When news of the rout at Leipzig reached Berlin the city erupted in a wave of jubilation. The sense of pride and optimism carried on into the summer, when the Prussians reached Paris and cartloads of property stolen from Prussia were brought back to Berlin. On 17 and 18 January 1816 a great victory celebration was held under the restored Quadriga on the Brandenburg Gate. The anti-French activists had now become heroes and Baron vom Stein was made a Knight of the Order of the Black Eagle – the highest decoration in the land. The victory had freed Berlin and Prussia from foreign domination.
Reformers and fledgling nationalist groups now demanded social and political reforms. Liberal nationalists like Jahn and Ernst Moritz Arndt wanted to see the creation of a unified German nation and in 1814 Arndt wrote in Germanien und Europa that Germany should be a single monarchical state with its own army, its own laws and its own representative institutions. To this end he started to organize the creation of monuments and festivals, including one at the site of the Battle of Leipzig. But the hopes of the reformers were soon dashed. The king was safe, Napoleon was gone and things could go back to the way they were. The political class found to their disappointment that not only was there little real desire for change amongst the ruling elite; there was little interest amongst the people either. The drive for national unity remained strong amongst liberals and reformers but they were a tiny minority. Democratic reforms were halted before representative government could be put into place in part because the mass of Berliners remained suspicious of it, even referring to democratic constitutionalism as ‘un-German’. Nineteenth-century attempts to portray the time as one of mass movement for national unity were mere fantasy; after all, even the Landwehr had consisted of only 20,000 volunteers, and the war had been won not by them but by the mammoth regular armies. Only later would men like Arndt and Fichte or the reformers like Stein and Scharnhorst become national heroes; at the time they were treated with suspicion both by the populace and by the aristocrats keen to retain power. With Napoleon gone liberal nationalism was increasingly seen as a threat. As Madame de Staël had said of Prussia, ‘the two classes of society – the scholars and the courtiers – are completely divorced from each other. The thinkers are soaring in the Empyrean and on the earth you encounter only grenadiers.’ The ‘grenadiers’ had fought the war for the restoration of stability and to retain Prussia’s status as a great power. They wanted to return to their own privileges. Society as a whole was unwilling or unable to stop them, and that is precisely what they did.
Men like Stein were bitterly disappointed by the general apathy of the population at large and by the fact that there was no real stomach for reform amongst the majority of Berliners. Peace had come at last and most wanted to settle down and rebuild their lives. Stein had already complained about Berliners’ pathetic response to Napoleon compared to the fervour of the masses during the Spanish revolt or of the Muscovites, in whom he had witnessed ‘heart-elevating inspiring scenes’. After the war he was even more scathing about Berliners’ lack of interest in reform. ‘It is a misfortune for the Prussian State that the capital is situated in the Electoral Mark,’ he said. ‘What impression can those dry flatlands make on the mind of their inhabitants? What power can they have to rouse or exalt or cheer it?’ He continued, ‘What can you expect from the inhabitants of those sandy steppes, those smart, heartless, wooden, half-educated people, cut out for nothing but corporals and calculators … fellows that think only of places, privileges, increased salaries.’58 Niebuhr told Wilhelm von Humboldt: ‘It is an utterly mistaken view to think that the mass of the German population has a democratic tendency; that appears in our savants, our pamphleteers, our beardless youths, but nowhere in the people, the nobles, citizens or peasants.’59
This view was soon codified in the post-war settlement of Europe. The bizarre Congress of Vienna in 1814–15, best known for the many amorous liaisons which took place behind the scenes, settled Europe’s borders after the defeat of Napoleon but did not end German fragmentation and absolutist rule. Stein had hoped for the creation of something akin to the old German empire and Hardenberg had wanted a close German federation and representative government, but such developments were impossible at a time when neither Prussia nor Austria would concede power to the other, when smaller states like Württemberg insisted on sovereignty, and when the people of Germany remained passive. The result was a loose confederation of states with a weak parliament in Frankfurt-am-Main made up of non-elected representatives. There was no constitutional reform in Austria or Prussia and the new German Confederation was little more than a collection of princes determined to retain power and prevent change. Ironically, the most important change had nothing to do with reform, but took place because the tsar wanted large chunks of Polish territory which was then in Prussian hands; Prussia was compensated with Saxon territory and with extensive areas in the Rhineland and Westphalia, giving it control over a swathe of territory from East Prussia to the new industrial areas in the west. Although the significance of this was little understood at the time it marked a crucial turning point in German history. For the first time ever Prussia’s focus had shifted to the west; for the first time ever Berlin was responsible not only for the defence of the east, but also for the border with France. The attempts to join these divided Prussian regions would now in effect shape the drive for German unity. But this lay in the future. Berlin was not yet the focal point of Prussia; neither Rhinelanders nor Saxons felt any loyalty to their new state capital. Goethe noted that whereas other countries had great cities which served as the capitals of a united nation Berlin remained a mere provincial city: ‘Paris is France,’ he wrote. ‘All the main interests of that great country are concentrated in the capital … It is quite different here in Germany … We have no city, we have not even a region of which one could say: “Here is Germany!” ’60
Some tried to maintain the nationalist momentum after the Wars of Revolution. Turnvater Jahn hoped to expand his patriotic gymnastic groups and in Jena the student movement or Burschenschaft was founded and quickly spread throughout Germany. These young people still longed for the creation of a united Germany; they dressed in what they believed to be old German national costumes, carried the black, red and gold colours of the old imperial order used by the Lützow volunteers, and they began to act out Romantic stories of medieval knights and folk tales in secret rituals and gatherings. In October 1817 they gathered at the symbolic Wartburg castle perched high on a rocky crag in Thuringia to merge all the local groups into a national body. Nearly 500 torch-bearing students dressed in costumes trudged up the hill to the site where Luther had translated the Bible, to the very room whose wall was still marked with the ink he had thrown at a vision of the Devil. There they held a ceremony commemorating both the victory at Leipzig and the anniversary of the Reformation which had brought ‘freedom from Rome’.61 In memory of Luther’s burning of the Papal Bull they gathered works of conservative and anti-nationalist writers together and burned them in a huge bonfire.
The idea of a group of nationalists agitating in the German universities made the leaders of the newly restored absolutist regimes nervous. The chance to silence them came when the student and Burschenschaft member Karl Sand assassinated the reactionary playwright Kotzebue on 23 March 1819 – the student was later decapitated in public.
All liberal democratic and nationalist groups were to be punished under a new set of laws: the infamous Carlsbad decrees. These were masterminded by the wily Austrian statesman Wenzel von Metternich, who was bitterly opposed to any participation of the people in government. All democratic clubs, liberal organizations and anyone suspected of involvement in ‘revolutionary agitation’ were now to be suppressed and police state techniques used to hunt down all those opposed to the restoration of absolutism. The press was censored along with all printed matter of less than twenty pages; universities became bastions of conservatism as professors who criticized the system were sacked and rebellious students sent down. Beethoven’s Fidelio was banned, as were Fichte’s Speeches to the German Nation; Friedrich Jahn was arrested and his gymnasia closed down and Frederick William III dismissed the last of the reformers, including Wilhelm von Humboldt; on 20 March 1820 Humboldt revealed the extent of the censorship when he began a letter to Stein with: ‘I have refrained from saying to you through the post anything about public affairs … All our letters are opened.’62 Berliners did not defend them; most longed for peace and agreed with Niebuhr when he said that there was no need