The Utility of the ‘Other’: German Representations of Sweden in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century

Foreign areas, countries and peoples have often served as screens for projections and as resources in domestic debates. This article deals with one instance of such usages of ‘others’ in eighteenth-century Europe, where both physically adjacent and geographically remote places could fuel the imagination as well as the arguments of contemporary political discourse. For example, the protracted invention of ‘Eastern Europe’ during the century was the outcome of a ‘Western European’ – geographical and philosophical – process of definition, through which countries like Poland and Russia were transformed into reservoirs for dreams, adventures and theoretical social experiments. In a similar vein, French physiocrats treated Baden, Poland and Sweden as experimental zones for their economic and political doctrines. ¹

At some points, foreign ‘others’ functioned as identity-augmenting antitheses to domestic ‘selves’, as when British travellers contrasted their supposedly superior homeland to the continental societies they visited and perceived as comparatively inferior. ² Other countries could also, however, be cast in a positive or idealizing light. Several states, among them England, France and Holstein-Gottorp, were hailed as models, which observers abroad identified with and sought to emulate. ³ It was, as Karen O’Brien has stated, ‘possible to fashion an image of national selfhood which derived, not from… [a straightforward] idea of the “other”, but from the interplay of likeness and difference within the family of Christian churches and nations’. ⁴ The foreign country could be conceptualized in terms of sameness and become a proximate other and a distant well-known, vaguely and porously demarcated from the domestic self. In that setting, the other nation was turned into a resource, a regulative idea and a mirror for the self.

In the following, this mode of representing others will be illustrated through an analysis of how Sweden was conceived and put to use in the culturally influential German Electorate of Hanover. The merit of the present case study commences from the complex set of meanings that Sweden was attributed in the Holy Roman Empire. Sweden has been described as a heterogeneous ‘imagination space’ for the German travellers who ventured there during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as well as for the reading public that subsequently consumed their travelogues. ⁵ The northern kingdom can be said to have been part of a number of German ‘identity dialogues’, a concept which Fania Oz-Salzberger has devised to capture imaginary or real exchanges with a discrete and neighbouring territory, exchanges which ultimately had to do with the definition of self. ⁶

Sweden and the German states had an extensive history of cultural, economic and political interchange. From the Middle Ages onward, Swedish erudition gravitated heavily towards northern Europe, in particular northern Germany, a pattern which was reinforced by the Reformation and remained salient throughout the eighteenth century. ⁷ German for a long time served as the lingua franca of the Baltic Sea countries and in the early nineteenth century it still constituted the second most important language in Sweden. ⁸ The Baltic Sea thus emerges as a ‘Mediterranean of the North’, as an arena for a transmarine Gemeinschaft with German and Lutheran features. ⁹ From the perspective of the proponents of the idea of a Germania Magna, an imagined and ancient Germanic realm from which the European states had allegedly arisen, Sweden was virtually a North German province situated on the periphery of the Teutonic world. ¹⁰ For example, the wide-ranging encyclopaedia usually referred to as Zedler’s Universal-Lexicon (1731) explicitly classified the Swedes – and the Finns – as a German people. ¹¹

In spite of such statements, the envisaged affinities between Sweden and the German lands should not be overemphasized, since the northern country exhibited a distinct language and national culture. The linguistic and cultural distinctiveness of the Swedes likely generated an ambivalent attitude among many Swedish and German observers. Sweden and Germany, respectively, were simultaneously the other and the same, a familiar but dissimilar part of the Protestant community that surrounded the Baltic Sea. ¹² Once again, it seems appropriate to invoke Zedler’s Universal-Lexicon, which expressed the view that Swedish was ‘a German dialect, which however is very different from the one, which is customary in Denmark and Germany proper’. ¹³

The choice to focus on Hanover is based in part on the vibrant networks that connected Swedish and Hanoverian scholars with one another, in part on the Electorate’s considerable cultural impact on the rest of Germany, an influence mainly due to Göttingen’s prestigious Georg August University. ¹⁴ The existence of multifarious and intertwined personal relationships allows for an investigation into how the republic of letters could affect the representations of otherness and the uses of others in eighteenth-century Europe. It is, of course, fairly obvious that the erudite, transnational networks brought their participants closer together and helped to reduce the significance of belonging to a certain political entity. What is less clear, though, is to what degree and in what way they did so. The analysis executed in this article supplies some answers to those questions and provides a foundation for further research about images of foreign spaces in times past.

The article examines the representations of Sweden in the central journalistic mouthpiece of the Göttingen university, the renowned review journal Göttingische Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen (1753; founded as the Göttingische Zeitungen von gelehrten Sachen in 1739), between the years 1753 and 1792, after which the amount of attention devoted to the northern realm drastically declined. Göttingische Anzeigen progressed in tandem with the Georg August University and had a distinct academic flavour, as it was tantamount to a forum for Göttingen’s entire professorial body. ¹⁵ Coverage of foreign literature was an integral part of the journal, which had good access to the European print market and served as an all-German portal for the diffusion of information from abroad. ¹⁶ However, some kinds of knowledge, notably science and medicine, were given preferential treatment, whereas philosophy, art and literature did not elicit a lot of interest among the contributors. ¹⁷ Anzeigen reported extensively not just on Swedish learning, but also on Swedish society; for many decades, the economic, political and social aspects of the kingdom constituted recurring themes in a flow of concise reviews, which appraised texts by a motley crew of utilitarian scientists and reformers. Anzeigen’s status, substantial following and continuous interest in Sweden make it a suitable object of study with regard to the topic of this article. ¹⁸

