While Stein reformed the civil service Wilhelm von Humboldt tackled education reform. Born in 1767, the sparkling, generous Humboldt had long been a popular figure in the Berlin salons of Henriette Herz, Dorothea Veit and Carl Laroche. He had championed classical education and the concept of Bildung from an early age. For him education was not merely the chance to learn a trade or set of skills but rather gave the individual the chance to develop his Humanität, his human spirit. He was a meritocrat and believed in education for all irrespective of birth – his reforms would do much to further the rise of the bourgeoisie in nineteenth-century Berlin. In 1808 he was appointed the king’s chief of educational and ecclesiastical affairs in the new Ministry of the Interior and set about reshaping the Prussian education system. He abolished class-based schools like the Ritter or Knight’s Academies, made education compulsory for all, improved elementary schooling and introduced a classical curriculum into a new kind of secondary school which he called the Gymnasium. His proudest achievement was the creation of a new university.
Berlin University came about as a direct result of the Napoleonic Wars. The Peace of Tilsit had forced Prussia to hand over the universities of Duisberg, Erlangen and, the most important, Halle; neither of the two remaining universities, Königsberg or Frankfurt-an-der-Oder, were regarded as suitable as the central Prussian seat of learning. In September 1807 the king agreed to the creation of a new university in Berlin and on 16 August 1809 he pledged an annual sum of 150,000 thalers and donated the beautiful Prince Henry’s Palace on Unter den Linden to the new university. The Humboldt brothers now travelled throughout Germany recruiting for the faculty, and the list of luminaries they attracted was impressive – the first rector was the famous professor of jurisprudence, Schmalz, while the first elected rector was the philosopher Fichte. The university could soon boast Schleiermacher and De Wette in theology, Friedländer, Hufeland, Reil and Holrausch in medicine, Wolf, Buttman, Rühs and Niebuhr in history, Tralles in mathematics (Gauss turned down the offer), Savigny in law, Oltmanns in astronomy and a host of other prominent intellectuals of the day.17 The university opened on 15 October 1810 and the first work published was Niebuhr’s Roman History. It quickly became a central feature of Berlin life and a magnet for leading German intellectuals, many of whom, from the Humboldts to Fichte, from the Grimm brothers to Schelling, from Hegel to Ranke, would leave an indelible mark on German intellectual life.18
It was here that the concept of Bildung and of Wissenschaft (knowledge) evolved into a movement which would sweep nineteenth-century Germany and Europe. The student was not to focus on a specific subject or learn a practical profession through repeating a restricted programme, but was to learn how to be curious, how to explore new subjects and to pursue knowledge for its own sake. Berlin University became something of a temple to knowledge, and its professors were treated with reverence not because of their birth, but because they embodied the classical ideal of the educated man. The magnanimous Humboldt was perfectly serious when he said that it was ‘no less useless for the carpenter to have learned Greek than it is for the scholar to make tables’. Berlin came closer to achieving his ideal of a free classical education for all in the first half of the nineteenth century than at any time since.19
The other institution to undergo reform was the military. For centuries the Prussian army had been a state within a state, living in a world of its own with its own police, its own codes of conduct, its own church, and with virtually no links to civil society. Prussians had been amazed to see French soldiers march into their country, fired up with patriotism and nationalistic pride. The introduction of conscription in 1792 had not only created an endless supply of recruits, it had also unified the nation and the army. The French soldier was not a sujet harangued and beaten like his Prussian counterpart; he was a citoyen. The French military, it was said, was the French people in uniform. The reformers in Prussia hoped that if they could harness the will of the people in a similar way they could provoke a national uprising and rid Prussia of the French occupiers.
The main reformers, including Gneisenau, Boyen and Count Götzen, were brought together in Hardenberg’s Military Organization Commission, but the most influential of all was General Scharnhorst, whose story mirrors the revolutionary nature of his times. In any previous era this boy of peasant stock would have been barred from a military career but he lived in a revolutionary age. As a young man he entered military school in Hanover and his brilliant strategic mind soon brought him to the attention of his superiors. He moved to Prussia where he entered the service and, although he was constantly put down by men – including General Yorck – for being a commoner, his lectures were recognized for their brilliance. Scharnhorst was eventually ennobled. His influence cannot be underestimated; Arndt called him the ‘greatest of the reformers’ while Clausewitz called him the ‘father of my mind’.20
The military reforms were radical and reflected Scharnhorst’s meritocratic views. In 1807 he dismissed 208 woolly-minded officers and replaced them with professionals; he opened the army to commoners; he dissolved the old cadet schools; he set up new institutes, including the Berlin Academy, and abolished the infamous and degrading punishments so characteristic of the Prussian military. More revolutionary still was Scharnhorst’s idea of the creation of a new force, a militia called the Landwehr. Napoleon had limited the Prussian army to 43,000 troops but Scharnhorst quietly sent soldiers on leave every month and replaced them with new recruits, building up a secret reserve which would ultimately enable Prussia to raise 280,000 men. On 17 March 1808 Napoleon permitted the creation of the Landwehr for all men between seventeen and forty not in the regular army, and in April allowed the Landsturm for all those capable of auxiliary work. Napoleon had assumed that they would be cannon fodder for his own armies; in fact they would eventually fight against France in the Wars of Liberation.
Napoleon became increasingly suspicious of the reformers and flooded Berlin with his spies to watch over them. Stein realized the danger – he advised the king to remain in far-off Königsberg so as not to come in Berlin ‘into immediate contact with all the machinery of domestic and foreign intrigue which is now set in such violent motion’.21 The French period of repression began on 15 August 1808 when a letter discussing a future War of Liberation from Stein to Prince Wittgenstein was intercepted. Napoleon had it printed in Moniter and in the Berliner Telegraf and Stein was forced to flee to Bohemia pursued by assassins; he only saved himself by going on to Russia, where he worked against the French in the service of the tsar. After Stein’s escape the French started a reign of terror in Berlin and anyone suspected of anti-Napoleonic sentiments was in danger. Von Troschke, who co-owned property with Stein, was arrested and was for a time condemned to death. Prince Wittgenstein was arrested and accused of planning to poison Napoleon at Bayonne. The eighty-year-old Countess Voss was detained for plotting to kill Napoleon, this apparently confirmed by the fact that she had taught her parrot to