Kingdom of Saxony

The Kingdom of Saxony (Königreich Sachsen), ordinarily Saxony or Sachsen, is a constituent kingdom of the German Empire and the third of its member states by population. It lies in the east of the Empire between the Prussian Province of Saxony to the north and west, the Bohemian frontier of Austria-Hungary to the south, and Prussian Silesia to the east, and it holds approximately six million people in roughly fifteen thousand square kilometres. Its capital is Dresden.

It is a monarchy under the House of Wettin in its Albertine line, which has held the country since 1485 and the royal title since 1806, and which reigns today in the person of Friedrich August IV. Its government is parliamentary: a Landtag of 140 members elected for five years, a ministry commanding that chamber’s confidence, and a Crown whose ordinary powers are exercised on advice. Its constitution dates from 1831, has been continuously amended and never replaced, and predates the imperial Constitution by forty years.

Saxony is the most densely populated of the German states, the most heavily industrialised in proportion to its area, and among the oldest continuously settled and worked landscapes in central Europe. It is also the smallest of the three kingdoms by a wide margin, and it was not always so.

Three facts about the country are older than any of its modern arrangements and explain most of what follows. Saxony is where the Reformation began, and it is ruled by a Catholic dynasty, which converted in 1697 in order to obtain the crown of Poland and has kept the Lutheran establishment of its Protestant subjects in force ever since. Saxony was for three centuries the wealthiest, most cultivated and most technically advanced state in Germany, and was overtaken by Prussia in the eighteenth century and has not caught up. And at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the powers took the northern half of the kingdom and gave it to Prussia, where it became the Prussian Province of Saxony, so that the country has spent two centuries living beside a province of another kingdom bearing its own name.

Name, style and forms

The name

The name is older than the country and does not fit it. The Saxons were a people of the North Sea coast and the lower Elbe, and the historic duchy of Saxony lay in what is now Lower Saxony and Westphalia, several hundred kilometres to the north west. When the Saxon ducal title passed to the Ascanians and then, in 1423, to the Wettin margraves of Meissen, the name travelled with the dignity rather than with the people, and it settled on a country of Thuringian and Sorbian settlement that had never been Saxon in any ethnographic sense.

Saxons in the modern kingdom therefore bear a name that properly belongs to people three hundred kilometres away, who are themselves called Lower Saxons to distinguish them, and the Kingdom of Hanover’s white horse, the Sachsenross, is the older Saxon emblem while the Kingdom of Saxony’s arms carry no reference to the Saxons at all. Saxon schoolchildren are taught this and Saxon adults regard it as one of the pleasanter absurdities of German history.

The King’s style

The sovereign is styled King of Saxony, König von Sachsen, with the subsidiary titles of Margrave of Meissen and Burgrave of Magdeburg among a longer historic list. Meissen is the older dignity and the real one: the Wettins were margraves of Meissen from 1089 and are the senior line of the house in continuous possession of its original territory, which few German dynasties can say.

The style is Majestät. The King is not addressed as Elector, though the electoral dignity was the house’s principal title from 1356 to 1806 and the electoral swords remain in the arms of state. In Saxony the older title is used freely in historical reference and never in ceremony.

The citizen

A subject of the kingdom is a Saxon, Sachse, and holds Saxon state citizenship, from which German nationality follows in the ordinary way. The distinction between a Saxon of the kingdom and a Saxon of the Prussian Province of Saxony is a genuine one in law and a fertile one in conversation, since the second is not a Saxon in the kingdom’s sense at all and frequently says so.

History

The March of Meissen

The country began as a frontier. The March of Meissen was established in the tenth century on the eastern edge of the German lands, in territory settled by the Sorbs, a West Slavonic people whose descendants remain in Lusatia and whose language is still spoken there. The march was a conquest and was administered as one, and the German settlement of the following two centuries was a colonisation, organised by margraves and monasteries, that displaced or absorbed most of the Slavonic population.

The Wettins received the march in 1089 and have held it since. No other German dynasty has held its original territory continuously for so long, and the fact is stated on the first page of every Saxon school history, which is accurate and is also the kind of thing a country says when it has lost other things.

Silver, and the making of a rich country

What turned a frontier march into the wealthiest state in Germany was found in the ground. Silver was struck at Freiberg in the 1160s and afterwards throughout the Erzgebirge, the ore mountains along the Bohemian frontier, and the rushes that followed populated a range of high, cold, agriculturally hopeless country with mining towns that had no other reason to exist.

The consequences were out of all proportion to the metal. Saxony acquired capital, a mining law that became the model for central Europe, a body of technical knowledge in surveying, drainage, hydraulics and metallurgy, and a population of skilled workers accustomed to organised industrial labour four centuries before industry. The mining academy at Freiberg, founded in 1765, is the oldest institution of its kind in the world, and the Saxon technical tradition that produced precision instruments, optics, machine tools and porcelain descends directly from the silver.

The ore also gave the country its politics. Mining towns were chartered, self-governing and rich, and the Saxon estates were correspondingly strong. A Saxon elector could not govern as a Brandenburg margrave governed, and the difference between the two states in the seventeenth century is largely a difference between a country with money of its own and a country without.

The division of 1485

In 1485 the brothers Ernest and Albert divided the Wettin lands between them, in an arrangement intended to be provisional and never reversed. The Ernestine line took Thuringia and the electoral dignity; the Albertine line took Meissen and the Dresden country.

The division is the single most consequential act in the dynasty’s history and it is why the Empire contains a Kingdom of Saxony under the Albertines and four Thuringian duchies under the Ernestines, a family sharing arms, a name and very little else. Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, Saxe-Meiningen and Saxe-Altenburg are the surviving Ernestine states, and their sovereigns and the King of Saxony are cousins at a remove of five centuries who meet at funerals and use the same rue crown.

The Reformation

Luther was an Ernestine subject. He taught at Wittenberg, which was Ernestine, under the protection of the Ernestine Elector Frederick the Wise, and the Reformation was made in the Ernestine lands rather than in the Albertine ones. Albertine Saxony under Duke George remained Catholic and hostile to it for a generation.

That changed in 1539, when George died and his brother introduced the Reformation into the Albertine lands within months. The result is that both halves of the Wettin inheritance became Lutheran, that Saxony as a whole is the country in which the Reformation began, and that the modern kingdom’s claim to that inheritance rests on a territory its own dynasty acquired later and on a conversion its own dynasty resisted.

Saxons make the claim anyway, and it is not baseless: Wittenberg lies in the Prussian Province of Saxony and not in the kingdom, but Leipzig held the disputation of 1519, the Saxon church orders shaped Lutheran practice across northern Europe, and the Saxon chancery language became the basis of written German.

The Schmalkaldic War and the transfer of the electorate

In 1547 the Albertine Duke Maurice fought on the Emperor’s side against the Protestant league led by his Ernestine cousin, defeated him, and received the electoral dignity and a substantial part of the Ernestine territory as his reward. He then changed sides and fought against the Emperor five years later.

The episode is not defended in Saxony and is not concealed. The standard treatment is that Maurice made his house the leading Protestant power in Germany by an act of treachery against the leading Protestant power in Germany, and that the electorate the Albertines carried from 1547 to 1806 was taken from their own family in a religious war they fought on the wrong side of. Saxon historians have been arguing about him for four hundred and fifty years without reaching a settled view, which is itself the settled view.

The Thirty Years’ War

Saxony entered the Thirty Years’ War late, changed sides twice, and was devastated. The country was fought across, occupied, plundered and depopulated by armies of both confessions, and the population losses in some districts exceeded half. The recovery took two generations.

The war’s political lesson was drawn immediately and held for a century: Saxony was rich, central, and militarily second-rate, and its interest lay in avoiding wars rather than in winning them. That doctrine served the country well until it met Frederick of Prussia, against whom it failed completely.

Augustus the Strong, Poland, and the conversion

Frederick Augustus I, Elector from 1694 and remembered as Augustus the Strong, converted to Catholicism in 1697 in order to be elected King of Poland. It was a transaction and was understood as one by everybody involved, including the Pope, who received a convert of no discernible piety, and the Saxon estates, who received a Catholic sovereign over the country in which Luther had preached.

What the estates obtained in exchange has governed Saxon public life ever since. The Elector guaranteed the Evangelical-Lutheran establishment in perpetuity, surrendered the church government of Saxony to a board of Lutheran privy councillors who have exercised it in the sovereign’s name ever since, undertook to build no Catholic churches beyond his own court chapel, and accepted that his Catholicism was a private condition carrying no public consequence.

The undertaking has been kept for three hundred and thirty years, by a dynasty that has remained Catholic throughout and has never once attempted to recover the church government it gave away. The Catholic Court Church at Dresden, built in the eighteenth century as the royal chapel and now a cathedral, stands across a square from the Lutheran Frauenkirche, and the relationship between the two buildings is the plainest statement of the Saxon settlement available to a visitor.

The Polish crown itself was less durable. Saxony held it in personal union from 1697 to 1763 with one interruption, spent enormous sums on it, gained little, and lost it on the death of Augustus III without any Saxon institution having been permanently changed by the connection. Its residue is architectural, in the building programmes the Polish revenues financed at Dresden, and dynastic, in a family memory of having been kings before the royal title came.

The Dresden of Augustus

The two Augustan reigns, from 1694 to 1763, gave Dresden its shape and Saxony its reputation. The Zwinger, the court churches, the great collections of paintings, prints, arms, coins, mathematical instruments and worked stones, the Green Vault treasury, the porcelain manufactory at Meissen and the court orchestra that became the Staatskapelle were all founded or built in these seventy years.

The expenditure was ruinous and was criticised at the time on exactly that ground. What the criticism did not anticipate is that the collections were assembled systematically rather than acquisitively, catalogued, and opened to scholars and eventually to the public earlier than almost anywhere in Europe, so that a court’s extravagance became a public institution within a century. Saxony’s cultural standing in the modern Empire rests substantially on money spent by two electors who were not admired for spending it.

The Seven Years War

Frederick of Prussia opened the Seven Years War in 1756 by invading Saxony without declaration, occupying the country entire, and administering it as a resource for the duration. The Saxon army was surrounded at Pirna and forced into Prussian service. Saxon revenues, recruits, magazines and mints were taken for seven years; the Prussian occupation issued debased coin in Saxony’s name on a scale that disordered the currency of half of Germany.

Saxony emerged from the war intact in territory and wrecked in every other respect, and the episode is the origin of the Saxon attitude to Prussia that survives, in a much reduced and largely humorous form, into the present. It is also the origin of a more consequential judgement: that a rich, cultivated, militarily modest country next to Prussia is not safe merely because it has given no offence.

Napoleon, the royal title, and Leipzig

Saxony entered the Napoleonic period as an elector and left it as a kingdom with half its territory gone. It joined the Confederation of the Rhine in 1806 and received the royal title from Napoleon at the same moment and for the same reason that Bavaria and Württemberg received theirs.

Frederick Augustus I, the first King, then held to the French alliance longer than any other German sovereign, and held to it after it had plainly become ruinous. The reasons given at the time were treaty obligation, the fate of the Duchy of Warsaw of which he was also Grand Duke, and a personal conviction that a sovereign’s word survives a change in his ally’s fortunes. The reason given since, in Saxony as elsewhere, is that he misjudged.

The Battle of the Nations was fought at Leipzig in October 1813, on Saxon soil, with Saxon troops on both sides after two Saxon brigades changed sides during the engagement. It was the largest battle in Europe before the Great Wars, it destroyed Napoleon’s position in Germany, and it left the Kingdom of Saxony an enemy state occupied by the victors with its King a prisoner.

The partition of 1815

At the Congress of Vienna, Prussia proposed to annex the Kingdom of Saxony entire, and very nearly did. The kingdom’s survival was the work of Austria, France and Britain, who preferred a weakened Saxony to a Prussia extended to the Bohemian frontier, and the compromise reached in 1815 took the northern half of the country and gave it to Prussia.

The figures are the ones every Saxon schoolchild learns. The kingdom lost about three fifths of its territory and something over two fifths of its population. It lost Wittenberg, where Luther had preached, and Torgau and Merseburg and Naumburg and the Thuringian districts and the whole of Lower Lusatia. What Prussia took became, in 1815, the Prussian Province of Saxony, which wraps around the surviving kingdom’s northern and western sides without touching Dresden and has borne the name ever since.

The kingdom that remained is the kingdom that exists: compact, dense, industrial, and about two fifths the size of the country that entered the Napoleonic wars. Saxony has never contested the settlement, has never made a claim on the province, and has never stopped mentioning it.

The Constitution of 1831

The restored kingdom was governed for fifteen years by an unreformed administration and a set of estates that satisfied nobody, and the July revolution in France produced disturbances at Leipzig and Dresden in 1830 that made reform unavoidable.

The Constitution of 1831 was the result: a two-chamber Landtag, ministerial responsibility in embryo, a guarantee of the Lutheran establishment, an independent judiciary, and the abolition of the manorial jurisdictions. It was among the more liberal instruments granted in Germany in that decade, it has been amended continuously and replaced never, and Saxony’s possession of a constitutional order forty years older than the Empire is a point the Landtag makes at every opportunity, most often when a Prussian minister is present.

1848, and the Dresden rising

The revolutions of 1848 ran strongly in Saxony, which had the industrial population, the press and the associational life to sustain them. The Landtag carried a liberal programme, a democratic ministry took office, and the country’s deputies at the Frankfurt parliament were among the more radical.

The reaction came in 1849, when the King refused the Frankfurt constitution and dissolved the chamber, and Dresden rose. The barricades held the old city for several days, a provisional government was proclaimed, and the rising was put down by Prussian troops requested by the Saxon government, at a cost of several hundred lives and a good deal of the old city burnt. Among those on the barricades were the anarchist Bakunin and the Dresden court’s own conductor, Richard Wagner, who fled the country and remained in exile for eleven years.

Two things about the episode are still argued about in Saxony. The first is that a Saxon government put down a Saxon rising with Prussian soldiers, thirty-four years after Prussia had taken half the country. The second is that the constitution the rising defended was, in its essentials, conceded within two decades anyway.

1866, and not being annexed

Saxony fought on Austria’s side against Prussia in 1866 and lost. The Saxon army fought well, at Gitschin and Königgrätz, and was the only allied contingent to leave the field in order.

Prussia annexed Hesse-Kassel, Nassau and the Free City of Frankfurt, deposing the Elector of Hesse and the Duke of Nassau, and it annexed neither Saxony nor Hanover. The two kingdoms that had fought against it survived, and they survived for different reasons. Hanover was spared by the victorious settlement itself, King Georg V keeping his throne where in another arrangement of the war he would have lost it. Saxony was spared because Austria insisted: the peace of Prague was negotiated with Vienna, and Vienna made Saxon integrity a condition of it.

The kingdom entered the North German Confederation instead, retaining its Crown, its constitution, its administration and, under a military convention, its own army contingent. That two of the defeated kingdoms kept their crowns is the reason the Empire of 1871 was a federation of monarchies rather than a Prussia with provinces, and it is the single most consequential thing about the settlement of 1866.

Saxony was therefore preserved by the intervention of the power it had just lost a war beside, in the same way that it had been preserved at Vienna by powers with no affection for it, and the pattern is one the Saxon foreign-political tradition, such as it is, has drawn conclusions from.

The Empire, and the industrial century

Saxony entered the German Empire in 1871 as a kingdom with a contingent and no reserved rights worth the name. It had no diplomatic representation, no postal reservation, no taxation right and no permanent committee seat. The comparison with Bavaria, which negotiated separately and obtained all four, is made in Saxony frequently and with an edge, and the honest answer is that Saxony was in no position to negotiate in 1870 and Bavaria was.

What followed was the most rapid industrialisation in Germany. Saxony entered the century as the country of textiles, mining and craft manufacture and left it as the country of machine tools, precision instruments, optics, electrical goods, chemicals, printing and porcelain, with the highest population density, the highest proportion of industrial employment and the densest railway network of any German state.

It also produced the German labour movement. Leipzig is where the first German workers’ party was founded in 1863, the Saxon industrial districts returned socialist deputies earlier and in greater numbers than anywhere else in the Empire, and the phrase Red Saxony dates from the 1870s. The kingdom’s response was a restricted three-class franchise for the Landtag, introduced in 1896 specifically to keep the Social Democrats out of a chamber the ordinary franchise would have given them, which succeeded for twenty years and cost the Crown a great deal of the good will the constitution of 1831 had earned it.

The First Great War

Saxony contributed its contingent to the imperial armies and lost heavily. The kingdom’s industrial base was turned to war production, its textile trade collapsed for want of imported cotton, and the food shortages of the later war years fell harder on a densely populated industrial country than on an agricultural one.

The political consequence was the end of the three-class franchise. A state that conscripted men it excluded from the Landtag could not defend the exclusion, and by 1917 the demand for equal suffrage was being pressed in Dresden by parties that had voted for the restriction twenty years earlier. Friedrich August III, who had come to the throne in 1904, promised reform during the war and delivered it after.

The settlement

Because Germany won, Saxony had no revolution, and the reform of the Saxon constitution was carried by amendment through institutions that remained standing. It was nonetheless the largest change in the kingdom’s public life since 1831.

The settlement of 1919 to 1922 abolished the three-class franchise and introduced universal adult suffrage; abolished the upper chamber and left a unicameral Landtag; made the ministry answerable to that chamber alone; converted the royal domains, palaces, collections and forests into an audited public trust with a civil list voted by the Landtag; and left the Lutheran establishment and the guarantees of 1697 untouched, at the request of both the church and the Social Democrats.

The first ministry elected under the new franchise was a Social Democratic one, and Saxony became the first German state to be governed by the SPD. The King commissioned it without visible reluctance, which was noticed at the time across Germany and is the single act for which Friedrich August III is chiefly remembered. The kingdom that had built a franchise to keep the Social Democrats out was governed by them within three years of abandoning it, and the Crown survived the transition intact because it made no attempt to resist it.

The interwar decades

Red Saxony in the 1920s and 1930s was the most consistently left-governed state in the Empire and one of the more prosperous. Industrial output recovered, the export trades in machine tools, optics and instruments expanded, and the state built housing, schools and clinics on a scale that made Dresden and Leipzig models cited elsewhere.

The period’s difficulty was the same as everywhere: the world depression fell heavily on an export economy, unemployment in the textile districts of the Vogtland and the upper Erzgebirge reached levels the state could not relieve, and the political extremes gained ground at both ends. The USPD took industrial seats from the SPD; a nationalist right grew in the rural districts and among the shopkeepers of the small towns. Neither displaced the governing centre-left, and the Saxon settlement held, though it was closer in 1932 than the standard account allows.

The Second Great War

Saxony’s war was not the war of the western and northern states, and the difference is the largest single fact about the country’s twentieth century.

The kingdom supplied its contingent, converted its precision industries to war production, and took very large numbers of evacuees and later of refugees from the bombed cities of the west and from the Berlin districts destroyed in the winter of 1941. Saxon casualties at the front were proportionate to the kingdom’s population and were severe.

But the fascist French offensive ran along the north German plain, in a narrow deep thrust that reached Berlin and was held there, and the air war followed the same axis and the western and southern industrial regions. Saxony lies south east of that line, at the far end of Germany from France, and it was not reached. There were long-range raids on the Leipzig marshalling yards and on particular works, and they did real damage in particular streets. There was no campaign against the Saxon cities.

