Читать книгу Fanny von Arnstein: Daughter of the Enlightenment - Hilde Spiel - Страница 12

IN THE BERLIN OF FREDERICK THE GREAT, WHICH HAD NOTED Joseph’s reforms with admiring or ironic amazement, a new era was likewise imminent. The King, who saw freedom as his spiritual possession, but handed it out as negligently and arbitrarily as alms to the poor; who had never taken anything in his life seriously except the greatness of Prussia, and who gave to this abstract concept, rather than to the living people of whom Prussia consisted, his meager measure of love and sympathy — the King sat, old, alone and ill-tempered, in his palace at Potsdam and felt his powers waning. There is no doubt about the feelings which accompanied his amazement at the Emperor’s latest rulings. That “nouvel ordre de choses” that he had prophesied filled him with derisive doubt. Years ago he had made the epigrammatic remark that he wanted to make people happy in their own fashion. Joseph seemed to be forcing them to be happy in his own fashion. He, Frederick, cared not in the slightest whether they were happy or not.

Nor did he feel much inclination to apply to his Jewish subjects those progressive principles which he had so often professed. To Itzig and Ephraim, who had arrived some time earlier with a petition requesting leniency towards the Jews of Breslau, he sent a royal adjudication: “Whatever has to do with their trade they may keep. But as for their bringing whole tribes of Jews to Breslau and making it into another Jerusalem, that cannot be.” For the rest, he stood by the ruling of 1750, which still upheld the oppressive precepts of his ancestors. When Mirabeau visited Berlin in the last year of Frederick’s reign, he called this law “une loi digne d’un cannibale.”

In any case it was difficult to know which of the two monarchs who occupied the thrones of Prussia and of the Holy Roman Empire was to be preferred. With the same conviction of his absolutist power one introduced his idealistic innovations, while the other in his skepticism left everything as it was. If one tended sometimes to prefer the Prussian misanthrope to the Austrian philanthropist, then perhaps it was because one could get along better with a freedom-loving despot than with a despotic liberator. And it could not take long for a woman like Fanny to notice — after the first upsurge of enthusiasm over Joseph’s Edict of Tolerance had ebbed — that she and her kind could live in a more peaceful and even a more dignified manner in Berlin.

Even before the death of the old King and the changes that were gaining ground with the accession of his nephew Frederick William, the climate of opinion had become decidedly more favorable towards the Jews. The amused or contemptuous indifference manifested by Frederick towards most of his subjects — indeed towards the whole of humanity — certainly included the entire Jewish community. But his disdain was first and foremost for those fanatical champions of their old teaching and way of life who expected a degree of tolerance from him that they themselves did not extend to their own fellow-believers. It was not the “illuminated” and emancipated spirits among them that he rejected, but those obstinately pious Talmudists who sought to frustrate with all the powers at their disposal any innovation in their religion, any attempt at integration with their environment. Above all, however, he conceded to them a right which Joseph denied them: the formation and management of their own religious community.

This, after all, was the king who had written in his History of Brandenburg that false religious zeal was the tyrant which depopulated nations, while the spirit of toleration was the mother who tended them and made them bloom. In his What is Enlightenment?, Kant had praised this king in these terms: “A prince who finds it within his dignity to say that he considers it his duty not to dictate to his people in matters of religion, but to give them total freedom in these matters, who therefore himself refuses the arrogant label of tolerance, is very enlightened and deserves to be praised by the grateful world and by posterity.” Indeed, to such an extent had this greatest of German philosophers seen the harbinger of enlightenment in this king, who allowed the freedom “to make public use of reason in all things,” that he called this era “the century of Frederick.” Under this king, who refused to use the word tolerance and did not always practice this virtue himself, but allowed everyone to be tolerant who wished to be so, countless men of understanding, morality and integrity came together, whose actions and aspirations were directed at raising their fellow human beings out of their spiritual immaturity.

Nicolai, the “wandering preacher of the Enlightenment,” its pedantic fighting cock, a personality who ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous, was from the first the driving force of this movement in Berlin. As a friend of the same Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, one of Germany’s earliest dramatists, critics, thinkers and educators of the highest rank, who at the age of twenty had already written his first appeal for tolerance, a little play called The Jews; as a friend of Moses Mendelssohn, the prototype for the eponymous hero of Lessing’s far more influential drama Nathan the Wise, he created the platform from which the spirit of toleration could be proclaimed: a periodical called Literaturbriefe (Literary Letters), Germany’s first mouthpiece of fearless and independent criticism.

In Literary Letters, in 1760, Mendelssohn could even find fault with two poems by the King and condemn them as imitations of Lucretius, as “badly rhymed attacks on the concept of immortality.” Summoned to Sanssouci and questioned as to whether he was the author of the derogatory review, he replied: “He who writes verses is playing at ninepins, and whoever plays at ninepins, whether king or peasant, must accept the marker’s decision.” The retort was well received, and Literary Letters, which had been threatened with suppression, was reprieved. Nevertheless, the King, who appreciated his critic’s honesty and his flair for a telling metaphor, took a mischievous pleasure in delaying his privilege of protection for a little longer. It was not until three years later that Frederick, at the urging of his companion in philosophy, the Marquis d’Argens, allowed Mendelssohn the privilege of regular residence in Berlin.