Kitabı oku: «Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin», sayfa 14

III The Emerging Giant

Bring in the wine! A toast! To liberty!

(Faust, Part I)

‘FROM HERE AND TODAY,’ Goethe said to friends shortly after the French Revolution, ‘a new epoch in world history is dawning, and you will be able to say that you were there’.¹ During his eighty-two years the genius poet witnessed the dramatic changes which rocked Europe and Berlin, from the Napoleonic Wars and the coming of the Industrial Revolution to the birth of that essentially urban movement which he did so much to bring about – Romanticism. It was a time of great uncertainty, of turmoil and, for many in Germany, of humiliation. At the end of his life Goethe said sadly: ‘I thank God that I am not young in so thoroughly finished a world.’

For an era of such extraordinary importance it started calmly enough. In the last years of his life Frederick the Great had become a recluse, languishing at Sanssouci with only his dogs for company. He had grown weary of life and when he died in 1786 Berliners seemed almost relieved. The Enlightenment was already faltering and the Sturm und Drang (storm and stress) writers were ushering in a new, wilder culture. Then, in 1789, the news of an extraordinary upheaval exploded across Europe.

The French Revolution shook every aspect of European life, from politics to the economy, from literature to philosophy. It propelled Europe headlong into the modern era. When the news from Paris first reached Germany the revolution was heralded as the precursor to a new, better age. Kant praised it, Hölderlin called it a ‘beloved wonder’, the young Hegel called it a ‘glorious sunrise’ and was so moved that he and his friend Schelling planted a Liberty Tree in the Tübingen market place, Klopstock and Schiller became honorary French citizens, Herder and Fichte and Beethoven wrote of a new age of liberty and brotherly love. Wordsworth captured the dream in his immortal lines: ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!’²

The dream was short lived. Within months news of the September massacres had turned erstwhile supporters against the revolution. Iffland and Gneisenau were now scathing about the Terror, von Gentz published Burke’s critique of the revolution, Kotzebue wrote a burlesque mocking Paris, Klopstock mourned that ‘our Golden Dream is shattered’. On 8 February 1793, after the execution of Louis XVI, Schiller wrote, ‘I feel so sickened by these abominable butchers’, and six months later fumed that the revolution had ‘plunged not only that unhappy people itself, but a considerable part of Europe and a whole century, back into barbarism and slavery’.³ The longing for Freiheit, Gleichheit, Brüderlichkeit had ended in the bloody crash of the guillotine.

In Germany the profound disappointment turned to fear when it became obvious that the violence would not be contained in France. War threatened on the Rhine. The Gironde party, hoping for a diversion abroad to prevent the Jacobins and Royalists from gaining power, began to churn out pamphlets and posters proclaiming that ‘France owned the Rhine’ and that it was France’s ‘mission’ to bring the ideas of the revolution to enslaved peoples ‘yearning to be free’. The problem for Germans was that this ‘freedom’ would come through the force of arms.

In April 1792 France declared war on Austria and, by implication, on her ally Prussia. It was the start of the Revolutionary Wars. The disorganized Germans were no match for the zealous French army and by September France had won the great victory at Valmy. By 1794 all German territory west of the Rhine was held by the occupying forces. Austria now fought alone in Italy against the new commander-in-chief of the Army of the Interior, a young Corsican named Napoleon Bonaparte who had already astonished the world with his military genius. On 9 November 1799 he returned to Paris and was made first consul. In 1804 Napoleon Bonaparte declared himself emperor. He was thirty-five years old.

Napoleon was determined to make German states virtual colonies of France. In 1805 he resumed the campaign in the east and by 1806 had dissolved the Holy Roman Empire, forcing the emperor, Francis II, to abdicate. Germany had ceased to exist as a unified political body. Napoleon reorganized the German Reich into a new entity: the Confederation of the Rhine.

Until now Prussia had remained neutral in the European war. In his Annalen Goethe wrote: ‘Europe had changed shape, cities and navies were being destroyed on land and sea, but central and northern Germany profited from a certain feverish peace which enabled us to enjoy a doubtful safety.’ The ‘feverish peace’ which had so encouraged the cultural flowering in Weimar and in Berlin itself was almost at an end. Tension was growing between Paris and Berlin. In 1805 Napoleon had tried to use Prussian-occupied Hanover as bait in his peace negotiations with Britain. Tension was exacerbated when in 1806 he had the Nuremberg bookseller Johann Palm executed for publishing an anonymous pamphlet attacking France: the trial caused a sensation and roused popular anger throughout German lands. In the end it was his violation of the Treaty of Schönbrunn which provoked Frederick William III of Prussia to make his disastrous declaration of war on 1 October 1806. Prussia was now fighting alone against the mighty French army. It was doomed to fail.

