Читать книгу Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin - Alexandra Richie - Страница 10

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.

The devastation of the city and the surrounding area was beyond comparison with anything which had gone before, and although some parts of Germany, including much of Saxony and Holstein, were untouched there was a huge swathe of desolate land which stretched from Swabia and the Palatinate through Thuringia and Brandenburg to Mecklenburg and Pomerania. The destruction was not just the result of the battles. There have been countless wars in European history; territories have changed hands, provinces have been won and lost and cities like Berlin have been occupied many times, but few pre-twentieth-century conflicts have created so much damage as the Thirty Years War. The loss of life was proportionally even greater than that sustained in the Second World War.¹⁵ The reason lay in part with the nature of the armies themselves. In the seventeenth century no European state had a national force; there was little in the way of conscription, proper training or effective control of troops’ behaviour. Emperors, princes and others in need of a fighting force held recruitment drives in some areas, but few could afford to support an army for long – not least because the war was a death sentence for thousands of young men: in the small village of Bygdea in northern Sweden, 215 of the 230 men who fought were killed in battle, and five of the survivors returned home crippled.¹⁶ Instead, most hired professional generals to recruit mercenaries. Many armies were made up of outcasts, criminals, vagabonds, homeless men, professional soldiers and psychopaths; some longed for adventure while others felt that it would be safer to be a soldier than a civilian. National and religious loyalties were irrelevant for most mercenaries. Poles fought for Germans, Swiss for Austrians, Dutch for the Swedes, Scots for the Danes, and former enemies often met to discuss the relative merits of an employer – contemporary reports held that the German emperor did not provide adequate shelter while the Polish king scrimped on food for the troops.¹⁷ Such men fought only for a banner; if it was captured they simply changed sides. Autumn desertion was common but generals tended to waive the mandatory death sentence, knowing that many of the men would return for fresh booty in the spring. Armies were expensive; they were kept relatively small, the strategy of attrition dominated and campaigns were dependent on finances. Generals assumed that occupied territory was the property of the army and gave troops free rein to loot, rape and plunder at will; indeed, those soldiers lucky enough to survive often returned home wealthy men – the Swedish general Königsmark, who had started out as a common soldier, returned with assets of almost 2 million thalers (4.8 thalers were worth around £1 sterling), while the once impoverished imperial commander Henrik Holck returned home to Denmark and paid 50,000 thalers in cash for an estate in Funen.¹⁸ The war became a relentless quest for fresh plunder – a self-perpetuating nightmare of destruction. The unruly troops rarely showed mercy to civilians; even when Berlin was occupied by her own allies she was laid waste.

Nikolaas van Eyck’s Occupation of a Village, which hangs in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, offers a glimpse of an everyday occurrence during the war. Van Eyck shows a hamlet surrounded by troops set on plunder, and while some soldiers push their way into houses others loll around on the cannon on the main dirt track waiting their turn to search for food, women and treasure. Helpless villagers wander aimlessly past the incoming wagons; one man comforts his wife and child while another sits beneath a tree, crying. The plundering of villages and towns was the norm. Nothing was spared. Church spires were melted down for lead, farms were stripped and set on fire, villages were burnt for amusement. Peasants were considered fair game for sport: it was common for them to be captured, rounded up like animals and tortured; some had cords tied around their heads so that their eyes were forced out, others had their thumbs pushed deep into gun barrels. Innocent people were bound and tossed into the rivers, thrown out of windows, roasted on spits or boiled in their own cauldrons. Prisoners were sometimes tied in rows and bets placed on how many bodies a bullet would penetrate. Some armies became known for particular forms of abuse: when Wallenstein took hostages in the Mark Brandenburg burghers were repeatedly tortured so that they would reveal the location of ‘treasure’ which had long since been plundered; priests were tied under wagons and made to crawl on all fours like dogs until they died; others were dragged ‘for miles along the rough roads bound to the tails of horses’.¹⁹

Despite official attempts to curb the violence to civilians the Swedish occupation was equally horrific. By 1632 there were no young women left in Berlin as all had been taken by the troops; children were reportedly killed in front of their parents in order to elicit the whereabouts of the family valuables. The soldiers, keen to amuse themselves, murdered unknown numbers of Berliners by sprinkling gunpowder on their victims and setting them alight; they also poured raw sewage down the throats of prisoners, a practice so widespread that the foul mixture came to be known as the ‘Swedish drink’. The hatred between the people and the occupying armies was extreme – particularly in the unprotected areas outside the city walls; civilians sometimes attacked soldiers’ encampments and then endured savage reprisals, while a popular expression amongst the troops went: ‘Every soldier needs three peasants: one to give up his lodgings, one to provide his wife, and one to take his place in Hell.’ Colonel Monro complained of the behaviour of Bavarian peasants towards the Swedes in 1632: they ‘cruelly used our souldiers (that went aside to plunder) in cutting off their noeses and eares, hands and feete, pulling out their eyes, with sundry other cruelties which they used; being justly repayed by the souldiers, in burning of many Dorpes [villages] on the march, leaving also the boores dead, where they were found’.²⁰ Both troops and civilians had become brutalized.

The armies consisted not only of soldiers but of whole communities, including army whores, bedraggled children and vagrants who dragged behind the wagons along with their often diseased livestock, horses and cows. All of them had to be supported and the results were ruinous for occupied territories. Berlin was badly affected by famine. Four failed harvests on the Havel between 1625 and 1628 had already weakened the population and entire encampments of wretched refugees were wiped out by starvation in the successive winters. In 1627 the crops had grown well but they were destroyed by the retreating Danes and the victorious imperial army. The land was constantly being stripped bare, crops were trampled or ripped out before they reached maturity, and starvation was widespread.²¹ In 1629 the Englishman Sir Thomas Roe travelled through the area and wrote: ‘I hear nothing but lamentations nor see variety but of dead bodies … in eighty English miles not a house to sleep safe in; no inhabitants save a few poor women and children vertend stercorarium to find a corn of wheat.’²² In Berlin the starvation in 1631–2 was so extreme that people were reduced to stealing dead animals from the knackers’ yards. The much used gallows were regularly plundered and even graves were found emptied. In one case fresh human bones were discovered in a pit with their marrow sucked dry.

Starvation weakened the population and left them vulnerable to sickness and diseases like smallpox, syphilis, scurvy and typhus. Worse still was the return of the dreaded plague. The first outbreak reached Berlin in 1620 but it continued throughout the war. In 1630–31 2,000 Berliners died of plague; in 1637 over 500 died. Bodies lay out in the streets as there was nobody left willing to push the plague carts or dig the mass graves. Those still alive created strange concoctions of lavender, rosemary, juniper berries, garlic, white onions, vinegar, walnuts, endive, hot poultices, cold compresses, scented masks and bags of herbs in a desperate attempt to halt the disease. People were obsessed with death: drawings of skulls and skeletons appeared on plague sheets and themes of decay and mutability abounded. When the English ambassador travelled to the electoral meeting at Regensburg he reported on a country where a few bedraggled villagers who saw them coming fled in terror, fearing that his party was yet another group of invading soldiers; roads were so unsafe that several of his group were murdered near Nuremberg, and he recounts how he found bodies newly scraped out of graves, ‘fair cities pillaged and burnt’, and people ‘found dead with grass in their mouths’.²³ In May 1631 a pastor in Brandenburg wrote in his diary: ‘Catherine, my old servant, shot.’²⁴ There was no other comment. Such things had become commonplace.

The importance of the conflict is reflected in the mass of literature – and the myths – which it has inspired. The Thirty Years War became a subject of particular importance in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when German historians attempted to use it to ‘prove’ how much the ‘all destructive fury of the Thirty Years War’ had damaged German interests and to show that both the conflict and the post-war settlement was ‘a monstrous iniquity perpetrated on Germany by foreign powers, especially France’; some even drew parallels between the Peace of Westphalia and the Treaty of Versailles.²⁵ But notwithstanding a tendency to exaggerate the results, the impact of the gruesome conflict cannot be underestimated, and many works have tried to come to terms with its effects. These range from Adalbert Stifter’s 1842 novelle Der Hochwald and Conrad Ferdinand Meyer’s 1882 Gustav Adolf’s Page to Heinrich Laube’s nine-volume novel Der deutsche Krieg (The German War), completed in 1866. Schiller wrote a History of the Thirty Years War in 1789 and his tragedy Wallenstein (1799) was one of his greatest works. Ricarda Huch’s Der grosse Krieg in Deutschland (published in 1914) and Wallenstein (published in 1915) were praised by Thomas Mann, and modern German perceptions of the war were greatly influenced by Gustav Freytag’s Bilder aus der deutschen Vergangenheit (Pictures from German History), published in 1859. But the impact of the war is brought to life most vividly in the works of those who experienced it at first hand; indeed, along with the music of composers like Michael Praetorius and Heinrich Schutz, Johann Jakob Froberger and Johannes Crüger in Berlin, literature was one of the few art forms to flourish in Germany during those ghastly decades.

The eyewitness accounts make grim reading. Johann Michael Moscerosch, who fought with the Swedish army and very nearly died of starvation during the war, wrote of the effect of war in his 1643 Adventurers of Philander of Sittewald. Two of the most celebrated poets of the day, Martin Opitz (who died of the plague in 1639) and Paul Fleming, wrote of the longing for peace. Like the other two Andreas Gryphius, born in Glogau in 1616, was forced to flee to Holland for much of the war, but his Tränen des Vaterlands anno 1636 remains one of the most moving descriptions of the devastation caused by the conflict: in it he describes the misery of the people with their towns in flames, the strong maimed, the virgins raped, the streets running with blood and everywhere ‘Fire, plague and death oppress the heart and soul’. His heart-wrenching Epitaph on Mariana Gryphius describes how his infant was killed: ‘Born during the flight, surrounded with swords and conflagration, almost stifled in the smoke … I pressed forward to the light when the furious fire had consumed my country; I looked upon this world and soon said farewell to it, for in one day all the dread of the world came upon me.’²⁶ Soldier poets like Caspar Stieler and Georg Greflinger brought the coarse scenes of battle to life; Greflinger wrote the sombre Der deutschen dreissigjähriger Krieg (The German Thirty Years War) in 1657 while Stieler wrote priapic pornographic works glorifying male power under the pseudonym Filidor der Dorfferer, pieces which were clearly influenced by his experiences as a soldier. In Leave the Dead in Peace he warns the soldier Filidor that his lover will ‘crack jokes over your coffin and sing, whoop and caper on your grave … she will even batter your rotting bones herself’. But he promises to torment her, to frighten her with ‘thumping and bumping’ so that if bruises are found on her in the morning, ‘say that I have done it as my revenge.’²⁷ During the war itself thousands of tasteless, smutty and gruesome illustrated pamphlets were produced by the respective armies to frighten the inhabitants of local towns and to justify their own crude behaviour, and some of these survive.²⁸

Above all the war resulted in the single most important German work of the seventeenth century, Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus Teutsch, translated as Simplicius Simplicissimus, by Hans (or Johann) Grimmelshausen. He was born in Gelnhausen, Hesse, in 1622 but in 1635 Hessian and Croat soldiers ransacked his village. They kidnapped him and he was forced to spend the next fourteen years first as a boy soldier then as a musketeer; he eventually served in a number of regiments, only turning to writing in the last decade of his life. Simplicius Simplicissimus, first published in 1669, is a semi-autobiographical account of the war and is the most important of his works. The main character recounts how his family’s farm is destroyed, how the inhabitants of his village are tortured or raped, how he is carried off by Croat soldiers, falls into Swedish captivity and ends the war serving under the Protestant forces. Its impact influenced many later German writers; nearly three centuries later Bertolt Brecht based his play Mother Courage on Grimmelshausen’s character Landstörzerin Courasche, a woman who spent her life trailing behind Protestant troops on their campaigns through Sweden, Poland and Germany, and whose very existence had become entirely dependent on the continuation of the war.²⁹

Within a decade of the beginning of the conflict the small mercantile town of Berlin had been reduced to a shadow of its former self. Much of it had been destroyed by fire; the city was stripped of anything of value, the once proud citizens scratched out a meagre existence in the ruins, the roads were in terrible shape, the Spree was so clogged up it was unfit for trading vessels, agriculture was in a dire state and the Schloss was so badly damaged that it had to be propped up with wooden slats. Much had been destroyed; the artist-historian Joachim von Sandrart, who had survived the war, wrote that ‘Queen Germania saw her palaces and churches decorated with magnificent pictures go up in flames time and again, whilst her eyes were so blinded by smoke and tears that she no longer had the power or will to attend to art.’³⁰ The population of Berlin had plummeted from over 14,000 to a mere 6,000. It seemed for a time that the elector of Brandenburg would lose his title; as early as 1630 he had sent a plaintive letter to Vienna declaring, ‘No one knows how long I shall remain Elector and master in my own land.’ Berlin seemed destined to become little more than a ghost town. Then, suddenly, the Elector George William died. His successor would prove to be one of the most remarkable leaders in Berlin history; a man determined to ensure that war would never again rule his destiny. It was he who dragged Berlin from the wreckage and set it on its way to becoming the capital of Prussia. His name was Frederick William, and he came to be known as the ‘Great Elector’.

