Читать книгу Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin - Alexandra Richie - Страница 11

Bring in the wine! A toast! To liberty!

(Faust, Part I)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Napoleon became increasingly suspicious of the reformers and flooded Berlin with his spies to watch over them. Stein realized the danger – he advised the king to remain in far-off Königsberg so as not to come in Berlin ‘into immediate contact with all the machinery of domestic and foreign intrigue which is now set in such violent motion’.²¹ The French period of repression began on 15 August 1808 when a letter discussing a future War of Liberation from Stein to Prince Wittgenstein was intercepted. Napoleon had it printed in Moniter and in the Berliner Telegraf and Stein was forced to flee to Bohemia pursued by assassins; he only saved himself by going on to Russia, where he worked against the French in the service of the tsar. After Stein’s escape the French started a reign of terror in Berlin and anyone suspected of anti-Napoleonic sentiments was in danger. Von Troschke, who co-owned property with Stein, was arrested and was for a time condemned to death. Prince Wittgenstein was arrested and accused of planning to poison Napoleon at Bayonne. The eighty-year-old Countess Voss was detained for plotting to kill Napoleon, this apparently confirmed by the fact that she had taught her parrot to screech obscenities about the Corsican.²² Fichte was put under observation and Hardenberg and Schleiermacher were followed and harassed. Theodor Schmalz was arrested. Scharnhorst was removed from office in 1810. Prussia fell behind in her reparation payments and Napoleon used this as an excuse to increase his control over the city. Depression, fear, frustration and anger no longer had an outlet in politics. Instead it spilled out in a new culture – Romanticism. Berlin, once the centre of the Prussian Enlightenment, was now transformed into a cultural centre of the fight against French tyranny.

Berlin is rarely thought of as a centre of Romanticism; rather, the label is usually applied to regions like Bavaria with its Ludwig II fairy-tale architecture, or to the Rhine with its great ruins towering above the water and its legends of river gods or magic rings. The image is wrong. Despite Berlin’s post-war attempts to distance itself from a movement now associated with everything from nationalism to Nazism it was in fact the most important centre of German Romanticism in the Napoleonic period.²³ It was Berlin which became the focal point of the diverse artistic, literary and intellectual output of that troubled age, and it was in Berlin that the sentimentality and Schwärmerei was channelled into a fledgling political movement. It was there that the resentment against France and against political impotence began to be mixed with its notions of the German Volk and Vaterland, with calls for German unity and, more ominously, with increasing claims to German cultural superiority and, later, racial purity as well. Berlin became important in an age in which middle-class Germans, barred from political life, began to be passionate about their own culture and their own past. They were permitted to pursue their cultural revolution under the noses of the French only because Napoleon refused to believe that such scribblers and artists threatened his rule. He was only half right.

The sheer number of artists and writers attracted to Berlin was staggering. When Kleist returned from Paris to carry on the struggle against Napoleon he chose Berlin as his base; in 1815 the world traveller Adelbert von Chamisso called it the ‘Father City’.²⁴ A number of Romantics, from Hitzig and Tieck to Eichendorff and Varnhagen, were Berliners but many more were drawn to the city to meet and to argue and to hear the latest works at the salons of Bettina von Arnim, Henriette Herz, Rahel Varnhagen, Karoline Schlegel and Henriette Sontag. Achim von Arnim settled in Berlin in 1809, where he married Bettina Brentano; the great Berlin critic Wilhelm Wackenroder, who stressed the importance of feelings over analysis, remained there for most of his life; Karl Philipp Moritz taught at the Academy of Arts and published the Magazin für Erfahrungsseelenkunde between 1783 and 1793, the first ever periodical of psychology produced in Germany. Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, the grandson of Frederick the Great’s famous general, married Karoline von Briest there and retired to her home near Berlin, where he wrote myriad Romantic tales, plays and novels, including Der Held des Nordens and his masterpiece Undine. E. T. A. Hoffmann moved to Berlin in 1798, where he wrote his evocative and fantastic stories and drank with friends like Ludwig Devrient at ‘Lutter und Wegner’; he died in Berlin in 1822, aged forty-six. Clemens Brentano, a friend of Arndt with whom he had written Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Boy’s Magic Horn), moved to Berlin from Heidelberg in 1810; here he met Müller and Eichendorff and the Schlegel brothers. Zacharias Werner, the most important dramatist of the Romantic movement, wrote poetry and songs while working in the Prussian civil service during the Napoleonic occupation; Adelbert von Chamisso, whose family had fled the revolution in France when he was a boy of nine, wrote many of his poems and stories in Berlin, including Der Soldat about a man ordered to execute his closest friend. Heinrich Heine studied in Berlin for two years and spent much of his time at Rahel Varnhagen von Ense’s salon. Kleist, who had spent most of his extraordinary life travelling, returned to Berlin in 1807, was arrested and spent time in a French prison but returned in 1810 to continue the fight against Napoleon and to complete his most famous work Prinz Friedrich von Homburg. He killed himself at Wannsee in Berlin on 21 November 1811 after shooting a terminally ill friend. Friedrich Schleiermacher helped to found Berlin University and emphasized the religious dimension of Romanticism; his lectures and sermons as a professor of theology filled young Berliners with patriotic fervour.

Romanticism in Berlin was born out of the indignity, the shame, the degradation felt by those living in the humiliated and occupied capital. German Romanticism was a reaction against France – against French manners, French ideas, the French Philosophes and finally against French aggression. Young Germans now saw Enlightenment rationality, classicism and utilitarianism as the culture of the enemy, a culture which lacked something fundamental, something spiritual, and above all something German. Romanticism started as a literary movement and can be traced to the short-lived whirlwind aptly named Sturm und Drang.

Sturm und Drang ran its feverish course between the years 1765 and 1785. Frederickan Berlin was still very much an Enlightenment city, and it was left to Weimar to lead the headlong charge into the new age. Wieland arrived in 1772. Three years later Karl August became duke and invited Goethe to stay. He would remain for the rest of his life. Herder moved to Weimar in 1776 and Schiller thirteen years later. The concentration of talent in the small town would later give rise to the inane notion that Germany was somehow divided into two mutually exclusive groups, the Dichter und Denker (poets and thinkers) represented by Weimar, and the arrogant Prussian militarists of Berlin; in fact the two strands in German life have always been linked. Nevertheless in the late eighteenth century Weimar was experiencing its golden age and was receptive to the ideas introduced to Germany by that Citoyen de Genève: Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Rousseau was the ‘wild man’ of Europe, the uncouth genius with a deep love of nature who travelled on foot preaching a new ‘natural religion’ and leaving a string of mistresses and abandoned children behind him. For him the Enlightenment man was a fallacy for underneath all the trappings of civilized life lurked an earthy, spiritual, natural human being. Being free meant breaking the restrictive chains imposed by society and allowing the natural man to shine. ‘I would rather be dead than be taken for an ordinary man,’ he exclaimed. The longing to break with the refined views of the Enlightenment was one of the key undercurrents of Sturm und Drang.

The name itself was derived from the title of a play written in 1777 by Friedrich Klinger.²⁵ In contrast to the characters in the typical bedroom farces of the day Klinger’s characters seethed with unbridled emotion; the hatred between the two families on stage raged so intensely that it could only be countered by passionate love. The very style, the tone, the wild abandon of the characters marked this out as quintessential Sturm und Drang. The new movement challenged conventional morality; the rule of law was scorned while anything which allowed man to follow his true nature was praised. Jakob Lenz actually lived the new carefree life, which included well-publicized attempts to bed married women; many of his works from Die Engländer to Der Waldbruder revolve around the idea of unrequited love. In Wilhelm Heinse’s 1780 novel Ardinghello the hero, a Florentine painter, commits two murders in the name of love but this was acceptable because the artist had thrown away stifling convention and had abandoned himself to his emotions. Schiller, too, foreshadowed the Romantics with his belief in the primacy of art and in the idea that beauty could restore to man all that he had lost through the Enlightenment. His heroes were to be respected not because of their deeds but because of their inner responses to life. In The Robbers of 1781 the wrenching conflicts suffered by his main character, Karl, glorify the anarchic liberty of the individual; Karl becomes a tragic hero despite the crimes he has committed as the head of a robber band.²⁶ These ideas were echoed by Hamann, the ‘Magus of the North’, in his anti-rationalism and his belief in instinct and in the primacy of poetry and imagination. But above all, Sturm und Drang found its leading spirit in Goethe. Later in his life this many-faceted character would mock his youthful outbursts, but in the late eighteenth century he was the undisputed master of the new movement.

