Ute Frevert. Vertrauen: Historische Annäherungen. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003. 430 S. (broschiert), ISBN 978-3-525-36270-9.

Reviewed by Ulf Zimmermann (Department of Political Science and International Affairs, Kennesaw State University)
Published on H-German (December, 2004)

Trust is a topic much discussed these days, as Ute Frevert notes at the outset: there are new questions of how we can trust people on the Internet and persistent but increasingly pressing ones of how we can trust businesses and, especially, governments. Commensurately, a great deal of scholarly literature has been produced on the subject and Frevert references salient selections of this as well.[1] Her introduction also reflects the wide compass of the concept of trust, from the intimate personal trust of family and friends to social trust of other members of society (horizontal trust), on the one hand, to local organizations to national governments (vertical trust), on the other. Trust becomes theoretically interesting, Frevert convincingly contends in her historical survey of the use of the concept, when we seek to extend it from that immediate family or friend level to the "face-independent" trust of Anthony Giddens or to the juridical "persons" of Annette Baier she cites. This is borne out in the dozen other scholars' contributions, briefly assessed below, which are organized to cover German historical understandings of "trust" from the concept's earliest significant appearance in the Middle Ages to contemporary issues, and their "case studies" further give the reader a wide understanding of the various conceptions of trust--from expectation and hope, reliance and confidence, to belief and faith.

As Dorothea Weltecke reminds us in the first contribution, from Aristotle into the Middle Ages trust refers to relations between free men--the citizens of the Greek city states--who deal with one another truthfully and responsibly. The possibility of such trust beyond the immediate vicinity diminished in southern German areas, she notes, when Roman institutions declined in the early Middle Ages, aptly citing as concrete testimony the walls cities built around themselves. This introduces a main theme whose variations are to be seen throughout these essays: general trust among people is facilitated by institutions that in one way or another guarantee others' trustworthiness.

When, lacking such institutions, members of the international republic of letters (Gelehrtenrepublik) sought to build such long-distance trust between the sixteenth and early-eighteenth centuries, as Franz Mauelshagen shows in his case study, they communicated trustworthiness by invoking the fama of well-placed mutual acquaintances or teachers, or by invoking the reciprocal obligations of friendship in their letters to one another. While relying purely on reputation or friendship might be adequate for scholarship, business, as Stefan Gorissen next documents, required more than these informal enforcement mechanisms. Businessmen in the eighteenth century made contracts with their former employees to ensure that they would not poach on their turf, and they also expanded and solidified their networks through another form of contract, marriage. While the scholars could put vertical trust only in the hope that others valued their reputations, the businessmen could have confidence in legal institutions to enforce their contracts.

A step further socially and politically extending the "ur-trust" of the family to teachers became an issue in the late-eighteenth century because, as Gunilla-Friederike Budde cogently observes in the fourth case study, once we had the Enlightenment, which required us to be autonomous and responsible human beings, we had to address how we became such human beings. Doing so required trusting school teachers who could help one achieve political autonomy through education. Germans found this more difficult than Britons who were already accustomed to entrusting their children to distant "public" schools, at the same time that they had already instituted a good deal of democracy and had thus developed broad social and political trust.

While this trust was largely limited to the (upper-) middle classes, a century later the "trau-schau-wem" problem extended to the masses migrating to the metropolis, as Bettina Hitzer shows next. In order to gain their trust so as to be able to help them, the Innere Mission, a Protestant charity, displayed pink crosses and distributed handbills explaining its mission. But as her research shows, the reason new arrivals put their trust in it was chiefly that they had heard about the Mission back home, which, Hitzer rightly stresses, gave this institution a personal dimension that facilitated trust. In a similar vein, Claudia Schmoelders describes, in the sixth case study, how the concern with the anonymity of big-city life helped fuel the renewed infatuation with physiognomy--which face can you trust?--in the early twentieth century (along with body types and racial types). She traces the search for "the German face," which culminated in images of the "healthy Aryan," and shows how Hitler, who hardly matched this image, made his physiognomy palatable nonetheless: his propaganda machine made much use of a letter by the prominent promoter of the "Teutonic race," Houston Chamberlain, which described Hitler's face as fully trustworthy. In both cases confidence becomes "trust" by personalizing it.

War requires absolute trust between soldiers, and Thomas Kuehne shows how this sentiment was produced by a construct of comradeship, which one demonstrated by unequivocal Mitmachen, going along. Though a mythical construct, this trust kept soldiers fighting, and believing in the Fuehrer, interlocking personal reliance with political faith, to the very end because it was, in fact, all they had to sustain them psychologically. In the previous war, on the other hand, as Anne Schmidt details instructively in the eighth piece, a huge civilian strike that not only demanded an end to the war but also voting reform demonstrated a "crisis of trust in the regime." Some imperial bureaucrats recognized the importance of gaining and sustaining the people's trust by establishing a trustworthy press/information policy--one that let out even bad news and respected other opinions. This was the first time such a policy of seeking public trust, and hence popular legitimacy for the regime, had been worked out for Germany, and though, of course, not used at the time, it would serve as a prototype for the Weimar Republic.

The Weimar Republic found itself having to revoke its trust in some groups, as Dagmar Ellerbrock next demonstrates, in order to assure the regime's trustworthiness to its constituents at large. In this case, government first limited the right to bear arms following the 1921-22 assassinations of Matthias Erzberger and Walther Rathenau to prevent certain groups from being armed. In 1972 the law was amended to require gun registration, in response to the Baader-Meinhof attacks. In 1994 it was made illegal for former East German SED party members to carry guns--not because of any perceived danger but because the government wanted to give its citizens the symbolic assurance that it would not permit, say, former Stasi officers to walk about armed. Political trust, as Ellerbrock correctly argues, has not been in general decline but has thus been given or withdrawn in response to specific issues.

