Kitabı oku: «Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin», sayfa 9

Since I found this building constructed on an old German site and built in the real German age, to be so highly evolved; and since the Master’s name on his modest tombstone was also fatherlandish by sound and origin, the merit of the work emboldened me to change the hitherto ill-famed designation of ‘Gothic’ … and to justify it as the ‘German Architecture’ of our own nation.⁸⁶

It was this love of the ‘true’ German past which would come to dominate Berlin Romanticism of the nineteenth century.

Despite its extraordinary diversity one of the most striking features of German Romanticism was the obsession with history and the longing to find a modern German identity buried back in the Middle Ages. Many Romantics, including Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim, rediscovered German folk art and fostered the collection of old songs, ballads, folklore and fairy tales. In 1800 Friedrich Schlegel wrote To the Germans, in which he encouraged people to fulfil their cultural mission.⁸⁷ Romantic notions of the German nation appeared in the work of poets like Novalis; fairytales by the brothers Grimm and Moritz von Schwind contained lavish illustrations of German knights and castles, while paintings like Ferdinand Olivier’s The Fairytale King’s Homecoming and Henry Fuseli’s Thor Battering the Midgard Serpent personified not only the fascination with the occult but also the desire to dig through centuries of ‘foreign influence’ to find that ‘pure’ German culture that was said to have existed in the mists of time. This was linked to the obsession with the Volk, the new love for ‘Fatherland’ and, above all, with the yearning to create a new nation-state which would reflect the glory of the German Empire of the high Middle Ages. As the nineteenth century progressed these national pursuits became more patriotic, and it was George Bernard Shaw who warned of the craving for German greatness hidden in Wagner’s revival of the themes of the lust for flesh, power and gold.⁸⁸

The rediscovery of ‘true German’ medieval art and culture was soon put to political use. In his 1808 Addresses to the German Nation given in a Berlin occupied by Napoleonic troops Fichte explained to the German people that they were a race morally superior to all others and that they had a duty to learn about their past through the study of art and architecture, poetry and language. The cry for nationhood intensified after the defeat of France: by the 1830s young people were gathering at events like the Hambach Festival of 1832 to recall the glories of the past and to call for the unification of Germany; medieval societies restored old buildings and held mock historical services and praised the lost glory of the Holy Roman Empire. Attempts to create a national identity took a new form: the writing of national history.

By the mid nineteenth century historians at the new university in Berlin had started to create a state-centred political history to justify Germany’s new powerful role in the world. In the years between the failed attempt at revolution in 1848 and the unification of Germany in 1871 historians from Ranke to Droysen, from Sybel to Treitschke worked to create a nationalist version of the past, outlining the importance – and indeed the superiority – of the traditions and the language shared by all Germans. Ranke had attempted to write a history free of personal bias but his very choice of subject, the rise of the nation-state or Machtstaat, was thinly veiled praise of the extraordinary rise of Prussia within Germany. Treitschke replaced Ranke’s conception of a balance of powers with the idea that individual states were constantly battling with one another for a position of dominance. Related to this was the glorification of war as a German destiny which would allow the nation to fulfil its cultural mission. For Droysen the concept of the Volk was inseparable from the desire to create a German state led by Prussia, while Friedrich Naumann defined nationalism as the urge of the Germans to spread their influence throughout the world. But it was in the years leading up to the creation of Bismarck’s Reich in 1871 that historians began to legitimate Germany’s new aggressive colonial and military policies, the political exploitation of cultural achievements in science, technology and the arts, the isolation of those in society who were considered not at one with the Volk, and above all the promulgation of German Kultur abroad.⁸⁹ The historian Sybel wrote in 1867 that Germans had to learn about the history of the ancient Volk because without this the nation would be like a tree without roots, and that they must look back to the ancient tribes described in Germania, for ‘the Germans of Tacitus were the Germans in their youth’.⁹⁰ Tacitus was also used by xenophobes like Houston Stewart Chamberlain to ‘prove’ German racial purity and ancient Germanic national traits from loyalty to honour in battle. History was used to give the new Germans a sense of pride in their nation. The story of Berlin was no exception.

