Experiencing Intrusion: Smashed Windows as Violations of Privacy in the University Town of Helmstedt, 1684–1706

Abstract

This article argues that much of what we refer to as privacy in present-day society was materialised, experienced, instrumentalised, and also, to some extent, protected before the 19th century, when it was broadly conceptualised as a value and a right. In a social-architectural approach, windows and facades of the private house are shown to have had an important regulatory function, mediating between the house and the neighbourhood, the open and the closed, and the public and the private. First ,we extract evidence from On the Art of Building in Ten Books by Leon Battista Alberti (1404– 1572) as well as from other architectural treatises of the period and region, in particular those by Joseph Furttenbach (1591–1667) and Leonhard Christoph Sturm (1669–1719), who cites Nicolaus Goldmann (1611–1665). Then, we combine the architectural insights with an in-depth reading of two well-documented but not yet analysed court cases of nocturnal window smashing in the university town of Helmstedt involving Professor Johann Barthold Niemeyer (1644–1708) in the opposing roles of both victim and instigator. The combination of these court cases and architectural treatises allows us to show how experiences of intrusions via broken windows share qualities with today’s conceptualisation of intrusions of privacy and thus point to the presence of notions of privacy in early modern societies.