Schlüter was born in Danzig but soon moved to Warsaw, where he worked on a number of important commissions, including the Krasinski and Wilanow palaces. In 1694 he moved to Berlin and the following year began work on the Royal Palace, which was completed in 1707. It was ripped down by the East Germans in 1950 and replaced by the asbestos-ridden modernist disaster, the Palast der Republik.56 Sadly, little else of Schlüter’s work survived the war, although a hint of his mastery can be seen in the grand equestrian statue of the Elector Frederick William I, which now stands before the Charlottenburg Palace. The work is based on the Roman model of Marcus Aurelius in the Capitol in Rome and, although derivative, projects vigour and power in its own right. His other surviving Berlin masterpiece is the Arsenal on Unter den Linden, a long elegant building best known for the twenty-two dramatic sculptures of heads of dying warriors with their beautifully carved and emotive faces: one throws his bearded head back and cries out in agony, another bites his lower lip and grimaces in terrible pain, another lies dying with his proud, noble face tilted to one side in so realistic a pose that one feels compelled to reach out to touch the furrowed brow.
The king also commissioned other important Berlin landmarks; he had Nering build Charlottenburg Palace; he built Monbijou Palace and commissioned homes for the military as well as a number of churches.57 Little survives; the only baroque church still standing in Berlin was commissioned for Spandau in 1712 by Sophie Luise, and its pretty butter-yellow walls and elegant dome still bring a touch of Bavaria to the northern capital.58 The king continued to invest in Berlin, draining land on the outskirts of the city and building new suburbs. He added to the new development north of the Lindenallee in Dorotheenstadt, and in 1709 joined the districts of Berlin, Cölln, Friedrichswerder, Dorotheenstadt and Friedrichstadt under a single municipal government, forming the nucleus of the city which would become modern Berlin.
Frederick brought something of the culture of Europe to the city, but the cost was very high for a small state and did little to benefit the lives of ordinary people in Prussia. The new buildings were beautiful but they still stood amidst rubble left over from the Thirty Years War and there was an extreme contrast between the exuberant life at court, with its ballets, fashionable clothes and masked balls, and the poverty to be found in the streets. Visitors were appalled at the number of prostitutes and beggars in Berlin; Lady Mary Wortley Montagu described the kind of poverty to be found amongst the glamour of the residence city as ‘a sort of shabby finery’ with ‘a number of dirty people … narrow nasty streets out of repair, wretchedly thin of inhabitants, and over half of the common sort asking for alms … How different from England!’59 Most of the streets of Berlin remained unpaved and filthy and housing was pitiful. Even its economic wealth was illusory; most of the luxury goods were imported and did more to support craftsmen in France, Saxony and the Dutch republic than in Berlin. For most residents life was squalid and dangerous. Once again, however, Berlin was about to be transformed.
The city’s political history has always been one of extremes, and the eighteenth century was no exception. The brief flowering of the baroque and the dazzling life of the Berlin court ended abruptly in 1713 with the death of Frederick I. No sooner had the fun-loving and creative king died than Berlin reverted to its tough militaristic life. The change was brought about by the new king’s determination to reverse his father’s excesses and to create a centre of military power. The city had entered the harsh era of Frederick William I, the Soldier King.60
Frederick William saw nothing but waste and vanity in his father’s palaces and art collections. The new king took his austere reformed Pietism very seriously, living by its code of hard work, puritanical restraint, devotion to duty, self-sacrifice and austerity. He gave his father a luxurious funeral but then set about dismantling the court and erasing his memory. Everything went – the silk bedclothes and velvet curtains were replaced by rough cloth; furniture, jewels and carriages were sold; the orders for twenty-course dinners, wigs, silk stockings, fans, pearls, delicate gloves and pretty shoes were cancelled, and decadence was banished in favour of efficiency, cleanliness and hard work. The dismantling did not end with the court. The paintings and operas of western Europe baffled the new king and architecture bored him. The construction of the capricious baroque buildings was halted; a court jester was appointed to succeed Leibniz as president of the Berlin Academy as science was now considered ‘empty formal garbage’; university lecturers were ‘not even good for sentry duty’ and intellectuals were referred to as ‘wastrels’ or ‘dog food’ and were banned from court.61 Instead of lavish feasts the new king preferred simple food served on a rough wooden table. He wrote little in his own language but detested French and spoke no other foreign languages. At a time when Pöppelmann and Permoser were putting the finishing touches to the Zwinger Palace in Dresden and at a time when St Petersburg was rising out of the muck at the mouth of the Neva, construction in Berlin ceased and the city fell back into cultural darkness. It was whispered that the people there had become the most enslaved of Europe, ‘worse, even, than Russia’. Frederick William had other priorities. Culture was unimportant; instead he wanted to make Prussia into one of the most powerful economic and military states in the world.
When Frederick William took power Berlin was bankrupt, and the king’s first step was to begin a concerted drive to impose central control over administration, finances and industry. Local power was to be crushed and all towns, including Berlin, were to be administered by royal appointees and their budgets treated as part of the royal domain. New and detested tax commissars took control of the city’s administration. In 1723 the king merged the old General War Commissariat and the General Finance Directory to create a new General Directory, which became a clearly defined administrative body whose fundamental aim was to account for every penny spent in Prussia both at the provincial and central level.62 Frederick William took personal control over the new civil service, running it like a giant military machine. His ministers sent him detailed reports covering every aspect of their work; those who displeased him were fired. The omnipresent corruption, bribery and embezzlement which had characterized his father’s government were stamped out and his employees began to develop the selfless devotion to duty which would come to characterize the Prussian civil service.
Frederick William was a fanatic when it came to controlling the lives of Berliners. State employees were told what to wear, what time to appear for work, when and what they should eat; if someone contradicted his orders he treated them to a crack across the face with his cane. He believed it was his duty to ensure that Berliners did not succumb to the sins of gluttony or sloth and insisted that they spend all their waking hours at work. He regularly sent spies to patrol the streets and, disguising himself as a commoner, walked through the city attacking those who were ‘idle’, breaking teeth and noses in the process. Market women and shopkeepers were expected to knit or sew when there were no customers around; street cleaners and stable boys were punished if they were found loafing; washerwomen and nurses were not to waste time gossiping.
His efforts to ‘clean up the streets’ were also motivated by his devotion to work. The beggars, vagabonds and prostitutes who had lived in Berlin under his father were rounded up by the Berlin police and, in keeping with the Pietist belief that nobody should receive charity for nothing, were put in workhouses where they were expected to spin wool; even children in orphanages were forced to work after a long morning of religious education. Ironically Frederick William managed to reduce the number of homeless in the city: they preferred to go elsewhere rather than face the strict regime in his Pietist workhouses. The work ethic affected everyone; when Berlin held its last witch trial in 1727 the ‘guilty’ Dorothea Steffin was not burned at the stake as was the custom, but was imprisoned in Spandau fortress to spend the rest of her life weaving and spinning.63 The obsession with work made Berlin a sober, disciplined and unpleasant place. Berliners detested the new rules and regulations which governed their lives