Bring in the wine! A toast! To liberty!
(Faust, Part I)
‘FROM HERE AND TODAY,’ Goethe said to friends shortly after the French Revolution, ‘a new epoch in world history is dawning, and you will be able to say that you were there’.1 During his eighty-two years the genius poet witnessed the dramatic changes which rocked Europe and Berlin, from the Napoleonic Wars and the coming of the Industrial Revolution to the birth of that essentially urban movement which he did so much to bring about – Romanticism. It was a time of great uncertainty, of turmoil and, for many in Germany, of humiliation. At the end of his life Goethe said sadly: ‘I thank God that I am not young in so thoroughly finished a world.’
For an era of such extraordinary importance it started calmly enough. In the last years of his life Frederick the Great had become a recluse, languishing at Sanssouci with only his dogs for company. He had grown weary of life and when he died in 1786 Berliners seemed almost relieved. The Enlightenment was already faltering and the Sturm und Drang (storm and stress) writers were ushering in a new, wilder culture. Then, in 1789, the news of an extraordinary upheaval exploded across Europe.
The French Revolution shook every aspect of European life, from politics to the economy, from literature to philosophy. It propelled Europe headlong into the modern era. When the news from Paris first reached Germany the revolution was heralded as the precursor to a new, better age. Kant praised it, Hölderlin called it a ‘beloved wonder’, the young Hegel called it a ‘glorious sunrise’ and was so moved that he and his friend Schelling planted a Liberty Tree in the Tübingen market place, Klopstock and Schiller became honorary French citizens, Herder and Fichte and Beethoven wrote of a new age of liberty and brotherly love. Wordsworth captured the dream in his immortal lines: ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!’2
The dream was short lived. Within months news of the September massacres had turned erstwhile supporters against the revolution. Iffland and Gneisenau were now scathing about the Terror, von Gentz published Burke’s critique of the revolution, Kotzebue wrote a burlesque mocking Paris, Klopstock mourned that ‘our Golden Dream is shattered’. On 8 February 1793, after the execution of Louis XVI, Schiller wrote, ‘I feel so sickened by these abominable butchers’, and six months later fumed that the revolution had ‘plunged not only that unhappy people itself, but a considerable part of Europe and a whole century, back into barbarism and slavery’.3 The longing for Freiheit, Gleichheit, Brüderlichkeit had ended in the bloody crash of the guillotine.
In Germany the profound disappointment turned to fear when it became obvious that the violence would not be contained in France. War threatened on the Rhine. The Gironde party, hoping for a diversion abroad to prevent the Jacobins and Royalists from gaining power, began to churn out pamphlets and posters proclaiming that ‘France owned the Rhine’ and that it was France’s ‘mission’ to bring the ideas of the revolution to enslaved peoples ‘yearning to be free’. The problem for Germans was that this ‘freedom’ would come through the force of arms.
In April 1792 France declared war on Austria and, by implication, on her ally Prussia. It was the start of the Revolutionary Wars. The disorganized Germans were no match for the zealous French army and by September France had won the great victory at Valmy. By 1794 all German territory west of the Rhine was held by the occupying forces. Austria now fought alone in Italy against the new commander-in-chief of the Army of the Interior, a young Corsican named Napoleon Bonaparte who had already astonished the world with his military genius. On 9 November 1799 he returned to Paris and was made first consul. In 1804 Napoleon Bonaparte declared himself emperor. He was thirty-five years old.
Napoleon was determined to make German states virtual colonies of France. In 1805 he resumed the campaign in the east and by 1806 had dissolved the Holy Roman Empire, forcing the emperor, Francis II, to abdicate. Germany had ceased to exist as a unified political body. Napoleon reorganized the German Reich into a new entity: the Confederation of the Rhine.
Until now Prussia had remained neutral in the European war. In his Annalen Goethe wrote: ‘Europe had changed shape, cities and navies were being destroyed on land and sea, but central and northern Germany profited from a certain feverish peace which enabled us to enjoy a doubtful safety.’ The ‘feverish peace’ which had so encouraged the cultural flowering in Weimar and in Berlin itself was almost at an end. Tension was growing between Paris and Berlin. In 1805 Napoleon had tried to use Prussian-occupied Hanover as bait in his peace negotiations with Britain. Tension was exacerbated when in 1806 he had the Nuremberg bookseller Johann Palm executed for publishing an anonymous pamphlet attacking France: the trial caused a sensation and roused popular anger throughout German lands. In the end it was his violation of the Treaty of Schönbrunn which provoked Frederick William III of Prussia to make his disastrous declaration of war on 1 October 1806. Prussia was now fighting alone against the mighty French army. It was doomed to fail.
It was not surprising that Prussia lost to France in 1806. When Frederick the Great died he left Prussia in the hands of his nephew Frederick William II, who was neither intelligent nor dedicated enough to keep the worn-out system alive. He had ignored the army and the bureaucracy while creating a glittering life at court – it was he who invited Mozart to Berlin to conduct The Marriage of Figaro. It was renowned for its courtesans, its corruption and its domination by the strange cult called the Rosicrucian Order. The members of the sect had transformed life at court with their palace seances in which people communed with spirits of the dead or with the elements, and with their truly depraved rituals which were said to prolong human life.4 When the system began to fall apart the king had merely increased controls and religious censorship. Instead of modernizing, Berlin had taken on the appearance of a frenzied and decadent eighteenth-century court. Frederick William II died in 1797 but his successor Frederick William III brought little change. He was less ostentatious and debauched than his predecessor but he lacked character, finding it impossible to make decisions and dithering and procrastinating at a time when Prussia needed a firm hand. It is telling that it was not he but his consort, the beautiful young Queen Luise, who would become the heroine of Berlin for taking a stand against the French and against Napoleon. By the time Napoleon invaded Prussia Berlin had languished under thirty years of incompetent rule.5
Napoleon needed only one week, from 10 to 17 October, to smash this once formidable opponent. Prussian divisions were knocked down one by one while the fortresses from Erfurt to Halle, Spandau to Stettin to Magdeburg surrendered in turn – only Kolberg at the Prussian Pomeranian coast held out until 1807. The final battles were fought on 14 October 1806, at Auerstedt and to the south at Jena. The latter was an unmitigated disaster. Last-minute changes in the Prussian battle plan resulted in confusion and a tangle of troops with no supply lines and no communication. At that moment the French attacked and within hours the Prussians were retreating in panic. One young man who heard the noise of battle from his room in Jena was Friedrich Hegel, who hastily scribbled the last words of his Phenomenology of Spirit so that he could hide it from the occupying forces. The Prussian army, which had risen to such prominence under Frederick the Great, had collapsed.
News of the catastrophe at Jena reached Berlin the following day and it became obvious that the city could no longer be defended. Panicky officials began to load wagons with everything from weapons from the arsenal to state papers; the king and queen were spirited off to Königsberg and those with means fled east. As the governor of the city, General von der Schulenburg-Kehnert, prepared to leave he posted the infamous declaration explaining how Berliners were expected to behave now that they had been defeated. ‘The King has lost a battle,’ it read. ‘The first duty of the citizen is now to be quiet. This duty I charge the inhabitants of Berlin to perform. The King and his brothers live.’ With that, Berliners were left to face French occupation alone. Henriette Herz, who calmly decided to remain in her Berlin apartments, wrote of the announcement: ‘How laconic! And yet part of it is superfluous. For who in Berlin thought of disturbing his quiet? The announcement was read, but few countenances showed any expression of fear, most no expression at all; at the utmost one or two people went away shaking their heads