Frederick William was a product of the Thirty Years War. Born in 1620, four years after the outbreak of war, Frederick William had spent many years in the safety of The Hague as a young man, where his Calvinism was reaffirmed along with its austerity and devotion to duty. Clever, dignified and utterly practical, he was well prepared to take power when his weak father died in December 1640. His greatest wish was to see the creation of a strong, independent state which would never again be at the mercy of marauding armies or dependent on the patronage of other rulers. It was he who would first brand Berlin with the mark of austerity, militarism, religious tolerance, devotion to duty and an undue respect for authority for which it became famous; it was he who ushered in the beginning of the rise of Prussia.

Frederick William had much to do. The war still raged around him, his territory was wrecked, his people desperate. The Mark was occupied by Swedish troops, Berlin was a ruin, his own slovenly army lived by moving from town to town and was as hated as the foreign troops. The elector was forced to remain in Königsberg as the Berlin Schloss was uninhabitable. If Frederick William was to bring peace to his territory his first move must be to secure an agreement between Brandenburg and the Swedes and he sent ambassadors to Stockholm to ask for a suspension of hostilities. By May 1641 they had agreed on terms; by October Brandenburg and Sweden had divided Pomerania while Stettin went to Sweden in return for a favourable settlement for Prussia of the Cleves-Jülich lands. With the Swedish flank secured Frederick William formed an alliance with the House of Orange in order to gain Dutch support. In 1643 he felt confident enough to move back to Berlin.

The desire for peace spread through Europe: Queen Christina of Sweden encouraged the French to negotiate and other powers followed suit – often out of sheer exhaustion and in the realization that the military capacity for total victory was beyond the grasp of any one country.³¹ Talks continued between the delegates of 109 states from 1643 to 1648, although fighting continued throughout – as the Catholic Prior Adami of Murrhart put it, ‘In winter we negotiate, in summer we fight.’ The people of Europe were desperate for peace; a Swabian family put in their diary of 1647, ‘They say that the terrible war is now over. But there is still no sign of a peace. Everywhere there is envy, hatred and greed: that’s what the war has taught us … We live like animals, eating bark and grass. No one could have imagined that anything like this would happen to us. Many say that there is no God.’³² Nevertheless progress was made and after much haggling an agreement was reached. Rumours of a settlement spread until on 24 October 1648, after thirty years of misery and months of negotiation, the European powers signed the Peace of Westphalia to an outpouring of rejoicing in the Mark Brandenburg. The music composed for the peace included some of the most powerful Lutheran hymns ever written, including Justus Schotel’s extraordinary Friedens Sieg.

The peace was an uneasy one. War had exacerbated the rivalry between France and Spain, between Richelieu and the Habsburgs, between the king of Sweden and the Dutch, between the Russian tsar and the Poles, and between the dozens of German princes and electors. But the peace had also resulted in compromises between Protestants and Catholics, and between the Holy Roman Emperor and individual German princes. It was the latter which would prove so advantageous to the young elector of Brandenburg. The war had weakened the Holy Roman Empire and strengthened regional leaders, including the electors of Bohemia, Saxony, Hanover and the young Frederick William of Brandenburg, who was determined to take advantage of the power vacuum in Europe. Ironically it was France which opened the way for the ambitious German elector. By shattering Austrian might France had laid the foundations for the creation of a new power in Germany – a ‘third power’ to curb both Austria and Sweden. Frederick William was happy to fill the gap. To his relief many rival German princes chose this moment of peace to withdraw from politics and to put their energies and their money into prestigious projects like palaces and art collections and parties. Their courts expanded exponentially and were paid for by their subjects; the minister in Berlin, Count Manteuffel, said of these petty princes that despite their often dubious birth ‘one would think they were put on earth to ride roughshod over their fellow men’.³³ They also created some of the most beautiful court-cities in Europe.

Frederick William was different. While his rivals amused themselves the hard-headed elector of Brandenburg set about consolidating his territory. In 1657 he signed the Peace of Wehlau and in 1660 the Peace of Oliva, which marked the end of the Swedish-Polish war.³⁴ Those in the eastern provinces who refused to obey him were punished: Colonel von Kalckstein, who, like many Junkers, preferred to ally himself with the more easy-going Polish nobility, was executed; the rest were forced to bow to Berlin. The elector of Brandenburg now ruled over a new entity which would eventually be referred to by a single name: Prussia.

In the nineteenth century historians of the Prussian school, including Sybel and Treitschke, were determined to show that the rise of their state was ‘inevitable’; that it had been ‘destined’ to become the force which would eventually unite Germany, that it was a state so graced with natural virtues that it was superior to all others. But there was very little to suggest that seventeenth-century Prussia or its capital Berlin would ever be much more than a poor outpost on the fringes of the German-speaking lands. Prussia had little on which to build. It had no glorious history, it did not consist of a single ethnic group nor did its peoples speak a single language; its disparate bits of land were scattered from the Rhine to the Niemen, making it seem ill defined and incoherent. The land itself was impoverished and underpopulated, the soil was generally poor and its showpiece, Berlin, was more like a dirty provincial village than a capital city. Prussia and Berlin became powerful not because of ‘natural forces’ but through the ambition, hard work, determination, luck and obsession with military and economic might of a series of extraordinary rulers who were determined to increase the power and prestige of their upstart state.

The Hohenzollerns were the luckiest of the ruling families of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Europe. Of all the great houses theirs was the only one to produce a succession of four healthy male heirs, none of whom was inept or deranged. Three were truly outstanding monarchs. This enviable continuity began with Frederick William in 1640, extended to the first king in Prussia, Frederick I, to his son Frederick William II, the ‘Soldier King’, and finally to Frederick the Great, who died in 1786. Three dedicated them-selves entirely to building a strong state through the improvement of the economy and the creation of a sound administration and bureaucracy and, above all, of an army. The pattern began with Frederick William. Immediately after securing his place in Europe he turned his attention to making Prussia stable and prosperous, and his reforms would become legendary.

He faced an enormous task. Berlin was bankrupt and the last Swedish troops evacuated the Mark Brandenburg only in 1650, leaving farms, hamlets and villages in ruin. Two-thirds of homes in the Mark were destroyed, as were nine-tenths of the cattle and livestock; the population of Neubrandenburg was reduced by half; Altmark towns like Salzwedel and Gardelegen had lost a third of their populations, Stendal and Seehausen lost over half, Werben and Osterburg two-thirds.³⁵ General Montaigne said, ‘I would not have believed a land could have been so despoiled had I not seen it with my own eyes.’ In terms of everything from culture to commerce Berlin lagged well behind a Paris now rising to greatness under the Sun King, Louis XIV.³⁶

Any notion of reconstruction was made more difficult by the fact that pre-war commerce had been so badly damaged; the commercial middle classes had been decimated and trade had virtually ceased. In 1621 200 ships had sailed across the sound at East Friesland; by the last decade of the war it had dropped to ten ships per year.³⁷ Germany was now landlocked as foreign powers controlled the mouths of its rivers. The Hanseatic League, which had done so much to bolster the Berlin economy, was disintegrating and Berliners had to deal with the loss of traditional markets in Italy and east Central Europe as the English and Dutch increased their trade in the west. Powerful medieval towns and old commercial centres like Lübeck and Nuremberg, which had traded with Berlin, were now overshadowed by princely residences like Mannheim and Karlsruhe.

In the end, however, Berlin was one of the few towns to succeed in making the shift from a medieval commercial centre to a residence city. The remaining rights of the townspeople were systematically crushed but this time they did not resist. The war had brought death and misery and by the time it was over Berliners were willing to submit to any authority strong enough to prevent a similar conflict. Frederick William consciously played on their fears by using the threat of renewed war to increase his control over the estates. In this sense his rule marks the final collapse of Berliners’ independent civic power and the beginning of their often excessive devotion to authority. The Hohenzollern rulers brought peace and prosperity to their lands but it was this very success which helped to convince the people that their interests were better served by benevolent paternalism from above than by the fight for political rights; later, when the French or the English or the Americans agitated for real political power and representation Berliners would be content to live as they had for centuries – under the all-powerful, all-knowing hand of a ‘great leader’. In their eyes it was the Hohenzollerns who had turned their small, dusty, uninspiring state into a world leader and who had transformed their city from a desolate backwater into a capital to be reckoned with; surely it would be ungrateful not to follow their princes without question. This passivity was relatively harmless under the eighteenth-century benevolent despots, but it ultimately inhibited political change and established a precedent of obedience and unquestioning loyalty which lasted well into the twentieth century – with disastrous consequences. Berlin would grow powerful in the eighteenth century but its people would remain politically unsophisticated for centuries to come.

Frederick William’s solutions for the internal reforms of his lands were bold, and it is not difficult to understand why he became a heroic figure in the minds of his subjects. Using his own money he built a canal with eleven locks to link the Oder and Elbe rivers, a vast project completed in 1669. He ripped down the old medieval city wall in Berlin, regulated the flow of the Spree and created docking facilities and a crane, attracting east – west inland trade between Hamburg and the Low Countries through to Bohemia, Silesia, Saxony and Poland. He built a sea-going fleet and a sugar refinery in Berlin, hoping to turn the city into the distribution centre of colonial products to Brandenburg, Prussia and eastern Europe, although it ultimately failed to compete with England, France and the Netherlands. The recovery of his lands was impeded by a severe labour shortage so, rather like his predecessor Albert the Bear, he invited people to settle there. Many had fled religious persecution from other parts of Europe, and Berlin became a city of refuge.

Frederick William was selective about whom he invited to Prussia, consciously choosing settlers who would bring money, expertise and skills, including Danes, Swedes, Jews, French and Scotsmen, Germans and Bohemians; by 1725 one-fifth of the population in Brandenburg had been born abroad. Berlin was transformed by the energy and skills of the immigrants. Artisans from Liege introduced the manufacture of weapons and armaments to the backward town; the Walloons cultivated the new plant called tobacco; Dutchmen drained marshland and their compatriot Benjamin Raule created a college of commerce in Berlin; the great painter Michael Willmann travelled to Berlin in 1660; and the influence of Rubens, Rembrandt, Ruisdael and Van Dyck reached Berlin around the same time. A limited number of protected Jews were allowed into the city shortly after the completion of the canal in 1669 and brought commercial contracts and business skill to the trade in luxury goods from silk and horses to furniture, chocolate, coffee, tea, snuff and tobacco. Calvinists came from Silesia, Scotland, Denmark and Sweden, attracted by promises of partial self-government, a separate judicial system and by economic privileges including tax relief. But by far the largest group of refugees were the Huguenots, the Calvinists who fled in the face of a new wave of religious persecution in France.

In 1598 the French had passed the Edict of Nantes allowing the French Protestants, the Huguenots, freedom of conscience, limited freedom of worship and civil status. After 1661, however, the truce began to break down. Protestants were gradually excluded from the professions and the law courts and synods were curtailed. Finally, in 1685, Louis XIV banned all forms of public worship, ordered the destruction of Protestant churches and had the ministers expelled. A seventeenth-century engraving in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris depicts Louis the Great in Triumph over the Heretics: the king stands in a wig and toga, his right foot on the head of a Huguenot, his left stamping on the pages of the New Testament from between whose pages a serpent emerges. The woodcut glorified the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which forced over 400,000 French Huguenots from their homes. Many fled to England or to Switzerland, and it was at this point that Frederick William, the Great Elector, issued the 1685 Edict of Potsdam inviting any of the refugees to Prussia. Over 20,000 came to the state and over 6,000 settled in Berlin.

By 1687 20 per cent of the population were Huguenots, making Berlin seem more like a French than a German town. They brought over 3,000 thalers per person to the province and contributed to Brandenburg’s average capital inflow of around 6 million thalers, but even more important was their contribution to Berlin industry; without them Berlin might well have remained poor and backward like many of its erstwhile rivals. It was they who made the woollen industry the most important of Brandenburg’s native products by the end of the century, and it was they who improved cotton weaving with new inventions and with the importation of raw materials from as far as the Balkans and the West Indies. The French contribution was widely recognized at the time, prompting the Great Elector’s grandson Frederick William to comment:

the French are very industrious people who have made the towns in our country capable of producing manufactured goods, for fifty years ago no fine cloths, stockings, crepe, velvet or woollen goods were manufactured here, and we had to import these from England, France, the Netherlands, now our lands export considerable quantities all over Germany.³⁸

The invitation to the refugees was one of the high points of Berlin history and has ever since been used to demonstrate Berlin’s credentials as a city of tolerance and freedom. Nevertheless this tolerance was not without ulterior motives. The Great Elector was genuinely concerned to protect Protestants in Europe, but the Edict of Potsdam was also motivated by both international and local politics. In 1670 Prussia had cemented an alliance with France; fifteen years later it was souring, not least because the elector was furious that Louis XIV had meddled in his Baltic policy against Sweden and feared that the French were planning an alliance with the new English Catholic king James II.³⁹ The French attack on the Huguenots and his subsequent invitation to the refugees gave him an excuse to signal his displeasure to the French king. The edict also had important repercussions closer to home.

