Town and Gown Video Recording: 2023 Mary Lindemann, Professor Emerita, University of Miami
I think that few people think of Brandenburg or Prussia as watery worlds Frederick the great is famous the lights are going out all over Europe Frederick the Great’s famous description of the his territory as a Sandbox tends to dominate our thinking unfortunately and wrongly in fact
Brandenburg-Prussia was and remains one of the water richest States in Germany and let me see the Brandenburg house of rivers Museum physically represents an understanding of how modern biospheres revolve around water it also signals the historical criticality of water Landscapes scattered across the modern state of Brandenburg and here is
Not wait a minute this is it’s a very strange looking Museum and it’s supposed to be a waterfall and it didn’t really look like a waterfall to me but I I took the people who were showing it
To me at their word this is Brandenburg roughly in the 17th century this actually might be 18th century this sort of lemon colored up at the top is Pomerania and then there’s the Kurmark the middle Mark which is really the heart of Brandenburg and that purple thing over on the
Right is Prussia and they weren’t really joined until later in the 17th century and that political history is is not massively relevant right now so scattered across this state and the modern state of Brandenburg which is where Berlin is lie some 3,000 natural and artificial lakes in addition
To multiple thousands of smaller ponds numerous rivers and their innumerable tributaries rivlets bricks Brooks streams drainage and Boundary ditches swamps morasses and watery low spots that have no other name interlocking waterways mark and mark the physical Topography of virtually
Every Brandenburg Province okay here’s sort of the ones that are in what is today Germany the rivers that are in today’s Germany then you see Poland on the other side which is where the Oder river is I
Have to look at both sides and I just couldn’t get it all on one slide I don’t have that kind of sophistication here so these interlocking waterways they Mark and marked the Topography of virtually every Brandenburg Province and the structures built on them and around them the Mills
The dams the dikes the causeways the canals and the channels really anchored social and cultural life. water’s presence was all but inescapable one could not walk or ride very far or perform daily tasks without encountering a river ford a right of way perched on the crest of an earthen dam a
Field inundated by flooding a washed out road a ditch to be crossed a swamp that impeded progress and threaten to suck carts horses and people down into the murky depths Waters and rivers especially formed sights of memory for everyone and even the sober soberly meticulous statisticians and
Topographers of the mid to late 19th century identified areas in Brandenburg Prussia by the rivers that ran through or alongside them they describe the historical province of Uckermark in the East Northeast of Brandenburg rather poetically as a land of lakes and rivers
Okay went far too far. This is a picture of the Elbe river probably not one that anybody here is so familiar with but this is what the Elbe looked like before it was canalized and
Before it had levies built on the side of it and before it was dredged in many places so this is a sort of an older picture of the Elbe river and you can see the banks that kind of come
Into the Elbe river which is a little bit more like its quote unquote natural appearance this is a forest lake in Brandenburg if any of you are fond of Theodor Fontane stories uh a lot of
Them are set on lakes like the very the famous one der Stechlin and then that’s the Spreewald again and you can see the punt in the middle and that punt is of course a modern one or a modern one
That is a replica of an older one but they they were used for all sorts of Transportation in the Spreewald because there weren’t any roads there were only Crossings, causeways and these Rivers okay the Oder River as it flowed through its many little arms across the landscape formed the huge
Oder Marsh before the Oder Marsh was drained and the river rectified that’s the 18th century word in the 18th century it was often designated unproductive wasteland yet such areas were veritable paradises for Flora and Fauna simple earthen dams like this one with a dam breach all
Of these are modern pictures of course they’re not unfortunately I don’t have any photographs from the 17th century so we have to sort of use these but these things still exist and this is actually one that is in the Spreewald so these simple Earth and dams marked out arable fields from errant
Waters a sheltered area arable fields from errant Waters in The somewhat misnamed Spree forest, Spreewald, that’s today a major Wetland preserve and a tourist attraction despite the ways in which such waterways greatly determined many aspects of early modern life historians have not been
All that quick to study the history of waters or landscape history more generally although environmental history is of course a booming field a recent survey of environmental history noted for instance that in studying wars scholars have talked a lot about causes, origins, courses,
And resolutions but nature and Landscape are mostly only mentioned tangentially and then in most cases merely is the stage upon which military Maneuvers unfolded. Equally important, landscape as landscape historians and archaeologists remind us major Transformations are especially visible in times of transition during sociocultural and political changes including the disruptive