Moreover, the editors and reviewers of the journal – internationally famous men of letters like Albrecht von Haller, Abraham Gotthelf Kästner and Johann David Michaelis – maintained close ties with a wide range of Swedish scholars. The Swedish–Hanoverian networks were to a large extent upheld by and through Göttingen’s scientific society, the Königliche Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, which in 1753 took charge of Anzeigen and for most of the eighteenth century engaged in frequent interactions with the Royal Academy of Sciences (Kungliga Vetenskapsakademien) in Stockholm. The societies exchanged writings and partially overlapped each other in terms of membership. The long-time secretary of the Royal Academy, Pehr Wilhelm Wargentin, and other esteemed scientists, such as the chemist Torbern Bergman, were elected fellows of Königliche Gesellschaft, while the high-profile Anzeigen contributors Haller, Johann Andreas Murray and Johann Beckmann were inaugurated into the Stockholm academy. ¹⁹

Most reviews of Swedish texts showed a more or less positive tendency, in all probability because of the tight-knit networks that linked the academic environments of Göttingen, Stockholm, Uppsala and Åbo (Turku). The transnational relationships, however, do not suffice to explain Anzeigen’s many favourable statements about Sweden. In the wake of the Great Northern War (1700–21), the kingdom had to cede the provinces of Bremen and Verden to the Electorate. ²⁰ Furthermore, Sweden and Hanover did not see eye to eye on great power politics, since Sweden was an ally of France and Hanover shared its sovereign with France’s arch rival, Great Britain. Among other things, this meant that Hanover and Sweden ended up on different sides in the Seven Years’ War.

None of these factors would have mattered much if Anzeigen’s contributors had been in essence free citizens of a truly cosmopolitan republic of letters, but this was certainly not the case. On the contrary, the rulers of Hanover – the Electors and the Privy Council alike – took an active interest in the affairs of the Georg August University. ²¹ Göttingen’s Königliche Gesellschaft has fittingly been described as an extension of the state administration; for instance, the powerful privy councillor Gerlach Adolph von Münchhausen was deeply involved in the creation of Anzeigen. ²²

Hence, a question that begs an answer is why did the Hanoverian authorities allow Anzeigen to commend a potential or – during the Seven Years’ War – actual enemy? What did the Electors and privy councillors appreciate in Sweden – a relatively poor and peripheral country struggling to recover from a devastating war that had downgraded it to a second-rate European power? To put it another way: what were the uses of the proximate other? In order to address this issue, it is necessary to examine Anzeigen’s representations of the Swedish realm in some detail.

Before that, some methodological remarks are required. Firstly, review journals must not be mistaken for books, since they amount to a distinct, more adaptive and dynamic, type of literature. ²³ Reviews in a journal cannot be managed in the same way as chapters in a book. It is neither possible nor desirable to transfix an ideological agenda in the kind of miscellaneous and nuanced source material that Anzeigen epitomizes. What the historian can and should do in such instances is to identify predominant ideological tendencies, without misinterpreting them as absolutes or overstating the coherence of a periodical. Secondly, it is fruitful to regard a journal as a composite agent, as a medium that aggregates individual communication and is marked by a group identity and a common voice. ²⁴ In accordance with this outlook, Anzeigen will be treated as a collective ‘personality’ kept together by features like typography, tradition and readership. ²⁵ In this manner, the journal can be comprehended on a supra-individual level without its internal and external consistency being exaggerated or a less consistent historical reality being violated by a simplistic narrative.

Anzeigen’s reporting on Sweden was primarily concerned with Swedish society, not with Nordic nature, a conspicuous fact considering the attention later, Romanticism-infused generations of Germans would devote to that aspect of the country. From Anzeigen’s viewpoint, Swedish nature was either an obstacle to, or a resource for, the project of incessant improvement which the Swedes were untiringly carrying out all over their realm. Much of the coverage centred on concrete attempts to augment national utility: the cultivation of virgin farm land, the upgrading of agricultural and industrial techniques and the mercantilist development of manufactures. Sweden was in effect accredited with a strong utilitarian ethos, embodied by a population endeavouring to achieve an advancement of wealth for all and everyone inhabiting the kingdom.

The northern country was represented as a nation of innovations and discoveries, as a fertile soil for useful and enhanced machines, techniques and tools. ²⁶ Anzeigen stated that Sweden was an excellent country, which energetically strived to realize the genuine common good. It manifested an eagerness to further itself and had a far-reaching, utilitarian awareness: ‘In Sweden nothing is considered insignificant, which can serve to increase, or to ennoble the gifts of nature’. ²⁷ Several reviews were struck by the publication of useful and utility-oriented literature. The Göttingen journal not only reflected upon the many texts which aimed at general improvement, but also claimed that Sweden spawned more brief tracts dedicated to domestic improvement than almost any other country, and that the fervour for the common good which was brought about by Swedish publications surpassed the efforts of nearly all other states. ²⁸

In keeping with these assertions, Anzeigen tended to represent Sweden as a model for the rest of the world. When the government, for economic and utilitarian reasons, ordered all theologians to attain knowledge in natural history, the journal celebrated the injunction as ‘an eternal source of light’ for the realm and as a course of action that gave ‘the other Europeans a praiseworthy example’. ²⁹ This way of viewing Sweden was not restricted to Anzeigen. For instance, in the mid 1750s the Coburg journal Auszug aus allen Theilen der neuesten Geschichte (1749) established that ‘after the latest peace [,] the whole soul of the Swedish nation has been eagerly intent on, making commerce and morals flourish, improving the manufactures, and encouraging half of Europe, to become economic by its example’. ³⁰ Sweden’s utilitarian aspirations were explicitly elevated to exemplary and universal phenomena, which could be appropriated by readers in the Holy Roman Empire and its principalities.