Goethe enjoyed the kind of adulation in his youth now typically reserved for pop stars, and his works, especially his Bildungsroman or novel of experience, caused a hitherto unheard of sensation. The young Goethe appealed to his generation precisely because he rejected conventional rules and codes; for him a genius did not follow a path laid down by others: instead such talent revealed itself by rejecting convention, by ‘overstepping existing law, breaking established rules and declaring itself above all restraint’. The early novels always featured such characters: Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (William Meister’s Apprenticeship) is the story of a young man who leaves his comfortable middle-class life to journey into the unknown; he experiences love and illness, he sees lost children and joins a wandering acting troupe, he is moved by a production of Hamlet, he is robbed and beaten and is rescued by a beautiful Amazon, and in the end he is taken in by a secret society in a great tower, populated by men who appreciate what he has been through and who declare him a Meister – a master. So too with the hero of Götz von Berlichingen, the young man who cries to God that he feels free under the sky, ‘how free!’ even as he dies. Goethe foreshadows the Romantics, too, in his accounts of Italian journeys and in his beautiful poems, Prometheus and Willkommen und Abschied and Neue Liebe. But it was the success of Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther) of 1774, a bestseller in its day, which went farthest in creating the image of the tortured Romantic soul. This is the story of a young man who longs for the freedom to fulfil himself but who cannot find happiness in the world as it is. He falls passionately in love with a girl, Lotte, who rejects him; he leaves her to find work but is misunderstood by the society in which he lives, returns to see his beloved and is finally driven to suicide. The book mourns for the misunderstood youth, the man who is too fine, too sensitive for the harsh world in which he finds himself. Such a person will always be misunderstood, just as all exceptional people ‘who have created something great, something that seemed impossible, have to be decried as drunkards or madmen’.²⁷ It was the birth of the German cult of genius, and it was taken with deadly seriousness. Hundreds of young people identified themselves with Werther and dressed in the blue coat and yellow trousers of their champion; many left their homes to write poetry or to make pilgrimages to Weimar. There were dozens of copycat ‘Werther’ suicides; one Christel von Lassberg even drowned herself, Ophelia-like, in the stream near Goethe’s house with a copy of the book wrapped in her clothing. The new ideas were exhilarating, inflammatory, alarming and intoxicating, and with the dawn of the nineteenth century, the coming of the French Revolution and the menacing period of uncertainty and war, Sturm und Drang moved seamlessly into the Romantic movement. Goethe soon turned his back on it but it was too late. The ideas had taken on a life of their own.

It was Lord Bacon who said ‘there is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion’. It was this need for ‘strangeness’, the worship of nature, the thirst for the bizarre and the erotic, the glorification of the uncontrollable, the belief in the great man, the desire to free oneself from urban restraint and to run through desolate, untamed woods or along black, craggy shores with the sinister spirits and dark forces unlocking the mysteries of the German soul, which characterized the Romantics. The term ‘Romantic’ was first used to describe medieval tales and songs written in Latin languages and by the seventeenth century already evoked something that was mythical, distant or fantastic. It was Madame de Staël who in 1813 first used the term to describe the poetry of the heirs of Sturm und Drang as the works concentrated not on events, but on the emotions of the main characters. The diverse artists, writers, poets, painters and philosophers who called themselves ‘Romantics’ were brought together by a common world view or Weltanschauung, and although there were expressions of Romanticism throughout Europe from England to Italy the movement reached its most intemperate heights in Germany. The private world of melancholy, darkness, fatalism, death, despair and cultural pessimism seemed to touch something in young Germans, and their new hero – the lonely misunderstood genius – was one they instinctively understood.

The new artistic hero was the antithesis of the hated French savant who had reduced the individual to a mere cog in the machine. For the Romantics there was no law higher than art; only the artist was sensitive to the laws of nature, only he could free himself from the restrictions of society and dedicate himself to the pursuit of truth. The Romantics revered men like Beethoven who had so spectacularly broken with convention. They repeated stories of his bravado and independence – how wonderful it was that in 1806 he had turned to his erstwhile protector and friend Prince Lichnowsky and said: ‘Prince, what you are you are by the accident of birth; what I am, I am of myself. There are and there will be thousands of princes. There is only one Beethoven!’²⁸ There was, of course, a price to be paid. The genius would almost certainly be misunderstood by the masses; he would probably suffer, struggle, be cast out by family and friends; he would be laughed at, he would be cold and hungry and lonely, and he would probably die young. But it would be worth it, for the suffering he bore would heighten his awareness and make him greater still. This belief in the benefits of pain became a self-fulfilling prophecy; Charlotte Stieglitz was so convinced of its power that she stabbed herself in her Berlin house so that her husband could write better poetry; sadly it did not work.²⁹ Countless young men and, to a lesser extent, women struggled in garrets and lonely rooms trying to paint or write or compose Lieder and, as Sheehan has put it, ‘often poor, almost always insecure and unsettled, the Romantics paid dearly for the artistic autonomy they celebrated in their work’.³⁰ Many died young – Hardenberg (Novalis) at twenty-nine, Wackenroder at twenty-five; Kleist committed suicide in Berlin aged thirty-four.

The notion of the individual against the world was echoed in all Romantic literature. Shakespeare’s tragedies were held up as the first role model because of the human conflicts they revealed; Hamlet was seen as the quintessential Romantic youth tormented by ghosts and drowning lovers and his own fears – ‘that dread of something after death’ – which made him incapable of action. King Lear was a tragic figure staggering towards his death blind and betrayed; the play Macbeth was filled with Romantic symbolism from hideous witches on the bleak moor to the bloodstained hands that could not be cleaned, and the eternal punishment for ‘unnatural deeds’ committed by ‘infected minds’. The German Romantics wanted nothing to do with society novels and had no time for Jane Austen or pretty French farces; their works were about suffering and pain and fate. In Ahnung und Gegenwart Eichendorff describes the traumatic experiences of a young man during the Napoleonic occupation; in Undine a mermaid is visited by her husband on the forbidden day and is forced to return to the sea for ever; Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde, subtitled ‘An Apology for Nature and Innocence’, describes a heroine who is so carried away by her own passions and natural urges that she flouts all norms of conventional morality. It is a tale of such eroticism, raw emotion and sexuality that it caused a scandal when it was published in 1789, but Schlegel defended his creation, announcing that Lucinde was innocent because she had merely been following her true nature.

