Authors: Frederick Taylor
In 1730, Frederick William also built the most comprehensive wall Berlin had so far seen. Its aim was not just to defend Berlin against enemies, but to act as an ‘excise wall’, enabling the King to tax travellers, commercial shipments, or any consumer goods being moved in and out of the city. The wall was also intended to prevent frequent desertions from the king’s army. A sentry was posted every hundred metres, and if any unhappy soldier was seen escaping, a cannon shot would alert the nearby villagers. Captured deserters faced a brutal running of the gauntlet, while a second attempt meant death.
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A similar wall was built at nearby Potsdam, to keep the garrison there in as well.
Frederick William sired ten children. In a continuation of the turn-and-turn-again tradition in the Hohenzollern family, his eldest son, Frederick, was a complete contrast to his father: a slightly-built, sensitive boy, interested in the arts and philosophy. Keen to toughen up his heir and ensure his fitness for the throne, Frederick William had him woken
each morning by the firing of a cannon. At six years old, young ‘Fritz’ was given his own unit of child cadets to drill, and soon granted his own arsenal of real weaponry. The boy was beaten for letting himself be thrown by a bolting horse; and again for showing weakness by putting on gloves in cold weather.
At eighteen, the Crown Prince tried to flee the kingdom with an older aristocratic friend, Hans Hermann von Katte. They were caught. Fritz was kept under arrest at a fortress, and forced to watch from a window as his friend was beheaded on the parade ground below. Within a couple of years, the Crown Prince was married off to a pleasant, pious princess, Elisabeth Christine of Brunswick. The marriage proved childless. After his succession, they lived apart. Fritz kept no mistresses. His possible homosexuality has been the subject of keen historical gossip ever since.
When the ‘soldier king’ died, many of his subjects heaved a sigh of relief. However, in one of the great paradoxes of European history, where the ‘soldier king’ had brought peace, his son, the ‘philosopher king’, would inflict war and suffering.
Frederick had succeeded in May 1740. In October, the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles VI, died, leaving no male heir. Since the imperial throne, though technically subject to election, had, in fact, become the family property of the Austrian Habsburgs, a power vacuum threatened. Charles had changed the law so that he might be succeeded by his daughter, Maria Theresa. Most of royal Europe had accepted this. Prussia was one of the states that had not.
In an act of unscrupulous opportunism, the ‘philosopher king’ marched the powerful army his loathed father had created into the neighbouring Habsburg province of Silesia. This rich district, once part of Poland, would, if Frederick could hold on to it, immeasurably increase the wealth of Prussia-Brandenburg, supplying it with the agricultural, industrial and mineral resources that the state urgently needed. He justified this occupation in terms of an obscure sixteenth-century treaty that his lawyers dug out of the diplomatic cupboard.
Thanks to his excellent army, the young Prussian king won the so-called ‘War of the Austrian Succession’, and held onto Silesia’s riches, but this was not the end of the story. The highly intelligent and astute Maria Theresa made the peace she had to make, but withdrew to plan her
revenge. She began weaving a new web of alliances, combining the power of Austria, France and Russia against the upstart Prussia.
In the decade of peace that followed, Frederick ran a highbrow salon at the glass-and-stone pleasure palace,
Sans Souci
(‘Without Care’), which he built just outside Berlin at the royal seat of Potsdam. He introduced many reforms, some of them genuinely humane. He abolished the torture of civilians and the death sentence except for murder. He extended religious tolerance, allowing the Catholics to build a cathedral in Berlin. Like his father, he was also an obsessive micro-manager. It was due to Frederick’s efforts that the potato became Prussia’s staple food.
In 1756, with war once more threatening, Frederick undertook a characteristically sly war of pre-emption, invading the rich but militarily weak state of Saxony. This he occupied for several years, exploiting its wealth and manpower to underpin his war-making. ‘Saxony,’ he quipped cynically, ‘is like a sack of flour. Every time you beat it, something comes out.’ Almost a hundred thousand out of two million Saxons (5 per cent of the population) died as a result of the Prussian invasion and occupation, including roughly the same proportion of the inhabitants of Dresden, Saxony’s beautiful capital. A third of its built-up area was destroyed by Prussian cannon fire and petrol bombs in 1760. Despite having killed more Germans and destroyed more of Germany than any commander until the RAF’s Sir Arthur Harris 200 years later, Frederick the Great remains a national hero.