The Hanoverian relevance of Swedish actions and initiatives was evidently a vital incitement behind Anzeigen’s reporting on the northern kingdom. One review alleged that a text about agriculture would definitely be instructive in more southerly settings, while another review stated that a book about sheep farming was universally applicable and that it had been translated so as to become of use in Germany, where it seemed advantageous to test the useful accomplishments of neighbouring countries with regard to sheep husbandry. ³¹ At times, the coverage of Sweden displayed a more overt didactic dimension, as when the review of a tome on the improvement of Swedish Pomerania stipulated that the reviewed work had a lot to teach foreigners – to be more exact, Germans – who understood the value of advice and examples from other countries. ³²

Anzeigen’s representations of Swedish utility, which will be discussed below, demonstrates that the journal sought to transplant the utilitarian undertakings to other national contexts, where these could be combined with foreign, above all Hanoverian and German, patriotisms. Taken together, these displacements can be conceived of as a transaction system that rendered possible or facilitated appropriations of foreign experiences and knowledge. In intellectual terms, this system positioned Sweden in close proximity to Germany and meant that the country was perceived as ‘same’ rather than as ‘other’. The transaction system is best envisaged as a patriotic–cosmopolitan economy, a concept inspired by Richard B. Sher’s hypothesis that eighteenth-century North American publishing of Scottish authors was ‘a mode of patriotic appropriation’, a means to transform foreign, Scottish, texts into domestic, American, writings in order to benefit the United States. ³³ The concept of a patriotic–cosmopolitan economy, which will be outlined in more detail below, has also been influenced by Claudia Profos Frick, who ascribes to Albrecht von Haller, an important and long-time contributor of Anzeigen, a patriotic as well as a cosmopolitan attitude to book reviewing. ³⁴

As the following analysis will make clear, classical rhetoric had a profound impact on the journal and its representations of Sweden. Much of Anzeigen’s usage of Swedish events and actors openly or tacitly drew upon the ancient dichotomy of exemplum and imitatio; the idea was that readers or listeners should comply with contemporary and historical models symbolizing universally valid truths or experiences. ³⁵ Exempla have largely been overlooked by historians, in part because example might, as John D. Lyons has recognized, ‘qualify as the most ideological of figures, in the sense of being the figure that is most intimately bound to a representation of the world and that most serves as a veil for the mechanics of that representation’. ³⁶ At any rate, the Holy Roman Empire evinced what Peter Hanns Reill has labelled ‘the eighteenth-century return to rhetoric’ as well as a ubiquitous employment of rhetorical examples. ³⁷ The Georg August University in many respects endorsed the legacy of classical rhetoric; the professors who composed Anzeigen’s reviews were, on the whole, well acquainted with exempla. ³⁸

To all appearances, the contributors of the Göttingen journal did not perceive of any fundamental conflict between patria and cosmopolis. In line with a commonplace eighteenth-century outlook on the correlation between humanity and its constituent societies, one review asserted that ‘all the institutions, which serve the common good of the peoples, and the improvement of useful crafts, [and] honour a government’ deserved to be reported on. ³⁹ A similar approach to cosmopolitanism and patriotism can be discerned in other German and German-speaking journals. For instance, the Basel periodical Ephemeriden der Menschheit oder Bibliothek der Sittenlehre und der Politik (1776) pointed out that all humans were intimately interconnected and that the effort of the citizen of a state contributed to the well-being of the entire human race. ⁴⁰

Anzeigen voiced an unequivocal appreciation of foreign patriotisms: ‘We always amusedly see [how] a people loves itself: and even more pleasurable [for] us is the spectacle of a people, which wrestles with the inconveniences of its circumstances’. ⁴¹ The journal complimented the patriotic tenor of a number of reviewed Swedish texts and maintained that this element considerably added to the value of reading them. ⁴² Several reviews informed the readership about Swedish patriotism, often in a rather sympathetic fashion: the Swedes were taken to be well known for their patriotism, to adore the patria more than any other people, and to exhibit a very enjoyable patriotic zeal. ⁴³ The readers were encouraged to familiarize themselves with ‘the love of the fatherland, which is so commendable and fervent among the Nordic peoples’. ⁴⁴

One reason for these statements was probably that the patriotic motives and ventures of the proximate other could be imitated by German-speaking readers, whose homelands would then profit from the representations of the bold struggles of the Swedish patriots. This emulative objective, however, cannot be separated from the extensive bonds and affinities that linked Hanover and Sweden within the framework of the republic of letters. Like Königliche Gesellschaft’s journalistic flagship Anzeigen, the Swedish counterpart to the Göttingen society, the Royal Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, was characterized by a patriotic spirit, enunciated in the foreword to its periodically published transactions and in numerous orations delivered during its gatherings. The celebrated botanist Carolus Linnaeus rejoiced in witnessing his ‘fellow countrymen put their strengths to the test [and] found an academy, principally to thereby serve their own nation’, and a councillor of the realm, Carl Sparre, established that the works of the Royal Academy were equally distinguished by great knowledge and an appropriate patriotism. The writer Nils Rosén von Rosenstein the younger went a step further when he announced that patriotism was ‘the holiest of all emotions, which never should be able to get mentioned without the trembling of the heart, without the wetting of the eye’. ⁴⁵

The Royal Academy also, again corresponding to the opinions of Königliche Gesellschaft as communicated by Anzeigen, vigorously embraced the credo of enlightenment utilitarianism. The preface to the first issue of the transactions published by the Stockholm academy was a virtual utilitarian manifesto, authored by the high-ranking politician Anders Johan von Höpken. To give a couple of additional examples, Sparre’s abovementioned oration stressed the merit of ceaseless, ardent labour for the common good, while the mining scientist and official Eric von Stockenström called attention to the participation of the academy in the general improvement of Swedish society. ⁴⁶

The prevalence of utilitarian and patriotic themes in both Königliche Gesellschaft’s and the Royal Academy’s most illustrious publications points to an ideological consensus between the Swedish and Hanoverian scholars who populated these societies. This consensus doubtless constituted a key component in the transnational networks as well as an important reason for Anzeigen’s positive representations of, and identification with, Sweden. The patriotic–cosmopolitan economy of the journal was thus deeply entangled with a set of principles that defied state boundaries at the same time as they focused on the advancement of national welfare.

