The Kingdom of Hanover

Hermann Kolbe's forefathers lived their lives in the rolling, fertile, partly wooded country around Göttingen, in Hanover's southern exclave. Sandwiched between the duchy of Braunschweig to the north, Electoral Hesse to the south and west, and Prussia to the east, this province had been ceded in the seventeenth century from Braunschweig to the country that subsequently became known as Hanover, after its largest city. In 1714 the country's ruler, Elector Georg Ludwig, also became the king of England, and for more than a century thereafter, Great Britain and Hanover had the same sovereign. During the rest of the eighteenth century, Hanover enjoyed a number of benefits from its close association with Britain. The oligarchic privy councils that effectively ran the country's affairs under an increasingly absentee succession of monarchs were relatively liberal and efficient; for instance, sound agrarian laws protected the peasants and censorship was not practiced. The political links also provided an avenue for direct cultural relations between the two countries. The creation of the University of Göttingen in 1737 is an example of the best work of the Hanoverian regime.^[1]

Hanover had an ambivalent relationship with its much larger neighbor Prussia, which was becoming an important power in the eighteenth century. This ambivalence was more increased than lessened by the consanguinity of the rulers of the two countries. During the welter of the Napoleonic wars, Hanover was successively occupied by France

and by Prussia, and then it was made part of a new north German kingdom. The French occupation was distasteful and vexatious. Hanoverians welcomed the restoration of the old order upon Napoleon's defeat in 1814, especially as now the country was raised to the dignity of a kingdom and it acquired additional territory from the Congress of Vienna.

But Hanover, like other German states, suffered from centrifugal and reactionary forces during the years after 1815. Hanover's chief minister after the Congress of Vienna was Count Münster, whose despotic rule from London was much resented by wide segments of the populace. As a ripple effect of the Parisian insurrection of 1830, a riot broke out in Göttingen in January 1831 that led to the fall of Count Münster. Two years later, a new and relatively liberal constitution for the kingdom was promulgated, a document that was written loosely on the English model. The University of Göttingen reflected these troubles. In the early postwar years, its enrollment topped 1500; by 1834 it had plummeted to 860.^[2]

Even worse was to come. By Hanoverian law, a woman could not ascend the throne. Accordingly, the fifth son of George III, Ernst August, and not Victoria, became sovereign of Hanover in 1837, thus ever after separating the crowns of Great Britain and Hanover. Ernst August was autocratic and illiberal; one wag reported that he had committed every crime in his life except suicide.^[3] One of his first official acts was to suspend Hanover's new constitution. The consequent protest of seven of Göttingen's most eminent professors, including Weber and the Grimm brothers, resulted in their dismissal. Despite expressions of outrage across Germany from citizens of a wide range of political belief, the king had the support of the Hanoverian nobility, and an appeal to the diet of the German Confederation proved fruitless. Open opposition to the regime died, and Ernst August continued his reactionary policies until the uprisings of 1848. "The decision of the Göt-tingen Seven," writes one historian, "propelled the German professoriate into the middle of public life. The Frankfurt Parliament of 1848 would be incomprehensible without the Göttingen protest."^[4]

However, the protest and expulsion of the Göttingen Seven can also be overinterpreted. Their refusal to break their oaths by repudiating the constitution of 1833 was more a statement of conscience than a political stand. Most members of the German professoriate in the Vormärz, when exercising any political sentiments at all, stood for moderate constitutional reform; very few had sympathy for extreme democratic or republican views.^[5] In this sense, as we will see, Hermann Kolbe became a typical representative of his class.