Dresden was not bombed. The baroque city of Augustus stands entire: the Zwinger, the court church, the Frauenkirche, the terrace above the Elbe, the old town in its eighteenth-century form, undamaged and unreconstructed. So do the medieval towns of the Erzgebirge and the merchant streets of Görlitz, which is the largest architecturally intact old town in Germany and would probably not have been so in any other arrangement of the war.

Saxony is conscious of this and slightly uncomfortable about it. The kingdom emerged from a war that killed its soldiers and left its buildings alone, in a Germany where Munich was bombed for years and rebuilt from measured drawings and a third of Berlin was destroyed, and Saxon commemoration has had to find a form that does not sound like relief. The form it has found is to say very little, to keep the war memorials in the churchyards, and to observe the imperial days of remembrance without adding any of its own.

After the war

The postwar settlement reached Saxony as it reached everywhere: land reform, which mattered less here than in the Prussian east because Saxony had few great estates; merit recruitment; the constitutional entrenchment of codetermination and sectoral bargaining, which the Saxon unions had been demanding since the 1890s and which the Saxon employers had resisted for as long.

Friedrich August III died in 1949 after a reign of forty-five years, and was succeeded by Johann II and in 1978 by Albert II. The long postwar expansion suited Saxony exactly. An economy of medium-sized precision manufacturers with export markets and a deep skilled workforce is the economy the postwar decades rewarded most, and the kingdom’s income per head, which had fallen behind the western states between the wars, closed most of the gap by the 1970s.

The country’s political life remained what it had been. The SPD has held the Saxon ministry for the greater part of the period since 1919, in coalition with the FVP for most of it and alone for stretches of it, and Saxony is the only German state in which the conservative parties have never formed a government under the modern franchise.

The present

Friedrich August IV succeeded his father in 2011. Dr Ulrike Bergmann has led an SPD and FVP ministry since 2023. The kingdom’s public arguments are those of a mature industrial economy with a demographic problem: the lignite closure in Lusatia and what replaces it, the drift of graduates westward out of a state that educates more of them than it retains, the condition of the Sorbian settlement, and a housing question in Dresden and Leipzig that is milder than Munich’s and moving in the same direction.

Saxony’s relationship with the Empire is unproblematic and its relationship with Prussia is correct. The Province of Saxony is still there, still called that, and still the first thing a Saxon mentions when a stranger asks him where he is from and gets the answer wrong.

Geography

The shape of the country

Saxony rises from north to south across a short distance, and the compression is the country’s defining physical fact. In the north it is lowland: the sandy heaths and pine country of Lusatia, the lignite fields, and the flat fertile loess belt around Leipzig that is among the best arable land in Germany. In the middle it is hill country, the wooded ridges and river valleys of the Saxon uplands. In the south it rises to the Erzgebirge, the ore mountains along the Bohemian frontier, which are not high by Alpine standards and are high enough to be cold, wet and agriculturally marginal.

Between the uplands and the mountains the Elbe cuts through a belt of sandstone in a gorge of pillars, tables and free-standing towers, the Saxon Switzerland, which is the most distinctive landscape in the kingdom and one of the more distinctive in Germany. It was named in the eighteenth century by two Swiss painters at the Dresden academy who thought it looked like home, and the name has outlived every attempt to replace it with something less absurd.

The whole country is small. It is possible to cross the kingdom by road in three hours, and no part of it is far from a town.

The Elbe

The Elbe is the kingdom’s river and its organising line. It enters from Bohemia through the sandstone gorge, passes Pirna, Dresden and Meissen, and leaves into the Prussian Province of Saxony north of Riesa. Dresden and Meissen are both on it, the vineyards of the Elbe valley are the most northerly wine district in Germany and among the smallest, and the river carries commercial traffic to Hamburg.

Its behaviour is the country’s standing anxiety. The Elbe floods, sometimes catastrophically, and the flood of the early 2000s reached the terrace at Dresden and the old town streets behind it. The defences built afterwards are extensive, are of the kind that protect a historic city without being visible in it, and cost a great deal, and Saxon flood policy since has been an argument between engineering and the restoration of the floodplain that has been resolved in favour of both and funded for neither.

Climate and land

The climate is continental by German standards, with colder winters and warmer summers than the west, and it becomes markedly harsher with altitude in the Erzgebirge, where the upper districts have snow cover for months and a growing season too short for most arable crops.

About a quarter of the kingdom is forest, heavily concentrated in the mountains and the Lusatian heaths. The Leipzig loess belt is intensively farmed. The mountain districts run cattle and, historically, ran a great deal of home industry precisely because farming would not support the population, which is the origin of the toymaking, lacemaking and instrument trades that still exist there.

The Crown

The House of Wettin

The Wettins are among the oldest reigning houses in Europe and have held the March of Meissen without interruption since 1089. The Albertine line, which has reigned in Saxony since the division of 1485, holds the royal title, the electoral swords in its arms, and the seniority within the wider family that the Ernestine dukes of Thuringia acknowledge in form and disregard in practice.

The house is Catholic, and has been since 1697. It is the only Catholic dynasty in the Empire reigning over an established Lutheran church, and the arrangement is the oldest continuously observed constitutional settlement in Saxony.

Friedrich August IV

Friedrich August IV has reigned since 2011, having succeeded his father Albert II. He was educated at Dresden and at Leipzig, took a doctorate in the economic history of the Saxon mining districts, and spent much of his adult life before the accession in the administration of the royal trust’s museums and archives, which has left him with a specialist’s knowledge of the collections and a habit of correcting curators that they describe as a mixed blessing.

His public manner is reserved and his public role is narrow. He opens the Landtag, receives ministers, signs what is put in front of him, presides at the great civic and church occasions, and appears at the Leipzig fair, the mining parades of the Erzgebirge and the Semperoper’s opening night. He speaks rarely and briefly, and the two occasions on which he has said anything that could be construed as political, both concerning the Sorbian settlement, produced considerable comment and no ministerial complaint.

The Crown’s powers

The Saxon Crown is a constitutional monarchy of the ordinary modern type and is not the Prussian arrangement. The King assents to legislation and has no veto over it. He appoints a Minister-President who commands the Landtag’s confidence and cannot dismiss one who does. He acts on advice in all matters of government, and the reserve powers that survive in the constitutional text have not been exercised since the nineteenth century.

The contrast with Prussia is exact and is made deliberately in Saxony. The King of Prussia retains an absolute veto and a personal power of dismissal; the King of Saxony retains neither. Saxon constitutional writers have described their own arrangement as the settled destination of German constitutional monarchy and the Prussian one as an unfinished journey, which is a comfortable position for a small kingdom to hold about a large one and is not, on the evidence, wrong.

The succession

Saxony enacted absolute primogeniture in the 1990s, without qualification and without a transitional protection, so that the order of succession was recalculated for every living member of the house on the day the statute came into force. It is the only member state of the Empire to have done so in that form.

The reform was carried in a single session with the assent of the then King, the support of every party in the Landtag and almost no public argument, which Saxons attribute to their own good sense and which is more plausibly explained by the fact that the reigning line’s eldest child at the time was a son, so nobody’s expectations were disturbed. The consequence a generation later is that Crown Princess Maria Josepha is heir apparent to the Saxon throne, and that Saxony has spent the years since Prussia’s prospective reform of 2015 pointing this out with a restraint that is audible in Berlin.

The royal trust and the court

The palaces, collections, archives, forests and estates transferred to public trust in the settlement of 1919 to 1922 are administered separately from the state budget and audited like any public body. The trust holds the Green Vault, the picture galleries, the porcelain collection, the armoury, the mathematical and physical instruments, the print room, the Zwinger, the Dresden and Pillnitz palaces and the Moritzburg hunting seat, and it is by any measure one of the great cultural undertakings of Europe.

Its position is easier than the Bavarian trust’s because the buildings survived. Saxony did not have to spend forty years reconstructing what it holds, and the trust’s expenditure has gone into conservation, cataloguing and the provenance research it has conducted and published since the 1990s.

The court is small. The civil list is voted by the Landtag, is modest, and has not been contested in living memory. The household maintains the ceremonial of a kingdom of six million people rather than of a great power, and the Saxon view of this, expressed whenever a comparison with Berlin arises, is that the kingdom stopped pretending to be a great power in 1763 and has been more comfortable ever since.

Government

The Constitution of 1831

The Saxon Constitution was granted in 1831, has been amended continuously and has never been replaced. It is among the older constitutional instruments in force in the Empire, later than Bavaria’s of 1818, Baden’s of the same year and Wurttemberg’s of 1819, and it predates the imperial Constitution by forty years, a fact Saxon ministers introduce into federal negotiations with a regularity their Prussian counterparts find wearing.

The document as amended is not the document as granted. The three-class franchise was inserted in 1896 and removed in 1919; the upper chamber was abolished in 1920; ministerial responsibility to the lower chamber alone was established in the same settlement; the royal domains were converted to trust in 1922; absolute primogeniture was enacted in the 1990s. What survives from 1831 is the structure, the guarantee of the Lutheran establishment, the independence of the judiciary and the abolition of manorial jurisdiction.

Amendment requires a two-thirds majority of the Landtag. Provisions touching the Crown, the succession, the established church or the Sorbian settlement require a two-thirds majority in two successive sessions separated by a general election, which is the Saxon equivalent of Bavaria’s referendum requirement and has the same effect of making such changes rare and deliberate.

The Landtag

The Landtag is unicameral, has 140 members, and is elected for five years by a mixed system of constituency and list seats. It legislates, votes supply, elects and may dismiss the Minister-President, and scrutinises the ministry through committees that are unusually strong by German state standards, a legacy of the long period in which the chamber was the only elected institution the country possessed.

It sits in Dresden. Its committee on the Sorbian settlement is the only standing committee of its kind in the Empire and includes members designated by the Sorbian organisations who speak and do not vote.

The ministry

The Minister-President heads a cabinet of about ten. Dr Ulrike Bergmann has held the office since 2023, leads a coalition of the SPD and the FVP, and came to it from the Leipzig city government by way of the state economics ministry, a route that is the ordinary Saxon one. Her predecessors have overwhelmingly been Social Democrats.

The ministry has no war ministry and no foreign ministry, Saxony having neither reserved right, and the absence is the plainest statement of the difference between Saxony’s position in the Empire and Bavaria’s.

Parties

The imperial parties operate in Saxony through their state organisations and the arithmetic is unlike anywhere else in the Empire. The SPD is the largest party and has been continuously since the introduction of universal suffrage, drawing on the industrial districts, Leipzig, Chemnitz and the mining valleys. The FVP is its usual partner, strong in Dresden, among the professions and in the export trades. The NLP is the principal opposition. The DKP and the FKP/DRP hold rural and small-town seats in the Erzgebirge and Lusatia and have never been in a Saxon government under the modern franchise. The USPD holds a bloc of industrial seats and has supported SPD ministries from outside without entering one.

The Zentrum is negligible in Saxony and this is the one place in Germany where the Empire’s most reliably governing party is a fringe. Saxony is between eighty and ninety per cent Protestant by historic affiliation, the Catholic population is concentrated in the Sorbian districts of Upper Lusatia and among migrants, and a confessional party of Catholic Germany has nothing here to organise. The Sorbian Catholic districts are in fact the Zentrum’s only secure Saxon seats, which produces the arrangement, unique in the Empire, by which a German confessional party’s Saxon representation is substantially Slavonic.

The courts

Saxony maintains its own courts to appellate level within the imperial structure, with a Constitutional Court at Leipzig ruling on the Saxon constitution. Leipzig also holds the Imperial Court of Justice, the supreme court of ordinary jurisdiction for the whole Empire, placed there at the foundation specifically so that it should not be a Berlin institution.

Saxony has held that court for a century and a half. The kingdom’s satisfaction in the arrangement is considerable, is expressed at every opportunity, and rests on the accurate observation that the Empire’s highest ordinary court sits in the capital of a state that lost half its territory to the Empire’s largest.

What the constitution guarantees

The Saxon Constitution’s substantive guarantees are worth listing because they are the practical shape of the kingdom’s public life. It guarantees the Evangelical-Lutheran establishment and the undertakings of 1697 that stand behind it. It guarantees municipal self-government, which the Constitutional Court has made a real constraint. It guarantees the Sorbian settlement, including the language rights, the schooling and the state’s obligation to maintain the Sorbian institutions, and this provision may be amended only by the double procedure across an election.

It guarantees the independence of the judiciary, the right of popular initiative, and a set of social provisions written in during the settlement of 1919 to 1922 that include a right to work in the sense of a state obligation to pursue full employment, a provision the Landtag has never treated as justiciable and no Saxon government has ever wished to test.

What it does not do is give the Crown any of the powers the Prussian constitution gives its King. There is no Saxon royal veto, no personal power of dismissal, and no reserve power that has been exercised since the nineteenth century, and the Saxon constitutional literature treats this as the settled destination of German constitutional monarchy rather than as a deficiency.

The electoral system

The Landtag’s 140 members are returned for five years on a mixed system, part constituency and part list, with a threshold and an exemption for parties representing the Sorbian minority that mirrors the imperial arrangement for the Polnische Fraktion. The Sorbian exemption has never been needed, no separate Sorbian party having contested a Saxon election, and the Domowina’s settled position is that it would rather work through all the parties than become one.

Elections are held on the Saxon cycle rather than the imperial one, which means Saxon governments are made and unmade on Saxon questions, and which is the ordinary German arrangement and the reason the Bundesrat’s composition never matches the Reichstag’s.

Religion

A Lutheran country

Saxony is where the Reformation began and it is thoroughly Lutheran in its history, its architecture, its music and its law. The Evangelical-Lutheran Church of Saxony is established, holds public-law status, levies the church tax through the state revenue offices, and is guaranteed by a constitutional provision that has stood since 1831 and by an undertaking that has stood since 1697.

Its government is the peculiarity. Because the sovereign is Catholic and cannot exercise the church government that in other Lutheran states belongs to the Crown, the office is discharged in the King’s name by a board of Lutheran privy councillors, and has been since the conversion. The King is therefore the formal head of a church he does not belong to, exercising through others an authority he may not exercise himself, and the arrangement has worked without serious friction for three hundred and thirty years.

The bargain of 1697

The terms Augustus the Strong accepted in order to become a Catholic and remain Elector are worth stating exactly, because Saxon public life still runs on them.

The Lutheran establishment was guaranteed in perpetuity. Church government passed to the Lutheran board. The sovereign undertook to build no Catholic church in Saxony beyond his own court chapel and to make no Catholic appointment to any Saxon office in the church’s gift. Catholic worship was permitted at court and nowhere else. The heir was to be educated in a manner that did not prejudice the settlement.

Every one of these undertakings was kept, in some cases past the point where anyone would have objected to their being relaxed. Catholic disabilities in Saxony were not removed by the dynasty that would have benefited from removing them; they were removed by the Landtag in the nineteenth century, over a period of decades, at the instance of Lutheran liberals, while the Catholic King’s ministers took no position. Saxons regard this as the most creditable thing their monarchy has ever done and it is difficult to disagree.

The Court Church and the Frauenkirche

Two buildings at Dresden state the settlement more clearly than any document. The Catholic Court Church, built in the mid-eighteenth century as the royal chapel and now the cathedral of the Dresden and Meissen diocese, stands beside the palace on the terrace above the Elbe. The Frauenkirche, the great Lutheran dome of the old city, stands a few hundred metres away and is larger.

The Frauenkirche was built by the city, not the Crown, and was built in the same decades as the Court Church, and the relationship between the two projects was competitive in a manner that was entirely understood at the time. Both stand today, undamaged, in a city that was never bombed, and the survival of the Frauenkirche is the single most conspicuous consequence of Saxony’s particular war.

Practice

Saxony has among the lowest rates of religious practice in the Empire and has had since the nineteenth century. Industrialisation, the labour movement and a working-class culture that built its own associations, choirs, libraries and funeral clubs produced a population formally Lutheran and substantially detached from the church two generations before the same thing happened elsewhere in Germany.

The church retains institutional weight through its schools, its welfare organisations, its music and its buildings, and it retains a real constituency in the Erzgebirge and the rural districts. In Leipzig and Chemnitz its congregations are small and its choirs are full, which is a distinction the church itself draws and does not find satisfactory.

The Catholic minority

Catholics are about one Saxon in twenty. They are concentrated in two places that have nothing to do with each other: the Sorbian districts of Upper Lusatia, which never accepted the Reformation and have been Catholic continuously since before it, and the industrial cities, where the Catholic population arrived with migration from Silesia, from the Habsburg lands and, in the postwar decades, from further afield.

The Catholic Sorbs of the Lusatian heartland are the older and stranger presence: a Slavonic-speaking Catholic peasantry inside a German-speaking Lutheran kingdom under a German Catholic dynasty, whose villages kept their liturgy, their processions and their language through four centuries in which every one of those things was under pressure.

The record

The Saxon church’s history is required teaching under the imperial critical-history framework and it is not comfortable. The Lutheran establishment supported the anti-socialist legislation and the three-class franchise, preached against the labour movement from the pulpit through the decades in which its own industrial parishes were emptying, and lost the Saxon working class through a political choice rather than through any general process of secularisation. Church leaders said so afterwards, at length, and the reckoning is a matter of published record rather than of dispute.

The treatment of the Sorbs is the other half of the account and belongs under its own heading.

The Sorbs

Who they are

The Sorbs are a West Slavonic people, the descendants of the Slavonic population that occupied the country before the German colonisation of the tenth to thirteenth centuries, and the only indigenous Slavonic minority in the German Empire. They live in Lusatia, on both sides of the frontier between the Kingdom of Saxony and the Prussian province of Brandenburg.

They speak two related languages. Upper Sorbian, the stronger, is spoken around Bautzen in Saxony; Lower Sorbian, much weaker, around Cottbus in Prussia. Both are written, both have literary traditions running to the Reformation, and both are the languages of a population that has been under pressure for a thousand years and is still there.

Sorbian numbers are disputed because Sorbian identity is not registered and the questions used to count it produce different answers. The figure generally used is some tens of thousands of speakers, the large majority of them in Saxony, with a smaller and older population in the Prussian districts.

Divided between two kingdoms

The Sorbs are the only minority in the Empire whose settlement depends on two states at once. Upper Sorbian is a Saxon matter and Lower Sorbian a Prussian one, the two kingdoms have different language statutes, different school laws and different thresholds for co-officiality, and a single small people is therefore governed under two regimes that were not designed together.

The instrument that holds it together is a joint foundation of Prussia, Saxony and the Empire, which finances the Sorbian schools, the publishing house, the language institute, the cultural ensemble and the newspapers. Its budget is renegotiated on a cycle that satisfies nobody: the foundation says the sum is inadequate to the task, Prussia says its share is disproportionate to the Sorbian population within its own territory, Saxony says the entire arrangement exists because Prussia took Lower Lusatia in 1815 and should be paid for accordingly, and the Empire says the states should settle it between them.

In Saxony, Upper Sorbian is co-official in the districts where it passes the statutory threshold, and the threshold is lower than the Prussian one. Bilingual place-name signs, Sorbian-medium and bilingual schools, Sorbian in the courts and in dealings with the administration, and a Sorbian department at Leipzig are the practical content of the settlement. It is the most generous minority arrangement in the Empire in law, and the Sorbian organisations say, correctly, that generous law has not stopped the language declining.

