 4690: General-Acten, Schiedsspruch durch den deutschen GroГџlogentag, 29 June Page 336 →1898. 201. Held, “Juden und Freimaurer,” 69. 202. GStA Berlin, Logen, 5.2. L 17 (Apollo), Personalakten, no. 170: J. GГ¶bel. 203. GStA Berlin, Logen, 5.2. L 23 (MaГ§onia), no. 20: Protokolle 1893–94, Vortrag von KieГџling “Über die Judenfrage,” 7.10.1893. See idem, Zur Judenfrage, FZ 48 (1894): 6, 13. Compare also the biting reproach of such “anti-Semitism covered by Masonic phraseology” by F. Auerbach, “Zur sogenannten Judenfrage,” Bh. 37 (1894): 25. 204. GStA Berlin, Logen, 5.2. L 17 (Apollo), no. 130: Ehrenratsverfahren; Beamtenkollegium gegen Joseph Danziger wegen unmaurer. Verhaltens, 1897. 205. P. Marteau [C. H. Georgi], Politik und ZustГ¤nde in den drei altpreussischen Grosslogen und der Kampf des christlichen mit dem humanistischen Prinzip (Frankfurt, 1906), 132. 206. GStA Berlin, Logen, 5.2. L 26, Freimaurerloge “PhГ¶nix,” Leipzig, no. 28: K. Petzold, “Geschichte der Freimaurer-Loge PhГ¶nix 1892–1917,” unpublished manuscript (Leipzig, 1922). 207. Schauerhammer, “Die Winkellogen,” R. 33 (1906): 51. 208. Kneisner, Geschichte der deutschen Freimaurerei, 245. 209. See “Logen und Winkellogen,” Breslauer Zeitung, 6 April 1913; “Feindliche BrГјder,” Schlesische Zeitung, 6 April 1913. 210. Compare GStA Berlin, Logen, 5.2. B 143, Freimaurerloge “Settegast zur deutschen Treue,” Breslau, no. 1: Allg. Schriftwechsel und Mitgliederverzeichnisse 1898–99; Latomia NF 21 (1898): 46. 211. ReuГџ, however, resembled more the charlatan Cagliostro than the enlightened spin doctor of the Illuminati, Adam Weishaupt. ReuГџ was initiated into an irregular high-degree lodge while in London. Thereafter he successfully introduced dubious high-degree systems to Germany and deceived the new members of his lodges. See A. P. Eberhardt, Von Winkellogen Deutschlands—Freimaurerlogen neueren Datums—im letzten Vierteljahrhundert (Leipzig, 1914), 89, 106; Kneisner, Geschichte der deutschen Freimaurerei, 245; GStA Berlin, Logen, 5.2. L 17 (Apollo), no. 98: Aufnahme von Mitgliedern der “Symbol. GroГџloge vom Schott. Ritus in Deutschland,” 1911–12. 212. M. Krause, Zehn Jahre Vesta zum heiligen Feuer. Bericht Гјber die GrГјndung und die ersten zehn Arbeitsjahre der Loge Vesta zum heiligen Feuer i.O. Leipzig (Leipzig, 1916). 213. A typical incident: A conservative lodge brother from Posen decided to take his Berlin business partner, who claimed to be a Freemason, to the local lodge. Upon request, he produced a lodge certificate that stated his Jewish confession and membership in an “irregular” lodge in Berlin—he was unaware of the fact that his lodge was not officially recognized by mainstream Freemasonry. “Vorsicht! ” SL 2 (1882), 18–19. 214. See Eberhardt, Von Winkellogen Deutschlands, 118; F. Mart, вЂErkenne Dich selbst’: 20 Jahre “F.Z.A.S. 1907–1927 (Dresden, 1927). 215. See, for example, “Reformmaurer und Reichstagswahl,” Die Sonnenstrahlen. Bundes-Organ

des Freimaurerbundes zur aufgehenden Sonne 5 (1911–12): 177.Page 337 → 216. Lennhoff and Posner, Internationales Freimaurerlexikon, 529. 217. Compare L. Maretzki, Geschichte des Ordens Bnei Briss in Deutschland, 1882–1907 (Berlin, 1907); [A. Goldschmidt], Zum 50jГ¤hrigen Bestehen des Ordens Bne Briss in Deutschland (Frankfurt, 1933). 218. “Kann ein Freimaurer zugleich Mitglied des Ordens Bnei Brith sein?” Bh. 46 (1903): 34. 219. Maretzki, Geschichte des Ordens Bnei Briss, 44. 220. Quoted in Schmuhl, StГ¤dtische Eliten, 693. 221. R. Daniel, “Die GroГџloge des Eklektischen Freimaurerbundes,” MonatsblГ¤tter der Freimaurerloge вЂHermann zur BestГ¤ndigkeit’ 4 (1914): 129. 222. See, for example, G. L. Mosse, “The Influence of the Volkish Idea on German Jewry,” in Germans and Jews (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987), 77–115; and Volkov, “The Ambivalence of Bildung.” 223. N. Elias, Гњber sich selbst (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1990), 12. Since 1902, Hermann Elias was a member of the Hermann zur BestГ¤ndigkeit Lodge. 224. A. J. La Vopa, “Jews and Germans: Old Quarrels, New Departures,” Journal of the History of Ideas 54 (1993): 694; S. Moyn, “German Jewry and the Question of Identity,” Yearbook of the Leo Baeck Institute 41 (1996): 291–308. 225. G. Simmel, “The Stranger,” in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. Wolff, 406–7. Translation altered. 226. Aschheim, “The Jew Within,” 226. This idea of an inner connection between Jews and capitalist “bourgeois” society—compressed into the image of the Jewish Freemason—became popular in Marxist and Socialist circles as well. 227. S. L. Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 2. 228. J. Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction: Anti-Semitism, 1700–1933 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), v. 229. Trentmann, Introduction to Paradoxes of Civil Society. 230. For example, some Masonic songs like “BrГјder, reicht die Hand zum Bunde” after Mozart’s “Kleiner Freimaurer Kantate” (1791) became—after some lyrical adjustments—part of the repertoire of early Social Democracy. V. Lidtke, The Alternative Culture: Socialist Labor in Imperial Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 110–11. 231. B. Davis, “Reconsidering Habermas, Gender, and the Public Sphere: The Case of Wilhelmine Germany,” in Society, Culture, and the State in Germany, ed. Eley, 397–426. 232. Blackbourn, “Progress and Piety,” 67. 233. G. L. Mosse, “Jewish Emancipation: Between Bildung and Respectability,” in The Jewish Response to German Culture, ed. Reinharz and Schatzberg, 1–16; Mosse, German Jews Beyond Judaism. 234. P. Loewenstein, “Die HumanitГ¤t am Ende des Jahrhunderts,” Bh. 42 (1899): 308. 235. See, for example, H. Siemer, “Der Niedergang der deutschen Freimaurerei,” Neue Hamburger Zeitung, 20 January 1912, suppl.Page 338 →

Chapter 4 1. See Jacob, Living the Enlightenment, and Smith, Working the Rough Stone. 2. “The art of all politics and political constitutions,” as the famous liberal Staatslexikon contended, “all wisdom about a just and happy formation and preservation of a civil society, of civil life and rights, are worthless without civic virtue and its most important features: a sense of civility and civic courage. These constitute the lifeblood of civic associations. They would wither and die without them.” Welcker, “BГјrgertugend und BГјrgersinn,” 748. 3. Similarly, Harrison, “Unsociable Frenchmen”; idem, Bourgeois Citizens. 4. M. Weber, “The Protestant Ethic and the вЂSpirit’ of Capitalism,” in The Protestant Ethic, 121; idem, Die protestantische Ethik II: Kritiken und Antikritiken, ed. J. Winckelmann (GГјtersloh:

Siebenstern, 1978), 303, 55. On what follows compare W. Hennis, Max Webers Fragestellung (TГјbingen: Mohr, 1987); idem, Max Webers Wissenschaft vom Menschen (TГјbingen: Mohr, 1996); C. Gordon, “The Soul of the Citizen: Max Weber and Michel Foucault on Government and Rationality,” in Max Weber: Rationality and Modernity, ed. S. Lash and S. Whimster (London: Allen and Unwin, 1986), 293–316; D. K. Peukert, Max Webers Diagnose der Moderne (GГ¶ttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1989). 5. M. Weber, Gesammelte AufsГ¤tze zur Religionssoziologie, 9th ed. (TГјbingen: Mohr, 1988), vol. 1, 204. 6. M. Weber, Gesammelte AufsГ¤tze zur Soziologie und Sozialpolitik (TГјbingen: Mohr, 1924), 413. On traces of Nietzsche’s ideas in the writings of Weber and Simmel see K. Lichtblau, Kulturkrise und Soziologie um die Jahrhundertwende: Zur Genealogie der Kultursoziologie in Deutschland (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1996), 77–177. 7. Quoted in Marianne Weber, Max Weber, Ein Lebensbild (1926) (Munich: Piper, 1989), 428; similiarly, also, Weber, “GeschГ¤ftsbericht,” 58. On Weber and Tocqueville: M. Hecht, ModernitГ¤t und BГјrgerlichkeit: Max Webers Freiheitslehre in Vergleich mit den politischen Ideen von Alexis de Tocqueville und Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1998), 199–250. 8. Weber, “GeschГ¤ftsbericht,” 55. 9. See Hennis, Max Webers Fragestellung, and Kahan, Aristocratic Liberalism. 10. G. Simmel, Soziologie: Untersuchungen Гјber die Formen der Vergesellschaftung (1908), ed. O. Rammstedt (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1992), 49–50. 11. Simmel, “The Stranger.” 12. Lichtblau, Kulturkrise und Soziologie um die Jahrhundertwende, 380. 13. G. Simmel, “Sociability (An Example of Pure, or Formal, Sociology),” in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 43. 14. F. Schleiermacher, “Versuch einer Theorie des geselligen Betragens [1799],” in Schleiermachers Werke, vol. 2 (Leipzig, 1927; reprint, Aalen, 1991), 15. 15. Simmel, “Sociability,” 49. 16. Ibid., 48. 17. Ibid., 53–54. 18. Ibid., 44. 19. Pandora, oder interessante Mittheilungen Гјber alte und neue Freimaurerei, Page 339 →aus dem handschriftlichen Nachlasse eines Geweihten (Stuttgart, 1859), 38–39. 20. Simmel, Soziologie, 653. 21. K. O. MГјller, Das Г¤chte RГјstzeug der Johannisfreimaurerei. Festvortrag, geh. in der St. Joh.-Loge Minerva z. d. drei Palmen in Leipzig (Leipzig, 1855), 6. 22. “Wo ist die natГјrliche Grenze zwischen dem Geheimnis der maurerischen Bestrebungen und der Г¶ffentlichen Sittlichkeit unserer Zeit,” Latomia 2 (1843): 97. 23. [J. C.] Horstmann, “Was ist von der Freimaurerei als geheimer Gesellschaft zu halten?” Archiv fГјr Freimaurerei 1 (1841): 19. 24. Koselleck, Critique and Crisis, 75. 25. GStA Berlin 5.2. L 18 (Balduin), no. 54: Drucksachen der Loge 1778–1876; no. 375: gedr. Festreden u. -schriften zu versch. AnlГ¤ssen 1816–1926: Rundschreiben der Loge Balduin, 24 June 1848, 76–77. 26. “BrГјderliche Liebe,” Bh. 16 (1873): 215; “Maurerische Briefe,” AstrГ¤a 25 (1864): 228. 27. C. Pilz, “Des Maurers Geselligkeit,” FZ 32 (1878): 330; “BrГјderliche Liebe,” Bh. 16 (1873): 215. 28. Ibid., 213. 29. K. H. Scheidler, “Geselligkeit,” in J. G. Ersch and J. G. Gruber, Allgemeine EncyklopГ¤die der Wissenschaften und KГјnste, ed. H. Brockhaus, section 1, part 63 (Leipzig, 1856), 434–35. 30. Koselleck, “On the Anthropological and Semantic Structure of Bildung.” 31. Compare Seligman, “The Fragile Ethical Vision of Civil Society.” 32. Breuer, “Ueber das uns umfangende Geheimniss,” Latomia 4 (1844): 265. 33. J. G. RГ¶nnefahrt, “Festrede zur Feier des Johannistags, 24. Juni 1867, in der Loge вЂzur goldenen Krone’ i.Or. Stendal,” AstrГ¤a 29 (1868–69): 125–26.

34. Agte, “Das maurerische GeheimniГџ,” AstrГ¤a 17 (1853–54): 149. 35. “Maurer, Licht und Welt,” Latomia 3 (1843): 180. 36. Such a change of perspective on all male associations has been suggested by U. Frevert, “MГ¤nnergeschichte oder die Suche nach dem вЂersten’ Geschlecht,” in Was ist Gesellschaftsgeschichte? ed. M. Hettling et al. (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1991), 40. 37. M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 30.

Chapter 5 1. See, for example on spas, D. Blackbourn, “Taking the Waters: Meeting Places of the Fashionable World,” in The Mechanics of Internationalism: Culture, Society, and Politics from the 1840s to World War I, ed. M. H. Geyer and J. Paulmann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 435–57; D. P. Mackaman, Leisure Settings: Bourgeois Culture, Medicine, and the Spa in Modern France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 2. A. Vincent-Buffault, L’Exercice de l’amitiГ©: pour une histoire des pratiques amicales aux XVIIIe et XIXe siГЁcles (Paris: Fayard, 1995), 217. 3. Zestermann, “Ein Gang durch die RГ¤ume der Loge Minerva zu den 3 Palmen in Leipzig,” FZ 20 (1866): 45–55.Page 340 → 4. A. Brehm, “Ein maurerisches Bild aus Aegypten,” FZ 12 (1858): 371. 5. P. BrГ¶cker, “Zur Ausdruckskultur der Freimaurerei,” Der Kunstwart, 27 July 1914. 6. Therefore, it is not surprising that many Jewish Freemasons claimed a special historical relation between Judaism and Freemasonry and contested Christian legends of Masonic origins. See, for example, the pamphlet by the chief rabbi of the duchy Limburg, L. Landsberg, Ein Blick auf das Freimaurerthum vom Standpunkt des Judenthums aus (Amsterdam, 1868). 7. This eclecticism is also apparent in lodge names, ranging from Greek philosophers (Archimedes, Pythagoras) and gods (Apollo, Minerva, AstrГ¤a) to Egyptian mythology (Memphis, Horus), from Masonic symbolism (Kelle, Kette, Zirkel) and virtues (Eintracht, Harmonie) to heroes of German Bildung (Goethe, Immanuel, Lessing) and history (Friedrich, BlГјcher). See A. Erlenmeyer, Die Namen der Freimaurerlogen: Eine geschichtliche Untersuchung (Leipzig, 1917). 8. Carus, Bausteine zu einer Geschichte der Freimaurerloge Minerva, 20–21; Das Neue Haus der Loge Minerva zu den drei Palmen in Leipzig (Leipzig, 1886); [A. Linge], Das neue Heim der Loge Minerva zu den drei Palmen in Leipzig (Leipzig, 1906); Illustrirte Zeitung 127, no. 3297 (1906): 388. 9. [W.] RГјnger, “Die Ungleichheit der Menschen, Triebkraft der hГ¶heren Kultur,” in [Linge], Das neue Heim der Loge Minerva, 31. 10. Detailed descriptions of lodge rituals circulated within the Masonic brotherhood in large-print format (to be laid open during the ceremony in front of the Grand Master) or as handwritten copies, and are accessible today in the public libraries mentioned in the bibliography. See, for example, Ritual fГјr die Trauerloge: Nach der Berichtigung vom 7ten October, ed. Grosse National Mutterloge “Zu den drei Weltkugeln” (Berlin, 1857). 11. See, for example, the description of lodge life in Berlin, Hamburg, and Leipzig in the travelogue of the German-American Freemason and bookseller E. Roehr, “Reisebilder,” FZ 22 (1868): 238–40, 276–78, 282–84. Modern technology made the smooth workings of a lodge night easier. The new building of the Minerva lodge, erected in 1886, had electric air conditioning for the characteristically windowless ritual rooms, and telegraphs in all rooms, enabling the Grand Master to coordinate musicians and servants discreetly and effectively during lodge night. An earlier satirical description of a not so perfect lodge night was published by Richard Wagner in 1838 in the Neue Zeitschrift fГјr Musik after his visit to a Magdeburg lodge, reprinted in C. F. Glasenapp, Das Leben Richard Wagners (Leipzig, 1905), vol. 1, 224. During his time in Bayreuth, Wagner was pondering whether to join the lodge like his father-in-law Friedrich Liszt. Apparently Wagner’s friend Friedrich Feustel, a well-known Freemason, banker, and politician, advised him not to. According to Feustel, Wagner’s relationship to King Ludwig II could have been severed by such a step. “Richard Wagner und die Loge “Eleusis zur

Verschwiegenheit” in Bayreuth,” Bayreuther Bundesblatt 6 (1905–6): 29–30. 12. “Ueber das AeuГџre der BrГјder beim Erscheinen in der Loge,” FZ 4 (1850): 245–46. 13. Horneffer, Freimaurerleben, 20–21. 14. A. L. Daiber, Elf Jahre Freimaurer (Stuttgart, 1905), 24. 15. A. Schmidt, “Wesen, Zweck, Lehr- und Uebungsweise der Freimaurerei. Page 341 →Allgemeine Instruction in Lehrlings-Grade,” ZC 9 (1880): 36. 16. In Saxony, the majority of the lodges used SchrГ¶der’s rituals. However, lodges in Chemnitz and Freiberg worked with FeГџler’s, the Minerva lodge in Leipzig and one lodge in Bautzen with their own rituals. The basic features of all German lodge rituals were similar, and these similarities are stressed in what follows. 17. For a detailed description of the workings of lodge rituals see, for example, “Die Loge zu N.,” R. 5 (1876): 87. 18. Schmidt, “Wesen, Zweck, Lehr- und Uebungsweise der Freimaurerei,” 39–40. 19. Such speeches as well as the position of the lodge orator were a German peculiarity. While Englishspeaking and French lodges placed special emphasis on the rituals and the following banquet, a German lodge night was incomplete without a speech, in most cases on the teachings of Masonic ideology. 20. A. Feld, “Ueber die Bedeutung des freimaurerschen Rituals und seine Wirkung auf Geist und GemГјt des Maurers,” BstF 11 (1902): 66.

