Kitap dosya olarak indirilemez ancak uygulamamız üzerinden veya online olarak web sitemizden okunabilir.
Kitabı oku: «Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin», sayfa 17
Given the pervading climate it is not surprising that Biedermeier Berlin produced little art of note. Sadly many of the great artists who had been drawn to the city during the heady days of the Romantic period now found their careers blocked. Felix Mendelssohn, who in 1820 had re-introduced Bach’s St Matthew Passion to Berlin and who should have succeeded to the directorship of the Singakademie, was passed over for the dull Karl Friedrich Rungenhagen. Carl Maria von Weber, who had inaugurated Romantic opera with the première of Der Freischütz in 1821, was rejected by the court composer Gaspare Spontini and moved to Dresden: the Berliner Giacomo Meyerbeer was forced to leave for lack of work and was only offered the position of director of the Opera in 1842 under Frederick William IV; Hector Berlioz and Richard Wagner both spent time in Berlin but were disappointed by its repressive atmosphere and moved elsewhere. Even the great sculptor and artist Johann Gottfried Schadow, who had created the Quadriga and who had been so scathing about the French occupation of Berlin, received no more commissions in his own city. He was superseded by the more solid Christian Daniel Rauch, who completed the great equestrian statue of Frederick the Great and had statues of the successful generals of the Napoleonic Wars – Blücher, Yorck, Gneisenau, Scharnhorst and Bülow – lined up along Unter den Linden. But Berlin still failed to impress. When Pastor Karl Philipp Moritz first saw London he exclaimed: ‘How great had seemed Berlin to me when I saw it from the tower of St Mary’s and looked down on it from the hill at Tempelhof … how insignificant it now seemed when I set it in my imagination against London!’67 The only field in which Biedermeier excelled and served to change the spartan view of Berlin was in architecture. This was largely thanks to the gift of one man, Karl Friedrich Schinkel.68
In 1826 the Viennese writer and friend of Beethoven’s, Franz Grillparzer, journeyed to Berlin in one of the new post coaches: ‘Finally the towers of Berlin,’ he wrote. ‘Through the gates. Beautiful. The collection of buildings more beautiful than I have seen together. The streets wide. Kingly.’69 Such praise was rare before the arrival of Schinkel, the greatest German architect of the nineteenth century. It was he who, over the space of a long and dynamic career, transformed central Berlin, giving the city centre a unified feel with his elegant neo-classical buildings in the ‘Prussian style’. Schinkel gave form to Unter den Linden, the Platz der Akademie, the Lustgarten and, with Lenné, the Tiergarten. If, as it is said, the first Roman emperor ‘found a city of brick and left it marble’, Schinkel found a city of wood and left it brick. But much of Schinkel’s brick was covered with plaster, swathed in marble and surrounded by columns of Saxon sandstone, sculptures and elaborate wrought iron. His gifts ranged from interior and set design – he created fabulous iron furniture, was one of the first to do lithographs, and designed the magnificent star-studded set for the Queen of the Night in Mozart’s The Magic Flute – to draughtsmanship and painting. But Schinkel’s career also reflected the triumph of reaction in Berlin. He had started out as an ardent Prussian reformer but, like so many of his generation, had retreated from political life after the disappointment following the Wars of Liberation. Instead he became a pillar of the establishment in the apolitical and naive world of Biedermeier Berlin.
Schinkel’s life spanned the era from the end of absolutism to the end of the Biedermeier years. He was born in 1781 in the little garrison town of Neurippen to the north of Berlin. It was a time of extraordinary change. By the time the family moved to Berlin in 1794 Kant had published The Critique of Pure Reason, Frederick the Great had died, and the ideas of the French Revolution were reverberating across Europe. The young Karl was sent to school at the famous Graue Kloster but in 1797 decided to become an architect after seeing Friedrich Gilly’s plans for a vast monument to Frederick the Great. He studied with Gilly and was given his first commission – a garden pavilion – in 1806. The revolution and ensuing turmoil had a powerful influence both on his personal and professional life. Schinkel watched from his rooms on the Alexanderplatz as French troops marched into Berlin in 1806 and like many of his contemporaries he was roused into a patriotic fervour by Fichte’s 1807 Addresses to the German Nation. He joined the Berlin Romantic literary circle and was befriended by Achim and Bettina von Arnim, Clemens von Brentano, Karl von Savigny and others; like many of them he volunteered to serve in the Prussian Landsturm after the declaration of war on France. Schinkel’s ardent patriotism was reflected in his work. By 1805 he had already designed a monument to Martin Luther; he would soon create sets for Undine and Faust and planned to illustrate Brentano’s fairy tales. His paintings, like the melancholy Bohemian Mountain Range at Sunset, were executed in the high Romantic style and were clearly influenced by Caspar David Friedrich’s lonely landscapes which he saw exhibited in Berlin in 1810. During the occupation he painted large dioramas of historic scenes to bolster public morale and in 1812 exhibited the vast Burning of Moscow to emphasize Russian fighting spirit against the Grande Armée: it showed thick brown clouds of smoke billowing over Moscow and the people stoically walking away as the French moved up towards the high towers of the Kremlin.
