Shifting plots

One oddity that we noted when surveying the Franztal Praestations-Tabellen (tax lists) is the shift in plots when Andreas Buller Jr. joined his father as a lease holder. In 1793, Andreas Sr. held the least to Franztal plot 14, but in the next tax list available to us, in 1805, Andreas Jr. leased plot 14, and his father Andreas Sr. now leased plot 20.

Why would a father move to a different plot so his son could take over the father’s lease formerly held lease? The likely answer to that can be deduced from Prussian law and history from the early nineteenth century.

Frederick William III, emperor of Prussia

We begin with Frederick William III’s “Declaration concerning the Edict of July 30, 1789, and the Related §28 of the Cantonal Regulation of February 12, 1792, Regarding the Ability of Mennonites to Acquire Property,” dated 17 December 1801. After a section explaining the rationale for the declaration (the 1789 edict had not produced the desired results), Frederick’s declaration lays out nine clarifying regulations. Numbers 4–5 are of greatest interest to us.

§4 Accordingly no Mennonite who is not ready to give up the military exemption will be granted a permit to acquire any type of property, rural or urban, that is not already the property of a Mennonite at the time of publication of this edict, so that the former exceptions are completely eliminated in the future and consequently the current number of nonserving Mennonite possessions may not be increased or expanded in any fashion.

§5 Those Mennonites owning property at the time of the publication of this regulation shall remain in possession of their property so long as they remain members of this sect. Their sons will also be exempted from military service, in exchange for which they must fulfill all legal requirements on which this exemption is based. (Jantzen 2010, 263)

In simple terms, §4 states that no Mennonite who rejected military conscription would be given a permit to acquire property from a non-Mennonite. The unstated reason was simple: any non-Mennonite who owned or leased land also owed the Prussian state military service. The government was not about to reduce the number of men potentially serving in the militia by allowing Mennonites who were exempt buy up non-Mennonite land. The solution of §4, then, was to restrict purchase of non-Mennonite land to those who agreed to serve when called, whether Mennonite or not.

Following on that, §5 promised that those Mennonites who already leased land would continue to be exempt from military service, they and their male descendants, provided that they remained in good standing (i.e., not under the ban) in the Mennonite church.

So how does this help us understand why Andreas Jr. took over his father’s plot? Because Andreas Sr. had been leasing plot 14 for some time (at least since 1793), it was exempt from military obligation. (In fact, plot 14 had been leased by another Mennonite [Hans Becker] before that, so it was exempt from the very outset of Mennonite habitation in Franztal; see here.) Important to keep in mind is the fact that obligation or exemption attached to the land, not to the person. Any Mennonite who leased plot 14 was exempt during the period of that lease.

By 1805, as we observed, Andreas Sr. had moved to plot 20, which had not been previously leased by a Mennonite (compare the 1793 Franztal list, which records plots 1–19, with the 1805 list, which has plots 1–20). Clearly, plot 20 was a later addition to the village and thus not exempt under the terms of the 1801 Declaration. To state the matter simply, Andreas Sr. moved from an exempt plot (14) to a nonexempt plot (20), so his son could take over the exempt plot 14. Why?

Mark Jantzen provides an explanation: “Fathers who were too old to serve bought such property and turned their own exempt land over to their sons” (Jantzen 2010, 73). Technically, Andreas Sr. was obligated to serve in the military if he was called to do so. However, he was playing the odds that a fifty-year-old man would not be called into service, given the number of available younger men who would make better soldiers.

Jantzen goes on to explain that the Prussian government closed this “potential loophole” shortly after it became known: “Berlin ordered all sons, regardless of age, to be liable for military service if their father acquired nonexempt property” (Jantzen 2010, 73). By then it was too late for Andreas Jr. to be called into service; the property acquisition had already taken place, and both Bullers were safe from military service: Jr. on account of his leasing of an exempt property and Sr. in light of his advancing age.

Because people are rational creatures, actions that intitially perplex those of us who come later can usually be explained in a logical fashion. This odd shift of plots between father and son demonstrates well this important truth.

Work Cited

Jantzen, Mark. 2010. Mennonite German Soldiers: Nation, Religion, and Family in the Prussian East, 1772–1880. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.