Times of war and also its aftermath despite this realization Landscapes including waterscapes have not formed one of the classic themes of historical writing it is true however that in recent decades historians have done a great deal to illuminate the environmental or landscape history of the
Modern world on one hand those who study the environment have often pitched their tents in the field of longue durée in the field of extended longitudinal history influenced by Ferdinand Braudel in the annales School much environmental history has tended to focus on Long acting large
Scale processes such as climate change in the little ice age of the 17th through almost the 19th century but also deforestation desertification irrigation-caused salinization species extinctions or near extinctions to the exclusion of addressing critically important micro-environmental changes modern local or micro-Environmental Studies on the other hand often focus on environmental
Degradation in the development in the interest of developing public policies of course the idea that human actions change nature is hardly new the historian of ancient China Karl Wittfogel writing over 60 years ago described China and India as hydraulic Empires because of their need to create
Large scale irrigation projects thus causally linking environmental modifications to the rise of a particular political system there is if you however if you will pardon the pun I guess it’s a pun something of a sea change underway and early modernists are increasingly interested in what
They off often perhaps somewhat ahistorically and anachronistically term Resource Management humanist Scholars have developed an interest in natural resources only very recently however this recent research turn defines resources broadly as the means to create sustain and alter social relations units and identities within the framework of cultural ideas and practices
Still much of this has not yet flowed into the historical mainstream an excellent study of wood resources in early modern Germany notes that students of History are far more likely to be familiar with witchcraft persecutions than the management of forests and Woodlands the same
Can be asserted even more forcefully I would argue for water thus in writing an alternative history of Brandenburg-Prussia I do not mean to reject political narratives or cultural analyses but rather to draw our attention to things that deeply concern virtually all of the inhabitants
The territory’s inhabitants and that bore long range and critical political implications I am asking simply what would a history of territories like Brandenburg and Prussia look like with water placed at their core the questions of water management and Water Resources have of course
Long interested Engineers geographers and policy makers yet in this still adolescent Century a new discourse is emerging carried by the humanities known as the hydro Humanities that focuses on social political and cultural changes wrought by water rather obviously bodies of water shaped and
Defined territories divided them into districts and provinces and demarcated property boundaries rivers that formed borders between states often became bones of contention and even triggered conflicts the Rhine river is only probably the most famous example of that in the European
Framework rivers that capriciously changed course were viewed as tricksters or endowed with Almost Human malevolence their apparent stability was only that apparent and fleeting. Disputes over boundaries rolled on almost unendingly and were bitter protracted and often violent ownership of or rather political control over a river allowed territories to levy customs and fees
That generated major sources maybe even the major source of their income but water shaped the land in more profound ways an excellent example of such water determined structural foundations were the little lands the Ländschen of Brandenburg and here’s some on this map you can see that the
Rivers are blue of course and the kind of this is they’re they’re perched on on a Sandy plateau and so there’s one up there the Ländschen Rhinow and then there’s the Ländschen Friesack and then
Over on the right is Belin and then there’s Glien on the other side and so what this is this is a big Marsh and Sandy plateaus upon on which these little territories and you a village or a city are
Perched to cross from one to the other or to cross the whole expanse you had to use a Causeway there are no really effective roads and there were Parts with it only could be crossed in punts so this is
A Marshland this is one of the most famous ones in Brandenburg it’s by no means the only one there’s a lot of these marshy areas like this so these boggy lowlands lacked a natural Waterway they’re not really affected by the rivers but they have low spots and rainwater gathers in them and then
Sometimes the rivers flood but it’s not a constant stream through the area like it is with the Oder Brook now of course also you’ll see here things like the Elbe havel Canal that’s newer but you still get some idea of the Havelland niederung the Havelland lowland up here on the upper right so
It’s a it’s a kind of an interesting area that’s that’s very watery but it’s not the only one. The oder River however course through a much larger area and it became what was known as the Oderbruch
Or the Oder Marsh and this is what it looked like where you have basically marshy Islands or islands of weeds in the river itself. The extensive construction of a system of canals and drainage in the 18th century not the 17th century but the 18th century improved that’s in quotation marks on