Schinkel’s patriotic service continued after the defeat of Napoleon. He designed the decorations which streamed from the Brandenburg Gate for the victory parade in 1814 and he helped to organize the great exhibition of war booty returned to Berlin from Paris. He produced a medal for Blücher showing the great general as Hercules in a lionskin on one side and St Michael defeating Satan – a reference to Napoleon – on the other. He designed the Iron Cross – and created the Pickelhaube or pointed helmet, which would later become the very symbol of Prussian militarism. Above all, his patriotism was reflected in his architecture, and in his use of the ‘national style’ – Gothic. Schinkel believed that Gothic architecture represented Romanticism, eternal Christianity, the lost Germany of the Middle Ages, even the ‘German soul’. The Gothic style provided a model for the development of Prussia and embodied the call for liberty and freedom, for reform and for the creation of a unified German state. Most of his early plans were in this style. When Queen Luise died in 1810 Schinkel submitted to the king drawings for a memorial chapel complete with guardian angels, high arches and tracery windows meant to evoke the very entrance to paradise. After the war he designed a vast Liberation Fountain, which had the Germanic chieftain Hermann rearing up on his horse and holding a spear to the belly of the fallen Roman Quintilius Varus who, weighed down by his imperial armour, bore a striking likeness to Napoleon. He designed a great Gothic cathedral to commemorate the Wars of Liberation and submitted plans for the rebuilding of the Petrikirche. But none of these huge projects was ever built. The reasons were political.
During the Napoleonic period Frederick William III had appeared to support the reformers, the German nationalists, the volunteers for the Landsturm, and the liberals who wanted political change, but with the defeat of France he quickly reverted to his old ways. Calls for political reform, for a unified Germany, for a constitution and for a representative government were now considered subversive and dangerous and the Gothic style was intrinsically linked to them. As such, it fell out of favour. Instead, the king now preferred buildings which gave an air of stability and safety, above all those designed in the neo-classical style.
Schinkel’s work was greatly affected by this change in royal preference. Frederick William III chose a Doric mausoleum over a Gothic tomb for his wife and halted plans for the great Gothic cathedral in Berlin because of a lack of funds. Schinkel had to make do with the cast iron Gothic monument in Kreuzberg created under the direction of Major von Reiche, the nephew of the eminent general ennobled after Waterloo, and although the crown prince commissioned a number of small Gothic monuments they did not amount to much. By 1820 Schinkel had been forced to abandon the Gothic in favour of classicism. Some saw this as tantamount to a betrayal of the fight for German unity, but despite his love for medieval architecture Schinkel wanted above all to build. For over a decade his most important work would reflect the needs of the reactionary Prussian state.
To be fair Schinkel did not see the two styles as mutually exclusive. Other artists, from Beethoven to Hölderlin to Möricke – and even Goethe in Faust – had mixed elements of Romanticism and neo-classicism and Schinkel convinced himself that educating people about the values of ancient Greece was the next best thing to evoking the spirit of medieval Germany. For him Greek architecture had been the product of a harmonious, integrated and free society which could be seen as a model for Prussia – ‘the most felicitous state of freedom within the law’. And art and culture were the key: beautiful buildings could, in Schinkel’s words, ‘ennoble all human relations’. But the view epitomized the problem of the Biedermeier world. It was naive to think that the creation of buildings and paintings and sculpture could somehow educate the people in democratic principles. Schinkel had convinced himself that his buildings were somehow ‘liberating’ Berlin. On the contrary he was legitimating the rule of one of the most reactionary regimes in Europe.
