Between Home and the City: Receiving and Controlling Strangers in Altona, 1740–1765

Abstract

This article investigates shifting expectations of hospitality and security in the eighteenth-century free town Altona. Although the Danish authorities preferred to keep the city relatively unregulated, the instruction for the burgher captains from 1748 introduced a more organized evening patrol, and the new police instructions from 1754 demanded detailed records of lodging guests to be reported to the police director on a daily basis. This order was motivated further in the city’s police director Johann Peter Willebrand’s book on the ideal police practice, Abrégé de la Police (1765). In this book, the importance of politeness and hospitality towards strangers and guests in the city was emphasized with clarifying examples from his experiences, ambitions, and seemingly utopian ideals, which the burgher captains were expected to support by performing their everyday duties. On the basis of Willebrand’s writings, police records, administrative correspondence, and travel accounts, as well as the burgher captains’ complaints about the hardship of their work, this article shows how the reforms of public security in eighteenth-century Altona strengthened colliding expectations of private and public responsibilities, and resulted in requests from the burgher captains for a more clear-cut division between home and city.

The establishment of the police office in mid-eighteenth-century Altona: new opportunities for privacy in transitional times?

“…65 Rising tensions over the issue came to the fore in the summer of 1764, when the heads of the burgher patrols submitted a joint protest to the Danish king about their workload in general, focusing especially on the awkwardness of entering private houses at a late hour. 66 This context of contested institutional practice makes it highly important to further investigate the documentation in the Kuhlenkamp case, as it prompted both the police director and other local authorities to assess the increasing transgressions across the outer door into the house.…”