The up-timers could claim considerable credit for inspiring some of the rapidly growing voluntary associations, true enough, especially the trade union s and the credit union s. Others seemed to them somewhat outlandish. Americans were certainly familiar with sports clubs, but they were quite unaccustomed to seeing such clubs—as with most of the insurance cooperatives—so closely associated with a political movement. But they would have been perfectly familiar to the German Social Democrats of the nineteenth century who had surrounded their powerful political party with such organizations.
Gretchen herself took the situation for granted, including the informal give-and-take between the CoC headquarters and the Rathaus. At any given time of the day or night, you were just as likely to find a city sanitation official discussing his business with CoC activists in their tavern as you were to find CoC activists in the tavern at the Rathaus wrangling over issues involving the city militias with one of the mayor's deputies.
She'd experienced that sort of informal dual power before, during the siege of Amsterdam. There, too, the CoC she'd organized had been as much the center of authority as the city's official government. And the reason had been much the same: military weakness on the part of the official authorities combined with very real if often informal military strength on the part of the radical plebeians.
When Gretchen entered the meeting room and saw the uncertain and dubious expression on the face of the woman from the Vogtland, it was obvious to her that the Vogtlander did not know what to make of it all. Gretchen was not surprised. The Vogtland, because of its terrain and being under Saxon control, had been isolated from the political developments which had transformed much of the Germanies since the Ring of Fire. The region had shared in those developments, true. In some ways, in fact, the political struggle was even sharper than most places, especially since the Saxon elector had placed Holk in charge of pacifying the region. But the Vogtlander rebels were programmatically limited—"down with the elector!" pretty much summed it up—and were tactically one-sided.
Gretchen took her seat across the table from the Vogtland woman, whose name was Anna Piesel. She was apparently betrothed to Georg Kresse, the recognized leader of the Vogtland rebellion. Tata sat down beside her.
Gretchen had to be careful here. The Committees of Correspondence were the largest and best-known—certainly the best-financed and organized—of Europe's revolutionary organizations. But they were not the only one. In Franconia, for instance, the dominant organization was the Ram movement.
The CoCs were the only revolutionary organization with a national scope, even an international one. So it was inevitable that they would overshadow the other groups, all of whom were regional in character. In times past, overbearing attitudes by CoC activists ignoring local conditions had produced some bad clashes. Gretchen had had to intervene personally in one such conflict, in Suhl, when the local CoC tried to run roughshod over the gun manufacturers who, whatever their political faults, still commanded the loyalty and confidence of the city's population.
The situation in the Vogtland presented a similar problem. There was no question that Kresse's movement had the support and allegiance of most people in the region who were opposed to the elector's rule. Unfortunately, from what Gretchen and the other national CoC leaders could determine, Kresse had a tendency to see political problems through a military lens. That was perhaps inevitable, given the origins of the movement and the conditions in southwestern Saxony. But while that sort of almost-exclusively military approach might work well enough in the mountains of the Vogtland, it was an insufficient basis for establishing a new political regime in the region as a whole.
Saxony was not the Vogtland. Dresden and Leipzig were major cities, cultural as well as population centers. The university at Leipzig, in fact, was the second-oldest in the Germanies. It had been founded in 1409 and was still very prominent, especially in law.
There was simply no way that a movement based in the Vogtland, and one whose approach was almost entirely military, was going to provide the basis for replacing the rule of the elector with a Saxon republic. On their own, Kresse and his people didn't even have the military strength to overthrow John George. They certainly didn't have the political experience and acumen to handle the situation that would be produced in Saxony if—as Gretchen and all the CoC leaders assumed was going to happen—Gustav Adolf crushed the Saxon army in the coming war.
What then? The same guerrilla tactics that worked well enough against a general like Holk would not work against the sort of military administration the Swedes would set up in Saxony. Gustav Adolf did not rule like John George—and, perhaps more directly to the point, would not try to suppress the Vogtland using the methods of Heinrich Holk. Dealing with him was like dealing with Fredrik Hendrik, the prince of Orange in the Low Countries—or the new Spanish king, for that matter. Such men were not brutes, and they were willing to make accommodations when necessary. Sometimes they were even allies.