Page 365 →

Bibliography Unpublished Primary Sources Geheimes Staatsarchiv PreuГџischer Kulturbesitz Berlin HA Logen, Rep. 5.1.4, Nr. 7585–7587, 7296; Rep. 5.1.9., Nr. 578–579; Rep. 5.2. B 130, Nr. 9, 76; B 138, Nr. 1–5; B 139, Nr. 1, 7–9; B 143, Nr. 1–3; B 141, Nr. 4–9, 12, 14, 22, 36, 38–45, 50–51, 52–56, 223–224, 229, 231–233, 237, 261, 265–266, 270, 284, 302, 304; L 16, Nr. 3; L 17, Nr. 81, 83–90, 98, 125, 130, 134, 146–211, 342, 353, 368, 437, 439, 453–454, 467–468, 471, 502; L 18, Nr 23–29, 39, 44, 46, 48, 54, 80–86, 98, 262, 287, 374–380, 391–392, 709; L 21, Nr. 5, 9; L 23, Nr. 10–27, Nr. 35–38; L 24, Nr. 152, 177, 187, 191, 454, 467, 473, 655–656; L 26, Nr. 1–2, 28; L 28, Nr. 2, 13–14, 21–22, 67–69, 83–84. Justizministerium, Rep. 2.5.1, Nr. 6991–6994. Ministerium des Innern (HA I), Rep. 77, Tit. 267, Nr. 1–3, 11–14; Tit. 268, Nr. 1–2; Tit. 343 A, Nr. 67; Tit. 859, Nr. 13; Tit. 1053, Nr. 3. SГ¤chsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Dresden Ministerium des Innern, Nr. 78–79, 11172–11173. Staatsarchiv Breslau OberprГ¤sidium Breslau, Nr. 345–346. Regierung Breslau, Allg. Abteilung, Polizeiakten, Nr. 352. Regierung Breslau, JustizbГјro, Nr. 5479–5490. Stadtarchiv Leipzig Kap. 35, Nr. 1775. Kap. 71, Nr. 63. Central State Archive Moscow/ “Special Archive” Fond 1412–1, Nr. 4600–4602, 4630, 4636, 4690, 4780, 4851–4856, 4949–4956, 4960, 4967–4980, 4983, 4985, 5002–5009, 5011–5012, 5025–5027, 5040–5041, 5050, 5053, 5056–5059, 5094–5095, 5107, 5109, 5114, 5126–5128, 5152. Page 366 →

Libraries Deutsche BГјcherei, Leipzig Deutsches Freimaurer Museum, Bayreuth Staatsbibliothek PreuГџischer Kulturbesitz, Masonica Collection Stadtgeschichtliches Museum, Leipzig

Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig University Library Poznan/Palais Ciazen, Masonica-Collection University Library Wroclaw, Pamphlet Collection

Published Primary Sources Masonic Journals Am rauhen Stein. Maurerische Zeitschrift der GroГџen Loge von PreuГџen, gen. Royal York zur Freundschaft (Berlin, 1904–18) Am Reissbrete. Handschriftl. Mitt. aus der Loge Balduin zur Linde in Leipzig (Leipzig, 1874–1913) Archiv fГјr Freimaurerei (Hamburg, 1841–48) AstrГ¤a. Taschenbuch fГјr Freimaurer (Ilmenau, 1824–70, NF Leipzig, 1882–1911) Bausteine. Gesammelt von BrГјdern des Logen-Bundes Royal York zur Freundschaft zu Berlin (Berlin, 1881–84) Bausteine. Mitt. der Grossen Freimaurer-Loge von PreuГџen, genannt Kaiser Friedrich zur Bundestreue (Berlin, 1892–1918) Bayreuther Bundesblatt (Bayreuth, 1900–1918) Braunschweiger Logen-Correspondenz (Braunschweig, 1882–1918) Bundesblatt. Organ der GroГџen National-Mutterloge вЂZu den drei Weltkugeln’ (Berlin, 1887–1918) Cirkel-Correspondenz (Hamburg, Jg. 1839–47); continued under the title: Hamburgische Zirkel-Correspondenz (Jg. 1896/97–1902/03) Der freimaurerische Gedanke (Jena, 1912–14) Der Herold (Berlin, 1903, 1905–10, 1912–14, 1917, 1919–21) Der unsichtbare Tempel. Monatsschrift zur Sammlung der Geister (Munich, 1916–20) Der Ziegeldecker im Osten von Altenburg (Kahla, 1837–47; continued under the title: BruderblГ¤tter fГјr Freimaurer (Altenburg, 1848–54); excerpts in Handschuh und Rose. Mittheilungen an die FreimaurerSchwestern dem Ziegeldecker im Osten von Altenburg entlehnt (Altenburg, 1838–54) Der Zirkel (Vienna, 1876, 1902) Die BauhГјtte (Leipzig, 1858–1918) Die Leuchte. UnabhГ¤ngige kritische Monatsschrift fГјr die deutsche Freimaurerei (Lennep, Jg. 1910–16) Dresdner Logenblatt (Dresden, 1871/72–1919/20) Freimaurer-Zeitung (Leipzig, 1847–1920) Hamburger Logenblatt (Hamburg, 1886–95, 1903/4–1918/19) Kalender fГјr Freimaurer (Berlin, since 1867, Leipzig, 1861–1932)Bibliography Page 367 →

Latomia. Freimaurerische Vierteljahrs-Schrift (Leipzig, 1842–73); new series under the title: Latomia. Neue Zeitschrift für Freimaurerei (Leipzig, 1878–1914) Mecklenburgisches Logenblatt (Rostock, 1886, 1904/5) Mitt. aus dem Bunde der Grossen National-Mutterloge der Freimaurer in den Preussischen Staaten, gen. Zu den drei Weltkugeln im Orient Berlin (Berlin, 1869/70–1871/72) Mitt. aus dem Verein deutscher Freimaurer (Leipzig, 1862–1932/33) Mitt. der Gr. Loge von Preußen, gen. Royal York zur Freundschaft (Berlin, 1885/86–1890) Mitt. über die Verhandlungen d. Großen Landesloge von Sachsen (Dresden, 1873) Monatsblätter der Freimaurerloge “Hermann zur Beständigkeit” (Breslau, 1911– 15) Neueste Zeitschrift für Freimaurerei (Altenburg, 1838–41); continued under the title Die Maurerhalle (1842–45) Protokoll der Großloge des Freimaurer-Bundes zur Eintracht (Frankfurt, 1866–73); continued under the title Mitt. aus den Protokollen der Großen Mutterloge des Eklektischen Freimaurerbundes in Frankfurt am Main (1874–1914) Schlesisches Logenblatt (Breslau, 1881–1922) Signale für die deutsche Maurerwelt (Leipzig, 1902) Sonnenstrahlen. Bundes-Organ des Freimaurerbundes zur aufgehenden Sonne (Nuremberg, 1911–12) Zirkelcorrespondenz unter den St. Johannis-Logenmeistern der Großen Landesloge der Freimaurer in Deutschland (Berlin, 1872–1918) Zwanglose Mitteilungen aus dem Verein deutscher Freimaurer (Leipzig, 1910/12– 1920/22)

Masonic and Anti-Masonic Literature Allgemeines Handbuch der Freimaurerei. 4 vols. Leipzig, 1863–79. Allgemeines Handbuch der Freimaurerei, new ed. Verein deutscher Freimaurer. 2 vols. Leipzig, 1900–1901. Beiträge zur Humanitätslehre. Elf Logenreden, mit einem Vorwort von J. G. Findel. Leipzig, 1889. Bericht, gutachtlicher, über Reformen im Logenwesen. Abgefasst von den durch das Meistercollogium der Loge Friedrich August z.d. 3 Zirkeln in Zittau hierzu ausgewählten Brüdern: Wilh. Jahn, Friedr. Küchenmeister, Edmund Oberreit. Zittau, 1849. Clemens Thieme—zum siebzigsten Geburtstag am 13. Mai 1931, Festschrift, ed. Deutschen Patriotenbund. Leipzig, 1931. Das Neue Haus der Loge Minerva zu den drei Palmen in Leipzig. Leipzig, 1886. Der Freimaurerorden in seiner gegenwärtigen Nichtigkeit dargestellt. Leipzig, 1847. Die Angriffe der katholischen Geistlichkeit gegen die Freimaurerei in Deutschland. Leipzig, 1864. Die Freimaurerloge Balduin zur Linde in Leipzig, 1776–1926. Leipzig, 1926.

Documents Respecting the Controversy between the Grand Lodges of Hamburg and New York. I. On the Exclusive Territorial Jurisdiction of Grand Lodges. II. On Page 368 →the Inquiry Concerning the Regularity of Colored Lodges,ed. Masonic Historical Society in Brooklyn, New York, n.d. Freiheit und Kirchenregiment. Meinungsstreit zwischen von Ketteler und Bluntschli. Heidelberg, 1871. Matrikel der Loge Balduin zur Linde in Leipzig 1776–1876. Leipzig, 1876. Pandora, oder interessante Mittheilungen Гјber alte und neue Freimaurerei, aus dem handschriftl. Nachlasse eines Geweihten. Stuttgart, 1859. Sechs Stimmen Гјber Geheime Gesellschaften und Freimaurerei von Joh. Struve, Ernst Moritz Arndt, Adolph Freiherr von Knigge, Heinr. Steffens, Joh. Fr. Meyer, J. A. FeГџler. Solothurn, 1824. Гњbersicht Гјber die ThГ¤tigkeit der Freimaurerischen WeltgeschГ¤ftsstelle 1903–1910. Bern, 1911. Zur Erinnerung an das 100jГ¤hrige Stiftungsfest der Loge Modestia cum Libertate. ZГјrich, 1873. Albanus, H. L. KurzgefaГџte Charakteristik der heutigen Israeliten und ihrer WГјrdigung zur Freymaurerey. Ein Beytrag zur Geschichte des Tages. Leipzig, 1818. Alexander-Katz, H. Die Freimaurerei in PreuГџen und das Edikt vom 20. Okt. 1798. Berlin, 1893. Barruel, A. MГ©moirs pour servir ГЎ l’histoire du jacobinisme. Hamburg, 1800; German ed. DenkwГјrdigkeiten zur Geschichte des Jakobinismus. MГјnster, 1800–1803. Battenberg. “Freimaurerei.” In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Vol. 2, 1044–51. TГјbingen, 1910. Bauer, B. Freimaurer, Jesuiten und Illuminaten in ihrem geschichtlichen Zusammenhang. Berlin, 1863. [Bauer, B.] “Freimaurerei.” In Staats- und Gesellschaftslexikon. Vol. 7, ed. H. Wagener, 669–85. Berlin, 1861. Beek, G. zur [MГјller von Hausen]. Die Protokolle der Weisen von Zion. Charlottenburg, 1919. Beuren, O. [J. M. Raich]. Die innere Unwahrheit der Freimaurerei. Mainz, 1884. Bischoff, D. “Das Wesen der Freimaurerei.” Die Grenzboten 67 (1908): 22–31. Bischoff, D. Der Geist von 1914 und die deutsche Freimaurerei. Leipzig, 1916. Bischoff, D. Deutsche Gesinnung. Jena, 1914. Bischoff, D. Freimaurerei und Politik. Leipzig, 1911. Bischoff, D. Freimaurers Kriegsgedanken. Leipzig, 1914. Bischoff, D. Wie kam’s und wohin geht’s. Leipzig, 1914. Blumenhagen, W. Wo ist der Platz der Freimaurerei in der Menschheit? Eine Beleuchtung . . . Гјber die Zulassung der Israeliten zum Maurerbund. Hannover, 1838. Bluntschli, J. C. “Das VerhГ¤ltnis der Maurerei zu Staat und Kirche.” In VortrГ¤ge, gehalten bei der Stiftung d. Schweizerischen Logenvereins, 3–14. Zurich, 1844. Bluntschli, J. C. DenkwГјrdiges aus meinem Leben. 3 vols. NГ¶rdlingen, 1884.

Bluntschli, J. C. “Freimaurer.” In Deutsches Staats-WГ¶rterbuch. Vol. 3, ed. J. C. Bluntschli and K. Brater, 745–55. Stuttgart, 1858.Bibliography Page 369 → Bluntschli, J. C. FreimaurergesprГ¤che. 2 vols. NГ¶rdlingen, 1879. Bluntschli, J. C. “Nation und Volk, NationalitГ¤tsprinzip.” In Deutsches Staats-WГ¶rterbuch. Vol. 7, ed. J. C. Bluntschli and K. Brater, 152–60. Stuttgart, 1862. Bluntschli, J. C. “Weltmacht und Weltreich.” In Deutsches Staats-WГ¶rterbuch. Vol. 11, ed. J. C. Bluntschli and K. Brater, 183–87. Stuttgart, 1870. Boos, H. Geschichte der Freimaurerei. Zur Kulturgeschichte des 18. Jahrhundert. Aarau, 1894. Boscamp, C. F. [H. K. Frh. v. Ecker und Eckhoffen]. Werden und kГ¶nnten Israeliten zu Freymaurern aufgenommen werden? VeranlaГџt durch die zur Beherzigung fГјr Freymaurer von einem ungenannten hgg. Schrift. Hamburg, 1788. BrГ¤gger, W. “Die Г¶ffentlich-rechtliche Sonderstellung der drei altpreuГџischen Grosslogen.” PhD diss., Leipzig, 1931. BrГ¤unlich, P. Der neueste Teufelsschwindel in der rГ¶misch-katholischen Kirche. Leipzig, 1897. Brauweiler, H. Die BrГјder im Weltkriege. Cologne, 1916. Brauweiler, H. Deutsche und romanische Freimaurerei. Cologne, 1917. Brettmann, E. Die Freimaurerische Werk- und WohltГ¤tigkeit. Berlin, 1913. Carus, J. V. Bausteine zu einer Geschichte der Freimaurerloge Minerva zu den drei Palmen in Leipzig 1841–1891. Leipzig, 1891. Carus, J. V. Logen-Arbeiten, geh. in der Loge Minerva zu den drei Palmen in Leipzig. Leipzig, 1882. Caspari, O. Was ist Freimaurerthum und was kГ¶nnte seine Zukunft sein? BeitrГ¤ge zur Ethik und Darlegung dieser Weltanschauung. Berlin, 1889. Conrad, M. G. Am Reissbrett. Freimaurerische Ansprachen und Skizzen. Zurich, 1875. Conrad, M. G. Der Freimaurer. Neue BeitrГ¤ge zur Kritik des Logenlebens seiner Freunde und Feinde. Munich, 1885. Conrad, M. G. Flammen. FГјr freie Geister. Leipzig, 1882. Conrad, M. G. “Mehr Licht!” Kritische Betrachtungen Гјber die Freimaurerei. Zurich, 1877. Daiber, A. L. Elf Jahre Freimaurer. Stuttgart, 1905. Didler, K. Freimaurer-Denkschrift Гјber die politische Wirksamkeit des Freimaurer-Bundes als der unter verschiedenen Namen und Formen unter uns im Finstern schleichenden Propaganda zum Sturz des legitimen Throne und des politischen Christenthums, No 1–37b. Berlin, 1864–67. Dreyer, O. Deutsches Logentum und weltbГјrgerliche Freimaurerei. WolfenbГјttel, 1912. Eberhardt, A. P. Von Winkellogen Deutschlands—Freimaurerlogen neueren Datums—im letzten

Vierteljahrhundert. Leipzig, 1914. [Ebers, C. F.] Sarsena, oder der vollkommene Baumeister. Enthaltend die Geschichte und Entstehung des Freimaurerordens . . . Treu und wahr niedergeschrieben von einem wahren und vollkommenen Bruder Freimaurer. [Bamberg], 1816. Eckert, E. E. Der Freimaurer-Orden in seiner wahren Bedeutung. Dresden, 1851. Erlenmeyer, A. Die Namen der Freimaurerlogen. Eine geschichtliche Untersuchung. Leipzig, 1917. Page 370 → Etzel, F. A. v. Geschichte der groГџen National-Mutterloge in den preuГџischen Staaten. Berlin, 1903. Fels, G. v. Die Freimaurer. EnthГјllte Geheimnisse der Freimaurerlogen. Berlin, 1897. Findel, J. G. Der Deutschkatholizismus in Sachsen. Ein Menetekel fГјr das deutsche BГјrgertum. Leipzig, 1895. Findel, J. G. Die Juden als Freimaurer. Zur Beleuchtung der Krisis innerhalb des deutschen Maurerthums. Leipzig, 1893. Findel, J. G. Die katholische Klerisei auf der Leimruthe. Leipzig, 1897. Findel, J. G. Geschichte der Freimaurerei von der Zeit ihres Entstehens bis auf die Gegenwart. Leipzig, 1893. Findel, J. G. Schach-Bismarck oder Jesuiten und Freimaurer. Zeitgeschichtlicher Roman. Leipzig, 1884. Fitzner, J. A. Kaiser Wilhelm I. als Freimaurer in Wort und That. Hannover, 1897. Fluhrer, W., ed. Kronprinz und Kaiser Friedrich III. als Freimaurer. Faksimile-Druck der Logenrede des Kaiserlichen Freimaurers vom 12. September 1886. Leipzig, 1931. Foerster, W. Ueber den Patriotismus des Freimaurers. Am 62sten Stiftungsfeste der ger. u. vollk. St. Joh. Loge Friedrich z. gold. Zepter im Or. zu Breslau den 10. Dez. 1838. Breslau, [1838]. Frenzel, O. Aus vergangenen Tagen. Zum Jubelfeste der Vereinigten St. Johannis-Loge genannt zu den drei Totengrippten, zur SГ¤ule und zur Glocke in Breslau am 18. Mai 1891. Breslau, 1891. Fuchs, F. Oswald Marbach. Ein freimaurerisches Lebensbild. Leipzig, 1890. Gagern, C. v. Schwert und Kelle. Aus dem NachlaГџ des Verfassers, ed. M. G. Conrad. Leipzig, 1888. Gerber, H. [H. Gruber]. Der “giftige Kern” oder: Die wahren Bestrebungen der Freimaurerei. Berlin, 1899. Gerber, H. Leo Taxils Palladismus-Roman. Berlin, 1897. [Goedecke, B.] Festschrift zur Feier des 150jГ¤hrigen Bestehens der Loge Friedrich zum goldenen Zepter im Orient zu Breslau 1776–192. Breslau, 1926. [Goldschmidt, A.] Zum 50jГ¤hrigen Bestehen des Ordens Bne Briss in Deutschland. Frankfurt, 1933. Gougenot de Mousseaux, H. Le Juif, le judaisme et la Judaisation des peuples chrГ©tiens. Paris, 1869. Grebe, [A.] Die Angriffe der katholischen Geistlichkeit gegen die Freimaurerei in Deutschland. Ein Wort zur AufklГ¤rung fГјr Nichtmaurer. Leipzig, 1864.

Gruber, H. Freimaurerei, Weltkrieg, Weltfriede. Vienna, 1917. Haarhaus, J. Deutsche Freimaurer zur Zeit der Befreiungskriege. Jena, 1913. [Hahn, H.] KГ¶nnen Bayrische Beamte und MilitГ¤rpersonen Mitglieder der Freimaurer-Logen werden? Vortrag, gehalten in der Sitzung des FrГ¤nkischen Bezirks des V.d.F. zu NГјrnberg, am 9.3.1874. FГјrth, [1874]. Hayden, L. Masonry among Colored Men in Massachusetts. Letter to the Right Worshipful J. G. Findel, Honorary Grand Master of the Prince Hall Grand Lodge and General Representative thereof to the Lodges upon the Continent of Europe. Boston, 1871.Bibliography Page 371 → Heinichen, O. Die Grundgedanken der Freimaurerei im Lichte der Philosophie. Berlin, 1912. Heise, K. Entente-Freimaurerei und der Weltkrieg. Basel, 1919. Hellwig, A. “Freimaurer im Volksglauben.” Archiv fГјr Kriminalanthropologie und Kriminalistik 59 (1914): 65–70. Hengstenberg, E. W. v. Die Freimaurerei und das evangelische Pfarramt. Berlin, 1854. [Henschel, A. W. E. T.] Die Forderungen der Gegenwart an die Freymaurerey. Ein Vortrag, geh. bei der Uebernahme des Hammers in der Loge Friedrich z. gold. Scepter. Breslau, 1849. [Henschel, A. W. E. T.] Das VerhГ¤ltniГџ der Freimaurerei zur Politik. Breslau, 1848. Hieber, O. Zur Abwehr. Eine Beleuchtung der Schrift des Professors Dr. Settegast: Die deutsche Freimaurerei, ihr Wesen, ihre Ziele und Zukunft in Hinblick auf den maurerische Nothstand in Preussen. Berlin, 1892. H[ippel], T. G. v. Gelegenheitsworte in verschiedenen Freimaurer-Logen gesprochen. Bromberg, 1842. Hochmuth, K. A. Maurerische GrundsГ¤tze, ausgesprochen in der Loge Minerva z.d. drei Palmen i.Or. Leipzig am 3. MГ¤rz 5846. Leipzig, 1846. Horneffer, A. Der Bund der Freimaurer. Jena, 1913. Horneffer, E. Aus meinem Freimaurerleben. Hamburg: Akazien, 1957. Horneffer, E. “Die Freimaurerei und die religiГ¶se Krisis der Gegenwart.” Die Tat 4 (1912): 307–401. JГјnger, C. Die franzГ¶sische Freimaurerei und der Weltkrieg. Essen, 1917. Keller, L. Die geistigen Grundlagen der Freimaurerei und das Г¶ffentliche Leben. Jena, 1911. Ketteler, W. E. v. “Die Freimaurerei.” In Freiheit, AutoritГ¤t und Kirche. ErГ¶rterungen Гјber die groГџen Probleme der Gegenwart, ed. W. E. v. Ketteler. Mainz, 1862. Ketteler, W. E. v. Kann ein glГ¤ubiger Christ Freimaurer sein? Antwort auf den Herrn Dr. Rudolph Seydel. Mainz, 1865. [Klencke, H.] Die Gegenwart und Zukunft der Freimaurerei in Deutschland. Offener Brief zur Warnung und Rettung von einem Staatsmanne und ehemaligen Logenbeamten. Leipzig, 1854. [Klop, K.] Votum Гјber die Zulassung der Juden zum Maurerbund. Abgegeben in der vollkommenen und gerechten St.-Johannis-Loge zur Ceder im Orient von Hannover. Hannover, 1838.