What was done to them

The record is long and the article does not soften it. The German colonisation of the March of Meissen was a conquest, and the Sorbian population that survived it did so as a subject peasantry under German lords and a German church. Sorbian was excluded from the courts, from the towns and from most trades. Guild ordinances in a number of Saxon and Lusatian towns barred men of Sorbian descent by name into the eighteenth century. The phrase used in the ordinances, that a member must be of German blood and not of the Wendish kind, is quoted in the Saxon school histories because it is the plainest surviving statement of what the exclusion was.

Systematic Germanisation followed in the nineteenth century, in Saxony and Prussia alike, through the schools above all. Sorbian was restricted or forbidden as a language of instruction, children were punished for speaking it, and the policy was pursued in the explicit and published belief that the Sorbs would and should disappear into the German population within a generation or two. It did not succeed and it did enormous damage, and the generation of Sorbian speakers who did not pass the language to their children because they had been taught that it was an obstacle is the reason the modern figures are what they are.

The Saxon state has acknowledged this. The acknowledgement is in the constitution, in the school curriculum, in the joint foundation and in the ministerial statements made at the Sorbian anniversaries. The Sorbian organisations’ consistent reply is that the acknowledgement is genuine, that the settlement is the best in the Empire, and that neither has reversed a decline that both arrived too late to prevent.

The villages the coal took

The most recent injury is the one still being argued about. The Lusatian lignite fields underlie the Sorbian settlement area, and open-cast extraction consumes the surface above them. Over the twentieth century a substantial number of villages in Lusatia were removed for coal, their populations resettled in new estates on the edges of larger towns, their churches and cemeteries relocated or lost.

A disproportionate share of those villages were Sorbian, for the straightforward reason that the coal is where the Sorbs are. Each removal took a community out of a continuous settlement area and dispersed it into a German-speaking town, which is the single most effective way of ending the everyday use of a minority language, and the cumulative effect over a century has been greater than any school policy.

The removals were lawful. Compensation was paid, the procedures were followed, the resettlement estates were of decent quality, and at no point did any Saxon or Prussian government set out to destroy Sorbian villages as such. The Sorbian organisations have never argued otherwise, and their position, which the article states because it is the accurate one, is that a policy does not have to intend a result in order to produce it, and that a state which acknowledges a thousand years of pressure on a language while continuing to dig up the ground the language lives on has not yet understood what it is acknowledging.

The lignite closure now under way ends the practice. It also ends the employment of a great many people in exactly those districts, including Sorbian ones, and the Sorbian organisations are divided about the transition in the way that everybody in Lusatia is divided about it.

The Domowina

The Domowina is the umbrella organisation of the Sorbian associations, founded in the 1910s, recognised in both kingdoms, and the body through which the Sorbs deal with Dresden, with Berlin and with the joint foundation. It designates the members who sit and speak without voting on the Landtag’s Sorbian committee.

Its standing complaint about that arrangement is the obvious one. A people whose representatives may speak and not vote is being consulted rather than represented, and the Domowina has asked at intervals for reserved seats in the Landtag. Saxony has declined, on the ground that reserved seats would fix an identity the state has spent a century learning not to define, which is a serious argument and is also convenient.

Economy

The shape of it

Saxony is the most densely industrialised country in the Empire relative to its area and among the most export-dependent. It has no coalfield of the Ruhr’s kind, no heavy steel industry of consequence, and very little that is large. What it has instead is an extraordinary concentration of medium-sized firms making precise things: machine tools, measuring and testing instruments, optics, printing machinery, vehicle components, electrical equipment, semiconductors, laboratory apparatus, musical instruments and porcelain.

The pattern is older than industry and descends directly from the silver. Four centuries of mining left the country with capital, technical schooling, a tradition of exact measurement and a population accustomed to organised skilled work, and when steam arrived Saxony was better equipped to use it than anywhere else in Germany. It industrialised first and it industrialised in the form its inheritance dictated, in small specialised works rather than in great plants.

The consequence is an economy with high output per head, very high research intensity, a skilled-labour shortage that every Saxon government of the last twenty years has identified as the binding constraint, and an unusual vulnerability to anything that disturbs export markets.

The trades

Machine tools and precision engineering are the core, concentrated at Chemnitz, which has been the machine-building capital of Germany since the middle of the nineteenth century and is the least visited important city in the Empire. Optics and instruments run from Dresden through the Erzgebirge foothills, and the Saxon optical trade and the Thuringian one at Jena, across the Ernestine frontier, are the two poles of German precision optics and cooperate more than either state’s ministers find convenient.

Textiles built the modern Saxon economy and no longer sustain it. The Vogtland and the western Erzgebirge spun and wove cotton and wool from the eighteenth century, Plauen lace was a world trade in the nineteenth, and the industry contracted through the twentieth in the way textiles contracted everywhere. What survives is specialised: technical textiles, filtration and reinforcement fabrics, and a small luxury lace trade at Plauen that exists on the strength of the name.

Vehicles are made at Zwickau, where the industry was founded at the turn of the twentieth century and where assembly and component work remain the largest single industrial employment in the kingdom. Saxony is therefore inside the imperial argument about decarbonisation and the vehicle industry on the side of the exposed states, and Saxon ministers say in Berlin what Saxon ministers say in Dresden, which distinguishes them from their Bavarian counterparts.

Printing, publishing and the book trade are Leipzig’s and are treated below. Porcelain is Meissen’s. Musical instruments are the Vogtland’s, and are a genuine industry rather than a curiosity: the cluster of villages around Markneukirchen has made stringed and wind instruments since the seventeenth century, supplies orchestras across the world, and sustains a trade school, a museum and a body of craft knowledge that exists in perhaps three places on earth.

Semiconductors and microelectronics are the newest of the Saxon trades and the one the state has invested in most heavily, on the reasoning that a country with four hundred years of precision manufacture, a strong technical university and an optical industry has the foundations for it. The investment has been substantial, the results have been real, and the standing criticism is that the largest plants are foreign-owned and could leave.

Mining

Silver mining in the Erzgebirge ended in the nineteenth century and the last shafts closed long ago. What remains of Saxon mining is lignite in Lusatia, extracted open-cast, burned in power stations on the field, and now closing under the imperial decarbonisation programme on a timetable agreed between the Empire, the kingdom, Prussia, the companies and the unions.

The closure is the largest economic question in Saxony. The Lusatian districts have the kingdom’s highest unemployment, its oldest population and its weakest alternative employment, and the structural funds committed to the transition are large, are being spent, and are not yet visibly producing the jobs the agreement promised. The Saxon method is the German method, negotiated over long horizons with nobody dismissed without a route to something else, and Saxons who defend it point at the Erzgebirge, where an earlier industry was closed and the districts did not collapse, and Saxons who criticise it point at the same place and note that the Erzgebirge has been losing people ever since.

Banking, and the Leipzig fair

Saxony has no financial centre and does not want one. Its firms are financed by the savings banks, which are municipally anchored, by the cooperative banks, and by a state development bank, in the ordinary German pattern, and the relationship between a Saxon machine-tool works and its local savings bank is frequently older than either party’s current management.

The Leipzig fair is the older institution and the more important. It has been held since the middle ages, was for centuries the principal commercial crossroads between western Europe and the east, and survives as a substantial trade-fair business alongside Frankfurt’s. Its historic importance was as a sample fair, an innovation Leipzig introduced in the nineteenth century, in which goods were shown rather than sold from stock, and which every trade fair in the world subsequently copied.

Meissen

The manufactory

Porcelain was made in Europe for the first time at Meissen, in 1710, in a manufactory established by Augustus the Strong in the castle above the Elbe, and it has been made there continuously ever since. The manufactory is owned by the Kingdom of Saxony, has been in public ownership for its whole existence, and is the oldest industrial undertaking in Europe still doing what it was founded to do.

Its origin is the best story in Saxon economic history and is true. Johann Friedrich Böttger was an apothecary’s apprentice who claimed to be able to make gold, was detained by the Elector on that basis, and was held for years under a compulsion to produce it. He did not produce gold. Working under the direction of the physicist Tschirnhaus, and with the mineral resources of a state that had been assaying ores for five hundred years, he produced first a red stoneware and then, in 1708 and 1709, white hard-paste porcelain, which Europe had been trying and failing to make for two centuries and which was worth more than gold by weight when he made it.

Böttger remained a prisoner for most of the period in which he was the most valuable technician in Europe. He was released late, in poor health, and died at thirty-seven. Saxony tells the story with the alchemy foregrounded and the imprisonment mentioned, and the manufactory’s own published history is more direct about the second part than the tourist literature is.

The crossed swords

The manufactory’s mark is the crossed swords of the Saxon electoral arms, applied in underglaze blue and used since the 1720s. It is the oldest trademark in continuous use anywhere in the world, it has been forged more often than any other, and the litigation the manufactory has conducted in its defence across three centuries is a foundational body of case law in the German law of marks.

What it is now

Meissen is small, expensive and state-owned, employs several hundred people, and trains its painters and modellers over years in a school attached to the works. It is not economically significant to Saxony and is culturally significant out of all proportion, and every proposal to sell it that any Saxon finance minister has ever floated has been withdrawn within days of being heard of.

The Erzgebirge

The mountains and the silver

The Erzgebirge, the ore mountains, run along the Bohemian frontier for a hundred and fifty kilometres and are the reason Saxony exists in the form it does. Silver was struck at Freiberg in the 1160s and at Schneeberg, Annaberg and Marienberg in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and each strike produced a rush, a chartered town and a population where there had been forest.

The mining law that developed here, the freedom to prospect, the regulated share system, the miners’ courts and the guaranteed provision for injured men and for widows, spread across central Europe and is one of the oldest bodies of industrial regulation in the world. The Freiberg mining academy, founded in 1765, is the oldest institution of its kind anywhere and still teaches.

After the silver

The ore ran thin and the mountains kept their people, which is the central fact of Erzgebirge social history and the origin of everything the region is now known for. A population too large for the agriculture, in a climate too hard for much of it, turned to home industry: lacemaking at Annaberg from the sixteenth century, toymaking and turned wooden wares around Seiffen, instrument making in the Vogtland beyond, and later the textile mills of the valleys.

The wooden trades are what survive and what the region is known for across the Empire. The turned figures, the arch-shaped candle frames, the pyramids, the smoking figures and the nutcrackers are Erzgebirge products with a mining iconography that is not decorative but literal: the arch is the mine mouth, the miners and angels are the paired figures set in the windows of mining households, and the candles are what a man who spent the winter underground put in his window when he came up.

The mining parades

The mining parades are still held. The miners’ associations of the Erzgebirge towns process in uniform, in the black and the plumes of the old corps, with their bands and their guild insignia, on the December feasts and at the great anniversaries, and the associations have continued without a break since the sixteenth century in towns where the last shaft closed generations ago.

They are among the more remarkable survivals in Germany: a working ritual that outlived its work by two centuries and is performed by men whose fathers were machine operators and whose grandfathers were weavers. The Empire’s cultural authorities describe them as intangible heritage. The associations describe them as the parade.

The present

The Erzgebirge districts have been losing population for a century and continue to. They are the poorest part of the kingdom after the Lusatian lignite districts, they have the oldest age structure, and the technical-institute and structural-fund policies applied to them have slowed the decline without reversing it.

They are also the part of Saxony that is most visited, most photographed and most reliably invoked in Saxon self-description, and the gap between the region’s cultural standing and its economic condition is a subject Erzgebirge deputies raise in the Landtag with some regularity and considerable effect.

The Vogtland and the textile country

The Vogtland, in the south west between the Erzgebirge and the Thuringian and Bavarian frontiers, is the kingdom’s third distinct country after the lowland north and the mountains, and the one least known outside it. It spun and wove from the eighteenth century, made Plauen lace into a world trade in the nineteenth, and carried an industry that at its height employed a substantial fraction of everybody in the district.

The lace trade was the most specialised textile industry in Germany and the most exposed. It depended on embroidery machines, on a design tradition, and on a fashion that could and did move, and its collapse through the twentieth century left the Vogtland with the industrial monuments, the technical school, the pattern archives and a fraction of the employment. What survives is technical textiles, filtration and reinforcement fabrics, and a small luxury trade at Plauen that exists on the strength of the name and supplies a market measured in tens of thousands rather than millions.

The district’s other industry is stranger and has proved more durable. The villages around Markneukirchen have made stringed and wind instruments since the seventeenth century, when Bohemian Protestant refugees brought the trade across the mountains, and they make them still: violins, bows, guitars, brass and woodwind, supplied to orchestras and players across the world from a cluster of workshops in a valley of a few thousand people. The trade sustains a school, a museum with one of the great instrument collections, and a body of craft knowledge that exists in perhaps three places on earth.

The Vogtland’s demographic position is the Erzgebirge’s. It is losing people, its age structure is old, and the technical-institute policy has held the district that has a works and not the districts that do not.

The optical trade

Saxon optics is a four-hundred-year inheritance and the clearest instance of what the mining tradition turned into. A country that had been assaying ores, surveying shafts and building drainage machinery since the middle ages had the glass, the metalworking, the mathematics and the habits of exact measurement that optics requires, and the Dresden instrument-makers of the eighteenth century were already supplying the courts and observatories of Europe.

The modern trade runs from Dresden through the Erzgebirge foothills and across the boundary into Thuringia, where the Jena works form the other pole of German precision optics. The two clusters are separated by a state frontier and by nothing else: they share suppliers, graduates, standards bodies and a good deal of staff, they cooperate more than either state’s ministers find convenient, and the joint research institutions between Saxony and the Ernestine duchies exist substantially because of them.

What the trade makes now is lenses and coatings, microscopy, metrology and inspection equipment, laser optics, and the lithographic components on which semiconductor manufacture depends. The last is the link between the oldest Saxon industry and the newest, and it is the reason the kingdom’s semiconductor investment was placed here rather than anywhere else.

Lusatia beyond the coal

Lusatia is discussed in Saxony almost entirely in terms of lignite, and the district is older and more various than that account allows.

It is the pond country: several thousand medieval fish ponds, dug from the thirteenth century onward and worked continuously since, forming a managed landscape that produces carp, supports a bird population found nowhere else in the Empire at that density, and is simultaneously an industry, a conservation asset and a Sorbian cultural inheritance. Its management is the one subject on which the state, the conservationists and the Sorbian organisations have never disagreed.

It is the Sorbian heartland, and the Catholic Sorbian villages of Upper Lusatia are the oldest continuous Slavonic-speaking communities in Germany, with a liturgy, a calendar and a set of observances that survived the Reformation, the Germanisation of the schools and the twentieth century. The Easter riding processions, in which mounted men in black coats and top hats ride from parish to parish singing, are the most photographed thing in the district and among the least altered.

It carries Bautzen, the Sorbian capital on its rock above the Spree, bilingual in its administration and its signage, with the Domowina, the Sorbian institute, the publishing house and the theatre. It carries Görlitz, with the largest intact old town in Germany. And it carries the textile and glass towns of the Neisse valley, whose industries went the way the Vogtland’s did.

The lignite closure will end the district’s largest employment within a decade. What Lusatia has instead is the pond country, the Sorbian institutions, two remarkable towns, and a structural fund whose spending is under way and whose results are not yet visible, and the honest Saxon position, which the ministry states in these terms, is that nobody yet knows whether it will be enough.

The cities

Dresden

Dresden is the royal capital, the seat of the Landtag and the ministry, and the most completely preserved baroque city in Europe. It holds something over six hundred thousand people on both banks of the Elbe, and its old town stands substantially as Augustus the Strong and his son left it.

The set piece is the river frontage: the Brühl Terrace above the water, the Catholic Court Church, the Residenzschloss with the Green Vault inside it, the Zwinger with its galleries and pavilions, the Semperoper, and behind them the dome of the Frauenkirche rising over the old town roofs. The composition was designed to be seen from the far bank and from the river, was painted from those positions by Bellotto in the 1750s, and can be compared with those paintings today from the same spots, which is the fact about Dresden that visitors find hardest to absorb.

The city is not a museum. It carries the optical and instrument industry, the semiconductor plants on its northern edge, a technical university of the first rank, the state archives and the royal trust’s administration, and the ordinary economy of a state capital. The Neustadt across the river is the young quarter and the one Dresdeners live in rather than photograph.

Its problem is the obvious consequence of its condition. An intact baroque capital of six hundred thousand people receives visitor numbers calculated for somewhere else, the old town’s residential population has fallen for thirty years as buildings have gone to short-term letting, and the city council has adopted successive measures that have slowed neither. The trust has introduced timed entry at the Green Vault and the galleries. The council has restricted new licences. Neither has addressed the fact that the thing generating the pressure is the thing everybody agrees must not be altered.

Leipzig

Leipzig is the larger city, the commercial and intellectual capital, and Dresden’s opposite in almost every respect. It is a merchant town rather than a court town, it has no palace, its great buildings are exchanges, warehouses, publishing houses, courts and churches, and its self-understanding is that Dresden is where the kingdom is displayed and Leipzig is where it is transacted.

It holds the fair, which has run since the middle ages; the university, founded in 1409 and among the oldest in Germany; the Imperial Court of Justice, the supreme ordinary court of the whole Empire; the book trade, which has had its national centre here for three centuries; and the Gewandhaus, whose orchestra is among the oldest civic orchestras in the world.

It is also Bach’s city. He was cantor at the Thomaskirche for twenty-seven years, wrote most of the church music there, is buried there, and the Thomanerchor that he directed has been singing continuously since the thirteenth century. The Bach connection is the single largest element of Leipzig’s international standing and the city is careful with it, in a way that a comparison with certain other composers’ towns makes instructive.

Leipzig is where the German labour movement began, in 1863, and where the first German workers’ party was founded. It has been Social Democratic without interruption under the modern franchise. The Monument to the Battle of the Nations on its southern edge, an enormous granite mass commemorating the engagement of 1813, is the largest monument in Germany, is not much loved, and is protected as thoroughly as anything in the kingdom.

Chemnitz

Chemnitz is the machine city and the third of the kingdom’s centres, industrial, functional, and the least regarded by everyone including Saxons. It has built machine tools, textile machinery and vehicles since the early nineteenth century, was called the Saxon Manchester at a time when that was a compliment, and carries a larger share of the kingdom’s industrial output than either Dresden or Leipzig.

Its difficulty is reputational rather than economic. It has no baroque quarter, no court, no fair and no cathedral, its nineteenth-century centre is workmanlike, and a country whose two other cities are Dresden and Leipzig has trouble giving it any attention at all. Chemnitz deputies raise this in the Landtag and are correct.

The others

Zwickau carries the vehicle industry and a well-preserved late-gothic centre that is under-visited for the reason Chemnitz is. Freiberg is the mining town, seat of the academy, with a cathedral containing a Silbermann organ and the finest medieval portal in the kingdom. Meissen is the porcelain town and the older seat, with the cathedral and the castle above the Elbe from which the margraves ruled before Dresden existed.

Bautzen is the Sorbian capital, bilingual in its signage, its schools and its administration, on a rock above the Spree, and the seat of the Domowina and the Sorbian institutions. Görlitz, on the Neisse in the far east of the kingdom, has the largest architecturally intact old town in Germany, a continuous stock running from the gothic through the renaissance and baroque to the nineteenth century, and it survives entire because nothing in the twentieth century touched it.