The new mood was echoed in the Romantic music which combined the cult of genius with deep human passion. Beethoven, Weber, Schubert and Schumann were venerated and E. T. A. Hoffmann called music ‘the most Romantic of all the art forms’; he was so enamoured of Mozart that he added ‘Amadeus’ to his name. Liszt said that music is ‘the embodied and intelligible essence of feeling; capable of being apprehended by our senses, it penetrates them like a dart, like a ray, like a dew, like a spirit, and fills our soul.’³¹ Music itself featured in Romantic works: Wilhelm Wackenroder’s Joseph Berglinger is about a composer torn between the inspiration of his music and the mundane life he is forced to lead. Lieder and programme music often evoked Romantic themes. Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise, which echoed around the Berlin salons of the 1820s, captured a world in which sensibility was all; Carl Maria von Weber included themes of wonder and magic in Der Freischütz of 1821 in which a forester goes into the woods in search of a magic spell which will restore his marksmanship but instead meets the sinister Black Ranger.³²

The forester’s journey into the wood was another of the great Romantic themes linked to the love of nature and the fascination with the dark forces of life. Rousseau had said ‘no flat country, however beautiful it may be, ever appeared so to me. I need torrents, rocks, firs, dark woods, mountains, rough tracks to climb up and down, precipices by my side.’³³ The German Romantics echoed this fascination with nature and landscape; they wanted nothing to do with fussy manicured lawns or carefully laid out paths; they wanted eerie forests, deep streams, strange grottoes and lonely seascapes far away from town and people. Nature, real or imagined, was the antithesis of and an escape from the city, where so many of these prophets lived; from the increasingly troubled world of the Industrial Revolution, and from the oppression of occupied Berlin. Even the ‘English garden’, the rage at the time, was planted to look as if it had grown naturally. Poetry and stories were filled with references to nature: Hölderlin lovingly describes the forest in the evening: ‘Now there is a breath which moves the tree-tops in the wood, and look, now the shadow image of our earth, the moon, is on her way in secret too; night the dream-laden is coming.’³⁴ Goltz wrote: ‘Of all nature’s scenes it is the wood in which all of her secrets and all of her favours are found together … What the evil over-clever, insipid, bright cold world encumbers and complicates, the wood – green mysterious, enchanted, dark, culture-renouncing but true to the law of nature – must free and make good again.’³⁵

The love of landscape was reflected in the painting of the day. In the landscapes of the old world, from the Dutch masters to Poussin, nature had been portrayed as a mere backdrop to the relationship between God and man and had been executed in a highly stylized, symbolic manner which evoked a sense of harmony and a divine order. Romantic painters changed this view. The old ideas of balance and construction and man’s control over nature were swept aside in favour of unfettered, uncontrollable nature which reduced man to a mere speck in an unfamiliar, frightening, painful and menacing world.

The greatest and most moving of these paintings came to Berlin in 1810, in an exhibition at the Academy of works by Caspar David Friedrich. The artist caused a sensation in the city with his chilling portrayals of destiny and the helplessness of man against the elements. His A Monk on the Seashore reveals a lonely windswept figure standing out against the threatening, turbulent water, an image of infinity with its terrible dark emptiness, the figure with no hope of redemption or eternal life. Wanderer above the Sea of Fog has the lone figure again, this time a man dressed in black standing on craggy rocks watching the crashing sea below. In Two Men Contemplating the Moon cloaked figures look out from the edge of the forest at the misty moonlight shining through the gnarled fingers of an ancient tree, and are overpowered by the spectacle before them.³⁶ Like so many of his generation Caspar David Friedrich had been influenced by the Naturphilosophie – the pantheism of men like Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling, who taught that the spirit of the world manifested itself in nature. The forest paths which led down rocky cliffs and past shadowy caves were both a source of revelation and a source of fear. The traveller seeking fundamental truths had to make his way through the German forest alone.

This endless journey, the search for meaning and truth, was another essential element of Romantic literature. The artist suffered the Romantic agony because he could never be content with the world as it was. He was driven on by the deep longing, Sehnsucht, to find something which, tragically, could never be achieved in his life. In his Evening Fantasy Hölderlin exclaims: ‘But where am I to go? Mortals live by wages and work; in alternate toil and rest everyone finds satisfaction: why is it always in my breast that the goad is never still?’³⁷ In his poem Sehnsucht Eichendorff describes how a lonely man suddenly hears the sound of a post horn echoing over the distant hills, a call which awakens his lost memories and desire: ‘My heart caught fire within me, and I thought secretly to myself: O, how wonderful to go along too in the glowing summer night.’³⁸ The most famous symbol of Sehnsucht, and indeed of German Romanticism itself, was Novalis’s ‘blue flower’. This remarkable image first appeared in his unfinished novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen, which was published posthumously in 1802. In it the young poet Heinrich meets a stranger who tells him of treasures in far-off lands and that night he dreams of the mysterious, magical light-blue flower. Heinrich becomes obsessed by this thing of perfection and beauty; the flower has awakened an ‘indescribable longing in me … I cannot get it out of my mind’. He is driven to search for this perfect object, but the blue flower can never be found in this world.

Heinrich’s dream was not unique. If the Philosophes had championed the coming of the light the Romantics preferred the murky world of apparitions and darkness. Hundreds of works were written on the themes of sunset and nightfall. Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata was the first of many pieces ranging from Robert Schumann’s Nachtstücke (Night Pieces) of 1839 to Brahms’s Der Tod, das ist die kühle Nacht (Death, that is the Cold Night). Poetry, too, ranged from Hölderlin’s Sunset to Brentano’s Evening Serenade, in which he describes the flute wafting over the dark hills: ‘How sweetly it speaks to the heart! Through the night which holds me embraced.’ Nightfall brought with it the terrible, wonderful world of dreams which gave the human being access to the secret world beyond reason. In Die Symbolik des Traumes (The Symbolism of Dreams) Gotthilf Schubert asserted that dreams gave human beings access to the subconscious, to the soul and to God.³⁹ E. T. A. Hoffmann’s dream sequences are the most disturbing in Romantic literature and range from fairy-tales like The Mouse King to sinister stories like Ignaze Denner and novels like Elixiere des Teufels, which delve into the horror of insanity and which would later inspire the genre of crime fiction. The world of dreams tied into the bizarre and the occult, into a world filled with strange apparitions, ghosts, rotting corpses, and spirits. Mesmer, who gave his name to his own particular brand of hypnotism, created a sensation in Berlin when he preached that all living creatures are linked by a mysterious substance called animal magnetism. He charged substantial sums of money to hypnotize members of the audience and to perform ‘miracles’ and ‘magic cures’ for them. Terrible dreams recurred in Romantic painting, as in the pictures of a goblin lying on a sleeping maiden in Fuseli’s The Nightmare or in Alfred Rethel’s Death as Assassin, complete with its hideous dancing skeleton.

The Romantics were obsessed by themes of fate and death. Popular Schicksalstragödien (tragedies of fate), which were often modelled on Greek plays, had individuals or even whole families fated to die because of a crime committed in the past. In his sensational success Die Schuld (The Guilt) Adam Müller portrays a count who murdered a man in his youth and then married his widow. As the play unfolds he, and the audience, slowly come to realize that the dead man was his own brother. The obsession with death was everywhere. In Hyperion’s Song of Fate Hölderlin described how ‘suffering human beings dwindle and fall headlong from one hour to the next hurled like water from precipice to precipice down through the years into uncertainty’. In Hymns to the Night Novalis cries, ‘Oh draw me, Beloved, powerfully on, so that I can fall into slumber and can love. I feel the rejuvenating stream of death … Eternal life has been revealed in death; you are death and it is only by you that we are made whole.’⁴⁰ This love of death came through in Achim von Arnim’s phrase ‘We live to die, we die to live.’⁴¹ Even in Wilhelm Müller’s cycle of poems Die schöane Müllerin, so beautifully set to music by Schubert, the young miller drowns himself when he learns that the woman he loves desires another. Gradually the fascination with mortality took on a new theme – the idealization of violence and violent death and the creation of apocalyptic visions of warfare and honour in battle. In Fragmente Schlegel writes about giving one’s life for the nation: ‘the noblest and most beautiful must be chosen, above all, the human being, the flower of the earth … only in the midst of death is the lightning of eternal life ignited.’⁴² Tieck wrote, ‘The desire for death is the warrior-spirit.’⁴³ Joseph von Eichendorff’s Ahnung und Gegenwart ends with: ‘We were born in struggle and in struggle we will go down conquered or in triumph. For out of the magic incense of our making a ghost of war will materialize, armoured, with the blanched face of death and bloody hair.’⁴⁴ It was not surprising that this was written in 1815, in the wake of the Wars of Liberation. The idealization of violence and war began to touch for the first time on the world of politics. This new, much more dangerous strain of Romanticism, found a natural home in Berlin.