KloГџ, G. B. F. Bibliographie der Freimaurerei und der mit ihr in Verbindung gesetzten geheimen Gesellschaften. Graz, 1970. Originally published Frankfurt a.M., 1844. KloГџ, G. B. F. Der schГ¤dliche EinfluГџ der sogenannten hГ¶heren Grade auf die wahre Freimaurerei. Vortrag, geh. fГјr die neuaufgenommenen BrГјder Meister am 24. Jan. 1844, in der Loge zur Einigkeit zu Frankfurt a.M. [Frankfurt, 1844]. KloГџ, G. B. F. Die Freimaurerei in ihrer wahren Bedeutung. Leipzig, 1845. KloГџ, G. B. F. Geschichte der Freimaurerei in England, Schottland und Irland. Leipzig, 1848. KloГџ, G. B. F. Geschichte der Freimaurerei in Frankreich aus Г¤chten Urkunden dargestellt 1725–1830. 2 vols. Darmstadt, 1852–53. Page 372 → KloГџ, G. B. F. “Stellung der Freimaurerei zu den Hauptfragen unserer Zeit.” Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift 4 (1841): 113–25. Kneisner, F. Geschichte der deutschen Freimaurerei in ihren GrundzГјgen. Berlin, 1912. Kohut, A. Die Hohenzollern und die Freimaurerei. Berlin, 1906. Krause, M. Zehn Jahre Vesta zum heiligen Feuer. Bericht Гјber d. GrГјndung und die ersten zehn Arbeitsjahre d. Loge Vesta zum heiligen Feuer i.O. Leipzig. Leipzig, 1916. KГјhne, G. Die Freimaurer. Eine Familiengeschichte aus dem vorigen Jahrhundert. Frankfurt, 1855. KuntzemГјller, O. Was sind die Freimaurer und was wollen sie? Dessau, 1908. Landsberg, L. Ein Blick auf das Freimaurerthum vom Standpunkt des Judenthums aus. Amsterdam, 1868. Lennhoff, E. Die Freimaurer. Vienna, 1932. Lennhoff, E, and O. Posner. Internationales Freimaurerlexikon. Zurich, 1932. Lenning, C. [Friedrich MoГџdorf]. EncyclopГ¤die der Freimaurerei, nebst Nachrichten Гјber die damit in wirklicher oder vorgeblicher Beziehung stehenden geheimen Verbindungen, in alphabetischer Ordnung. . . . 3 vols. Leipzig, 1822–28. [Lichhorn, K. L.] Die Tendenz und der wahre Standpunkt der Freimaurerei den neuesten Angriffen gegenГјber. Eine Rede zur Feier des Geburtsfestes Sr. MajestГ¤t des KГ¶nigs von Preussen Friedrich Wilhelm des Vierten, am 15. October 1854 in der Provinzial-Grossloge von Schlesien genannt Royal York zur Freundschaft. Breslau, [1854]. Lindner, F. W. Mac-Benac, Er lebet im Sohne, oder das Positive der Freimaurerei. Leipzig, 1818. Lissauer, H. Freimaurerische Gedanken. AufsГ¤tze und VortrГ¤ge. Berlin, 1900. Ludendorff, E. Vernichtung der Freimaurerei durch EnthГјllung ihrer Geheimnisse. Munich, 1927. Ludendorff, M. Der ungesГјhnte Frevel an Luther, Lessing und Schiller im Dienste des allmГ¤chtigen Baumeisters aller Welten. Munich, 1928. Mahlmann, A. Liederbuch der Freimaurer-Loge Minerva zu den drei Palmen in Leipzig. Leipzig, 1822. Maier, G. Weltliche Freimaurerei. Ein Beitrag zur humanistischen Bewegung innerhalb des deutschen

Maurertums. Leipzig, 1888. Marbach, O. An der SГ¤ule der Weisheit. LehrlingsvortrГ¤ge aus der Loge Balduin zur Linde. Leipzig, 1876. Marbach, O. Arbeiten am rauhen Stein. Leipzig, 1862. Marbach, O. Die Freimaurerei und der Streit der Parteien um Tagesfragen. Stiftungsfestrede am 2. MГ¤rz 1873. Leipzig, 1873. Maretzki, [L.] Geschichte des Ordens Bnei Briss in Deutschland, 1882–1907. Berlin, 1907. Mart, F. “Erkenne Dich selbst.” 20 Jahre “F.Z.A.S.” 1907–1927. Dresden, 1927. Marteau, P. [C. H. Georgi]. Politik und ZustГ¤nde in den drei altpreussischen Grosslogen und der Kampf des christlichen mit dem humanistischen Prinzip. Frankfurt, 1906.Bibliography Page 373 → Martin, J. S. Geschichtliche Darstellung der St.-Johannis-Freimaurerloge gen. zu den drei Todtgerippten. Breslau, 1841. Meissner, E., and A. Wenck. Geschichte der g. u. v. St. Johannis-Loge Apollo im Orient Leipzig. Leipzig, 1905. Merzdorf, J. F. L. T. Die Symbole, die Gesetze, die Geschichte, der Zweck der Masonei schlieГџen keine Religion von derselben aus. Leipzig, 1836. Merzdorf, J. F. L. T. Gotthold Ephraim Lessings Ernst und Falk. GesprГ¤che fГјr Freimaurer historisch-kritisch erlГ¤utert. Hannover, 1855. [Merzdorf, J. F. L. T.] Die Freimaurer-Logen und die Annexion. Von einem alten Freimaurer. [Leipzig], 1866. Milim, O. 25 Jahre Freimaurer! Erlebnisse und EnttГ¤uschungen eines alten Logenbruders. Berlin, 1910. Misipporus, J. J. [E. Meyer]. Ueber Alter und sittlich-religГ¶sen Charakter der Г¤lteren und eigentlichen Freimaurerei. Sendschreiben an . . . August Knobel . . . Auf AnlaГџ der deistenriecherischen Hengstenbergischen Angriffe auf dieselbe. Bremen, 1855. MГјller, A. W. Die FГјrsten Deutschlands in ihrer Beziehung zum Freimaurerbunde. Sondershausen, 1864. MГјller, K. O. Das Г¤chte RГјstzeug der Johannisfreimaurerei. Festvortrag, geh. in der St. Joh.-Loge Minerva z. d. drei Palmen in Leipzig. Leipzig, 1855. Naundorf, E. v. In der Loge “Archimedes zum flammenden Stern.” Nach den hinterlassenen Papieren eines Freimaurers. Prague, 1881. [NГјtten, H.] Die Gegenwart und Zukunft der Maurerei in Deutschland, Von einem alten Logenbruder. Leipzig, 1870. Oehlke, A. Hermann Settegast. Sein Leben, Walten und Wirken. Berlin, 1904. Oertzen, D. v. Was treiben die Freimaurer? Kurzer Wegweiser fГјr Laien. GГјtersloh, 1892. Ohr, W. Aus einem Jahr Feldlogenarbeit. Munich, 1916. Ohr, W. Der franzГ¶sische Geist und die Freimaurerei. Leipzig, 1916.

Olbrich, K. Die Freimaurerei im deutschen Volksglauben. Breslau, 1930. Orth, L. v. Maurerisches Glaubens-Bekenntnis. Lorch, 1908. Pachtler, M. G. Der GГ¶tze der HumanitГ¤t oder das Positive der Freimaurerei. Freiburg, 1875. Pachtler, M. G. Der stille Krieg gegen Thron u. Altar oder das Negative in der Freimaurerei. Amberg, 1876. Peuckert, W. E. Art. “Freimaurer.” In HandwГ¶rterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens. Vol. 3, 23–44. Berlin, 1931. PГ¶sche, G. 25 Jahre Freimaurer, 1906–1931. Berlin, 1931. Raich, J. M. “Freimaurer.” In Wetzer und Weste’s Kirchenlexikon oder EncyklopГ¤die der katholischen Theologie und ihrer Hilfswissenschaften. Vol. 2, 1967–90. Freiburg, 1886. Reinhardt, A. v. Die Judenfrage und der Freimaurerbund. Ulm, 1893. Rittershaus, E. Freimaurerische Dichtungen, ed. J. G. Findel. Leipzig, 1878. Rosenberg, A. Das Verbrechen der Freimaurerei, Judentum, Jesuitismus, Deutsches Christentum. Munich, 1922. Page 374 → Rosenberg, A. Die Protokolle der Weisen von Zion und die jГјdische Weltpolitik. Munich, 1923. Runkel, F. Die Geschichte der Freimaurerei in Deutschland. 3 vols. Berlin, 1931. Salomon, G. Stimmen aus Osten. Eine Sammlung Reden und Betrachtungen Maurerischen Inhalts. Hamburg, 1845. Sausse, H. W. Die Freimaurerei und Prof. Hengstenberg in Berlin. Offene Antwort auf dessen Angriffe gegen den Orden der Freimaurer. Leipzig, 1855. Schiffmann, G. A. Das VerhГ¤ltnis der Freimaurerei zum Christenthum und zur Kirche. Stettin, 1857. Schletter, H. Der Freimaurerorden in seiner gegenwГ¤rtigen Bedeutung. Leipzig, 1848. Schletter, H. “Freimaurerei im VerhГ¤ltniГџ zu Staat und Gesellschaft.” In Staats-Lexikon. Vol. 5, ed. C. v. Rotteck and C. T. Welcker, 3d ed., 676–82. Stuttgart, 1861. Schletter, H. Maurerische Lebensanschauungen. LogenvortrГ¤ge. Leipzig, 1863. Schultze, E. Die Kulturaufgaben der Freimaurerei. Stuttgart, 1912. Schwabe, J. C. Freimaurerei und Presse im Weltkrieg. 3 vols. Frankfurt, 1916–26. Schwabe, J. C. “Freimaurerische Lebensauffassung.” Nord und SГјd (1912): 357–63. Schwabe, J. C. FГјr und Wider die Freimaurerei. Kleine Bibliographie der Angriffs- u. Abwehrliteratur. Leipzig, 1931. Schwartz-Bostunitsch, G. Die Freimaurerei. Ihr Ursprung, ihre Geheimnisse, ihr Wirken. Weimar, 1928. Selasinsky, [C. F.] v. Freimaurerei und Christentum. Letztes Wort Гјber die Angriffe des Prof. Hengstenberg gegen den Freimaurer-Orden vom Verfasser der “Beleuchtung der Angriffe der Evangel. Kirchenzeitung u.s.w.” Berlin, 1854.

Selasinsky, [C. F.] v. “Vortrag am 3ten Sept. 1849 bei der Trauerfeier fГјr den . . . Ordensmeister Graf Henckel v. Donnersmarck.” In Zwei VortrГ¤ge, geh. im groГџen Ordenskapitel der GroГџen Landeslogen von Deutschland, 5–30. Berlin, 1849. Settegast, H. “Das christliche Prinzip in der Freimaurerei.” Mitt. aus dem Verein zur Abwehr des Antisemitismus 3 (1893): 359–60. Settegast, H. Die deutsche Freimaurerei, ihre Grundlagen, ihre Ziele, 8th ed. with appendix: Der Darwinismus in seinem VerhГ¤ltnis zur Naturforschung, Religion und Freimaurerei. Berlin, 1908. Settegast, H. Was vermag die Freimaurerei fГјr den Fortschritt der Cultur und fГјr die Staatswohlfahrt zu leisten. Berlin, 1885. Seydel, R. Katholicismus und Freimaurerei. Ein Wort zur Entgegnung auf die vom Freiherrn von Ketteler, Bischoff von Mainz, wider den Freimaurerbund erhobenen Anklagen. Leipzig, 1862. Seydel, R. Reden Гјber die Freimaurerei an denkende Nicht-Maurer. Leipzig, 1860. Six, F. A. Studien zur Geistesgeschichte der Freimaurerei. Hamburg, 1942. Smitt, W. Katechismus der Freimaurerei. Leipzig, 1891. Spitzner, A. Das VГ¶lkerschlacht-National-Denkmal, das Denkmal der Befreiung und der nationalen Wiedergeburt, Denkschrift des Deutschen-Patriotenbundes. Leipzig, 1897. Steitz, G. E. “Freimaurer und Freimaurerei.” In Real-EncyclopГ¤die fГјr protestantische Theologie und Kirche. Vol. 4, ed. J. J. Herzog, 570–91. Hamburg, 1855.Bibliography Page 375 → Stichling, G. T. Ueber die Bedeutung der Freimaurerei in der Kulturgeschichte der Menschheit. Zur SГ¤kularfeier des Grossherzogs Carl August in der Loge Amalia zu Weimar am 1. Sept. 1857. Weimar, 1857. Stieglitz, C. L. Geschichte der Freimaurerloge Minerva zu den drei Palmen im Orient Leipzig und Bescheibung ihrer SГ¤cularfeier am 20. MГ¤rz 5841. Leipzig, 1841. Stolz, A. Akazien-Zweig fГјr die Freimaurer. Freiburg, 1863. Stolz, A. MГ¶rtel fГјr die Freimaurer. Freiburg, 1862. Stolz, A. Naturgeschichte der Freimaurer. Vienna, 1869. Taute, R. Die katholische Geistlichkeit und die Freimaurerei. Berlin, 1909. Taute, R. Maurerische BГјcherkunde. Ein Wegweiser durch die Literatur der Freimaurerei mit literarischkritischen Notizen und zugleich ein Supplement zu Kloß’ Bibliographie. Leipzig, 1886; reprint, Graz, 1971. Taute, R. Ordens- und Bundes-Romane. Ein Beitrag zur Bibliographie der Freimaurerei. Frankfurt, 1907. Taxil, L. [G. Jogand-PagГ©s]. Les FrГЁres Trois-Points. 2 vols. Paris, 1885; German ed. Die Drei-PunkteBrГјder. VollstГ¤ndige EnthГјllungen Гјber die Freimaurerei. 2 vols. Freiburg, 1886–87. Venedey, J. Dankschreiben eines Freimaurers an seinen Bruder in Christo Alban Stolz. Lahr, 1862. Wagler, P. Freimaurerei als Erlebnis der Arbeit. Berlin, 1912. Wehrhan, K. Die Freimaurerei im Volksglauben. Geschichten, Sagen und ErzГ¤hlungen des Volkes Гјber die

Geheimnisse der Freimaurer und ihre Kunst. Berlin-Lankwitz, 1919. Weismann, H. Die Deutschen sollen national zu werden trachten; aber vor allem human, also Г¤cht maurerisch. Zwei maurerische VortrГ¤ge, geh. in der Loge zur Einigkeit . . . am 21. November 1863. Frankfurt, 1863. Wellersberg, C. v. Die Freimaurer, oder: Europas enthГјllte Staatsgeheimnisse. Strasbourg, [1875]. Wernicke, K. T. A. Beleuchtung der Angriffe der Evang. Kirchenzeitung gegen den Freimaurer-Orden und den Eintritt evangelischer Geistliche in denselben von einem Freimaurer. Berlin, 1854. Wichtl, F. Weltmaurerei, Weltrevolution, Weltrepublik. 8th ed. Munich, 1921. Wiebe, C. Die Grosse Loge von Hamburg und ihre VorlГ¤ufer. Hamburg, 1905. Wolfstieg, A. Bibliographie der freimaurerischen Literatur. 3 vols. Burg, 1913–25; suppl. vol. and 4th vol., ed. B. Beyer. Leipzig 1926; reprint, Hildesheim, 1964. [Wolfstieg, A.] “Christentum, HumanitГ¤t und Freimaurerei.” PJ 99 (1900): 21–41. Wolfstieg, A. Der freimaurerische Gedanke in groГџer Zeit und G. Minde-Pouet, Der Geist der deutschen Freimaurerei 1813 und heute. VortrГ¤ge auf der Jahresversammlung des Vereins deutscher Freimaurer in Breslau, 20./21.09.1913. Leipzig, 1914. Wolfstieg, A. Die Philosophie der Freimaurerei. 2 vols. Berlin, 1922. [Wolfstieg, A]. Freimaurerische Betrachtungen Гјber Harnacks Wesen des Christentums. Vom Verfasser von вЂChristentum, HumanitГ¤t und Freimaurerei.’ Berlin, 1901. Page 376 → Wolfstieg, A. Ist der freimaurerische Begriff “HumanitГ¤t” ein rein christlicher? Vom Verfasser von “Christentum, HumanitГ¤t und Freimaurerei.” Berlin, 1900. Wolfstieg, A. Ursprung und Entwicklung der Freimaurerei. 3 vols. Berlin 1920.

Literature Agethen, M. “Aufklärungsgesellschaften, Freimaurer, Geheime Gesellschaften.” Zeitschrift für historische Forschung 14 (1987): 439–63. Agethen, M. Geheimbund und Utopie. Illuminaten, Freimaurer und deutsche Spätaufklärung. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1984. Agulhon, M. Le cercle dans la France bourgeoise, 1810–1848. Étude d’une mutation de sociabilité. Paris: Armand Colin, 1977. Agulhon, M. Pénitents et Francs Maçons de l’ancienne Province. Essai sur la sociabilité méridionale. Paris: Fayard, 1984. Alexander, J. C. “Citizen and Enemy as Symbolic Classification: On the Polarizing Discourse of Civil Society.” In Cultivating Difference, ed. M. Lamont and M. Fournier, 289–308. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Alter, P., ed. Die Konstruktion der Nation gegen die Juden. Munich: Fink, 1999. Altgeld, W. Katholizismus, Protestantismus, Judentum. Über religiöse begründete Gegensätze und

nationalreligiГ¶se Ideen in der Geschichte des deutschen Nationalismus. Mainz: Matthias-GrГјnewald, 1992. Anderson, B. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991. Anderson, M. L. “The Kulturkampf and German History.” Central European History 29 (1996): 82–115. Anderson, M. L. “Piety and Politics: Recent Work on German Catholicism.” Journal of Modern History 63 (1991): 681–716. Anderson, M. L. Windthorst: A Political Biography. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981. Angress, W. T. “The German Army’s вЂJudenzГ¤hlung’ of 1916. Genesis—Consequences—Significance.” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 23 (1978): 117–37. Applegate, C. A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Arendt, H. “Karl Jaspers: Citizen of the World.” In The Philosophy of Karl Jaspers, ed. P. A. Schilpp, 539–49. New York: Tudor, 1957. Aschheim, S. Brothers and Strangers. The East European Jew in German and German-Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982. Aschheim, S. “вЂThe Jew Within’: The Myth of вЂJudaization’ in Germany.” In The Jewish Response to German Culture: From the Enlightenment to the Second World War, ed. Reinharz and Schatzberg, 212–41. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1985. Assmann, A. Arbeit am nationalen GedГ¤chtnis. Eine kurze Geschichte der deutschen Bildungsidee. Frankfurt: Campus, 1993. Assmann, A. “Nationale Diskurse zwischen Universalisierung und Ethnisierung.” Page 377 →In Bilder der Nation, ed. U. Bielefeld, 390–400. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1998.Bibliography Assmann, A., and J. Assmann, eds. Schleier und Schwelle. Vol. 1: Geheimnis und Г–ffentlichkeit. Munich: Fink, 1997. Balibar, E. “Ambiguous Universality.” Differences 7 (1995): 48–74. Balibar, E. “Paradoxes of Universality.” In Anatomy of Racism, ed. D. T. Goldberg, 283–94. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1990. Balibar, E. “Racism as Universalism.” In Masses, Classes, and Ideas, ed. Balibar, 191–204. London: Routledge, 1994. Baumann, Z. Modernity and Ambivalence. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991. Baumann, Z. “Strangers: The Social Construction of Universality and Particularity.” Telos 78 (1988–89): 7–42. Beachy, R. “Freemasonry and Associations in Leipzig, 1741–1830.” In Paradoxes of Civil Society: New Perspectives on Modern German and British History, ed. F. Trentmann. Providence: Berghahn Books, 2000. Beachy, R. “Recasting Cosmopolitanism: German Freemasonry and Regional Identity in the Early Nineteenth Century.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 33 (2000): 266–75.

Beachy, R. The Soul of Commerce: Property, Power, and Politics in Leipzig, 1750–1850. Leiden: Brill, 2004. Berding, H., ed. Mythos und Nation. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1996. Bermeo, N., and P. Nord, eds. Civil Society before Democracy: Lessons from Nineteenth-Century Europe. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000. Berstein, S. “La franc-maГ§onnerie et la RГ©publique (1870–1940).” Histoire 49 (1982): 28–37. Bessel, R. Germany after the First World War. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. Bhabha, H. “Introduction: Narrating the Nation.” In Nation and Narration, ed. H. Bhabha, 1–7. London: Routledge, 1990. Bhabha, H. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Bhabha, H. “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.” In Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. F. Cooper and L. Stoler, 152–62. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Bieberstein, J. v. Die These von der VerschwГ¶rung 1776–1945. Flensburg: Flensburger Hefte, 1992. Biefang, A. Politisches BГјrgertum in Deutschland 1857–1868. Nationale Organisation und Eliten. DГјsseldorf: Droste, 1994. Birke, A. M. Bischof Ketteler und der deutsche Liberalismus. Mainz: Matthias-GrГјndewald, 1971. Blackbourn, D. “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.” In The Peculiarities of German History, ed. D. Blackbourn and G. Eley, 159–292. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984. Blackbourn, D. The Long Nineteenth Century. London: Fontana Press, 1997. Blackbourn, D. Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Bismarckian Germany. New York: Clarendon Press, 1995. Blackbourn, D. “The Politics of Demagogy.” Past and Present 113 (1986): 152–84. Page 378 → Blackbourn, D. “Progress and Piety: Liberalism, Catholicism, and the State in Imperial Germany.” History Workshop Journal 26 (1988): 57–78. Blackbourn, D. “Taking the Waters: Meeting Places of the Fashionable World.” In The Mechanics of Internationalism: Culture, Society, and Politics from the 1840s to World War I, ed. M. H. Geyer and J. Paulmann. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Blackbourn, D. “VolksfrГ¶mmigkeit und Fortschrittsglaube im Kulturkampf.” Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1988. Blackbourn, D., and R. J. Evans, eds. The German Bourgeoisie. London: Routledge, 1991. Blaschke, O. Katholizismus und Antisemitismus im Deutschen Kaiserreich. GГ¶ttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1999. Blaschke, O., and F.-M. Kuhlemann, eds. Religion im Kaiserreich. Milieus-MentalitГ¤ten-Krisen. GГјtersloh: GГјtersloher Verlagshaus, 1996. Blumin, S. The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760–1900.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. BГ¶deker, H. E. “Menschheit.” In Historisches WГ¶rterbuch der Philosophie. Vol. 6, ed. J. Ritter and K. GrГјnder, 1127–38. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1980. BГ¶deker, H. E. “Menschheit, HumanitГ¤t, Humanismus.” In Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Vol. 3, ed. O. Brunner, W. Conze, and R. Koselleck, 1063–1128. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1982. Bollenbeck, G. Bildung und Kultur. Glanz und Elend eines deutschen Deutungsmusters. Frankfurt: Insel, 1994. Bollenbeck, G. “Die Abwendung des BildungsbГјrgertums von der AufklГ¤rung. Versuch einer AnnГ¤herung an die semantische Lage um 1880.” In Nach der AufklГ¤rung, ed. W. Klein and W. Naumann-Beyer, 151–62. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1995. Bradley, J. “Subjects into Citizens: Societies, Civil Society, and Autocracy in Tsarist Russia.” American Historical Review 107 (2002): 1094–1123. Brakensiek, S. FГјrstendiener—Staatsbeamte—BГјrger. AmtsfГјhrung und Lebenswelt der Ortsbeamten in niederhessischen KleinstГ¤dten 1750–1830. GГ¶ttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1999. Brenner, M. “вЂGott schГјtze uns vor unseren Freunden.’ Zur Ambivalenz des Philosemitismus im Kaiserreich.” Jahrbuch fГјr Antisemitismusforschung 2 (1993): 174–99. Breuer, S. Die Anatomie der Konservativen Revolution. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1993. Brewer, J. “This, That, and the Other: Public, Social, and Private in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” In Shifting the Boundaries: Transformation of the Languages of Public and Private in the Eighteenth Century, ed. D. Castiglione and L. Sharpe, 1–21. Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1995. Brubaker, R. Citizenship and Nationhood in France. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992. Brubaker, R. Nationalism Reframed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.Bibliography Page 379 → Bullock, S. C. Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730–1840. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Burke, J. M. “Freemasonry, Friendship, and Noblewoman: The Role of the Secret Society in Bringing Enlightenment Thought to Pre-Revolutionary Women Elites.” History of European Ideas 10 (1989): 283–93. Burke, J. M. “Sociability, Friendship, and the Enlightenment among Women Freemasons in Eighteenth Century France.” PhD diss., Arizona State University, 1986. Burke, J. M. “Through Friendship to Feminism: The Growth in Self-Awareness among Eighteenth-Century Women Freemasons.” Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History 14 (1987): 187–96. Burke, J. M, and M. C. Jacob. “French Freemasonry, Women, and Feminist Scholarship.” Journal of Modern History 68 (1996): 513–49. Calhoun, C., ed. Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992. Carlebach, J. “The Forgotten Connection: Women and Jews in the Conflict between Enlightenment and Romanticism.” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 24 (1979): 107–38.