Plauen is the lace town of the Vogtland, Annaberg and Schneeberg and Marienberg the silver towns of the Erzgebirge, Seiffen the toy village, Markneukirchen the instrument village, and Pirna and Bad Schandau the towns of the sandstone gorge.

Culture

Music

Saxony’s musical inheritance is the densest in Germany and the claim is not seriously contested. Bach at Leipzig, Schütz at the Dresden court a century earlier, Wagner born at Leipzig and conductor at Dresden until the rising of 1849 drove him out, Schumann born at Zwickau, Silbermann building organs across the country from Freiberg outward, the Staatskapelle at Dresden as one of the oldest orchestras in the world and the Gewandhaus at Leipzig as the oldest civic one, the Thomanerchor and the Kreuzchor singing continuously since the middle ages.

The institutional density beneath the famous names is what actually sustains it. Every Saxon town of any size supports a municipal orchestra or a church music foundation; the conservatories at Dresden and Leipzig train a substantial share of the Empire’s professional musicians; the organ-building trade descending from Silbermann is still practised; and the choral societies of the industrial towns, founded by workers’ associations in the nineteenth century, are still singing.

The Semperoper at Dresden is the state opera and one of the handful of houses in Europe where the building, the orchestra and the repertoire have continuous institutional descent from the eighteenth century. It has premiered a substantial part of the German operatic repertoire, including nine works of Richard Strauss.

The collections

The Dresden collections are among the great museum holdings of Europe and are unusual in having been assembled systematically rather than accumulated. The picture gallery holds the Italian and Netherlandish acquisitions of the Augustan reigns. The Green Vault is a treasury of worked gold, silver, ivory, amber and gemstone, displayed in the baroque rooms built for it, and is the only princely treasury in Europe still in the building and substantially the arrangement its founder designed. The armoury, the porcelain collection, the print room, the coin cabinet and the mathematical and physical salon complete the set.

They survived the twentieth century because Saxony was not bombed and because they were removed to the Erzgebirge mines and the outlying castles during the war and returned intact. Curators from institutions that lost their collections describe the Dresden holdings in terms Saxons have learned not to repeat in company.

The trust’s provenance work

The royal trust has conducted and published provenance research on the collections since the 1990s. The questions are those that arise for any princely collection assembled between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries: objects taken in war, objects acquired under compulsion from religious houses at the Reformation, objects bought from dealers whose own sources were undocumented, and ethnographic material from a colonial trade in which Saxony had no colonies and a good deal of participation.

A number of restitutions have been made by agreement. The larger part of the research has produced no claimant and considerable published detail, which the trust regards as the point of the exercise and which its critics regard as a substitute for one.

Letters, printing and the book

The Saxon contribution to German letters runs through printing rather than through authorship. Leipzig has been the centre of the German book trade since the seventeenth century, took the trade from Frankfurt in the eighteenth, and holds the German book and manuscript collections, the trade’s own institutions, the typographic tradition and the bibliographic apparatus.

The fixed-price agreement that keeps small bookshops viable across the Empire is administered from Leipzig, was devised there in the nineteenth century, and is periodically challenged inside the European Concert, where Saxony defends it with the vigour of a state defending an industry rather than a principle, and says so.

Language

The dialect that became the standard

The Saxon dialect occupies a position in German life that no other dialect occupies, and the position is a contradiction. Saxon is the ancestor of standard written German, and it is the most mocked speech in the Empire.

The first half is a matter of record. The chancery language of the Saxon electors, the Meissen usage, was the administrative German of the most powerful and best-organised state in fifteenth-century Germany, and it was the register in which Luther chose to write. Luther said explicitly that he followed the Saxon chancery so as to be understood across the German lands, his Bible went everywhere the Reformation went, and the printed standard that developed over the following two centuries developed out of that usage. Written German is Saxon German in origin and every German philologist knows it.

The second half is equally a matter of record. Spoken Saxon, the Upper Saxon of Leipzig, Dresden and the Erzgebirge foothills, is the dialect Germans reach for when they want a comic voice. It softens consonants that other dialects harden, flattens vowels that other dialects round, and produces a sound that the rest of the Empire finds provincial, ingratiating and funny. Saxon speakers on the imperial broadcasters are cast accordingly, and Saxons who intend careers outside the kingdom commonly lose the accent on purpose.

Why the prestige moved

The reversal happened in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and its cause is not linguistic. Saxony was the cultural arbiter of Germany until the middle of the eighteenth century, its speech was the model taught to actors and preachers, and Gottsched at Leipzig laid down Saxon usage as the norm for the stage.

Then Prussia rose, Berlin became the political capital, the north German pronunciation of the written standard became the prestige spoken form, and the country whose written language had become everybody’s found its spoken language demoted within a century. The mockery of Saxon speech is a residue of the shift in power that took the northern half of the kingdom, and Saxons who point this out are making a linguistic observation and a political one at the same time.

Saxons are not much wounded by it. The dialect is spoken across the classes in the kingdom, including in the Landtag and by ministers, and a Saxon minister who moderates his accent in Berlin and resumes it in Dresden is doing what everybody does and would be criticised at home for doing otherwise.

Sorbian

Upper Sorbian is co-official in the Lusatian districts that meet the statutory threshold, is a language of instruction in the Sorbian and bilingual schools, may be used in the courts and in dealings with the administration, and is taught and studied at Leipzig. Its position in Saxon law is the strongest any minority language holds in the Empire, and its speaker numbers have fallen throughout the period in which that position was being built.

The mining vocabulary

The one Saxon contribution to general German that nobody mocks is the mining vocabulary. Four hundred years of organised extraction produced a technical language for shafts, seams, drainage, timbering, assay, share-holding and the organisation of work, and it passed into standard German and from German into the mining vocabularies of half the world. The greeting Glück auf, which is what a Saxon miner said to another going down, is used across the German mining regions and in the Erzgebirge as an ordinary salutation between people who have never been underground.

Education and science

The universities

The University of Leipzig, founded in 1409, is among the oldest in Germany and among the largest in the Empire. It was founded by German masters and students who had walked out of Prague, it has taught continuously for six hundred years, and its strengths are the ones a university acquires by being old and well endowed: law, theology, classical philology, medicine, mathematics and the sciences.

The Technical University of Dresden is the kingdom’s engineering and applied-science institution and one of the largest technical universities in the Empire, tied closely to the optical, precision and semiconductor industries around it.

The Freiberg Mining Academy, founded in 1765, is the oldest institution of its kind in the world. It was established to teach the technical knowledge the Saxon mines had accumulated, it exported that knowledge across Europe and the Americas through generations of foreign students, and it teaches now what the mining tradition has become: materials, geology, energy systems, resource economics and the engineering of extraction and of its aftermath. Its graduates are running the Lusatian closure.

The schools

Schooling is a Saxon competence within the imperial framework, and the Saxon system is the ordinary German one: a common primary stage, differentiated secondary tracks, and a vocational route into the apprenticeship. Saxony tracks somewhat later than several states and permits transfer more readily, a reform carried by an SPD ministry against opposition and generally judged to have worked.

Saxony’s particular provision is the Sorbian and bilingual network in Lusatia, funded through the joint foundation with a small-school supplement, and the specialist schools in music, sport, mathematics and the crafts, which are older than the modern system and were built up as a deliberate policy of a state whose industries required specific skills.

Science

Saxon science is old, dense and concentrated in the physical and mathematical disciplines. The Leipzig school in mathematics, physics and physical chemistry was among the most productive in Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the Dresden technical tradition produced the instrument-making that supported it; and the absence of any rupture in the German scientific establishment during the twentieth century means the institutions carried their inheritance forward without the break that reshaped science elsewhere.

The applied research network is what the economy actually runs on: institutes attached to the technical university and distributed through the industrial towns, working under contract to the medium-sized firms that could not maintain research capacity of their own. The arrangement is the German one and Saxony’s version of it is older than most, having grown out of the technical schools the mining and textile industries founded for themselves in the nineteenth century.

The record

The Saxon universities’ institutional histories, published since the 1990s, cover the same ground as the rest of the Empire’s. Jewish scholars were excluded in practice from the professorial chairs through the imperial period by an administrative practice no statute required. Racial anthropology was taught and its collections held. The technical faculties worked for whatever government commissioned them and would have worked for a worse one.

The histories were written by historians employed by the institutions they were investigating, which several of them have described as the methodological problem of the exercise and none has claimed to have solved.

The Saxon contingent

What it is

The Royal Saxon Army is Saxony’s contingent within the German Army and has been since the military convention concluded with Prussia in 1867 and carried into the imperial constitution in 1871. It recruits in Saxony, is administered and based in Saxony, and carries Saxon regimental titles, traditions, colours and distinctions of uniform.

It has no independent capacity and Saxony claims none. Equipment, doctrine, ranks, training standards, discipline and pay are imperial. There is no Saxon war ministry, the administrative functions being discharged by a department of the Saxon interior ministry under an officer answerable through the imperial chain, and on mobilisation the contingent passes wholly to imperial command.

The comparison with Bavaria is the one Saxons make. Bavaria has a War Ministry, a King who commands in peacetime and a double oath. Saxony has a recruiting area, a set of regimental names and a march. The difference reflects what the two kingdoms were able to negotiate in 1870, and Saxony’s position is that it negotiated nothing because it was in no position to.

Standing

The contingent’s public standing in Saxony is respectful rather than warm. Saxony has no equivalent of the Bavarian mountain formations, no rescue function that brings soldiers into ordinary civilian life, and a labour movement with a long tradition of scepticism towards the army that has softened without disappearing.

What the contingent does carry is the regimental memory of a small army that fought well in wars it did not choose and mostly lost: at Königgrätz against Prussia, in the war of 1870 alongside it, and through the First Great War as part of the imperial line. The regimental colours hang in the Dresden garrison church and the anniversaries are observed by the associations rather than by the state.

The Province of Saxony

The other Saxony

North and west of the kingdom lies the Prussian Province of Saxony, which is not the Kingdom of Saxony, wraps around it on two sides without touching Dresden, and holds about 3.7 million people. It was assembled in 1815 out of the northern half of the old Saxon kingdom, the former archbishopric of Magdeburg and a scatter of Thuringian and Halberstadt fragments, and it has borne the name for two hundred and thirteen years.

The arrangement produces a permanent low-level confusion in German public life. There are two Saxonies, a kingdom and a province, in different states with different governments, different laws and different citizenship, and the province is the larger by population. Postal misdirection is routine. Statistical tables have to specify which. A German who says he is from Saxony may mean either, and the follow-up question is a fixed feature of German conversation.

What the kingdom lost

The territory Prussia took in 1815 was about three fifths of the country and rather more than two fifths of its people. It included Wittenberg, where Luther preached and where the Reformation began; Torgau, where the Lutheran church orders were framed; Merseburg and Naumburg with their cathedrals; the Thuringian districts; and the whole of Lower Lusatia with its Sorbian population, which is why the Sorbs are divided between two kingdoms today.

The kingdom therefore lost the places on which its historical claims rest. Saxony is the country of the Reformation and the Reformation’s own sites are in Prussia. Saxony has the Sorbian settlement and half of it is administered from Berlin. The dynasty’s electoral inheritance is divided between a kingdom that has the crown and a province that has the ground.

How the kingdom treats it

Saxony has never made a claim on the province, has never disputed the settlement, and has never proposed a boundary revision, and there is no Saxon party or movement of any size that advocates one. The 1815 settlement is regarded in Dresden as closed, and the closing is genuine rather than diplomatic: two centuries have made the province Prussian in law, administration, schooling, party organisation and habit, and its inhabitants do not think of themselves as Saxons of the kingdom.

What Saxony does instead is mention it. The province appears in Saxon ministerial speeches, in the Landtag, in the school curriculum, in the museum labels and in ordinary conversation, always as a fact and never as a grievance with a programme attached. A Saxon minister negotiating the equalisation formula in the Bundesrat will observe that his state’s capacity to contribute was fixed in 1815 by a decision it was not party to, and will not follow the observation with a demand, because there is nothing to demand.

The relationship between the two governments is entirely practical. The joint Sorbian foundation, the Elbe flood arrangements, the cross-boundary transport authorities and the university cooperation all work, and none of them is conducted in the register of the historical question.

Saxony in the Empire

The federal position

Saxony holds the third delegation in the Bundesrat, after Prussia’s capped thirty per cent and Bavaria’s, and votes it on its government’s instruction like every other state. It has no reserved rights beyond the military convention, no diplomatic representation, no permanent committee seat and no taxation power of its own, and its position in the federation is therefore that of a middle state with real institutions and no special privileges.

Its settled federal doctrine follows from that. Saxony supports the constitutional apparatus that constrains the largest state, because the cap on the Prussian vote, the separation of the Chancellorship from the Prussian ministry, the transfer of the General Staff to the Empire and the seating of the imperial courts outside Prussia are the arrangements a state in Saxony’s position depends on. It supports the equalisation, from which it draws roughly what it pays. And it is consistently among the states most willing to accept federal competence in fields where uniformity is useful, because a small dense export economy inside a customs union has more to gain from common rules than from the right to make different ones.

The contrast with Bavaria is the standing joke of German federalism. The two southern kingdoms vote together on the substance of federal policy about as often as any two states in the Empire and take opposite positions on federalism itself, Bavaria defending prerogatives it negotiated and Saxony defending constraints that protect it from the state that once took half of it.

The courts

Saxony’s largest federal asset is the Imperial Court of Justice at Leipzig, the supreme court of ordinary jurisdiction for the whole Empire, placed outside Prussia at the foundation on the reasoning that the Empire’s highest ordinary court should not be a Berlin institution.

Saxony has held it for a century and a half. Every proposal to move it, and there have been several, has been defeated in the Bundesrat by an alliance of the middle and smaller states that has nothing to do with Saxony’s merits and everything to do with what a transfer to Berlin would signify. The Saxon government’s contribution to defending it consists largely of saying nothing and allowing the smaller states to make the argument.

Prussia

Relations with Prussia are correct, dense and unsentimental. The two kingdoms share a long boundary, a divided Sorbian population, the Elbe, the Lusatian coalfield and a great deal of industrial supply chain, and the working relationship between the two administrations is close.

The historical account is another matter and is taught in Saxon schools without much softening: the invasion of 1756 and the seven-year occupation, the partition of 1815, the Prussian troops that put down the Dresden rising in 1849, and the war of 1866. Saxons regard this as history rather than as politics, and the evidence that they mean it is that no Saxon party campaigns on any of it.

The Concert and the world

Saxony has no foreign policy and does not pretend to one. It maintains a representation at Berlin, as every state does, and an office at Brussels to follow the European Concert’s business in the fields that touch state competence, which is what the states do collectively rather than a Bavarian-style legation.

Its interests in the Concert are those of its industries: the common market for capital goods, the regulation of technical standards, the rules on state aid that bear on the savings banks and the state development bank, and the fixed-price agreement for books, which Saxony defends because the trade is Leipzig’s.

Demographics

Population and density

Saxony holds approximately six million people in about fifteen thousand square kilometres, which makes it the most densely populated state in the Empire. The density is a consequence of industrialisation on a small territory rather than of urbanisation into a few centres: Saxon settlement is spread through a great many medium and small towns, the valleys of the Erzgebirge foothills are effectively continuous built-up country, and there is very little of the kingdom that is empty.

Growth is slight and comes from migration. The birth rate has been below replacement for two generations, and the age structure is older than the imperial average, markedly so in the Erzgebirge and Lusatian districts.

The internal drift

The kingdom’s demographic problem is internal before it is national. Population moves from the Erzgebirge, the Vogtland and Lusatia towards Dresden, Leipzig and the Chemnitz-Zwickau belt, and out of the kingdom altogether towards the western and southern states. Saxony educates more graduates than it retains, which is a complaint every Saxon ministry has made for thirty years and which the technical-institute and structural-fund policies were built to answer.

The answer has worked in the industrial belt and not in the mountains. The districts that have a medium-sized employer and a technical institute hold their young people; the districts that had a mine or a mill and have neither do not.

Migration

Saxony received refugees and evacuees during the Second Great War in very large numbers, and a substantial minority stayed, which changed the confessional balance of several districts and is the origin of most of the Catholic population outside Lusatia. Industrial recruitment from southern Europe and the eastern Mediterranean followed from the 1950s, concentrated in Chemnitz, Zwickau and the Leipzig industrial districts. Movement from the Mitteleuropa states and, since 2027, within the European Concert has continued it.

The kingdom’s politics on the subject are the imperial politics. Its particularity is that the party which dominates Saxony is the SPD rather than the Zentrum, so the argument runs through a labour movement divided between an internationalist tradition and an industrial membership rather than through a confessional party divided between its clergy and its voters.

Society

Associational life

Saxony has the densest associational life in the Empire and it is of a particular kind. Where Bavarian association is parish-based and Rhenish association is confessional, Saxon association is overwhelmingly secular and occupational in origin: the workers’ education societies, the choral unions, the consumer cooperatives, the funeral and sickness clubs, the gymnastic and cycling associations and the free-thinking societies that the industrial districts built for themselves in the nineteenth century, largely outside and often against the church.

Most of them still exist. The choirs in particular are a serious institution rather than a survival, and the Saxon workers’ choral tradition, founded by associations whose members had been in the mills that day, is the reason a country of six million people supports the choral establishment it does.

The allotment garden is a Saxon invention and the most exported one. The movement began at Leipzig in the 1860s, was organised into associations with statutes, committees and rules almost immediately, and spread across Germany and well beyond it. The allotment colonies on the edges of the Saxon cities are governed by their associations with a thoroughness that visitors find comic and members regard as the point.

The coffee

Saxons drink coffee, are known throughout the Empire for drinking coffee, and have been mocked for it since the eighteenth century. The Kaffeesachse is a fixed German comic type: the Saxon who takes coffee three times a day, who has views on the roast, and whose coffee is nonetheless notoriously weak, the term Blümchenkaffee meaning coffee so thin that the flowers painted on the bottom of the cup are visible through it.

The institution behind the joke is real. Leipzig’s coffee houses are among the oldest in Europe, the trade came up the old routes from the south east through the Leipzig fair, the coffee-house culture of the eighteenth-century city was where the book trade, the university and the merchants met, and Bach wrote a comic cantata about the habit for performance in one of them.

The Saxon manner

Saxons are described by other Germans as talkative, industrious, thrifty, quick to complain and hard to offend, and describe themselves in much the same terms with the emphases moved. The self-image is of a country that works with its hands and its head at once, that made things before anybody else in Germany did, and that has been consistently underrated since about 1763.

There is a settled Saxon irony about the kingdom’s diminished standing, deployed most often against Prussia and the north, that visitors take a while to hear. It is not bitterness. A Saxon explaining that written German is Saxon, that the Empire’s highest court is in Leipzig, that Europe’s porcelain was invented at Meissen and that half the country is in Prussia is enjoying himself.

Cuisine

The table

Saxon cooking is central German, plainer than the south and richer than the north, built on pork, potatoes, freshwater fish, mushrooms, plums and the produce of the loess belt. Sauerbraten in the Saxon manner, Quarkkeulchen of potato and curd, Leipziger Allerlei of spring vegetables with crayfish, the Dresdner Eierschecke of curd and custard in three layers, and the carp of the Lusatian ponds are the standard dishes.