The most important author in the creation of the popular legend of Berlin was the historian Adolph Streckfuss, who coined the expression From Fishing Village to World City, the title of his 1864 history of the city. As a young man Streckfuss had been a democrat and a supporter of the 1848 Revolution, and it was he who popularized notions of the Berliner Unwille.⁹¹ Nevertheless the myth that Berlin had been founded in a barren wasteland in the twelfth century soon became orthodoxy and by 1910 it had become a staple of the Baedeker guide. But why was history rewritten? Why was this dry story taken up with such enthusiasm – a story which ignored so much of the region’s complex and fascinating history? The reason was less than pleasant. Not only had the Berlin area been one of the last areas to be Christianized; unlike ‘truly German’ cities like Cologne or Nuremberg, it had been populated for six centuries not by Tacitus’ Germans, but by the hated Slavs.⁹² Rather than acknowledge their contribution, the Wendish past was at best marginalized and at worst simply written out of history.⁹³

The Berlin legend was created in an age when concepts like ethnic purity and the superiority of one race over another were taken for granted by many Germans. It was devised at a time when Germans were being taught that their own national characteristics had evolved through contact with certain geographical areas or with the Heimat (homeland) or even with the ‘soil’; at a time when Germans genuinely believed that they were direct descendants of the pure northern race of Germans described by Tacitus. In our multi-ethnic, relativist world it is difficult to understand the importance placed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on concepts like ethnic, racial or cultural ‘purity’; indeed the notion of a racially ‘pure’ area was ludicrous in a continent in which every corner has been touched by wars, migration, intermarriage, conquest and commerce, and where even the isolated British were a mixture of Celtic, Roman, Norman, Viking and other peoples. This was particularly true of Germany, which for most of its history had been a patchwork of squabbling territories with no clearly defined borders and no real sense of unity. It was perhaps the very lack of a distinct national identity which made Germans so keen to create a coherent history after 1871 and to turn Berlin into a unifying symbol for the entire nation. But to do so meant that history had to be altered to fit contemporary demands. And the first victim was Berlin’s Slavic past.

In keeping with racial Darwinism and other such theories many Germans now believed that civilization in Europe had moved from the ‘superior’ west to the ‘inferior’ east. Of course such ideas were not unique to Germany; in Britain they were reflected in the colonial policies of the Victorian age, and many nations throughout the nineteenth century created equally chauvinistic accounts of their own superiority. But while internal prejudice was being increasingly channelled into rising anti-Semitism, the external foe was seen to lie in the Slavic lands to the east. Negative views of ‘the Slavs’ were widespread in nineteenth-century Prussia. Friedrich Engels was voicing a popular view when he wrote that ‘all these [Slavic] peoples are at the most diverse stages of civilization, ranging from the fairly highly developed (thanks to the Germans) modern industry and culture of Bohemia down to the almost nomadic barbarism of the Croats and Bulgarians’.⁹⁴ All Slavs were ‘inferior’, but for Berliners the most contemptible group were their neighbours – the Poles.

The vast borderlands between Germany and Poland have long been one of the most controversial regions of Europe. The lines between them have constantly shifted, leaving mixed populations on one or other side and, despite claims and counter-claims by both nations, there is not and never has been anything like a simple clear-cut historical border to divide the two. The mutual contempt was not merely the result of a long and troubled history but had to do with contemporary questions of political power. The Prussians, with Austria and Russia, had erased Poland from the map in 1795. Germans were taught that the re-creation of a Polish state would result in unacceptable losses to the Prussian – German eastern frontier, and instead of responding to legitimate demands for Polish independence they had tried to Germanize the Prussian-Polish lands through the Kulturkampf and through special bodies created to oversee German colonization; these measures included the prohibition of the use of the Polish language in schools and the purchase of Polish estates for German settlers.⁹⁵ And yet, to Bismarck’s chagrin, Polish cultural and economic bodies were so well organized that despite his concerted efforts there was little decline in use of the Polish language or in the ownership of land. Worse still, his measures seemed to have intensified a sense of Polish national consciousness.