Schinkel’s career as an architect began in earnest in 1818, four years after the Congress of Vienna, with the completion of his first great commission – the Neue Wache or New Guard House. It was a small monument to Prussia’s victorious army. Built in the shape of a Roman castrum with a Doric portico of six simple columns it remains the most striking monument on Unter den Linden. The king liked it and it led to new commissions. Within the next two decades Schinkel touched virtually every corner of the city centre, converting the baroque cathedral across from the Schloss, planning the Lustgarten, creating the Schlossbrücke, building the Schauspielhaus or theatre, which opened in 1824, and a number of private houses and palaces, including a residence for Prince William on Unter den Linden and the Palais Redern on Pariser Platz, and drawing up plans for everything from a new library to gatehouses for the Potsdamer Platz. In a letter to Sulpice Boissiére in 1822 he said he hoped his work would create ‘beauty in itself and for the city’.70
His crowning work in the neo-classical style, and the building which he considered his greatest work, was the Altes Museum, which was completed in 1830. It remains a great Berlin landmark. From the outside it looms like a vast Greek stoa with its grand row of eighteen Ionic columns marching in perfect symmetry across the northern end of the Lustgarten. The vast rotunda, modelled on the Pantheon in Rome, is hidden from view from the outside and comes as a marvellous surprise to the visitor. Schinkel intended the rotunda to be a temple to art and culture; a sanctuary where ‘the sight of a beautiful and sublime room must make the visitor receptive and create the proper mood for the enjoyment and acknowledgement of what the building contains’.71 After studying the exhibits the visitor could leave via the Treppenhaus, which connected the museum-temple to the busy secular world of Berlin. The position was vital. The museum was placed across from the Royal Palace, flanked by the arsenal and the cathedral, and next to the Stock Exchange and the Neue Packhof or New Customs House, which was completed in 1832. By placing it here Schinkel was trying to prove that art could fit into the civil order and to demonstrate that culture was indeed equal to the pillars of Prussian society represented by the military, the monarchy, the Church and the new emerging power of industry. It was an absurd delusion. Art was not as powerful as the rival institutions and never would be. When Robert Smirke designed the British Museum in 1824 it was placed miles from Whitehall and St Paul’s and the City, and the English would have thought it absurd that culture could be seen as a rival to parliament or the military or industry in the running of their country. Schinkel’s notion that culture was a substitute for political action was typical of Biedermeier Berlin. However beautiful his symmetrical, clear, austere neo-classical buildings, he had come to mirror that fatal tendency in the Berlin educated middle class: the belief that they could influence politics through culture.
What Schinkel did not seem to recognize was that far from being a political activist he had in fact become a pillar of the Prussian establishment. He was a trusted public servant and in 1838 was considered reliable enough to be elevated to the highest office of public works in Prussia. The sheer number of commissions and projects which came to him through the royal family made him the most famous architect in Prussia, but he was a court architect in all but name. His claims to be leading Prussians to a better, more democratic world through his architecture and his art rang increasingly hollow.
In many ways the Altes Museum heralded the end of pedagogic architecture in Berlin and by the time it was finished the Biedermeier world was beginning to crumble. Even Schinkel foreshadowed the change and in the last decade of his life began to explore other forms of architecture by developing an ahistorical functional style inspired in part by British industrial architecture.72 His new designs included plans for a shopping bazaar on Unter den Linden and the surprisingly modern purple brick Bauakademie, so wantonly destroyed by the East Germans after the Second World War. His late works hinted at a new age to come, when the edifying public buildings of the past would make way for hotels, factories, department stores and train stations, built not to educate or to ennoble the public, but to facilitate trade and commerce.73
By the time Schinkel died in 1840 many of those excluded from the Prussian elite were growing increasingly angry at the censorship and repression which still characterized Berlin. If Schinkel had renounced the fervent nationalism and politics of his youth there were many in Berlin who had not, and the work of those in exile was finding its way back to the city. Groups of reform-minded individuals were forming political groups disguised as poetry clubs, literary circles and music societies to defy the ban on the fledgling political parties; works written during the Napoleonic occupation were rediscovered; the longing for national unity was growing stronger. However civilized and sedate the Biedermeier years had been, however gracious Schinkel’s neo-classical masterpieces had appeared, they had represented the artificial calm of a middle class shielded from the political realities of the day. Heinrich Heine was suspicious of the new elegant city with its ‘long stretches of uniform houses, the long wide streets … but with no care given to the opinion of the masses.’74 In his famous lines he foreshadowed things to come: ‘Berlin, Berlin, great city of misery! In you, there is nothing to find but anguish and martyrdom … They respect rights as if they were candles.’75 Biedermeier, and all it stood for, was set to come to a sudden and violent end in the revolutionary year of 1848.