Carnes, M. C. “Middle-Class Men and the Solace of Fraternal Ritual.” In Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America, ed. M. C. Carnes and C. Griffen, 37–66. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Carnes, M. C. Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989. Carnes, M. C., and C. Griffen, eds. Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Chartier, R. “The Chimera of Origin: Archaeology, Cultural History, and the French Revolution.” In Foucault and the Writing of History, ed. J. Goldstein, 167–86. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. Chartier, R. The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. Chartier, R. “Le monde comme reprГ©sentation.” Annales E.S.C. 44 (1989): 1505–20. Chevallier, P. Histoire de la franc-maГ§onnerie francaise. Vol. 2. L’Eglise de la RГ©publique 1877–1944. Paris: Fayard, 1975. Chevallier, P. “La maГ§onnerie francaise et la maГ§onnerie allemande en 1870–71.” Annales de l’Est. FacultГ© des lettres de l’UniversitГ© de Nancy 25 (1973): 77–94. Chickering, R. Imperial Germany and a World without War: The Peace Movement and German Society, 1892–1914. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975. Chickering, R. Karl Lamprecht: A German Academic Life (1856–1915). Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993. Chickering, R. We Men Who Feel Most German: A Cultural Study of the Pan-German League, 1894–1914. Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1984. Clark, P. British Clubs and Societies, 1580–1800: The Origins of an Associational World. New York: Clarendon Press, 2000. Page 380 → Clawson, M. A. Constructing Brotherhood: Class, Gender, and Fraternalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989. Clowes, E. W., S. D. Kassow, and J. L. West, eds. Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Cochin, A. Les sociГ©tГ©s de pensГ©e et la dГ©mocratie: Г‰tude d’histoire rГ©volutionnaire (Paris: Plon Nourrit, 1921). Cohen, J., and A. Arato. Civil Society and Political Theory. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992. Cohn, N. Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1981. Confino, A. The Nation as a Local Metaphor: WГјrttemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871–1918. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Conrad, F. “Zur Sozialstruktur der Hildesheimer Freimaurerlogen im 18. Jahrhundert.” Quatuor Coronati Jahrbuch 33 (1997): 237–44. Cooper, F., and L. Stoler, eds. Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World. Berkeley: University

of California Press, 1997. Corbin, A. “The Secret of the Individual.” A History of Private Life, vol. 4: From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War, ed. M. Perrot, 457–548. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1990. Cubitt, G. “Catholics versus Freemasons in Late-Nineteenth-Century France.” In Religion, Society, and Politics in France since 1789, ed. F. Tallett and N. Atkins, 121–36. London: Hambledon, 1991. Cubitt, G. “Conspiracy Myths and Conspiracy Theories.” Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford 20 (1989): 12–28. Cubitt, G. The Jesuit Myth: Conspiracy Theory and Politics in Nineteenth-Century France. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. Daniel, U. Hoftheater: Zur Geschichte des Theaters und der HГ¶fe im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert. Stuttgart: KlettCotta, 1995. Dann, O., ed. Lesegesellschaften und bГјrgerliche Emanzipation. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1981. Dann, O., ed. Vereinswesen und bГјrgerliche Gesellschaft in Deutschland. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1984. Dann, O. “Vernunftfrieden und nationaler Krieg. Der Umbruch im Friedensverhalten des deutsche BГјrgertums zu Beginn des 19. Jh.” In Kirche zwischen Krieg und Frieden, ed. W. Huber and J. Schwerdtfeger, 169–224. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1976. Daum, A. Wissenschaftspopularisierung im 19. Jahrhundert. BГјrgerliche Kultur, naturwissenschaftliche Bildung und die deutsche Г–ffentlichkeit, 1848–1914. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1998. Davidoff, L., and C. Hall. Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1750–1850. London: Hutchinson, 1987. Davis, B. “Reconsidering Habermas, Gender, and the Public Sphere: The Case of Wilhelmine Germany.” In Society, Culture, and the State in Germany, 1870–1930, ed. G. Eley, 397–426. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996.Bibliography Page 381 → Demeter, K. Die Frankfurter Loge zur Einigkeit 1742–1966. Frankfurt: Kramer, 1967. Derrida, J. Politics of Friendship. London: Verso, 1997. Dirks, N., G. Eley, and S. B. Ortner, eds. Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. Dotzauer, W. Freimaurergesellschaften am Rhein. AufgeklГ¤rte SozietГ¤ten auf dem linken Rheinufer vom Ausgang des Ancien Regime bis zum Ende der napoleonischen Herrschaft. Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1977. Dotzauer, W. “Zur Sozialstruktur der Freimaurer in Deutschland im 18. Jahrhunder” In AufklГ¤rung und Geheimgesellschaften. Zur politischen Funktion und Sozialstruktur der Freimaurerlogen im 18. Jahrhundert, ed. H. Reinalter, 109–49. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1989. Dumenil, L. Freemasonry and American Culture, 1880–1930. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. Dumont, L. German Ideology: From France to Germany and Back. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Eley, G. “Deutsche Geschichte und die WidersprГјche der Moderne.” In Zivilisation und Barbarei, ed. F.

Bajohr et al., 17–65. Hamburg: Christians, 1991. Eley, G. “Is All the World a Text? From Social History to the History of Society Two Decades Later.” In The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences, ed. T. J. McDonald, 193–244. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. Eley, G. “Is There a History of the Kaiserreich?” In Society, Culture, and the State in Germany, 1870–1930, ed. G. Eley, 1–42. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. Eley, G. “Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century.” In Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. C. Calhoun, 289–339. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992. Eley, G. “Society and Politics in Bismarckian Germany.” German History 15 (1997): 101–32. Eley, G., ed. Society, Culture, and the State in Germany, 1870–1930. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. Eley, G. “What Is Cultural History?” New German Critique 65 (1995): 19–36. Eley, G., and R. G. Suny. “Introduction: From the Moment of Social History to the Work of Cultural Representation.” In Becoming National, ed. G. Eley, 3–37. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Elias, N. The Germans: Power Struggles and the Development of Habitus in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Cambridge: Columbia University Press, 1996. Elias, N. Гњber sich selbst. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1990. Espagne, M. “Welches sind die Bestandteile der AufklГ¤rung? Aus dem Pariser NachlaГџ eines Wetzlarer Freimaurers.” Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft 32 (1988): 28–50. Fels, A. D. “Religious Assimilation in a Fraternal Organization: Jews and Freemasonry in Gilded-Age San Francisco.” American Jewish History 74 (1985): 369–403. Page 382 → Fels, A. D. “The Square and Compass: San Francisco’s Freemasons and American Religion, 1870–1900.” PhD diss., Stanford University, 1987. Fichte, J. G. “Vorlesungen Гјber die Freimaurerei [Briefe an Konstant] (1803/1804).” In AusgewГ¤hlte Politische Schriften, J. G. Fichte, 169–216. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978. Fisch, J. “Zivilisation, Kultur.” In Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Vol. 7, ed. O. Brunner, W. Conze, and R. Kaselleck, 679–774. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1992. Foucault, M. “Friendship as a Way of Life.” In The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984, vol. 1: Ethics, Subjectivity, and Truth, ed. P. Rabinow, 135–40. New York: New Press, 1997. Foucault, M. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1: An Introduction. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. Foucault, M. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. Foucault, M. “On the Genealogy of Ethics.” In Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. H. L. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, 229–52. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Foucault, M. “The Political Technology of Individuals.” In Technologies of the Self, ed. L. H. Martin, P. H. Hutton, and G. Gutman, 145–62. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988.

Foucault, M. “The Subject and Power.” In Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. H. L. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, 208–28. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Fout, J. C. “Sexual Politics in Wilhelmine Germany: The Male Gender Crisis, Moral Purity, and Homophobia.” In Journal of the History of Sexuality 2 (1992): 388–421. FranГ§ois, E., ed. SociabilitГ© et sociГ©tГ© bourgeoise en France, en Allemagne et en Suisse, 1750–1850. Geselligkeit, Vereinswesen und bГјrgerliche Gesellschaft in Frankreich, Deutschland und der Schweiz, 1750–1850. Paris: Edition Recherches sur les Civilisations, 1986. FranГ§ois, E., H. Siegrist, and J. Vogel. Nation und Emotion. Deutschland und Frankreich im Vergleich, 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. GГ¶ttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1995. FranГ§ois, E., and R. Reichardt. “Les formes de sociabilitГ© en France du milieu du XVIIIe siГЁcle au milieu du XIXe siГЁcle.” Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine 34 (1987): 453–72. Frevert, U., ed. BГјrgerinnen und BГјrger. GГ¶ttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1988. Frevert, U. “BГјrgerliche Meisterdenker und das GeschlechterverhГ¤ltnis. Konzepte, Erfahrungen, Visionen an der Wende vom 18. zum 19. Jahrhundert.” In BГјrgerinnen und BГјrger, ed. U. Frevert, 17–48. GГ¶ttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1988. Frevert, U. “Die Innenwelt der AuГџenwelt. ModernitГ¤tserfahrungen von Frauen zwischen Gleichheit und Differenz.” In Deutsche Juden und die Moderne, ed. S. Volkov, 75–94. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1994.Bibliography Page 383 → Frevert, U. “Mann und Weib und Weib und Mann. Geschlechter-Differenzen in der Moderne.” Munich: C. H. Beck, 1995. Frevert, U. “MГ¤nnergeschichte oder die Suche nach dem вЂersten’ Geschlecht.” In Was ist Gesellschaftsgeschichte? ed. M. Hettling, C. Huerkamp, and P. Nolte, 31–43. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1991. Frevert, U. Men of Honour: A Social and Cultural History of the Duel. Cambridge, Mass.: Polity Press, 1995. Friedemann, P., and. L. HГ¶lscher. “Internationale, International, Internationalis-mus.” In Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, vol. 3, ed. O. Brunner, W. Conze, and R. Koselleck, 367–97. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1982. Furet, F. Interpreting the French Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Furet, F. The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Gall, L. “BГјrgerliche Gesellschaften und bГјrgerliche Gesellschaft.” In Frankfurter Gesellschaft fГјr Handel, Industrie und Wissenschaft—Casino-Gesellschaft von 1802, ed. L. Gall, 11–36. Frankfurt: SocietГ¤ts-Verlag, 1995. Gall, L. BГјrgertum in Deutschland. Berlin: Siedler, 1989. Gall, L. BГјrgertum, liberale Bewegung und Nation. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1996. Gall, L., ed. BГјrgertum und bГјrgerlich-liberale Bewegung in Mitteleuropa seit dem 18. Jahrhundert. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1997. Gall, L. “вЂ. . . ich wГјnschte ein BГјrger zu sein.’ Zum SelbstverstГ¤ndnis des deutschen BГјrgertums

im 19. Jahrhundert.” Historische Zeitschrift 245 (1987): 601–23. Gall, L. “Liberalismus und bГјrgerliche Gesellschaft in Deutschland.” Historische Zeitschrift 220 (1975): 324–56. Gall, L., ed. Stadt und BГјrgertum beim Гњbergang von der traditionalen zur modernen Gesellschaft. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1993. Gall, L., ed. Stadt und BГјrgertum im 19. Jahrhundert. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1990. Gall, L., ed. Vom alten zum neuen BГјrgertum. Die mitteleuropГ¤ische Stadt im Umbruch, 1780–1820. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1991. Gall, L. Von der stГ¤ndischen zur bГјrgerlichen Gesellschaft. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1993. Gall, L., and D. Langewiesche, eds. Liberalismus und Region. Zur Geschichte des Liberalismus im 19. Jahrhundert. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1995. Gellner, E. Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell, 1983. Gerlach, K. “Die Berliner Freimaurer 1783.” In Staat und BГјrgertum im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert, ed. H. Reinalter and K. Gerlach. Frankfurt: Lang, 1996. Gerlach, K. “Die GroГџe Landesloge der Freimaurer in Deutschland 1769–1807 in Berlin.” In Quatuor Coronati Jahrbuch 30 (1993): 79–98. Gerlach, K. “Royal York zur Freundschaft in Berlin 1762–1806. Ein Beitrag zur Sozialgeschichte der Freimaurerei in Brandenburg-PreuГџen.” Quatuor Coronati Jahrbuch 31 (1994): 51–79. Gerlach, K. “Zur Sozialstruktur der GroГџen National-Mutterloge вЂZu den drei Weltkugeln’ 1775–1805 in Berlin.” Quatuor Coronati Jahrbuch 28 (1991): 105–24. Page 384 → Geulen, C. “Die Metamorphose der IdentitГ¤t. Zur вЂLanglebigkeit’ des Nationalismus.” In IdentitГ¤ten, ed. A. Assmann and H. Friese, 346–73. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1998. Geulen, C. “Die Sprache der Ausgrenzung. Biologismus als Dispositiv.” In FaktizitГ¤t, Kontext, Diskurs, ed. C. Borck et al., 63–72. Bielefeld, 1997. Geulen, C. Wahlverwandte: Rassismus und Nationalismus im spГ¤ten 19. Jahrhundert. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2004. Geyer, M. “Deutsche—EuropГ¤er—WeltbГјrger. Eine Гњberlegung zum Aufstieg und Fall des Modernismus in der Historiographie.” In Deutschland und Europa in der Neuzeit, vol. 1, ed. R. Melville et al., 27–47. Stuttgart: Steiner, 1988. Gilkeson, J. S. “City of Joiners: Voluntary Associations and the Formation of the Middle Class in Providence, 1830–1920.” PhD diss., Brown University, 1981. Gilkeson, J. S. Middle-Class Providence, 1820–1940. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. Gilkeson, J. S. “Voluntary Associations.” In Encyclopedia of American Political History. Studies of the Principal Movements and Ideas, vol. 3, ed. J. P. Greene, 1348–61. New York: Scribner, 1984. Gilman, S. L. Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

University Press, 1986. Goldstein, J., ed. Foucault and the Writing of History. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. Goltermann, S. “DoppelgГ¤nger ihrer Selbst. Гњberlegungen zu MГ¤nnlichkeit und Mimesis am Beispiel der deutschen Turnbewegung, 1860–1900.” Traverse 5 (1998): 13–25. Goltermann, S. “IdentitГ¤t. Ein Konzept zur Analyse von вЂNation’ und вЂnationalem BewuГџtsein.’” In Politische Kollektive. Die Konstruktion nationaler, rassischer und ethnischer Gemeinschaften, ed. U. Jureit. Frankfurt: WestfГ¤lisches Dampfboot, 2000. Goltermann, S. KГ¶rper der Nation. Habitusformierung und die Politik des Turnens 1860–1890. GГ¶ttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1998. Goodman, D. “Public Sphere and Private Life: Toward a Synthesis of Current Historiographical Approaches to the Old Regime.” History and Theory 31 (1992): 1–20. Goodman, D. The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. Goodman, P. Towards a Christian Republic: Antimasonry and the Great Transition in New England, 1826–1836. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Gordon, C. “The Soul of the Citizen: Max Weber and Michel Foucault on Government and Rationality.” In Max Weber, Rationality, Modernity, ed. S. Lash and S. Whimster, 293–316. London: Allen and Unwin, 1987. Gordon, D. Citizens without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French Thought, 1670–1789. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. Graf, F. W. Die Politisierung des religiГ¶sen BewuГџtseins. Die bГјrgerlichen Religionsparteien im deutschen VormГ¤rz: Das Beispiel des Deutschkatholizismus. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Formmann-Holzboog, 1978. Graf, F. W. “Kulturprotestantismus. Zur Begriffsgeschichte einer theologiepolitischen Chiffre.” Archiv fГјr Begriffsgeschichte 28 (1984): 214–68.Bibliography Page 385 → Graf, F. W. “Rettung der PersГ¶nlichkeit. Protestantische Theologie als Kulturwissenschaft des Christentums.” In Kultur und Kulturwissenschaft um 1900, vol. 1, ed. R. vom Bruch, F. W. Graf, and G. HГјbinger, 103–31. Stuttgart: Steiner, 1989. Greive, H. “Religious Dissent and Tolerance in the 1840s.” In Revolution and Evolution: 1848 in GermanJewish History, ed. W. E. Mosse, A. Paucker, and R. RГјrup, 337–52. TГјbingen: Mohr, 1981. Groppe, C. Die Macht der Bildung. Das Bildungsprinzip des deutschen BГјrgertums und der Stefan-George-Kreis 1890–1933. Cologne: BГ¶hlau, 1997. Gross, M. B. “Kulturkampf and Unification: German Liberalism and the War against the Jesuits.” Central European History 30 (1997): 545–66. Gross, M. B. The War Against Catholicism: Liberalism and the Anti-Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Germany. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. Gudladt, K. “Zur Geschichte der AltpreuГџischen Logen.” In Schlaglichter PreuГџen—Westeuropa, ed. U. Fuhrich-Grubert and A. H. Johansen, 295–318. Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1997.

Gutman, A., ed. Freedom of Association. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. Habermas, J. “BestialitГ¤t und HumanitГ¤t.” Die Zeit, 29 April 1999. Habermas, J. “Kant’s Idea of Perpetual Peace: At Two Hundred Years.” In The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory, 165–203. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001. Habermas, J. “The Postnational Constellation and the Future of Democracy.” In The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays, 58–112. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001. Habermas, J. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989. Habermas, R. Frauen und MГ¤nner des BГјrgertums. Eine Familiengeschichte 1750–1850. GГ¶ttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1999. Hahn, H. W. AltstГ¤ndisches BГјrgertum zwischen Beharrung und Wandel. Die Reichsstadt Wetzlar 1689–1870. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1991. HalГ©vi, R. Les Loges maГ§onniques dans la France d’Ancien RГ©gime. Aux origines de la sociabilitГ© dГ©mocratique. Paris: Colin, 1984. Halpern, A. The Democratisation of France, 1840–1901: SociabilitГ©, Freemasonry, and Radicalism. Atlanta: Minerva Press, 1999. Hammermayer, L. Der Wilhelmsbader Freimaurer-Konvent von 1782. Ein HГ¶he- und Wendepunkt in der Geschichte der deutschen und europГ¤ischen Geheimgesellschaften. Heidelberg: Schneider, 1980. Hammermayer, L. “Zur Geschichte der europГ¤ischen Freimaurerei und der Geheimgesellschaften im 18. Jahrhundert.” In BefГ¶rderer der AufklГ¤rung in Mittel- und Osteuropa. Freimaurer, Gesellschaften, Clubs, ed. E. H. Balasz et al., 9–69. Berlin: Camen, 1979. Hammermayer, L. “Zur Geschichte und Historiographie der deutschen Freimaurerei vom 18. bis 20. Jahrhundert.” In Kulturbeziehungen in Mittel- und Page 386 →Osteuropa im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert, ed. W. Kessler et al., 81–106. Berlin: Camen, 1982. HГ¤nsel-Hohenhausen, M. Die deutschsprachigen Freimaurer-Zeitschriften des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts. Frankfurt: R. G. Fischer, 1988. Hardtwig, W. “BГјrgertum, Staatssymbolik und StaatsbewuГџtsein im Deutschen Kaiserreich 1871–1914.” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 16 (1990): 269–95. Hardtwig, W. “Eliteanspruch und Geheimnis in den Geheimgesellschaften des 18. Jahrhundert.” In AufklГ¤rung und Geheimgesellschaften. Zur politischen Funktion und Sozialstruktur der Freimaurerlogen im 18. Jahrhundert, ed. H. Reinalter, 63–86. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1989. Hardtwig, W. Genossenschaft, Sekte, Verein in Deutschland. Vol. 1, Vom SpГ¤tmittelalter bis zur FranzГ¶sischen Revolution. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1997. Hardtwig, W. “Strukturmerkmale und Entwicklungstendenzen des Vereinswesens in Deutschland 1789–1848.” In Vereinswesen und bГјrgerliche Gesellschaft in Deutschland, ed. O. Dann, 11–50. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1984. Hardtwig, W. “Verein, Gesellschaft, Geheimgesellschaft, Assoziation, Genossenschaft und Gewerkschaft.” In Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Vol. 6, ed. O. Brunner, W. Conze, and R. Koselleck, 789–829. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1990.

