Band 295, Heft 3 -

Formerly inscribed in golden letters above the main entrance of the cathedral, the privileges granted on 7 and 14 August 1111 by Emperor Henry V to the in­habitants of the city of Speyer marked a milestone in the early history of civic freedoms in German-speaking Europe. Letters granting freedoms, which many other cities had received before, had usually been limited to improvements for trade and manufacture, and to benefits in regard to markets, tariffs, coinage, and other such matters. Privileges applying to persons are documented for the earlier period only for the citizens of Huy in the Belgian Haspengau (1066). The citizens of Speyer were freed by Henry V from the death duties characteristic of manorial law and granted free inheritance for their chattels in connection with a multitude of further privi­leges, including legal security on the basis of defined jurisdiction and elementary personal freedoms. The right to dispose freely of bequests and assets constituted the right of citizens to personal property for the first time and therefore meant a decisive step in the development of civic freedoms. Shortly thereafter, such rights appeared in the founding privilege for Freiburg im Breisgau (1120) in a more elaborated form, though freedoms applying to persons otherwise spread only hesitantly at this time. Even an imperial city such as Frankfurt am Main acquired them only in the thirteenth century.

For early modern individuals, death was not the end of life, but a moment of liminality between two fundamentally different phases of life. These phases differed from each other in terms of their respective normative horizons. Mundane life was characterized by the coexistence of different systems of norms. Religious norms, norms concerning the public good and social norms (as they may be distinguished in an ideal-typical way) competed with each other. In the early modern period, the confessionalized churches demanded from their members to follow their respective norms; the rising states, on the other hand, propagated norms concerning the public good. Nonetheless, social norms, negotiated and reproduced in every-day face-to-face interaction, remained strong. It was typical for early modern societies that on the one hand different normative entities vigorously demanded the compliance of norms, whilst on the other hand fields applicable for each particular system of norms did not exist yet. Hence competition of norms was a characteristic of early modern society. Nonetheless, the situation changed dramatically on the deathbed. Dying persons expected to be judged by God immediately after death; hence they had to prepare for this judgment by orientating themselves exclusively to religious norms and to play the role of the devoted Christian. If a dying person managed to undergo this change of persona, he was generally regarded as chosen for eternal life in heaven. Therefore the deathbed as well as the scaffold was regarded as a place where God manifested himself on earth. As they oriented themselves to God and judged predominantly on the basis of religious norms, dying persons were adjudged sacral authority. The contrast between the normative horizon of the doomed with the one of the living sheds light on the particular melange of norms typical for early modern society.

The history of German migrants in New Zealand has only received little attention in historical scholarship, and the few studies that exist argue that the assimilation of German migrants was protracted. This article questions this traditional argument by exploring German associational culture. Ethnic associationalism among migrants helps to investigate the conditions for their assimilation or segregation, and promotes scrutiny of the continuity and discontinuity of ethnicity. The article documents that German associations, by offering coherent structures for organised sociability, were a response to an increasingly evolving colonial society, thus contributing an important new perspective on the experiences of non-British migrants in New Zealand. As sites of memory, German ethnic associations offered continuity with the past, while their interaction with wider colonial society facilitated assimilation. The associations’ activities, particularly as friendly societies, show that Germans were more integrated in New Zealand society than has previously been assumed. They used the same strategies as other migrants groups, ethnic associations could aid assimilation, and were quite successfully integrated in the matrix of New Zealand associational culture.