Bautzen makes the mustard the whole Empire buys. Radeberg and the Dresden breweries make the pilsner. The Elbe valley around Meissen makes wine on the most northerly commercial vineyards in Germany, in quantities so small that almost none of it leaves Saxony, a fact Saxons state with satisfaction rather than regret.

The Erzgebirge table

The mountains eat differently, on the pattern of a poor cold country. The Neunerlei, the nine dishes eaten on Christmas Eve in the Erzgebirge, each with a meaning attached and none of them expensive, is the best-known instance: the meal is a formal ritual assembled out of what a mining household could actually obtain, and it is still eaten.

Christmas

The Saxon Christmas

Christmas in Saxony is a larger cultural institution than anywhere else in the Empire, and the Empire’s Christmas markets, its wooden ornament, its carved figures and a good deal of its iconography come from here.

The Striezelmarkt at Dresden has been held since 1434 and is the oldest Christmas market in Germany. The Stollen is Dresden’s, is legally protected, and is carried through the city in an annual procession behind a knife of theatrical proportions, a ceremony that revived an eighteenth-century court occasion and is enjoyed without embarrassment by everybody involved.

The mountain Christmas

The Erzgebirge’s Christmas is the older and stranger thing and is a mining Christmas throughout. The Schwibbogen, the arch of lights set in the window, is the mine mouth. The carved miner and angel placed in pairs are the man underground and the light he does not have. The pyramids turn on the heat of their own candles, which is a piece of applied thermodynamics from a district that taught engineering. The Räuchermann and the nutcracker carry the trades and, in the nutcracker’s case, a long tradition of giving the figure the face of an official.

The Mettenschicht, the miners’ last shift before Christmas, is still observed by the associations, in the disused workings that have been kept open for it, with a service underground.

Sport

Football and the clubs

Football in Saxony is old. The first German championship was won by a Leipzig club in 1903, the German football association was founded at Leipzig in 1900, and the Saxon industrial towns took the game up earlier and more thoroughly than most of Germany. Dresden, Leipzig, Chemnitz, Zwickau and Aue carry clubs with long histories and support that follows the industrial geography rather than the administrative one.

The clubs are member-owned under the imperial rule requiring that members retain control, and Saxon supporters are among the more organised defenders of it.

Winter sport and the mountains

The Erzgebirge is the Empire’s winter-sport country outside the Alps. Oberwiesenthal and the high district around it carry ski jumping, nordic skiing, biathlon and the sliding sports, and produce a share of the Empire’s winter athletes wildly out of proportion to the population, which is generally attributed to the schools, the clubs and the fact that there is nothing else to do in a mountain village in February.

The season is shortening. The lower installations have had unreliable snow for two decades, snowmaking has extended the season at a cost in water and energy, and the argument in the Erzgebirge resorts is the same argument as in the Alpine ones and is being conducted with less money.

Gymnastics and the societies

The gymnastic and shooting societies remain a substantial part of small-town associational life, and the Saxon workers’ sport movement, which built its own parallel structure of clubs, halls and festivals in the nineteenth century in deliberate opposition to the nationalist gymnastic associations, is still a distinct tradition with its own institutions.

Government below the kingdom

The tiers

Saxony has two levels of self-government beneath the state, the municipalities and the districts, and no administrative provincial tier of the Bavarian or Prussian kind. The kingdom is small enough that the ministry deals with the districts directly, and the three district-free cities of Dresden, Leipzig and Chemnitz deal with it directly as well.

Municipal self-government is guaranteed in the constitution and is enforced by the Constitutional Court at Leipzig, which has developed a substantial jurisprudence on what the guarantee protects. Saxon municipalities litigate against the Saxon ministry with some regularity and win often enough for the practice to continue.

The municipalities

There are several hundred municipalities, a number reduced sharply by amalgamations in the 1990s and 2000s that are still resented in the villages concerned in the way such reforms are resented everywhere. Mayors are directly elected for seven years, a longer term than in most German states, adopted on the reasoning that a mayor should outlast a council and criticised on the reasoning that seven years is a long time to be wrong about somebody.

The municipal works supplying power, water, heat and transport are municipally owned in the ordinary German pattern, and the Saxon savings banks are among the oldest in Germany, the Leipzig institution dating from the early nineteenth century.

The districts

The districts carry the secondary schools, the hospitals outside the cities, refuse, roads below the state network, social assistance and licensing, and are financed by a levy on their municipalities that produces the same structural argument as everywhere else in the Empire. In the Erzgebirge and Lusatian districts the argument is severe, because the levy must be set at a rate the poorest municipality can pay and several of them can pay very little.

Referendums

Binding municipal referendums exist on petition, on the pattern general in the Empire, and are used at a rate somewhat below the Bavarian one. Saxony also permits a state-level popular initiative capable of putting a bill before the Landtag and, if the chamber rejects it, to a statewide vote. The procedure is old, dating from the settlement of 1919 to 1922, has been used successfully four times, and its most consequential use carried the protection of the Elbe floodplain that the ministry of the day had declined to introduce.

Public finance

Revenue

Saxony’s revenue is overwhelmingly its share of the imperial taxes, divided between the Empire, the states and the municipalities under statutes requiring Bundesrat consent. The kingdom’s own taxes are a short list, and unlike Bavaria it holds no reserved taxation power of any kind: property transfer duty, gaming duty, licensing charges and the returns of the state forests, the state lottery and the Meissen manufactory are the whole of it.

Saxony sits near the middle of the horizontal equalisation and has moved between the columns within living memory, drawing more than it paid through the 1950s and 1960s, paying more than it drew through the long expansion, and sitting close to the line since. This gives Saxon finance ministers an unusually flexible negotiating position and an unusually weak one, since neither the contributing nor the receiving bloc regards Saxony as reliably theirs.

Spending and the budget

The Landtag budgets annually, and its budget committee is the strongest of its committees. The largest items are education, including the universities and the technical institutes; the police and the courts; and transfers to the districts and municipalities, which carry the structural burden of the weaker regions.

Saxony maintains its own state development bank, lending long and below market for industrial investment in the weaker districts, municipal infrastructure and the technical institutes. It is the instrument through which the structural policy is actually financed and it is the reason the Erzgebirge and Lusatian programmes could be sustained across decades rather than voted annually.

Debt

Saxon public debt is low, the kingdom having adopted a constitutional borrowing rule in the 1990s in the wave that produced Bavaria’s and the Empire’s. The criticism is the same criticism made everywhere: that the rule has constrained capital spending in exactly the districts least able to fund the local share, and that the condition of school buildings, bridges and rural rail in the Erzgebirge is the evidence.

Transport

Rail

Saxony built the first long-distance railway in Germany, between Leipzig and Dresden, opened in 1839, and the kingdom’s network was for the rest of the century the densest in the Empire. The state railways were surrendered to the Empire in the consolidation of the first half of the twentieth century, in exchange for money and for undertakings about branch-line service that are still cited in the Landtag whenever a closure is proposed.

The network remains dense and carries a heavy freight traffic from the industrial belt. Its weakness is the mountains, where the branch lines that served the mining and textile valleys have been closing steadily and where the districts losing them are the districts already losing people. Several have been taken over by the state or by district authorities and run as light railways, with mixed results, and two of the Erzgebirge narrow-gauge lines survive as working railways that are also the principal visitor attraction of their valleys.

Roads, water and air

The motorway network crosses the kingdom on the Berlin to Bohemia and the Frankfurt to Silesia axes and is dense in the industrial belt. The Elbe carries commercial traffic to Hamburg, subject to a navigability that is increasingly unreliable in dry summers, and the argument between deepening the channel and restoring the floodplain has been resolved in favour of neither for twenty years.

Leipzig has the kingdom’s principal airport and is a substantial air-freight hub, a position acquired because it is centrally placed in the Empire and had space to expand where older airports did not. Its night-flight arrangements are the subject of continuous litigation by the municipalities beneath the approaches, who have used the procedural rights German administrative law gives them with considerable persistence and partial success.

Environment and energy

The lignite country

The Lusatian lignite field is Saxony’s largest environmental question and its largest social one. Extraction is open-cast, the overburden is removed and the landscape with it, and the field has consumed villages, farmland, forest and watercourses across a century.

The closure programme agreed between the Empire, Saxony, Prussia, the companies and the unions ends extraction on a fixed timetable with a review, and the restoration obligations are extensive and are financed from funds established for the purpose. What restoration means in practice is the conversion of worked-out pits into a lake district, which is under way, is genuinely impressive, and is not the country that was there before.

The water is the unresolved part. Filling the pits requires enormous quantities of water in a district that has become drier, the groundwater disturbed by a century of pumping is acidic and iron-laden and is discolouring the Spree, and the treatment obligations run for decades beyond the end of mining. The Saxon and Prussian ministries and the companies dispute the allocation of those costs, the dispute is before the courts, and the sums are large enough that the outcome matters to both budgets.

Forests, air and water

Saxony’s forests were among the worst damaged in Germany by the acidification of the 1970s and 1980s, the Erzgebirge ridges standing directly downwind of the central German industrial belt and of the Bohemian one across the frontier. Whole stands died. The air-quality legislation that followed worked, the sulphur load collapsed, and the replanting has been under way for forty years.

What has replaced acid as the threat is drought, heat and bark beetle, and the Saxon forest administration’s conversion of even-aged spruce plantations to mixed and uneven-aged stands is proceeding at the speed of a rotation rather than the speed of the problem, which is the position everywhere in the Empire.

The Elbe and the Mulde were among the most polluted rivers in Europe within living memory, principally from the chemical works of the central German belt across the Prussian boundary, and are now among the cleaner ones. The recovery was achieved by regulation against strong industrial resistance and is the standard example in Saxon environmental teaching.

How the argument runs

There being no German green party, the Saxon environmental argument runs inside the SPD, where it contends directly with the industrial and mining unions, and through the churches, whose standing in a country with the Empire’s lowest church attendance is correspondingly weaker than in Bavaria. The result is that Saxon environmental policy is made by a governing party arguing with itself, and that the Lusatian transition is the subject on which that argument is hardest.

Health, welfare and daily life

Provision

Health care and social insurance are imperial and reach the whole population through the statutory funds. What Saxony provides beneath them is the hospital network, the schools, the housing programmes and the social services, administered by the districts and the cities.

The hospital question is the ordinary German one in an acute form. The Erzgebirge and Lusatian districts have lost small hospitals steadily, the closing authorities point to the outcome data showing that a rarely performed procedure is more dangerous than a longer journey, and the town meetings are unpersuaded. Saxony has gone further than most states in building the intermediate provision, day clinics and specialist outposts staffed from the larger hospitals, that makes closures survivable, and it has not made them popular.

The working year

The Saxon year is the German year with the confessional holidays of a Protestant state, which means fewer public holidays than Bavaria and a penitential day in November that the Catholic states do not keep. Sunday is protected. The industrial towns keep their own festivals, the mining towns their parades, and the wine villages of the Elbe their autumn.

Media

The press

Saxony supports a dense regional press of the ordinary German kind, with papers of standing at Dresden, Leipzig and Chemnitz and a layer of local subscription papers beneath them that is contracting more slowly than in most of the Empire. Leipzig’s position in the book trade has given the city a publishing and journalistic infrastructure out of proportion to its size.

Broadcasting

Saxon public broadcasting is constituted as a public-law corporation governed by a council on which parties, churches, unions, employers, the Sorbian organisations and cultural bodies sit. The Sorbian representation is guaranteed by statute and the corporation carries Sorbian-language radio and television under an obligation written into its charter, financed in part through the joint foundation.

The arrangement distributes influence widely and is criticised for distributing it to the organised interests that already have some, which is the criticism made of every such council in the Empire.

The Wettins beyond Saxony

The Ernestine cousins

The division of 1485 left two Wettin lines, and the junior one has been the more consequential dynastically. The Ernestines hold the four Thuringian duchies within the Empire, and they married better than almost any house in Europe.

Saxe-Coburg and Gotha is the connection that matters. Its cadets reached the thrones or consortships of Britain, Belgium, Portugal and Bulgaria in the nineteenth century, and the assassination that began the First Great War claimed a Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha precisely because he was a sovereign prince of a small German duchy with relations in half the courts of Europe. Killing him was an act against the European order rather than against a state, and the Kingdom of Saxony, which shares his arms and his name and had no part in any of it, has spent a century explaining the distinction.

The two lines meet at funerals, weddings and the anniversaries of the house, use the same rue crown, and have no constitutional relationship whatever. A King of Saxony has no standing in Thuringia and a Thuringian duke none in Saxony, and both would regard the suggestion as an embarrassment.

The Polish crown

Saxony held the crown of Poland in personal union from 1697 to 1763, with one interruption, and the connection is the largest thing the Albertine line ever attempted and the least productive. It cost enormous sums, required the dynasty’s conversion, produced two Saxon kings of Poland and no lasting institution, and ended on the death of Augustus III without either country having been permanently altered by it.

The Polish crown returned in 1921 and is held still. When the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania was restored out of the collapse of the Russian Empire, the Sejm offered the crown to the House of Wettin as the last dynasty to have worn it lawfully, and offered it to the senior Albertine line rather than to a cadet branch. Friedrich August IV is therefore King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania as well as King of Saxony, as his three predecessors were, and divides his year between Dresden and Warsaw by an agreed calendar.

The two capacities are kept rigorously separate. Saxon ministers advise on Saxon business and Commonwealth ministers on Commonwealth business, neither has standing in the other’s sphere, and the households maintain separate secretariats and archives. The arrangement makes the King of Saxony a sovereign of an independent foreign state and a constituent sovereign of the German Empire at the same time, which is unique in the imperial order and which the Empire has never found it necessary to regulate.

The conversion of 1697 is the reason for all of it. A Catholic dynasty is an anomaly in Lutheran Saxony and an unremarkable fact in Catholic Poland, and the price Augustus the Strong paid for the Polish crown bought it back for his house a hundred and fifty-five years after it was lost. See the Kingdom of Poland and Grand Duchy of Lithuania.

Its residue is at Dresden, in the buildings the Polish revenues helped pay for, in the collections, and in a dynastic memory of having worn a crown before the royal title arrived from Napoleon. Saxons mention it. Poles, when the subject arises, are noticeably less enthusiastic, and the standard Polish assessment of the Saxon kings is not one Saxon historians attempt to rebut.

The Catholic marriages

The Albertine line’s Catholicism has shaped its marriages for three centuries, connecting it to the Habsburgs, the Bourbon houses of Italy and Spain and the Catholic princely families of the Empire, and largely excluding it from the Protestant dynastic network its own country belongs to.

The consequence is a Saxon royal house whose relations are Catholic and southern while its subjects are Lutheran and northern, and a court that has been at once the most cosmopolitan and the least representative institution in the kingdom. Saxons have never much minded, the settlement of 1697 having removed anything that could have turned it into a grievance.

Emigration and the Saxons abroad

The century of departure

Saxony was a country of emigration through the nineteenth century, though on a smaller scale relative to its population than Franconia or the Palatinate, because a densely industrialising country absorbs its own surplus more readily than an agricultural one. Departures came principally from the Erzgebirge and the Vogtland, where the home industries collapsed under factory competition, and from the Lusatian countryside.

Sorbian emigration was proportionally heavier than German emigration from the same districts, and its causes were the ones described above: land pressure, poverty, and the settled conviction communicated by a century of policy that there was no future for the language at home. Sorbian communities were established in Texas and in Australia and both retained the language for several generations, in the Texan case in a settlement that kept Sorbian in church and school for the better part of a century.

The Missouri emigration

The most consequential Saxon departure was religious and small. In 1838 something under a thousand Old Lutherans left Saxony for Missouri, under a pastor whose leadership collapsed in scandal within a year of their arrival, in protest against rationalist theology and the direction of the state church.

What they founded outlasted the circumstances of its founding. The Saxon settlement in Missouri became the nucleus of a confessional Lutheran body that spread across the American realm, established its own seminaries, schools, publishing house and German-language press, and remains one of the substantial Protestant denominations of the United Kingdom of America. Its liturgy, its hymnody and its theological method are the Saxon church’s of the 1830s, preserved abroad in a form the Saxon church itself moved on from.

The relationship between the two bodies is cordial, occasional and slightly awkward, in the manner of a family and the branch that left over an argument nobody now remembers the details of.

What emigration left

The emigration districts are the districts still losing people, and the local histories the village societies have published since the 1970s are in substantial part emigration histories. Twinning arrangements between Erzgebirge towns and American municipalities, founded on those connections, are numerous and are taken seriously at municipal level.

Saxony itself has been a country of net immigration for seventy years and its emigration century is not much commemorated, which is the ordinary pattern: the places people left remember it less than the places they arrived at.

Public memory

What Saxony remembers

Saxon public memory is organised around a sequence of losses rather than around victories, and the kingdom is comfortable with this in a way that surprises visitors expecting either grievance or embarrassment.

The Thirty Years’ War, the Prussian occupation of 1756, the partition of 1815, the rising of 1849 and the defeat of 1866 are all taught, all commemorated in some form, and none of them is presented as an injustice requiring redress. The settled Saxon treatment is that these things happened to a country that was rich, central and militarily modest, that most of them were the consequences of decisions Saxon governments made, and that the kingdom’s survival through all of them is the thing worth noticing.

The two Great Wars

The First Great War is commemorated as it is across the Empire: the dead in the churchyards, the regimental memorials, the imperial days of remembrance, and no celebration of the victory.

The Second is the difficulty. Saxony’s soldiers died in proportion to its population and Saxony’s buildings did not burn, and a country that came through the war of the German cities with its cities intact has had to find a commemorative register that does not sound like relief and does not sound like a claim to have suffered equally. The form arrived at is a determined plainness: the war memorials are in the churchyards and the garrison church, the imperial days are observed, and Saxony has added nothing of its own and built nothing new.

Saxon historians have written about this at length and the phrase used most often is that the kingdom has a duty to be quiet about its luck. Whether that is dignity or evasion is argued about within Saxony and hardly at all outside it.

1849, and the rising

The Dresden rising of 1849 occupies an unusual place. It was a democratic insurrection put down by a Saxon government using Prussian soldiers, thirty-four years after Prussia had taken half the country, and its participants included the court’s own conductor.

Saxony commemorates it. There are plaques, a museum treatment, and a settled place in the school curriculum, and the commemoration is of the rising rather than of its suppression, which is a choice a monarchy did not have to make. The royal house has never objected, and the present King’s predecessor attended the anniversary in the 1990s, which was noticed.

The Sorbian reckoning

The Sorbian settlement is the part of Saxon public memory still in motion. The guild exclusions, the Germanisation of the schools, the published intention that the Sorbs should disappear and the villages taken for coal are all required content in the Saxon curriculum, and the Sorbian organisations’ standing criticism is the one made of the imperial framework generally: that stating the facts is not the same as attributing responsibility for them.

Architecture and the intact country

What survived

Saxony’s buildings are the most completely preserved of any German state, and the reason is the war that did not reach it. There is no Saxon reconstruction debate because there was nothing to reconstruct, and the consequence is a country where the ordinary built stock of five centuries stands in place.

This is not confined to Dresden. Görlitz has the largest architecturally intact old town in Germany, running continuously from the gothic through the renaissance and the baroque into the nineteenth century, with a stock of late-gothic hall houses and renaissance portals that exists nowhere else at that scale. Leipzig carries the largest intact stock of nineteenth-century apartment quarters in the Empire, several hundred thousand dwellings of it, along with the trade-fair houses and covered arcades of the commercial city. Freiberg, Meissen, Pirna, Zittau, Bautzen, Annaberg and Zwickau all keep their medieval and early-modern centres.

