Von Städten, Gütern und Dörfern

In Mecklenburg-Schwerin, the Middle Ages only ended in 1918/19. Along with Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Mecklenburg-Schwerin was one of the two parts of the Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg. Mecklenburg as a whole was an anomaly in the wider political framework of the German nation-state that had been established in 1871. Of the twenty-two monarchical entities and three free cities that made up the German federative state, Mecklenburg was the only state that did not have a modern constitutional system. Instead, Mecklenburg was governed by a landständisches system. The Diet of Mecklenburg, representing both halves of the state, was made up of two Stände , or estates, comprising the Landschaft on the one hand, i.e. representatives of the towns, and the Ritterschaft , representing the Ritter (knights), owners of the manorial landed estates, on the other. For Mecklenburg-Schwerin alone, these were forty-two towns in which the local authorities were mostly appointed by the ruler, and about 600 manorial estates or Rittergüter . This was not only a system that lacked any structures for the horizontally integrated political representation of the overwhelming majority of the population—even one that was based on unequal franchise systems, as in the other constitutions at state level prior to 1914. In addition, Mecklenburg-Schwerin lacked any coherent, generalised administrative structures along the Prussian model. As in the political representation at the top tier, local administration was based on the ownership of real estate and was divided into three separate pillars without any effective co-ordination. In the Domanium , the large landed estate of the grand duke, the village authority was appointed by the Domanialamt . Towns had their municipal authorities, and, in the manorial estates, the Ritter was at the same time the property owner, the local state and the police authority, and his private estate was a public administrative entity. As it persisted until late 1918, this was probably the most backward political and administrative system in the whole of Europe: even in Russia, the creation of the zemstvos had ushered in a system of coherent local self-administration

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