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

admiring everything which comes from France.’ Collini, Voltaire’s Italian secretary, noted that the victories of the Seven Years War had already made Prussians feel superior not only to Austria but also to France, which was sometimes referred to as ‘a futile frivolous, vain deflated nation’. The rising tide against the French was found in the work of Francke and Spener; it emerged in Klopstock’s epic poem The Messiah and later in the works of Hamann and Herder. In Berlin it took the form of a reaction against the French tax collectors, bureaucrats and courtiers with whom Frederick had flooded the city. Frederick II was a cultural Germanophobe and had consistently appointed French academics and officials to important posts; he called Shakespeare, then championed by German writers, ‘abominable’ and ‘worthy only of the savages in Canada’, and when he read Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen he labelled it a parody of the very worst efforts of Shakespeare.¹¹⁵ By the second half of the eighteenth century the pent-up feeling in Berlin led to open denunciations of the utilitarian ideas of the French Philosophes, an anti-French movement which Madame de Staël would later describe in De l’Allemagne. But above all, the move away from French cultural hegemony was championed by Lessing.

      Lessing became increasingly angry with Frederick’s inability to recognize the emergence of a German national literature. He fell out with Voltaire and was furious with the king for installing Maupertuis and la Mettrie at court while excluding both himself and Mendelssohn from the Potsdam Academy. Unlike Frederick, Lessing revered Shakespeare, seeing him as a model for a theatre free of French influences and even calling him the ‘father of German literature’. His anger and impatience were extended to Berliners, whom he saw as docile and submissive.

      Lessing is often held up as the most important Enlightenment figure of Berlin; his name is everywhere, his statue stands in the Tiergarten near the Brandenburg Gate and he, like Mendelssohn and Nicolai, are mainstays of a self-congratulatory myth of Berlin as a ‘city of tolerance’. But Lessing had an uneasy relationship with Berlin and he was ultimately as critical of the city as it was of him. His work bristles with anger at the stifling rules and controls imposed upon him there. In his play Minna von Barnhelm the main character goes to Berlin to find her lover, but instead of being welcomed is immediately interrogated by the ‘very exact’ police, who demand to know precisely where she is from and what she is doing in the city; at the same time the maid Franziska complains: ‘Where can one sleep in this devilish big city?’ – where one is annoyed ‘by the coaches, the nightwatchmen, the drums, the cats, the corporals who never stop clanking, shouting, sounding rolls, meowing, cursing’. The play was banned in Berlin and this, compounded with the fact that his application for a job as librarian was turned down, caused a disgusted Lessing to leave the city for good. He remained in Hamburg from 1767 to 1768 and then became librarian to the duke of Braunschweig at Wolfenbüttel, writing in 1769:

      How can one feel well in Berlin? Everything there makes one’s gorge rise. Don’t talk to me of your freedom of thought and publication in Berlin. It consists only of the freedom to publish as many idiotic attacks on religion as one wants – a freedom of which any honest man would be ashamed to avail himself. But just let anyone try to write about other things in Berlin … let him attempt to speak the truth to the distinguished rabble at court, to stand up for the rights of the subject, to raise his voice against despotism as now happens in France and Denmark, and you will realize which country, up to the present day, is the most enslaved in Europe.¹¹⁶

      He never bothered to visit the city again and died in Braunschweig in 1781. Lessing was not the only one to feel stifled by a place which, as Voltaire put it, had ‘astoundingly many bayonets and very few books’. Voltaire left Prussia for the last time in 1753. Goethe visited Berlin only once in his life, in May 1778. He met Chodowiecki, the art collector Johann Christoph Frisch and the music director Johann Andre, but he had no contact with Nicolai or Mendelssohn and left thoroughly unimpressed. In 1767 Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach grew tired of the residence city and followed Telemann to Hamburg.