My piece of paper here these areas and turned them into Lush, Lush grass grasslands and arable Fields yet it would be wrong to characterize the marshes as wastelands that is as virtually unpopulated areas or homes of impoverished and disease-ridden inhabitants. Such negative judgments first formed
In the late 17th and 18th centuries have persisted well into the 20th century in fact these marshes supported a thriving if not a large population and their watery character shape their social cultural political and economic lives with his deep appreciation for landscape and traditions
The great 19th century German novelist Teodor Fontana I’ve mentioned him twice he’s one of my favorite novelists Fontana described these little lands as centers of culture even before they were drained the little lands play an important role in this story their waterscapes formed part of
What Fontana called the unknown and forgotten histories of brandenberg and what I have termed its alternative history here I do not wish to review this process of amelioration and Improvement that David Blackbourn So brilliantly analyzed in his book the conquest of nature rather
I wish to explore the ways in which people lived with the Waters of Brandenburg during what might be called The pre-conquest era. Medieval and Early Modern attempts to control errant waters to utilize water better or to protect land and people from water’s damages
Are perhaps best known from the Dutch story of winning Land from the North Sea that great land reclamation project that lasted from the 11th through the 14th century and successfully created the great green heart of the Netherlands creation was one thing the preservation was quite
Another and that’s what windmills were used for first you know to pump water out of the land and Regional water boards developed to facilitate both they also functioned as a type of Quasi-political organization and in light of their experiences we should think about how
Resource Management influence shaped or even created political structures and not only the other way around Dike and water boards and similar organizations also existed in Brandenburg although they were far less rigorously structured even while they lacked a formal political character
They certainly functioned in a similar manner to the Dutch water boards and all were deeply implanted in village and local politics it was the responsibility of those who lived along the dikes and the levies to participate in their maintenance a participation largely enforced by villages or by
The provincial Estates. The repair and here’s a a modern Monument to the Happy Dyke workers these guys hated this they absolutely despised doing it even though they lived along the dikes and it necessary to protect the land, so you know this gives you an idea of a very happy
Cooperative group they weren’t neither happy nor Cooperative most of the time anyway. The repair of dikes and dams formed however only one element in a far more elaborate extensive water system in speaking of a political economy of water one must recognize the criticality of what I call Little
Politics as equally important as large-scale initiatives Guided by the visible hand of the state for Brandenburg-Prussia systems for control and management of water developed in the Middle Ages and persisted in these traditional forms throughout the 16th and into the 17th century or
Even later most if not all of these were local in origin and range of action of course larger water related initiatives such as the construction of canals and dams were often planned and executed by greater political entities even before 1600 in the middle of the 16th century the Holy Roman
Emperor Ferdinand I and the Braunschweig elector Johan Sigismund joined in proposing a canal to link the Oder River with the spree lack of funds, this is this is the eternal story, lack of funds frustrated the completion of the project during the 30 Years War when the Swedes
Threatened to blockade the Oder thereby denying access to Brandenburg the canal project was again taken into hand the 24 kilometer long Friedrich Wilhelm Canal soon became the Wonder of all Europe when it was completed in 1668 and here’s a early 19th century drawing of this canal which goes from
The Oder to the Spree River and all those little things there are markers they’re not locks there’s too many of them, but this is the very famous canal and this is one of the locks and this lock
Is kind of like what it was in the 17th century not necessarily exactly like it was but it’s made of wood except this one already has a stone side and after the they built them out of wood
The wood rotted and they replaced many of them with stone and then they used wood as the locks And then finally this is what it looks like today this is where they have bicycle paths now that’s where all all the old waterways that are no longer navigable or no longer profitably
Navigable become bike paths in Germany and in France too the very famous Canal du Midi in France a modern picture of it was only completed a decade later and was not navigable until 1681 the construction of large-scale projects and even more importantly their maintenance however
Required the cooperation of locals cooperation that was not always, hardly ever, forthcoming and which repeatedly gave rod to disputes over the allotment of responsibilities and costs but not only rulers were involved in creating water related projects everything connected with water
Gave rise to human intervention from the greats and not so greats of society individuals and groups Lords and commoners alike managed used and misused the Waters of Brandenburg-Prussia the many tasks involved in preserving waterways and their para–hydraulic structures that’s a