IV From Revolution to Realpolitik
Needs must, when the Devil drives!
Business and duty rule our lives.
(Faust, Part I)
BY THE LATE 1820s the absolutist systems bolstered by the Congress of Vienna were starting to break down. Europe was changing. Its population was growing, industrialization was bringing social and economic change and people were becoming increasingly impatient with the outmoded system which blocked any chance of reform. In Germany young men who had been exhilarated by their experiences in the Wars of Liberation resented retreating to a dull, stifling world. Artists and writers and ex-soldiers fuelled the Young Germany movement led by Karl Gutzkow and Heinrich Laube, who in turn introduced themes of rebellion and emancipation in their Zeitromanen (novels of the times). New oppositional poets and songwriters, including Hoffmann von Fallersleben (who wrote the German national anthem but lost his job because of his political views), Georg Herwegh and Ferdinand Freiligrath (both of whom were sent into exile), and the continuing influence of Heinrich Heine, began to challenge the status quo.1 The students in the Burschenschaften dressed themselves in medieval clothes, grew long hair and beards, and gathered secretly in old ruins to reaffirm their calls for a unified German fatherland. Then, in the 1830s, revolutions began to erupt all over Europe. News of the fall of the Bourbons in France in 1830 raised hopes that the period of reaction might soon be at an end. The Belgians began to fight for independence from the Dutch, while Poland rose up and fought for independence against Russia. The Polish insurrection was particularly important in Berlin. It lasted nearly a year and despite the fact that the Prussian king backed the tsar’s brutal repression, there was much sympathy for the victims in the city itself. Thousands of Poles found sanctuary in Berlin and were championed by the population; Harro Harring wrote Freedom’s Salvation in their honour and Richard Wagner, then in Leipzig, wrote: ‘The victories achieved by the Poles during a short period in May of 1831 aroused my ecstatic admiration: it seemed to me as if the world had been created anew by some miracle.’2 Two years later while staying in Berlin he wrote the overture Polonia and Berlin salons were now filled with music by Chopin and the rousing poetry of Mickiewicz.3
Then in May 1832 German students organized the Hambach Festival: 20,000 liberal supporters gathered with black, red and gold banners to honour the new political spirit of the age. In Berlin despite constant repression intellectuals again began to call openly for German unity; Dahlmann wrote that the civil service should be open to all, and others called for a representative government. When William Jacob visited Berlin in 1819 he had noted that liberals there seemed uncertain of their goals, but by the mid-1830s a coherent set of calls for political reform found expression.4 Some merely wanted to lift the most repressive censorship laws; others wanted to challenge the power of the aristocracy and the military, but for most the underlying hope was that Germany could unify as a nation state based on the rule of law – a state which would represent the common will. Liberals demanded basic rights: freedom of expression, of association, of right to property and education; they wanted to retain the monarchy but have participation of the nation in government. For them the people – the Volk – did not mean the masses but rather an educated elite; universal suffrage was still considered a dangerous idea best left to the radical democrats. But nationalism was a powerful force; the idea of the Kulturnation and the liberal idea of the Staatsnation had begun to fuse, and when the French demanded the Rhine as a frontier in 1840 Germans reacted in a wave of patriotism.5 Nikolaus Becker’s Rheinlied became a hit with the lines ‘They shall not have it, the free German Rhine’. Die Wacht am Rhein (Watch on the Rhine) was heard everywhere, as was Hoffmann von Fallersleben’s Deutschlandlied, now the German national anthem, whose sentiments, like Verdi’s Nabucco in Italy, mirrored the longing for unity. Far from being an aggressive song of conquest it called for people to forget their petty differences and put a united ‘Germany, Germany above all’.
The political changes were reflected in many aspects of culture. Berliners now wanted to discuss politics, to be active, to have news from other nationalist groups in the rest of Germany. This thirst for information contributed to the sharp rise in the number of newspapers. The first liberal newspapers to break through the censorship of the Metternich era had to be smuggled into the city from other German states. Oppositional publications founded by Young Hegelians and Young Germany – including Görres’s Rheinischer Merkur and the Rheinische Zeitung edited by Karl Marx – were under constant threat; Görres was forced into exile in 1827 and Marx’s paper was banned in 1843. In 1846 the liberal Deutsche Zeitung was founded in Heidelberg to cover not a single region, but the whole of Germany. Berlin also produced publications of its own, including the Vossische Zeitung whose circulation doubled to 20,000 between 1840 and 1848; it was also home to conservative papers like the 1831 Politische Wochenblatt, and the Neue Preussische Zeitung, known as the ‘Cross Newspaper’ because of the Iron Cross on its front page.6 The cutting, satirical magazine Kladderadatsch was started in 1848 and had reached a circulation of 39,000 by 1860. By 1862 Berlin would publish fifty-eight weekly papers and thirty-two dailies.