It was not surprising that Prussia lost to France in 1806. When Frederick the Great died he left Prussia in the hands of his nephew Frederick William II, who was neither intelligent nor dedicated enough to keep the worn-out system alive. He had ignored the army and the bureaucracy while creating a glittering life at court – it was he who invited Mozart to Berlin to conduct The Marriage of Figaro. It was renowned for its courtesans, its corruption and its domination by the strange cult called the Rosicrucian Order. The members of the sect had transformed life at court with their palace seances in which people communed with spirits of the dead or with the elements, and with their truly depraved rituals which were said to prolong human life.⁴ When the system began to fall apart the king had merely increased controls and religious censorship. Instead of modernizing, Berlin had taken on the appearance of a frenzied and decadent eighteenth-century court. Frederick William II died in 1797 but his successor Frederick William III brought little change. He was less ostentatious and debauched than his predecessor but he lacked character, finding it impossible to make decisions and dithering and procrastinating at a time when Prussia needed a firm hand. It is telling that it was not he but his consort, the beautiful young Queen Luise, who would become the heroine of Berlin for taking a stand against the French and against Napoleon. By the time Napoleon invaded Prussia Berlin had languished under thirty years of incompetent rule.⁵

Napoleon needed only one week, from 10 to 17 October, to smash this once formidable opponent. Prussian divisions were knocked down one by one while the fortresses from Erfurt to Halle, Spandau to Stettin to Magdeburg surrendered in turn – only Kolberg at the Prussian Pomeranian coast held out until 1807. The final battles were fought on 14 October 1806, at Auerstedt and to the south at Jena. The latter was an unmitigated disaster. Last-minute changes in the Prussian battle plan resulted in confusion and a tangle of troops with no supply lines and no communication. At that moment the French attacked and within hours the Prussians were retreating in panic. One young man who heard the noise of battle from his room in Jena was Friedrich Hegel, who hastily scribbled the last words of his Phenomenology of Spirit so that he could hide it from the occupying forces. The Prussian army, which had risen to such prominence under Frederick the Great, had collapsed.

News of the catastrophe at Jena reached Berlin the following day and it became obvious that the city could no longer be defended. Panicky officials began to load wagons with everything from weapons from the arsenal to state papers; the king and queen were spirited off to Königsberg and those with means fled east. As the governor of the city, General von der Schulenburg-Kehnert, prepared to leave he posted the infamous declaration explaining how Berliners were expected to behave now that they had been defeated. ‘The King has lost a battle,’ it read. ‘The first duty of the citizen is now to be quiet. This duty I charge the inhabitants of Berlin to perform. The King and his brothers live.’ With that, Berliners were left to face French occupation alone. Henriette Herz, who calmly decided to remain in her Berlin apartments, wrote of the announcement: ‘How laconic! And yet part of it is superfluous. For who in Berlin thought of disturbing his quiet? The announcement was read, but few countenances showed any expression of fear, most no expression at all; at the utmost one or two people went away shaking their heads with an air that seemed to say, really, it has come a little too quick!’⁶

Napoleon entered Berlin on 27 October 1806 and as his triumphal procession made its way under the newly completed Brandenburg Gate and down Unter den Linden curious Berliners lined the streets to watch him pass. The sculptor Gottfried Schadow, who had designed the new Quadriga atop the Brandenburg Gate, sketched the stubble-faced victor glowering at the people from under his hat. That evening French troops celebrated by breaking into churches, plundering wine cellars and raiding food stores.⁷ Napoleon dismissed the acting governor Prince Hatzfeld and ordered the councillors to gather 2,000 eminent Berliners together; sixty were elected to a new city council, with seven forming the executive. He appeased Berliners by promising political reforms, the institution of the Code Napoléon and a modern constitution, but soon after the signatures were dry on the Treaty of Tilsit of July 1807 it became clear that he saw Berlin as little more than a subjugated capital from which to squeeze reparations.

