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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      By 1687 20 per cent of the population were Huguenots, making Berlin seem more like a French than a German town. They brought over 3,000 thalers per person to the province and contributed to Brandenburg’s average capital inflow of around 6 million thalers, but even more important was their contribution to Berlin industry; without them Berlin might well have remained poor and backward like many of its erstwhile rivals. It was they who made the woollen industry the most important of Brandenburg’s native products by the end of the century, and it was they who improved cotton weaving with