Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen: Review of Radziwill’s Study of Stolberg Landownership (1900)

Schullern’s review of Carl Prinz Radziwill’s 1899 study of Stolberg landed property places a dynastic estate history within contemporary debates over agrarian policy and family entails. Its opening establishes the methodological basis of the appraisal: economic intervention requires knowledge of historically specific conditions, rather than the application of political doctrine.

Immer mehr erkennt man, dass alle Maassregeln der Volkswirtschaftspolitik zeitlich und örtlich relativen Charakter haben, dass es also verfehlt ist, rein nur auf Grund einer doctrinären politischen Anschauung in das ökonomische und sociale Leben einzugreifen.

English translation: It is recognized more and more that all measures of economic policy have a character relative to time and place, and that it is therefore mistaken to intervene in economic and social life purely on the basis of a doctrinaire political view.

For Schullern, removing restrictions on landed property has proved insufficient to remedy agrarian problems. The social and economic significance of the Familienfideicommiss—the hereditary family entail—therefore deserves renewed investigation. He welcomes Radziwill’s book as an inductive contribution while emphasizing that its author refrains from drawing a policy conclusion. Its value lies in documenting how both the estates and the intention to preserve them permanently within the owning family developed.

The review follows the book’s three-part organization: a concise account of the constitutional position of the Stolberg counties, a history of their landed possessions, and an examination of individual estates within Wernigerode that now belong to the entail. Schullern’s account of the second part traces an increasingly definite effort, visible from the thirteenth century, to retain land for male descendants, exclude women from succession, and prevent division through either sole ownership or joint family possession. Inheritance agreements enlarged the estates, while exchanges consolidated them territorially.

The crucial conceptual distinction is between this longstanding dynastic purpose and its gradual legal realization. The brothers’ agreement of 1548 declared ancestral estates inalienable and excluded women while male family members survived, yet neither established primogeniture nor prevented further partitions. Schullern thus presents the entail as the eventual outcome of an extended institutional development:

Der Gedanke, die Primogeniturerbfolge einzuführen, sickert nun immer mehr und mehr in den Bestand der Hausgesetze ein und wird im 18. Jahrhunderte herrschend (1714); so ist man auf langem Wege, immer dasselbe Ziel und zwar immer bestimmter verfolgend, schliesslich zum Fideicommiss gelangt.

English translation: The idea of introducing succession by primogeniture now seeps more and more into the body of the house laws and becomes dominant in the eighteenth century (1714); thus, by a long road, always pursuing the same goal and pursuing it ever more definitely, one finally arrived at the entail (Fideikommiss).

The closing assessment connects scholarly usefulness with selective, archive-based exposition. Schullern notes the documentary appendix and estate maps, but reports that he could not find the family tree listed in the contents, which would have made the history easier to follow. He praises Radziwill’s ability to distinguish scientifically important material from incidental detail and cautiously judges the archival research to have been very thorough. The review’s central claim is consequently methodological: historical reconstruction makes renewed inquiry into entails possible without itself settling whether they should be retained.