Tilsit was Prussia’s final humiliation. Despite the occupation of Berlin Prussia had remained formally allied to Russia and at war with France, but on 14 June 1807 Napoleon defeated the tsar at Friedland and Russia sued for peace. On 9 July Tsar Alexander and Napoleon met on a luxurious raft on the river Niemen; Frederick William was forced to wait on the riverbank while the two leaders signed the treaty which dismembered Prussia and removed her territory west of the Elbe along with most Prussian-held territory in Poland, which became the grand duchy of Warsaw under the duke of Saxony. Prussia, which had had a population of 6 million at the death of Frederick the Great, now had only 4,938,000 people. Only four provinces were left, all of which were occupied by Napoleon. The land was impoverished and weakened by war and the Prussian army was reduced to 42,000 men, 16,000 of whom were to be at Napoleon’s disposal. Furthermore, Prussia was forced to pay an indemnity of over 100 million francs and also to cover the costs of the occupation of a huge foreign army of over 150,000 men, a burden which would cost 216 million francs.⁸ Napoleon knew that Prussia would be unable to raise the money quickly and used this tardiness as an excuse to continue his occupation. At the same time, the French stripped Berlin of its wealth and its few treasures; the official list of plunder included 116 paintings, 96 busts and statues, 183 bronzes, 538 gems, 7,262 medals and coins, manuscripts, amber and the Quadriga, which had only just been placed atop the Brandenburg Gate. This was a meagre haul compared to the 4,000 cartloads of booty taken from Rome, which became the foundation of the Musée Napoléon (the Louvre), but the loss of their few treasures irked the population. There was also a good deal of unofficial looting and Berliners were forced to watch as officers piled goods on to boats and sent them off to Paris.⁹ Berliners also resented the rowdy troops quartered in their homes and the creation of huge French barracks like the Camp Napoléonburg in Charlottenburg, which housed 25,000 men. Manufacturers and merchants suffered from a drop in trade brought about by Napoleon’s ‘continental system’, but even when Napoleon replaced the blockade with an import ban of between 40 and 50 per cent, scarcity and price rises caused hardship. Berliners could not believe that their mighty capital had fallen so quickly and so far.

Napoleon was astounded by the ease of his victory over Prussia. When he visited the tomb of Frederick the Great he told his officers: ‘Hats off, gentlemen! If he were still alive, we would not be here.’¹⁰ Napoleon’s words were echoed by Queen Luise, who lamented that Prussia had ‘gone to sleep on the laurels of Frederick the Great’. The problem lay in part with Frederick’s own success. His obsessive control over the army and administration had kept enlightened absolutism alive long past its natural life. His successors had ignored his advice, but for an artificial state made strong primarily by its oversized army the decision to allow it to decay had been a form of suicide.

Napoleon’s occupation of Berlin did have one surprising benefit: it ushered in a period of reform which led to profound changes in the army, education and administration of Prussia. The reason was clear. Under the old system of absolutism the monarchy had seen no need to change. Napoleon’s lightning strike had exposed the rot in the system. Even the reactionary king understood that if he did not introduce reforms Prussia would never again attain great power status in Europe. He did not want reforms because he felt they were right; he introduced them because he had no choice. Prussia could no longer survive as an absolutist state. It was a question of reform or perish.

Berlin was now under French military control and although the king was in Königsberg the government in Berlin did appear to be pro-French, not least because open defiance of Napoleon would have led to immediate reprisals. In return for his loyalty the king was allowed some autonomy in the running of his government and managed to appoint a number of ministers who were given unheard of authority despite being clandestine opponents of France. Frederick William advised that the Prussian state should ‘replace by spiritual strength those material things which have been lost’. The reformers wanted to modernize the army, improve the educational system, and above all create a constitutional government. Under normal circumstances the king would have seen these ideas as radical and dangerous. As it was, they were his only hope if he was to preserve his own power.