The Great Elector had long been troubled by the entrenched Lutheranism in Berlin and elsewhere and longed to convert the population to Calvinism. It was not an easy task. The conflict between Calvinists and Lutherans, which was based on doctrinal disagreements on the Lord’s supper and predestination, had wreaked havoc in many parts of Germany after the Reformation, when rulers from Saxony, Brandenburg, the Palatinate and elsewhere had lurched from Lutheranism to Calvinism. The two groups of clergy detested one another even more than they loathed the Catholics. The Lutheran Matthias Hoe von Hoënegg reflected this view in his 1601 pamphlet entitled A solid, just and orthodox detestation of Papists and Calvinists, which was followed in 1620 by A weighty (and in these dangerous times very necessary) discussion of whether and why it is better to have conformity with the Catholics … than with the Calvinists.⁴⁰ Fights over religious succession were often bitter; a regent in the Palatinate was so desperate to ensure the province remained Calvinist that he locked the young Lutheran successor away in a lonely convent and tried to convert him; in Baden the regent stole his nephew from his dead brother’s wife and forced him to adopt his own religion. Berlin was at the centre of a similar conflict. The first of the Calvinist electors was Johann Sigismund, who had converted in 1613, and his successors remained faithful, swearing, ‘I am a Calvinist and with God’s help I shall die one.’ Berliners, however, remained devout Lutherans and were violently opposed to change. When the Great Elector took power the only Calvinist institutions in Berlin were the court and the cathedral, and when the first Calvinist preacher entered the city a Lutheran mob broke into his house, beat him up and stole everything but his green underwear – in which he was forced to preach the following Sunday. Thereafter the few Calvinists in Berlin were regularly attacked in the streets.⁴¹ If the elector could not convert Berliners peacefully he could do so by force of numbers, which could be bolstered by the refugees. As a result, when war broke out in Europe in 1672 and Catholic governments began to attack the entire Protestant community he invited them to Berlin, not only from France but also from the Palatinate, the upper Rhine and from Habsburg lands. They changed the religious balance in Berlin, and did so without bloodshed.

The townspeople were suspicious and even hostile to the large number of Calvinist refugees who suddenly appeared in their midst. The French spoke a strange language, wore strange clothing and followed a different religion; worse still, they were given tax breaks and financial assistance funded by the local population through forced collections like that of 20 January 1686, when ‘each and every citizen’ had to contribute to a fund of 14,000 thalers for the refugees.⁴² Despite later claims of ‘tolerance’ these Berliners did not welcome the newcomers with open arms; Muret decried the ‘Gehässigkeit’, the hateful behaviour of Berlin Lutherans towards the French, and it took generations for them to be accepted.⁴³ In the end, however, the Huguenots became an integral part of the city. By 1690 the institutional autonomy of the Lutheran Church had crumbled and Calvinism had become the official religion in Berlin.

By the eighteenth century ‘tolerance’ had come to mean the freedom to practise religion without the kind of persecution seen in many parts of Europe at the time. This extended to many groups, including the Jews. Like other cities of the ancien régime Berlin was far from allowing complete emancipation of Jews but it was more liberal than many in Europe; it did not have a ghetto and had ceased to persecute and expel Jews.⁴⁴ The Great Elector had invited a small number of ‘protected Jews’ into Brandenburg in 1650 and on 21 May 1671 issued an edict on the ‘Admission of Fifty Families of Protected Jews’, who were permitted to ‘keep open stalls and booths, to sell cloths and similar wares … to deal in new and old clothes, and further, to slaughter in their houses and to sell what is above their needs or forbidden to them by their religion, and finally to seek their subsistence in any place where they live’. The Jews were not permitted to have synagogues but could meet in one of their own houses as long as they conducted ceremonies ‘without giving offence to Christians’.⁴⁵ The electoral edict of 1671 attracted many more families to Prussia from Poland and the Habsburg lands; wealthy Jewish families who had been expelled from Vienna in 1670 came to the city and formed the foundation of what was to become Berlin’s sophisticated German-Jewish sub-culture.⁴⁶ Frederick the Great would improve their situation further in 1750 through the ‘Revised General Privilege and Regulation for the Jews in the Kingdom of Prussia’, under which they were given complete control of their own schools, synagogues and cemeteries and were to be tried in accordance with the tenets of Jewish law. Berlin was not tolerant in the twentieth-century sense but it became the most permissive of all Prussian towns and was, for a time, one of the most open-minded in Europe.⁴⁷ Even so, some religions were excluded until the reign of Frederick the Great: in the Brandenburg Recess of 1653 Frederick William announced he would ‘not permit the practice of their religion, in public or private, to Papists, Arrians, Photinians, Weigalians, Anabaptists, and Minists’. He emphasized that his successors ‘must not tolerate Jesuits in your lands. They are devils who are capable of much evil and intrigue against you and the whole community’.⁴⁸ Catholics continued to suffer under intolerant laws until well into the eighteenth century and even ‘protected Jews’ were subject to myriad regulations, special taxes and discrimination.

Irrespective of their shortcomings the Great Elector’s innovative policies were highly successful in creating a prosperous state out of the devastation of the Thirty Years War. The influx of skilled and talented refugees fired the Berlin economy and the city began to flourish. Increased trade and industry meant more revenue for the state, and to assist in administration and tax collection Frederick William created the General Kriegskommissariat (War Commission), a powerful new agency based on the French and Dutch models which formed the basis of a unified central state apparatus. It was the tentative beginning of Berlin’s role as the administrative centre of Prussia. In 1667 he introduced a detailed excise tax on virtually every product: home distilled brandy cost 6 groschen per quart, Rhenish and Polish brandy cost 9 groschen per quart, a fattened hog cost 3 groschen, a ton of salt 4. The revenue generated was ploughed back into the most distinctive feature of the new state, the army.

It had been clear from the beginning of his reign that Frederick William had intended to create a strong army but few had realized the extent of his plan. His army was not to be a mere fighting force; it was set to become the very foundation, the very essence of the Prussian state. The army would change Berlin for ever, influencing everything from its layout and architecture to its culture, its economy and its spirit. In the short term it helped to protect Prussia and made it an important power in European affairs. In the long term, the obsession with the military would prove disastrous.

In his Political Testament Frederick William wrote: ‘A ruler is of no consideration if he does not have adequate means and forces of his own; that alone has made me – thank God for it – a force to be reckoned with.’⁴⁹ The experience of the Thirty Years War had taught him that although alliances were useful they could not be relied upon and it was this which determined his military policy. Unlike other German princes Frederick William had not disbanded his troops after the Peace of Westphalia but had quickly added to his forces. The growth of the military was spectacular: at the end of the Thirty Years War Frederick William had an army of a mere 2,000 poorly trained, undisciplined men, but he was determined to change this. Berlin became a garrison city in 1657 and that year Prussia defeated the Swedes at Fehrbellin, making Brandenburg the strongest German state after Austria. The elector spent 70,000 thalers on the fortification of Berlin alone, building an eight-metre-high wall complete with thirteen bastions around the city. Parade grounds and guard houses began to appear everywhere and Berlin took on the arid militaristic atmosphere which would soon give it the reputation of the ‘Sparta of the North’. The recruitment and generous financing brought results: when the Great Elector died the army consisted of 30,000 men. Suddenly, Berlin ruled over one of the largest forces in Europe.⁵⁰

Frederick William died in 1688. He had not achieved the power or prestige of contemporaries like Cromwell or Richelieu but his accomplishments were extraordinary. He had raised his lands above the dismal legacy of the Thirty Years War and created the foundations of a strong, successful Prussian state. His acceptance of religious refugees and his innovative approach to industry had made Berlin prosper, while his determination to create a strong army had made it an important European power.

After the death of the Great Elector his son Frederick III, the least impressive of the four rulers, took the throne. He had an immediate impact on the city. The new elector was tired of the obsession with fiscal policy and the army and reacted against everything his father had stood for. He was more concerned with questions of status and spent money on useless wars which he had not started and could not influence while splashing out on a grandiose life of luxury. He gave Berlin a short-lived air of decadence. Politically, Frederick’s reign was unremarkable. His only real accomplishment was to use his father’s army to blackmail the Holy Roman Emperor into giving him a royal title; the emperor was in desperate need of Brandenburg’s military support in the War of the Spanish Succession and as a reward for a consignment of Prussian troops he elevated the elector of Brandenburg to ‘King in Prussia’.⁵¹ He would henceforth be known as King Frederick I.

Frederick was delighted with his promotion and was determined to make his coronation a European spectacle. Hundreds of carriages wound their way to Königsberg, and jewels and medals glinted in the sun as he was proclaimed king; this was followed by lavish celebrations in Berlin which were a mere foretaste of what was to come later in his reign. The new king continued to raise revenue by hiring out his army: the English and Dutch paid sizeable subsidies of around 1.5 million thalers to maintain 31,000 of his troops at war in Italy and in the Low Countries, and in all he managed to net around 14 million thalers in this way. Unlike his father, however, he did not use the money to increase his military or economic strength but poured it into the creation of a fabulous baroque court in Berlin. His personal expenditure was staggering. In the years 1705–10 he spent around 5.3 million thalers a year, with over 600,000 on personal expenses; in 1688, the year of his father’s death, more than half of all state expenditure went on luxuries at the Berlin court. An indication of the massive increase in spending is recorded in the excise taxes paid by Berlin Jews, who were the primary traders of luxury goods. In 1696 they paid 8,614 thalers in tax; by 1705 it had reached a massive 117,437 thalers.⁵² The large amount of money in circulation in Berlin gave it the reputation of a fortune-seeker’s paradise, attracting adventurers and opportunists from throughout Europe, and the population raced from a low of 4,000 in the war years to 55,000 by 1710.⁵³ For the first time the city shook off its aura of gloom and began to emerge from years of cultural isolation.

The Great Elector had done relatively little to revive the culture of the city. His obsession with strict Calvinism had brought improvements to some aspects of life: there was, for example, a rise in literacy as all members of the Church were expected to be able to read before confirmation and hence before marriage; he had founded a library and a number of schools in the city. But his concentration on the military and the economy combined with strict religious beliefs had kept Berlin culturally backward. The popular recreation of dancing had been banned as it was said to lead to debauchery; street singing of ‘smutty songs’ had not been permitted; theatres and taverns had been closed as they led to ‘indecency’; and no recreational activities had been permitted on Sunday. The comparison between Berlin and the rest of Europe was startling and the city had nothing to compare at a time when Italy had already produced Michelangelo, Bernini and Corelli, when Holland had Rembrandt and Vermeer, and Flanders Rubens and Van Dyck, when Spain had El Greco and Velázquez, England Purcell, Milton and Christopher Wren, and when the France of Racine and Poussin revolved around Versailles. It had remained distant from the artistic and philosophical debates of the age and isolated from those intellectuals from Poland to Scotland who had already begun to debate the works of Descartes, Hobbes, Galileo and Kepler; the jurist Samuel von Pufendorf had been enticed to Berlin only in 1688, the year of the elector’s death. The new king was embarrassed by the cultural shortcomings of his capital and, with his consort the Hanoverian princess Sophie Charlotte, bankrupted Berlin in an attempt to make it comparable to other European cities.

One of his first important projects was the creation in 1696 of the Academy of Arts in Berlin, followed by the Academy of Sciences in 1700. The latter, which brought Leibniz to Berlin, was one of the city’s first intellectual coups. Leibniz, along with the court chaplain, Jablonski, had long been interested in founding a learned society in Germany for men interested in the study of rational science, but many provincial princes had been suspicious of these ideas. It was the consort Sophie Charlotte who gave Leibniz the chance to create a society which would allow men to ‘strive towards the development, improvement, complete understanding and correct application of beneficial studies, the sciences and the arts, useful information, and anything else that is relevant’.⁵⁴ Like the Academy of Arts it was based on the French model and became the third Academy of Sciences in Europe. There were eighty members, including the astronomer Gottfried Kirch, the mathematician Jean Bernoulli, and the architect Andreas Schlüter. A small observatory was constructed and in 1710 the first Berlin scientific journal, the Miscellanea Berolinensia, was published.