Hardtwig, W., and H.-U. Wehler, eds. Kulturgeschichte Heute. GГ¶ttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1996. Harland-Jacobs, J. “All in the Family: Freemasonry and the British Empire in the Mid-Nineteenth Century.” Journal of British Studies 42 (2003): 448–82. Harland-Jacobs, J. “Hands Across the Sea: The Masonic Network, British Imperialism, and the North Atlantic World.” Geographical Review 89 (1999): 237–53. Harrison, C. E. The Bourgeois Citizen in Nineteenth-Century France: Gender, Sociability, and the Uses of Emulation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Harrison, C. E. “Unsociable Frenchmen: Associations and Democracy in Historical Perspective.” Tocqueville Review 17 (1996): 37–56. Hass, L. “The Russian Masonic Movement in the Years 1906–1918.” Acta Poloniae Historica 48 (1983): 95–131. Hass, L. “The Socio-professional Composition of Hungarian Freemasonry (1868–1920).” Acta Poloniae Historica 30 (1974): 71–117. Haupt, H.-G. “Der Nationalismus in der neueren deutschen und franzГ¶sischen Geschichtswissenschaft.” In Nation und Emotion. Deutschland und Frankreich im Vergleich, 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. E. FranГ§ois, H. Siegrist and J. Vogel, 39–55. GГ¶ttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1995. Haupt, H.-G., and G. Crossick. The Petite Bourgeoisie in Europe, 1780–1914. London: Routledge, 1995. Haupt, H.-G., and C. Tacke. “Die Kultur des Nationalen. Sozial- und kulturgeschichtliche AnsГ¤tze bei der Erforschung des europГ¤ischen Nationalismus im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert.” In Kulturgeschichte Heute, ed. W. Hardtwig and H.-U. Wehler, 255–83. GГ¶ttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1996. Hausen, K. “Family and Role-Division: The Polarization of Sexual Stereotypes in the Nineteenth Century—An Aspect of the Dissociation of Work and Family Page 387 →Life.” In The German Family, ed. R. J. Evans and W. R. Lee, 51–83. London: Croom Helm, 1981.Bibliography Hazareesingh, S., and V. Wright. Francs-MaГ§ons sous le Second Empire: Les Loges provinciales du GrandOrient Г la veille de la TroisiГЁme RГ©publique. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2001. Headings, M. J. French Freemasonry under the Third Republic. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1949. Healy, R. The Jesuit Specter in Imperial Germany. Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2003. Hecht, M. ModernitГ¤t und BГјrgerlichkeit. Max Webers Freiheitslehre im Vergleich mit den politischen Ideen von Alexis de Tocqueville und Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1998. Hein, D. “Soziale Konstituierungsfaktoren des BГјrgertums.” In Stadt und BГјrgertum beim Гњbergang von der traditionalen zur modernen Gesellschaft, ed. L. Gall, 151–81. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1993. Hein, D., and A. Schulz, eds. BГјrgerkultur im 19. Jahrhundert. Bildung, Kunst und Lebenswelt. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1996. Held, T. “Juden und Freimaurer in Hamburg.” MA thesis, University of Hamburg, 1983. Helfer, C. “HumanitГ¤tsduselei, zur Geschichte eines Schlagworts.” Zeitschrift fГјr Religions- und Geistesgeschichte 16 (1964): 179–82. Hellmuth, E., ed. The Transformation of Political Culture: England and Germany in the Late Eighteenth Century.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Hennis, W. Max Webers Fragestellung. Studien zur Biographie des Werks. TГјbingen: Mohr, 1987. Hennis, W. Max Webers Wissenschaft vom Menschen. TГјbingen: Mohr, 1996. Hennis, W. “Tocquevilles вЂneue politische Wissenschaft.’” In Aspekte der Kultursoziologie, ed. J. Stagl, 385–407. Berlin: Reimer, 1982. Herder, J. G. “FreimГ¤urer.” In SГ¤mtliche Werke, 24 vols., ed. B. Suphan, 126–48. Hildesheim: Olms, 1967. Herzog, D. “Anti-Judaism in Intra-Christian Conflicts: Catholics and Liberals in Baden in the 1840s.” Central European History 27 (1994): 267–81. Herzog, D. Intimacy and Exclusion: Religious Politics in Pre-Revolutionary Baden. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. Hettling, M. Politische BГјrgerlichkeit. Der BГјrger zwischen IndividualitГ¤t und Vergesellschaftung in Deutschland und der Schweiz von 1860 bis 1918. GГ¶ttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1999. Hettling, M. Reform ohne Revolution. BГјrgertum, BГјrokratie und kommunale Selbstverwaltung in WГјrttemberg von 1800 bis 1850. GГ¶ttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1990. Hettling, M. “Von der Hochburg zur Wagenburg. Liberalismus in Breslau von den 1860er Jahren bis 1918.” In Liberalismus und Region. Zur Geschichte des Liberalismus im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. L. Gall and D. Langewiesche, 253–76. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1995. Hettling, M., and S.-L. Hoffmann. “Der bГјrgerliche Wertehimmel. Zum Problem Page 388 →individueller LebensfГјhrung im 19. Jahrhundert.” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 23 (1997): 333–59. Hieronimus, E. “Leo Taxil. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Antifreimaurerei.” Quatuor Coronati Jahrbuch 13 (1976): 99–118. Hobsbawm, E. J. “Introduction: Inventing Traditions.” In The Invention of Tradition, ed. E. J. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger, 1–14. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Hobsbawm, E. J. Nations and Nationalism since 1780. Programme, Myth, Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Hoffmann, S.-L. “Brothers or Strangers? Jews and Freemasons in Nineteenth-Century Germany.” German History 18 (2000): 143–61. Hoffmann, S.-L. Civil Society, 1750–1914. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Hoffmann, S.-L. “Civility, Male Friendship, and Masonic Sociability in Nineteenth-Century Germany.” Gender and History 13 (2001): 224–48. Hoffmann, S.-L. “Mythos und Geschichte. Leipziger Gedenkfeiern der VГ¶lkerschlacht im 19. und frГјhen 20. Jahrhundert.” In Nation und Emotion. Deutschland und Frankreich im Vergleich, 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. E. FranГ§ois, H. Siegrist, and J. Vogel, 111–32. GГ¶ttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1995. Hoffmann, S.-L. “Nationalism and the Quest for Moral Universalism: German Freemasonry, 1860–1914.” In The Mechanics of Internationalism: Culture, Society, and Politics from the 1840s to World War I, ed. M. H. Geyer and J. Paulmann. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Hoffmann, S.-L. “Sakraler Monumentalismus um 1900. Das Leipziger VГ¶lkerschlachtdenkmal.” In Der Politische Totenkult. KriegerdenkmГ¤ler in der Moderne, ed. R. Koselleck and M. Jeismann, 249–80. Munich: Fink, 1994. Hofman, A. “Opinion, Illusion, and the Illusion of Opinion: Barruel’s Theory of Conspiracy.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 27 (1993): 27–60. HГ¶lscher, L. “BГјrgerliche ReligiositГ¤t im protestantischen Deutschland des 19. Jhs.” In Religion und Gesellschaft im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. W. Schieder, 191–215. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1993. HГ¶lscher, L. “Die Г–ffentlichkeit begegnet sich selbst. Zur Struktur Г¶ffentlichen Redens im 18. Jahrhundert zwischen Diskurs- und Sozialgeschichte.” In вЂГ–ffentlichkeit’ im 18. Jahrhundert, ed. H.-W. JГ¤ger, 11–31. GГ¶ttingen: Wallstein, 1997. HГ¶lscher, L. “Die Religion des BГјrgers. BГјrgerliche FrГ¶mmigkeit und protestantische Kirche im 19. Jahrhundert.” Historische Zeitschrift 250 (1990): 595–627. HГ¶lscher, L. “Die religiГ¶se Entzweiung. Entwurf zu einer Geschichte der FrГ¶mmigkeit im 19. Jahrhundert.” Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft fГјr NiedersГ¤chsische Kirchengeschichte 93 (1995): 9–25. HГ¶lscher, L. Г–ffentlichkeit und Geheimnis. Eine begriffsgeschichtliche Unter-suchung zur Entstehung der Г–ffentlichkeit in der frГјhen Neuzeit. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1979. Hopp, A. JГјdisches BГјrgertum in Frankfurt am Main im 19. Jahrhundert. Stuttgart: Steiner, 1997. Horstmann, A. “Kosmopolit, Kosmopolitismus.” In Historisches WГ¶rterbuch der Page 389 →Philosophie, vol. 4, ed. J. Ritter and K. GrГјnder, 1155–67. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1979.Bibliography Hubert, R., and F. ZГ¶rrer. “Die Г¶sterreichischen Grenzlogen.” Quatuor Coronati Jahrbuch 20 (1983): 143–66. HГјbinger, G. Kulturprotestantismus und Politik. Zum VerhГ¤ltnis von Liberalismus und Protestantismus im Kaiserreich. TГјbingen: Mohr, 1994. HГјbinger, G., ed. Versammlungsort moderner Geister. Der Eugen Diederichs Verlag—Aufbruch ins Jahrhundert der Extreme. Munich: Diederichs, 1996. HГјbotter, A. Das Schicksal der HumanitГ¤t im 19. Jahrhundert. Berlin, 1929. Hull, I. V. Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany, 1700–1815. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995. Hunt, L., ed. The New Cultural History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Jackson Lears, T. J. No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920. New York: Pantheon, 1981. Jacob, M. C. “The Enlightenment Redefined: The Formation of Modern Civil Society.” Social Research 58 (1991): 475–95. Jacob, M. C. Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Jacob, M. C. “Money, Equality, Fraternity: Freemasonry and the Social Order in Eighteenth-Century Europe.” In The Culture of the Market, ed. T. L. Haskell and R. F. Teichengraeber III, 475–95. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Jacob, M. C. The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons, and Republicans. London: Allen and Unwin, 1981. Jeismann, M. Das Vaterland der Feinde. Studien zum nationalen Feindbegriff und SelbstverstГ¤ndnis in Deutschland und Frankreich 1792–1918. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1992. Jeismann, M. “Der letzte Feind. Die Nation, die Juden und der negative Universalismus.” In Die Konstruktion der Nation gegen die Juden, ed. P. Alter, 173–90. Munich: Fink, 1999. Jeismann, M. “Was bedeuten Stereotypen fГјr nationale IdentitГ¤t und politisches Handeln?” In Nationale Mythen und Symbole in der zweiten HГ¤lfte des 19. Jh. Strukturen und Funktionen von Konzepten nationaler IdentitГ¤t, ed. J. Link and W. WГјlfing, 84–92. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1991. Jelavich, P. “Method? What Method? Confessions of a Failed Structuralist.” New German Critique 65 (1995): 75–86. Jelavich, P. Munich and Theatrical Modernism: Politics, Playwriting, and Performance, 1890–1914. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985. Jenkins, J. “The Kitsch Collections and The Spirit in the Furniture: Cultural Reform and National Culture in Germany.” Social History 21 (1996): 123–41. Jenkins, J. Provincial Modernity: Local Culture and Liberal Politics in Fin-de-SiГЁcle Hamburg. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002. Joas, H. “Die Sozialwissenschaften und der Erste Weltkrieg. Eine vergleichende Analyse.” In Kultur und Krieg: Die Rolle der Intellektuellen, KГјnstler und Page 390 →Schriftsteller im Ersten Weltkrieg, ed. W. J. Mommsen, 17–29. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1996. Judson, P. M. Exclusive Revolutionaries: Liberal Politics, Social Experience, and National Identity in the Austrian Empire, 1848–1914. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. Judt, T. Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944–1956. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Kahan, A. Aristocratic Liberalism: The Social and Political Thought of Jacob Burckhardt, John Stuart Mill, and Alexis de Tocqueville. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Kant, I. “Idea for a Universal History with Cosmopolitan Intent [1784].” In Basic Writings of Kant, ed. A. W. Wood, 117–32. New York: Modern Library, 2001. Kaplan, M. A. The Making of the Jewish Middle-Class. Women, Family, and Identity in Imperial Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Katz, J. “The Fight for Admission to Masonic Lodges.” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 9 (1966): 171–209. Katz, J. From Prejudice to Destruction: Anti-Semitism, 1700–1933. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980. Katz, J. Jews and Freemasons in Europe, 1723–1939. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970. Kittsteiner, H. D. “Romantisches Denken in der entzauberten Welt.” In Versammlungsort moderner Geister. Der Eugen Diederichs Verlag—Aufbruch ins Jahrhundert der Extreme, ed. G. HГјbinger, 486–507. Munich: Diederichs, 1996. Klein, L. E. Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early

Eighteenth-Century England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Knigge, Baron. Practical Philosophy of Social Life or The Art of Conversing with Men. 2 vols. London: Cadell Jun. and Davies, 1794. Kocka, J., ed. Arbeiter und BГјrger im 19. Jahrhundert. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1986. Kocka, J., ed. BildungsbГјrgertum im 19. Jahrhundert. Vol. 4: Politischer EinfluГџ und gesellschaftliche Formation. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1989. Kocka, J., ed. BГјrger und BГјrgerlichkeit im 19. Jahrhundert. GГ¶ttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1987. Kocka, J., ed. (with the assistance of U. Frevert). BГјrgertum im 19. Jahrhundert. Deutschland im europГ¤ischen Vergleich. 3 vols. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag, 1988. Kocka, J. “The European Pattern and the German Case.” In Bourgeois Society in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. J. Kocka and A. Mitchell, 3–39. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1993. Kocka, J. “The Middle Class in Europe.” Journal of Modern History 67 (1995): 783–806. Koselleck, R., ed. BildungsbГјrgertum im 19. Jahrhundert. Vol. 2, BildungsgГјter und Bildungswissen. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1990. Koselleck, R. Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988.Bibliography Page 391 → Koselleck, R. “Freimaurerei im 18. Jahrhundert zwischen Politik und Moral.” Der Tau. Halbjahresschrift der Forschungsloge Quatuor Coronati 1 (1982): 5–18. Koselleck, R. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, 159–97. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985. Koselleck, R. “Historik und Hermeneutik.” In Hermeneutik und Historik, Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften. Phil.-histor. Klasse, Bericht 1, 9–28. Heidelberg: Winter, 1987. Koselleck, R. “Krise.” In Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Vol. 3, ed. O. Brunner, W. Conze, and R. Koselleck, 617–50. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1982. Koselleck, R. “Linguistic Change and the History of Events.” Journal of Modern History 61 (1989): 649–66. Koselleck, R. The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Koselleck, R. PreuГџen zwischen Reform und Revolution (1967). Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag, 1989. Koselleck, R. Zur politischen Ikonologie des gewaltsamen Todes. Ein deutsch-franzГ¶sischer Vergleich. Basel: Schwabe, 1998. Koselleck, R., U. Spree, and W. Steinmetz. “Drei bГјrgerliche Welten? Zur vergleichenden Semantik der bГјrgerlichen Gesellschaft in Deutschland, Frankreich und England.” In BГјrger in der Gesellschaft der Neuzeit, ed. H.-J. Puhle, 14–58. GГ¶ttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1991. Koselleck, R., et al. “Volk, Nation, Nationalismus, Masse.” In Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, vol. 7, ed. O. Brunner, W. Conze, and R. Koselleck, 141–431. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1992.

Koselleck, R., and M. Jeismann, eds. Der Politische Totenkult. KriegerdenkmГ¤ler in der Moderne. Munich: Fink, 1994. Koselleck, R., and K. Schreiner, eds. BГјrgerschaft. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1994. KrГјger, G. . . . grГјndeten auch unsere Freiheit. SpГ¤taufklГ¤rung, Freimaurerei, preuГџisch-deutsche Reform, der Kampf Theodor von SchГ¶ns gegen die Reaktion. Hamburg: BauhГјtten, 1978. Laclau, E. “Universalism, Particularism, and the Question of Identity.” In Emancipation(s), ed. E. Laclau, 20–35. London: Verso, 1996. Lamont, M., and M. Fournier, eds. Cultivating Difference: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Langewiesche, D. “BildungsbГјrgertum und Liberalismus im 19. Jahrhundert.” In BildungsbГјrgertum im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. J. Kocka, vol. 4, 95–113. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1989. Langewiesche, D. “Die schwГ¤bische SГ¤ngerbewegung in der Gesellschaft des 19. Jhs.—ein Beitrag zur kulturellen Nationsbildung.” Zeitschrift fГјr wГјrttembergische Landesgeschichte 59 (1993): 257–301. Langewiesche, D. “вЂ. . . fГјr Volk und Vaterland zu wГјrken . . .’ Zur politischen und gesellschaftlichen Rolle der Turner zwischen 1811 und 1871.” In Kulturgut oder KГ¶rperkult? ed. O. Grupe, 87–111. TГјbingen: Atempto, 1990. Langewiesche, D. “Liberalism and the Middle Classes in Europe.” In Bourgeois Society in NineteenthCentury Europe, ed. J. Kocka and A. Mitchell, 40–69. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1993. Page 392 → Langewiesche, D. Liberalism in Germany. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Langewiesche, D., ed. Liberalismus im 19. Jahrhundert. GГ¶ttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1989. Langewiesche, D. “Liberalismus und Judenemanzipation im 19. Jahrhundert.” In Juden in Deutschland: Emanzipation, Integration, Verfolgung und Vernichtung, ed. P. Freimark, 148–63. Hamburg: Christians, 1991. Langewiesche, D. “Nation, Nationalismus, Nationalstaat. Forschungsstand und Entwicklungsperspektiven.” Neue Politische Literatur 40 (1995): 190–236. Langewiesche, D. Nationalismus im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Zwischen Partizipation und Aggression. Bonn: Forschungsinst. der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, 1994. Langewiesche, D. “Sozialgeschichte und Politische Geschichte.” In Sozialgeschichte in Deutschland, vol. 1, ed. W. Schieder and V. Sellin, 5–32. GГ¶ttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1986. La Vopa, A. J. “Conceiving a Public: Ideas and Society in Eighteenth-Century Europe.” Journal of Modern History 64 (1992): 79–116. La Vopa, A. J. “Jews and Germans: Old Quarrels, New Departures.” Journal of the History of Ideas 54 (1993): 675–95. Lepsius, M. R., ed. BildungsbГјrgertum im 19. Jahrhundert. Vol. 3: LebensfГјhrung und stГ¤ndische Vergesellschaftung. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1992. Lessing’s Masonic Dialogues. London: Baskerville Press, 1927. Levenson, A. “Philosemitic Discourse in Imperial Germany.” Jewish Social Studies 2 (1996): 25–53.