Berlin’s role was central in the transformation of Romantic ideas into political ideology. Whereas in other parts of Germany it was possible to remain aloof from political life, even the most unworldly philosophers and poets could not shield themselves from the national problems of unity and independence so visible in the occupied city. Suddenly their themes began to take on a new patriotic meaning; characters could still walk through the woods but now they had to be German woods; they could admire buildings, but they had to be ‘German’ Gothic buildings; they could talk of history but it had to be ‘German’ history. Images of national regeneration, of rebirth and greatness, of a lost world of the German Volk, of medieval pageantry and honour, found their way into the works of Novalis and Arndt and Körner and Schenkendorf. Novalis wanted to bring back the glory of the lost Germany and said that ‘the magic of the imagination can unite all ages and all worlds’. Now Hölderlin referred to the German nation as the only one which was pure and called Germans ‘incomparably diverse, wonderfully deep’, while Schlegel wrote that the spirit of Europe ‘now lived in Germany’.⁴⁵ Folk tales and legends were now treated as a lifeline back to a ‘true German’ past, and Arnim and Brentano’s folk songs, Des Knaben Wunderhorn, or Wackenroder and Tieck’s Der getreue Eckart und der Tannenhäuser and Tod des kleinen Rotkappchens were read with intense interest; even tales like Die schöne Melusine, which had originated in France, were presented as quintessentially German. The Grimms’ fairy tales, published between 1812 and 1814, were decidedly nationalistic; glorious German epics like the Nieblungenlied were resurrected along with ancient German heroes. The figure of the huntsman, for example, now stood for the magical Teutonic character Siegfried.

History, too, became part of the idea of national rebirth. It was important to discover the ‘true’ German past because, as Friedrich von Schlegel put it, only people with ‘great national memories’ have survived in history, ‘history is the self-consciousness of a nation’. The real Germany was said to have existed far back in the Middle Ages, a perfect age when Germans had pursued pure and noble goals. The Berliner Ludwig Tieck had explored the monasteries and villages of the Mark Brandenburg with his friend Wackenroder in search of a medieval past; like so many of his generation he became enamoured of Dürer – his 1798 story Frank Sternbald’s Wanderungen was a fictitious tale about one of the master’s pupils. The reverence for the medieval past had religious undertones and was connected not only to the new reverence for Luther as the ‘father of the German language’ but to German Pietism, which held that religion was above all a deeply personal, emotional experience rather than one dictated by empty formal institutions admired by the previous generation. Adam Müller, a member of the Berlin salons and the Christlich-Deutsche Gesellschaft, believed that Germany was essentially Christian; in order to survive it had to rediscover the community of the faithful, united once again by an emotional sense of belonging to the nation, the feeling which had once produced a ‘beautiful brilliant’ Christian age. Such vague Romantic ideas had not initially been part of a single political message but were soon channelled into a specific national political programme by those united against Napoleon. One of the most important was the revolutionary nationalist prophet and propagandist, the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte. It was he who articulated the link between Romantic notions of history and culture with a new concept of German nationalism. He used the lecture halls of Berlin as his pulpit.

Fichte was born in Rammeau in 1762 and first studied theology before becoming a student of Kant’s. In 1794 he was appointed to a chair of philosophy at Jena, where he met Goethe, Schiller, the Schlegel brothers and the Humboldts, but he was dismissed for being an atheist. Instead he moved to that ‘Godless city’ Berlin, where he became the first elected rector at the new university. It was there that he turned against the Enlightenment and against Kant, and moved towards a Romantic view of German history and the German nation. For him Germans – the Urvolk – were morally superior to other races, not least because they had remained uncorrupted by other cultures, especially those of the Latin and Roman worlds. It was this vision which prompted Fichte to write his Speeches to the German Nation, delivered in Berlin during French occupation in 1806–7.⁴⁶

The speeches came at an important time. The Spanish had revolted against the French and some, including vom Stein, hoped that Berliners might also rise up against Napoleon. In his addresses Fichte asked, ‘What is to be done with Germany?’ and in fourteen lectures proceeded to outline a new vision of German nationalism. He asked what made a German ‘German’; why, despite the fact that Rome had been a superior civilization, had the ancient Germans resisted it for so long? His answer was that freedom meant rejecting foreign cultures and ‘just remaining Germans’. There, in the heart of occupied Berlin and with French officers in the audience, he asserted that ‘only the German has character’ and went on to stress that individuals must be taught to feel part of this national group. The key to this was education, which would teach young Germans that fulfilment in life would only come about if they were at one with the German nation. The message was clear: Berliners might not be as sophisticated as the French but to be true to themselves they had to rid themselves of the occupiers and re-create a glorious past through the resurrection of folk tales and medieval history. It was a provincial idea born of humiliation and loss of prestige, an idea which would later be twisted into the service of racists and chauvinists whom Fichte would have hated. And yet with his help Germanic fairy tales, the Gothic cathedrals, the poetry of ‘longing’, the patriotic songs, the slanted versions of history and the many other trappings of German Romanticism became mixed up with the new political movement – nationalism.

By 1808 other patriotic Germans had joined Fichte in the effort to rouse Berliners against the French. Schleiermacher, who had been exiled from Berlin by Napoleon, returned and spent his time whipping up popular support for war against France, for ‘one could not abandon the nation to the foreigner’ but had to create ‘one true German Empire, powerfully representing the entire German Volk’. Kleist said of the French in 1808:

Bleach every space, field and town,

White with their bones;

Spurned by crow and fox,

Deliver them unto the fishes;

Dam the Rhine with their bodies;

Let her, swollen with their limbs

Flood the Pfalz with foaming waves,

May she then be our frontier.⁴⁷

Ernst Moritz Arndt cried, ‘let the unanimity of your hearts be your church, let hatred of the French be your religion, let freedom and Fatherland be your saints, to whom you pray!’; and in his 1813 speech ‘What is the German’s Fatherland?’ he spoke of the need to unite Germans in a great nation. For him, Germans did not appreciate their own country: ‘We live in a beautiful large rich land, a land of glorious memories, undying deeds, unforgettable service to the world in remote and recent times.’⁴⁸ It had been lost, now it must be recovered. Publications, too, began to reflect the new mood. As early as 1807 Wilhelm Gubitz, a teacher at the Academy of Arts, had attempted to publish a nationalist newspaper Der Vaterland, although the first edition was seized and he was imprisoned. In 1808 Kotzebue published a number of anti-Napoleonic articles in Der Freymüathige; the paper was banned after K. M. Müller submitted an inflammatory article called ‘Über die Nemesis’, but the papers continued to circulate underground.

Anti-French feelings began to take more practical forms after news of the Spanish Uprising and the Austrian Wars of Liberation in 1809, the return of the king from Königsberg at the end of that year and the death of Frederick III’s consort Queen Luise in July 1810 – a woman who was revered for her stance against Napoleon and whose death brought people together in mourning. A plethora of illegal and secret organizations sprang up: Reimer’s bookshop on the Kochstrasse became a centre of clandestine activity for anti-French groups; men from Chamisso to Savigny, from Varnhagen to Arndt continued to meet at the Herz salon to discuss possible moves against France. One of the most powerful organizations was the Tugendbund, started in April 1808 in Königsberg, with a chapter in Berlin. It called itself the ‘Moral and Scientific Union’ for ‘the revival of morality, religion, serious taste and public spirit’ but was in fact a secret society directed against the French. Friedrich von der Marwitz said that they got ‘intelligence from all quarters, to create irritation against the French … and then to make report how discontented the people are here’.⁴⁹ Schleiermacher was the leader of the Berlin Committee, which included military men amongst its members and which met secretly even when ‘the enemy was still in the land’. The groups communicated between Königsberg and Berlin using codes to deceive the French; in one the king and queen were referred to as ‘Quednow and his wife’, vom Stein was called ‘Christ’, and Gneisenau was referred to as ‘the Call’.⁵⁰ In 1812 the Hauptverein or Berlin Central Club was founded to further the nationalist cause and in November 1810 the Deutsches Bund or German Confederation was formed by the student Friedrich Friesen and the teacher Friedrich Ludwig Jahn to ensure ‘the survival of the German people in its originality and self-sufficiency, the revival of German-ness, of all slumbering forces, the preservation of our nationhood … aiming at the eventual unity of our scattered, divided and separated Volk’.⁵¹ Jahn was obsessed by the idea of strengthening the German Volk by ridding it of the foreign presence; in 1811 he put these ideas into practice by forming the Turnerschaft in Berlin’s Hasenheide. Two hundred gymnasts gathered not only to exercise together but to stage medieval tournaments, complete with crossbow competitions and mock sword fights. Young people were to be ready for war and all these activities – from poetry readings to night marches – were meant to instil a communal spirit. By 1812 the Deutsches Bund had spawned other groups, including the Charlottenburger Bund which included Gneisenau, Schleiermacher and Reimer amongst its members. The wave of anti-French activity increased dramatically when Napoleon began preparations for a new campaign in 1812. In the end, however, it was neither the reformers nor Romantic ideas nor the patriotism of men like Fichte or Görres which drove Napoleon from Berlin. It was the result of Napoleon’s one great mistake – the invasion of Russia.