Sophie Charlotte contributed to the cultural life of the city in other ways, dedicating her court at the splendid new palace of Charlottenburg to artistic and intellectual life. The princess was influenced by those elements in Pietism which emphasized religious tolerance, personal rebirth and intellectual curiosity; she invited not only Leibniz but a host of European thinkers to the palace, including the English free-thinker John Toland, author of Christianity Not Mysterious. For his part, Toland praised Berlin as a city of peaceful tolerance between communities and a place of ‘happy prosperity’. The queen brought Italian music and opera to the court with performances of Alessandro Scarlatti, Corelli, Giovanni Buononcini and even the young Telemann.⁵⁵ Frederick also encouraged advances in health care: the College of Medicine was founded in 1685 and the Charité-Hospital, initially started for plague victims in 1710, became a centre of medical excellence. In 1713 a vast circular operating theatre was built with rows of benches and a wooden table recessed in the centre, complete with a collection of instruments, jars of preserved organs and various human skeletons propped up on stands.

Frederick I was now king in Prussia and he was determined to make his residence look like a royal capital. He had much to do. His predecessor had made some minor changes to Berlin, creating Dorotheenstadt and Friedrichstadt for Huguenot settlers, hiring Nering to make small alterations to the old palace, rebuilding the wooden Lange Brücke in stone in 1695, planting the first small avenue of trees which eventually became Unter den Linden, and laying out the Tiergarten as a hunting ground. Nevertheless it was Frederick I who gave Berlin its first grand buildings. When he came to power Europe was steeped in the exuberance of the high baroque inspired by the fabulous Italian palaces and churches and fountains designed by Bernini and Borromini, and by the more correctly classical French style reflected in Salomon de Brosse’s Luxembourg Palace in Paris, Le Vau’s Institut de France and by the Palace of Versailles. Baroque had originated in the Counter-Reformation as an attempt by the Roman Catholic Church to attract people back through the joy and pageantry of its buildings, and the results were delightful. The movement in the architecture was breathtaking, and the curvaceous spires and graceful windows and ornate pastel-coloured facades the product of sheer exuberance; the drama of the chiaroscuro, the gilt and friezes and barrel-vaulted ceilings dripping with cherubs and stylized tendrils and branches came to grace some of the most glorious buildings of Europe. The style was brought to Catholic Germany by the Jesuits, but although villages and hillsides in Catholic Bavaria and Swabia are dotted with dozens of churches in this style sober Protestant northern Germany was less receptive; Berlin got a whiff of the baroque during the reign of Frederick I through the work of a handful of architects and artists invited to the city. The most important were Jean de Bodt, Johann Friedrich Eosander, Arnold Nering and, above all, the architect and sculptor Andreas Schlüter.

Schlüter was born in Danzig but soon moved to Warsaw, where he worked on a number of important commissions, including the Krasinski and Wilanow palaces. In 1694 he moved to Berlin and the following year began work on the Royal Palace, which was completed in 1707. It was ripped down by the East Germans in 1950 and replaced by the asbestos-ridden modernist disaster, the Palast der Republik.⁵⁶ Sadly, little else of Schlüter’s work survived the war, although a hint of his mastery can be seen in the grand equestrian statue of the Elector Frederick William I, which now stands before the Charlottenburg Palace. The work is based on the Roman model of Marcus Aurelius in the Capitol in Rome and, although derivative, projects vigour and power in its own right. His other surviving Berlin masterpiece is the Arsenal on Unter den Linden, a long elegant building best known for the twenty-two dramatic sculptures of heads of dying warriors with their beautifully carved and emotive faces: one throws his bearded head back and cries out in agony, another bites his lower lip and grimaces in terrible pain, another lies dying with his proud, noble face tilted to one side in so realistic a pose that one feels compelled to reach out to touch the furrowed brow.

The king also commissioned other important Berlin landmarks; he had Nering build Charlottenburg Palace; he built Monbijou Palace and commissioned homes for the military as well as a number of churches.⁵⁷ Little survives; the only baroque church still standing in Berlin was commissioned for Spandau in 1712 by Sophie Luise, and its pretty butter-yellow walls and elegant dome still bring a touch of Bavaria to the northern capital.⁵⁸ The king continued to invest in Berlin, draining land on the outskirts of the city and building new suburbs. He added to the new development north of the Lindenallee in Dorotheenstadt, and in 1709 joined the districts of Berlin, Cölln, Friedrichswerder, Dorotheenstadt and Friedrichstadt under a single municipal government, forming the nucleus of the city which would become modern Berlin.

Frederick brought something of the culture of Europe to the city, but the cost was very high for a small state and did little to benefit the lives of ordinary people in Prussia. The new buildings were beautiful but they still stood amidst rubble left over from the Thirty Years War and there was an extreme contrast between the exuberant life at court, with its ballets, fashionable clothes and masked balls, and the poverty to be found in the streets. Visitors were appalled at the number of prostitutes and beggars in Berlin; Lady Mary Wortley Montagu described the kind of poverty to be found amongst the glamour of the residence city as ‘a sort of shabby finery’ with ‘a number of dirty people … narrow nasty streets out of repair, wretchedly thin of inhabitants, and over half of the common sort asking for alms … How different from England!’⁵⁹ Most of the streets of Berlin remained unpaved and filthy and housing was pitiful. Even its economic wealth was illusory; most of the luxury goods were imported and did more to support craftsmen in France, Saxony and the Dutch republic than in Berlin. For most residents life was squalid and dangerous. Once again, however, Berlin was about to be transformed.

The city’s political history has always been one of extremes, and the eighteenth century was no exception. The brief flowering of the baroque and the dazzling life of the Berlin court ended abruptly in 1713 with the death of Frederick I. No sooner had the fun-loving and creative king died than Berlin reverted to its tough militaristic life. The change was brought about by the new king’s determination to reverse his father’s excesses and to create a centre of military power. The city had entered the harsh era of Frederick William I, the Soldier King.⁶⁰

Frederick William saw nothing but waste and vanity in his father’s palaces and art collections. The new king took his austere reformed Pietism very seriously, living by its code of hard work, puritanical restraint, devotion to duty, self-sacrifice and austerity. He gave his father a luxurious funeral but then set about dismantling the court and erasing his memory. Everything went – the silk bedclothes and velvet curtains were replaced by rough cloth; furniture, jewels and carriages were sold; the orders for twenty-course dinners, wigs, silk stockings, fans, pearls, delicate gloves and pretty shoes were cancelled, and decadence was banished in favour of efficiency, cleanliness and hard work. The dismantling did not end with the court. The paintings and operas of western Europe baffled the new king and architecture bored him. The construction of the capricious baroque buildings was halted; a court jester was appointed to succeed Leibniz as president of the Berlin Academy as science was now considered ‘empty formal garbage’; university lecturers were ‘not even good for sentry duty’ and intellectuals were referred to as ‘wastrels’ or ‘dog food’ and were banned from court.⁶¹ Instead of lavish feasts the new king preferred simple food served on a rough wooden table. He wrote little in his own language but detested French and spoke no other foreign languages. At a time when Pöppelmann and Permoser were putting the finishing touches to the Zwinger Palace in Dresden and at a time when St Petersburg was rising out of the muck at the mouth of the Neva, construction in Berlin ceased and the city fell back into cultural darkness. It was whispered that the people there had become the most enslaved of Europe, ‘worse, even, than Russia’. Frederick William had other priorities. Culture was unimportant; instead he wanted to make Prussia into one of the most powerful economic and military states in the world.

When Frederick William took power Berlin was bankrupt, and the king’s first step was to begin a concerted drive to impose central control over administration, finances and industry. Local power was to be crushed and all towns, including Berlin, were to be administered by royal appointees and their budgets treated as part of the royal domain. New and detested tax commissars took control of the city’s administration. In 1723 the king merged the old General War Commissariat and the General Finance Directory to create a new General Directory, which became a clearly defined administrative body whose fundamental aim was to account for every penny spent in Prussia both at the provincial and central level.⁶² Frederick William took personal control over the new civil service, running it like a giant military machine. His ministers sent him detailed reports covering every aspect of their work; those who displeased him were fired. The omnipresent corruption, bribery and embezzlement which had characterized his father’s government were stamped out and his employees began to develop the selfless devotion to duty which would come to characterize the Prussian civil service.

Frederick William was a fanatic when it came to controlling the lives of Berliners. State employees were told what to wear, what time to appear for work, when and what they should eat; if someone contradicted his orders he treated them to a crack across the face with his cane. He believed it was his duty to ensure that Berliners did not succumb to the sins of gluttony or sloth and insisted that they spend all their waking hours at work. He regularly sent spies to patrol the streets and, disguising himself as a commoner, walked through the city attacking those who were ‘idle’, breaking teeth and noses in the process. Market women and shopkeepers were expected to knit or sew when there were no customers around; street cleaners and stable boys were punished if they were found loafing; washerwomen and nurses were not to waste time gossiping.

His efforts to ‘clean up the streets’ were also motivated by his devotion to work. The beggars, vagabonds and prostitutes who had lived in Berlin under his father were rounded up by the Berlin police and, in keeping with the Pietist belief that nobody should receive charity for nothing, were put in workhouses where they were expected to spin wool; even children in orphanages were forced to work after a long morning of religious education. Ironically Frederick William managed to reduce the number of homeless in the city: they preferred to go elsewhere rather than face the strict regime in his Pietist workhouses. The work ethic affected everyone; when Berlin held its last witch trial in 1727 the ‘guilty’ Dorothea Steffin was not burned at the stake as was the custom, but was imprisoned in Spandau fortress to spend the rest of her life weaving and spinning.⁶³ The obsession with work made Berlin a sober, disciplined and unpleasant place. Berliners detested the new rules and regulations which governed their lives and organized watchmen to warn them if the king or one of his spies was approaching so that they could hide. Nevertheless the reforms did bring prosperity and Berlin became the prime beneficiary of the protectionist measures introduced by the king.

The king was also determined to foster domestic industries, in particular those which he deemed essential to the military, but he realized that the local manufacturers could not compete with foreign imports. His response was to demand punitive duties on imported goods and in some cases he banned them altogether. In 1724 he halted the import of all foreign weapons, but six years later armaments manufacturers in Spandau and Potsdam were exporting their goods to Denmark, Poland, Russia and the Habsburg Empire. The most blatant form of control came in the textile industry, which was so important for the supply of military uniforms. Frederick William personally controlled the prices of textile goods; in 1719 he banned the import of all foreign cloth and two years later ordered all military personnel to buy expensive new uniforms every year; if they could not afford it they were expected to supplement their incomes by spinning wool for cash. Spinners and weavers at the state managed textile enterprises, such as the Berlin Lagerhaus, were paid 25 per cent above the going rate and the king insisted on high quality and prompt delivery, which in turn promoted the development of efficient production methods.⁶⁴ This artificial market attracted skilled workers from all over Europe; 20,000 people came to Prussia in 1732 and over a quarter moved to the Berlin area. Wool for manufacture increased from 43,969 stones in 1720 to 81,955 in 1737.⁶⁵ Increased production and revenue allowed the king to pursue his greatest ambition: the creation of a powerful army.

When Frederick William took power the army was in terrible shape.⁶⁶ The state had not been able to pay the soldiers, they had no education, lived in degrading housing and were often short of food; widows and orphans and wounded men were considered outcasts and resorted to begging on the streets of Berlin. The Pietist Jakob Spener had tried to alleviate the problem by creating a wing at the Grosse Friedrichs Hospital, where they were given food and shelter in return for regular church attendance, but when war broke out in 1701 the numbers of the destitute rose again and riots often flared when the Berlin police tried to clear them off the streets. Frederick William’s solution was to put the injured in workhouses while the able bodied were expected to join the army. By now Prussia had a population of 2.25 million, of which an extraordinary 90,000 were soldiers, and the numbers were swollen by peasants expected to divide their time between army service and work on the land. Frederick William’s obsession went beyond the desire to assemble a strong fighting force; one of his most notorious hobbies was the creation of a bizarre battalion of giant grenadiers: the countryside was scoured for men over six feet tall, who were then forced to serve. These men were personally trained by him, and when he was ill or depressed he would have them march through his private rooms.⁶⁷ But, above all, the king saw the army as a model way of life for all men and he issued a stream of ‘articles’ dictating every aspect of their behaviour. Common soldiers had to keep scrupulously clean and show unquestioning obedience to officers, who in turn were to carry batons with them at all times; visitors to Berlin were often shocked to see officers beating soldiers who had not saluted quickly enough or were sloppily dressed. Minor offences were severely punished; stocks and floggings were common, as was hard labour on construction of fortresses or barracks. The most infamous punishment was running the gauntlet, in which the unfortunate victim would be made to race past a line of around 200 soldiers who hit him with the flats of their swords. Drunkenness was punished with ten runs, insubordination with thirty runs; theft and a second attempt to desert were punished by death. The army was also meant to be part of religious life. The first military church in Berlin was located at the garrison and was directed by Lampertus Gedicke; it became renowned for its tough moral stance and bleak services. The king made officers march their soldiers to church every Sunday and guards were posted at the doors so that nobody could sneak out; one disgusted visitor noted that the men were marched in ‘in the same Order, and with the same Silence, as if they were going to Battle’.⁶⁸ The king often delivered the cheerless sermons himself.