Levy, R. S. The Downfall of the Anti-Semitic Political Parties in Imperial Germany. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975. Lichtblau, K. Kulturkrise und Soziologie um die Jahrhundertwende. Zur Genealogie der Kultursoziologie in Deutschland. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1996. Lidtke, V. The Alternative Culture: Socialist Labor in Imperial Germany. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Linse, U. Geisterseher und Wunderwirker. Heilssuche im Industriezeitalter. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1996. Lipp, C. “Verein als politisches Handlungsmuster. Das Beispiel des wГјrttembergischen Vereinswesens von 1800 bis zur Revolution 1848/49.” In SociabilitГ© et sociГ©tГ© bourgeoise en France, en Allemagne et en Suisse, 1750–1850. Geselligkeit, Vereinswesen und bГјrgerliche Gesellschaft in Frankreich, Deutschland und der Schweiz, 1750–1850, ed. E. FranГ§ois, 275–96. Paris: Edition Recherches sur les Civilisations, 1986. LГјbbe, H. Politische Philosophie in Deutschland. Basel: Schwabe, 1963. Lubelski-Bernard, N. “Freemasonry and Peace in Europe, 1867–1914.” In Peace Movements and Political Cultures, ed. C. Chatfield and P. van den Dungen, 81–94. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988. Ludz, P. C., ed. Geheime Gesellschaften. Heidelberg: Schneider, 1979. Luhmann, N. “Interaktion in Oberschichten. Zur Transformation ihrer Semantik im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert.” In Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik. Studien zur Wissenssoziologie der modernen Gesellschaft. Vol. 1, ed. N. Luhmann, 72–161. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1993.Bibliography Page 393 → Lyttelton, A. “An Old Church and a New State: Italian Anticlericalism, 1876–1915.” European Studies Review 13 (1983): 225–48. Mackaman, D. P. Leisure Settings: Bourgeois Culture, Medicine, and the Spa in Modern France. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Manheim, E. AufklГ¤rung und Г¶ffentlichen Meinung. Studien zur Soziologie der Г–ffentlichkeit im 18. Jahrhundert. 1933; rpt., Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1979. Manheim, E. “The Communicator and His Audience: Liberals and Traditionalists in Eighteenth Century Germany.” In Sociology and History: Theory and Research, ed. W. J. Cahnmann and A. Boskoff, 503–16. New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1964. Mann, H. The Loyal Subject. New York: Continuum, 1998. Mann, T. The Magic Mountain: A Novel. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995. Mann, T. Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man. 1918; rpt., New York: Frederick Ungar, 1983. Marchand, S., and D. Lindenfeld, eds. Germany at the Fin de SiГЁcle: Culture, Politics, and Ideas. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004. Maurice, F. Freimaurerei um 1800. Ignaz Aurelius FeГџler und die Reform der GroГџloge Royal York in Berlin. TГјbingen: Niemeyer, 1997. Mauss, M. “Nation, Nationality, Internationalism.” In Nationalism in Europe, 1850 to the Present, ed. S.

Woolf, 85–101. London: Routledge, 1996. McNeely, I. F. The Emancipation of Writing: German Civil Society in the Making, 1790s–1820s. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Medick, H. Naturzustand und Naturgeschichte der bГјrgerlichen Gesellschaft. Die UrsprГјnge der bГјrgerlichen Sozialtheorie als Geschichtsphilosophie und Sozialwissenschaft bei Samuel Pufendorf, John Locke und Adam Smith. GГ¶ttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1973. Mehta, U. S. “Liberal Strategies of Exclusion.” In Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. F. Cooper and L. Stoler, 59–86. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Meinecke, F. Cosmopolitanism and the National State. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970. Meinecke, F. “Die deutschen Erhebungen von 1813, 1848, 1870 und 1914.” In Die deutsche Erhebung von 1914. VortrГ¤ge und AufsГ¤tze, 9–38. Stuttgart, 1914. Melzer, R. Konflikt und Anpassung. Freimaurerei in der Weimarer Republik und im Dritten Reich. Vienna: BraumГјller, 1999. Mergel, T. Zwischen Klasse und Konfession. Katholisches BГјrgertum im Rheinland 1794–1914. GГ¶ttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1994. Mettele, G. BГјrgertum in KГ¶ln 1775–1870. Gemeinsinn und freie Assoziation. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1998. Michels, R. Der Patriotismus. Prolegomena zu seiner soziologischen Analyse. Munich: Duncker und Humblot, 1929. Middell, K. “Leipziger SozietГ¤ten im 18. Jahrhundert. Die Bedeutung der SoziabilitГ¤t fГјr die kulturelle Integration von Minderheiten.” Neues Archiv fГјr SГ¤chsische Geschichte 69 (1998): 125–58. Page 394 → Mola, A. A. “Storia della Massoneria italiana dalle origini ai nostri giorni.” Milan: Bompiani, 1992. Money, J. “Freemasonry and the Fabric of Loyalism in Hanoverian England.” In The Transformation of Political Culture: England and Germany in the Late Eighteenth Century, ed. E. Hellmuth, 235–71. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Mooser, J. “Katholische Volksreligion, Klerus und BГјrgertum in der zweiten HГ¤lfte des 19. Jahrhundert.” In Religion und Gesellschaft im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. W. Schieder, 144–56. Stuttgart: KlettCotta, 1993. Mosse, G. L. German Jews beyond Judaism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Mosse, G. L. “The Influence of the Volkish Idea on German Jewry.” In Germans and Jews, 77–115. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987. Mosse, G. L. “Jewish Emancipation: Between Bildung and Respectability.” In The Jewish Response to German Culture: From the Enlightenment to the Second World War, ed. J. Reinharz and W. Schatzberg, 1–16. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1985. Mosse, G. L. Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe. New York: H. Fertig, 1985. Moyn, S. “German Jewry and the Question of Identity.” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 41 (1996):

291–308. MГјnkler, H., ed. BГјrgerreligion und BГјrgertugend. Debatten Гјber die vorpolitischen Grundlagen politischer Ordnung. Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1996. MГјnkler, H. Politische Bilder, Politik der Metaphern. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1994. MГјnkler, H. “Politische Tugend. Bedarf die Demokratie einer sozio-moralischen Grundlegung.” In Die Chancen der Freiheit, ed. H. MГјnkler, 25–46. Munich: Piper, 1992. MГјnkler, H. Zivilgesellschaft und BГјrgertugend. BedГјrfen demokratisch verfaГџte Gemeinwesen einer soziomoralischen Fundierung? Humboldt-UniversitГ¤t zu Berlin, Fachbereich Sozialwissenschaften, inaugural address, 10 May 1993. Nairn, T. “Internationalism and the Second Coming.” Daedalus 122 (1993): 155–70. Neuberger, H. Freimaurerei und Nationalsozialismus. Die Verfolgung der deutschen Freimaurerei durch vГ¶lkische Bewegung und Nationalsozialismus 1918–1945. 2 vols. Hamburg: BauhГјtten, 1980. Neugebauer-WГ¶lk, M. Esoterische BГјnde und BГјrgerliche Gesellschaft. Entwicklungslinien zur modernen Welt im Geheimbundwesen des 18. Jahrhunderts. GГ¶ttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1995. Nipperdey, T. Deutsche Geschichte 1866–1918. 2 vols. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1990–92. Nipperdey, T. Germany from Napoleon to Bismarck, 1800–1866. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. Nipperdey, T. “Nationalidee und Nationaldenkmal in Deutschland im 19. Jahrhundert.” In Gesellschaft, Kultur, Theorie, 133–73. GГ¶ttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1976. Nipperdey, T. “Verein als soziale Struktur in Deutschland im spГ¤ten 18. und Page 395 →frГјhen 19. Jahrhundert.” In Gesellschaft, Kultur, Theorie, 174–205. GГ¶ttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1976.Bibliography Nolte, P. GemeindebГјrgertum und Liberalismus in Baden 1800–1850. GГ¶ttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1994. Nord, P. The Republican Moment: Struggles for Democracy in Nineteenth-Century France. Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Nord, P. “Republicanism and Utopian Vision: French Freemasonry in the 1860s and 1870s.” Journal of Modern History 63 (1991): 213–29. Norton, B. “Russian Political Masonry and the February Revolution of 1917.” International Review of Social History 28 (1983): 240–58. Nunes, M. M. Die Freimaurerei. Untersuchungen zu einem literarischen Motiv bei Heinrich und Thomas Mann. Bonn: Bouvier, 1992. Nye, R. Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Padulo, G. “Contributo alla storia della massoneria da Giolitti a Mussolini.” Annali dell’ Istituto Italiano per gli studi storici 8 (1983–84): 219–347. Paletschek, S. Frauen und Dissens. Frauen im Deutschkatholizismus und in den Freien Gemeinden 1841–1852. GГ¶ttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1990.

Palmowski, J. “The Politics of the вЂUnpolitical German’: Liberalism in German Local Government, 1860–1880.” Historical Journal 42 (1999): 675–704. Palti, E. J. “Liberalism vs. Nationalism: Hobsbawm’s Dilemma.” Telos 95 (1993): 107–26. Pecora, V. P. “Habermas, Enlightenment, and Antisemitism.” In Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution,” ed. S. FriedlГ¤nder, 155–70. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992. Penny, G. “Fashioning Local Identities in an Age of Nation-Building: Cosmopolitan Visions and IntraGerman Competition.” German History 17 (1999): 488–504. Peters, B. Die Geschichte der Freimaurerei im Deutschen Reich 1870–1933. Berlin: Heinicke, 1986. Peukert, D. J. K. “Alltag und Barbarei. Zur NormalitГ¤t des Dritten Reiches.” In Ist der Nationalsozialismus Geschichte? Zu Historisierung und Historikerstreit, ed. D. Diner, 51–61. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1987. Peukert, D. J. K. Max Webers Diagnose der Moderne. GГ¶ttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1989. Pick, D. War Machine: The Rationalisation of Slaughter in the Modern Age. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. Plessner, H. Die verspГ¤tete Nation. Гњber die VerfГјhrbarkeit des bГјrgerlichen Geistes. 1935; rpt., Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974. Plessner, H. “Macht und menschliche Natur.” 1931; rpt. in Zwischen Philosophie und Gesellschaft, 241–317. Bern: Francke, 1953. Plessner, H. “Ungesellige Geselligkeit. Anmerkungen zu einem Kantischen Begriff.” In Conditio humana, 294–306. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1993. Pocock, J. The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975. Pocock, J. “The Machiavellian Moment Revisited.” Journal of Modern History 53 (1981): 49–72. Page 396 → Pocock, J. Politics, Language, and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History. New York: Atheneum, 1971. Pulzer, P. Jews and the German State: The Political History of a Minority, 1848–1933. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. Pulzer, P. The Rise of Political Antisemitism in Germany and Austria. 2d ed., Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988. Puschner, U., W. Schmitz, and J. H. Ulbricht, eds. Handbuch zur vГ¶lkischen Bewegung. 1871–1918. Munich: Saur, 1996. Putnam, R. D. “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital.” Journal of Democracy 6 (1995): 65–78. Putnam, R. D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000. Putnam, R. D. Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. Princeton: Princeton University Press,

1993. Putnam, R. D. “The Strange Disappearance of Civic America.” American Prospect 24 (1996): 34–48. Reichardt, R. “Zur SoziabilitГ¤t in Frankreich beim Гњbergang vom Ancien Regime zur Moderne.” In SociabilitГ© et sociГ©tГ© bourgeoise en France, en Allemagne et en Suisse, 1750–1850. Geselligkeit, Vereinswesen und bГјrgerliche Gesellschaft in Frankreich, Deutschland und der Schweiz, 1750–1850, ed. E. FranГ§ois, 27–41. Paris: Edition Recherches sur les Civilisations, 1986. Reif, H. WestfГ¤lischer Adel 1770–1860. GГ¶ttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1979. Reinalter, H., ed. AufklГ¤rung und Geheimgesellschaften. Zur politischen Funktion und Sozialstruktur der Freimaurerlogen im 18. Jahrhundert. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1989. Reinalter, H., ed. Freimaurer und GeheimbГјnde im 18. Jahrhundert in Mitteleuropa. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983. Reinalter, H. “Geheimgesellschaften und Revolution. Freimaurerei und Nationalsozialismus am Beispiel Alfred Rosenbergs.” In Quatuor Coronati Jahrbuch 21 (1984): 55–82. Reinalter, H. “вЂWhat Is to Be Done?’ The Red Specter, Franchise Questions, and the Crisis of Conservative Hegemony in Saxony, 1896–1909.” Central European History 24 (1991): 271–312. Reinharz, J., and W. Schatzberg, eds. The Jewish Response to German Culture: From the Enlightenment to the Second World War. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1985. Retallack, J. “Society and Politics in Saxony, 1763–1990.” Archiv fГјr Sozialgeschichte 38 (1998): 396–457. Rich, P. J. “Public-School Freemasonry in the Empire: вЂMafia of the Mediocre’?” In Benefits Bestowed? Education and British Imperialism, ed. J. A. Mangan, 174–92. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988. Richarz, M., ed. BГјrger auf Widerruf. Lebenszeugnisse deutscher Juden, 1780–1945. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1989. Riedel, M. “Gesellschaft, bГјrgerliche.” In Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Vol. 2, ed. O. Brunner, W. Conze, and R. Kaselleck, 719–863. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1975. Bibliography Page 397 → Riehl, W. H. The Natural History of the German People. Ed. D. J. Diephouse. Lewiston: Edwin Mellon Press, 1990. Roberts, J. M. “Freemasonry: Possibilities of a Neglected Topic.” English Historical Review 84 (1969): 323–35. Roberts, J. M. “LibertГ©, Г©galitГ©, fraternitГ©: The Hypothesis of Masonic Origin.” In Historische Semantik und Begriffsgeschichte, ed. R. Koselleck, 314–26. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1978. Roberts, J. M. The Mythology of the Secret Societies. London: Secker and Warburg, 1972. Roche, D. “Die SociГ©tГ©s de pensГ©e und die aufgeklГ¤rten Eliten im 18. Jahrhundert.” In Sozialgeschichte der AufklГ¤rung in Frankreich, ed. R. Reichardt and H.-U. Gumbrecht, 77–115. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1981. Roche, D. La siГЁcle des lumiГЁres en province. AcadГ©mies et acadГ©miens provinciaux, 1680–1789. 2

vols. Paris: Г‰cole des hautes Г©tudes en sciences sociales, 1978. Roche, D. Les rГ©publicains des lettres. Gens de culture et LumiГЁres au XVIIIe siГЁcle. Paris: Fayard, 1988. Roche, D. “Literarische und geheime Gesellschaftsbildung im vorrevolutionГ¤ren Frankreich: Akademien und Logen.” In Lesegesellschaften und bГјrgerliche Emanzipation, ed. O. Dann, 181–96. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1981. Rosenzweig, R. “Boston Masons, 1900–1935: The Lower Middle Class in a Divided Society.” Journal of Voluntary Action Research 6 (1977): 119–26. Rossignol, D. Vichy et les francs-maГ§ons. La Liquidation des sociГ©tГ©s secrГЁtes 1940–1944. Paris: LattГЁs, 1981. Roth, R. Stadt und BГјrgertum in Frankfurt am Main. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1996. RГјrup, R. Emanzipation und Antisemitismus. Studien zur “Judenfrage” der bГјrgerlichen Gesellschaft. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1987. RГјsen, J. “IdentitГ¤t und Konflikt im ProzeГџ der Modernisierung.” In Universalgeschichte und Nationalgeschichten, ed. G. HГјbinger, J. Osterhammel, and E. Pelzer, 333–43. Freiburg: Rombach, 1994. Ryan, M. P. Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City during the Nineteenth-Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Sandmann, N. “FranzГ¶sische Freimaurerlogen in OsnabrГјck wГ¤hrend der napoleonischen Annexion.” OsnabrГјcker Mitt. 98 (1993): 127–59. Sarasin, P. Stadt der BГјrger. Struktureller Wandel und bГјrgerlicher Lebenswelt, Basel 1870–1900. GГ¶ttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1997. Schieder, W. “BrГјderlichkeit.” In Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Vol. 1, ed. O. Brunner, W. Conze, and R. Kaselleck, 552–82. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1982. Schieder, W., ed. Religion und Gesellschaft im 19. Jahrhundert. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1993. Schindler, N. “AufklГ¤rung und Geheimnis im Illuminatenorden.” In Geheime Gesellschaften, ed. P. C. Ludz, 203–29. Heidelberg: Schneider, 1979. Schindler, N. “Freimaurerkultur im 18. Jahrhundert. Zur sozialen Funktion des Geheimnisses in der entstehenden bГјrgerlichen Gesellschaft.” In Klassen und Kulturen, ed. R. M. Berdahl et al., 205–62. Frankfurt: Syndikat, 1982. Schleiermacher, F. “Versuch einer Theorie des geselligen Betragens (1799).” In Werke, vol. 2, 3–31. Aalen, 1991. Page 398 → Schlesinger, A. M. “Biography of a Nation of Joiners.” American Historical Review 50 (1944): 1–25. SchloГџmacher, N. DГјsseldorf im Bismarckreich. Politik und Wahlen, Parteien und Vereine. DГјsseldorf: Schwann, 1985. Schmitt, C. The Concept of the Political. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1976. Schmitt, C. The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988.

Schmitt, C. The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996. Schmuhl, H.-W. “StГ¤dtische Eliten in NГјrnberg und Braunschweig.” Habilitationsschrift, University of Bielefeld, 1996. Schrader, F. E. Augustin Cochin et la RГ©publique FranГ§aise. Paris: Seuil, 1992. SchГјler-Springorum, S. Die jГјdische Minderheit in KГ¶nigsberg/Preussen, 1871–1945. GГ¶ttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1996. Schwarz, M. “Leviathan oder Lucifer. Reinhart Kosellecks вЂKritik und Krise’ revisited.” Zeitschrift fГјr Religions- und Geistesgeschichte 45 (1993): 33–57. Scobey, D. “Anatomy of the Promenade: The Politics of Bourgeois Sociability in Nineteenth-Century New York.” Social History 17 (1992): 203–27. Scott, J. W. Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996. Scott, J. W. “Universalism and the History of Feminism.” differences 7 (1995): 1–14. Sedgwick, E. K. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Seligman, A. B. “The Fragile Ethical Vision of Civil Society.” In Citizenship and Social Theory, ed. B. S. Turner, 139–61. London: Sage, 1993. Seligman, A. B. The Idea of Civil Society. New York: Free Press, 1992. Sheehan, J. J. German History, 1770–1866. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. Sheehan, J. J. German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century. Altlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1995. Sheehan, J. J. “Liberalism and the City in Nineteenth-Century Germany.” Past and Present 51 (1971): 116–37. Sheehan, J. J. “Wie bГјrgerlich war der deutsche Liberalismus?” In Liberalismus im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. D. Langewiesche, 28–44. GГ¶ttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1989. Shell, M. Children of the Earth: Literature, Politics, and Nationhood. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Sieg, U. “Bekenntnis zu nationalen und universalen Werten. JГјdische Philosophen im Kaiserreich.” Historische Zeitschrift 263 (1996): 609–38. Siemann, W. Gesellschaft im Aufbruch. Deutschland 1849–1871. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1990. Siemann, W. “Krieg und Frieden in historischen Gedenkfeiern des Jahres 1913.” In Г–ffentliche Festkultur. Politische Feste in Deutschland von der AufklГ¤rung bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg, ed. D. DГјding, P. Friedemann, and P. MГјnch, 298–320. Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1988.Bibliography Page 399 → Simmel, G. The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. K. H. Wolff. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1950. Simmel, G. “The Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret Societies.” American Journal of Sociology 11 (1906): 441–98.