By the end of 1811 relations between France and Russia had started to break down and both sides began to plan for war. The French preparations were staggering. Napoleon assembled an army of 1,100,000 men in Europe. Five hundred thousand, including Dutch, German, Polish and Swiss troops, were moved to the east. To the annoyance of the local population thousands were stationed in Berlin. Worse still, Napoleon forced the Prussian king not only to maintain the troops on his soil but to provide 20,000 troops for the army. From March 1812 Berlin once again endured the economic hardships of the occupation of a vast army. Many of the reformers were so disgusted by the king’s support of France that they left the country: around 500 officers resigned their commissions – Boyen and Clausewitz went to Russia, Gneisenau went to England, and the head of the Prussian police went to Prague. Civil servants, journalists, writers, philosophers and others who yearned for a war of liberation continued to organize underground. Some Berliners were visibly hostile to the French troops in their midst; when the foreign soldiers celebrated Napoleon’s birthday on 15 August a handful of people pelted them with stones and had to be driven back with bayonets. The Deutsches Bund and other groups began to sabotage French supply lines and attack guard posts. This did not amount to a popular uprising against the French – far from it – but some Berliners used the opportunity to demonstrate their hatred of France for the first time.

The war began on 24 June 1812. A vast army of 422,000 men struggled across the river Niemen and entered Russia. Napoleon had high hopes of victory. He believed that the Russian serfs would rise up and join him in their demands for the principles of liberty, equality and brotherhood. But the Russian serfs knew little of the principles of 1798. Napoleon hoped he might be reconciled with the tsar before Christmas and decided not to burden his troops with heavy fur coats, boots or ice shoes for the horses. But the tsar did not negotiate. Compared to the mighty French force bearing down on it the Russian army was weak and Napoleon thought it would be easy to crush. But instead of fighting it continued to retreat into the vast landscape, burning villages and fields on the way thereby depriving the French army of food. By the end of that fiery August the invaders had already lost 150,000 men to illness and desertion and so many horses were dying in the heat that the basic provision of food and supplies simply ceased.⁵² Just before Moscow, at Borodino, Marshal Kutuzov finally turned and fought the French, but although it was a Russian bloodbath their army remained intact. The French continued on to Moscow with 100,000 troops but found the city deserted and emptied of supplies. It was a hollow victory. By the time Napoleon arrived there winter was closing in. As he paced the Kremlin wall and looked over his latest conquest he realized that he had been trapped.

The winter of 1812 was particularly bitter. Napoleon ordered his army to retreat down the Smolensk road pursued by Kutuzov. Many were killed by Cossacks and partisans but more simply froze to death on the way home as temperatures reached –21°C at Smolensk, –24°C at Minsk, –30°C at Molodeze. The suffering was immense. On 5 January the pro-Russian activists vom Stein and Arndt left a liberated St Petersburg to the sound of church bells and followed the retreating French army down the road from Pskov. The carnage was terrible to behold. Their sledge passed over the dead bodies of horses and men which were strewn on either side of the road; all the villages they passed had been ransacked or burned. On 11 January they reached Wilna and found a pyramid of corpses in the courtyard of the monastery ‘as high as a third storey window and all frozen together’. Stein wrote to his wife: ‘We see nothing but wagons full of corpses which are found in the high road partly eaten by wolves or are carried out of the hospitals (in Wilna alone there are 15,000 in hospitals) or gangs of prisoners in rags, hollow-eyed, with blue-grey skin, awaiting death in sullen silence.’⁵³ Over 20,000 men were lost crossing the river Berezina alone, and when the remnants of the Grande Armée finally struggled over the Niemen into Poland only 18,000 troops remained. Napoleon had lost 380,000 men, making this one of the most costly campaigns in history.⁵⁴

The majority of Berliners had remained passive throughout the French occupation, unmoved even by Fichte’s speeches and the activities of the Bund, but rumours of Napoleon’s defeat in Russia brought anti-French sentiments to life. French army soldiers quartered in people’s homes were turfed out on to the street. By the end of 1812 the remnants of the Grande Armée had started to struggle back into Berlin; Ludwig Rellstab saw the wagons filled with wounded men roll slowly into the city and noted that ‘the appearance of the unfortunates was terrible’.⁵⁵ As the Grande Armée struggled west General Hans Yorck, then in command of a Prussian auxiliary corps of 14,000 troops, had deliberately disobeyed the king – unthinkable behaviour for a Prussian officer in an army whose motto was ‘Obedience’ – and had changed sides. The Convention of Tauroggen, signed in December 1812, opened the border to the tsar’s army and the two had pursued the French into Prussia together. Gustav Parthey noted that above all it was ‘the young generation which greeted [Yorck’s action] with joy’.⁵⁶

On 6 February 1813 Berliners had their first contact with the victorious Russian army when an advance party of 300 Cossacks entered the city and demanded the surrender of Napoleon’s 10,000 troops there. The French barricaded the city but Russian reinforcements arrived and on 4 March Berlin was liberated. Many who had remained loyal to France fled the city in disgrace and on 17 March General Yorck made his triumphal entry into Berlin. At the same time Stein had travelled to Breslau to try to persuade the king to change sides and enter the war against France. On 23 February Frederick William, who had finally broken his ties with Napoleon, read the proclamation An Mein Volk (To My People), appealing to his subjects to rise up and volunteer for service. On 3 March he introduced a new medal for bravery in battle to be awarded irrespective of rank. It was designed by Schinkel, and was called the Iron Cross.

Friedrich William III’s change of heart heralded the true start of the Wars of Liberation. The Prussian army openly called for men and the clandestine organizations were transformed into recruitment centres: members of Jahn’s organization rushed to join the Landwehr under Adolf von Lützow, who adopted the uniform of black frock coat, red lapels and gold oak branches – the first manifestation of the black-red-gold which would later become the colours of the German nationalist movement. Theodor Körner wrote poetry glorifying the national fight; he was later killed in action and became a hero – there are still two streets named after him in Berlin. Thirteen thousand Prussians from all walks of life joined up – 6,500 from Berlin, including Schadow, Fichte and Iffland, who came in outlandish medieval outfits. Berlin businessmen raised 1.2 million thalers to pay for the volunteer army and many women gave their gold jewellery in return for ornate filigree iron bracelets and necklaces which were worn with patriotic pride. On 24 March Frederick William finally returned to his capital confident that the city was now safe. The final battle near Berlin took place at Grossbeeren on 23 August 1813, when a French force of 70,000 men met an army of Swedish, Russian and Prussian troops under Bernadotte. The French defeat there foreshadowed the most important battle of the Wars of Liberation, the ‘Battle of the Nations’ at Leipzig.

This battle was the largest so far in history. It was fought by the coalition of Austria, Prussia and Russia; Austria alone contributed 127,000 men, Prussia 228,000 infantry and 31,000 cavalry, while Napoleon had a force of 442,000. The battle began on 16 October 1813. The mammoth armies clashed for three days and when smoke finally cleared the rolling fields, now hills of mud, could be seen littered with dead and wounded men, mutilated horses, discarded weapons and twisted wreckage. The French lost a staggering 38,000 men while 30,000 were taken prisoner.⁵⁷ The battle was a disaster for Napoleon and it broke him. War continued for months, but his hopes for the mastery of Europe ended in 1815, at Waterloo.