The consequences

An intact country is an expensive one. Saxony carries a monument stock per head of population unlike anything else in the Empire, a conservation administration correspondingly large, and a permanent argument in every municipal budget between what the buildings need and what everything else needs.

It also carries a particular kind of pressure. Visitor numbers concentrate on the intact centres, the residential populations of those centres have fallen for thirty years as buildings have moved to short-term letting, and Saxony’s cities have adopted the whole standard repertoire of measures without arresting the trend.

The Saxon conservation authorities take a position that is unusual in Germany and follows directly from their situation: because so much survives, they are markedly less permissive about alteration than authorities in cities that lost their fabric and rebuilt it. A Saxon planning refusal frequently rests on the proposition that the applicant’s building is not remarkable and that the ensemble it stands in is, which is an argument only a country with intact ensembles can make.

The Saxon renaissance and the Silbermann organs

Two specific inheritances are worth separating out. The Saxon renaissance, financed by the silver and executed in the sixteenth century in the palaces, town halls and portals of the mining towns and the Elbe valley, is the densest concentration of that architecture in northern Europe.

The Silbermann organs are the other. Gottfried Silbermann built some thirty instruments in Saxony in the first half of the eighteenth century, most of them survive in the churches they were built for, and the concentration of playable historic organs in one small country is the reason organists come to Saxony from everywhere. Bach knew and argued with him, which is the fact every Saxon guide mentions.

Politics in practice

How Saxony is governed

Saxony is the only member state of the Empire in which the conservative parties have never formed a government under the modern franchise, and the SPD’s dominance is the organising fact of Saxon political life. It has governed alone and in coalition, most often with the FVP, since the settlement of 1919 to 1922, with interruptions measured in single terms.

The consequences are the consequences of long incumbency anywhere. Saxon administration and Saxon social democracy have grown into one another; the party’s relationship with the unions, the cooperatives, the choral and allotment associations and the municipal apparatus is dense; and the criticism made by the opposition, that a state governed by one party for a century acquires a party’s habits, is a serious criticism that the governing party answers by pointing at the electoral results.

The opposition

The NLP is the principal opposition and is strongest in Dresden, among the professions and in the export industries. The DKP and FKP/DRP hold the rural Erzgebirge and Lusatian seats and have supplied ministers to no Saxon government. The USPD holds industrial seats to the SPD’s left and has supported ministries from outside without entering one, which suits both parties.

The Zentrum is the anomaly. In the Empire’s most reliably governing party’s Saxon organisation, representation rests substantially on the Catholic Sorbian districts of Upper Lusatia, so that a German confessional party’s Saxon deputies are disproportionately Slavonic and its Landtag interventions are disproportionately about the minority settlement. Nobody designed this and everybody involved finds it useful.

What the arguments are about

Saxon politics turn on four things. The Lusatian transition and whether the structural funds are producing employment. The internal drift of population from the mountains and the east towards the cities and out of the kingdom. The Sorbian settlement and the joint foundation’s budget. And the housing question in Dresden and Leipzig, which is milder than Munich’s and moving the same way.

None of them divides the parties along the usual lines, which is why Saxon coalition politics is less predictable than the arithmetic suggests, and why the Erzgebirge and Lusatian deputies of all parties vote together more often than their whips would prefer.

Law and the courts

The Saxon jurisdiction

Saxony administers the imperial codes through its own courts, appoints and promotes its own judges through committees on which the judiciary and the Landtag both sit, and maintains its courts to appellate level within the five imperial jurisdictional branches.

Its own constitutional jurisdiction belongs to the Saxon Constitutional Court at Leipzig, which rules on the Saxon constitution, on disputes between Saxon organs, and on the municipal self-government guarantee, and which has developed the most extensive jurisprudence on that guarantee of any German state court, for the straightforward reason that Saxon municipalities litigate.

The older law

Saxon private law before the imperial Civil Code was among the most developed in Germany. The Sachsenspiegel, compiled in the early thirteenth century in the Saxon lands, is the oldest German law book, was the foundation of the common law of northern and eastern Germany for six hundred years, travelled with German settlement across central Europe, and was still being cited in courts into the nineteenth century.

Saxony also produced its own civil code in 1863, one of the two serious German codifications before the imperial one, and it was among the models the imperial draftsmen worked from. Saxon lawyers mention this. It is true.

The mining law

The other Saxon contribution is the mining law that grew out of the Erzgebirge from the twelfth century: the freedom to prospect, the regulated share system, the miners’ courts, the guaranteed provision for injured men and widows, and the separation of surface ownership from the right to extract. It spread across central Europe, was carried by Freiberg graduates to the mining districts of two other continents, and survives in Saxon law as a living body of doctrine rather than as a historical curiosity.

Its modern descendants are the statutes governing the Lusatian closure, the restoration obligations and the liability for groundwater, and the continuity is not merely rhetorical: the Saxon courts hearing the closure litigation are applying doctrines with a documented history running back eight hundred years.

Saxon Switzerland and conservation

The sandstone

The Elbe Sandstone Mountains, called Saxon Switzerland on the Saxon side and Bohemian Switzerland across the frontier, are a landscape of pillars, tables, ravines and free-standing towers cut into a sandstone plateau by the Elbe and its tributaries. There is nothing else like it in central Europe.

It is a national park, jointly managed with the Austro-Hungarian authorities across the Bohemian boundary in one of the older cross-frontier conservation arrangements in Europe. It is also the birthplace of free climbing: the Saxon climbing rules, which forbid artificial aid and metal protection on the towers and have done since the nineteenth century, are the oldest such code anywhere and are still enforced by the climbing associations themselves rather than by the park.

Pressure

The park receives very large numbers of visitors on a small area with fragile rock and narrow valleys. The management response has been to concentrate access on hardened routes and close others, which works and is resented, and the villages beneath the plateau have the standard difficulty of communities whose economy depends on an industry the park exists to limit.

The wider conservation estate

Beyond the sandstone, Saxony’s protected landscapes are the Erzgebirge ridges, the Lusatian heath and pond country, which is a managed landscape of medieval fish ponds carrying an unusual bird population, and the Elbe floodplain where it has been restored. The pond country is Sorbian country, and its management is one of the few subjects on which the state, the conservationists and the Sorbian organisations have never disagreed.

Saxony and Bohemia

The oldest frontier

Saxony’s southern boundary runs along the crest of the Erzgebirge and through the sandstone gorge, and on the other side is Bohemia, a co-equal crown of the Habsburg monarchy. It is the kingdom’s only international frontier and it is the oldest fixed border in central Europe, having moved scarcely at all since the middle ages.

The relationship across it is dense and old. The silver rushes populated both slopes at once and the mining towns of the Bohemian side are the twins of the Saxon ones. The Reformation crossed it in one direction and the Counter-Reformation’s exiles in the other: Protestant refugees from Bohemia settled in Saxony in the seventeenth century in numbers large enough to found towns, of which Johanngeorgenstadt is the clearest instance, and the Bohemian exile community shaped Saxon Pietism and the Moravian settlement at Herrnhut, which became a missionary movement of worldwide reach from a Lusatian village.

Herrnhut

The Moravian Brethren were re-founded at Herrnhut in Upper Lusatia in 1722, on the estate of a Saxon count who gave refuge to Bohemian and Moravian Protestants, and the community that grew there became one of the most consequential small religious movements in modern history. Its missionary societies reached the Caribbean, Greenland, southern Africa, Labrador and Central Asia within a generation, and its educational method and its hymnody influenced Protestantism well beyond its own numbers.

Herrnhut is still there, still the movement’s mother settlement, and still small. Its daily scripture texts, drawn by lot and published annually since 1731, appear in more languages than any comparable devotional book.

The frontier now

Cross-frontier life is ordinary. The Erzgebirge districts and the Bohemian ones share labour markets, health provision, transport and a good deal of family connection, the national park is jointly managed, and the arrangements were built up bilaterally over decades before the European Concert existed and have since been folded into it.

The one persistent friction is environmental and runs one way. The Bohemian industrial basin lies immediately south of the Erzgebirge, its emissions cross the ridge, and the acidification that killed the Saxon mountain forests in the 1970s and 1980s came substantially from there. That was settled by treaty and by the general fall in emissions, and the residue is a Saxon habit of watching the southern air quality closely and saying so.

The administration

The Saxon official

The Saxon civil service is a career service on the German pattern, entered young after two state examinations, tenured, and drawn overwhelmingly from the Saxon universities. It is smaller than the great states’ services, is regarded within Germany as competent and unshowy, and has an institutional culture formed by two centuries of administering a country that could not afford waste.

Saxony’s particular administrative traditions are technical rather than legal. The mining, forestry, water and statistical administrations are older than the modern state, were built by a country that needed to measure things accurately in order to get value out of the ground, and they retain a standing within Saxon government that the equivalent services do not have elsewhere. The Saxon statistical office is among the oldest in Germany, and the mining administration’s survey records, running unbroken for centuries, are the reason the Lusatian and Erzgebirge closure liabilities can be established at all.

Women and family

Saxon women entered industrial employment earlier and in greater proportion than in most of Germany, because the textile industry that built the country employed them from the beginning, and the female participation rate in Saxony has been above the imperial average for a hundred and fifty years.

The institutional consequences are visible. Saxony built municipal childcare earlier and more extensively than the southern states, largely on the initiative of the industrial municipalities and the workers’ associations rather than of the state; its schools have run a full day in more districts and for longer than the German norm; and the tax and insurance disincentives to a second earner, which are imperial rather than state matters, bear on Saxon households in a pattern that Saxon deputies raise in the Reichstag more often than most.

The gap in pay after the first child is smaller in Saxony than in the Empire generally and has not closed. The kingdom’s birth rate is below replacement and has been for two generations, as everywhere.

Tourism

What people come for

Tourism matters to Saxony more than to most industrial states, because the kingdom has an intact capital, an intact second city of the nineteenth century, a mountain range with a Christmas industry, a sandstone national park and a set of museum collections in the top rank of Europe.

Visitors concentrate on Dresden, on the Saxon Switzerland, on the Erzgebirge in Advent, and on Leipzig for the music, the fair and the book trade. The Elbe valley between Dresden and Meissen carries river traffic, vineyards and a chain of palaces. Görlitz receives fewer visitors than its old town warrants and its municipality says so at every opportunity.

The strain

The pressures are those of a small country with concentrated attractions. Dresden’s old town has lost residents to short-term letting for thirty years. The sandstone park’s honeypot routes are eroding. The Erzgebirge’s Advent traffic overwhelms villages of a few thousand people for six weeks a year and sustains their economies for twelve.

The kingdom’s response has been management rather than restriction: timed entry at the collections, hardened and closed routes in the park, licensing limits in Dresden, and a deliberate policy of directing visitors to the second-rank towns, which has worked about as well as such policies usually do.

Orders, honours and the royal year

The orders

Saxony maintains its own orders, several of them older than the Empire. The Order of the Rue Crown, founded in 1807, is the kingdom’s senior order and takes its name and its device from the crancelin in the arms; the older military and civil orders and the Saxon merit decorations complete the list. Awards are made by the King on the ministry’s advice, and the practice since the settlement has been to concentrate them on service to the state, to the arts and to the technical professions rather than on rank.

The kingdom’s honours are among the more freely given in the Empire at the lower grades, a Saxon habit of decorating long municipal and associational service that produces a great many recipients in the choral unions, the fire brigades, the mining associations and the allotment federations.

The royal year

The fixed points of the Crown’s year are the opening of the Landtag, the Leipzig fair, the Semperoper’s opening night, the great church festivals at the two Dresden cathedrals in their respective confessions, the mining parades of the Erzgebirge in December, the Stollen procession, and an annual circuit of the districts.

The King attends the Lutheran services of state in the Frauenkirche and the Kreuzkirche as sovereign, does not communicate at them, and attends mass at the Court Church as a private person. The arrangement is three hundred years old, is understood by everybody, and is described in the court’s own published protocol in exactly those terms.

Theatre and letters

The Saxon stage is a public institution on the German model and an unusually old one. The Dresden court theatre and the Leipzig municipal stage both descend from eighteenth-century foundations, the acting reform that produced the modern German theatre was carried out at Leipzig by Gottsched and the Neuber company in the 1730s, and the actress Caroline Neuber’s expulsion of the harlequin from the German stage is the sort of episode Saxon cultural history is full of and other countries’ are not.

Beneath the two great houses the ordinary provincial theatre of a small dense country operates as it does across the Empire: permanent ensembles in towns of forty thousand people carrying repertoires that would be metropolitan elsewhere, funded by municipalities and the state, and defended in every budget round by everybody.

In letters Saxony’s contribution runs through criticism, scholarship and publishing more than through authorship. Leipzig’s book trade, its university and its journals made the city the arbiter of German literary taste for a century and a half, and the Saxon literary reputation rests on the apparatus of literature rather than on a canon of Saxon writers. Saxons are aware of this and observe, accurately, that somebody has to print it.

The workers’ culture

Red Saxony built a parallel civil society and much of it survives. The industrial districts of the nineteenth century produced workers’ education associations, libraries, choirs, gymnastic and cycling clubs, consumer cooperatives, funeral and sickness funds, temperance societies and free-thinking congregations, and they were founded deliberately outside the church and the state.

The scale was extraordinary. A Saxon industrial town of thirty thousand people might carry twenty such associations, a cooperative store, a workers’ library of several thousand volumes and a choral union with its own hall, and the whole apparatus was run by people who had been at the machines that day. It was the densest working-class institutional culture in Germany and it is the reason the SPD’s Saxon dominance has outlasted the industries that created it.

Its residue is everywhere in the modern kingdom: in the choirs, in the allotment federations, in the cooperative retail that survives in Saxony more strongly than elsewhere, and in a settled Saxon assumption that people organise their own affairs through associations rather than waiting for a ministry.

The free religious communities, which formally left the church in the nineteenth century and constituted themselves as humanist congregations with their own naming, marriage and funeral rites, are the least known part of it and the most distinctively Saxon. They hold public-law status alongside the churches, conduct a measurable share of Saxon funerals, and exist at that scale nowhere else in the Empire.

Trade and the world

An export economy

Saxony exports a higher proportion of what it makes than any other German state, and it exports capital goods: machine tools, printing and packaging machinery, measuring and testing equipment, optical and laboratory apparatus, vehicle components and semiconductors. Its customers are the European Concert, the Mitteleuropa states, the United Kingdom of America, China, Japan and Raj, in roughly that order.

The structural consequence is an economy unusually sensitive to conditions it cannot influence. A downturn in world capital investment reaches Saxony faster and harder than it reaches states making consumer goods, and the Saxon employment record through the twentieth century tracks the world investment cycle with a precision that Saxon economists teach as the kingdom’s defining macroeconomic fact.

Saxony and the Concert

Saxony’s interests in the European Concert are its industries’ interests: the common market for capital goods, the regulation of technical standards, and the state-aid rules that bear on the savings banks and the state development bank. It has been consistently among the more integrationist German states, for the ordinary reason that a small dense export economy inside a customs union gains more from common rules than from the right to make different ones.

It defends two things at Straßburg with a vigour disproportionate to their scale. The fixed-price agreement for books, because the trade is Leipzig’s and has been for three centuries. And the territorial principle restricting the savings banks to their own districts, because Saxon industry is financed by them and a consolidated banking market would take that finance out of the smaller towns.

The kingdom’s representation at Brussels is an office rather than a legation, Saxony having no diplomatic right, and it operates through the collective machinery by which the German states follow union business in fields of state competence.

Policing and crime

The Saxon police

Policing is a Saxon competence, administered by the interior ministry with the cities running their own forces under state supervision. Recorded crime is low and has fallen for two decades in most categories, property crime is concentrated in the larger cities, and the eastern districts along the Prussian and Bohemian boundaries carry the cross-border traffic that frontier districts everywhere carry.

The prison estate is administered by the kingdom, the sentencing philosophy is the imperial one directed at resocialisation, and the Saxon institutions are among the older and less adequate in the Empire, a fact successive Landtag committees have reported and successive budgets have not addressed.

The older record

Saxony’s police were an instrument of the anti-socialist legislation between 1878 and 1890 and were used against a lawful political movement with the thoroughness that a well-administered state can bring to such work. Meetings were dissolved, the press was suppressed, organisers were imprisoned, and the surveillance apparatus built for the purpose was extensive.

The kingdom’s own historical treatment of this is unsparing, for the straightforward reason that the party the apparatus was directed against has governed Saxony for most of the century since and has had no reason to be delicate about it. The Saxon police archives were opened, catalogued and published earlier than most, and the standard Saxon school treatment names the ministers responsible.

Living standards

Saxon income per head sits a little below the imperial average and well above the world’s. The gap with the leading German states opened between the wars, when the export trades were hit hardest by the depression, and closed substantially through the long postwar expansion without disappearing.

Within the kingdom the distribution is unusually even by German standards. Saxony has few very rich households, a broad skilled-industrial middle, and poverty concentrated geographically rather than socially: the Lusatian lignite districts, the upper Erzgebirge and the Vogtland carry unemployment, low incomes and old populations, and the Dresden-Leipzig-Chemnitz belt does not.

The kingdom’s Gini coefficient is among the lowest of the German states, which Saxons attribute to the coordinated model and to the absence of a landed class, the great estates having been few here even before the postwar reform. Wealth, as everywhere in Germany, is far less evenly held than income, and for the same reason: a population that rents does not accumulate housing equity.

Rural Saxony and the small towns

A little under a quarter of Saxons live in rural districts, and the characteristic Saxon settlement is not the village but the small industrial town of five to twenty thousand people in a valley, with a works, a station, a church, a school, a savings bank, a fire brigade, a choral society and an allotment colony.

Where that combination holds, the kingdom’s regional policy has worked: the productivity gap with the cities is modest, the technical institute keeps the young in the district, and the works has a successor. Where it has failed, in the upper Erzgebirge and the Lusatian coal districts, the sequence is the standard one, the works closing, then the hospital, then the Gymnasium consolidating, then the branch line, then the bank.

Saxony has spent sixty years on this. Its record is better than its neighbours’ in the industrial valleys and no better in the mountains, and Saxon ministers supply the qualification themselves because the Erzgebirge deputies would supply it otherwise.

The floods, and civil protection

The Elbe floods are the kingdom’s recurring emergency. The flood of the early 2000s reached the terrace at Dresden, the old town streets, the Zwinger’s basements and the Semperoper, damaged the collections’ stores, and put a substantial part of the Saxon Switzerland valleys under water.

The response mobilised the volunteer fire brigades, the technical relief organisation and the army’s engineers at scale, and produced the sandbag lines along the Dresden terrace that are the most reproduced Saxon images of the century. The defences built afterwards are extensive and are designed to be invisible in a historic city, which cost a great deal and was not negotiable.

What the subsequent inquiries found was the usual thing: the warnings were adequate and the decisions were slow, the responsibility for ordering evacuation was distributed among municipal, district and state authorities, and the chain has since been shortened. The unresolved half is upstream. Much of the water arrives from Bohemia, the retention capacity that would moderate it is floodplain that has been drained and built on for two centuries, and the argument between engineered defence and floodplain restoration has been settled in favour of both and funded for neither.