Simmel, G. “Soziologie der Geselligkeit.” In Verhandlungen des Ersten Deutschen Soziologentages vom 18. bis 22. Okt. 1910 in Frankfurt, 1–16. TГјbingen, 1911. Simmel, G. Soziologie. Untersuchungen Гјber die Formen der Vergesellschaftung (1908), ed. O. Rammstedt. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1992. Simmel, G. “Tendencies in German Thought since 1870.” International Monthly 5 (1902): 93–111, 166–84. Simon-Ritz, F. Die Organisation einer Weltanschauung. Die freigeistige Bewegung im wilhelminischen Deutschland. GГјtersloh: Kaiser, 1997. Singer, B. C. J. “Cultural versus Contractual Nation: Rethinking Their Opposition.” History and Theory 35 (1996): 309–37. Skocpol, T. “The Tocqueville Problem: Civic Engagement in American Democracy.” Social Science History 21 (1997): 455–79. Smith, D. “Freemasonry and the Public in Eighteenth-Century Russia.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 29 (1995): 25–44. Smith, D. Working the Rough Stone: Freemasonry and Society in Eighteenth-Century Russia. De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1999. Smith, H. W. German Nationalism and Religious Conflict: Culture, Ideology, Politics, 1870–1914. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. Smith, H. W. “The Learned and the Popular Discourse of Anti-Semitism in the Catholic Milieu of the Kaiserreich.” Central European History 27 (1994): 315–28. Smith, H. W., ed. Protestants, Catholics, and Jews in Germany, 1800–1914. New York: Berg, 2002. Smith, H. W. “Religion and Conflict: Protestants, Catholics, and Anti-Semitism in the State of Baden in the Era of Wilhelm II.” Central European History 27 (1994): 283–314. Smith-Rosenberg, C. “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in NineteenthCentury America.” In Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America, 53–76. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Sorkin, D. “The Impact of Emancipation on German Jewry: A Reconsideration.” In Assimilation and Community, ed. J. Frankel and S. J. Zipperstein, 177–98. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Sorkin, D. The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780–1840. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Sorkin, D. “Wilhelm von Humboldt: The Theory and Practice of Self-Formation (Bildung), 1791–1810.” Journal of the History of Ideas 44 (1983): 55–73. Sperber, J. “BГјrger, BГјrgertum, BГјrgerlichkeit, BГјrgerliche Gesellschaft: Studies of the German (Upper) Middle Class and Its Sociocultural World.” Journal of Modern History 69 (1997): 271–97. Sperber, J. Popular Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century Germany. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. Stamm-Kuhlmann, T. “HumanitГ¤tsidee und Гњberwertigkeitswahn in der Page 400 →Entstehungsphase des deutschen Nationalismus.” Historische Mitt. 4 (1991): 161–71. Steinmetz, W. Das Sagbare und das Machbare. Zum Wandel politischer HandlungsrГ¤ume. England

1780–1867. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1993. Steinmetz, W. “Die schwierige Selbstbehauptung des deutschen BГјrgertums.” In Das 19. Jahrhundert. Sprachgeschichtliche Wurzeln des heutigen Deutsch, ed. R. Wimmer, 12–40. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1991. Steinmetz, W. “GemeineuropГ¤ische Tradition und nationale Besonderheiten im Begriff der Mittelklassen. Ein Vergleich zwischen Deutschland, Frankreich und England.” In BГјrgerschaft, ed. R. Koselleck and K. Schreiner, 161–237. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1994. Steinmetz, W. “вЂSprechen ist eine Tat bei euch.’ Die WГ¶rter und das Handeln in der Revolution von 1848.” In Europa 1848, ed. D. Dowe, H.-G. Haupt, and D. Langewiesche, 1089–1138. Bonn: Dietz, 1998. Stekl, H., P. Urbanitsch, E. BruckmГјller, and H. Heiss, eds. BГјrgertum in der Habsburgermonarchie. Vol. 2. “Durch Arbeit, Besitz, Wissen und Gerechtigkeit.” Vienna: Verl. fГјr Geschichte und Politik, 1992. Stern, F. “The Political Consequences of the Unpolitical German.” In The Failure of Illiberalism: Essays in the Political Culture of Modern Germany, 3–25. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972. Sternberger, D. Panorama of the Nineteenth Century. New York: Urizen Books, 1977. Stichweh, R. “Fremde, Barbaren und Menschen. VorГјberlegungen zu einer Soziologie der вЂMenschheit.’” In Der Mensch—das Medium der Gesellschaft, ed. P. Fuchs and A. GГ¶bel, 72–91. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1994. Tacke, C. Denkmal im sozialen Raum. Nationale Symbole in Deutschland und Frankreich im 19. Jahrhundert. GГ¶ttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1995. Tal, U. Christians and Jews in Germany: Religion, Politics, and Ideology in the Second Reich, 1870–1914. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975. Tal, U. “Liberals, Protestantism, and the Jews in the Second Reich, 1870–1914.” Jewish Social Studies 26 (1964): 23–41. Tarrow, S. “Making Social Science Work across Space and Time: A Critical Reflection on Robert Putnam’s Making Democracy Work.” American Political Science Review 90 (1996): 389—-97. Tenbruck, F. “Freundschaft. Ein Beitrag zur Soziologie der persГ¶nlichen Beziehungen.” In Die kulturellen Grundlagen der Gesellschaft, 227–50. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1989. Tenfelde, K. “Die Entfaltung des Vereinswesens wГ¤hrend der industriellen Revolution in Deutschland (1850–1873).” In Vereinswesen und bГјrgerliche Gesellschaft in Deutschland, ed. O. Dann, 55–114. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1984. Tenfelde, K., and H.-U. Wehler, eds. Wege zur Geschichte des BГјrgertums. GГ¶ttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1994. Tester, K. Civil Society. London: Routledge, 1992. Tocqueville, A. de. Democracy in America, ed. H. C. Mansfield and D. Winthrop. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.Bibliography Page 401 → Todorov, T. On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Tombs, R., ed. Nationhood and Nationalism in France: From Boulangism to the Great War, 1889–1918. London: HarperCollins Academic, 1991. Tosh, J. A. “Authority and Nurture in Middle-Class Fatherhood: The Case of Early and Victorian England.” Gender and History 8 (1996): 48–64. Tosh, J. A. Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Vistorian England. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. Tosh, J. A. “What Should Historians Do with Masculinity? Reflections on Nineteenth-Century Britain.” History Workshop Journal 38 (1994): 179–202. Treitel, C. A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of the German Modern. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Treitschke, H. v. “Der Sozialismus und seine GГ¶nner (1874).” 1874; rpt. in AufsГ¤tze, Reden und Briefe, vol. 4, ed. v. K. M. Schiller, 122–211. Meersburg, 1929. Treitschke, H. v. Die Gesellschaftwissenschaft. Leipzig, 1859. Trentmann, F., ed. Paradoxes of Civil Society: New Perspectives on Modern German and British History. Providence: Berghahn Books, 2000. Trepp, A.-C. “MГ¤nnerwelten privat: Vaterschaft im spГ¤ten 18. und beginnenden 19. Jahrhundert.” In MГ¤nnergeschichte—Geschlechtergeschichte, ed. T. KГјhne, 31–50. Frankfurt: Campus, 1996. Trepp, A.-C. Sanfte MГ¤nnlichkeit und selbstГ¤ndige Weiblichkeit. Frauen und MГ¤nner im Hamburger BГјrgertum 1770–1840. GГ¶ttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1996. Turner, V. W. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. London: Routledge, 1969. Uhalde, S. D. “Citizen and World-Citizen: Civic Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism in Eighteenth Century Hamburg.” PhD diss., Berkeley, 1984. van DГјlmen, R. The Society of the Enlightenment: The Rise of the Middle-Class and Enlightenment Culture in Germany. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. Van Horn Melton, J. “The Emergence of вЂSociety’ in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Germany.” In Language, History, and Class, ed. P. J. Corfield, 131–49. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Van Horn Melton, J. The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. van Rahden, T. Juden und andere Breslauer. Die Beziehungen zwischen Juden, Protestanten und Katholiken in einer deutschen GroГџstadt, 1860–1925. GГ¶ttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2000. van Rahden, T. “Mingling, Marrying, and Distancing: Jewish Integration in Wilhelminian Breslau and Its Erosion in Early Weimar Germany.” In JГјdisches Leben in der Weimarer Republik, ed. W. Benz, A. Paucker, and P. Pulzer, 197–222. TГјbingen: Mohr, 1998. Viallet, J.-P. “Anatomie d’une obГ©dience maГ§onnique: le Grand Orient d’Italie (1870–90).” MГ©langes de l’école franГ§aise de Rome 90 (1978): 171–223. Vickery, A. “Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of Categories and Page 402 →Chronology of English Women’s History.” Historical Journal 36 (1993): 383–414.

Vierhaus, R. “AufklГ¤rung und Freimaurerei in Deutschland.” In Freimaurer und GeheimbГјnde im 18. Jahrhundert in Mitteleuropa, ed. H. Reinalter, 115–39. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983. Vierhaus, R. “Bildung.” In Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, vol. 1, ed. O. Brunner, W. Conze, and R. Koselleck, 508–51. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1972. Vierhaus, R. “Kultur und Gesellschaft im 18. Jahrhundert.” In Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert als Epoche, ed. B. Fabian and W. Schmidt-Biggemann, 71–85. Nendeln: KTO Press, 1978. Vincent-Buffault, A. L’Exercice de l’amitiГ©: pour une histoire des practiques amicales aux XVIIIe et XIXe siГЁcles. Paris: Fayard, 1995. Volkov, S. “The Ambivalence of Bildung.” In The German-Jewish Dialogue Reconsidered, ed. K. L. Berghahn, 81–97. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1996. Volkov, S. JГјdisches Leben und Antisemitismus. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1990. Volkov, S. “Nationalismus, Antisemitismus und die deutsche Geschichtsschreibung.” In Nation und Gesellschaft, ed. M. Hettling and P. Nolte, 206–17. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1996. Volkov, S. “The вЂVerbГјrgerlichung’ of the Jews as a Paradigm.” In Bourgeois Society in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. J. Kocka and A. Mitchell, 367–91. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1993. Wahrman, D. Imagining the Middle-Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c. 1780–1840. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Walzer, M. “The Civil Society Argument.” In Dimensions of Radical Democracy, ed. C. Mouffe, 89–107. London: Verso, 1992. Weber, E. Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976. Weber, E. Satan franc-maГ§on. La mystification de LГ©o Taxil. Paris: Julliard, 1964. Weber, M. Max Weber. Ein Lebensbild. TГјbingen, 1926. Weber, M. Die protestantische Ethik II. Kritiken und Antikritiken, ed. J. Winckelmann. GГјtersloh: Siebenstern, 1978. Weber, M. Gesammelte AufsГ¤tze zur Religionssoziologie. Vol. 1. TГјbingen: Mohr, 1988. Weber, M. Gesammelte AufsГ¤tze zur Soziologie und Sozialpolitik. TГјbingen, 1924. Weber, M. Gesammelte AufsГ¤tze zur Wissenschaftslehre, ed. J. Winckelmann. TГјbingen: Mohr, 1988. Weber, M. Gesammelte Politische Schriften, ed. J. Winckelmann. TГјbingen: Mohr, 1988. Weber, M. “GeschГ¤ftsbericht.” In Verhandlungen des Ersten Deutschen Soziologentages vom 19. bis 22. Okt. 1910 in Frankfurt/M, 52–62. TГјbingen, 1911. Weber, M. “вЂKirchen’ und вЂSekten’ in Nordamerika.” Die christliche Welt 20 (1906): 558–62, 577–83. Weber, M. “The Profession and Vocation of Politics.” In Political Writings, ed. P. Lassman and R. Speirs, 309–69. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.Bibliography Page 403 →

Weber, M. The Protestant Ethic and the вЂSpirit’ of Capitalism and Other Writings, ed. P. Baehr and G. C. Wells. New York: Penguin Books, 2002. Weckel, U. “Der вЂmГ¤chtige Geist der Assoziation.’ Ein- und Ausgrenzung bei der Geselligkeit der Geschlechter im spГ¤ten 18. und frГјhen 19. Jahrhundert.” Archiv fГјr Sozialgeschichte 38 (1999): 57–77. Wehler, H.-U. Aus der Geschichte lernen? Essays. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1988. Wehler, H.-U. “Deutsches BildungsbГјrgertum in vergleichender Perspektive—Elemente eines вЂSonderwegs’?” In Aus der Geschichte lernen? Essays, ed. H.-U. Wehler, 218–40. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1988. Wehler, H.-U. Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte. 3 vols. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1987–95. Wehler, H.-U. “Geschichte und Zielutopie der deutschen bГјrgerlichen Gesellschaft.” In Aus der Geschichte lernen? Essays, 241–55. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1988. Weichlein, S. Nation und Region: Integrationsprozesse im Bismarckreich. DГјsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 2004. Weil, P. Qu’est ce qu’un franГ§ais? Histoire de la nationalitГ© franГ§aise depuis la RГ©volution. Paris: Grasset, 2002. Wilhelmy, P. Der Berliner Salon im 19. Jahrhundert (1780–1918). Berlin: de Gruyter, 1989. WГјrgler, A. Unruhen und Г–ffentlichkeit. StГ¤dtische und lГ¤ndliche Protestbewegungen im 18. Jahrhundert. TГјbingen: Bibliotheca-Academica, 1995. Young, R. J. C. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race. London: Routledge, 1995.

Page 404 → Page 405 →

Index Page numbers in italics indicate figures. African Americans, 96, 249 Alsace-Lorraine, 257–58, 260, 261 Ambrosch, Joseph Julius Athanasius, 74, 314n124 Amusement. See Sociability Anschütz, Ernst, 197 Anti-Catholicism, 96, 102, 134–45, 154–55, 215–16, 226, 255, 259, 292–93 Antifeminism, 207 Anti-Masonry, critique of lodges, 38–39, 41–42, 61, 74–75, 77, 80–83, 85–92, 133–34, 139–42, 264, 282–85, 291, 307n14 Anti-Semitism, 58, 68, 72, 91–92, 130, 133–34, 145–67, 265–66, 277, 283–84, 323n255, 328n70, 337n226; and conspiracy theories, 10, 27, 29, 74, 85–88, 90–91, 133–34, 144, 249–50, 282–85, 316n162, 333n154, 335n182 Aristocrats/aristocracy, 5, 20–21, 24–28, 30, 37, 42–45, 48–49, 93, 113–18, 208–9, 224, 305n40. See also Monarchy Arndt, Ernst Moritz, 38, 244 Assmann, Aleida, 207 Assmann, Jan, 207 Associations, 32–33, 37, 40–41, 49, 52–53, 58, 62–64, 66, 71, 102–3, 107–10, 123, 167, 171–74, 216, 226–27, 325n18; and laws, 72, 107, 154. See also Sociability Atheism, 219 Auerbach, Berthold, 59, 100, 101 Auerbach, Fritz, 149 Auerbach, Jakob, 59, 146 Babaud-Laribière, Léonide, 93 Baden, 33, 36, 110, 255, 258 Bahr, Hermann, 222 Bangel, Ludwig, 261 Barasch, Artur, 157

Barruel, Augustin, 29 Barsch, Paul, 189 BГ¤rwinkel, Friedrich Gottlieb, 53 Bauer, Bruno, 80–81, 133 Bavaria, 11, 36, 40, 326n29 Bayreuth, 36, 110, 341n11; Zur Sonne Grand Lodge, 94, 95, 111, 112, 115, 116, 131, 162, 261 Beck, Ulrich, 3 Behrens, Christian, 270 Belgium, 86, 98, 110, 143, 251, 254, 257, 261 Berlin, 19, 20, 40, 77, 86–87, 132, 153, 161; Urania zur Unsterblichkeit Lodge, 84 Beschoren, August, 66 Bildung/moral improvement, 2, 5, 8–9, 23, 31, 34, 59, 99, 105–6, 122, 127, 150, 166–67, 177–78, 201, 203, 214–35, 240–43, 263–64, 269, 272, 292–93; and education, 46, 112, 137–38, 226, 327n56; and mass culture, 234; and Page 406 → pulp fiction, 227–28. See also Sociability Bischoff, Diederich, 125–26, 221, 228 Bischoffswerder, Johann Rudolf von, 26 Bismarck, Otto von, 78, 79, 136, 332n143 BlГјcher, Gebhard Leberecht von, 21, 268, 340n7 BlГјher, Hans, 343n57 Blum, Robert, 61, 65, 67, 314n124 Blumenthal, Julius, 312, 333n156 Bluntschli, Johann Caspar, 8, 34, 76, 95, 96, 130, 131, 134, 135, 136, 137–38, 199, 216, 218–20, 221, 240, 245–47, 291, 331n121, 348n15, 353nn35–36 BlГјthner, Julius, 121 Bollenbeck, Georg, 150 Bourgeoisie/materialism/business, 3, 4, 10, 20, 21, 24, 30, 43, 49, 52–54, 88–90, 93, 114, 121, 123–24, 140–41, 152, 164–67, 209, 222, 224, 233, 285–91, 310n68. See also BГјrger/BГјrgertum Brunswick, 111, 163 Brehm, Alfred, 121, 180 Breslau, 19, 20, 27, 42, 44–46, 49, 53, 55, 68–74, 96–99, 111–18, 128, 146, 153–58, 160–64, 212, 277; Friedrich zum goldenen Zepter Lodge, 19, 26–27, 44–46, 55, 68–74, 84, 114, 128, 129, 155–56, 188, 194, 209, 277; Hermann zur BestГ¤ndigkeit Lodge, 156–58, 163–64; Horus Lodge, 45, 73, 98, 155–56, 158; Kosmos Lodge, 71–73; Settegast zur deutschen Treue Lodge, 156; Vereinigte Lodge, 45,

71, 73, 78, 155, 157; Zu den drei Todtengerippen Lodge, 45; Zur Glocke Lodge, 19, 45; Zur Säule Lodge, 19, 45 Brussels, 258 Bülow, Prince von (Reichskanzler), 259 Bürger/Bürgertum (citizen, citizenry), 3–4, 17, 20–21, 31, 34–35, 48–50, 52, 54–59, 89, 101–6, 113–14, 124–29, 150–53, 164–67, 196, 221–25, 229, 233–34, 271–72, 285–93, 313n117; and Bildungsbürger (educated elites), 52, 118; and Stadtbürger (burgher), 49–50; and Weltbürger (citizen of the world), 29, 105–6, 149–50, 164, 244, 256. See also Bourgeoisie/materialism/business; Civility; Civil society Calvinists, 28 Canthal (musical director), 67–68 Carolath-Schönaich, Heinrich Ludwig Erdmann Prince zu, 129, 226 Carus, Julius Victor, 160, 220 Catholics/Catholicism/Catholic Church, 28, 35, 54–56, 75–76, 83–84, 110–11, 159, 167, 264, 305n54, 311n81, 322n255; and anti-Masonry, 87–96, 136, 140–45, 210–11, 264, 282–83, 332n141, 332n143. See also Universalism Charity, 53, 122–23, 157, 216, 333n156 City, 20, 42, 48–50, 83–84, 99, 111, 156–58, 182; city councilmen, 21, 26, 28, 51, 53, 71, 97, 128–29, 146 Civility (Bürgerlichkeit), 4–5, 9, 23, 34–35, 53, 56, 74, 100, 104–6, 150–51, 164–67, 201, 233, 286–87, 289–90 Civil society (bürgerliche Gesellschaft). See Sociability Clarus, Albrecht, 48 Clarus, Johann Christian August, 47 Clarus, Julius, 47 Clarus, Hermann, 47–48 Class/status, 20–22, 49–50, 54, 89, 113, 121, 124–26, 229. See also Bourgeoisie/materialism/business; Lodges/Grand lodges Clemens XII, Pope, 305n54 Clergy, 21, 36, 37, 43, 55, 81–83, 86, 115, 162, 206, 287, 305n54, 332n141 Cohen, Hermann, 276 Cohn, Falk, 333n156 Colmar, 257, 261 Cologne, 28, 55, 56, 140; Minerva zum vaterländischen Verein Lodge, 71–73

Comenius, Amos, 226 Conrad, Michael Georg, 135, 138 Page 407 →Conservatives/conservatism, 40–41, 45, 57–58, 71–76, 80–88, 116, 126, 128, 133–34, 259–61, 265–67 Conspiracy. See Anti-Semitism Corbin, Alain, 208 Corinth, Lovis, 234, 235 Cosmoplitanism/cosmopolitan ethos. See Universalism Cramer, August Benvenuto, 224 Creizenach, Michael, 59 Creizenach, Theodor, 59 Cubitt, Geoffrey, 144 Danziger, Joseph, 159 Darwinism, 154, 160, 240–41, 267 Death, (Masonic) funerals, 48, 55, 142, 184, 209, 252–53, 270, 273, 332n141 Decke, Ernst, 314n124 Democracy, 1–3, 9, 24, 27, 61–75, 78, 81, 92–97, 102, 124–35, 159–60, 172–74, 239, 258, 272–73, 281–83, 293, 297n2; Democrats, 41–42, 51, 61–75, 84 DГ©nervaud, Claude, 149 Detmold, J. H. (minister), 314n124 Didler, Carl, 74–75, 86, 87, 321n234 Diederichs, Eugen, 194, 350n76 Die BauhГјtte (journal), 95 Die Hilfe (journal), 285 Die Tat (journal), 230 Dietrichs, Karl Heinrich Wilhelm August, 74 Dortmund, 49 Dresden, 19, 85, 138, 149 Dreyer, Otto, 267 DГјsseldorf, 140

Eckert, Eduard Emil, 85–89, 91, 133, 140 Eckstein, Anton, 125 Eley, Geoff, 241 Elias, Hermann, 164, 337n223 Elias, Norbert, 164, 242, 252 Ellissen, Abraham, 58 England, 19, 25, 41, 72, 244, 276; British Empire, 109; Grand Lodge of England, 19, 94, 131 Ernst II zu Sachsen-Coburg-Gotha, Duke, 79, 84, 103 Essen, 141 Etzel, Franz August von, 152 Falkenhausen, Friedrich Wilhelm von, 71, 74, 84, 146 Family, 22, 47–48, 91, 197, 212; fathers and sons, 47–48, 66–67, 157, 196–200, 206; marriage, 48, 192, 205–6, 328n64. See also Women Feist, Rosa, 204 Feßler, Ignaz Aurelius, 305n41, 341n16 Feustel, Friedrich, 341n11 Findel, Gottfried Josef Gabriel, 95–96, 135, 150, 251, 334n174 Finke, Joseph, 332n141 Fischer, Rudolf Richard, 58, 65–66, 221 Foerster, Wilhelm, 243, 247 Forge, Anatole de la, 257 Foucault, Michel, 12–13, 240, 351n1 France, 7, 8, 9–10, 20, 21, 24, 30, 92–94, 107, 109, 142, 144, 249–62, 270, 275–76, 291, 293; Grand Loge de France, 357–58; Grand Orient de France, 36, 59, 92, 93, 219, 249, 253–54, 257–62, 276, 283, 312n99, 354n1, 354n4 Fränkel, Heinrich, 227–28 Frankfurt, 20, 33, 36, 60, 65, 98, 309n51; Große Mutterloge des Eklektischen Freimaurerbunds, 71, 94, 95, 96, 111–12, 115–16, 131, 163–64; Zum Frankfurter Adler Lodge, 59; Zur aufgehenden Morgenröte Lodge, 59, 131, 261; Zur Einigkeit Lodge, 21, 28 Freiburg, 94, 218 Freimüthige Sachsen-Zeitung (news-paper), 85–86 Freudentheil, Gottlieb Wilhelm, 314n124