By the end of his reign life in Berlin had become inextricably linked with the army. All frivolity had vanished and the city had regained its reputation as a gloomy place devoted to the barrack square and the parade ground. Eighty per cent of all revenue went into the army; only 2 per cent was spent on the court. When it had first become a garrison city in 1657 Berlin had contained 1,500 soldiers and 579 dependants; under Frederick William one quarter of the population of 57,000 were in or dependent on the military. Soldiers were everywhere, parading around in their uniforms in bright yellow, blue, red or white, barking orders, marching in rows or filing into their barracks. The landscape of Berlin was dominated by new installations: a parade ground was set up at the Lustgarten, another in the Tiergarten, another near present-day Alexanderplatz; there was a parade ground in front of the Brandenburg Gate, another by the Potsdam Gate, another by the Halleschen Gate; there were soldiers, guard houses and exercise grounds everywhere. It was Mirabeau who quipped that ‘La guerre est l’industrie nationale de la Prusse’ and by the time of the Soldier King’s death Prussia had the fourth largest army in Europe despite being only thirteenth in population and tenth in area.⁶⁹ In his Political Testament the king warned his successor to be godly, not to take mistresses or follow ‘scandalous pleasures’, to beware of ‘flatterers and toadies’. Above all he was to manage his finances and the army ‘personally and alone’. The Soldier King had put the imprint of the military firmly on Berlin’s character. It would be left to his son Frederick II, known as Frederick the Great, to transform Berlin into one of the most important cities in Germany.

Frederick the Great was the last and the most important in the line of benevolent despots who ruled Berlin in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His reign lasted from 1740 until his death in 1786, and under him Berlin was a complex and often contradictory place. It became the centre of a new kind of administration, a haven of French fashion, a centre of learning and industry, a cultural centre. But it was also despised as a city of aggressive militarism, an upstart, a sand-pit of soldiers and cannon and officers which could threaten not only Russia and Sweden, but France and England and Austria as well. These contradictions were very much a reflection of the king himself, the last of the absolutist monarchs who shaped the city in his own complicated image.

Frederick II became king in Prussia on 31 May 1740. The coronation was nothing like the spectacle enjoyed by his grandfather, and after a short traditional ceremony the king went to the balcony of the Schloss and looked out over the crowd in the Lustgarten.⁷⁰ Berliners cheered with delight. They had heard about Frederick’s love of art and of music, his hatred of violence, his suspicion of the military, his passion for learning and for Enlightenment ideas, and all were hopeful that the oppressive policies of the Soldier King had come to an end. To their surprise, instead of dismantling the military he immediately started a war. Berlin, which had enjoyed peace for decades, was plunged into the middle of a bloody European conflict for which they were blamed. Once again, its future hung in the balance.

Frederick had been in power only a few months when news reached Berlin that the Emperor Charles VI of Austria had died and that the throne had passed to the young Maria Theresa. Frederick was keen to take advantage of her weakness. Without even declaring war he mobilized his army and led it into Silesia, sending word to the young empress that he would ‘protect’ her if only she would hand over the province without a fight. She refused and in 1741 an Austrian force was sent to attack the Prussian troops. Frederick held on to the territory in the First Silesian War, but it was difficult to protect and after years of continued conflict the Austrians made a decisive bid to win it back. The Seven Years War lasted from 1756 to 1763 and extended far beyond Silesia until all European powers were involved in some way; the British backed Prussia not because they agreed with their expansion into Silesia but because they needed them as an ally elsewhere, particularly in North America, and at one point it was money from the British government which saved Frederick from ruin because, as Pitt put it, Canada and India were to be won for the British on the battlefields of Silesia. Macaulay said of Frederick: ‘In order that he might rob a neighbour whom he had promised to defend, black men fought on the coast of Coromanel, and red men scalped each other by the Great Lakes of North America.’⁷¹ The rest of Europe frowned on Frederick’s greed and from that time Berlin was identified by many with dangerous Prussian militarism and opportunism.

The war was devastating for the city, at least in the short term. Once again Berlin found itself in the middle of a long-drawn-out conflict and a series of battles which it could not afford to finance. It suffered occupation twice. The first occurred on 16 and 17 October 1757, when 3,400 Austrian hussars took control of the city and demanded 200,000 thalers before they would leave. A more serious occupation took place in October 1760. In that year Russian troops had swept through East Prussia and had met up with the Austrians near Berlin; 44,000 Austrian and Russian troops engaged 16,000 Prussians at the gates of the city and after a five-day battle the armies took Berlin. They demanded a payment of 2 million thalers but this time money did not save the city. Palaces and houses were looted and many of Berlin’s newly acquired treasures disappeared. Frederick was so angry about the sacking of the palace of Charlottenburg by Saxon troops that he wrote to Augustus III, king of Saxony, to complain; when he received no reply he retaliated by occupying his rival’s hunting lodge at Hubertusburg, selling the contents and using the money for his field hospitals. When the marauding armies finally abandoned Berlin at the end of October it was left demoralized and bankrupt. Ernst von Lehnsdorf wrote in his diary in 1761 that only war profiteers had enough to eat; most of the population were hungry and the city was in a terrible state of decay. Prussia emerged victorious in 1763 but the country was exhausted, the land uncultivated and the people starving. Berlin was a shell of its former self, with the population having dropped from a pre-war high of 126,000 to a low of 98,000. Frederick returned to the city six weeks after signing the Treaty of Hubertusburg: he was welcomed with a triumphal coach, flags and flowers, but he was saddened by its decline and noted that he found nothing but ‘empty walls and the memory of those he had loved’ upon his return.

The rest of the world did not see it that way; Berlin was now cast as the capital of a new self-confident, aggressive power, a reputation which would be further enhanced in one of the most controversial moves of Frederick’s reign. In 1772 he orchestrated the First Partition of Poland in order to – as he put it – eat the Polish provinces ‘like an artichoke, leaf by leaf’.⁷² On 5 August he, along with Catherine the Great and the Empress Maria Theresa, sliced off pieces of the defenceless country. Prussia took 36,000 square kilometres, Austria took 83,000 and Russia 92,000 square kilometres. The land was particularly valuable to Frederick as it linked East Prussia with the west and gave her control over the river Vistula. In 1793 and 1795 the three powers would administer the coup de grâce, dismembering Poland completely in the final partition. It was a disgraceful act, but Berliners cared little. Through war and the opportunistic seizure of territory Frederick had made Prussia a great power, posing a direct threat to Austria and relegating the Holy Roman Empire to political obscurity. The people were proud of their king and became more so when Frederick turned his attention to rebuilding the state after the destruction of the Seven Years War and to making a capital city worthy of a new great power.

Frederickan Berlin conjures up images of a growing, vibrant city, a place feeling its self-esteem and confidence, developing its own unique identity and finally becoming something of a unifying force in Prussia. The king was responsible for many of these changes, promoting everything from the rejuvenation of industry to the creation of a sophisticated new legal code. Farmers ruined by the war were supplied with government money to rebuild their homes, purchase seed and cattle and grow strange new crops like the potato. Frederick was determined to foster trade, improving harbours on the Baltic, linking the Elbe, Oder and Vistula rivers by a system of canals and improving docking facilities in Berlin. He was also inspired by the French Philosophes who advocated the application of Newtonian ideas to industry and believed that the traditional production of anything from weapons to wheels, rope to tanned leather could be improved by a scientific approach. Frederick encouraged development in technology from new water pumps to innovations in glass making; he invested heavily in industries like the ‘Manchester’ textile mill and the Berlin clock factory, and gave the bankers Splitgerber and Daum charge of gunpowder and arms manufacture in Berlin; the city got its own cannon foundry and gunpowder works as well as textile mills. Frederick also encouraged more refined industries like furniture making and the new Berlin lacquer works, and in 1761 he purchased a small porcelain factory belonging to J. E. Gotzkowsky and renamed it the Königliche Porzellanmanufaktur, the Royal Porcelain Works.⁷³ To the annoyance of the Saxons he poached workers from Meissen and began to produce exquisite vases, dinner services, delicate figurines and tea sets smothered in gold and dotted in flowers and butterflies. To advertise the money-losing factory and to buy favours he sent gifts of his precious hard paste porcelain to the great houses throughout Europe. In 1755 Frederick founded the Berlin silk industry with the help of French Huguenots; this was more successful because of the exceptional quality and beautiful patterns of the stuff in colours ranging from peppermint greens or vivid yellows to the deep Berliner or Prussian blue. The Huguenots were involved in dozens of luxury industries: Daniel Chodowiecki’s detailed etchings reveal the world of French merchants in Berlin as they bring new bolts of silk to potential customers or show off their elaborate dresses heavy with embroidery and ribbons and feathers; Pierre Mercier founded the Berlin Tapestry Company, which employed 283 handworkers; Pierre Froméry made guns of exquisite quality; Jean Barès created intricate pieces in gold and silver, while other Frenchmen produced everything from delicate enamelled snuff boxes to imposing carriages.

For all his attempts to promote Prussian goods Frederick had to rely on protectionism to nurture the infant industries. He was aware of the problems inherent in this but, as he explained to the French financial expert de la Haye de Launay, he could not afford to change:

I prohibit imports as much as I can so that my subjects shall be encouraged to produce those things which I forbid them to get from elsewhere. Admittedly their early efforts are crude, but time and practice will bring perfection and we must show patience with first attempts … I have poor soil; therefore I must give the trees time to take root and grow strong before I can expect them to produce fruit.⁷⁴

The protectionist measures were not popular; when Frederick decided that coffee was too expensive Johann Sebastian Bach was prompted to write the Coffee Cantata, which poked fun at the king’s incessant praise of the official alternative – beer.

The attempt to control all aspects of life in Prussia led to another crucial development. Although Berlin was already a military and administrative centre Frederick built on his father’s legacy and transformed it into the centre of a modern civil service populated by bureaucrats who owed their allegiance to the state. He reformed the legal system, creating the foundation of the Allgemeines Landrecht.⁷⁵ Berlin became a city of offices, bureaucrats, secretaries and clerks. By the 1780s it contained not only the General Directory, but also the Administration Secret State Council, the Department of External Affairs, the Chief Audit Office, the General Supply Office, the Department of Justice, the Supreme Court, the Ecclesiastical Department – with separate sections for Lutherans, Calvinists and Huguenots – the Post, the Regie for Customs Administration, the Medical Board, the Mint, the Offices of the Fiscal, the Offices for the Administration of the Army, including the Secret War Chancery and the Commissariat, and the Colleges of the Estates. The administration of the city of Berlin came under central control and from the 1720s Berlin’s Magistrat was composed of civil servants led by a president appointed by the king; Berlin’s administration thereafter rested on what the great Berlin publisher Friedrich Nicolai called the ‘repression of traditional corporate municipal self-government’.

Berlin’s own administrative bodies included the Court Post Office, the Royal Firewood Administration Office, the Commission for Royal Buildings in Berlin, offices for the Saltworks, the Fire Society and the Porcelain Industry. Berlin social welfare administration included the Invalidenhaus for disabled soldiers, the Institute for Poor Widows and the Public Alms Houses.⁷⁶ The city also contained offices to oversee the Academy libraries, the art collections, the Royal Library and the Schloss collection of paintings; Frederick built 150 Bürgerhäuser or apartment blocks for the new bureaucrats. Even the buildings reflected the importance attached to these new offices; Gerlach’s impressive Collegienhaus in Kreuzberg was the first specially commissioned administrative building in Berlin and still projects its importance through its balanced baroque facade and through the large allegorical figures of Justice and Mercy which recline high on the pediment over the grand entrance. The city was not yet the all-powerful administrative centre which it would become after 1871, and Prussian cities and districts still had a high degree of autonomy not least because poor communications between regions made efficient central government impossible. Nevertheless its influence was growing. So was its population. At the end of the war Berlin had a population of 98,000 people but by 1786 it had already reached 150,000. Thirty thousand people worked in industry and trade alone and there were already 3,500 administrative officials. Twenty per cent of the population was in the military and the Berlin garrison now numbered 25,000 men.⁷⁷ Berlin was increasing in size and importance. Now Frederick set about transforming its cultural life as well.