What the state pays for

Saxony spends a larger share of its budget on culture than any other German state, which is the arithmetic consequence of holding the collections, the two opera houses, the orchestras, the choirs, the monument stock and the Meissen manufactory in a country of six million people.

The expenditure is defended across all parties and comes under pressure in every budget round without being reduced. The standing criticism, made in Saxony as elsewhere, is that the subsidy flows to audiences older, richer and better educated than the population paying for it. The standing Saxon answer, which is more specific than the general German one, is that the collections and the buildings are the kingdom’s largest single economic asset as well as its cultural one, and that the argument is therefore not really about culture at all.

Saxony and the other states

Saxony’s closest working relationships in the Empire are with the states it resembles rather than those it borders. Württemberg and Baden are the natural partners: middle states with strong technical industries, no reserved rights worth the name, and a shared interest in a federation whose rules constrain the largest member. The three vote together in the Bundesrat on industrial, research and equalisation questions with a regularity that is remarked on and has never been formalised.

With the Thuringian duchies the relationship is dynastic, geographic and administrative at once. The Ernestine states are Wettin, adjoin Saxony, and share courts, higher administration, broadcasting and research institutions with it through interstate treaties, and the arrangement is the most developed cooperation between constituent states anywhere in the Empire.

With Bavaria the relationship is friendly and unlike. The two southern kingdoms agree about most substantive federal policy and disagree about federalism itself, Bavaria defending prerogatives it negotiated in 1870 and Saxony defending the constraints on Prussia that a state without prerogatives depends on. The two ministries meet annually, the meeting is amicable, and its communiqués are studied for the sentence in which they diverge.

Industrial policy

Saxony’s industrial policy is the oldest continuous programme of its kind in Germany and predates the Empire. The state founded technical schools for the mining, textile and machine trades in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, tied them to the industries of their districts, and financed them through a state bank, and the modern network of technical institutes and applied research stations is the same policy under later names.

The kingdom’s method has been consistent across a century of governments: place technical capacity where the firms are, keep it small and specialised, tie it to a local industry by statute, and finance it long. It is the reason Saxon manufacturing is distributed through the valleys rather than concentrated in the cities, and it is the model Bavaria adopted in the 1950s and is generally credited with inventing.

Where it has failed the failures are documented. Institutes placed for political rather than industrial reasons have closed or merged; the Lusatian and upper Erzgebirge programmes have not produced the employment their business cases projected; and the semiconductor investment, the largest single commitment in Saxon industrial history, rests on plants whose owners are not Saxon and could leave.

Energy

Saxony’s power comes from Lusatian lignite in a declining share, from wind on the northern plain and the Erzgebirge ridges, from solar across the loess belt, from gas, and from imports across the Bohemian and Prussian boundaries. The kingdom is a net importer of electricity and will be more so as the lignite stations close.

Wind on the ridges is contested in exactly the way it is contested everywhere and with a Saxon particularity: the ridges are the Erzgebirge, the Erzgebirge is the kingdom’s visitor economy and its cultural heartland, and the objections come from municipalities whose Advent traffic depends on the landscape. Transmission is the other constraint, the wind being in the north and the industrial load in the valleys, and the lines have been delayed by objections lodged under the procedural rights German administrative law supplies.

The church’s institutions

The Evangelical-Lutheran Church of Saxony is a large employer and a substantial provider of services. Its welfare organisation runs hospitals, care homes, clinics, kindergartens and social work across the kingdom on public funding, its schools are numerous and over-subscribed, and its music foundation maintains the two great choirs and a network of church musicians in the parishes.

Its finances rest on the church tax collected by the state revenue offices from declared members, and its membership has fallen for fifty years faster than in almost any other German state, Saxony having begun from a position of low practice and high formal affiliation. The revenue has fallen more slowly than the membership, because those who remain are older and better paid, and the church’s own projections describe the position as manageable for a generation and not beyond it.

The Catholic diocese of Dresden and Meissen is small, is concentrated in Lusatia and the cities, and holds the Court Church as its cathedral. Its Sorbian parishes are the oldest continuous Catholic communities in the kingdom and its liturgy in them is Sorbian.

The mining landscape

The Erzgebirge mining region is protected as a cultural landscape rather than as a set of monuments, which is the right category and was arrived at after a long argument. What is protected is not a building but a system: the shafts and adits, the water-management works that drove the machinery, the ore-processing sites, the mining towns laid out to a plan, the churches the miners built, the forests planted to supply the timbering, and the pattern of settlement that a five-hundred-year extractive industry imposed on a mountain range.

Several of the workings are open, worked as visitor mines by the associations that once worked them, and a number are still used for the Mettenschicht. The Freiberg shafts are maintained by the academy as a teaching mine and are described under that heading below.

The category has consequences. A protected landscape constrains development across a wide area rather than at points, and the Erzgebirge districts, which are the kingdom’s poorest and most in need of investment, carry restrictions that the industrial valleys do not. That tension is raised in the Landtag by the same deputies who defend the designation, which is the ordinary condition of heritage politics everywhere.

The museums beyond Dresden

The Dresden collections dominate any account of Saxon museums and are not the whole of them. Leipzig holds the museum of fine arts, the ethnographic collection, the Bach museum, the German book and typography museum and the university’s teaching collections. Chemnitz holds a modern art collection of real quality that almost nobody visits. Freiberg holds the mineralogical collection of the academy, which is among the most important in the world and is arranged as a working scientific instrument rather than a display.

Beneath them lies a dense layer of municipal, industrial and craft museums: the toy museum at Seiffen, the instrument museum at Markneukirchen, the lace collection at Plauen, the mining museums of the Erzgebirge towns, and the works collections that Saxon firms have kept because a company making measuring instruments since 1840 accumulates a history whether it wants one or not.

Agriculture

Saxon agriculture is small in output and unusually good in quality of land. The loess belt running west from Leipzig through the Meissen country is among the most fertile arable soil in Germany, carries wheat, sugar beet, rape and barley on holdings larger than the German average, and produces yields at the top of the imperial range.

South of it the ground deteriorates with altitude. The uplands run mixed farming and dairy, and the upper Erzgebirge is marginal for anything but grass, which is why its population turned to home industry in the first place. Lusatia carries the pond country, a managed landscape of medieval carp ponds that is simultaneously an agricultural industry, a conservation asset and a Sorbian cultural inheritance, and the carp is on Saxon tables at Christmas and on Fridays through Lent.

The Elbe valley vineyards around Meissen and Radebeul are the most northerly commercial wine district in Germany and among the smallest in Europe, some hundreds of hectares on terraces above the river. The wine is dry, white and almost entirely drunk within the kingdom, and the growers’ association’s position on this is that they would rather have the reputation than the export trade, which is fortunate.

Farm politics are quieter in Saxony than in Bavaria, agriculture employing fewer people and carrying less weight in a governing party built on industrial labour. The environmental conditions attached to support are argued about, the nitrate position in the loess belt is the standard problem of intensive arable everywhere, and the pattern is the German one of gradual change reliably achieved.

Forestry

About a quarter of the kingdom is forest, concentrated in the Erzgebirge, the Vogtland uplands, the sandstone country and the Lusatian heaths. Saxon forestry is old, state-organised and technically influential: the Tharandt forestry academy, founded in 1811, is among the oldest in the world and was one of the institutions through which German scientific forestry spread across the globe.

That inheritance is now the problem. What Tharandt taught was the even-aged single-species plantation, spruce above all, which produces timber efficiently and produces a forest with no resilience, and the Saxon uplands were planted to that model for two centuries. The acidification of the 1970s and 1980s killed large areas of it; the drought, heat and bark beetle of the last two decades have killed more.

The conversion to mixed and uneven-aged stands has been Saxon forest policy since the 1990s and proceeds at the speed of a rotation. The state forest administration publishes its own assessment of the position and the assessment is not optimistic about the ridges.

Water

Saxony has less water than it needs and the position is deteriorating. The kingdom sits in the rain shadow of the central uplands, its summers have grown drier over three decades, and it carries three large demands at once: the industrial and semiconductor plants around Dresden, which use water in quantity and to a purity specification; the filling and treatment of the Lusatian pits; and agriculture in the loess belt.

The reservoir system in the Erzgebirge, built from the late nineteenth century onward for drinking water and flood retention, is extensive and is the reason the position is manageable at all. Its yields have fallen in dry years and the operators have begun the transfers between catchments that a drier country requires.

The Lusatian water question is the sharpest, because filling worked-out pits consumes enormous volumes in the driest part of the kingdom, and because the groundwater disturbed by a century of pumping is acidic and iron-laden and is discolouring the Spree well downstream into Prussian territory. The treatment obligations run for decades past the end of mining, the allocation of their cost between Saxony, Prussia and the companies is before the courts, and the sums are large enough to matter to two state budgets.

The Landtag at work

The Saxon Landtag is a working chamber rather than a ratifying one, and its committees are the strongest of any German state legislature relative to the size of the government they scrutinise. The pattern is a legacy of the long nineteenth century in which the chamber was the only elected institution in the kingdom and developed the habits of a body that had to extract information rather than receive it.

A minority of members may establish a committee of investigation without the majority’s consent, with powers of compulsion over documents and witnesses, and Saxon committees have used the power against ministries of their own party often enough that the convention is real. The budget committee examines the estimates line by line. The Sorbian committee is unique in the Empire in seating designated members of a minority organisation who speak without voting.

The chamber’s difficulty is the one that follows from a century of single-party dominance: an opposition that has never formed a government has limited incentive to behave as a government in waiting, and the serious scrutiny of Saxon ministries is done as often by the governing party’s own back benches and by the Erzgebirge and Lusatian deputies of all parties as by the formal opposition.

Schools, and what they produce

Saxon school outcomes are among the strongest in the Empire on the imperial comparative assessments, consistently and across subjects, and the kingdom is unusually pleased about this in a manner other states find tiresome.

The explanations offered are the tracked system applied later than elsewhere with easier transfer, a teaching profession recruited from a strong regional university system, the specialist schools in music, sport, mathematics and the crafts, and a settled social expectation of technical education that descends from four centuries of skilled industrial work. The explanation Saxon education ministers do not offer, and that the imperial assessments make plain, is that a state with a relatively even income distribution and little concentrated poverty starts from an easier position than states with more of both.

The gap that persists is the one everywhere: outcomes for children of migration background remain below the average, the early tracking bears on them disproportionately, and the Sorbian and bilingual network is the one part of the Saxon system whose results are unambiguously better than the state’s average, which the Sorbian organisations mention whenever the settlement’s cost is questioned.

The kings of Saxony

The line is unusual among German dynasties in how little of it is dramatic. Saxony has had no disputed succession since the division of 1485, no regency of consequence, no abdication, and no monarch removed by any means. Johann’s translation of the Divine Comedy, published under the name Philalethes and still in print, is the single best-known personal act of any Saxon king, which is a fair indication of the tenor of the whole.

The collections, and how they were opened

The Dresden collections were assembled by two electors in seventy years and were made public over the following two centuries, and the sequence matters because it is the reason they exist in the form they do.

Augustus the Strong and his son bought systematically rather than acquisitively, engaged curators, imposed catalogues, and separated the holdings into specialised cabinets by subject rather than displaying them as a single treasury. That decision, taken in the 1720s and 1730s, is the origin of the modern museum: a collection divided by discipline, catalogued, staffed by specialists and arranged for study.

Scholarly access followed within a generation, public access in stages from the later eighteenth century, and by the middle of the nineteenth the galleries were open on the terms familiar today. The collections were removed to the Erzgebirge mines and the outlying castles during the Second Great War and returned intact, and Saxony’s museum holdings are therefore not merely undamaged but continuous in their arrangement to a degree that exists almost nowhere else.

Saxon science

The Saxon scientific record is concentrated in chemistry, physics, mathematics, mineralogy and the applied disciplines, and it runs through Leipzig, Dresden and Freiberg rather than through any single figure.

Freiberg produced the systematic mineralogy of the eighteenth century and taught the geologists who mapped two continents. Leipzig produced the nineteenth-century schools in physical chemistry, experimental psychology and mathematics whose methods were adopted internationally, and its laboratories were among the destinations to which foreign students came when German science was the world’s. Dresden produced the instrument-making and the optical technique on which a good deal of that experimental work depended, and the relationship between the Saxon laboratories and the Saxon instrument trade is the reason both were strong.

The tradition did not break. There was no emigration of German science in the 1930s, no regime to drive anybody out, and the Saxon institutions carried their inheritance forward continuously. The consequence, as across the Empire, is a scientific establishment with unbroken descent and the corresponding weakness of a body that has never been forced to reconstitute itself: a hierarchy, a deference to the chair-holder and a slowness in advancing the young that Saxon reformers have complained about for a century.

Medicine and public health

Health care reaches the whole population through the imperial statutory funds, and what Saxony provides is the hospital network, the training and the public health administration.

Saxon medicine has two old strengths. Occupational and industrial medicine developed early here for the obvious reason, mining and then factory work having produced a body of disease that somebody had to treat, and the Saxon industrial health institutes are among the oldest in the world. Public hygiene was a Dresden speciality from the nineteenth century, the city having built a hygiene museum and a public health movement that were internationally influential and are still going.

The kingdom’s present difficulty is distribution rather than quality. The cities are well provided and the Erzgebirge and Lusatian districts are not, the small hospitals have closed steadily, and the intermediate provision Saxony has built to replace them works better on paper than in a valley in February.

The firms, and the succession problem

Saxon industry is family industry. The medium-sized works that make the kingdom’s machine tools, instruments, optical components and specialist textiles are overwhelmingly family-held, frequently in the fourth or fifth generation, and frequently in the same valley they started in.

The advantages are the ones family ownership brings anywhere: investment horizons a listed company cannot defend, a relationship with a local savings bank older than either party’s current management, and a workforce whose families have worked there as long as the owners have owned it. The disadvantage arrives once a generation, when the firm passes to heirs who may not want it, may not be capable of it, or may be several and disagree.

Succession failure is the largest single cause of the loss of such firms in Saxony as in Bavaria, and the kingdom has built an apparatus around it: advisory services, a state development bank facility for management buyouts, and a foundation model that allows a family to place a works in trust with the workforce and the locality represented on the board. The foundation model was a Saxon innovation of the 1970s, has been adopted by several dozen firms, and is the mechanism that has kept a number of works in their valleys that would otherwise have been sold to a group and closed within a decade.

The festival year

Beyond Christmas, the Saxon year is organised around the calendars of three institutions: the church, the associations and the industries.

The church supplies the Protestant festivals, the penitential day in November that the Catholic states do not keep, and the confirmation season that is still a substantial family occasion in the rural districts. The associations supply the choral festivals, the shooting and gymnastic feasts, the fire brigade anniversaries and the allotment colonies’ summer occasions, which in an industrial town are the largest events of the year. The industries supply the mining parades of the Erzgebirge in December, the vintners’ festivals in the Elbe valley in September, and the fairs.

The Leipzig fair is the oldest of the fixed points and the one the kingdom’s economy still turns on. The Dresden civic year runs on the opera’s opening, the Striezelmarkt and the Stollen procession. The Sorbian calendar in Lusatia is distinct and older, carrying the Easter riding processions, the egg decoration and the bird wedding in January, and it is the part of the Saxon year that most visibly is not German.

The Elbe

The Elbe is the kingdom’s working river and its principal landscape at once. It enters from Bohemia through the sandstone gorge, passes the vineyards, Dresden’s terrace and the porcelain town, and leaves into Prussia carrying commercial traffic towards Hamburg.

Its commercial use is real and is declining, for a reason nobody in Saxony can do much about: the river is shallow, its summer flows have fallen with the drier decades, and the depth needed for reliable freight is a depth that can be maintained only by engineering the channel. That engineering is opposed by conservation interests and by the flood authorities, who want the floodplain widened rather than the channel deepened, and successive Saxon governments have committed to both and delivered neither.

What the river carries instead is people. Passenger traffic between Dresden, Meissen and the sandstone country is substantial, the historic paddle steamers of the Saxon fleet are among the oldest working river vessels anywhere, and the towpath cycle route along the valley is the most used in the kingdom.

Saxony abroad

Saxony has no foreign policy, no legations and no diplomatic right, and its presence beyond the Empire is cultural and commercial. The collections lend, the orchestras and choirs tour, the Meissen manufactory maintains its own trade abroad, and the Leipzig fair and the book fair bring the world to Saxony rather than the reverse.

The kingdom maintains university partnerships across the Concert and beyond it, an old and dense set of connections between the Freiberg academy and the mining faculties of two continents, and the Moravian settlement at Herrnhut, whose missionary descendants are on every inhabited continent and whose annual text book appears in more languages than any comparable publication.

The Saxon government’s own external activity is confined to trade promotion, the office at Brussels, and the twinning arrangements the municipalities run, which are numerous and which in the Erzgebirge towns rest on nineteenth-century emigration.

Dresden and Leipzig

The kingdom has two capitals in everything but law, and the relationship between them is the oldest continuous argument in Saxon public life. Dresden is the royal seat, the government, the court, the collections and the baroque. Leipzig is the fair, the university, the book trade, the money, the Imperial Court of Justice and the labour movement. Dresden is larger in reputation and Leipzig in population.

The division is functional rather than accidental. Leipzig was a free-trading merchant town with privileges of its own before the Wettins made Dresden a residence, it resisted the concentration of the court’s business, and the electors found it easier to leave the commerce where it was than to move it. The result is a country whose political and economic centres have never coincided, which is unusual in Germany and has been good for both cities.

The rivalry is real and is conducted at the level of civic self-regard rather than of policy. Leipzigers describe Dresden as a museum with a ministry attached. Dresdeners describe Leipzig as a warehouse with a university. Both cities compete for institutions, both are represented in every Saxon cabinet by convention, and no Saxon government has survived being seen to prefer one.

Housing

Saxon housing is the least strained of the large German states and is following the others. Dresden and Leipzig have rising rents, falling vacancy and construction below the rate of household formation; the Erzgebirge, the Vogtland and the Lusatian districts have surplus stock in towns losing people.

The kingdom retained a larger municipal housing stock than most German states through the disposals of the 1990s and 2000s, having sold less of it, and the Saxon municipalities that kept theirs are cited across the Empire by the people who argue the disposals were a mistake. The nineteenth-century apartment quarters of Leipzig, the largest such stock in the Empire, are the kingdom’s particular asset and its particular problem: several hundred thousand dwellings of real quality, expensive to maintain, protected as an ensemble, and the reason Leipzig has absorbed thirty years of growth better than any comparable German city.

The measures the cities have taken are the standard ones and have slowed the trend rather than reversed it. What would work is building at scale on the periphery, which requires land the municipalities do not control and permits their own residents oppose.

The student cities

Leipzig and Dresden are among the largest student populations in the Empire relative to their size, and Freiberg is a town of forty thousand people with a mining academy at its centre that shapes everything about it.

The consequence is a kingdom whose two cities are visibly young in a state whose overall age structure is older than the imperial average, and whose university quarters carry the music, the bookshops, the cheap eating and the political argument that student populations produce. Leipzig’s has been the more consequential historically: the workers’ education associations of the nineteenth century, the free-thinking congregations, the publishing that carried both, and the party founded in 1863 all came out of the overlap between the university, the trades and the printing houses.

