From the Holy Roman Empire to the Land of the Tsars: One Family's Odyssey, 1768–1870 by Alexander M. Martin

Abstract

Reviewed by: From the Holy Roman Empire to the Land of the Tsars: One Family's Odyssey, 1768–1870 by Alexander M. Martin Patrick O'Meara Martin, Alexander M. From the Holy Roman Empire to the Land of the Tsars: One Family's Odyssey, 1768–1870. Oxford Studies in Modern European History. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2022. xix + 393 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £90.00. Rosenstrauch is, to be fair, hardly a household name in either German or Russian history. However, by means of ingenious detective work, Alexander Martin, the distinguished American historian of nineteenth-century Russia, seeks to pluck his subject from perhaps undeserved obscurity in order to realize through the prism of Johannes Ambrosius Rosenstrauch's life (1768–1835) some sense of what it meant to be alive in Germany and Russia (both terms broadly understood) in the Age of Revolution. The stated purpose of this 'microhistory' is to explore how individual people shape, and are shaped by, the historical forces of their time. Martin was led to Rosenstrauch by a manuscript in a Russian archive which contained a German eyewitness's description of what he saw in Moscow during Napoleon's ill-fated occupation, as one of the 6,000 out of the pre-war population of 275,000 who stayed put. Its author proved to be Rosenstrauch, a man constantly on the move and reinventing himself, and the six weeks he records here is the best documented period of his entire life. Half of it he spent in the Holy Roman Empire, and the remainder in both Russia and Ukraine. He was in turn a barber-surgeon, an actor, a merchant who founded a business in Moscow that flourished until long after his death, as well as a Catholic, a Freemason and a Lutheran pastor. He participated in the Enlightenment, the consumer revolution, the Pietist awakening and Russia's colonization of the Black Sea Steppe. For the reconstruction of Rosenstrauch's biography, Martin draws on an impressive array of sources, both published (especially in Russian and German) and in archives (principally in Russia, but also in Germany). Every [End Page 764] stage of Rosenstrauch's existential development is contexualized in its time and place, thereby generating a broad panorama of life in the German lands and the Russian Empire from the Old Regime to modernity. For example, Rosenstrauch's apprenticeship as a barber-surgeon in Breslau prompts an interesting excursion into the history of medicine, while his move to the stage seven years later, and his entry into the 'bourgeios public sphere', provides a cue for some detailed theatre history. Equally, Rosenstrauch's involvement in Freemasonry from 1792 leads Martin, in a particularly solid chapter, to a deftly detailed sketch of its purpose and structure as an important institution of the Enlightenment, as well as a graphic description of Rosenstrauch's initiation (Martin points out that Alexander I attended several meetings of the same St Petersburg lodge and so, intriguingly, the two men may have met there); Rosenstrauch's departure from Kassel to join the court theatre of the Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin is accompanied by some fascinating details of stagecoach travel which are in turn underpinned by four useful maps of his extensive itineraries in the 1790s and 1800s. Similarly, Rosenstrauch's passage from Rostock to St Petersburg in 1804 brings a snapshot of Baltic shipping and trade. Martin reminds us that with 24,000 Germans resident in St Petersburg by 1817 (compared with a mere 1,349 in Moscow), it was easily the most German city in Russia. From 1820, Rosenstrauch embarked on the final (and well-documented), Ukrainian, chapter of his life, first as Lutheran pastor to German colonists in Odessa (Odesa), and then as pastor in Kharkov (Kharkiv) where he died in 1835 aged 67, his funeral there attended by an astonishing (estimated) 10,000 mourners and, moreover, reported in the St Petersburg Gazette. Martin argues convincingly that Rosenstrauch remained long in living memory, traced here over three generations, as founder-benefactor of the church school in Kharkiv, and subsequently in cultural memory through his publications, particularly An Evangelical Pastor's Experiences at Deathbeds (1833 in German, 1846 in...