Berlin’s history was rewritten at a time when Germans felt threatened by this increasing tide of Polish nationalism and when words like ‘Wend’, ‘Slav’ and ‘Pole’ were increasingly – and incorrectly – used interchangeably. Late nineteenth-century Germans were bombarded with images of Slavs as a chaotic people whose towns and villages were primitive and dirty compared with their pristine German counterparts. Poles were commonly portrayed as devious and untrustworthy and incapable of governing themselves. Why, it was asked, should Germany allow the creation of a Polish state which would merely collapse into anarchy? Furthermore, Engels’s view that all civilization, culture, progress and advancement in the Polish lands had ultimately been introduced by Germans was widely believed. One of the most pervasive themes in popular history was the notion of the Drang nach Osten: the ancient German ‘mission in the east’ was viewed as one of the crowning achievements of European history. Wilhelm Jordan was typical when he asked: ‘Are not the Germans more important and more difficult to replace from the perspective of the progressive development of the human race than the Poles?’⁹⁶ Furthermore it was argued that this was not a modern phenomenon; archaeology and ancient history could ‘prove’ that the Slavs had ‘always’ been comparatively primitive. Ancient Germanic villages could be identified because they were neat and technologically advanced, whereas Slavic ones were crude and disorganized. The archaeologist Wilhelm Unversagt, who carried out excavations between the Oder and the Elbe, said of one Slav fortress:

The domestic and defensive buildings were constructed in the most primitive block-technique … when one recalls that such houses appear in the residences of Slav princes, and at a time when the imposing Romanesque churches were built on the Rhine and in central Germany, which even today arouse our highest admiration, one can understand what the culturally superior Germanic West had to give to the primitive Slavic East.⁹⁷

These ‘scientific’ and ‘scholarly’ views provided fertile ground for the National Socialists in 1933.

The process of rewriting Berlin history was intensified in the 1930s, when it became a tool of Nazi state policy through the work of bodies such as Walter Frank’s Reichsinstitut für die Geschichte des neuen Deutschlands (the Institute for the History of New Germany) and the work of eminent men like Erich Marcks, Fritz Hartung and Heinrich von Srbik. And it was then that a concerted attempt was made to thoroughly ‘Germanize’ Berlin’s history. Positive references to Jews, Slavs and other ‘undesirable groups’ were simply erased. In the 1936 article ‘What All Berliners Must Know About Their History’ Dr Hermann Rügler, the head of the Institute for the History of Berlin, wrote that ‘Berlin was from the very beginning to the present day a German city’. He acknowledged that although there had been a period of Slavic settlement this had been ‘insignificant’, as Germans had quickly resettled the altes deutsche Stammesgebiet – the old German ancestral area. He claimed that there was plenty of archaeological evidence of early Germanic settlements in the region but that the ‘few Wendish finds’ revealed that the Slavs had merely ‘existed – nothing more’. The 1937 Nazi publications for Berlin’s official birthday boasted that the city was indeed ‘founded on good Germanic soil’, and the mention of the city’s Slavic past disappeared from the 1937 Baedeker.⁹⁸ In short, Berliners were taught that although there had been a brief period of ‘illegitimate’ Slavic settlement in a Germanic area, these people had contributed nothing to the history of the city. The message was as powerful as it was sinister. If the medieval Germans had been right to retake the ‘true German’ areas around Berlin and if the Slavs were not worthy of inhabiting ‘German soil’, why should this end in the Mark Brandenburg?⁹⁹ The same arguments were quickly extended to whip up support for the retaking of ‘true German’ cities like Danzig. As early as 1936 the Nazi version of the history of Berlin had become a handmaiden to the war effort.

The denial of the Slavic heritage became the first great myth of Berlin historiography. It was pathetic – rather as if the British had tried to deny the Norman Conquest – but the extraordinary notion that one could use ancient history to legitimate contemporary politics was taken with deadly seriousness. The abuse of early history continued even after the war and not only by the Germans; the ludicrous assumption that the ancient Wends were in fact Polish was used by some Polish extremists in 1945 to claim that because Slavs had at one time lived in the Berlin area the city should become part of Poland.¹⁰⁰ Nevertheless the most blatant abuses in the early history of the Mark Brandenburg were corrected after the war, and the Wends were finally given their rightful place as one of the many groups who had lived in and contributed to the long and complex history of the city of Berlin.

Such considerations were of course irrelevant to the Berliners of the fifteenth century. The city was still small and insignificant and paled in comparison to Paris or London, Amsterdam or even Rome, where Cardinal Odoardo Farnese could hear twenty-seven languages spoken in the refectory of the Jesuit college in the Piazza Altieri. Berlin still had nothing to compare with the marvels of the rest of Europe, whether in the Vladislav Hall in Prague or the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence or the magnificent guild hall of Ypres. But Berlin was now firmly in the grip of the Hohenzollern family and was about to be pushed on to the world stage. In the coming years it would undergo a transformation so profound that it would become one of the most important and powerful cities in Europe. It would be a traumatic birth.