In the eighteenth century all Germany looked to France as the model of civilization. German princes spent fortunes on mock palaces of Versailles; they tried to learn French, copied French manners and imported French courtiers to populate their new palaces – indeed, in 1775 Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand of Brunswick would allow only Frenchmen at his court.⁷⁸ Frederick the Great was amused at the pretensions of these petty princes: ‘there is no prince down to the younger member with an apanage who does not imagine himself to be a Louis XIV. He builds his Versailles, has his mistresses and maintains an army.’⁷⁹ Ironically, however, Frederick set about precisely the same thing and his capital became a quasi-French city. French became the language of the educated elite and of the court at Potsdam on the outskirts of Berlin; in 1750 Voltaire commented that German was reserved only ‘for soldiers and horses’; Frederick had his poetry corrected by Voltaire and even his German history books were in French. An anonymous writer recorded that ‘French language, French clothes, French food, French furniture, French dances, French music, the French pox … hardly have the children emerged from their mothers’ wombs than people think of giving them a French teacher …’ Young men destined for life at court took a ‘Knight’s Tour’ to Paris, where they studied the art of conversation, wit and fashion in an attempt to lose les airs allemands. Saint-Simon referred to these ponderous youths as ‘gross, ignorant creatures, very easy to dupe, whom one cannot help mocking’.⁸⁰ Educated Berliners, on the other hand, referred to Paris as the ‘New Athens’.

There were other settlers in Frederickan Berlin: over 300,000 colonists were welcomed to Prussia, and by the end of his reign one-sixth of his subjects had been born abroad. Frederick claimed to be tired of looking into blue eyes and encouraged not only French, German and Polish immigrants but Greeks and other Mediterraneans to come; he had an immigration office set up in Venice and considered building a mosque in Berlin to attract Turks.⁸¹ But the overriding influence was French, and his cultural ambitions were set by the court at Versailles.

Frederick the benevolent despot was determined to make Berlin a great city, on a social, economic, intellectual and cultural par with France. He took the ideas of the French Enlightenment seriously, encouraging a free press and banning censorship even if books or pamphlets were critical of him. At a time when people throughout Europe were being banished for stealing a loaf of bread, and long before Molière complained that in Paris ‘they hang a man first, and try him afterwards’, Frederick abolished the torture of civilians and permitted the death sentence only for those convicted of murder. He was not religious but was tolerant of others’ beliefs, even allowing a Catholic cathedral in the city centre. He was obsessed with education, setting up training schools for teachers and making primary education mandatory. He founded the Realschule in Berlin, which taught not only reading, writing, mathematics and Latin but also physics, engineering, architecture, geography, botany, book keeping and other practical skills, and he set up the Ritterakademie to train civil servants and created a school for diplomats. Although Berlin would not have its own university until 1809 he rejuvenated the Academy of Sciences, installing the mathematician and physicist Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis as its president and turning it into a centre of learning; it was there, for example, that Johann Heinrich Pott analysed over 30,000 mineral and soil samples and discovered the secret of making Chinese porcelain.

After decades of neglect Berlin began to develop as a centre of culture. The king had little faith in the ability of Berliners to produce great art; he told his sister Sophia Wilhelmina in 1746 that ‘We are emerging from barbarism and are still in our cradles. But the French have already gone a long way and are a century in advance of us in every kind of success.’ He also told Voltaire: ‘You are right to say that our good Germans are still at the dawn of their knowledge. In the fine arts Germany is still at the period of Francis I. We love them, we cultivate them, foreigners transplant them here, but the soil is not yet propitious enough to produce them itself.’⁸² Instead he went abroad for his treasures. He purchased classical statues, including the Polignac marbles admired by Voltaire; he had Berlin-based French art dealers like Girard and Michelet supply him with paintings by his favourite artists Watteau and Lancret; he commissioned many works, including numerous portraits by the French artist Pesne; he had copies of French furniture made by manufacturers like J. A. Nahl. An avid flautist, he welcomed Johann Sebastian Bach to his beloved palace of Sanssouci in Potsdam in 1747; Bach’s Musikalisches Opfer were written for Frederick based on a phrase composed by the king; Bach’s son Carl Philipp Emanuel became Kapellmeister to Frederick and introduced a new musical style to the court.⁸³ The king also presided over the architectural transformation in Berlin, a feat accomplished with the help of his old friend the architect Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff.⁸⁴

Frederick set out to redesign the city, building monumental structures which combined elements of baroque, rococo and neo-classical styles which still grace central Berlin. Unter den Linden was given thirty small houses and twenty larger palaces along with the new Academy buildings and the Royal Library. Frederick helped to design the Gendarmenmarkt, modelled on the Piazza del Popolo in Rome, flanked by the French and German cathedrals with their graceful baroque towers and impressive sculptures. Unlike his father he did not see opera houses as places of the Devil and commissioned Knobelsdorff to build what he called his ‘Temple of Apollo’. The Opera House was unique for the age in that it was not located in the wing of a palace but was an entirely separate structure. The building remains impressive. The pedimented portico with its sweeping stairs running up the sides was inspired by English architecture; there was room outside for 1,000 carriages, and the interior was complete with moveable stages, water pumps for artificial lakes and waterfalls and myriad other innovations. Architects and musicians travelled to see it even when still under construction, and the spectacular opening on 7 December 1742 was followed by a performance of Graun’s Cleopatra e Cesare. The Opera Platz was finished along with St Hedwig’s Cathedral, a vast domed Catholic church designed in part by Frederick himself after the Pantheon in Rome. The Tiergarten, Berlin’s large central park, was redesigned in the baroque style complete with mazes, avenues of trees, benches and tents, where people could enjoy tea, coffee, chocolate, lemonade or Danzig liqueur; its paths met at the Grosser Stern, near the pretty new Bellevue Palace, built in 1786 for Frederick’s brother Prince Ferdinand, its debt to classical architecture most visible in its clean outline, its flat facade and its simple windows. Many private houses built under Frederick have been destroyed, although one of the most exquisite, the Ephraim House with its delicate curved sandstone facade, was rebuilt in 1985. The Nicolaihaus on Brüderstrasse, which had been given a new facade by the publisher Friedrich Nicolai in 1787, is the only baroque town house to survive, although the lighter rococo buildings along the Märkisches Ufer built in the 1760s still stand. Frederick’s most ambitious project was the design of the Forum Fridericianum, a vast area flanked by the Altre Bibliothek with its great curved baroque facade, nicknamed the ‘Commode’, acting as a counterweight to the neo-classical Opera House, and Prince Henry’s Palace, which is now the Humboldt University. The Schloss had already been transformed by Schlüter from an Italianate cloister into a French complex and for the moment remained one of the largest palaces in Europe, bigger than Versailles itself.⁸⁵ The famous equestrian statue of Frederick the Great by Christian Daniel Rauch, unveiled in 1851, is positioned so that the king sits high above Unter den Linden, poised as if ready to ride into the majestic Forum which he himself had created for Berlin.

With the erection of dozens of magnificent buildings the city began to take on the appearance of an important capital and even James Boswell was moved to write in 1764 that Berlin was ‘the most beautiful city I have seen’.⁸⁶ Other visitors were less impressed. When Madame de Staël visited in 1804 she was surprised by its newness: ‘one sees no traces of earlier times … an entirely modern city, beautiful as it is, makes no impressions; it reveals no marks of the history of the country, or the character of its inhabitants.’⁸⁷ The English minister Sir Charles Hanbury Williams wrote, ‘Berlin is a very fine and large town but thinly inhabited. It is big enough to contain 300,000 souls and yet without the garrison there is not about 80,000 inhabitants, and among these there is not one at whose house you can dine or sup without a formal invitation; and that is a thing that very seldom happens.’⁸⁸ Frederickan Berlin was impressive, but it was cold. The turn to neo-classicism placed an emphasis on order and correctness and the new buildings in Berlin were characterized by their straight lines, pure tones and lack of colour. They were dignified rather than captivating, elegant rather than ebullient, detached rather than high-spirited, and they reflected the character of Berlin, with its preoccupation with military precision, order and strength.

The accomplishments of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Hohenzollerns were extraordinary. Berlin had been improved beyond recognition, built from nothing in the midst of a sandy wasteland by a succession of visionary leaders culminating in Frederick the Great. His accomplishments account for the cult status he has been accorded by successive regimes in Berlin. The first state meeting to be held by Frederick’s tomb at nearby Potsdam was between the tsar and Frederick William III in the tumultuous month of October 1805, when the two swore eternal friendship in the face of the Napoleonic threat; William I held his first presentation of colours to new regiments beside his tomb; Hitler held the infamous ‘Day of National Awakening there in 1933, while the latest evidence of the cult was the reburial of Frederick’s bones at Potsdam in 1990.⁸⁹

But while much local history has portrayed the king as unique he was in fact only one of a number of benevolent despots who refashioned eighteenth-century Europe. The most extraordinary example of a city created from nothing was not Berlin but Peter the Great’s St Petersburg to the east which, as Alexander Pushkin put it, rose in all its grandeur and its pride from the ‘dank of forests’ and the ‘damp of bogs’ at the mouth of the Neva.⁹⁰ Neither were Frederick’s social and political reforms unique; after the Seven Years War the Austrians had also modernized their administrative system, while Joseph II abolished serfdom, introduced religious tolerance and made Vienna into a world centre of the arts – Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven would go there, after all, and not to Berlin. Many institutions rivalled the Berlin Academy of Sciences; the great mathematician Leonhard Euler would leave Frederick’s Berlin for St Petersburg, and even the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences of Stockholm and the university at Uppsala were centres of excellence which attracted men like Carolus Linnaeus and Celsius, who invented his thermometer there in 1741.

Furthermore Frederick’s extraordinary accomplishments touched only a tiny minority of Berliners. The city was still relatively poor and with the exception of the elite and the rising middle class the majority of people still lived in poverty or squalor. In 1768 30,000 people in the city had the Armutszeugnis, an official recognition of poverty, and there was little support for the disabled soldiers, ex-prisoners, the failed students or beggars who wandered Berlin’s foul back streets. Life remained difficult for ordinary people, who huddled in cold, damp, poorly lit houses with little furniture. Clothing for most was coarse and uncomfortable, few people bathed and food was unpleasant. The roads were terrible: it took Casanova three days to make the eighty-five mile journey between Magdeburg and Berlin.⁹¹ Above all, the military still dominated Berlin life: the barracks, parade grounds and uniforms prompted Goethe to write to Frau von Stein of his visit to Berlin in 1778 that he could not enjoy the splendour of the royal city as it was obscured by ‘men, horses, wagons, guns, ammunition; the streets are full of them. If only I could describe adequately the monstrous piece of clock-work spread out here before one’s eyes.’⁹²

In reality, Frederick represented the end of an era: he was an absolutist monarch who insisted on personal control of all aspects of life. He would remain one of the most important figures in the history of Berlin, but he did not understand the new force beginning to take hold even at the height of his reign. The Enlightenment ideas upon which he modelled his rule were also fuelling the rise of an independent, educated middle class which was no longer content to follow unquestioningly the dictates of the monarch. These men and women admired Frederick’s reforms, but they were increasingly tired of the constraints placed upon them by absolutism. These Berliners were preparing the way for the future. And the future was being made in France.

The French Revolution of 1789 sent shock waves throughout Europe and, for a time, the champions of the Enlightenment believed that they were witnessing the triumph of reason over the ‘allies of darkness’ and the ‘enemies of man’. For thousands of men like Karl von Mastiaux, who stood before a little German reading group in 1789, the Enlightenment had improved and ennobled the spirit and the heart: ‘Its progress is long and arduous, but following a lengthy process of ripening, it bears those most noble of fruits, the true virtues, the fruit of enlightened reason and benevolent sensibilities.’⁹³ Mastiaux’s sentiments had been repeated throughout Europe in an age when words like ‘improvement’, the ‘brotherhood of man’, and the ‘light of reason’ were to ‘ignite the flame of teaching and banish the darkness which blighted the Christian peoples’. As one Masonic song had it: ‘The noble goal of our scared quest; Light, virtue and justice blessed … This shall be our battle-cry.’⁹⁴ These ideas had been accepted in Frederickan Berlin.

The Enlightenment swept through Europe at the end of the seventeenth century, shaking the very foundations of human understanding and knowledge. It found its first echoes in the detached systematic philosophy of Descartes but it began in earnest in England, with the work of Sir Isaac Newton. In 1687 Newton published one of the most significant works of intellectual history, his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, in which he proposed radical new ideas about the workings of the physical universe. The discovery of natural laws by Descartes and Newton and in the work of Boyle, Hooke and Bacon had led to a new attitude to the world, one in which everything could be explained through the application of science and technology and reason.