Further areas of transnational agreement can be detected, among them a shared attitude to the powers that be and their importance for the utilitarian and patriotic project. Anzeigen tended to represent Swedish elite actors as imitation-worthy role models, which guided or should guide the ignorant populace to adequate actions and standards of behaviour in service of its patria. The journal echoed the notion that the nobility ought to furnish the commoners with examples to imitate, a standpoint which was clearly espoused elsewhere in the coverage of Sweden. ⁴⁷ One review remarked that a Swedish nobleman had provided a laudable example by cultivating meadows, another review recorded the names of a number of patriots, not least members of the upper echelons of society, who had, by transforming marshes into fertile arable land, ‘given their fellow countrymen the example of the public good’. According to Anzeigen, the latter individuals were eligible for praise in Sweden as well as abroad, a comment that seems to have been due to the perceived utility of their achievements in Germany and Hanover, since the review drew a parallel between cultivated Swedish marsh land and a swamp in the vicinity of Göttingen. ⁴⁸ Moreover, several of the acclaimed patriots belonged to the Royal Academy, which means that the compliments can be viewed as network-reproducing acts in the multifaceted interaction between Königliche Gesellschaft and the Stockholm society.

Priests and affluent burghers were likewise assigned an exemplary status. Clerics were taken to be suited to ‘instruct the peasant with example and teaching in agriculture’, while a priest affiliated with the Royal Academy was described as a patriotic and competent cultivator, whose example to his compatriots was so useful that he should be rewarded by the government. ⁴⁹ When it comes to the burghers, the representations of the wealthy merchant Nicolas Sahlgren, a director of Sweden’s East India Company, are instructive. Sahlgren was portrayed as one of the most active Swedish patriots, as a generous, versatile and eager promoter of utility, and as an ideal member of his estate: ‘How venerable is this estate, how utterly vital for the state, and how much great knowledge does it presuppose, if it is managed after Mr. S[ahlgren’s] example!’ ⁵⁰

Anzeigen obviously perceived the higher ranks of estate society as the engine that drove Sweden’s ingenuity and utility. This point can also be made for the representations of the diet and the court. The parliament, the royal family and various state institutions were rendered as useful benefactors, at several points in connection with Swedish men of letters. The journal reported that the estates energetically goaded the inhabitants of the realm to endeavours of improvement, that the diet sponsored books by the famed linguist Johan Ihre and that a biography on King Carolus XI was all the more interesting because it had been commissioned by the parliament. ⁵¹ As for the heads of State, Adolf Fredrik, Lovisa Ulrika and Gustavus III, they were all depicted as enthusiastic sponsors of the utilitarian program. ⁵² For instance, Anzeigen noted that Gustavus III looked after the property of deceased men of learning and assisted scholars such as Linnaeus and his disciple Pehr Kalm. ⁵³

There are indications that the accounts of benevolent elite actions were intended to persuade members of the Hanoverian establishment to emulate the examples of their Swedish peers. In a letter to Wargentin, Murray, a Swedish-born Göttingen professor responsible for many a review in Anzeigen, on the topic of an increase in donations made to the Stockholm society declared that he would be happy to see ‘that some of our noblemen and rich would want to follow the example of the Swedish in this regard’. ⁵⁴ The quote points to the patriotic–cosmopolitan economy that was often at play in Anzeigen’s representations of the northern kingdom, since one purpose of the coverage of beneficial deeds was evidently to transfer them to the Hanoverian setting. This usage of Sweden’s rulers, aristocrats and burghers appears to have been intertwined with yet another ideological accord between Königliche Gesellschaft and the Royal Academy, with a network-related consensus about the role of the elite which can in turn be attributed to mental and institutional congruencies between Sweden and Germany.

Lisbet Rausing (previously Koerner) has argued for the existence of a Baltic Enlightenment, typified by a utilitarian and Lutheran spirit and promulgated by actors preoccupied with erudition and closely associated with the authorities. ⁵⁵ Jonathan B. Knudsen has talked about a German ‘estate enlightenment’ (ständische Aufklärung) epitomized by a Christian, mercantilist and paternalistic mindset as well as by a far-reaching compromise between the men of letters and the powers that be. ⁵⁶ Knudsen’s interpretation of the enlightenment movement in the Holy Roman Empire is congruent not only with Rausing’s proposition of a Baltic Enlightenment, but also with the heterogeneous and reformist complexion that other historians have ascribed to eighteenth-century Germany. ⁵⁷ The Swedish enlightenment exhibited an analogous non-radical quality and a matching compatibility with traditional estate society. ⁵⁸ This similarity was apparently reflected in Anzeigen, whose contributors, akin to their Swedish network contacts, were on an excellent footing with the aristocratic rulers of the realm.