When news of the rout at Leipzig reached Berlin the city erupted in a wave of jubilation. The sense of pride and optimism carried on into the summer, when the Prussians reached Paris and cartloads of property stolen from Prussia were brought back to Berlin. On 17 and 18 January 1816 a great victory celebration was held under the restored Quadriga on the Brandenburg Gate. The anti-French activists had now become heroes and Baron vom Stein was made a Knight of the Order of the Black Eagle – the highest decoration in the land. The victory had freed Berlin and Prussia from foreign domination.

Reformers and fledgling nationalist groups now demanded social and political reforms. Liberal nationalists like Jahn and Ernst Moritz Arndt wanted to see the creation of a unified German nation and in 1814 Arndt wrote in Germanien und Europa that Germany should be a single monarchical state with its own army, its own laws and its own representative institutions. To this end he started to organize the creation of monuments and festivals, including one at the site of the Battle of Leipzig. But the hopes of the reformers were soon dashed. The king was safe, Napoleon was gone and things could go back to the way they were. The political class found to their disappointment that not only was there little real desire for change amongst the ruling elite; there was little interest amongst the people either. The drive for national unity remained strong amongst liberals and reformers but they were a tiny minority. Democratic reforms were halted before representative government could be put into place in part because the mass of Berliners remained suspicious of it, even referring to democratic constitutionalism as ‘un-German’. Nineteenth-century attempts to portray the time as one of mass movement for national unity were mere fantasy; after all, even the Landwehr had consisted of only 20,000 volunteers, and the war had been won not by them but by the mammoth regular armies. Only later would men like Arndt and Fichte or the reformers like Stein and Scharnhorst become national heroes; at the time they were treated with suspicion both by the populace and by the aristocrats keen to retain power. With Napoleon gone liberal nationalism was increasingly seen as a threat. As Madame de Staël had said of Prussia, ‘the two classes of society – the scholars and the courtiers – are completely divorced from each other. The thinkers are soaring in the Empyrean and on the earth you encounter only grenadiers.’ The ‘grenadiers’ had fought the war for the restoration of stability and to retain Prussia’s status as a great power. They wanted to return to their own privileges. Society as a whole was unwilling or unable to stop them, and that is precisely what they did.

Men like Stein were bitterly disappointed by the general apathy of the population at large and by the fact that there was no real stomach for reform amongst the majority of Berliners. Peace had come at last and most wanted to settle down and rebuild their lives. Stein had already complained about Berliners’ pathetic response to Napoleon compared to the fervour of the masses during the Spanish revolt or of the Muscovites, in whom he had witnessed ‘heart-elevating inspiring scenes’. After the war he was even more scathing about Berliners’ lack of interest in reform. ‘It is a misfortune for the Prussian State that the capital is situated in the Electoral Mark,’ he said. ‘What impression can those dry flatlands make on the mind of their inhabitants? What power can they have to rouse or exalt or cheer it?’ He continued, ‘What can you expect from the inhabitants of those sandy steppes, those smart, heartless, wooden, half-educated people, cut out for nothing but corporals and calculators … fellows that think only of places, privileges, increased salaries.’⁵⁸ Niebuhr told Wilhelm von Humboldt: ‘It is an utterly mistaken view to think that the mass of the German population has a democratic tendency; that appears in our savants, our pamphleteers, our beardless youths, but nowhere in the people, the nobles, citizens or peasants.’⁵⁹

This view was soon codified in the post-war settlement of Europe. The bizarre Congress of Vienna in 1814–15, best known for the many amorous liaisons which took place behind the scenes, settled Europe’s borders after the defeat of Napoleon but did not end German fragmentation and absolutist rule. Stein had hoped for the creation of something akin to the old German empire and Hardenberg had wanted a close German federation and representative government, but such developments were impossible at a time when neither Prussia nor Austria would concede power to the other, when smaller states like Württemberg insisted on sovereignty, and when the people of Germany remained passive. The result was a loose confederation of states with a weak parliament in Frankfurt-am-Main made up of non-elected representatives. There was no constitutional reform in Austria or Prussia and the new German Confederation was little more than a collection of princes determined to retain power and prevent change. Ironically, the most important change had nothing to do with reform, but took place because the tsar wanted large chunks of Polish territory which was then in Prussian hands; Prussia was compensated with Saxon territory and with extensive areas in the Rhineland and Westphalia, giving it control over a swathe of territory from East Prussia to the new industrial areas in the west. Although the significance of this was little understood at the time it marked a crucial turning point in German history. For the first time ever Prussia’s focus had shifted to the west; for the first time ever Berlin was responsible not only for the defence of the east, but also for the border with France. The attempts to join these divided Prussian regions would now in effect shape the drive for German unity. But this lay in the future. Berlin was not yet the focal point of Prussia; neither Rhinelanders nor Saxons felt any loyalty to their new state capital. Goethe noted that whereas other countries had great cities which served as the capitals of a united nation Berlin remained a mere provincial city: ‘Paris is France,’ he wrote. ‘All the main interests of that great country are concentrated in the capital … It is quite different here in Germany … We have no city, we have not even a region of which one could say: “Here is Germany!” ’⁶⁰

Some tried to maintain the nationalist momentum after the Wars of Revolution. Turnvater Jahn hoped to expand his patriotic gymnastic groups and in Jena the student movement or Burschenschaft was founded and quickly spread throughout Germany. These young people still longed for the creation of a united Germany; they dressed in what they believed to be old German national costumes, carried the black, red and gold colours of the old imperial order used by the Lützow volunteers, and they began to act out Romantic stories of medieval knights and folk tales in secret rituals and gatherings. In October 1817 they gathered at the symbolic Wartburg castle perched high on a rocky crag in Thuringia to merge all the local groups into a national body. Nearly 500 torch-bearing students dressed in costumes trudged up the hill to the site where Luther had translated the Bible, to the very room whose wall was still marked with the ink he had thrown at a vision of the Devil. There they held a ceremony commemorating both the victory at Leipzig and the anniversary of the Reformation which had brought ‘freedom from Rome’.⁶¹ In memory of Luther’s burning of the Papal Bull they gathered works of conservative and anti-nationalist writers together and burned them in a huge bonfire.

The idea of a group of nationalists agitating in the German universities made the leaders of the newly restored absolutist regimes nervous. The chance to silence them came when the student and Burschenschaft member Karl Sand assassinated the reactionary playwright Kotzebue on 23 March 1819 – the student was later decapitated in public.

All liberal democratic and nationalist groups were to be punished under a new set of laws: the infamous Carlsbad decrees. These were masterminded by the wily Austrian statesman Wenzel von Metternich, who was bitterly opposed to any participation of the people in government. All democratic clubs, liberal organizations and anyone suspected of involvement in ‘revolutionary agitation’ were now to be suppressed and police state techniques used to hunt down all those opposed to the restoration of absolutism. The press was censored along with all printed matter of less than twenty pages; universities became bastions of conservatism as professors who criticized the system were sacked and rebellious students sent down. Beethoven’s Fidelio was banned, as were Fichte’s Speeches to the German Nation; Friedrich Jahn was arrested and his gymnasia closed down and Frederick William III dismissed the last of the reformers, including Wilhelm von Humboldt; on 20 March 1820 Humboldt revealed the extent of the censorship when he began a letter to Stein with: ‘I have refrained from saying to you through the post anything about public affairs … All our letters are opened.’⁶² Berliners did not defend them; most longed for peace and agreed with Niebuhr when he said that there was no need to fight for political change when liberty was ‘based more on administration than on constitution’. The disillusioned poets and writers and artists were not powerful enough to rouse the city from its complacency; how could they when even Goethe taught that he would ‘rather cause an injustice than tolerate disorder’. The ‘quiet years’ of the Biedermeier period had begun.⁶³

Biedermeier represented a great retreat from politics and from the national questions left unsolved after the Wars of Liberation. It was also a reaction against Romanticism, which by now was sinking under the weight of its own obsession with tuberculosis and opium and death. There was a sense of insecurity and helplessness amongst the bourgeoisie, captured by the anguished term Weltschmerz, the pain of being in the world. People were too tired or too disappointed to face the issues churning beneath the placid surface of life and drifted into a period of restoration, of security and of conservatism. They turned inward to the small things in life, to local politics, to the Heimat and to the family.