The city of Berlin remains something of a shrine to the reformers who struggled to modernize Prussia under the watchful eye of the French. Statues, plaques, busts, streets and squares still bear the names of men hailed as everything from German nationalists to the ‘fathers of German democracy’. Humboldt University – so named by the Soviets in 1945 – is graced by statues of the brothers Alexander and Wilhelm; statues of Freiherr vom and zum Stein and August von Gneisenau stand on Unter den Linden; Hardenbergstrasse, Hardenberg Platz, Gneisenaustrasse and Niebuhrstrasse criss-cross the west end. Ironically these ‘great Berliners’ had come from elsewhere: Scharnhorst and Hardenberg were Hanoverians, Niebuhr was educated in Holstein, Stein was Franconian and educated in Hanover, Blücher and Queen Luise were from Mecklenburg, and only the Humboldt brothers, Schleiermacher and von Schön were born in Prussia. Many had originally come to Berlin to work in the civil service and were shocked to find their adopted city subjugated by a foreign power. The reformers were universally anti-French. Stein had initially adopted a tolerant line but when Napoleon continued to demand larger sums from destitute Prussia he realized that the only course open to them was to wage war on France and provoke a popular uprising.¹¹ Gneisenau said, ‘As a patriot I sigh. In the time of peace we have neglected much, occupied ourselves with trivialities, flattered the people’s love of show, and neglected war which is a very serious matter.’¹² Heinrich von Bülow wrote in 1806 that leaders who let even large armies ‘lie idle in garrison service, where it rusts and bastardizes and sinks into a spiritless militia of the sort that German students call Philistine … The fact is certain, Prussia has lost her independence since she forgot how to make use of 200,000 men.’¹³ And Hardenberg had warned the king: ‘a radical treatment of the defects of our administration is absolutely and urgently necessary.’¹⁴ The most influential of the reformers was Stein, who was appointed after Tilsit in July 1807. He would be in power only one year, but his impact on the government and administration of Berlin would be remarkable.

Baron vom und zum Stein came from an old Thuringian family but had moved to Berlin to take up a post in the Prussian General Directory in July 1804. He was highly independent, had a fiery temperament and a determination which had already set him apart from his colleagues. After Jena Stein and his friend Hardenberg persuaded the king to dismiss the Kabinett, the powerful but irresponsible group of courtiers which had helped lead Prussia to ruin and included men like Lombard, Beyme and von Köckeritz and the ineffectual and stupid minister of foreign affairs Haugwitz; Lombard had in fact been a traitor, feeding information to Napoleon while pretending to advise the king. In 1807 Stein was presented to the king as the ‘only man’ who could save Prussia and in his memoirs Stein recalled looking out at the defeated capital, a sight which fuelled his desire to create a ‘rousing, moral, religious, patriotic spirit in the nation, of inspiring it anew with courage, self-confidence, readiness for every sacrifice in the cause of independence of the foreigners and of national honour, and of seizing the first favourable opportunity to begin the bloody and hazardous struggle for both’.¹⁵

Stein began by taking over the Civil Organization Commission, which included men like von Schön, Niebuhr and Stägemann. Like Stein they had been deeply influenced by Adam Smith, had worked to rid Prussia of backward class divisions and hoped to set up representative institutions in their place.¹⁶ Stein’s first accomplishment was the Emancipation Edict of 9 October 1807, which freed the estates from ancient restrictions and allowed all men to engage in the occupation or business of their choice irrespective of birth; it abolished serfdom and allowed noblemen to engage in trade while curbing the restrictive guilds. Stein’s government reforms were equally radical. The Edict for Local Institutions abolished all existing administrative bodies, reorganized local government districts and centralized the administration of the state to allow for coherent centralized government and for the efficient distribution of resources. The new Council of State was to be presided over by a president, ministers of the crown, royal princes, and appointed privy councillors; a smaller body, the Council of Ministers, was to deal with ordinary government business. For this five ministries were created: Foreign Affairs, War, Finance, Justice and Internal Affairs, with the first meeting held in the Berlin Rathaus on 6 July 1809. The council survived until 1918 and its creation marked the beginning of Berlin’s domination of Prussian, then German, national government affairs. For the first time ministers were freed from the direct interference of the king and the court. At the municipal level Berlin was given special status, with its own elected city council and with a magistrate and an elected Bürgermeister and Oberbürgermeister. The mayors were still subject to official approval by the king, and police and justice came under state jurisdiction, but Berliners gained control over many other functions from road building to housing. These would prove crucial in regulating development in the coming era of rapid industrialization and would later make Berlin’s municipal administration the envy of Europe.

While Stein reformed the civil service Wilhelm von Humboldt tackled education reform. Born in 1767, the sparkling, generous Humboldt had long been a popular figure in the Berlin salons of Henriette Herz, Dorothea Veit and Carl Laroche. He had championed classical education and the concept of Bildung from an early age. For him education was not merely the chance to learn a trade or set of skills but rather gave the individual the chance to develop his Humanität, his human spirit. He was a meritocrat and believed in education for all irrespective of birth – his reforms would do much to further the rise of the bourgeoisie in nineteenth-century Berlin. In 1808 he was appointed the king’s chief of educational and ecclesiastical affairs in the new Ministry of the Interior and set about reshaping the Prussian education system. He abolished class-based schools like the Ritter or Knight’s Academies, made education compulsory for all, improved elementary schooling and introduced a classical curriculum into a new kind of secondary school which he called the Gymnasium. His proudest achievement was the creation of a new university.