Like Königliche Gesellschaft, the Royal Academy in many respects functioned as an extension of the state administration. For a number of decades, the Stockholm academy was closely aligned with the ruling elite: first the Hat Party, which governed Sweden during a large part of the so-called Age of Liberty (1719–72), when the parliament held power, then King Gustavus III, who orchestrated a successful coup d’état in 1772 and ultimately introduced a royal absolutism reminiscent of the ‘Caroline’ absolutism of the pre-1719 era. ⁵⁹ To give some examples of the position of the Stockholm academy on the established political and social system, the German-born economist Johan Fredrik Kryger, as well as Rosenstein, Sparre and other fellows of the organization, highlighted the duties of the subjects vis-à-vis the authorities. Moreover, Rosenstein gave precedence to the enlightenment of the higher strata of society and portrayed them as precursors for the commoners. ⁶⁰ Members of the Royal Academy articulated equally subservient views regarding the Age of Liberty diet. Kryger extolled the reign of the parliament and the Hat Party as caring, patriotic and fervently utilitarian, while Linnaeus did not hesitate to utilize an oration on insects to defend the political order. ⁶¹

Anzeigen’s obvious identification with the useful Swedish other that was represented for German and Hanoverian imitation extended to its political conditions. In compliance with the scholars who filled the ranks of the Royal Academy and retained bonds of friendship with several of the reviewers, the journal tended to approve of Sweden’s parliamentary rule, which was represented in highly favourable terms. The sovereignty of the estates was taken to have brought the kingdom incomparable advantages in comparison to earlier epochs, both domestically and with respect to other countries. One review placed the Age of Liberty in stark contrast to the previous era of royal absolutism and agreed with the appraised author, the historian Samuel Loenbom, on the immense gains Sweden had avowedly made during the eighteenth century:

The towns in ruins, the country ravaged. Because of that no impartial person can criticize this changed system. In that way[,] Sweden, as Mr. L[oenbom] very well observes, established a twenty year long peace. A time, during which it might have been the most respected in Europe, and in itself the most powerful and flourishing. ⁶²

Through this forthright confirmation of Loenbom’s observation, Anzeigen effectively committed itself to the hegemony of the diet, whose benefits could reportedly be disputed only by biased commentators.

The Göttingen journal admired Sweden’s liberty, which was said to emanate from the division of power and to abolish all coercion not dictated by the law, the sole sovereign of the country. According to Anzeigen, the Swedish constitution wholly conformed to natural law; it was furthermore alleged to amount to a successful compromise between autocracy and democracy, and to be lauded by foreigners, who wanted to copy and exploit it. ⁶³ The constitution was hence elevated to a natural and universal phenomenon which could be appropriated abroad, in Germany and Hanover. The positive representations of Sweden’s political system were clearly informed by the potential usability of this system in the German-speaking world as well as by a network-related, estate-enlightened consensus between Königliche Gesellschaft and the Hat-friendly Royal Academy.

A Hanoverian–Swedish agreement on the blessings of the utilitarian and mercantilist policies of the Hat Party can also be identified. Anzeigen represented the ascension of the Hats to political dominance in 1738 as a turning point for Sweden’s economic fortunes, since their assumption of power was presumed to have breathed new life into the useful crafts and to have made the population as zealous as that of any other nation. The journal credited the Hat Party with boosting general welfare, with rendering a national surplus, with expanding agriculture, with cutting imports, with new and better manufactures and with a population increase of two hundred thousand inhabitants. The problems affecting Sweden were downplayed, at the same time as Anzeigen verified the assertion that the Hat-ruled country had grown in terms of population, industry and funds. ⁶⁴ By stressing the grand feats and aspirations of the Hat Party, the journal in effect underscored Sweden’s status as a nation of utility and useful examples, which could be appropriated abroad. This line of reasoning can also be applied to the representations of Gustavus III after his coup d’état in 1772.

For Anzeigen’s part, the royal seizure of power led to a major revision when it came to the Hat Party, which was dissolved by the king. The journal swiftly revamped the Hats into a previously governing faction of false patriots, guilty of deceiving themselves and the nation, while the Age of Liberty was depicted as a period of ‘so-called patriotic parties’. ⁶⁵ Anzeigen now maintained that the leaders of the preceding era had treated the king in a jealous and illegal way, something the journal erroneously claimed to have commented upon already when it happened. The once lauded Age of Liberty became a thoroughly despicable chapter in Swedish history, a sad epoch characterized by numerous evils – quarrels, persecution, disorder, depopulation, corruption, self-interest, sudden and destructive political change – which persisted until Gustavus eventually managed to triumph over the harmful discord. ⁶⁶ The praise for the ever-more absolute monarch was even more palpable than the praise for the former rulers had been. Gustavus was repeatedly presented as the supreme guardian of the common good, who had vanquished a chaos that would have devastated Sweden if it had not been for the righteous actions of the heroic and wise monarch. ⁶⁷

Anzeigen’s modified stance on Swedish politics mirrored a shift in loyalties amid Königliche Gesellschaft’s Swedish network contacts in the Royal Academy and beyond. During the early 1770s, many men of letters deserted the Hat Party and adopted royalism, among them Wargentin, who in a letter to Haller lent his support to Gustavus’s overthrow of parliamentary rule. ⁶⁸ Like its secretary, the Stockholm academy quickly acclimatized to the new regime and the new patronage structure that the coup entailed, whereas the Age of Liberty was as blatantly condemned in the academy orations as it was in the Göttingen journal. Just two months after the coup, an address by the former Hat politician Carl Fredric Scheffer glorified the royal takeover and the valiant king; the bygone era was, in sharp relief, dismissed as cruel, unforgiving and embittered. Later in the decade, a discrete flattery of the court distinguished many of the Royal Academy’s orations, a tendency which remained pronounced during the 1780s, when Gustavus’s domestic popularity gradually diminished. ⁶⁹