The name Biedermeier was invented in the 1850s, long after the period had ended, and was a gentle dig at the dull, sentimental bourgeois culture which flourished after the defeat of Napoleon. The Biedermeier world was one of Bildung, of classical education, of innocence and naïveté. Its air of respectability and quiet dignity hid a degree of prudishness and hypocrisy. Contemporary paintings capture its spirit, filled as they are with their images of pretty but not grand interiors, of young men in their libraries or young ladies practising the piano or having tea or singing Christmas carols. The rooms were cosy and homely, with wooden floors and striped silk wallpaper, filled with dainty furniture of lavender and cherrywood. The centre of this world was the family.

The new morality made the family into the highest achievement of bourgeois life; children were seen not merely as future providers but as a way for a middle-class couple to ensure immortality: they represented hopes for advancement and success in the next generation.⁶⁴ Marriage was no longer strictly controlled by the community or regarded as a financial transaction or dynastic contract between two families. Love matches were suddenly fashionable. The new morality influenced sexual mores. In the eighteenth century love and sexuality had been seen as two distinct things and open libertinism and erotic adventures had been a source of amusement, particularly amongst the aristocracy. In the early part of the nineteenth century Wilhelm von Humboldt was famous for his visits to Berlin’s better brothels, and yet his marriage had been held up as a paragon of virtue. Thomas Jefferson had told Humboldt in 1807 that ‘When a man assumes a public trust he should consider himself as public property’, but neither man would have thought this included scrutiny of his private life. Now Humboldt’s personal life was criticized; Hardenberg was castigated for keeping a mistress and both Wieland, who had had a splendidly decadent sex life, and Kotzebue, who had at least seventeen children and perhaps more, were labelled lascivious and immoral. Men still frequented brothels and had mistresses on the side but it was no longer polite to talk about it openly. This prudishness extended to all aspects of life, including the world of politics. Bourgeois Berliners knew they had no political power but they rejected the inflammatory work of Heinrich Heine who, writing from Paris, railed against the repression in Berlin. Rather than heed his warnings of the dangers lurking in Prussian life Berliners called him ‘radical’ and ‘dangerous’.⁶⁵ In reality, the educated elite remained firmly under the control of the Hohenzollerns and the military. Personal and political doubts were pushed underground in a world of censorship and conformity and repression. Even Humboldt, who had done so much for the city’s academic life, called Berlin an ‘intellectual wasteland, small, unliterary, and therefore overly malicious’.⁶⁶

Given the pervading climate it is not surprising that Biedermeier Berlin produced little art of note. Sadly many of the great artists who had been drawn to the city during the heady days of the Romantic period now found their careers blocked. Felix Mendelssohn, who in 1820 had re-introduced Bach’s St Matthew Passion to Berlin and who should have succeeded to the directorship of the Singakademie, was passed over for the dull Karl Friedrich Rungenhagen. Carl Maria von Weber, who had inaugurated Romantic opera with the première of Der Freischütz in 1821, was rejected by the court composer Gaspare Spontini and moved to Dresden: the Berliner Giacomo Meyerbeer was forced to leave for lack of work and was only offered the position of director of the Opera in 1842 under Frederick William IV; Hector Berlioz and Richard Wagner both spent time in Berlin but were disappointed by its repressive atmosphere and moved elsewhere. Even the great sculptor and artist Johann Gottfried Schadow, who had created the Quadriga and who had been so scathing about the French occupation of Berlin, received no more commissions in his own city. He was superseded by the more solid Christian Daniel Rauch, who completed the great equestrian statue of Frederick the Great and had statues of the successful generals of the Napoleonic Wars – Blücher, Yorck, Gneisenau, Scharnhorst and Bülow – lined up along Unter den Linden. But Berlin still failed to impress. When Pastor Karl Philipp Moritz first saw London he exclaimed: ‘How great had seemed Berlin to me when I saw it from the tower of St Mary’s and looked down on it from the hill at Tempelhof … how insignificant it now seemed when I set it in my imagination against London!’⁶⁷ The only field in which Biedermeier excelled and served to change the spartan view of Berlin was in architecture. This was largely thanks to the gift of one man, Karl Friedrich Schinkel.⁶⁸

In 1826 the Viennese writer and friend of Beethoven’s, Franz Grillparzer, journeyed to Berlin in one of the new post coaches: ‘Finally the towers of Berlin,’ he wrote. ‘Through the gates. Beautiful. The collection of buildings more beautiful than I have seen together. The streets wide. Kingly.’⁶⁹ Such praise was rare before the arrival of Schinkel, the greatest German architect of the nineteenth century. It was he who, over the space of a long and dynamic career, transformed central Berlin, giving the city centre a unified feel with his elegant neo-classical buildings in the ‘Prussian style’. Schinkel gave form to Unter den Linden, the Platz der Akademie, the Lustgarten and, with Lenné, the Tiergarten. If, as it is said, the first Roman emperor ‘found a city of brick and left it marble’, Schinkel found a city of wood and left it brick. But much of Schinkel’s brick was covered with plaster, swathed in marble and surrounded by columns of Saxon sandstone, sculptures and elaborate wrought iron. His gifts ranged from interior and set design – he created fabulous iron furniture, was one of the first to do lithographs, and designed the magnificent star-studded set for the Queen of the Night in Mozart’s The Magic Flute – to draughtsmanship and painting. But Schinkel’s career also reflected the triumph of reaction in Berlin. He had started out as an ardent Prussian reformer but, like so many of his generation, had retreated from political life after the disappointment following the Wars of Liberation. Instead he became a pillar of the establishment in the apolitical and naive world of Biedermeier Berlin.

Schinkel’s life spanned the era from the end of absolutism to the end of the Biedermeier years. He was born in 1781 in the little garrison town of Neurippen to the north of Berlin. It was a time of extraordinary change. By the time the family moved to Berlin in 1794 Kant had published The Critique of Pure Reason, Frederick the Great had died, and the ideas of the French Revolution were reverberating across Europe. The young Karl was sent to school at the famous Graue Kloster but in 1797 decided to become an architect after seeing Friedrich Gilly’s plans for a vast monument to Frederick the Great. He studied with Gilly and was given his first commission – a garden pavilion – in 1806. The revolution and ensuing turmoil had a powerful influence both on his personal and professional life. Schinkel watched from his rooms on the Alexanderplatz as French troops marched into Berlin in 1806 and like many of his contemporaries he was roused into a patriotic fervour by Fichte’s 1807 Addresses to the German Nation. He joined the Berlin Romantic literary circle and was befriended by Achim and Bettina von Arnim, Clemens von Brentano, Karl von Savigny and others; like many of them he volunteered to serve in the Prussian Landsturm after the declaration of war on France. Schinkel’s ardent patriotism was reflected in his work. By 1805 he had already designed a monument to Martin Luther; he would soon create sets for Undine and Faust and planned to illustrate Brentano’s fairy tales. His paintings, like the melancholy Bohemian Mountain Range at Sunset, were executed in the high Romantic style and were clearly influenced by Caspar David Friedrich’s lonely landscapes which he saw exhibited in Berlin in 1810. During the occupation he painted large dioramas of historic scenes to bolster public morale and in 1812 exhibited the vast Burning of Moscow to emphasize Russian fighting spirit against the Grande Armée: it showed thick brown clouds of smoke billowing over Moscow and the people stoically walking away as the French moved up towards the high towers of the Kremlin.