The kingdom’s difficulty is the one every Saxon ministry has named for thirty years. Saxony educates more graduates than it retains. The technical institutes hold them in the industrial valleys where a firm is hiring; the cities hold them while they study; and a measurable share leave for the western and southern states on qualifying, which is the demographic problem stated in its most expensive form.

Freiberg and the mining academy

The school the silver built

Freiberg is a town of forty thousand people that has shaped the technical practice of half the world. Silver was struck there in the 1160s, the town was chartered on the strength of it, and for six centuries it was the centre of an industry that had to solve problems nobody else was solving: how to find ore, how to prove its content, how to drain a shaft below the water table, how to move rock and men and air up and down, and how to divide the proceeds among people who had put in different things.

The Mining Academy, founded in 1765, was created to teach the answers. It is the oldest institution of its kind in the world by a substantial margin, and its founding purpose was frankly commercial: a state whose ore was running thin needed to extract more from less, and decided that the way to do it was to write the knowledge down and teach it.

What it exported

The academy’s influence ran through its students. Foreign students came in numbers from the beginning, from the Habsburg lands, from Britain, from Scandinavia, from Russia and from the Americas, and they took Freiberg’s mineralogy, its surveying, its assay methods and its mining law home with them. The geological mapping of two continents was carried out substantially by men trained in a Saxon mountain town, and the mining codes of a dozen countries descend from the Saxon one.

Alexander von Humboldt studied there. So did a long list of the people who founded the geological surveys of other states. The academy’s mineralogical collection, assembled for teaching, is among the most important in the world and is arranged as a working scientific instrument rather than as a display.

Now

Freiberg teaches what the mining tradition has become: materials science, geology, energy systems, resource economics, and the engineering of extraction and of its aftermath. Its graduates are running the Lusatian closure, which is a piece of continuity the academy points out and which is entirely real, since the restoration liabilities are being calculated against survey records the same institution’s methods produced.

The teaching mine beneath the town is still worked for instruction and is the oldest continuously used training facility of its kind anywhere.

The savings banks and the cooperative economy

Where the money comes from

Saxon industry is financed from Saxony. The savings banks, municipally and district-anchored, publicly owned and restricted by the territorial principle to their own areas, hold the greater part of Saxon household deposits and provide the greater part of the credit to Saxon firms. The Leipzig institution is among the oldest in Germany.

The relationship this produces is the structural reason the kingdom’s industry is dispersed rather than concentrated. A machine-tool works of two hundred people in an Erzgebirge valley is not a client any national bank would compete for, and it is the principal industrial client of the savings bank in its district, whose managers know the family, the order book and the succession position. Credit does not drain from the valleys towards Dresden in a downturn because the institutions that supply it are not permitted to lend outside them.

The cooperatives

Saxony’s cooperative sector is the densest in the Empire and is a direct inheritance of the workers’ movement. The consumer cooperatives founded by the industrial associations in the nineteenth century survive in Saxony more strongly than anywhere else in Germany, the cooperative banks are numerous, and the housing cooperatives hold a share of the urban rental stock that no other German state approaches.

The housing cooperatives are the most consequential. Several hundred thousand Saxon households rent from a cooperative in which they hold a share and a vote, on terms that are not market terms and cannot be converted to them, and this is a substantial part of why Saxon housing pressure is milder than Bavarian.

Under pressure

Both sectors are under pressure from the European Concert’s rules on state guarantees and the territorial restriction of competition, which leave ownership alone and bind how publicly owned institutions behave, and Saxony defends them at Brussels as public service rather than commerce. It has lost ground on the guarantees and held the territorial principle so far, and its argument is the one the Empire makes generally, with a Saxon addition: that a consolidated banking market would take industrial finance out of exactly the districts the kingdom has spent sixty years trying to keep alive.

The Elbe wine country

The vineyards on the terraces between Meissen and Dresden are the most northerly commercial wine district in Germany and among the smallest in Europe, a few hundred hectares on south-facing slopes above the river, worked in part by hand because the terraces will not take machinery.

Vines were planted here in the twelfth century by the margraves and the monasteries, the district survived phylloxera by replanting on grafted stock, and it survives now because the state, the growers and the conservation authorities all want the terraces maintained and none of them could justify the cost on the wine alone. The dry stone walls are a protected landscape and their upkeep is publicly assisted.

The wine is white, dry, and drunk within the kingdom almost in its entirety. The growers’ association’s stated position is that it would rather have the reputation than the export trade, which is fortunate, and the annual vintners’ festivals in the villages along the river are among the fixed points of the Saxon autumn.

The Sorbian year

The Sorbian calendar in Lusatia is distinct from the German one around it and is the most visible surviving expression of the minority’s separateness.

The Easter riding processions are the best known: mounted men in black coats and top hats ride from parish to parish through the Catholic Sorbian villages on Easter Sunday, singing the resurrection, in a practice documented since the fifteenth century and unbroken since. Several hundred riders take part, the routes are fixed, and the parishes visit one another in a settled order that nobody has altered in living memory.

The decorated eggs, worked in wax-resist, scratch and etching techniques with patterns that are regional and in some cases village-specific, are a craft with a real body of technique behind it rather than a souvenir trade, though it is also that. The bird wedding in January, in which children put out plates for the birds and receive sweets in return, is a household custom that has spread well beyond the Sorbian districts into German Lusatia and Saxony generally, most Saxons being unaware of where it came from.

The Maypole customs, the harvest observances and the winter figures complete a calendar that is Catholic in the heartland villages and Protestant in the northern and Prussian ones, and that differs between the two in ways the ethnographers at the Sorbian institute have documented at length.

What the calendar demonstrates is the thing the language statistics obscure. Sorbian practice is stronger than Sorbian speech, participation in the customs has not fallen at the rate the language has, and a substantial number of the people riding at Easter are more fluent in German than in Sorbian. Whether that is the survival of an identity or the afterlife of one is argued about within the Sorbian organisations and not settled.

The book trade

Why Leipzig

Leipzig has been the centre of the German book trade for three centuries and holds the position still. The trade moved here from Frankfurt in the eighteenth century, for reasons that were partly about censorship, Saxony being more permissive than the imperial commissions at Frankfurt, and partly about the fair, which brought the booksellers of the German lands to one place twice a year already.

What Leipzig then built was not a publishing industry but an apparatus: a commission system by which publishers kept stock and settled accounts through Leipzig agents, a clearing house for the trade’s debts, a bibliographic record of everything published in German, a wholesale distribution business, and the trade’s own association with its own arbitration. A German publisher in Munich or Hamburg conducted his settlement, his distribution and his record-keeping through Leipzig whether he wanted to or not.

The institutions

The German Library at Leipzig holds the legal deposit of everything published in German and is the trade’s memory. The book and typography museum holds the technical history. The trade’s association administers the fixed-price agreement that keeps small bookshops viable across the Empire, a Saxon device of the nineteenth century that has been challenged inside the European Concert and that Saxony defends with the vigour of a state defending an industry rather than a principle.

The book fair is the spring event to Frankfurt’s autumn, is oriented towards readers and towards the literatures of central and eastern Europe rather than towards the rights trade, and is the largest public literary occasion in the Empire.

The printing trades

Beneath the publishing sits the manufacture. Leipzig and its district make printing machinery, binding equipment, papers and typefaces, and the Saxon printing-machinery industry supplies presses across the world. The type foundries of Leipzig cut a substantial share of the German typographic tradition, and the technical training in composition, binding and press work that the trade built for itself in the nineteenth century still exists.

The trade’s workers were also, and this is not incidental, among the best organised and most literate in Germany, and the Leipzig printing unions were a founding element of the labour movement that began in the same city in 1863.

The Dresden collections

The cabinets

The Dresden holdings are divided into specialised collections by subject, an arrangement imposed in the 1720s and 1730s that was itself the innovation.

The picture gallery holds the Italian and Netherlandish acquisitions of the Augustan reigns, bought systematically through agents with instructions, and is among the half-dozen most important collections of old master painting in Europe. The Green Vault is a treasury of worked gold, silver, ivory, amber, enamel and gemstone displayed in the baroque rooms built for it, and is the only princely treasury in Europe still in its own building and substantially its founder’s arrangement.

The armoury holds parade and tournament equipment of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries at a quality and completeness that exists nowhere else, much of it never used in war and made to be looked at. The porcelain collection holds the East Asian material Augustus the Strong bought compulsively and the Meissen made in answer to it, and the juxtaposition is the point of the collection and was the point when it was assembled.

The mathematical and physical salon holds clocks, globes, surveying and astronomical instruments and early calculating machines, and is the collection that connects the court’s taste to the country’s industry: the instrument-makers who supplied it were the ancestors of the Saxon optical trade.

The print room and the coin cabinet complete the set, and the sculpture collection and the ethnographic holdings sit alongside them under the trust.

Their condition

The collections were removed to the Erzgebirge mines and the outlying castles during the Second Great War and returned intact, and they are therefore not merely undamaged but continuous in their arrangement to a degree that has no parallel. Curators from institutions that lost their holdings describe the Dresden position in terms Saxons have learned not to repeat in company.

The trust has published provenance research since the 1990s on the questions any princely collection of that age raises: objects taken in war, objects acquired from religious houses at the Reformation, objects from dealers whose sources were undocumented, and ethnographic material acquired through a colonial trade in which Saxony had no colonies and considerable participation. Restitutions have been made by agreement. The larger part of the research has produced no claimant and a great deal of published detail.

Chemnitz and the machine trades

Chemnitz is the kingdom’s third city and its industrial capital, and it is the least regarded important place in the Empire. It began as a textile town, moved into textile machinery, moved from there into machine tools generally, and has built the machines that make other machines for two hundred years.

The trade it carries is the least visible and most consequential in Saxon industry. A machine tool is bought by other manufacturers, is never seen by a consumer, and determines what a country can make; a nation that cannot build its own machine tools builds what somebody else’s machine tools permit. Saxony has been among the world’s principal suppliers since the middle of the nineteenth century, and the Chemnitz district holds the densest concentration of the trade in the Empire.

The city’s difficulty is that none of this photographs. It has no court, no fair, no cathedral and no baroque quarter, its nineteenth-century centre is workmanlike, and a kingdom whose other cities are Dresden and Leipzig has trouble giving it any attention. Chemnitz deputies raise this in the Landtag with some regularity and are entirely correct, and the standard Saxon response, that the city is where the money is made, is offered as consolation and received as evasion.

Around it lie the industrial valleys: Zwickau with the vehicle works, Aue and the mining valleys behind it, Glauchau and Meerane with the surviving textile trades, and the belt of medium-sized engineering towns that runs west into the Vogtland. It is the most heavily industrialised country in the Empire per square kilometre and the part of Saxony that visitors never see.

Place names and the older country

The map of Saxony is largely Slavonic and most Saxons do not notice. The endings that recur across the kingdom, -itz, -itzsch, -au and -a, are German renderings of Sorbian forms, and the great majority of Saxon village names, together with Leipzig, Chemnitz, Zwickau, Dobeln and a long list of others, are Slavonic in origin rather than German.

They are the residue of the population that occupied the country before the German colonisation of the tenth to thirteenth centuries. The colonists took the land and kept the names, which is the ordinary pattern of such settlements everywhere, and the result is a German kingdom whose ordinary toponymy records the people it displaced.

The pattern is legible enough that a Saxon can read the settlement history off a map with a little instruction, and it is taught in Saxon schools for exactly that reason. Villages founded by German colonists are recognisable by their forms and by their layout, the planned street villages and forest-clearance villages of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries being visibly different from the older irregular Slavonic settlements they were planted among.

In Lusatia the substrate is not a substrate. Sorbian place names there are current names in a living language, appear on the bilingual signs beside their German forms, and are used daily by the people who live in them. The rest of the kingdom’s Slavonic names are fossils; Lusatia’s are not, and the boundary between the two conditions is the sharpest cultural line inside Saxony.

Semiconductors and the new industry

The kingdom’s newest industry is the one it has invested in most heavily and the one whose foundations are oldest. Semiconductor manufacture requires precision optics, materials science, ultra-clean process engineering, exact metrology and a workforce trained to work to tolerances most industries never encounter, and Saxony had every one of those things before anybody needed a semiconductor.

The plants sit north of Dresden, near the technical university and within reach of the optical cluster that supplies the lithographic components on which the whole process depends. The state committed to the sector in a deliberate policy decision, financed the infrastructure, and used the technical institutes and the university to supply the training, which is the Saxon industrial method applied to a new object.

The results have been substantial. The district is among the larger concentrations of the industry in Europe, the supplier network beneath the large plants is Saxon and medium-sized in the ordinary Saxon pattern, and the sector has pulled in research capacity that benefits the older trades.

The standing criticism is the obvious one and Saxon ministers do not dispute it. The largest plants are foreign-owned, the industry is mobile, the investment competes against subsidies offered elsewhere, and a kingdom that has placed a great deal on a sector it does not control has taken a risk of a kind its family-held machine-tool works never presented. The answer offered is that the alternative was to place nothing.

The eastern towns

Bautzen

Bautzen stands on a granite spur above the Spree in Upper Lusatia and is the capital of Sorbian Saxony. It is a small city of some forty thousand people with a silhouette of towers, a walled old town, and a bilingual public life that begins at the boundary signs and runs through the street names, the administration, the courts, the schools and the shops.

Its institutions are the Sorbian ones. The Domowina, the Sorbian institute, the publishing house, the newspaper, the Sorbian grammar school and the Sorbian national ensemble of music, dance and theatre are all seated here, and the town is therefore the administrative and cultural centre of a people spread across two kingdoms. It is also an ordinary Saxon district town with a German-speaking majority, and the two facts coexist without much friction and with a good deal of everyday negotiation.

Bautzen’s cathedral is the oldest simultaneum in Germany: a single church used by both confessions since 1524, Catholic in the choir and Protestant in the nave, divided by a low barrier, with services timed so that they do not collide. It has worked for five hundred years. Saxons offer it as the plainest available demonstration that the kingdom’s confessional settlement was arrived at by people who had to share buildings, and it is a fair claim.

The town also carries the mustard the whole Empire buys, which is the thing most Germans know about it and which Bautzeners raise with visitors before anything else.

Görlitz

Görlitz is the easternmost town of the kingdom, on the Neisse, and has the largest architecturally intact old town in Germany. It carries a continuous stock running from the gothic through the renaissance and the baroque into the nineteenth century: late-gothic hall houses with their vaulted halls still in place, renaissance portals in numbers found nowhere else, baroque merchant houses, and whole streets of nineteenth-century apartment building beyond them.

It survives because nothing happened to it. Görlitz was a rich cloth and trading town on the road from Silesia into Saxony, it lost that position when the trade routes moved, and the poverty that followed meant that nobody had the money to demolish and rebuild in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries. Then the war did not reach it. A town that failed commercially for two hundred years and was untouched by the twentieth century is what an intact town actually requires, and Görlitz is candid about the sequence.

Its problem now is the same poverty in a different form. The stock is enormous relative to the population, maintenance costs fall on a town that is not rich, and the district has been losing people. Visitor numbers are well below what the fabric warrants, which the municipality raises at every opportunity, and the town has been used repeatedly as a film location for cities that no longer look like themselves, which brings money and a certain amount of local ambivalence.

The Holy Sepulchre, a group of buildings put up in the fifteenth century by a Görlitz burgher as a scale copy of the sites in Jerusalem after he had visited them, is the oldest such complex north of the Alps and the town’s strangest possession.

Symbols

The arms

Saxony’s arms are barry of ten sable and or, a crown of rue in bend vert: ten horizontal bars of black and gold crossed diagonally by a green wreath of rue. The bars are the older element and the rue crown, the Rautenkranz or crancelin, is the mark that distinguishes the Wettins from every other bearer of a barry field in Europe.

The device is among the oldest in continuous use in Germany, has been borne since the thirteenth century, and is shared with the Ernestine duchies, which is why the arms of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, Saxe-Meiningen and Saxe-Altenburg all carry the same bars and wreath under different marks of difference.

The crossed swords are the second Saxon device and belong to the electoral dignity rather than to the country. They are the badge of the imperial Arch-Marshalcy, the office the Electors of Saxony held in the old Empire, and they survive in the arms of state, in the manufactory’s mark on every piece of Meissen porcelain, and as the most forged trademark in the world.

The flag

The flag is a horizontal bicolour of white over green, taken from the tinctures of the rue crown, and it is the plainest flag of any German state. The state flag adds the arms in the centre.

Saxons are attached to it in a low-key way and note, when the imperial black-white-red is raised beside it, that the national colours are Prussia’s and the Hanseatic cities’ and contain nothing of the south or the east. This is a Bavarian complaint that Saxons make less loudly and just as often.

The motto and the anthem

The motto is Providentiae memor, mindful of providence, adopted with the Order of the Rue Crown and used as the royal motto since. Its object is unstated in the way such mottoes usually are, and Saxon commentary on it tends towards the observation that a country which has been invaded, partitioned and occupied might reasonably be mindful of providence without being confident of it.

The Sachsenlied is sung at state occasions alongside the imperial anthem and never beneath it, an ordering the constituent states observe uniformly and Saxony observes exactly.

Kingdom Day

Saxony’s national day marks the granting of the Constitution of 1831 rather than the assumption of the royal title in 1806, and the reasoning is the same as Bavaria’s: both kingdoms received their crowns from Napoleon, and neither has ever found a comfortable way to commemorate the fact. The two southern kingdoms therefore celebrate their constitutions, which is either an admirable piece of civic priority or the only available alternative, and in both cases it is both.

Chronology

Assessment

Saxony is the oldest continuously governed territory in the Empire and the one whose modern position least resembles its historic one. It was the richest German state, the most cultivated, the most technically advanced and the first to industrialise, and it is now the third kingdom of a federation dominated by a state that took half of it.

The kingdom’s institutions are the record of that descent and of its management. A constitution of 1831, older than the Empire and never replaced. A monarchy that surrendered its church government in 1697 and its veto in the nineteenth century and has kept both undertakings without being made to. A public life organised by a labour movement that the state spent twenty years trying to exclude from the Landtag and has been governed by for a century since. An economy built on the technical inheritance of a mining industry that ended before the modern state existed.

What Saxony did not do is contest any of it. There is no Saxon claim on the Province of Saxony, no Saxon programme for the recovery of anything, and no Saxon party organised around a grievance, and the kingdom’s habit of mentioning 1815 without ever proposing to do anything about it is the clearest single statement of how it understands its own position.

The country’s present difficulties are those of a small, dense, export-dependent industrial state with a demographic problem in its weakest regions and a minority settlement it began too late. The lignite closure will be finished within a decade, the Sorbian decline probably will not be arrested, and the Erzgebirge will continue to lose people while everybody agrees that it should not.

Trivia

See also

• The German Empire, the federation Saxony entered in 1871 without reserved rights
• The Kingdom of Prussia, which took the northern half of the kingdom in 1815 and holds it as the Province of Saxony
• The Kingdom of Bavaria, the second kingdom, which negotiated the terms Saxony could not
• The Kingdom of Württemberg, the other middle kingdom without reserved rights
• The Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, a republic inside the same monarchy
• Austria-Hungary, across the oldest fixed frontier in central Europe, and the power that saved the kingdom in 1866
• The Kingdom of Hanover, the other kingdom that fought Prussia in 1866 and kept its crown

Categories

Nations of the World · German Empire · Monarchies · Constitutional History · Lutheranism · Industry