How to Marry a German? Germans of the Northern Baltic and Their Marriage Strategies

Germans had lived and done business in the Northern Baltic since the times of the Hanseatic League. A new wave of German immigrants arrived after Catherine II of Russia’s manifestos of 1762 and 1763, which encouraged the immigration of skilled men (Ijäs 2018a; Bartlett 1979, 1).

Laube would have been a lonely and powerless man in Vyborg without his wife’s family networks. In 1774, Laube married Helena Christina Haveman, whose parents had German roots. The bride was twenty-three years old and the groom was twenty-nine. In Northern Europe, on average, both men and women remained unmarried until their late twenties. Younger couples typically relied on their parents’ economic support (Andersson 2005, 57). As Laube had already established his place in the Russian administration, he could support a family of his own. The couple could also rely on help from Helena’s family.

A similar marriage pattern was repeated several times in the families discussed in this chapter. For example, in 1799, Laube’s twenty-three-year-old daughter Marie Elisabeth married Johan Friedrich Hackman, who was fifty-four years old at the time. Hackman had moved to Vyborg in his twenties but had not been able to stabilise his economic position. He had worked as a paid clerk in a merchant house before managing to gather enough capital to establish his own company in 1790.

Marriage eased a newcomer’s entry into business and established his social position in a town where he had no family. In Laube’s case, the extended family he joined through marriage included almost all the German families in Vyborg and the other Northern Baltic port towns. The Sutthoffs, too, belonged to this family network.3 For the German timber merchants in the Baltic, marrying a newcomer was an expansive strategy. For example, the Laube-Haveman marriage benefitted social reproduction; the husband brought with him new skills, network ties, and cultural capital, which probably provided his wife’s family with social prestige (Bull 2002, 203).

This strategy was also profitable for the established local German community; new connections and network ties to Bremen, Riga, and other port towns around the Baltic were multiplied when choosing a husband outside local social circles. In this process, women not only produced heirs; they held a substantial amount of social capital, which they transmitted to their husbands and the next generation. Leos Müller has demonstrated that reproduction was the most important thing for an early modern merchant house, so the women’s role in the family business was crucial (Bourdieu [1979] 2007; Müller 1998).

The families could also apply a reductive strategy by choosing a spouse from within the family circle. The reductive family strategy aimed to keep the already established and prosperous business intact. Intermarriage within the German community ensured the close-knit nature of the network. The Finnish historian Jarkko Keskinen, who has studied eighteenth-century business family networks in Western Finland, has found that the more closely integrated the network was, the easier it was to have common behavioural norms, rules, and strategies (Keskinen 2012, 119; Hasselberg and Petterson 2006, 355).

It seems that the families did not want to take the economic risk of bringing an unknown wife into the tight-knit community. The choice made by Carl Alexander Hackman, the younger son of Johan Friedrich Hackman, served as a cautionary tale of what could happen if a young man unwisely married an outsider. Carl Alexander Hackman married his first wife against his mother’s wishes. His bride’s family did not belong to the German community but came from the Swedish side of Finland. Because of poor investments made by his wife’s family, Carl Alexander Hackman lost his share of his father’s inheritance (Hackman 1906).

By contrast, the elder son of Johan Friedrich Hackman married a distant relative, aged nineteen, when he was in his early twenties. The couple received support from both sets of parents, but their kinship ensured that the family capital stayed inside the family circle. The marriage also reinforced the ties to the local community and St Petersburg. Likewise, the Sutthoff marriages in Narva bolster the theory that resources had to be kept within the German community.4

The grandsons of Johan Friedrich Hackman also found their spouses among the urban, Northern Baltic German elite.5 In this generation, men were in their thirties and women typically eighteen to twenty-five years old when they got married. On the one hand, the stable economic situation guaranteed that men could support a family and marry earlier than in times of insecurity and personal hardship (Tigerstedt 1940, 747). They did not hold leading positions in the family business at the time of their marriage, but the business nevertheless guaranteed the economic security of the young couples. On the other hand, the German families could afford to wait before finding a suitable spouse for their daughters. Young girls were not married in their mid-teens; they only married after they had finished their training.

This pattern is quite typical among the European urban elite of the time. Gudrun Andersson has pointed out the importance of the economic and social factors behind this pattern. She stresses the fact that by providing equal shares of both economic and social capital for sons and daughters, the families maintained their position in the local community (Andersson 2005, 69). This equality also shows in the brides’ and grooms’ ages, which may have resulted in more balanced marriages and family life, thus benefitting the whole German community.

The families sought ties to Germans who served in the Imperial army and carried a noble title. Women became a bridge between the bourgeois urban German elite and the (Baltic) German nobility serving the imperial majesty. The brides both maintained the existing social and cultural capital and brought new capital to the family network. For example, Helena Christina Haveman’s second cousin6 was ennobled for his participation in the coup d’etat of the future Empress Catherine II of Russia in 1762. His daughter was married to a Baltic German officer who later became the governor-general of Finland.7 Thus, Vyborg’s German elite held the highest administrative position in Finland (Paaskoski 2003, 601–602).

From the 1840s on, the expansive family strategy of Vyborg-based families altered. The daughters were no longer married exclusively to the German business elite or the nobility serving the Imperial army but also to the Swedish-speaking elite. New Swedish-speaking families had moved to Vyborg after the town was annexed to the Grand Duchy of Finland in 1812. Swedish was the official language of the Grand Duchy, and the elite had its roots in the Swedish nobility, merchant families, and those serving the church. The German families’ strategy of marrying daughters to officers from Western Finland intensified in the second half of the nineteenth century.

The family strategy did not favour marrying Russians; only one marriage with an ethnic Russian can be found among the studied families (Laube, Johann Friedrich; Laube, Johann Nikolaevicˇ). It is hard to say if it was religion, language, or other cultural factors that separated the Germans from the Russians. Whereas the Germans were members of the Lutheran Church, the Russians belonged to the Orthodox Church. Most likely the social gap between the two groups was too large; the Russians were either far below (peddlers or common soldiers) or too high (members of the Russian aristocracy) in the social order. In general, the Germans did not marry the local people—Finns, Ingrians, and Estonians—because such individuals belonged to the peasantry and the common people of the provinces. As Johanna Annola has shown in her chapter, most of the local upper middle-class families lacked a cosmopolitan spirit and appearance—which the Germans had—even though they might have been quite wealthy and held good positions in the local community.

A family strategy can be both reductive and expansive at the same time. It was the sons, after all, who married inside the community and passed the undivided business on to the next generation. Nevertheless, we should not underestimate the power of daughters in this setting. Through the daughters, the family business acquired talented men who brought the latest technology to the business or could act on the behalf of the business in the Finnish Senate (the Diet). Daughters brought the family business to the next generation. Furthermore, the daughters tied the bourgeois families to the nobility. As illustrated above, merchant daughters’ marriages to ennobled officers or Baltic German noblemen serving in the Imperial army gave urban business families social capital and prestige beyond the local elite society.