      For all its advancements Berlin was still overwhelmed by the Hohenzollerns and by the military. Things could not have been more different in France. In the 1770s an apocryphal conversation between the dauphin and the court physician François de Quesnay made the rounds of the cafés and salons of Europe. In it the dauphin asked the doctor what he would do if he were king. ‘Nothing,’ de Quesnay replied. ‘Then who would govern?’ the dauphin asked in alarm. De Quesnay replied, ‘The Law.’ The story delighted the French, but it baffled Berliners. While French thinkers from Rousseau to d’Alembert now insisted that Enlightenment and despotism were mutually exclusive, Berliners continued to defend Absolutism; even the great Immanuel Kant called eighteenth-century Prussia ‘the age of the Enlightenment or the century of Frederick’.¹¹⁷ The unquestioning respect for Frederick and for duty and obedience struck many visitors as odd; even Nicolai was astounded in 1759 to find that the official Censor for Philosophical Works had nothing to do as nobody ever wrote anything critical of the king. Berlin still ‘smelled of gunpowder’. The famous Italian playwright Vittorio Alfieri visited in 1770 and found Prussia ‘like a horrific never ending guard room’ and Berlin ‘like a gigantic loathsome barracks’. In 1779 George Forster, best known for his accounts of his voyage with Captain Cook, spent five weeks in Berlin and commented that although it was outwardly beautiful it was ‘inwardly much blacker than I had envisaged’, with the new buildings and streets impressive but the people coarse, arrogant and badly educated.¹¹⁸

      With such meagre defence of its ideas, it was no wonder that the Enlightenment would soon fade. The death knell was sounded when Frederick the Great was succeeded by Frederick William II in 1786, a man who opposed the Enlightenment and soon became terrified by the implications of the French Revolution. After 1789 many Berliners turned against their own Enlightenment thinkers and some societies and clubs voluntarily closed themselves down rather than be associated with the spread of Jacobinism. Those who held on to their Enlightenment beliefs were labelled ‘Nicolai-iten’ and treated with disdain. The self-censorship extended to all levels of society. Immanuel Kant dutifully stopped writing about religion when, in 1794, his works were declared derogatory to Christianity, noting in his papers: ‘To withdraw or deny one’s convictions is base, but silence in such a case as this is the subject’s duty.’¹¹⁹ The Berlin salons of Dorothea Veit and Henriette Herz and Rahel Levin (later Varnhagen von Ense) enjoyed a brief flurry of activity between the time of Frederick’s death and 1806, attracting men from Fichte to the Humboldt brothers to Varnhagen and Schlegel, but this ended with the Napoleonic Wars, when ‘friendships between commoners and nobles and the open display of Jewish wealth and culture all became deeply controversial’.¹²⁰ Rahel Varnhagen would soon lament: ‘where are our days, when we were all together! They went under in the year ‘06. Went under like a ship: containing the loveliest goods of life, the loveliest pleasures.’¹²¹

      Perhaps the most poignant symbol of the sad decline of the Enlightenment was the defection from the circle around the once-revered Friedrich Nicolai. Nicolai hung on to his ideals until the end. He was deeply resentful of the coming of Romanticism and was so appalled by Goethe’s The Sufferings of Young Werther that in 1775 he wrote a lame satire called The Friends of Young Werther; he disliked Kant and mocked Herder’s cult of folk songs and interest in German national identity. But his time had passed. Goethe and Schiller attacked him in Xenien and Goethe used him as the model for the ludicrous character Proktophantasmist in the first part of Faust. By the time of his death in 1811 he had become a figure of ridicule amongst the new intellectual elite in Berlin. The Enlightenment, the ‘coming of the light’, had brought a brief period of tolerance to the city, but its most fundamental principles had already been pushed aside by the time of the French Revolution. The Enlightenment would leave a legacy, but not the one envisaged by Mendelssohn and Lessing and Nicolai. By shattering the belief in traditional religion and loosening the bonds to an old way of life it had left an immense vacuum in people’s lives. The Enlightenment thinkers had hoped the void would be filled by notions of tolerance, reason and universal brotherhood, but this was not to be. Instead, people turned to nationalism – not merely the cultural nationalism of Lessing and Klopstock and Herder, but the political nationalism which would be sparked off by one of the most formative events in Berlin history: the arrival of Napoleon.