Fancy word for dikes Mills locks causeways and anything that is around and on water or is used to control water form constant concerns of urban and especially Rural Life some projects required major excavations like the canals and even the rerouting of rivers and streams and the effect
On Land and Landscape was correspondingly enormous even in the Middle Ages for example in the 13th century the monks of the Cistercian Cloister Chorin had begun to restructure nearby Lakes a natural Channel running from the Choriner Lake supplied water to the monastery even at the
Abbey’s founding in 1258 however the water proved insufficient and to rectify the problem the monks dug hand dug of course a 5 km long channel to obtain a more reliable and abundant source of water this channel allowed for the drainage and subsequent cultivation of the surrounding moor and
This is the Abbey plus its Lake this lake is much bigger became progressively larger over centuries, then when the water level in the largest lake in the area a lake called the Parsteiner lake began to rise rapidly in the 16th and 17th centuries the monks went to work again fearing that their newly
Won land was going to be flooded and diverted the excess water by cutting an outlet running from the lake to a nearby River they then filled in the river’s Southern arm because it had two, two or three arms actually and thus altered the entire fluvial landscape for future centuries
And you see this is the best picture I got of of the lake but the original Lake that they had drawn water from was farther Away by the beginning of the 17th century therefore many ways existed to tame the Waters of Brandenburg some were large scale like this one or that
Of the Canal builders while others involved lesser but nonetheless important activities such as the upkeep and timely repair of dams and causeways. No comprehensive system existed but the tangle of rules and agreements that evolved over Generations went far toward creating a reasonably well-functioning Network for constructing maintaining and repairing everything
Involving water tenancy agreements whether they pertain to a single estate or the governance of an entire District meticulously catalog the full range of what belonged to the estate or District down to individual door handles and broken tools these documents invariably included all things
Concerning water, whether those waters were large small or insignificant including fish ponds, and specified water rights including fishing rights in so doing they explicitly testified to the centrality of water in Rural Life and demonstrated the way in which estate holders but also Villages
And towns were intimately and ceaselessly involved in water management. An example: an agreement concluded by the the noble von Walden family and the Electoral government in 1616 made the soons responsible for maintaining repairing the bridge and Causeway that allowed Passage
Through the Havelland Marsh, the first picture I showed you with the little lands, and linked the little lands with the rest of Brandenburg. The cooperation between parties that was envisioned not surprisingly was not forthcoming instead an ongoing bitter quarrel arose among all the parties
Each claiming that the other had failed to fulfill the bargain struck and this went on for about a 100 years in one form or another these persistent squabbles may seem pin Pricks in history but they
Continued to simmer for years they boiled over in the 1650s in the wake of the 30 Years War and more violently again in the mid 1670s these three dates that one 1660 1616 the mid 1650s and 1675 are
Significant 1616 represented the last years of a working Arrangements two years later the 30 years war broke out and by the 1620s Brandenburg was deeply embroiled in one of the most destructive Wars in European history over the course of the next three decades the territory suffered
Repeated occupations and financial exactions that were nowhere more serious than among the little lands the arrangement so laboriously hammered out with the several interested parties before 1620 dissolved during the continued chaos of War as these personal and political arrangements
Unraveled as administrative officials fled or died as the documents disappeared or went up in smoke so too did the physical substance of dams Bridges and causeways disappear like so much that happened in these War-torn Years A Perfect Storm of dangerous circumstances blew up it did little
Good for example to restore Bridge supports if Waters raged unchecked thus the 1650s seized with quarrels and even violence newly drafted agreements came and went seeking a return to the status quo ante but Swedish invasion in 1675 again threw everything into confusion finally in
1689 a new ordinance made all the inhabitants of Belin without exception responsible for upkeep this solution however only triggered greater troubles most villages and villagers protested their allotments complaining that the years of maladministration had blurred boundaries and furthermore the exact extent of the causeway that bridged the marsh and its division into workable
Sections was really very unclear they had no idea who was supposed to do what. This is a typical Causeway this is not the causeway that bridged the whole Marsh of the little lands this is a much more primitive one but these kinds of this one’s actually from Ireland sorry also no good
Pictures from the 16 17th century in Germany but this is the kind it’s stones and it’s got a grass a gravel or grassy path over it and this is how you crossed over and they broke down after a while