Communist rule, however, had caused trust to decline to the point of creating "distrust" societies, but as Jan Behrends shows in the tenth case study, even their leaders sought the people's trust and believed they could gain it via their propaganda. This may have worked to some extent in insulated Russia but not in Poland or East Germany, which were more open to outside information sources. Russia's references to crises in these countries as crises in trust and resolution of them with military force did not, understandably, enhance local trust in the Russians as friends. Instead it led people in these satellites to withdraw into the private realm. Such withdrawal, as Behrends aptly points out, is further promoted by the requirement that people trust their leaders--but not one another--since they were required to denounce the unfaithful (this is what made trust a myth among Kuehne's soldiers under the Nazis). Horizontal trust, except among tightly knit groups, is usually difficult without vertical trust.

While friendship between Russia and Poland (and East Germany) failed to come about for lack of trust, Gesa Bluhm contends in the penultimate piece, that a real friendship developed between the archenemies France and Germany. This relationship succeeded, as she demonstrates, because of many years of trust-building initiated by De Gaulle and Adenauer, which culminated in the "Friendship Treaty" of 1963, and gradually involved more and more citizens through various Franco-German clubs, student exchanges, and other grassroots associations. It is important to stress, though, that such personal trust would not have arisen spontaneously without government incentives and institutional trust.

Using the subject of nuclear energy, Albrecht Weisker shows in the final case how trust in experts can shift and result in radical policy change. What triggered this chain reaction was distrust: nuclear power authorities claimed that the leftist contacts of one of their physicists could give terrorists access to nuclear power and had his apartment bugged in 1977. This violation of the constitution already created a public uproar when uncovered by the Spiegel news magazine, but firing the physicist for his political beliefs then totally discredited the nuclear establishment and gave its opponents not only a martyr but also a more credible insider expert (since he was not standing to profit from his information). The public discussion forced by Spiegel's revelations, which subsequently led to a complete reversal in policy, presupposes, Weisker reminds us, an open society in which one can trust government to respond to citizens' concerns when they feel it necessary to voice their distrust.

The contributors generally agree that, once one gets beyond the immediate personal trust of child-parent, family, or friend it is institutions that enable vertical trust and ensure the reliability of horizontal trust. To see the overarching significance of institutions, one need only recall how little friendship or even family could mean under Nazi or Communist rule. These cases (and more recent examples of trust among terrorists) also remind one that trust is not a good thing, "an und fuer sich." While this is clearly illustrated, it might have been made somewhat more theoretically explicit. (The usual distinction is between "thick" in-group trust, with the usual example of Mafia familism, and the "thin" trust of people beyond that which amounts to social capital.)

They also agree that personalizing trust, putting a face on it, facilitates trust, but as the Polish, East German, and other examples show, this consequence is only true if the institutions are already trusted. (Hitler, it must be remembered, was backed by established institutions.) While friendship between two trusted leaders like Adenauer and De Gaulle might encourage their people to seek to establish more relationships, friendship between an East German and a Russian leader, even if it were to exist, probably would not.

The general historical lesson offered by this expansive coverage is that trust, personal and political, becomes progressively more prevalent in the late-eighteenth century, with the Enlightenment illuminating the possibility of trusting one another as equal human beings and the French Revolution illustrating the necessity of distrusting those who put themselves above everyone else. Democratic societies, as various contributors demonstrate, require more or less universal "horizontal" trust, which is a goal progressively pursued in the expansion of the franchise since the initial eighteenth-century revolutions. And to be kept trustworthy, democracies require the ability of individuals and other agents to exercise vertical distrust (as in the case of the Spiegel). Trusting fellow citizens, which rests on the rejection of the use of force, is made possible by institutions, such as those that control the right to bear arms, and those are created on the basis of "the consent of the governed."

As intimated, one might wish to distinguish trust theoretically from expectation and hope, reliance and confidence, belief and faith, and related notions. Such distinctions are not made here, nor is there a "universal" definition of trust.[2] What these historical case studies show instead is that trust has been used in all those senses: people expect and hope that favors (and books) are returned; they rely on their comrades; they have confidence in government; they believe, sometimes even have faith (rightly or wrongly), in charismatic leaders. The cases likewise show that trust is seen as having not only cognitive but also behavioral, emotional, and moral dimensions. People more or less know they can trust those who have shown themselves trustworthy, behave in such a way as to demonstrate their trustworthiness, befriend others to give and receive trust, and view trustworthiness as a moral quality. All this makes these historische Annaeherungen a truly rich panorama of trust in all its social and political manifestation at the same time that it challenges readers to reflect on what is really meant by trust. The volume is, in that sense, a doubly valuable addition to the important current literature on the subject.

Notes

[1]. These range from Niklas Luhmann's most cited Vertrauen classic (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke Verlag, 1968) to Robert Putnam's recent Bowling Alone (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), which extends the concept of trust to social capital.

[2]. Frevert herself relies chiefly on Annette Baier's definition in which, when we trust, we count on some other person to be concerned with things that are important to us. Probably the best and most comprehensive treatment of the concept is Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness (New York: Russell Sage, 2002).

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Citation: Ulf Zimmermann. Review of Frevert, Ute, Vertrauen: Historische Annäherungen. H-German, H-Net Reviews. December, 2004.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=10100

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