Newspapers were not the only means of spreading information in the era of repression. The university was still a centre of independent thought; Hegel, the champion of the state, held a chair of philosophy at the university from 1817 and his influence was already widespread. Literary societies and educational groups, choral and gymnastic festivals, shooting matches and poetry groups were increasingly used as covers for political meetings, and liberalism flourished in the German coffee houses and Konditereien of Berlin like Josty, Spargnapani and Stehely. Literary societies like the 1824 Mittwochsgesellschaft (Wednesday Society) or its rival Der Tunnel über der Spree, founded by Moritz Saphir in 1827, and newspaper reading rooms like that started by Gustav Julius, provided places where people could meet in relative safety to discuss the works of Hegel, Heine, Ludwig Börne and later Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.7 Despite police controls increasing numbers of periodicals, pamphlets and cartoons appeared which were critical of the government. Finally, there was a flurry of excitement in liberal circles in 1840 when the repressive king died and was succeeded by his son Frederick William IV. This, they hoped, was the chance for reform they had been waiting for.
King Frederick William IV came to the throne on a wave of optimism in the city. He was a humane man and seemed to espouse liberal ideas; indeed one of his first acts was to free political prisoners and to appoint the liberal heroes, the brothers J. and W. Grimm, Savigny, Schelling and Tieck, who had been turfed out of Göttingen by the king of Hanover, to professorships at Berlin University.8 Unlike his father he loved the grandiose neo-Gothic architecture then coming into vogue and hoped to build an enormous national cathedral on the banks of the Spree. He loved ceremony and colour and show and used Berlin as a personal parade ground, holding mock manoeuvres and even mistakenly blasting out windows with his cannon. Despite his liberal tendencies, he was first and foremost the king of Prussia. He liked the appearance of freedom and he genuinely wanted to be liked, but he refused to accept any diminution of his power. Frederick William IV was an impulsive man who could be kind and charming one minute and violent and brutal the next; this neurosis ultimately ended in mental collapse. As one observer put it, his people were like an animal on a long string; he liked them to enjoy ‘freedom’ and was distressed if they hurt themselves by pulling on it, but he still would not cut the string. After a short period of grace he once again began to oppress those intent on reform.
There was widespread disappointment in Berlin when it became clear there would be nothing but cosmetic change. Once again people began to be prosecuted for minor infringements: Johann Jacoby, a regular at the liberal Siegel’s Konditorei, was arrested in February 1841 for publishing a pamphlet called Vier Fragen (Four Questions), which was mildly critical of the government. But Berlin was heating up. The Industrial Revolution was finally reaching the city, its population was growing and social problems like destitution, homelessness, rising disease and crime rates were putting pressure on the old system. The problem was made worse by a simmering economic crisis in the east which resulted in the 1844 revolt of the Silesian weavers and the famine in Silesia and East Prussia of 1847. When the new king refused all demands for fundamental reform the frustration amongst the intellectual elite and the political classes increased. They could never have started a revolution on their own – Berlin was no Paris or Warsaw or Vienna. But revolution was coming. Once again, the spark was ignited in France.
