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

the all-powerful administrative centre which it would become after 1871, and Prussian cities and districts still had a high degree of autonomy not least because poor communications between regions made efficient central government impossible. Nevertheless its influence was growing. So was its population. At the end of the war Berlin had a population of 98,000 people but by 1786 it had already reached 150,000. Thirty thousand people worked in industry and trade alone and there were already 3,500 administrative officials. Twenty per cent of the population was in the military and the Berlin garrison now numbered 25,000 men.⁷⁷ Berlin was increasing in size and importance. Now Frederick set about transforming its cultural life as well.

      In the eighteenth century all Germany looked to France as the model of civilization. German princes spent fortunes on mock palaces of Versailles; they tried to learn French, copied French manners and imported French courtiers to populate their new palaces – indeed, in 1775 Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand of Brunswick would allow only Frenchmen at his court.⁷⁸ Frederick the Great was amused at the pretensions of these petty princes: ‘there is no prince down to the younger member with an apanage who does not imagine himself to be a Louis XIV. He builds his Versailles, has his mistresses and maintains an army.’⁷⁹ Ironically, however, Frederick set about precisely the same thing and his capital became a quasi-French city. French became the language of the educated elite and of the court at Potsdam on the outskirts of Berlin; in 1750 Voltaire commented that German was reserved only ‘for soldiers and horses’; Frederick had his poetry corrected by Voltaire and even his German history books were in French. An anonymous writer recorded that ‘French language, French clothes, French food, French furniture, French dances, French music, the French pox … hardly have the children emerged from their mothers’ wombs than people think of giving them a French teacher …’ Young men destined for life at court took a ‘Knight’s Tour’ to Paris, where they studied the art of conversation, wit and fashion in an attempt to lose les airs allemands. Saint-Simon referred to these ponderous youths as ‘gross, ignorant creatures, very easy to dupe, whom one cannot help mocking’.⁸⁰ Educated Berliners, on the other hand, referred to Paris as the ‘New Athens’.

      There were other settlers in Frederickan Berlin: over 300,000 colonists were welcomed to Prussia, and by the end of his reign one-sixth of his subjects had been born abroad. Frederick claimed to be tired of looking into blue eyes and encouraged not only French, German and Polish immigrants but Greeks and other Mediterraneans to come; he had an immigration office set up in Venice and considered building a mosque in Berlin to attract Turks.⁸¹ But the overriding influence was French, and his cultural ambitions were set by the court at Versailles.

      Frederick the benevolent despot was determined to make Berlin a great city, on a social, economic, intellectual and cultural par with France. He took the ideas of the French Enlightenment seriously, encouraging a free press and banning censorship even if books or pamphlets were critical of him. At a time when people throughout Europe were being banished for stealing a loaf of bread, and long before Molière complained that in Paris ‘they hang a man first, and try him afterwards’, Frederick abolished the torture of civilians and permitted the death sentence only for those convicted of murder. He was not religious but was tolerant of others’ beliefs, even allowing a Catholic cathedral in the city centre. He was obsessed with education, setting up training schools for teachers and making primary education mandatory. He founded the Realschule in Berlin, which taught not only reading, writing, mathematics and Latin but also physics, engineering, architecture, geography, botany, book keeping and other practical skills, and he set up the Ritterakademie to train civil servants and created a school for diplomats. Although Berlin would not have its own university until 1809 he rejuvenated the Academy of Sciences, installing the mathematician and physicist Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis as its president and turning it into a centre of learning; it was there, for example, that Johann Heinrich Pott analysed over 30,000 mineral and soil samples and discovered the secret of making Chinese porcelain.