The positive representations of the Swedish king in Anzeigen can be explained by the political reorientation that took place among the foreign acquaintances of its reviewers, as well as by the estate-enlightened sensibilities of the journal. What is more, some of Anzeigen’s main contributors – Haller, Murray, Beckmann – were de facto Gustavus’s clients, since they enjoyed full membership in the Royal Academy. Murray even had the good fortune to encounter the king first hand at his own inauguration into the academy in 1772, an event which was mentioned several times in his anonymous reviews. ⁷⁰ It is, however, possible to recognize yet another reason for the sympathetic treatment of Gustavus in Anzeigen. A review from 1774 listed a number of economic drawbacks that were supposed to have accompanied the Age of Liberty: luxuriance, ambition, the mishandling of agriculture and mining, the failure of landowners to act as beneficial examples for the people, the neglect of property rights, etc. ⁷¹

The vices of self-interest and conceit stood out as the hallmarks of parliamentary rule, whereas Gustavus – as has been shown above – was hailed as a virtuous champion of the common good. Akin to the earlier reporting on the utilitarian efforts of the Hat Party and the diet, the representations of Sweden’s politics and economy after 1772 underlined its status as an admirable nation of utility, which could be put to use in foreign contexts. The coverage of the Gustavian era was in all likelihood influenced not only by the transnational networks and by estate-enlightened inclinations, but also by Anzeigen’s endeavour to convey Swedish experiences to international, in particular German, readers for foreign emulation. Once again, the Hanoverian–Swedish networks, the estate-enlightened mindset and the identification with the Swedish other that they generated were entwined with the utilitarian transactions of the patriotic–cosmopolitan economy.

In spite of the importance that was attached to the rulers, their policies and the political system, the fundamental prerequisite for the imitation-worthy nation of utility that emerged from the reviews was not the political order, but the Protestant legacy. The Protestant religion enjoyed strong support in both Hanover and Sweden. The expression of notions incompatible with the core tenets of Lutheranism was not tolerated at the Georg August University, and the Hanoverian authorities at one point employed Anzeigen to refute a posthumous, heterodox treatise by the Göttingen professor Christoph August Heumann, who had gravitated towards the Reformed Church. ⁷² In Sweden, Lutheran theologians warily protected their state-sanctioned faith and did not approve of any major deviations from the official doctrines; the Anzeigen editor Michaelis found this out the hard way when his Compendium theologiae dogmaticae (1760) was banned in 1763 because its contents were considered to be heretical. ⁷³

Moreover, Anzeigen’s contributors and their contacts in the Lutheran Royal Academy displayed deep-seated anti-Catholic sentiments. ⁷⁴ An academy oration by the historian Anders Anton von Stiernman charged Catholics with fallacy, ignorance, power-hunger and ambition, while an oration by the merchant Johan Clason alleged that the Catholic Church had deprived the nation of freedom and resources. Rosenstein likewise propagated an anti-Catholic viewpoint and accordingly stipulated that ‘the Reformation begot the light in Europe’, politically as well as religiously. ⁷⁵

The Göttingen journal essentially shared the religious attitudes of the Royal Academy, not least Rosenstein’s perspective on the Reformation. Anzeigen’s depictions of the medieval Swedish realm were thus predominantly negative. The journal represented the religious creed of the time, Catholicism, as a false and superstitious teaching, which was hostile towards knowledge and – due to pride and greed – honoured the pope instead of God. Anzeigen contended that the brave Swedes who helped destroy the Roman Empire were deceived into letting a Roman bishop and his minions take advantage of their country, a mishap which led to welfare-ending exploitation. In addition, the northern kingdom suffered from political instability, epidemics, mismanaged agriculture, underdeveloped and lopsided foreign trade, scanty utilitarian efforts and emigration prompted by poverty. During the reign of King Carolus Knutsson Bonde, Sweden supposedly lacked patriotism, virtue and honesty, as misguided loyalties, arrogance and unrestrained self-interest brought disaster upon the country. ⁷⁶

The representations of Sweden’s Protestant history for the most part differed substantially from the representations of its Catholic past. The Reformation king Gustavus I Vasa was portrayed as a genuinely great monarch, as a heroic advocate of truth vis-à-vis Catholic superstition and as a liberator of his fatherland from Danish suzerainty. Anzeigen stated that Gustavus Vasa was an illustrious and pious Lutheran, who attempted to accomplish moderation through his example. Even if the king had a hot temper, he publicly exhibited patience, reason, restraint, justness and an all-embracing care for the people. Gustavus’s most creditable act was reportedly his instigation of order in the kingdom: ‘He found everything in confusion and anarchy, and left everything well organized’. Notwithstanding all the problems he faced, the king miraculously succeeded in reforming the economy and in accumulating ‘a not insignificant treasure’, collected ‘without oppression of his subjects’. Irrespective of that, Gustavus was not always loved by the people; Anzeigen tentatively attributed his unpopularity to the Reformation, which the journal nevertheless represented as a thought-through, sensible and sincere improvement of the church as well as the religion. ⁷⁷

As far as Anzeigen was concerned, the Reformation and Gustavus Vasa’s reign marked the beginning of the utilitarian project that defined eighteenth-century Sweden and was revitalized first by the Hat Party, then by Gustavus III. The representations of Gustavus Vasa’s undertakings to improve the country closely paralleled the representations of equivalent pursuits by Sweden’s contemporary rulers, while the journal cast most of his successors as utility-oriented and virtuous sovereigns. For instance, Gustavus Vasa’s grandson, the Protestant arch protagonist Gustavus II Adolphus, was described as an energetic, bold and immortal hero with an altogether interesting life story. Anzeigen noted that Gustavus Adolphus fostered exuberance, but also pointed out that he taught his subjects how to utilize national resources and that he managed to effectuate a number of economic advances. ⁷⁸