And they had to be repaired but not everybody was happy to be involved in doing the work to repair them who would Supply the stones, who would bring the the the the dirt necessary it was a real mess and it was very easy to escape your obligations The fura never quite disappeared yet
These methods imperfect though they so obviously were persisted until the 19th century when a more comprehensive agency in Prussia assumed control of all the waters in the state these loosely organized and Scattered methods of managing and utilizing the Waters of Brandenburg never worked
Smoothly disputes over who was responsible for what and more important who would pay led to chronic neglect of critical repairs add to this the wanton destruction of structures not only by enemy and friendly troops during the wars but also by local inhabitants who repurposed wood
From bridges and stone from causeways to build or repair houses and farm buildings and I could only think of The Disappearance of catalytic converters from under automobiles today seems a very similar kind of thing these problems were rampant and some became the stuff of Legends and
Frequently triggered violence among neighbors and neighboring jurisdictions villagers and individuals proved perfectly capable of diverting streams and even the channels of larger rivers to suit their own needs to expand their Holdings by shifting boundary markers or to augment their incomes Millers fought constantly to obtain sufficient water to turn their wheels while
Their neighbors complained about the siphoning of water from streams thus killing the fish or alternately the flooding of Meadows and Fields as Millers damed Waters Fisher folk too disrupted the flow of water when they built weirs and fish traps in streams and rivers and here is a a very
Old-fashioned fishing weir you know the fish get caught in there but they were much more elaborate on some of the larger rivers and they caused the water level to fluctuate which really pissed a lot
Of people off if they were either above where they ended up with too much water or below where they didn’t have enough water natural disasters such as floods or hail storms but also human-caused ones such as Wars could throw even the best Arrangements into total disarray the wars of
The mid to late 17th century we always talk about the 30 Years War we kind of forget there’s a whole series of wars that come right after the 30 Years War there’s the second Northern war in the 1650s
And then there’s a Swedish Brandenburg war in the 1670s and then there’s well then there was the the Düsseldorf cow War but that’s just a little thing and then there’s the Great Northern war so there’s a whole series of wars that competed continually Rock the entire area and actually some of them
Were almost as severe in their destruction of certain particular areas as was the 30 Years War these wars did much to upset or even destroy water systems and structures that existed since the later Middle Ages the physical damage military operations did could be immense but so too were
The effect of years of neglect that left great large parts of the great Elbe Dyke in a precarious condition with breakthroughs threatening much valuable agricultural land. Sources on the damages the wars caused convey Rich if often horrifying information about the complex environmental infrastructural and ecological troubles that affected the waters of Brandenburg-Prussia
And whose resolution presented thorny problems there were for example dead animals mostly horses clogging and polluting canals millstreams and locks Fords dams and crossings had been demolished drainage ditches had silted up and the clearing of forests for fortresses and for fuel resulted
In erosions and frightening mudslides moreover by the end of the 30 Years War Brandenburg had suffered a population decline of perhaps as high as 50% not all due to Deaths sometimes due to people just simply moving away and not returning it resulted in a substantial shortage
Of agricultural labor agricultural production had virtually ceased during stages of the war the lack of Labor also frustrated the work of rebuilding critical hydraulic rebuilding critical hydraulic and para-hydraulic infrastructures and all sorts of other secular and sacred structures effects at restoration and Innovation frequently built on pre-war precedents and methods but just as
Often new initiatives that changed many parts of the territory’s landscape including its waterscape were initiated if it is too simple to divide the flow of History into periods of War and Peace it is equally simplistic to see destruction and Recovery as two very different
Processes or as chronologically separate they interacted and often occurred simultaneously moreover even the most well meaning and carefully planned measures proved ineffective or worse, harmful. The history of environmental engineering is filled with examples of good intentions gone wrong drainage to create more productive landscapes as I showed you with the Oder Marsh
Formed the principal goal of amelioration projects such Endeavors began in the late 17th century but gathered steam in the 18th and particularly in the 19th century projects that drained Wetlands fashioned more arable Fields but also disrupted or destroyed whole ways of life the draining of
The Oder Marsh was in the 19th century considered almost universally as the beneficial Taming of a barbaric and unruly nature. War however was not the only was not only destructive it could also be a creative disruption tearing down old barriers encouraging Innovations and upending traditional
