Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin. Alexandra Richie

in Europe. The first was between Protestant princes and the Catholic Habsburgs in the Holy Roman Empire; the second was the continued hostility between Poland and the Swedes; the third, the conflict between France and the Habsburgs, and the fourth, that between the Spanish and the Dutch. These were woven into a net of related quarrels, dynastic ambitions and petty rivalries so that even before the war began treachery, broken alliances and deceit amongst rulers had become common on all sides.¹¹ No single religion, ruler or state was powerful enough to impose any decisive settlement on the others. War was a foregone conclusion.

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

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

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

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

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

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