The coverage of Swedish history added force to the representations of the Age of Liberty and the Gustavian epoch that followed it. Yet, certain monarchs and time periods were treated in a more ambivalent way, and the warrior King Carolus XII was represented in a largely negative fashion. Although Carolus was acknowledged to have possessed good as well as bad character traits, and Anzeigen expressed some sympathy for the royal absolutism of his day, his and Sweden’s role in the Great Northern War did not hold much appeal for the journal. ⁷⁹ The war was ascribed a plethora of damaging effects, such as poverty, the economic crisis that afflicted Sweden in the 1760s, ravaged forests, a decline in manpower and a twisted demographic structure. ⁸⁰ The one explicit verdict that Anzeigen passed over Carolus’s reign amounted to a decisive dismissal of the king: ‘Carolus XII’s era was just as unfavourable for the economy and the commerce, as it set itself apart by deeds of valour’. ⁸¹ The Sweden of Carolus XII was on the whole not seen as a nation of utility which should be appropriated and imitated abroad, but rather as an unwholesome entity on a par with the medieval Swedish realm.

There were, of course, several cases where Sweden was not represented as a useful other of interest to foreign observers. To be sure, the country had its share of problems – famine, diseases, deficient agriculture, poor or insufficient farm land, meadows and livestock, etc. ⁸² The majority of representations were nonetheless positive, and the reports about Sweden’s shortcomings were balanced and compensated for by reports about how its inhabitants struggled to come to terms with them. As established in the introduction to this article, a journal like Anzeigen cannot be attributed a full-blown agenda, only a range of tendencies, which means that the best any study of its views can do is to outline the notions it asserted most of the time.

One area in which the Göttingen journal did not perceive Sweden as a useful model or source of inspiration was the particularistic variant of patriotism, Gothicism, which had dominated the intellectual life of the northern kingdom in the seventeenth century and exerted a heavy influence upon eighteenth-century Swedish self-representations, especially with regard to history writing and climate discourse. Presupposing a grandiose national past, the Gothicist tradition stressed Sweden’s exceptional standing in the world. In line with their antecedents, eighteenth-century Gothicists conceptualized their patria as a promised and chosen land with splendid climate, prominent culture and old ancestry. ⁸³

Such unabashed claims to Swedish excellence did not harmonize with German images of Sweden’s proper place in the overall scheme of things, considering that scholars in the Holy Roman Empire had formulated a competing and incompatible world view, which ranked the Teutons and the Germans above the Goths and the Swedes. ⁸⁴ This opposition is illustrated by an article in the Saxon journal Deutsches Museum (1776), whose author rebutted the idea of a Swedish descendence from the Goths and declared that they, like numerous other peoples, were an altogether German nation: ‘One can… on good grounds claim, that not Scandinavia, but Teutonia’s North, or Germany, is the people factories (vagina & officina gentium) of the ancients’. ⁸⁵

Anzeigen repudiated Gothicism as a mendacious teaching founded on errors, incompetence and unreliable or abstruse data. For example, the seventeenth-century historian and arch Gothicist Olaus Rudbeck was exposed to severe criticism, not least for alleged delusions, while a contemporary of his, the theologian Peter Bång, was described as a wishful thinker, who had fabricated a prehistoric Sweden where Adam functioned as bishop and Christians dwelled in the first century AD. ⁸⁶ One of the harshest judgements befell a German publisher, the Prussian official Jacob Schimmelmann, who had issued an edition of the Norse Edda epos. Anzeigen represented the Edda narratives as fables and Schimmelmann as a fanciful, flawed and inadequately competent editor. Simultaneously, the journal attacked the Swedish authority which the Prussian publisher based himself on, the Gothicist antiquarian Johan Göransson, who reportedly adhered to ‘the axioms of the Swedish–Rudbeckian history cult’. According to Anzeigen, Göransson not only wanted to turn the Edda into a Scythian and Jewish text, but also ignored or revised source material that was inconsistent with his distorted perception of the truth. ⁸⁷

Anzeigen’s censure of Gothicism can to some extent be explained by a dislike of excessive patriotism among its reviewers. In one of his writings, Haller polemicized against the vices of disproportionate national humility and pride, while the Göttingen journal tended to represent the Gothicists as immoderate patriots too preoccupied with the glory of their own patria. ⁸⁸ The anti-Gothicist representations, however, seem to have also depended on a specific understanding of the proper relationship between Sweden and Germany. Even although Anzeigen did not expound the conception of an archaic Germania Magna from which Europe’s kingdoms were taken to have originated, the journal operated in an environment of thought where this theory was in circulation. Furthermore, Anzeigen in its coverage of Sweden at one point represented the Nordic peoples as Teutons, which suggests that the notion of a Germania Magna might have been a reason for Anzeigen’s disapproval of Gothicism. ⁸⁹ In any case, the journal, as a rule, did not appreciate attempts to give precedence to Sweden over Germany. When a Swedish mining engineer, Daniel Tilas, furnished the Swedes with an advantage over the Germans regarding the mining industry, Anzeigen was careful to communicate the emphatic German rejection of this charge. ⁹⁰

The reviews discussing the historical bonds and exchanges between Germany and Sweden had a tendency to portray the Germans as the active, giving part, whereas the Swedes and the other Nordic peoples were depicted as passive recipients of German ideas. The readership got to know that the Norse sagas were partly inspired by Teutonic tales and that the Norse high god Odin was modelled on the Saxon deity Wotan. ⁹¹ The journal also informed its readers about Sweden’s German rulers, immigrants, visitors, trade and linguistic imports. ⁹² What is more, Germany was represented as a beneficial example and as a fertile soil for useful crafts, technologies and innovations. Anzeigen proclaimed that Sweden had obtained the art of peat-burning from Saxony and that the Swedes had gotten their crafts from the Germans. The Swedish traveller Jonas Apelblad was reported to have delineated auspicious German institutions for imitation in his fatherland, while the mathematician Erik Gustaf Lidbeck and Linnaeus were noted to encourage their compatriots to cultivation of new land by reference to Germany’s example. ⁹³

