Abstract
In the lands of northwestern Europe subject to prolonged French rule, the Napoleonic Wars encouraged nationalist, civically engaged, often democratic and militarized conceptions of masculinity. By contrast, in the more tradition-bound societies of southern Europe, French rule was simultaneously more tenuous and more destructive and tended to stimulate conservative responses.1 The dynamic factors at work were different again in multi-ethnic empires, where prosperous but unpopular and politically vulnerable minorities could experience fear, not exhilaration, when faced with revolutionary ferment and xenophobic belligerence among the dominant nationality. These last two phenomena—the violence of Napoleon’s encounter with Europe’s periphery and the conservative instincts of a middle-class diaspora—came together in the case of the German minority in the Russian Empire, which this chapter will explore by examining the life of Johannes Ambrosius Rosenstrauch (1768–1835).
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Notes
Michael Broers, Europe under Napoleon, 1799–1815 (London, 1996), 266.
Karen Hagemann, ‘Mannlicher Muth und Teutsche Ehre’: Nation, Militär und Geschlecht zur Zeit der Antinapoleonischen Kriege Preußens (Paderborn, 2002), 53–65, 304–350; see also the essays in Representing Masculinity: Male Citizenship in Modern Western Culture, ed. Stefan Dudink et al. (Basingstoke, 2007).
For an introduction to these themes, see, for example: Esther Kingston-Mann, In Search of the True West: Culture, Economics, and Problems of Russian Development (Princeton, NJ, 1999);
Dale E. Peterson, Up From Bondage: The Literatures of Russian and African American Soul (Durham, NC, 2000);
Richard S. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ, 1995–2000).
Marc Raeff, ‘Les Slaves, les Allemands et les “Lumières”’, Canadian Slavic Studies 1 (1967): 521–551; idem, The Well-Ordered Police State: Social and Institutional Change through Law in the Germanics and Russia, 1600–1800 (New Haven, 1983).
Division of Written Sources, State Historical Museum, Moscow, fond [collection] 402, delo [file] 239, ‘Geschichtliche Ereignisse in Moskau im fahre 1812, zur Zeit, der Anwesenheit des Feindes in dieser Stadt’. I am grateful to Andrei Dmitrievich Ianovskii of the State Historical Museum for allowing me to photocopy the entire manuscript, and to my father, Dr Donald W. Martin, for transcribing the text. Rosenstrauch’s authorship of the unsigned manuscript is apparent from internal evidence, and key details of the narrative are confirmed in a letter signed by Rosenstrauch: Central Historical Archive of Moscow, fond 20, opis’ [inventory] 2, delo 2219, fo. 171r-v. The only text to make reference to the narrative (though without identifying its author)—indeed, the only scholarly study of any of his writings—appears to be M. Korelin, ‘Novyia dannyia o sostoianii Moskvy v 1812 godu’, Russkaia mysl’ 10 (1896): 57–73.
F. Bienemann, Werden und Wachsen einer deutschen Kolonie in Süd-Rußland: Geschichte der evangelisch-lutherischen Gemeinde zu Odessa (Odessa, 1893), 108.
F. O. Reingardt, ‘Rozenshtraukh, Ioann-Ambrozii, pastor g. Khar’kova’, Khar’kovskii sbornik: literaturno-nauchnoe prilozhenie k ‘Khar’kovskomu kalendariu’ za 1887 god 1 (1887): 153.
Mack Walker, German Home Towns: Community, State, and General Estate, 1648–1871 (Ithaca, 1971); ‘Geschichtliche Ereignisse’, fo. 43v; H. W. Bärensprung, Versuch einer Geschichte des Theaters in Meklenburg-Schwerin (Schwerin, 1837), 183–202; the Kasseische Polizei- und Kommerzienzeitung records that he was an actor in the employ of the court of Kassel as of August 1794 (I thank Frank-Roland Klaube of the Stadtarchiv Kassel for this information). On Rosenstrauch’s acting career in St Petersburg,
see N. V. Gubkina, Nemetskii muzykal’nyi teatr v Peterburge v pervoi treti XIX veka (St Petersburg, 2003).
A. Hasselblatt and G. Otto (eds), Album academicum der kaiserlichen Universität Dorpat (Munich, 1889), 35;
E. Amburger, ‘Die Konsulate der Freien Stadt Frankfurt, Kurhessens, Hessen-Darmstadts und Nassaus im Russischen Reich’, in Festschrift für Heinz F. Friedrichs, ed. G. Geßner (Neustadt/Aisch, 1980), 17 n. 7;
A. I. Serkov, Russkoe masonstvo 1731–2000: Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ (Moscow, 2001), 1135.
Willard Sunderland, Taming the Wild Field: Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe (Ithaca, 2004), esp. chs 2–3.
Bienemann, Werden, 77, 110; A. W. Fechner, Chronik der Evangelischen Gemeinden in Moskau, 2 vols (Moscow, 1876), vol. 2, 118.
P. I. Shchukin (ed.), Bumagi, otnosiashchiiasia do Otechestvennoi voiny 1812 goda, 10 vols (Moscow, 1897–1905), vol. 4, 225–228;
A. Döllen, Kurze Geschichte der evangelisch-lutherischen Kirche und Gemeinde zu Charkow (Kharkov, 1880), 148.
See, for example, Hugh McLeod, ‘Weibliche Frömmigkeit—männlicher Unglaube? Religion und Kirchen im bürgerlichen 19. Jahrhundert’, in Bürgerinnen und Bürger: Geschlechterverhältnisse im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Ute Frevert (Göttingen, 1988), 134–156.