The work had an immediate effect on European intellectual life. Newton’s work on prisms and the diffraction of light was applied to everything from hydraulics and the development of water pumps to medicine. Inoculation was introduced at the end of the 1720s and was championed by Voltaire’s Philosophes. New operations were devised to cut out cataracts and set broken bones, trepanation was developed to evacuate blood from the skull after a fracture, lithotomy was used to remove bladder stones – both Samuel Pepys and Benjamin Franklin underwent this operation. La Mettrie, later brought to Berlin by Frederick the Great, was fascinated by experiments on muscular reaction and concluded that just as the legs have muscles for walking, ‘the brain has its muscles for thinking’. The world was no more than a gigantic ‘system’ governed by natural laws. All man had to do was use his reason to figure out how they worked, and then apply them to his own society.

The new materialism and utilitarianism was applied to all aspects of life. Old belief systems like religion, superstition and magic became irrelevant in a world in which everything could be explained. In the middle of the century a group of French writers, the Physiocrats, claimed to have identified a ‘natural order’ by which man could understand the natural laws of economics and thereby achieve a better standard of living – their ideas inspired Adam Smith, who developed them in his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. In his 1690 Essay Concerning Human Understanding John Locke had tried to show how man is a tabula rasa, a creature which, given the correct environment, laws and education, could become a model citizen irrespective of class or nationality; of course, if man could be improved, society could be improved also. The idea was revolutionary and challenged the very assumptions upon which the existing order rested.

The Enlightenment had its roots in England, but it found its spiritual home in France, where it was led by the philosophes who contributed to Denis Diderot’s Great Encyclopaedia, itself an attempt to catalogue and summarize all human knowledge. In his De l’Esprit des lois Montesquieu equated enlightened self-interest with the common good; Voltaire’s irreverent wit cut deep into religious and social mores of the day, with Candide becoming one of the most famous books of the age; in 1770 Baron d’Holbach published his Système de la nature, in which he outlined a mechanical scheme of the cosmos and of man; Turgot attacked the current distribution of wealth, in his Code de la nature, Morellet launched a scathing attack on religion, concluding that ‘Any moral system which bases its doctrine on this conception of the Divinity [as a beneficent god] is absolutely vicious.’ Even the Marquis de Sade echoed these ideas when the philosopher-king Zamé in Aline et Valcour says of God: ‘What you wish is that man should be just; what pleases you is that he should be humane.’⁹⁵ Condillac took Locke’s ideas still further, claiming that man could never comprehend anything beyond his own experience so that abstract notions like religion were a waste of time. These works spread through France and then to the rest of Europe: Buffon’s L’Histoire naturelle and Montesquieu’s De l’Esprit des lois were bestsellers, the latter going to 35,000 copies. Candide went through eight editions in 1759 alone, while 4,000 people subscribed to the expensive Encyclopédie.⁹⁶ The Enlightenment in France became a revolutionary force which challenged Absolutism and which prepared the way for the French Revolution, the American Declaration of Independence and the 1791 Polish Constitution. In Germany, however, it took quite a different form.

Germany was slow to take up the ideas of the Enlightenment – the Aufklärung – and by the time they reached Berlin they had lost their radical edge. The progenitors of the Aufklärung included Christian Thomasius, who passionately opposed the witch-burnings and religious show trials of the day and wrote to this effect in a number of the new German periodicals. Leibniz, too, had been important in laying the foundations of the German Enlightenment, writing as early as 1700 that only through the use of reason could man ‘strive towards the development, improvement, complete understanding and correct application of ideas’. Christian Wolff was the first influential Enlightenment thinker in Prussia, although he was forced to move to Leipzig after arguing that the Chinese were capable of philosophical virtue. Nevertheless, while the French Philosophes tended to speak up against their king and were often harassed by the monarch, many of their German counterparts became fixtures at court. Christian Wolff’s Politik was like a handbook for kings and justified the all-powerful state with an absolutist monarch at its head. For many Germans, autocracy was rational, and therefore good. Unlike the French many defended religion, resting the Aufklärung firmly on Pietiest foundations and teaching German Enlightenment thinkers that religion could be reconciled with reason. The Germans did not appreciate French attacks on the Church or on morality; rakish works like Diderot’s Bijoux indiscrets and Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes were firmly rejected and Berliners failed to grasp that sexual freedom was considered a mark of breeding in the France of Louis XVI. They were baffled when Parisians sneered at Rousseau’s mistress Madame de Warens because she ‘conceals her bust like a bourgeois’; they were shocked when the Parisian lawyer Barbier called Christian marriage a ‘despised popular superstition’, and shook their heads when he proudly recounted that ‘of every twenty lords at Court, fifteen are separated from their wives and keep mistresses’.⁹⁷ Both Christian Thomasius and Christian Wolff rejected empiricism and utilitarianism in favour of religion, a stance which so disgusted Chateaubriand that he wrote in 1797: ‘When all other nations have given up respect for religion it will find a haven among the Germans.’ Voltaire disliked Wolff and called him a ‘system builder’; he later tried to convince Frederick the Great that he was ‘a mere German pedant’.⁹⁸ Ironically it would soon be Voltaire who would be ridiculed in Berlin.

Berlin was by no means the only centre of the Aufklärung in Germany. Christian Thomasius was a professor in Leipzig and Halle; Johann Christoph Gottsched, who at one time had been forced to flee Prussia to avoid being drafted into the Soldier King’s special band of tall troops, worked in Leipzig; Kant spent his entire life in Königsberg; Christian Wolff worked in Jena and Leipzig. Enlightenment ideas first came to the city ‘from above’ via Frederick the Great and were first manifested at court. Only later did they begin to affect the new middle class of Berlin.

As the administrative centre of Prussia Berlin had gradually become the centre for the new groups of independent, salaried professionals, people who neither worked at the court nor laboured in a trade, who had free time for the pursuit of culture and wanted to improve both themselves and society. They were determined to distance themselves from the world of trade and commerce and were in turn excluded from court life as Frederick still preferred ‘a worthless noble to a cultured bourgeois’.⁹⁹ Most genuinely admired Frederick’s reforms and believed that he represented their best interests, but such deference was in part due to the fact that he still controlled all appointments in the civil service, including those in academia. But whereas in France and England natural rights were invoked to guarantee the freedom of the individual against oppression by the state, in Berlin it was assumed that the state itself was the guarantor of rights. The people looked to their benevolent despot in a way which was unthinkable in Paris or London, and Berlin’s Enlightenment was anything but revolutionary; it was more cultural than political, more to do with Bildung (education) than with economics or power.¹⁰⁰ It would be a charming and civilized episode in its history, it would allow members of the new middle class to ‘improve themselves’ through education and the creation of new institutions, it would revel in public-spirited ideals, in the pursuit of reason, religious tolerance, education and humanitarian principles.¹⁰¹ It would also leave the city ill prepared for the political upheavals to come.

The rise of the new educated middle class changed the face of Berlin. Elegant gentlemen carrying canes and newspapers could now be seen attending the opera or promenading in the Tiergarten or meeting their friends to discuss the latest articles in the new ‘moral weeklies’ or the ‘civil journals’. By the end of the century Berlin contained a plethora of open and secret clubs, reading societies, debating associations, scientific groups and learned and literary circles whose members included everyone from civil servants to professionals to the clergy, from professors to bankers to physicians. Many had their own buildings which contained reading rooms and conversation rooms; each society had a complex set of statutes which usually included the banning of alcohol, smoking and gambling, and the prohibition of conversation about personal problems or religious or political beliefs.¹⁰² Conversation tended to focus on sensible reforms, on scientific innovation and on practical matters from new agricultural methods to improvements in education. There were dozens of closed or secret societies: the Society of Friends of the Aufklärung, the German Society, the Reading Cabinet, the Monday Club; but the most famous of the exclusive secret Berlin clubs was the Wednesday Society, started in 1783, which not only championed Enlightenment ideas but which would after Frederick the Great’s death be one of the few to advocate reforms of Prussian absolutism.¹⁰³ Its membership included the society secretary Johann Biester, who published the respected Berlin Monthly Journal, Friedrich Nicolai, Christian Wilhelm von Dohm, best known for his 1781 essay On the Civic Improvement of the Jews, which marked the beginning of the era of Jewish emancipation in Germany, and Prussian state officials like Karl Zuarez and Ernst Klein, who were later involved in the reform of the Prussian legal system.¹⁰⁴ The strict code of secrecy allowed even government officials to speak freely at meetings without fear of reprisal. The Freemasons were also very active in the city and were keen to promote the ‘development of men within laws of enlightened reason’. Berlin contained dozens of lodges. The early ones like Aus trois globes (1740), Fidélité and L’Harmonie (1758) were modelled on their French counterparts, while those founded after 1760 were decidedly more German, with names like Hochcapital von Jerusalem (1760), Zu den drei goldenen Schlüsseln (1769), Zum Pegasus (1771), and Friedrich zu den drei Seraphim (1774). Berlin’s growing importance was reflected in its being given the Mother Lodge Zum Widder Grosses regierendes Ordens Capital der grossen Landesloge der Freimaurer von Deutschland in Berlin in 1776. Lessing and Fichte were both members and Lessing would later write, ‘Freemasonry and middle-class society are of the same age. Both originated side by side.’¹⁰⁵

The innovative new culture quickly spread beyond the reading rooms of the city centre. In 1749 a famous music club was opened in the Brüderstrasse in the house of the Berlin organist Sack, dedicated to the music of Telemann, Haydn, Glück and to Bach’s sons; other enthusiasts championed Mozart and performed his great Enlightenment opera The Magic Flute. For the first time theatres were built for new middle-class patrons away from the court; in 1760 Andreas Bergé opened the privately funded 1,000-seat Pantomime in Spandau. The Danzig-born artist Daniel Chodowiecki moved away from painting court scenes in oils and executed over 2,000 drawings and etchings which depicted the merchants and beggars and fashionable ladies of Berlin; he also illustrated works by Lessing, Goethe, Bürger, Schiller and Claudius, who was himself often called the ‘father of modern German popular journalism’. Chodowiecki was the quintessential Enlightenment artist and it was his allegorical work of the sun’s rays piercing the gloom at daybreak which came to symbolize the ‘coming of light’ of the Aufklärung.

Berlin also became the German centre of the salons modelled on those in Paris and brought to Germany by Germaine de Staël-Holstein. These were held in the private homes of the well-to-do, allowing everyone from intellectuals to impoverished nobles, from bureaucrats to artists to form friendships across the estates.¹⁰⁶ The salons were unique in Berlin history for giving a remarkable group of educated Jewish women, including Henriette Herz and Rahel Levin (later Varnhagen von Ense), real influence over intellectual life in the city; the latent anti-Semitism in Berlin would re-emerge with a vengeance in 1806, but for four decades the Jewish salons were the most prestigious in the city. The beautiful and intelligent Henriette Herz wrote that she attracted ‘as if by magic, all the outstanding young men who were either living in Berlin or else visiting the city’.¹⁰⁷ The Prussian Academy of Sciences, the gymnasia, the academies and the public lectures were now of a high standard. One of the most influential in this circle was the writer and publisher Friedrich Nicolai.