II The Capital of Absolutism

The chance is offered; take it while you can.

(Faust, Part II, Act 1)

WHEN EMINENT FIFTEENTH-CENTURY EUROPEANS like Copernicus and Albrecht Dürer set out on their travels through Europe they did not contemplate visiting Berlin; why should they when Florence, Venice, Padua, Paris and Rome beckoned with ‘the most glorious sights for state and magnificence that any city can show a traveller’ or when the Low Countries were reaching ever greater heights of art and culture?¹ Why should they go to the small German town when so many other cities, from Buda to Prague to Moscow, were being transformed by Italian Renaissance architects and artists, when Nuremberg and Augsburg and Munich were producing fabulous works of art, or when Copernicus’ own university of Cracow was being transformed by the spirit of religious tolerance and Humanism of the ‘Golden Age of Poland’ reflected in the works of that great poet Jan Kochanowski.² The Dutch art historian Karel van Mander travelled not to Berlin but to Vienna, and recommended those travelling south to go to Prague, which, under Rudolf II, had become the Parnassus of the arts.³ Compared to the great princely houses of Europe the Hohenzollern margraves were poor and their city was rough, unsophisticated and shabby.⁴ Even so, Berlin was now a residence city and its culture was improving.

The sixteenth century had started well for Berlin. The Reformation, which had swept through Germany after 1517 when Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to the castle church of Wittenberg, had come to Brandenburg peacefully. The Hohenzollern Elector Joachim II had adopted Lutheranism on 13 February 1539 – the first service was held in Berlin by Luther’s friend Johann Agricola in 1540 – and the people had followed him. Within a few years the great families of Berlin were commissioning paintings and monuments for themselves in the new style: the Blankenfeldes had a massive memorial carved showing the family at prayer, while the Reiches ordered a painting of the entire family mourning at the crucifixion. Most of the great painters of sixteenth-century Germany – Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach, Hans Baldung (Grien) and Hans Holbein – worked in the service of the Reformation, helping to spread its ideas and to glorify the new leaders on canvas. Luther’s friend Lucas Cranach the Elder painted a magnificent portrait of Joachim I, who ruled in Berlin until 1535. In 1551 Cranach the younger painted his heir, Joachim II.

This 1551 portrait captures the self-confident air of a man not yet troubled by conflict. He stands stocky and proud, with a hint of cruelty hovering around his eyes in a manner reminiscent of Holbein’s 1536 portrait of Henry VIII.⁵ Joachim’s red tunic is shot through with gold, his bearskin hat is decorated with pearls and his heavy fur cloak is weighted down by two enormous jewel-encrusted gold chains. There is nothing in the portrait to suggest any doubt about the future. The painting was commissioned at an optimistic moment in northern Europe’s history, when Amsterdam was outpacing Antwerp as the greatest city of the Low Countries and when east – west trade was sustaining towns from Danzig to Nuremberg. The culture of northern Germany was becoming more sophisticated: great castles were built from Dresden to Stettin; princes and merchants patronized the arts and employed craftsmen, furniture makers, metal workers, sculptors and painters in the creation of their magnificent courts.⁶

The elector had started to improve Berlin. He invited the Torgau master-builder Konrad Krebs to build the electoral residence, which in the 1540s became a monumental Renaissance palace; he invited in Dutch-trained builders and hired artists and architects like Kaspar Theyss, Hans Schenk and Kunz Buntschuh to bring a glimmer of the Renaissance to the city. Under him Berlin sustained a population of 10,000 people. But the self-confidence of this generation would be short-lived. Despite the Religious Peace of Augsburg of 1555, during which all imperial rulers from the electors to the knights had promised to tolerate Lutherans and Catholics within the empire according to the principle cuius regio, eius religio, the divisions brought about by the Reformation were about to resurface.⁷ Berlin was on the verge of another of those traumatic upheavals which mark its history, known as the Thirty Years War. This time the war would wipe out virtually all vestiges of Berlin’s medieval past.