Berlin University came about as a direct result of the Napoleonic Wars. The Peace of Tilsit had forced Prussia to hand over the universities of Duisberg, Erlangen and, the most important, Halle; neither of the two remaining universities, Königsberg or Frankfurt-an-der-Oder, were regarded as suitable as the central Prussian seat of learning. In September 1807 the king agreed to the creation of a new university in Berlin and on 16 August 1809 he pledged an annual sum of 150,000 thalers and donated the beautiful Prince Henry’s Palace on Unter den Linden to the new university. The Humboldt brothers now travelled throughout Germany recruiting for the faculty, and the list of luminaries they attracted was impressive – the first rector was the famous professor of jurisprudence, Schmalz, while the first elected rector was the philosopher Fichte. The university could soon boast Schleiermacher and De Wette in theology, Friedländer, Hufeland, Reil and Holrausch in medicine, Wolf, Buttman, Rühs and Niebuhr in history, Tralles in mathematics (Gauss turned down the offer), Savigny in law, Oltmanns in astronomy and a host of other prominent intellectuals of the day.¹⁷ The university opened on 15 October 1810 and the first work published was Niebuhr’s Roman History. It quickly became a central feature of Berlin life and a magnet for leading German intellectuals, many of whom, from the Humboldts to Fichte, from the Grimm brothers to Schelling, from Hegel to Ranke, would leave an indelible mark on German intellectual life.¹⁸

It was here that the concept of Bildung and of Wissenschaft (knowledge) evolved into a movement which would sweep nineteenth-century Germany and Europe. The student was not to focus on a specific subject or learn a practical profession through repeating a restricted programme, but was to learn how to be curious, how to explore new subjects and to pursue knowledge for its own sake. Berlin University became something of a temple to knowledge, and its professors were treated with reverence not because of their birth, but because they embodied the classical ideal of the educated man. The magnanimous Humboldt was perfectly serious when he said that it was ‘no less useless for the carpenter to have learned Greek than it is for the scholar to make tables’. Berlin came closer to achieving his ideal of a free classical education for all in the first half of the nineteenth century than at any time since.¹⁹

The other institution to undergo reform was the military. For centuries the Prussian army had been a state within a state, living in a world of its own with its own police, its own codes of conduct, its own church, and with virtually no links to civil society. Prussians had been amazed to see French soldiers march into their country, fired up with patriotism and nationalistic pride. The introduction of conscription in 1792 had not only created an endless supply of recruits, it had also unified the nation and the army. The French soldier was not a sujet harangued and beaten like his Prussian counterpart; he was a citoyen. The French military, it was said, was the French people in uniform. The reformers in Prussia hoped that if they could harness the will of the people in a similar way they could provoke a national uprising and rid Prussia of the French occupiers.

The main reformers, including Gneisenau, Boyen and Count Götzen, were brought together in Hardenberg’s Military Organization Commission, but the most influential of all was General Scharnhorst, whose story mirrors the revolutionary nature of his times. In any previous era this boy of peasant stock would have been barred from a military career but he lived in a revolutionary age. As a young man he entered military school in Hanover and his brilliant strategic mind soon brought him to the attention of his superiors. He moved to Prussia where he entered the service and, although he was constantly put down by men – including General Yorck – for being a commoner, his lectures were recognized for their brilliance. Scharnhorst was eventually ennobled. His influence cannot be underestimated; Arndt called him the ‘greatest of the reformers’ while Clausewitz called him the ‘father of my mind’.²⁰

The military reforms were radical and reflected Scharnhorst’s meritocratic views. In 1807 he dismissed 208 woolly-minded officers and replaced them with professionals; he opened the army to commoners; he dissolved the old cadet schools; he set up new institutes, including the Berlin Academy, and abolished the infamous and degrading punishments so characteristic of the Prussian military. More revolutionary still was Scharnhorst’s idea of the creation of a new force, a militia called the Landwehr. Napoleon had limited the Prussian army to 43,000 troops but Scharnhorst quietly sent soldiers on leave every month and replaced them with new recruits, building up a secret reserve which would ultimately enable Prussia to raise 280,000 men. On 17 March 1808 Napoleon permitted the creation of the Landwehr for all men between seventeen and forty not in the regular army, and in April allowed the Landsturm for all those capable of auxiliary work. Napoleon had assumed that they would be cannon fodder for his own armies; in fact they would eventually fight against France in the Wars of Liberation.