And calcified social structures it could open up opportunities for people once closed out of positions of authority migrants second or third sons and even women and not all troops or their commanders embarked on Mindless destruction the famous General Albrecht von Walenstein made
Serious efforts at Canal building and agricultural Improvement in Mecklenburg the territory next to Brandenburg, a territory he controlled his Duke from 1629 until his assassination in 1634 during his short-lived tenure there he experimented with ways to to improve plants and seeds in
The extensive Gardens he built at his castle in Güstrow and here is Güstrow before 1635 when the rebuilding is just starting and that’s what the castle looks like and this is the garden he laid out it looks pretty much the same way today the plants are different and it’s a little bigger
And it’s a little better cared for but this was basically what he did and the castle actually has a collection of his seed catalogs that he collected his seeds you know and stapled them in a leaf loose leaf binder it’s kind of interesting I’m sure they will no longer germinate but it was
Kind of an interesting thing to see Scholars have devoted much attention to the many top- down initiatives undertaken after the end of the 30 Years War as forms of State formation administrative centralization and financial reform that have often been gathered under the
Now much questioned umbrella term of absolutism the government of Brandenburg-Prussia recognized a pressing need to recover from the wartime damage and to improve the economic situation of the territory historians have not been slow to investigate how the government sought to rebuild
Its shattered lands and especially to stimulate agricultural production bolster or found new manufactures and improved Transportation networks in the wake of the Great War. Initiatives launched during the reign of the great elector from 1640 to 1688 and his three immediate successors the
Four famous hyperactive Hohenzollern rulers to improve, I always felt like they needed a little Ritalin to help them out here, to improve existing Transportation networks focused almost exclusively on Rivers canals and causeways and attendant customs and fees these attempts and improvements
Affected communities profoundly but so too did a whole series of other measures more local in character more individualized in conception more fragmented in execution and yet just as fittingly understood as resource management integral to the process of early modern State formation a dike
Breach along the Oder River in 1675 had flooded the fields of the District of Labus. Assessing the blame for shoddy or absent maintenance proved a very ticklish and frustrating and eventually a futile task the investigations triggered by these lamentable events highlighted the
Problems with time honored methods that relied on the cooperation of interested parties these individuals and groups could easily obfuscate or deny their responsibilities altogether and they did years of war had shaken such traditional practices to the very core while reshuffling
The groups and individuals designated as the interested parties just keeping track of who is responsible for which section of a dam to be repaired was a very complicated task especially as people lied about who the next door neighbor was when the local authorities probed the matter
They blamed the inutility of the practice where each peasant was allotted a specific stretch of dyke to keep in good repair many had scandalously neglected the work they appended to this investigation a list of individuals who were queried about whether they had or all to
Apparently had not done the work the answers were surprisingly blunt many simply answered I didn’t want to do it or queried why should I work on the Dyke when Joe over there doesn’t Joe is made up of
Course how does it benefit me I don’t live close to the dike what do I care I mean literally that is what they’re saying these complex negotiations over dike maintenance eventually altered the sense of traditional rights and forged new patterns of communal interactions with local and more
Distant governing entities the wars of the mid to late 17th century had unsettled those older relationships and frayed long-standing communal bonds demographic decline abraded them and sheer physical destruction erased many markers of communal life from the landscape Mills for example physically reminded locals of their obligation to pay taxes and grain no structure
Was more susceptible to wartime destruction and as the Mills disappeared so too did much of their political economic and social meaning into the gaps flowed new currents that altered living and governing in ways manifested on the landscape the visible hand of the state controlled some
Innovations but not all other changes proved equally if not more decisive the bankruptcy of Nobles and communes Villages technological advances that included more sophisticated surveying techniques that shifted how land and waterscapes were perceived and known the arrival of people in new places and the launching of new Enterprises cash strapped often insolvent Nobles
Sought novel sources of revenue that frequently depended on relatively expensive technological adaptations such as the substitution of windmills for water-driven ones and sawmills for grain for grain grinding ones and they accelerated the commercialization of Water Resources such as
Fish farming. Fish farming is really very old but they actually began to do it in a far larger, far more elaborate way where you had several different kinds of fish ponds with one flowing into another and then they drain them and they’d catch the fish it sounded horrible draining them catching