Given these renderings, the journal could not affirm the basic suppositions of Gothicism, which in essence amounted to an inverted version of the world view that Anzeigen’s representations of the German–Swedish interfaces manifested. The patriotic–cosmopolitan economy and the transnational consensus were hence unable to incorporate phenomena that violated Anzeigen’s and Königliche Gesellschaft’s patriotic sensibilities. Swedish patriotism was only praiseworthy as long as it did not challenge the notion of Teutonic and German supremacy, which by all appearances constituted an axiom in the reporting on the northern realm.

Anzeigen’s usage of the Swedish other was firmly focused on the foreign – to be more exact German and Hanoverian – utility of the events and measures that were being represented to the reading public. Sweden was primarily a source of inspiration and examples to be emulated abroad in order to advance patriotic causes there, above all in Hanover and the Holy Roman Empire. The representations were transactions that added up to a system, a patriotic–cosmopolitan economy, which was influenced by classical rhetoric and its dichotomy of exempla and imitatio.

This mode of using the other was intertwined with the vibrant networks that connected Sweden and Hanover within the framework of the republic of letters. Through the frequent network interchanges, Swedish and Hanoverian scholars, clustered around the Royal Academy of Sciences and Königliche Gesellschaft, established a transnational consensus spanning several areas of contemporaneous religious, social and political discourse: utilitarianism, mercantilism, moderate patriotism, Protestantism and a frame of mind which Jonathan Knudsen has labelled estate enlightenment. The consensus between the learned societies clearly had a bearing on Anzeigen’s coverage of Sweden. The identification with the country that the benevolent reporting on it ultimately signified was probably in part a result of the networks and the ideological affinities which accompanied them. For instance, the transnational agreement on the blessings of the Reformation, the ascent of the Hat Party and Gustavus III’s coup d’état indirectly bolstered the representations of Sweden’s usefulness for the German-speaking readers.

The Hanoverian–Swedish consensus was not just a matter of erudite interplay in the republic of letters. Both Königliche Gesellschaft and the Royal Academy maintained intimate ties to the authorities – in the former case the Privy Council and the Elector in London, in the latter case the Hat Party and the royal court in Stockholm. The powers that be were involved in or linked to the network exchanges between the societies, which often acted as extensions of their respective state administrations. The transnational agreement thus extended to the ruling elites of the two countries.

Anzeigen’s representations of Sweden had to be sanctioned by the persons in power, who evidently believed that the positive consequences of depicting a potential or an actual enemy in favourable terms outweighed the drawbacks of doing so. This should be seen against the background that Sweden, like Hanover, was a traditional estate society typified by mercantilism, utilitarianism, patriotism, reformism and Lutheranism. The representations of the Swedish other were solidly anchored in the social and political realities of the time, in national settings which closely paralleled one another and engendered identification rather than dissociation.

Peter Sahlins once asserted that the perception of differences frequently is most salient when a historical awareness of kinship and cooperation exists. ⁹⁴ The analysis of Anzeigen’s representations of Sweden, on the contrary, alludes to the importance of imagined similarities rather than conceived dissimilarities in one such situation. The study fits well with Karen O’Brien’s thesis that eighteenth-century identity formation could be informed by a complex interaction between discrepancies and likenesses in the context of Christian states and churches. The process of defining foreign others, and domestic selves, indeed had the capacity to be remarkably intricate and to be far from a straightforward, dualistic recognition of contrasts.

The article shows that early modern representations of European others could be predominantly positive and identification-driven rather than negative and exoticizing, as in for instance Larry Wolff’s analysis of how ‘Eastern Europe’ was construed by ‘Western’ spectators during the eighteenth century. ⁹⁵ Anzeigen did not portray Sweden as a peripheral or peculiar abode of nature, but as an integral part of a German and a European cultural community, in keeping with Sverker Sörlin’s observation that the status of centrality or peripherality in the eighteenth century did not chiefly depend on geography, but on scientific, social and power-related matters. ⁹⁶

In addition, the investigation into Anzeigen’s images of Sweden lends credence to the existence of a German–Scandinavian or ‘Northern’ enlightenment, which challenges the supposition of a bundle of national enlightenments as professed by scholars such as Roy Porter and sits well with current interpretations of enlightenment as a capsule comprising a series of debates or ‘an echo chamber in which various networks of communication facilitated a reciprocal exchange of voices’. ⁹⁷ The web of interactions spun between Swedish and German locales corroborates the idea of a multi-centred and multi-perspectival topography of enlightenment, consisting of ‘a series of self-constituting, polycentric, transnational and multilingual movements at the local, regional and even continental levels’. ⁹⁸

Since the transnational enlightenment discussed here was generally rather reformist, traditionalist and utilitarian in scope, the article provides an interesting supplement to expositions of radical enlightenment by historians like Jonathan Israel. ⁹⁹ According to Peter Gay, the quintessential proponent of a unified, avant-garde, Francophone Enlightenment, the ‘German Aufklärer were isolated, impotent, and almost wholly unpolitical’. ¹⁰⁰ The results of this article call this claim into question, since the men behind Anzeigen, who undoubtedly belonged to the leading German intellectual circles of their day, were internationally well connected, exceedingly ardent and very much political, albeit not in the specific way Gay presupposes.