Reusch is remembered two centuries later for his surviving written recollections of Kant and his friends before and during the years dominated by the French Revolution of 1789 and the ensuing wars which it triggered across Europe.
Between 1793 and 1797 he studied aspects of Jurisprudence at the University of Königsberg where, like his father, his teachers included Immanuel Kant, whose lectures he is reported to have attended on subjects such as Logic, Metaphysics and Physiography.
Having visited Berlin in order to compete in and pass the appropriate exam on 31 January 1803, he received a Justiz – Commissarius certificate which entitled him to work in a junior judicial post as an Assessor.
The political outlook remained far from certain in the aftermath of the Treaty of Lunéville, however, and Reusch was evidently in no hurry to launch his judicial career far from home in a province which might easily be annexed at short notice into one of the three competing empires surrounding Prussia.
Reusch instead spent the first half of 1803 undertaking a “grand tour”, visiting in rapid succession Magdeburg, Halberstadt and Quedlinburg before crossing over the Harz mountains to Göttingen and as far west as Kassel, before completing the circle via Eisenach, Gotha, Weimar, Halle an der Saale, Leipzig, Dresden and Berlin back home to Königsberg where he arrived on 17 June 1803.
However, following the ceding of the Polish provinces (rebranded Duchy of Warsaw) to the French at the end of 1807 a number of Prussian judges more senior and experienced than he was, were relocated to East Prussia.
His starting salary of 730 Thalers implies a position of some importance in the structure which, as Prussia struggled to reinvent itself following the catastrophic events of 1807, was emerging as the kingdom's government.
He was involved in creating local policing and financial authorities and in detailed reconfiguration of fire insurance arrangements and of the Commerz–Collegium (loosely, 'chamber of commerce').
In 1815, as the practical difficulties and traumas created by nearly a quarter century of war began slowly to recede, he was selected as chief advisor to the East Prussia Oberpräsident, following the transfer of his predecessor in the post to Berlin.
A little later he participated at a conference in Berlin involving Finance Minister Hans Graf von Bülow, convened to work on the creation of a new tax system for a new Prussia.
The idea was blocked by Chancellor von Hardenberg on the grounds that the regional government in Königsberg had already lost 15 experienced members and should not afford the loss of any more.
Two months later the king sent an appreciative letter to the East Prussian Oberpräsident Auerswald in which he thanked the regional government in Königsberg for the eagerness of its officials to serve in the creation of a Landwehr (standing militia), in which he cited Reusch by name.
One of the two departments was to look after church and schools administration and the other attended to direct taxation, government lands and forests, and other "interior ministry" matters administered at the provincial level.
Despite the separation into two administrative departments, directorial control of both of them was entrusted to a single man, Privy Counsellor Reusch, who was promoted at the same time to the rank of Oberregierungsrat.
[1][2] On 12 October 1809 Christian Friedrich Reusch married Marianne Friederike Heinriette Schultz, the daughter of a senior official from Labiau (as Polessk was known before 1945).
[1] Immanuel Kant became well known in intellectual circles for the dinners which he regularly hosted at his home, at which pressing philosophical and other compelling topics of those times were discussed.