      After decades of neglect Berlin began to develop as a centre of culture. The king had little faith in the ability of Berliners to produce great art; he told his sister Sophia Wilhelmina in 1746 that ‘We are emerging from barbarism and are still in our cradles. But the French have already gone a long way and are a century in advance of us in every kind of success.’ He also told Voltaire: ‘You are right to say that our good Germans are still at the dawn of their knowledge. In the fine arts Germany is still at the period of Francis I. We love them, we cultivate them, foreigners transplant them here, but the soil is not yet propitious enough to produce them itself.’⁸² Instead he went abroad for his treasures. He purchased classical statues, including the Polignac marbles admired by Voltaire; he had Berlin-based French art dealers like Girard and Michelet supply him with paintings by his favourite artists Watteau and Lancret; he commissioned many works, including numerous portraits by the French artist Pesne; he had copies of French furniture made by manufacturers like J. A. Nahl. An avid flautist, he welcomed Johann Sebastian Bach to his beloved palace of Sanssouci in Potsdam in 1747; Bach’s Musikalisches Opfer were written for Frederick based on a phrase composed by the king; Bach’s son Carl Philipp Emanuel became Kapellmeister to Frederick and introduced a new musical style to the court.⁸³ The king also presided over the architectural transformation in Berlin, a feat accomplished with the help of his old friend the architect Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff.⁸⁴

      Frederick set out to redesign the city, building monumental structures which combined elements of baroque, rococo and neo-classical styles which still grace central Berlin. Unter den Linden was given thirty small houses and twenty larger palaces along with the new Academy buildings and the Royal Library. Frederick helped to design the Gendarmenmarkt, modelled on the Piazza del Popolo in Rome, flanked by the French and German cathedrals with their graceful baroque towers and impressive sculptures. Unlike his father he did not see opera houses as places of the Devil and commissioned Knobelsdorff to build what he called his ‘Temple of Apollo’. The Opera House was unique for the age in that it was not located in the wing of a palace but was an entirely separate structure. The building remains impressive. The pedimented portico with its sweeping stairs running up the sides was inspired by English architecture; there was room outside for 1,000 carriages, and the interior was complete with moveable stages, water pumps for artificial lakes and waterfalls and myriad other innovations. Architects and musicians travelled to see it even when still under construction, and the spectacular opening on 7 December 1742 was followed by a performance of Graun’s Cleopatra e Cesare. The Opera Platz was finished along with St Hedwig’s Cathedral, a vast domed Catholic church designed in part by Frederick himself after the Pantheon in Rome. The Tiergarten, Berlin’s large central park, was redesigned in the baroque style complete with mazes, avenues of trees, benches and tents, where people could enjoy tea, coffee, chocolate, lemonade or Danzig liqueur; its paths met at the Grosser Stern, near the pretty new Bellevue Palace, built in 1786 for Frederick’s brother Prince Ferdinand, its debt to classical architecture most visible in its clean outline, its flat facade and its simple windows. Many private houses built under Frederick have been destroyed, although one of the most exquisite, the Ephraim House with its delicate curved sandstone facade, was rebuilt in 1985. The Nicolaihaus on Brüderstrasse, which had been given a new facade by the publisher Friedrich Nicolai in 1787, is the only baroque town house to survive, although the lighter rococo buildings along the Märkisches Ufer built in the 1760s still stand. Frederick’s most ambitious project was the design of the Forum Fridericianum, a vast area flanked by the Altre Bibliothek with its great curved baroque facade, nicknamed the ‘Commode’, acting as a counterweight to the neo-classical Opera House, and Prince Henry’s Palace, which is now the Humboldt University. The Schloss had already been transformed by Schlüter from an Italianate cloister into a French complex and for the moment remained one of the largest palaces in Europe, bigger than Versailles itself.⁸⁵ The famous equestrian statue of Frederick the Great by Christian Daniel Rauch, unveiled in 1851, is positioned so that the king sits high above Unter den Linden, poised as if ready to ride into the majestic Forum which he himself had created for Berlin.

      With the erection of dozens of magnificent buildings the city began to take on the appearance of an important capital and even James Boswell was moved to write in 1764 that Berlin was ‘the most beautiful city I have seen’.⁸⁶ Other visitors were less impressed. When Madame de Staël visited in 1804