None the less, by 1760 he had suffered several crushing defeats. Berlin was occupied by the Russians and the Austrians. Surrender seemed inevitable. Then the Empress of Russia, Elisabeth, died. The son who succeeded her, Tsar Peter III, was a fanatical fan of Prussian militarism. This unexpected
deus ex machina
restored Frederick’s fortunes. The young man granted peace on highly favourable terms, ending the ‘Seven Years War’.
Moreover, Prussia’s main ally, Britain, had driven the French out of North America (where this conflict is known as the ‘French and Indian War’) and had also established itself as the dominant power in India. Britain became the first world superpower. The country’s heroic friend, King Frederick, was wildly popular in Britain. Until Prussia’s name was blackened by the First World War, there were inns in England named
after him, and well into the nineteenth century the Anglo-Prussian alliance was taken for granted in both countries.
The final
coup
of Frederick’s reign was the dismantling of the almost thousand-year-old kingdom of Poland. Paralysed by internal dissent, this once-mighty Eastern European power made tempting prey for its neighbours. In 1772 Frederick agreed with Austria and Russia to carve great slices off Poland. Within a little over two decades, Poland was wiped from the map and would not re-emerge as a properly independent country until 1918. Prussia, however, gained a solid, continuous block of territory and a much increased population.
In 1786, Frederick died at Sans Souci, alone except for his dogs and by all accounts world-weary and reclusive in old age. Berlin had recovered from the disastrous wars with remarkable speed. Its population stood at 150,000. Thirty thousand worked in industry and trade, while 3,500 were civil servants. The Berlin garrison numbered 25,000 men, and 20 per cent of Berliners were connected with the military.
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The future of Frederick’s system of government seemed assured for decades, even centuries to come.
Three years later, the French Revolution broke out and changed everything. The first eruption of popular democratic rebellion on the continent, it spread like a virus and threatened to destroy the whole system of hereditary privilege upon which Frederick, like all European monarchs, based his thinking. When that revolution turned sour, a new despot rose to power in the shape of Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte.
The greatest general and most successful conqueror the post-medieval world had seen, during two decades of dominance the Corsican upstart created a new Europe that remains recognisably his 200 years later.
Napoleon was old Prussia’s nemesis. And, in the short term at least, Berlin’s.
On 27 October 1806, Napoleon entered Berlin. Two weeks before, the Emperor had inflicted a massive double-blow on the Prussian forces. The French had prevailed first at Jena, near Weimar, south-west of Berlin, and then again at Auerstedt, a few hours’ ride to the north. The victory, achieved against a Prussian army exceeding a hundred thousand men,
was total. At Auerstedt, King Frederick III’s forces outnumbered the enemy two to one, and still they turned tail and ran from the superbly disciplined French.
Napoleon marched his victorious army down the wide boulevard of Unter den Linden into the heart of the city, and paraded through the magnificent Brandenburg Gate.
The gate was a new, grander opening in the defence and customs wall, now totalling seventeen kilometres in length, and 4.2 metres high, that still surrounded central Berlin. It had been designed by the famous architect Carl Gotthard Langhans, and completed just a few years earlier. Atop its neo-classical columns the sculptor Johann Gottfried Schadow had created a huge stone quadriga or four-horsed chariot, the symbol of victory in the old Olympic Games. In this case the goddess Victory, who drove the chariot, carried the olive wreath of peace, which was a pleasant and perhaps over-optimistic touch.
Initially, those Berliners who wished for more freedom, especially the unenfranchised middle classes, had hopes of Napoleon. The Emperor promised reform of the laws, even a constitution. Elections were held for a Berlin city council.
The French dictator’s real aims were, however, soon clear. He planned to use Berlin and Prussia as a money-pump and supplier of manpower, to turn it into another puppet regime in French-ruled Europe. Already impoverished and stripped of huge areas of territory, with her army reduced to just over 40,000 men (of which 16,000 were to be at Napoleon’s disposal for new military adventures), Prussia was also forced to pay hundreds of millions of francs in reparation and occupation costs. The French set about stripping the Prussian capital of its treasures, including the quadriga from the Brandenburg Gate, which was carted off to Paris. And that was just the official looting. With 25,000 often rowdy French occupation troops quartered on its citizenry, Berlin stood at its lowest ebb for a hundred and fifty years.
