The accomplishments of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Hohenzollerns were extraordinary. Berlin had been improved beyond recognition, built from nothing in the midst of a sandy wasteland by a succession of visionary leaders culminating in Frederick the Great. His accomplishments account for the cult status he has been accorded by successive regimes in Berlin. The first state meeting to be held by Frederick’s tomb at nearby Potsdam was between the tsar and Frederick William III in the tumultuous month of October 1805, when the two swore eternal friendship in the face of the Napoleonic threat; William I held his first presentation of colours to new regiments beside his tomb; Hitler held the infamous ‘Day of National Awakening there in 1933, while the latest evidence of the cult was the reburial of Frederick’s bones at Potsdam in 1990.89
But while much local history has portrayed the king as unique he was in fact only one of a number of benevolent despots who refashioned eighteenth-century Europe. The most extraordinary example of a city created from nothing was not Berlin but Peter the Great’s St Petersburg to the east which, as Alexander Pushkin put it, rose in all its grandeur and its pride from the ‘dank of forests’ and the ‘damp of bogs’ at the mouth of the Neva.90 Neither were Frederick’s social and political reforms unique; after the Seven Years War the Austrians had also modernized their administrative system, while Joseph II abolished serfdom, introduced religious tolerance and made Vienna into a world centre of the arts – Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven would go there, after all, and not to Berlin. Many institutions rivalled the Berlin Academy of Sciences; the great mathematician Leonhard Euler would leave Frederick’s Berlin for St Petersburg, and even the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences of Stockholm and the university at Uppsala were centres of excellence which attracted men like Carolus Linnaeus and Celsius, who invented his thermometer there in 1741.
Furthermore Frederick’s extraordinary accomplishments touched only a tiny minority of Berliners. The city was still relatively poor and with the exception of the elite and the rising middle class the majority of people still lived in poverty or squalor. In 1768 30,000 people in the city had the Armutszeugnis, an official recognition of poverty, and there was little support for the disabled soldiers, ex-prisoners, the failed students or beggars who wandered Berlin’s foul back streets. Life remained difficult for ordinary people, who huddled in cold, damp, poorly lit houses with little furniture. Clothing for most was coarse and uncomfortable, few people bathed and food was unpleasant. The roads were terrible: it took Casanova three days to make the eighty-five mile journey between Magdeburg and Berlin.91 Above all, the military still dominated Berlin life: the barracks, parade grounds and uniforms prompted Goethe to write to Frau von Stein of his visit to Berlin in 1778 that he could not enjoy the splendour of the royal city as it was obscured by ‘men, horses, wagons, guns, ammunition; the streets are full of them. If only I could describe adequately the monstrous piece of clock-work spread out here before one’s eyes.’92
In reality, Frederick represented the end of an era: he was an absolutist monarch who insisted on personal control of all aspects of life. He would remain one of the most important figures in the history of Berlin, but he did not understand the new force beginning to take hold even at the height of his reign. The Enlightenment ideas upon which he modelled his rule were also fuelling the rise of an independent, educated middle class which was no longer content to follow unquestioningly the dictates of the monarch. These men and women admired Frederick’s reforms, but they were increasingly tired of the constraints placed upon them by absolutism. These Berliners were preparing the way for the future. And the future was being made in France.
The French Revolution of 1789 sent shock waves throughout Europe and, for a time, the champions of the Enlightenment believed that they were witnessing the triumph of reason over the ‘allies of darkness’ and the ‘enemies of man’. For thousands of men like Karl von Mastiaux, who stood before a little German reading group in 1789, the Enlightenment had improved and ennobled the spirit and the heart: ‘Its progress is long and arduous, but following a lengthy process of ripening, it bears those most noble of fruits, the true virtues, the fruit of enlightened reason and benevolent sensibilities.’93 Mastiaux’s sentiments had been repeated throughout Europe in an age when words like ‘improvement’, the ‘brotherhood of man’, and the ‘light of reason’ were to ‘ignite the flame of teaching and banish the darkness which blighted the Christian peoples’. As one Masonic song had it: ‘The noble goal of our scared quest; Light, virtue and justice blessed … This shall be our battle-cry.’94 These ideas had been accepted in Frederickan Berlin.
The Enlightenment swept through Europe at the end of the seventeenth century, shaking the very foundations of human understanding and knowledge. It found its first echoes in the detached systematic philosophy of Descartes but it began in earnest in England, with the work of Sir Isaac Newton. In 1687 Newton published one of the most significant works of intellectual history, his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, in which he proposed radical new ideas about the workings of the physical universe. The discovery of natural laws by Descartes and Newton and in the work of Boyle, Hooke and Bacon had led to a new attitude to the world, one in which everything could be explained through the application of science and technology and reason.
The work had an immediate effect on European intellectual life. Newton’s work on prisms and the diffraction of light was applied to everything from hydraulics and the development of water pumps to medicine. Inoculation was introduced at the end of the 1720s and was championed by Voltaire’s Philosophes. New operations were devised to cut out cataracts and set broken bones, trepanation was developed to evacuate blood from the skull after a fracture, lithotomy was used to remove bladder stones – both Samuel Pepys and Benjamin Franklin underwent this operation. La Mettrie, later brought to Berlin by Frederick the Great, was fascinated by experiments on muscular reaction and concluded that just as the legs have muscles for walking, ‘the brain has its muscles for thinking’. The world was no more than a gigantic ‘system’ governed by natural laws. All man had to do was use his reason to figure out how they worked, and then apply them to his own society.
The new materialism and utilitarianism was applied to all aspects of life. Old belief systems like religion, superstition and magic became irrelevant in a world in which everything could be explained. In the middle of the century a group of French writers, the Physiocrats, claimed to have identified a ‘natural order’ by which man could understand the natural laws of economics and thereby achieve a better standard of living – their ideas inspired Adam Smith, who developed them in his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. In his 1690 Essay Concerning Human Understanding John Locke had tried to show how man is a tabula rasa, a creature which, given the correct environment, laws and education, could become a model citizen irrespective of class or nationality; of course, if man could be improved, society could be improved also. The idea was revolutionary and challenged the very assumptions upon which the existing order rested.
The Enlightenment had its roots in England, but it found its spiritual home in France, where it was led by the philosophes who contributed to Denis Diderot’s Great Encyclopaedia, itself an attempt to catalogue and summarize all human knowledge. In his De l’Esprit des lois Montesquieu equated enlightened self-interest with the common good; Voltaire’s irreverent wit cut deep into religious and social mores of the day, with Candide becoming one of the most famous books of the age; in 1770 Baron d’Holbach published his Système