Freytag, Gustav, 47, 72, 156 Fried, Alfred, 261, 270 Friedrich II, King, 19–20, 21, 26 Friedrich III, Kaiser, 78–79, 82, 84, 100, 103, 131–32, 132, 154, 161, 330n100 Friedrich Leopold von PreuГџen, Prince, 259 Page 408 →Friedrich Wilhelm II, King, 26 Friedrich Wilhelm IV, King, 79–80 Friedrich von Brandenburg-Bayreuth, Markgrave, 21 Fritsch, Theodor, 133, 284 FГјlleborn, Georg Gustav, 26–27 Furet, FranГ§ois, 286 Geisenheimer, Sigismund, 59–60 Georg V, King, 103 Georgi, Carl Heinrich, 228 Gera, 84 Gerlach, Leopold von, 80 Gierke, Otto von, 102 Giessler, Johann Karl Ludwig, 80 Gilman, Sander, 165 Glagau, Otto, 140–41 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 113, 197, 203, 229, 322n246, 340n7, 343n63 Gotha, Ernst zum Compass Lodge, 84 GГ¶tz, Heinrich, 121 Gougenot de Mousseaux, Henri Roger, 284 Grand lodges. See individual states, cities, and provinces. GrГ¤vell, Maxim Karl Friedrich Wilhelm, 68, 314n124 Greupner, Richard, 123, 129 Guttmann (senior teacher), 71 Haarhaus, Julius, 270

Habermas, Jürgen, 3, 5, 6, 302n3 Habsburg Empire, Austria-Hungary, 10, 11, 36, 109–10, 133, 227, 260, 261, 282, 283, 284 Hague, The, 19, 261 Halle, Zu den drei Degen Lodge, 66 Hamburg, 19, 20, 98–100, 146, 158, 163; Großloge von Hamburg, 94, 98–99, 111–12, 115–16, 131, 157, 160, 249 Hanover, 36, 84, 111; Großloge von Hannover, 94, 130 Hardenberg, Karl August Prince von, 36 Harnack, Adolf von, 221 Haugwitz, Christian Count von, 26 Hebenstreit (doctor), 47 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 17 Heidelberg, 95, 136 Heinrich von Reuß-Schleiz, Prince, 84 Hengstenberg, Ernst Wilhelm, 80–83, 89, 133 Henkel von Donnersmark, Graf, 317n180 Henne-am-Rhyn, Otto, 346n122 Henschel, August Wilhelm, 63–64, 71, 74 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 30, 226, 306, 322n246 Hessen-Kassel, 36, 110 Hilmer, Gottlieb Friedrich, 26 Hirschfeld, Georg, 333 Höck, Christian Hermann, 50–51 Hölscher, Lucian, 214 Honigmann, Paul, 157 Honor, 91, 146, 183, 202; dueling, 114, 336, 346n115; honorary council and court, 43, 121–22, 159, 208–9, 251, 328n64 Horneffer, August, 189, 230–33 Horneffer, Ernst, 162, 230–32 Horst (Justizrat), 146

Humanity/mankind, 4–5, 8–10, 23, 56–63, 76, 86, 99–100, 104–6, 125–27, 138, 140–41, 145–51, 159, 164–67, 171–72, 176–78, 192, 215–21, 224–35, 240–47, 250–56, 262–67, 277–82, 287–90; sentimental humanitarianism, 41–42, 167, 196, 262–65, 288. See also Universalism Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 214, 223 Hund, Karl Gotthelf von, Baron, 25 Iconography in lodge buildings, 158, 180–84, 182 Independence, economic and moral, 4, 30, 44, 47–48, 67, 85, 90, 118–19, 143; self-made men, 121 Italy, 10, 105, 109, 110, 135, 136, 143, 257, 261, 282, 291, 297n2 Jaspis (General Superintendent), 82 Jesuits, 136–44, 162, 247, 286, 289, 332n129, 357n45 Jews/Judaism, 30–31, 40–41, 56–75, 79, 97–99, 117–18, 145–67, 180–81, 207, 216–18, 277, 292, 311n81, 312n99, 315n149, 322n255, 333n156; and Page 409 →B’nai B’rith Order, 108, 158, 160, 163–64. See also Universalism Joachimsohn, Hirsch, 97–98, 146 JГ¶rg, Edmund, 87–90, 91, 92, 102 Jost, Marcus, 59 Kaliski, Louis, 197 Kampmann (rector), 71–72, 316n152 Kant, Immanuel, 18, 26, 32, 154, 221, 226, 229 Katz, Jacob, 59 Keller, Ludwig, 226–27 Ketteler, Wilhelm Emanuel von, 90, 92, 96, 136, 139 Kiessling, Franz, 217 Klemperer, Victor, 100 Kloss, Georg, 96 Knigge, Adolph von, Baron, 20 KГ¶nigsberg, 20, 163, 256, 315n149 KГ¶rber, Gustav Wilhelm, 71, 73, 116 Koselleck, Reinhart, 6, 12, 23, 302n3 Kovno, 278 Kraft, Heinrich, 258, 260

Kultur/civilization, 23, 76–77, 233, 242–43, 246–47, 250–56, 264–65, 276–77, 280–82, 288, 362n26 Kunth, Ernst, 314n124 Langewiesche, Dieter, 58 Laßwitz, Carl Wilhelm, 71 Latomia (journal), 55 Laudien (Regierungsrat), 314n124 Leipzig, 19, 20, 25–26, 28, 42–51, 55–56, 59–60, 65–67, 83, 95–99, 111–18, 120–23, 128–29, 154–55, 158–63, 202, 209, 267–68; Apollo Lodge, 19, 26, 42–44, 50–51, 55, 59–60, 65–68, 72–73, 97–98, 120, 122, 145–46, 158–59, 197, 202, 267; Balduin zur Linde Lodge, 19, 42–44, 56–57, 59–60, 67–68, 99, 112, 122, 175, 194; Maçonia Lodge, 66–67; Minerva zu den drei Palmen Lodge, 19, 25–26, 28, 42–44, 47–48, 51–53, 68, 99, 112, 160, 180–82, 225; Phönix Lodge, 160; Stern zur Treue Lodge, 160, Vesta zum heiligen Feuer Lodge, 161; Zur grünenden Eiche Lodge, 161 Le Monde maçonnique (journal), 95 Leo XIII, Pope, 87, 124 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 5–6, 20, 28, 30, 32, 38, 70, 76, 146, 221, 226, 263, 322n246 Lessing, Theodor, 142 Levy, Alphonse, 149, 277–78, 360n95 Liberals/liberalism, 41, 48, 58, 65, 67, 70–72, 86, 90, 92, 95–97, 109, 114, 116, 126, 128–29, 131, 133–34, 139–41, 143, 148, 151, 156, 218, 235, 246, 285–86, 290 Lichnowsky, Felix von, Prince, 314n124 Lindner, Friedrich Wilhelm, 308n26 Lissauer, Hugo, 153 Liszt, Franz, 341n11 Löberich, Karl Heinrich, 162 Lodges/grand lodges, 39–41, 86, 94; admission process, 46–47, 50–51, 59–60, 95, 97, 119–20, 145–46, 153, 183–86; and age, 46–47, 118, 158, 327n55; banquets, 69, 183, 194, 205, 341n19; and dress, 183, 194–95; dues and fees, 43, 98, 107–9, 118–19, 288, 328n58; festivals, 69, 258, 260–61; high degrees, 25–26, 93, 117–18, 160; irregular, 161–62, 337n213; membership, 19–20, 37, 108–12, 323n266; and religious affiliation, 55–58, 99, 152–56, 158, 311n81, 322n255; secret ballot, 24, 50, 68, 153, 202, 308, 323n255; and social composition, 20–21, 26, 42–46, 48–49, 112–17, 157, 327n56; statutes and constitutions, 56, 67, 93, 219, 259. See also lodges in individual cities Löwe, Martin August Ludwig, 194–95 Ludendorff, Erich, 284–85 Ludwig Wilhelm August von Baden, Prince, 84

LГјtzeler, Franz, 140 Magic Flute (Mozart), 132 Magnan, Bernard Pierre, 93 Mahlmann, Siegfried August, 47 Mann, Heinrich, 286–87, 289–90 Mann, Thomas, 135, 286, 287–90 Mannheim, 36, 49 Manteuffel, Otto Theodor von, 87 Marbach, Oswald, 65–67, 85, 127, 238, Page 410 →256, 323n255 Martin, Henri, 257 Marx, Heinrich, 312 Marx, Karl, 17, 148, 312 Mecklenburg, 111, 326n29 Meinecke, Friedrich, 241, 272–73, 276, 360n104 Meissner, Emil Apollo, 66, 197 Meissner, Friedrich Ludwig, 48, 53, 67, 197, 209 Mellinet, Emile, 93 Mendel, Moses, 59–60 Messerschmidt, Karl Friedrich von, 84 Metz, 257, 354n4; Zum Tempel des Friedens Lodge, 257 Meyerhoff (merchant), 100 Michaelis (professor), 139 Michel, Reinhard, 256 Military, 20, 37, 44, 49, 86, 110, 113–16, 209, 355n18; militarism, 194, 251–52, 270, 278, 287 Mohr, J. C. B. (publisher), 96 MГ¶ller, Johann Friedrich, 82–83 Monarchy, 20, 39–40, 77–85, 93, 103, 134, 269, 271–72. See also Aristocrats/aristocracy Monism, 162, 220, 232, 265 Mosse, George L., 150

Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 132, 338 Müffelmann, Ludwig, 277 Müller von Hausen, Ludwig, 284 Munchen, Carl, 314n124 Munich, 110, 162 Münkler, Herfried, 3 Münster, 21, 142, 226 Murat, Lucien, Prince, 92–93 Music/musicians/songs, 44, 47, 52, 113, 309n39, 338n230, 241n12, 343n63 Muslims, 335n182 Naphtali, Heymann, 97–99 Naples, 19, 135 Napoléon III, Emperor, 92, 93 Nationalism/patriotism/Volk, 9–10, 38, 88, 105–6, 130, 151, 165–67, 239–73, 276–83, 293, 353n35, 356n26. See also Universalism Neuchâtel, 261 Neumann, Otto Philipp, 221 Neustadt, Hermann, 157 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 172, 230, 232, 263 Nipperdey, Thomas, 215 Nuremberg, 36 Occultism, 24, 26, 27, 143 Oehlke, Alfred, 156, 336n197 Oelsner, Johann Wilhelm, 26 Oertzen, Dietrich von, 133, 282 Ohr, Wilhelm, 278 Olbrich, Karl, 212 Oncken, Wilhelm, 137, 254 Orientalism, 180 Ostwald, Wilhelm, 162

Pachtler, Michael Georg, 140 Pacifism/peace movement, 257–58, 260–62, 270, 287, 358n55 Paczensky-Tenczin, von (Justizrat), 70 Paris, 19, 20, 110, 251, 258, 261, 354n1; Concordia Lodge, 257; Goethe Lodge, 260, 279; L’Alsace-Lorraine Lodge, 257 Party/politics, 40–41, 63–67, 76, 80, 83, 114, 126–30, 138–40 Pattay, Guido, 314n124 Perls, Nathan, 161 Peukert, Detlev, 289 Philippson, Ludwig, 146 Pilz, Carl, 254 Pius IX, Pope, 87 Plenge, Johannes, 276 Poppe, Oskar, 157 Posner, Oskar, 113 Prague, 87 Pressburg, 110 PreuГџische JahrbГјcher (journal), 217, 265 Protestants/Protestantism, 28, 54–55, 83, 88–90, 110–11, 115, 136, 154–55, 215–21, 226–27, 249, 265–67, 292, 311n81, 322n255; Protestant Association, 96 Prussia, 8, 11, 20, 36–37, 39–40, 45, 48, 69–75, 77–79, 81–86, 88, 92, 94–100, 111, 113–16, 130–32, 145–46, 152–59, 250–51, 254–55, 259–60, 326n29; GroГџe Landesloge, 45, 71–72, 92, 94, 98, 100–112, 115–16, 131, 152, 357n49; GroГџmeistertag, 131; GroГџmeisterverein,Page 411 → 39, 72, 83; Kaiser Friedrich zur Bundestreue Grand Lodge, 154; Royal York zur Freundschaft Grand Lodge, 36, 45, 73, 84, 94, 98, 111, 115–16, 129, 131, 152–53, 260, 357n49; Zu den drei Weltkugeln Grand Lodge, 27, 45, 55, 72–73, 83–84, 94–96, 98, 111, 114–16, 152, 155–56, 160 Public sphere. See Secrecy Puhlmann (general physician), 97 Putnam, Robert D., 1–2, 171, 293, 297n2 Puttkamer, Heinrich von, 129 Quartier-la-Tente, Edouard, 261 Rabenhorst, von (minister of war), 86 Race/racism, 246, 251–52, 264–65, 276; and Darwinism, 154, 240–41, 267. See also Anti-Semitism

Rath (senior teacher), 71 Rathenau, Walter, 222, 286 Rättig, Carl, 314n124 Raumer, Karl Otto von, 75 Reclam, Anton Philipp, 160, 228 Reclam, Hans Heinrich, 51 Reclam, Carl, 50–51, 120 Reden, Friedrich Wilhelm von, Baron, 314n124 Reform, 36, 61–64, 67–73, 92–97, 100–102, 131, 152–56, 195, 204, 225–28, 232–35, 271 Religion/religiosity, 7–9, 29, 54–83, 89–90, 93, 95, 134–54, 214–28, 230–34, 249–50, 259, 263, 266, 292; religious dissent, 55, 81–82 Renan, Ernest, 255 Republicanism (French), 92–93, 251, 259–60 Reuß, Theodor, 161, 336n211 Revolution of 1688, 19, 25; of 1789, 5–6, 27, 35; of 1830, 89; of 1848, 60–66, 74–77, 91–92, 94–95, 243–44, 278; of 1917, 284 Revue Maçonnique (journal), 260 Rhineland, 19, 33, 55, 111 Riehl, Wilhelm Heinrich, 17, 34, 102, 310n68 Riesser, Gabriel, 59, 314n124 Rittershaus, Emil, 138 Rituals/ceremonies, 21, 24–26, 31, 44, 45–46, 66, 68–69, 70, 91, 94–95, 123–24, 174, 180, 182–90, 185, 186, 187, 193–94, 198–202, 205, 212, 218, 231, 233, 292, 341n16, 348n25 Rödenbeck, Carl, 314n124 Rosenberg, Alfred, 284 Rosenberg, Paul, 217 Rosenkranz, Karl, 51–52 Rotteck, Karl von, 56 Rückert, Friedrich, 268 Rünger, Wilhelm, 255 Russia, 110, 284, 307n14; Soviet Union, 10, 291, 362n26

Salm-Holstmar, Prince Otto zu, 283–84, 363 Salomon, Gotthold, 59 Saxony, 36, 40, 44, 67, 82, 84–85, 111, 126–27, 155; GroГџloge von Sachsen, 94, 115–16, 131 Schacht, Hjalmar, 279 Schaffgotsch, Philipp Count von, 305n54 Schaps, Henry, 156 Schaps, Louis, 156 Scharnhorst, Gerhard Johann David von, 268 Schauss, Anton, 314n124 Schenkendorf, Max von, 268 Scherr, Johannes, 278 Scheuchenstuel, Carl von, 314 Schiffmann, Gustav Adolf, 82, 96, 221, 318n193 Schlegel, Friedrich, 38 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 173–74 Schlichting, von (Major), 328 Schmidt, Alexis, 116–17, 125, 187 Schmitt, Carl, 29, 87, 285, 291, 306n55 Scholz, Frank, 314n124 SchrГ¶der, Friedrich Ludwig, 26, 315n135, 341n16 Schultze, Ernst, 281 Schwabe, Johann Conrad, 222 Schwartz-Bostunitsch, Gregor, 284 Schwetschke, Karl Gustav, 314n124 Secrecy, 8, 22–24, 27–28, 33, 74, 90–91, 94, 108, 174–75, 188–89, 252; and popular fantasies, 201, 208–13, Page 412 →347n124; and public sphere, 22–24, 38–39, 61–63, 208–10, 268; and women, 201–2, 205–7 Secret societies, 24–25, 27, 35–36, 72, 107–8, 160–61; and Edict of 1798, 36, 72, 139, 154–61 Selasinsky, Karl Friedrich von, 78, 317n180 Settegast, Henry, 160

Settegast, Hermann, 153–54, 160 Settembrini, Luigi, 135 Sexuality, 91, 143, 192–95, 211, 343n57 Seydel, Rudolf, 95, 96 Simmel, Georg, 8, 23, 29, 165, 171–75, 188, 211, 213 Smitt, Willem, 120, 159, 224 Sociability, 17–18, 29, 41–42, 56, 99, 171–78; and amusement, 177, 205; and civil society (bürgerliche Gesellschaft), 1–5, 10, 12–13, 17–18, 20, 28–34, 50, 52–54, 63, 76, 82, 102, 106–9, 124, 127–28, 146, 165–67, 174–77, 239, 287, 290–93; and male friendship, 147, 188–96; and virtue, morality, moral decorum, 1–6, 8–9, 17–18, 22–23, 68, 77, 80, 91, 116, 128, 171–79, 199–203, 223, 233–35, 239–41, 243, 289, 292. See also Associations; Bildung/moral improvement; Bürger /Bürgertum; Civility; Lodges/grand lodges Speeches/lodge orators, 22, 52, 68–69, 341n19 Stalin, 10, 363n46 State, 17, 27–29, 36, 39–41, 69–70, 74–93, 95, 102–3, 139–41, 143, 272–73; civil servants, 21, 45–46, 79, 87–88, 113–17, 161, 326n25 Staudinger, Franz, 232 Steffens, Heinrich, 38 Stein, Leopold, 59 Stein, Lorenz von, 102 Steitz, Georg Eduard, 318n189 Stephani, Martin Eduard, 47 Stieber, Friedrich Carl, 314n124 Stoilov, Constantin, 356n39 Stolz, Alban, 90–91, 94, 136 Strasbourg, 257–58; An Erwins Dom Lodge, 258 Strauß, David Friedrich, 61 Stresemann, Gustav, 284 Switzerland, 251, 254, 257, 261, 357n51; Alpina Grand Lodge, 251 Täschner, Adolph, 199, 206 Taxil, Leo (Gabriel Jogand Pagés), 142–43, 210, 287 Thieme, Clemens, 121–22, 271–72

Tirpitz, Grand Admiral Afred von, 362n32 Titles/decorations, 208 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 1–2, 4, 6, 9, 12, 32, 102, 107, 171, 239 Tolstoy, Leo, 307n14 Treitschke, Heinrich von, 124 Trenckmann, Hermann Adolf, 283 Trotzky, Leon, 285 Ullmann, Elias, 252 United States, 1–3, 8, 102, 107–9, 160, 249, 307n14, 323n266; New England, 19 Universalism/cosmopolitanism, 13, 29, 31, 34, 80–81, 96, 100, 105–6, 164, 249–56, 262, 288, 290; and Catholics, 135–38, 144, 213, 247, 264; and internationalism, 247, 250, 263, 269; and Jews, 56–60, 149–51, 164–67; and nationalism, 241–47, 251–55, 262–73, 275–85; and women, 30–31, 201–4. See also Humanity/mankind Urbach, Heinrich, 163–64 Usedom, Guido Count von, 79 Venedey, Jakob, 94, 96, 136, 246, 314n124 Verein deutscher Freimaurer (Association of German Freemasons), 96–97 Verhaegen, Pierre Theodore, 86 Vesoul, 253 Vienna, Humanitas Lodge, 109; Sokrates Lodge, 261 Virtue/morality/moral decorum. See Bildung/moral improvement; Sociability Vogel, Ernst, 314n124 Voigt, Arno, 285 VГ¶lkerschlachtdenkmal (Battle of the Nations Monument), 122, 267–72, 268, 271 Page 413 →Wagener, Hermann, 80 Wagner, Richard, 341 Wanner d.Г„., Heinrich, 221, 234 War, 81, 203, 269–72; civil war, 19, 75–77, 124; and field lodges, 253, 278, 271; First World War; 275–85, 289; Franco-Prussian war, 105, 250–62; Napoleonic wars, 37, 268; War of 1866, 130 Waxmann, Gustav, 84 Weber, Max, 12, 32, 107, 151, 171–72, 215, 228, 230, 234

Weber, Reinhold, 192 Weigert, Jonas, 72 Weismann, Heinrich, 244 Welcker, Heinrich, 72, 227 Wendler, Christoph Adolph, 52 Wernich (publisher), 314n124 Wetzlar, 22, 49 Wichtl, Friedrich, 284 Wiesbaden, 49 Wiese, Leopold von, 276 Wigard, F. (professor), 314n124 Wilde, Oscar, 195 Wilhelm I, Kaiser, 39–40, 77–80, 82–84, 97, 115, 131–32, 132, 152, 161, 251 Wilhelm II, Kaiser, 131–33, 246, 271–72, 283, 330n100 Wilhelm IX, Landgrave, 36 Wilhelmsbad, 25 Woellner, Johann Christoph, 26 Wolfstieg, August, 189, 265–66 Women, 30–31, 57, 91, 166, 200–207, 292; adoption lodges of, 30; and religion, 215; women’s movement, 119. See also Secrecy; Universalism/cosmopolitanism Workers, 54, 126, 166, 200, 229, 287; Social Democrats, 124–33, 135, 154, 166. See also Class Württemberg, 33, 36 Württemberg, Duke Eugen Friedrich Heinrich von, 26 Zechel, Bruno, 95