Schinkel’s patriotic service continued after the defeat of Napoleon. He designed the decorations which streamed from the Brandenburg Gate for the victory parade in 1814 and he helped to organize the great exhibition of war booty returned to Berlin from Paris. He produced a medal for Blücher showing the great general as Hercules in a lionskin on one side and St Michael defeating Satan – a reference to Napoleon – on the other. He designed the Iron Cross – and created the Pickelhaube or pointed helmet, which would later become the very symbol of Prussian militarism. Above all, his patriotism was reflected in his architecture, and in his use of the ‘national style’ – Gothic. Schinkel believed that Gothic architecture represented Romanticism, eternal Christianity, the lost Germany of the Middle Ages, even the ‘German soul’. The Gothic style provided a model for the development of Prussia and embodied the call for liberty and freedom, for reform and for the creation of a unified German state. Most of his early plans were in this style. When Queen Luise died in 1810 Schinkel submitted to the king drawings for a memorial chapel complete with guardian angels, high arches and tracery windows meant to evoke the very entrance to paradise. After the war he designed a vast Liberation Fountain, which had the Germanic chieftain Hermann rearing up on his horse and holding a spear to the belly of the fallen Roman Quintilius Varus who, weighed down by his imperial armour, bore a striking likeness to Napoleon. He designed a great Gothic cathedral to commemorate the Wars of Liberation and submitted plans for the rebuilding of the Petrikirche. But none of these huge projects was ever built. The reasons were political.

During the Napoleonic period Frederick William III had appeared to support the reformers, the German nationalists, the volunteers for the Landsturm, and the liberals who wanted political change, but with the defeat of France he quickly reverted to his old ways. Calls for political reform, for a unified Germany, for a constitution and for a representative government were now considered subversive and dangerous and the Gothic style was intrinsically linked to them. As such, it fell out of favour. Instead, the king now preferred buildings which gave an air of stability and safety, above all those designed in the neo-classical style.

Schinkel’s work was greatly affected by this change in royal preference. Frederick William III chose a Doric mausoleum over a Gothic tomb for his wife and halted plans for the great Gothic cathedral in Berlin because of a lack of funds. Schinkel had to make do with the cast iron Gothic monument in Kreuzberg created under the direction of Major von Reiche, the nephew of the eminent general ennobled after Waterloo, and although the crown prince commissioned a number of small Gothic monuments they did not amount to much. By 1820 Schinkel had been forced to abandon the Gothic in favour of classicism. Some saw this as tantamount to a betrayal of the fight for German unity, but despite his love for medieval architecture Schinkel wanted above all to build. For over a decade his most important work would reflect the needs of the reactionary Prussian state.

To be fair Schinkel did not see the two styles as mutually exclusive. Other artists, from Beethoven to Hölderlin to Möricke – and even Goethe in Faust – had mixed elements of Romanticism and neo-classicism and Schinkel convinced himself that educating people about the values of ancient Greece was the next best thing to evoking the spirit of medieval Germany. For him Greek architecture had been the product of a harmonious, integrated and free society which could be seen as a model for Prussia – ‘the most felicitous state of freedom within the law’. And art and culture were the key: beautiful buildings could, in Schinkel’s words, ‘ennoble all human relations’. But the view epitomized the problem of the Biedermeier world. It was naive to think that the creation of buildings and paintings and sculpture could somehow educate the people in democratic principles. Schinkel had convinced himself that his buildings were somehow ‘liberating’ Berlin. On the contrary he was legitimating the rule of one of the most reactionary regimes in Europe.

Schinkel’s career as an architect began in earnest in 1818, four years after the Congress of Vienna, with the completion of his first great commission – the Neue Wache or New Guard House. It was a small monument to Prussia’s victorious army. Built in the shape of a Roman castrum with a Doric portico of six simple columns it remains the most striking monument on Unter den Linden. The king liked it and it led to new commissions. Within the next two decades Schinkel touched virtually every corner of the city centre, converting the baroque cathedral across from the Schloss, planning the Lustgarten, creating the Schlossbrücke, building the Schauspielhaus or theatre, which opened in 1824, and a number of private houses and palaces, including a residence for Prince William on Unter den Linden and the Palais Redern on Pariser Platz, and drawing up plans for everything from a new library to gatehouses for the Potsdamer Platz. In a letter to Sulpice Boissiére in 1822 he said he hoped his work would create ‘beauty in itself and for the city’.⁷⁰

His crowning work in the neo-classical style, and the building which he considered his greatest work, was the Altes Museum, which was completed in 1830. It remains a great Berlin landmark. From the outside it looms like a vast Greek stoa with its grand row of eighteen Ionic columns marching in perfect symmetry across the northern end of the Lustgarten. The vast rotunda, modelled on the Pantheon in Rome, is hidden from view from the outside and comes as a marvellous surprise to the visitor. Schinkel intended the rotunda to be a temple to art and culture; a sanctuary where ‘the sight of a beautiful and sublime room must make the visitor receptive and create the proper mood for the enjoyment and acknowledgement of what the building contains’.⁷¹ After studying the exhibits the visitor could leave via the Treppenhaus, which connected the museum-temple to the busy secular world of Berlin. The position was vital. The museum was placed across from the Royal Palace, flanked by the arsenal and the cathedral, and next to the Stock Exchange and the Neue Packhof or New Customs House, which was completed in 1832. By placing it here Schinkel was trying to prove that art could fit into the civil order and to demonstrate that culture was indeed equal to the pillars of Prussian society represented by the military, the monarchy, the Church and the new emerging power of industry. It was an absurd delusion. Art was not as powerful as the rival institutions and never would be. When Robert Smirke designed the British Museum in 1824 it was placed miles from Whitehall and St Paul’s and the City, and the English would have thought it absurd that culture could be seen as a rival to parliament or the military or industry in the running of their country. Schinkel’s notion that culture was a substitute for political action was typical of Biedermeier Berlin. However beautiful his symmetrical, clear, austere neo-classical buildings, he had come to mirror that fatal tendency in the Berlin educated middle class: the belief that they could influence politics through culture.

What Schinkel did not seem to recognize was that far from being a political activist he had in fact become a pillar of the Prussian establishment. He was a trusted public servant and in 1838 was considered reliable enough to be elevated to the highest office of public works in Prussia. The sheer number of commissions and projects which came to him through the royal family made him the most famous architect in Prussia, but he was a court architect in all but name. His claims to be leading Prussians to a better, more democratic world through his architecture and his art rang increasingly hollow.

In many ways the Altes Museum heralded the end of pedagogic architecture in Berlin and by the time it was finished the Biedermeier world was beginning to crumble. Even Schinkel foreshadowed the change and in the last decade of his life began to explore other forms of architecture by developing an ahistorical functional style inspired in part by British industrial architecture.⁷² His new designs included plans for a shopping bazaar on Unter den Linden and the surprisingly modern purple brick Bauakademie, so wantonly destroyed by the East Germans after the Second World War. His late works hinted at a new age to come, when the edifying public buildings of the past would make way for hotels, factories, department stores and train stations, built not to educate or to ennoble the public, but to facilitate trade and commerce.⁷³

By the time Schinkel died in 1840 many of those excluded from the Prussian elite were growing increasingly angry at the censorship and repression which still characterized Berlin. If Schinkel had renounced the fervent nationalism and politics of his youth there were many in Berlin who had not, and the work of those in exile was finding its way back to the city. Groups of reform-minded individuals were forming political groups disguised as poetry clubs, literary circles and music societies to defy the ban on the fledgling political parties; works written during the Napoleonic occupation were rediscovered; the longing for national unity was growing stronger. However civilized and sedate the Biedermeier years had been, however gracious Schinkel’s neo-classical masterpieces had appeared, they had represented the artificial calm of a middle class shielded from the political realities of the day. Heinrich Heine was suspicious of the new elegant city with its ‘long stretches of uniform houses, the long wide streets … but with no care given to the opinion of the masses.’⁷⁴ In his famous lines he foreshadowed things to come: ‘Berlin, Berlin, great city of misery! In you, there is nothing to find but anguish and martyrdom … They respect rights as if they were candles.’⁷⁵ Biedermeier, and all it stood for, was set to come to a sudden and violent end in the revolutionary year of 1848.