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Among the first initiatives of the reconstituted Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of the Sciences in 1989 was the revival of Acta Borussica, the critically edited documents on Prussian administrative and economic history, first begun by Gustav Schmoller in the 1890s. After unification, the Academy launched the "Acta Borussica, Neue Folge,â[euro] a series that began with an annotated twelve-volume inventory of the Prussian State Ministry's protocols--the discussions and decisions of the executive council--between 1817 and 1934. These superbly annotated guides mapped a vast microfiche collection of 5,200 state council meetings, thereby providing historians with an array of indispensable material. (The Academy has recently placed the inventories online as PDF documents, and one hopes that the same spirit of accessibility will organize a digitized, online version.) "Preussen als Kulturstaat,â[euro] the second initiative of the Acta Borussica, now focuses on an under-researched area of Prussian history, the Kultusministerium and its impact on the cultural and intellectual life of Germany.
The title's syntax, "Prussia as a Cultural State,â[euro] is significant. This locution, notes Wolfgang Neugebauer in his discerning introduction, expressly seeks to avoid any revisionist claim of viewing Prussia preeminently as a Kulturstaat. The editors view Prussia instead as a military and administrative entity that acquired additional cultural assignments over the modern era. In 1817, growing out of the ideals of the Reform Era, Karl von Hardenberg's government created the Ministry for Religious, Educational, and Medical Affairs (better known as the Kultusministerium) to supervise religion, medicine, schooling, higher education, academies, museums, institutes, and state-supported artistic and scientific societies. This ministry was one of the first of its kind in central Europe. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the ministry's roles expanded considerably, especially in the field of education, reflecting Prussia's overall tendency toward state interventionism. The first volume, Darstellung, amounts to a compact administrative history of the Kultusministerium and its fields of cultural activity. To supplement this narrative, the second volume, Dokumente, offers sources--letters, memoranda, reports, instructions, press articles--that outline the ministry's breadth of concerns between 1808 and 1933. The 139 documents, which mostly stem from various repositories in the Geheimes Staatsarchiv, serve nicely as an empirical handrail to the Darstellung, thus inviting simultaneous reading.
The first...