The turbulent year of European revolution started in Paris on 22 February 1848. The bourgeois king Louis-Philippe had infuriated the populace by prohibiting a banquet which had been planned in order to raise money for reforms. Within hours students, workers and the national guard were raging through the streets of Paris demanding an end to political repression. The king was forced to flee and France was declared a republic. News of the triumph spread rapidly through Europe: the patriotic movement had begun in Italy and the writer Massimo d’Azeglio proclaimed the ‘principle of open conspiracy’; Garibaldi was forced out of the country. The wave of violence spread east. The first uprisings in Baden and Saxony saw demonstrators demanding freedom of assembly and of the press, trial by jury and the creation of a people’s militia. Unrest spread rapidly through the rest of Germany and people used petitions, strikes, demonstrations and the fear of revolution to extract political reforms from the terrified rulers.9 By March Berlin was a tinderbox ready to explode. Berliners now gathered daily at the Zelten in the Tiergarten to hear speeches, read pamphlets and sign petitions for change.10 Then, on 13 March, the news broke that the revolution had reached Vienna and that the architect of the hated Carlsbad decrees, Metternich, had been forced to flee to England hidden in a laundry basket; Frederick William IV was convinced he had to act quickly to avoid the same fate. On the evening of 17 March he drafted a series of political reforms in order to appease his people. He also appointed the hard-line General von Prittwitz as military commander of Berlin.11
Sunday 18 March 1848 dawned peacefully in the city. A large crowd, including radicals, students, craftsmen and apprentices, gathered at the palace to hear the king speak; most were unarmed, although workers from the Borsig factory had brought axes with them. The municipal authorities had agreed to admit a deputation demanding a modern constitution, freedom of speech and of the press, the right of citizens to bear arms and the withdrawal of troops from Berlin. The group of representatives was received by the king that morning but was surprised to learn that he had already passed a law which granted freedom of the press, abolished censorship, called for a united Diet and the reorganization of the German federal constitution, and that he had drafted a modest constitution for Prussia itself. However, he had said nothing about withdrawal of the troops.12
Berlin was still very much a military city but the oppressive presence of a disproportionate number of soldiers had long been a source of friction between Berliners and the government. The people were tired of barracks and parade grounds and abusive officers in their midst; after the Napoleonic Wars they had demanded a military which represented the people – a people’s militia. They had a point. On that March day there were more than 20,000 troops on the streets, many of whom stood and jeered at the civilians in front of the palace. None of the citizens had guns nor any intention of fighting the Berlin garrison; they cheered the king when he appeared to announce the reforms. But when the speech ended, and still nothing had been said about the military, people began to chant: ‘Withdraw the troops! Withdraw the troops!’ The king was horrified.
Frederick William was willing to introduce some reforms but the call to banish the military challenged the very legitimacy of the Prussian monarch. In his eyes it amounted to a call for the king to renounce the very power on which his authority had rested since the Thirty Years War.13 He did not respond; indeed, in an attempt to appease the army he told the cavalry to ‘clean up’ the palace square. The order was misunderstood. Rather than simply clearing the area the troops began to ride towards the crowd brandishing their swords and pushing the people back into the side streets; Major von Falkenstein chased one group to the Breitestrasse while a second was pushed towards the Lange Brücke. Suddenly two rifle shots rang out. These were probably accidental but the crowd thought that the troops had opened fire. Cries of ‘Assassins!’ rang through the air and the people began to fight back. The army opened fire in earnest amidst screams from the public. The revolution in Berlin had begun.
Within minutes barricades were being put up throughout the city centre. The first, made out of two hackney coaches, an overturned carriage, the sentry box from the front of a bank and some old barrels, was constructed at the corner of Oberwallstrasse and Jägerstrasse. The barricade in Friedrichstrasse was made out of Mother Schmiddecke’s fruit stall; and the biggest of all, at the corner of Königstrasse on the Alexanderplatz, was put together out of blocks of granite. Republicans and socialists manned the barricades with students, craftsmen, workers, liberal intellectuals and destitute migrants from the east. Some had firearms but most were armed with makeshift weapons like pitchforks and bricks; a small brass cannon had also been found and loaded with marbles. The king refused to speak to the people, further increasing suspicions that he had been behind the order to shoot. Fighting intensified throughout the afternoon. Fierce battles were raging by nightfall.14 The violence was made worse by rumours that the military were tying prisoners in cellars and beating them with rifle butts. Berlin was ablaze; the artillery sheds at the Oranienburg Gate and the iron foundry went up in flames and all the customs houses were burning. Citizen Hesse took the reservist arsenal in Lindenstrasse and distributed weapons while women and children pelted the troops from windows and rooftops with paving stones and tiles. Over 230 people were killed in the fighting on the night of 18 March. The king feared a civil war. On 19 March, to the fury of the military, he ordered the troops to stop firing. In a dramatic gesture he rode up to the barricades and through the city draped in a flag bearing the black, red and gold colours of the revolution, and followed this with the famous speech ‘To my dear Berliners’, in which he called for the cessation of violence and the removal of the barricades in the ‘true old Berlin spirit’ of reconciliation. Negotiations began at the palace. This time, when the citizens demanded the withdrawal of troops from Berlin, the king obliged. He also promised a national assembly to debate the draft for a constitution and promised to find a solution to the national question.15