Nicolai was one of the most important figures of the Berlin Enlightenment. His father, a bookseller, left the business to his twenty-five-year-old son in 1759 and Nicolai turned it into a focal point of Berlin life. In the mid eighteenth century books were still an expensive luxury; there were no public libraries and people were obliged to share copies amongst friends. Nicolai advocated the increased production of books and pamphlets and pushed for the publication of ever more reviews, journals and ‘moral weeklies’ based on English journals like the Tatler and the Spectator. He promoted better education and literacy in the drive to create enlightened citizens. On 4 January 1759 he, advised by his friends Lessing and Moses Mendelssohn, began to publish some letters – Briefe, die neueste literatur betreffend, the most important paper of the German Enlightenment, which came out every Thursday. In 1765 he founded the Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek, which was published for nearly forty years and which contained reviews of some 80,000 German titles between 1765 and 1805 alone, including memoirs, literary histories, biographical dictionaries and novels. His bookstore, the largest in Berlin, became a haven where intellectuals could meet for a glass of wine and discuss the latest publications. Nicolai also promoted the modern newspapers which combined entertainment and edification; in 1721 the Königlich privilegierte Berlinische Zeitung (later the Vossische Zeitung) began its career, and many of the 300 contributors to the Berlinische Monatsschrift were high-ranking civil servants who were published alongside ten army officers and five women.¹⁰⁸ The voracity for books meant that the number printed doubled every ten years; there were 3,000 authors in 1760 but 10,000 by 1800. Nicolai’s own works were successful and his Sebaldus Nothanker was a great bestseller of the day. To Goethe’s annoyance it sold 12,000 copies, far more than his own work.¹⁰⁹

By the turn of the century Berlin had the highest concentration of ‘intellectuals’ of any German city.¹¹⁰ Many were civil servants or bankers who dabbled in literature, but there were others of profound importance, in particular the friends Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Moses Mendelssohn. It was they who, by moving to Berlin, pulled the city out from under the shadow of rivals like Jena, Leipzig, Göttingen, Königsberg and Weimar. In autumn of 1748 the nineteen-year-old Lessing, a Saxon by birth, came to Berlin to escape debts which he had run up while at university in Leipzig. After finding lodging in the Spandauer Strasse he set out to transform Berlin. Lessing was a true son of the Enlightenment. He fervently believed that reason was the key to progress, that humanism and human freedom were paramount, and he stood against the evils of prejudice in all its forms. In November 1748 he and his cousin Christlob Mylius, who edited the Berlinische Privilegierte Zeitung, met the publisher Christian Friedrich Voss and Richier de Louvain, who later became Voltaire’s private secretary. Together they founded the Montagsclub (the Monday Club), which attracted luminaries like the critic Karl Ramler, the composer Johann Quantz, Friedrich Nicolai and Moses Mendelssohn, immediately making it a centre of Berlin intellectual life. Lessing became the most eloquent of German Enlightenment writers, with his works reflecting his deep longing for equality and justice: Minna von Barnhelm is a plea for reconciliation between the old enemies Prussia and Saxony and an attack on the outmoded notion of ‘honour’; his famous critique of Johann Winckelmann’s aesthetic theory in his essay Laokoon foreshadowed the classical revival in Germany; the tragedy Emilia Galotti exposed the corruption of the minor German courts.¹¹¹ Lessing was convinced that morality was more important than the dogma of conventional religion and he detested the religious intolerance which he witnessed in Berlin, the most obvious example being continuing prejudice against the Jews. His two plays, Die Juden of 1749 and the magnificent Nathan der Weise, written in Wolfenbüttel in 1779, which stands as one of the greatest works of the Aufklarung, challenged the stereotypical image of the Jew. Through his work Lessing demanded of his audience that they not ask if a person was a Christian or a Jew. Instead, they should ask if he is a man, a human being. The kind and noble character of Nathan was modelled on Moses Mendelssohn, of whom Lessing said: ‘How free from prejudice his lofty soul, His heart to every virtue how unlocked, with every tender feeling how familiar.’ It was an apt description.

Moses Mendelssohn was the third great figure of Enlightenment Berlin. Born in Dessau in 1729, he moved to the city when he was twenty-five. He began as a tutor to a wealthy Jewish family and later supported himself by running a silk factory. At the same time he wrote extensively in journals and newspapers and produced a number of philosophical works, including Phädon oder Über die Unsterblichkeit der Seele, which revealed his humane rationalism. Mendelssohn was a tireless campaigner for Jewish emancipation. He founded the first Jewish school in Berlin for eighty children, financed by court banker Daniel Itzig and the businessman David Friedländer, while his work Jerusalem oder Über religiöse Macht und Judentum was a plea for acceptance of his people; it formed the basis of the Haskalah and later for Reformed Judaism. For those Jewish families granted permission to live in the city Berlin offered many advantages: the city had no ghetto, there were few housing restrictions, and during Mendelssohn’s time it was home to around 3,500 Jews – around 2 per cent of the population. Their growing prosperity was reflected in palatial houses on Unter den Linden and Spandauer Strasse and in the great salons of the day.¹¹² Nevertheless Jews still faced a plethora of petty restrictions and discrimination; when he came to Berlin Moses Mendelssohn could not enter the city as other men did but was forced to remain in a hostel outside the gate otherwise used for livestock. There he was questioned at length and had to pay a transfer tax similar to that applied to cattle before being permitted to enter.¹¹³ Another of the levies forced him to purchase overpriced figures from Frederick the Great’s struggling porcelain firm; as a result twenty monkeys sat in a row on a shelf in his house in Berlin.¹¹⁴ Mendelssohn was a leading intellectual of his day but he faced official discrimination throughout his life: in 1763 Frederick the Great rejected his application to the Academy of Sciences because he was a Jew, a decision meekly accepted by its members even though they had unanimously supported his application. When he died Mendelssohn had still received no official recognition from the Prussian state. Lessing snorted that Frederick’s renowned religious tolerance clearly did not extend to allowing a Jew into the upper reaches of a learned society.

The passive acceptance of such discrimination which went so clearly against their principles was one of the problems with the Berlin Aufklärer. They were innovative in their social and artistic and cultural lives, but they were politically impotent. The only serious criticism of Frederick came in the form of growing resentment against the very people who had brought the Enlightenment to Berlin in the first place: the French.

Anti-French sentiments and the rise of German nationalism are typically identified with the Napoleonic Wars, but resentment against France was simmering away in Berlin long before 1806. It was the product of increased self-confidence in Prussia: as early as 1700 Leibniz had said: ‘We have set France up as a paragon of all virtues and our young self … [and the Prussians] have in consequence misunderstood their own country while, on the other hand, admiring everything which comes from France.’ Collini, Voltaire’s Italian secretary, noted that the victories of the Seven Years War had already made Prussians feel superior not only to Austria but also to France, which was sometimes referred to as ‘a futile frivolous, vain deflated nation’. The rising tide against the French was found in the work of Francke and Spener; it emerged in Klopstock’s epic poem The Messiah and later in the works of Hamann and Herder. In Berlin it took the form of a reaction against the French tax collectors, bureaucrats and courtiers with whom Frederick had flooded the city. Frederick II was a cultural Germanophobe and had consistently appointed French academics and officials to important posts; he called Shakespeare, then championed by German writers, ‘abominable’ and ‘worthy only of the savages in Canada’, and when he read Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen he labelled it a parody of the very worst efforts of Shakespeare.¹¹⁵ By the second half of the eighteenth century the pent-up feeling in Berlin led to open denunciations of the utilitarian ideas of the French Philosophes, an anti-French movement which Madame de Staël would later describe in De l’Allemagne. But above all, the move away from French cultural hegemony was championed by Lessing.

Lessing became increasingly angry with Frederick’s inability to recognize the emergence of a German national literature. He fell out with Voltaire and was furious with the king for installing Maupertuis and la Mettrie at court while excluding both himself and Mendelssohn from the Potsdam Academy. Unlike Frederick, Lessing revered Shakespeare, seeing him as a model for a theatre free of French influences and even calling him the ‘father of German literature’. His anger and impatience were extended to Berliners, whom he saw as docile and submissive.

Lessing is often held up as the most important Enlightenment figure of Berlin; his name is everywhere, his statue stands in the Tiergarten near the Brandenburg Gate and he, like Mendelssohn and Nicolai, are mainstays of a self-congratulatory myth of Berlin as a ‘city of tolerance’. But Lessing had an uneasy relationship with Berlin and he was ultimately as critical of the city as it was of him. His work bristles with anger at the stifling rules and controls imposed upon him there. In his play Minna von Barnhelm the main character goes to Berlin to find her lover, but instead of being welcomed is immediately interrogated by the ‘very exact’ police, who demand to know precisely where she is from and what she is doing in the city; at the same time the maid Franziska complains: ‘Where can one sleep in this devilish big city?’ – where one is annoyed ‘by the coaches, the nightwatchmen, the drums, the cats, the corporals who never stop clanking, shouting, sounding rolls, meowing, cursing’. The play was banned in Berlin and this, compounded with the fact that his application for a job as librarian was turned down, caused a disgusted Lessing to leave the city for good. He remained in Hamburg from 1767 to 1768 and then became librarian to the duke of Braunschweig at Wolfenbüttel, writing in 1769:

How can one feel well in Berlin? Everything there makes one’s gorge rise. Don’t talk to me of your freedom of thought and publication in Berlin. It consists only of the freedom to publish as many idiotic attacks on religion as one wants – a freedom of which any honest man would be ashamed to avail himself. But just let anyone try to write about other things in Berlin … let him attempt to speak the truth to the distinguished rabble at court, to stand up for the rights of the subject, to raise his voice against despotism as now happens in France and Denmark, and you will realize which country, up to the present day, is the most enslaved in Europe.¹¹⁶

He never bothered to visit the city again and died in Braunschweig in 1781. Lessing was not the only one to feel stifled by a place which, as Voltaire put it, had ‘astoundingly many bayonets and very few books’. Voltaire left Prussia for the last time in 1753. Goethe visited Berlin only once in his life, in May 1778. He met Chodowiecki, the art collector Johann Christoph Frisch and the music director Johann Andre, but he had no contact with Nicolai or Mendelssohn and left thoroughly unimpressed. In 1767 Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach grew tired of the residence city and followed Telemann to Hamburg.

For all its advancements Berlin was still overwhelmed by the Hohenzollerns and by the military. Things could not have been more different in France. In the 1770s an apocryphal conversation between the dauphin and the court physician François de Quesnay made the rounds of the cafés and salons of Europe. In it the dauphin asked the doctor what he would do if he were king. ‘Nothing,’ de Quesnay replied. ‘Then who would govern?’ the dauphin asked in alarm. De Quesnay replied, ‘The Law.’ The story delighted the French, but it baffled Berliners. While French thinkers from Rousseau to d’Alembert now insisted that Enlightenment and despotism were mutually exclusive, Berliners continued to defend Absolutism; even the great Immanuel Kant called eighteenth-century Prussia ‘the age of the Enlightenment or the century of Frederick’.¹¹⁷ The unquestioning respect for Frederick and for duty and obedience struck many visitors as odd; even Nicolai was astounded in 1759 to find that the official Censor for Philosophical Works had nothing to do as nobody ever wrote anything critical of the king. Berlin still ‘smelled of gunpowder’. The famous Italian playwright Vittorio Alfieri visited in 1770 and found Prussia ‘like a horrific never ending guard room’ and Berlin ‘like a gigantic loathsome barracks’. In 1779 George Forster, best known for his accounts of his voyage with Captain Cook, spent five weeks in Berlin and commented that although it was outwardly beautiful it was ‘inwardly much blacker than I had envisaged’, with the new buildings and streets impressive but the people coarse, arrogant and badly educated.¹¹⁸

With such meagre defence of its ideas, it was no wonder that the Enlightenment would soon fade. The death knell was sounded when Frederick the Great was succeeded by Frederick William II in 1786, a man who opposed the Enlightenment and soon became terrified by the implications of the French Revolution. After 1789 many Berliners turned against their own Enlightenment thinkers and some societies and clubs voluntarily closed themselves down rather than be associated with the spread of Jacobinism. Those who held on to their Enlightenment beliefs were labelled ‘Nicolai-iten’ and treated with disdain. The self-censorship extended to all levels of society. Immanuel Kant dutifully stopped writing about religion when, in 1794, his works were declared derogatory to Christianity, noting in his papers: ‘To withdraw or deny one’s convictions is base, but silence in such a case as this is the subject’s duty.’¹¹⁹ The Berlin salons of Dorothea Veit and Henriette Herz and Rahel Levin (later Varnhagen von Ense) enjoyed a brief flurry of activity between the time of Frederick’s death and 1806, attracting men from Fichte to the Humboldt brothers to Varnhagen and Schlegel, but this ended with the Napoleonic Wars, when ‘friendships between commoners and nobles and the open display of Jewish wealth and culture all became deeply controversial’.¹²⁰ Rahel Varnhagen would soon lament: ‘where are our days, when we were all together! They went under in the year ‘06. Went under like a ship: containing the loveliest goods of life, the loveliest pleasures.’¹²¹

Perhaps the most poignant symbol of the sad decline of the Enlightenment was the defection from the circle around the once-revered Friedrich Nicolai. Nicolai hung on to his ideals until the end. He was deeply resentful of the coming of Romanticism and was so appalled by Goethe’s The Sufferings of Young Werther that in 1775 he wrote a lame satire called The Friends of Young Werther; he disliked Kant and mocked Herder’s cult of folk songs and interest in German national identity. But his time had passed. Goethe and Schiller attacked him in Xenien and Goethe used him as the model for the ludicrous character Proktophantasmist in the first part of Faust. By the time of his death in 1811 he had become a figure of ridicule amongst the new intellectual elite in Berlin. The Enlightenment, the ‘coming of the light’, had brought a brief period of tolerance to the city, but its most fundamental principles had already been pushed aside by the time of the French Revolution. The Enlightenment would leave a legacy, but not the one envisaged by Mendelssohn and Lessing and Nicolai. By shattering the belief in traditional religion and loosening the bonds to an old way of life it had left an immense vacuum in people’s lives. The Enlightenment thinkers had hoped the void would be filled by notions of tolerance, reason and universal brotherhood, but this was not to be. Instead, people turned to nationalism – not merely the cultural nationalism of Lessing and Klopstock and Herder, but the political nationalism which would be sparked off by one of the most formative events in Berlin history: the arrival of Napoleon.