One can sometimes catch glimpses of the violence and despair of so many people’s lives in the paintings of the time. There are flashes of ugliness and cruelty in the works of Holbein and Cranach; there is a sense of gloom, an undercurrent of despair in the works of Brueghel and of Bosch with their cold peasant villages, destitute vagabonds and terrifying visions of carnage. Brueghel’s beggars have sunken battered faces, they wear rags, they are blind and struggle down cart tracks on crutches; Bosch’s downcast pedlar wears only one shoe as he creeps slowly away from an isolated inn, its broken windows and hanging shutters just visible in the bleak light of mid-winter. Grünewald’s depiction of the ugly enraged villagers in The Mocking of Christ shows the people dragging an accused man through the streets on a rope, beating him as he passes and leaving blood streaming down his face – common treatment of condemned men and women in the villages of northern Europe. In Three Ages of Woman and Death Grien shows a ghastly rotting corpse holding an hourglass over the head of a young maiden; his woodcuts with titles like Young Witch and Dragon, or Albrecht Altdorfer’s Departure for the Sabbath, hint at the common fear of the occult. Even Holbein, better known for his revealing portraits of monarchs and princes, depicts horrific scenes in his series of drawings, Der Totentanz (Dance of Death) and Das Todesalphabet (Death Alphabet) of 1524; indeed it was the turbulence following the Reformation which drove him to England and the court of Henry VIII. An acceptance of violence shows in the thousands of contemporary woodcuts with their gory portrayals of battle scenes, torture and dismemberment. The images were not fantasy but reflected the harsh spirit of an age consumed by the religious and dynastic conflicts which erupted in Europe and Berlin, and they capture the despair of populations forced to endure decades of violence during that most grisly of religious conflicts.⁸

The Thirty Years War began in 1618 and raged until 1648. It left deep scars on the German psyche and it was a turning point for Berlin, destroying the old city and paving the way for the benevolent despots of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.⁹ Even before the outbreak of hostilities it was clear that Europe was on the verge of a disaster. There had been a sense of impending doom since the 1550s, which had seen waves of unrest, peasant uprisings and a general mood of crisis. Berlin had also experienced increased poverty and social unrest; once again Jews were targeted. In July 1510 100 people were tried for allegedly stealing and selling sacred items from a Berlin church: thirty-eight Jews were burned in the Neue Markt and the rest were banished from the Mark Brandenburg. But above all there was a sense that the fragile truce between Protestants and Catholics hammered out at the Peace of Augsburg was about to fail. Governments throughout the German lands had started building up their defences, and even in Prussia, where the estates refused to pay for a militia, the elector raised taxes to pay for fortifications for Memel and Pillau and built two warships to patrol the Baltic.¹⁰ The premonition was correct: in 1608 the imperial Diet collapsed. By 1618 four important political conflicts had emerged in Europe. The first was between Protestant princes and the Catholic Habsburgs in the Holy Roman Empire; the second was the continued hostility between Poland and the Swedes; the third, the conflict between France and the Habsburgs, and the fourth, that between the Spanish and the Dutch. These were woven into a net of related quarrels, dynastic ambitions and petty rivalries so that even before the war began treachery, broken alliances and deceit amongst rulers had become common on all sides.¹¹ No single religion, ruler or state was powerful enough to impose any decisive settlement on the others. War was a foregone conclusion.

In the event the Thirty Years War began in Prague. Hostilities broke out during the Bohemian revolt of 1618 when a Protestant king, the twenty-three-year-old Frederick II of the Palatinate, was chosen by the estates to rule Bohemia instead of the Catholic Habsburg successor. The Habsburgs, then in league with a number of other German states, attempted to oust the new king; they were victorious under General Tilly, who triumphed at the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620. The Habsburg emperor’s success fuelled his hope that he might wipe Protestantism from the face of Europe altogether, and he decided to push northward and retake converted lands, a scheme later codified in the Edict of Restitution. With the help of his brilliant general, Albrecht von Wallenstein, it seemed that he might succeed. Wallenstein conquered great swathes of Germany, finally approaching the Mark Brandenburg in 1626. In the tenth year of fighting, the war reached Berlin.

Until then Berliners had been spared the worst of the conflict. A few troops had passed by the city in 1620, including 3,000 English mercenaries on their way to Prague under Ernst von Mansfeld, but although a fire had swept through the town that year it had had nothing to do with the troops. Now, however, the armies were drawing near. Berlin was ruled by a weak and ineffectual leader, the Elector George William, whose ideas about war were limited to the notion that if attacked one should surrender and change sides. It would prove a disastrous policy for Berlin.