Napoleon himself seemed amazed at how swiftly Prussia had been vanquished. Just before entering Berlin, he paid a visit to the grave of Frederick the Great, in the crypt of the Garrison Church at Potsdam. There he told his officers: ‘Hats off, gentlemen! If he were still alive, we would not be here!’
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The people of Prussia were forced to take a hard look at the system under which they had been living. So was the state’s ruling élite.
Some of the ensuing reforms were aimed at making Prussia better run. Others had to do with re-establishing its military power. The latter were necessarily covert, including General Scharnhorst’s most cunning creation, the
Landwehr
(Home Guard), which by training a revolving, parttime citizen army circumvented the limitations placed on its size by Napoleon. Its official strength may never have exceeded these restrictions, but somehow by 1813 an army of 280,000 stood at the King’s behest.
A passionate spirit of rebellion seethed beneath the relatively calm surface of occupied Berlin. The anti-French forces within Prussia, and in Germany as a whole, were merely awaiting their opportunity.
In June 1812, after massing an army of a million men from all over Europe, including Prussia, Napoleon invaded Russia. The Emperor won every major battle, but the campaign’s outcome was catastrophic. In the fierce winter of 1812/13 Napoleon’s
Grande Armée
left Moscow in flames and retreated through snow and ice towards the safety of Europe, harried by Cossacks, plagued by cold, hunger and disease. Only 18,000 troops crossed the river Niemen back into Poland.
The Prussian king, Frederick III, who had meekly supplied Napoleon with 20,000 soldiers for his disastrous march on Moscow, finally changed sides. The entire Prussian army was turned against Napoleon, and men who had been secretly training flocked to the colours. For them the architect Schinkel designed a special medal for bravery, to be awarded to any hero, irrespective of rank. It was called the Iron Cross.
Prussia, Germany, and the rest of Europe rose up against French domination in a wave of idealistic, romantic nationalism known as the ‘War of Liberation’. Napoleon was defeated and exiled. Many in Berlin and elsewhere hoped that a new, better Germany would arise.
A brave new world for Berlin, Prussia and Germany? Not at all. The following years saw a concerted effort to put the stopper back in the reformist bottle. The victorious absolutist monarchs thought they could turn the clock back to the eighteenth century. For forty years they almost succeeded. All talk of national liberation and civic freedom was suppressed, in Prussia as elsewhere.
It was a hopeless task. Prussia was no longer a bleak ‘sandbox’, isolated in the far east of the German lands. It had gained large amounts of territory in western Germany, including the Rhineland and Westphalia. These were mostly Catholic, fertile agricultural districts—and most important of all for the state’s future, rich in coal and mineral deposits.
Soon these newly Prussian western towns began to be transformed into industrial powerhouses. In the 1830s, railways were built. The last maintenance on Berlin’s city wall was performed in 1840. Within twenty years the whole structure, seventeen kilometres long, would be knocked down, and Berlin could finally burst its boundaries. So, for around a hundred years, Berlin was without any internal wall.
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Industry expanded rapidly in the capital, but the late 1840s saw an economic downturn. In 1848, revolution broke out in France. The movement spread to Germany, Austria, Hungary and Italy. In Prussia, all the passions that had lain dormant since the defeat of Napoleon once more rose to the surface: the desire for German unification, for political representation and intellectual freedom.
An uprising in Berlin, involving the middle classes and the rapidly growing industrial proletariat, resulted in bloody clashes with the city’s garrison. None the less, King Frederick William, a well-meaning reactionary, agreed to elections and the appointment of a liberal government.
The liberals formed a ‘civil guard’ that bore more than a passing resemblance to the old militia from the War of Liberation. They took the black, red and gold banner of the pre-revolutionary radicals (itself based on the uniform of a famous Prussian unit from the War of Liberation) as their flag instead of the black and white of the old regime. They promised themselves a new Prussia as part of a united Germany, with a democratic, free Berlin at its heart.