The fish terrible, at the same time opportunities unfolded for people new to particular localities one always thinks in this context of the famous Dutch and other migrants welcomed to Brandenburg by the elector and his first wife herself a Dutch princess and who brought with them techniques of
Hydraulic Engineering that transformed whole areas such as around the old town of BSO creating the new model estate of Oranienburg which is right outside Berlin and you can see the canal up there and the The Gardens and it was a very elaborate estate it was actually quite large but it was not
Only these famous migrants who made the difference so in 1685 the nobleman atius fitzel a major landholder in the province of Prignitz and that’s in the western side of the of Brandenburg damed a channel that paralleled the old Elde not Elbe but Elde River it’s a much smaller River in order to
Provide more power to his newly constructed Mill almost immediately those living alongside the river protested that the Overflow had flooded their fields and pastures to the extent that they now had to travel over them in punts or wade. fitel was hardly alone in manipulating
This particular water course the Local District administrator had sought to facilitate timber floating on the Elde and had therefore blocked the entire riverbed by arbitrarily setting into it a series of large locks this diversion of the Elde drained water from the channel and deprived the
Quitzow’s mill of Motive Power while the tannin that leeched out of the floated logs poisoned the fish. While disputes over the natural or altered courses of water, like the building and upkeep of hydraulic and para-hydraulic structures, date well back into the late Middle Ages the 30 Years
War nonetheless represented a turning point in Brandenburg-Prussia that affected research management directly but which also changed the Contours of the land and the look of the landscape as well as reshaping the lives and livelihoods of those who lived on them the war also marked the
Beginning of a gradual shift in ideas of property from an older sense of lands and Waters held in tenure, often for a limited period of time to that of private ownership this represented a significant change one that atius fito implicitly articulated in inserting his rights to modify the
Channel in 1685 it’s my River I get to do with it what I want a concatenation of Destruction neglect demographic decline economic malaise and from 1648 through the 1720s the continued demands of the Warfare that raked all Northern Germany and Northern Europe made the territory that emerged
By the 1720s significantly different in its social political and economic structures from that existing in 1618 or even 1648 arguing that the wars of the 17th century proved watersheds in Brandenburg and Prussia is nothing even remotely new yet this story has been for a very long time
Told in a fairly triumphalist tradition inherited from the Nationalist historians of the 19th century who rooted an inevitable Rise Of Prussia in a purposeful Hohenzollern effort or purposeful Hohenzollern efforts to create a powerful State beginning directly after the Treaty of Versailles
This initiative was supposedly carried forward and strengthened by generations of subsequent rulers their Allied nobilities and especially their growing core what we would today call bureaucrats with profound effects good and bad on the land and the lives of the inhabitants there whether
They were human animal or plant even though historians of Germany have long incorporated newer perspectives into their analyses that have moved the attention somewhat away from the efforts of the Hohenzollerns and the initiatives of a state with a clear centralizing absolutist Mission this
Older narrative simply won’t die the author of a study published at the beginning of the century On The Rise Of Prussia did not hesitate to open with the line in the 17th and 18th centuries Prussia rose out of obscurity to become one of the most powerful countries in Europe and further argued
That the great elector completely refashioned both the political and economic structures of the electorate by adopting the model of absolutism set by Louis the 14th certainly the Hohenzollerns and their administrators had a significant impact on the shape of Brandenburg-Prussia
As it emerged in the second half of the 17th century a skeptic in the audience might and probably should ask whether the local day-to-day managing or mismanaging of the environment I have traced here was as critical as the weight of the visible hand of the state. Was the daily
Was the quotidian so ordinary so commonplace and indeed so Universal as to be unremarkable I think not rather the many contradictory uncoordinated self-serving and perhaps even almost imperceptible actions of innumerable others whose names are less familiar or even unknown to history changed
Brandenburg-Prussia in important ways surely the story of the rise of Prussia or the formation of the Prussian state must also be told on the basis of everyday actions here those originating with the many people who lived on and with the Waters of Brandenburg thus when we consider the
History of early modern Europe and not only Brandenburg-Prussia let us think rather more about landscapes like this one it’s Potsdam early and you can see Potsdam, if you know Potsdam, Potsdam is still surrounded by water it’s really very beautiful but this is even waterier if that’s
A word let us think more about these Landscapes and perhaps less about rulers like Friedrich or about battles like the battle of Fehrbellin let’s think about that thank you very much