With Wallenstein’s men approaching fast the elector was finally forced to do something. He tried to gather a defence force but could muster fewer than 1,000 troops; when they entered Berlin in order to organize themselves the confused citizens pelted them with stones, believing them to be on a secret mission to convert them from Lutheranism to Calvinism.¹² The troops were of little use. By the summer of 1626 Wallenstein had overrun most of Germany and had based himself at Crossen on the Oder. His troops threatened to ransack the towns of the Mark if they were not paid compensation. Brandenburg’s ‘obligation’ was assessed at 60,000 gulden, and to encourage payment Wallenstein rounded up hundreds of people and held them hostage. The money was finally paid, but it made little difference. His troops entered Berlin for the first time on 15 November 1627 and ransacked the city, looting and raping. They returned a year later, bringing another wave of terror. Forty thousand troops arrived in February 1630, and this time they remained for over a year, leaving a legacy of destruction, hunger and disease in their wake. Each occupation meant more brutality for the people, who prayed: ‘Is there no God in heaven that will take our part? Are we then such utterly forsaken sheep? Must we look on while our houses and dwellings are burnt before our eyes?’¹³ This is one reason why there is only one late Renaissance building still standing in central Berlin.¹⁴

After four years of occupation by the Catholic forces Berlin’s fortunes appeared to be changing. The apparent salvation came in the form of one of the great heroes of the Protestant cause, the king of Sweden, Gustavus Adolphus, who had landed at Usedom in Pomerania in July 1630 and had begun to march south. The imperial commander, Tilly, had already taken the outer fortifications of Magdeburg by April, but as the Swedes approached he feared that he might be caught between the city and the Swedish forces. He gave the order to attack, but tragically could not control his own insubordinate, bloodthirsty troops, and on 20 May 1631, in one of the most outrageous acts of the war, 30,000 of the people of Magdeburg were hacked or burned to death in a matter of hours. The news of the massacre infuriated the Swedish king, who was spurred on by the desire to avenge the disaster. By the end of May 1631 his men, wearing the telltale yellow and blue ribbon around their hats, had driven the imperial troops south and had reached the gates of Berlin. Gustavus Adolphus now demanded that the dithering Elector George William sign a Treaty of Alliance with Sweden. The elector’s attempts to try to evade his obligation so infuriated the Swedish king that on 21 June he brought his army to the gates of Berlin and aimed his cannon directly at the electoral palace. George William cowered inside, sending his wife and mother-in-law out to pacify the king, but on 23 June the treaty was finalized, putting Berlin firmly under Swedish rule. Brandenburg and the fortresses of Spandau and Küstrin were placed at the disposal of the Swedish king, Berlin was occupied, and Gustavus Adophus himself took up residence there for a time, demanding 30,000 thalers a year for the upkeep of his troops.

Any hopes Berliners might have had for an improvement in their lives were quickly dashed. The new occupation force, which remained until 1634, behaved as badly as Wallenstein’s men had done. The situation would worsen again. In 1635 the emperor’s forces began to move north once more; armies swept into the Mark Brandenburg from the south and Berlin became part of the central battlefield of the war. That year marked the beginning of the last and most horrible phase of the conflict in the Mark Brandenburg; fighting between Sweden and the emperor was constant and the city changed hands and was plundered and occupied on numerous occasions. In 1638 George William fled to Königsberg, leaving Berlin under the control of the imperial Catholic general Adam Graf zu Schwarzenberg and stripping it of its Residenz status. Schwarzenberg was detested by Berliners. Not only did he treat the city as his own, but he took to burning down part of Berlin every time an enemy army approached to try to dissuade them from attacking; much of the city was destroyed in this manner – particularly in a raging fire of 1640. In January 1641 word spread that the Swedes were moving towards Berlin once again, and this time Schwarzenberg gave the order to burn Cölln. As the buildings blazed it was discovered that the Swedish ‘army’ consisted of only 1,000 poorly equipped men, 360 of whom were easily captured. To Berliners’ delight Schwarzenberg died suddenly in March 1641, releasing them from his grim hold, but by now Berlin had only 845 houses left, 200 of which were empty. Cölln had been almost completely destroyed.