On the Germans in Kharkov, see Diana Zypina et al., Deutsche in Charkiv: Ihr Leben und Wirken (19. Jahrhundert—Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts) (Kiev, 2004), 4 and passim.
‘Geschichtliche Ereignisse’, fos 5v–6, 9v–10. A German eyewitness account that shares Rosenstrauch’s interpretation is Anton Wilhelm Nordhof, Die Geschichte der Zerstörung Moskaus im Jahre 1812, ed. Claus Scharf and Jürgen Kessel (Munich, 2000).
I discuss some of the relevant sources in Alexander Martin, ‘The Response of the Population of Moscow to the Napoleonic Occupation of 1812’, in The Military and Society in Russia, 1450–1917, ed. Marshall Poe et al. (Leiden, 2002), 469–489.
On age at marriage, see Anne-Charlott Trepp, Sanfte Männlichkeit und selbständige Weiblichkeit: Frauen und Männer im Hamburger Bürgertum zwischen 1770 und 1840 (Göttingen, 1996), 31, 49, 145.
On Moscow’s demographic makeup, see Shchukin, Bumagi, vol. 4, 225–228. The role of Masonic lodges in promoting a highly emotional male sociability is discussed in Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, ‘Unter Männern: Freundschaft und Logengesellschaft im 19. Jahrhundert’, in Der bürgerliche Wertehimmel: Innenansichten des 19. Jahrhunderts, ed. Manfred Hettling and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (Göttingen, 2000), 193–216.
On male sociability more generally, see Jürgen Martschukat and Olaf Stieglitz, ‘Es ist ein Junge!’ Einführung in die Geschichte der Männlichkeiten in der Neuzeit (Tübingen, 2005), esp. ch. 7.
I discuss some of the relevant sources in Alexander Martin, Romantics, Reformers, Reactionaries: Russian Conservative Thought and Politics in the Reign of Alexander I (DeKalb, 1997).
In a letter to his mother, Flahaut mentions lodging with the three officers in the house of Mr Demidov (Rosenstrauch’s landlord) but not Rosenstrauch himself: Archives Nationales (Paris), 565 AP 5, dossier 5, fo. 109, letter of 27 September 1812. See also Geneviève Daridan, MM. Le Couteulx et Cie, banquiers à Paris: Un clan familial dans la crise du XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1994), 321;
Françoise de Bernardy, Son of Talleyrand: The Life of Count Charles de Flahaut, 1785–1870, trans. Lucy Norton (London, 1956), 92–97;
Hortense de Beauharnais, Mémoires de la reine Hortense, publiés par le prince Napoléon, 3 vols (Paris, 1927), vol. 2, 159;
Gaëlle Thiébaut, ‘Charles de Flahaut, un diplomate de l’Europe impériale vers une Europe des nations’ (Université Paris Sorbonne—Paris IV, mémoire de maîtrise, 2004), 29–31, <http://www.charles-de-flahaut.fr/Ressources/Flahaut.pdf> (22 January 2008);
Lord Frederic Hamilton, The Days Before Yesterday (New York, 1920), 51–52.
Louis de la Roque and Edouard de Barthélemy, Catalogue de la noblesse des colonies et des familles anoblies ou titrées sous l’Empire, la Restauration, et le gouvernement de juillet (Paris, 1865), 42; M. Darmaing, Relation complète du sacre de Charles X (Paris, 1825), 170.
A. Marcade, Talleyrand: Prêtre et évêque (Paris, 1883), 134.
Daridan, MM. Le Couteulx et Cie; Michel Zylberberg, Capitalisme et catholicisme dans la France moderne: La dynastie Le Couteulx (Paris, 2001), chs 8–9.
On the increasing ‘militarization’ of Western masculinity from the late eighteenth century onward, see Wolfgang Schmale, Geschichte der Männlichkeit in Europa (1450–2000) (Vienna, 2003), 195–203.
This concept is discussed in Martina Kessel, ‘The “Whole Man”: The Longing for a Masculine World in Nineteenth-Century Germany’, Gender & History 15/1 (2003): 1–31.
S. P. Zhikharev, Zapiski sovremennika, 2 vols (Leningrad, 1989), vol. 2, 84.
Nikolai Mikhailovich, Imperator Aleksandr I. Opyt istoricheskago izsledovaniia, 2 vols (St Petersburg, 1912), vol. 1, 557.
Fanny Lewald, The Education of Fanny Lewald: An Autobiography, trans. and ed. Hanna Ballin Lewis (Albany, 1992);
Gabriele Schneider, Fanny Lewald (Reinbek, 1996).
The Autobiography of Heinrich Stilling, Late Aulic Counsellor of the Grand Duke of Baden, &c., &c., trans. S. Jackson (New York, 1844); the sections on Jung-Stilling’s childhood and youth were first published in 1777–78. On Jung-Stilling’s autobiography, see also Martin Hirzel, Lebensgeschichte als Verkündigung: Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling—Ami Bost—Johann Arnold Kanne (Göttingen, 1998).
On Jung-Stilling’s apocalyptic writings, see Gerhard Schwinge, Jung-Stilling als Erbauungsschriftsteller der Erweckung: Eine literatur- und frömmigkeitsgeschichtliche Untersuchung seiner periodischen Schriften 1795–1816 und ihres Umfelds (Göttingen, 1994).
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Martin, A.M. (2010). Middle-Class Masculinity in an Immigrant Diaspora: War, Revolution and Russia’s Ethnic Germans. In: Hagemann, K., Mettele, G., Rendall, J. (eds) Gender, War and Politics. War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230283046_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230283046_8
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