Biedermeier represented a great retreat from politics and from the national questions left unsolved after the Wars of Liberation. It was also a reaction against Romanticism, which by now was sinking under the weight of its own obsession with tuberculosis and opium and death. There was a sense of insecurity and helplessness amongst the bourgeoisie, captured by the anguished term Weltschmerz, the pain of being in the world. People were too tired or too disappointed to face the issues churning beneath the placid surface of life and drifted into a period of restoration, of security and of conservatism. They turned inward to the small things in life, to local politics, to the Heimat and to the family.
The name Biedermeier was invented in the 1850s, long after the period had ended, and was a gentle dig at the dull, sentimental bourgeois culture which flourished after the defeat of Napoleon. The Biedermeier world was one of Bildung, of classical education, of innocence and naïveté. Its air of respectability and quiet dignity hid a degree of prudishness and hypocrisy. Contemporary paintings capture its spirit, filled as they are with their images of pretty but not grand interiors, of young men in their libraries or young ladies practising the piano or having tea or singing Christmas carols. The rooms were cosy and homely, with wooden floors and striped silk wallpaper, filled with dainty furniture of lavender and cherrywood. The centre of this world was the family.
The new morality made the family into the highest achievement of bourgeois life; children were seen not merely as future providers but as a way for a middle-class couple to ensure immortality: they represented hopes for advancement and success in the next generation.64 Marriage was no longer strictly controlled by the community or regarded as a financial transaction or dynastic contract between two families. Love matches were suddenly fashionable. The new morality influenced sexual mores. In the eighteenth century love and sexuality had been seen as two distinct things and open libertinism and erotic adventures had been a source of amusement, particularly amongst the aristocracy. In the early part of the nineteenth century Wilhelm von Humboldt was famous for his visits to Berlin’s better brothels, and yet his marriage had been held up as a paragon of virtue. Thomas Jefferson had told Humboldt in 1807 that ‘When a man assumes a public trust he should consider himself as public property’, but neither man would have thought this included scrutiny of his private life. Now Humboldt’s personal life was criticized; Hardenberg was castigated for keeping a mistress and both Wieland, who had had a splendidly decadent sex life, and Kotzebue, who had at least seventeen children and perhaps more, were labelled lascivious and immoral. Men still frequented brothels and had mistresses on the side but it was no longer polite to talk about it openly. This prudishness extended to all aspects of life, including the world of politics. Bourgeois Berliners knew they had no political power but they rejected the inflammatory work of Heinrich Heine who, writing from Paris, railed against the repression in Berlin. Rather than heed his warnings of the dangers lurking in Prussian life Berliners called him ‘radical’ and ‘dangerous’.65 In reality, the educated elite remained firmly under the control of the Hohenzollerns and the military. Personal and political doubts were pushed underground in a world of censorship and conformity and repression. Even Humboldt, who had done so much for the city’s academic life, called Berlin an ‘intellectual wasteland, small, unliterary, and therefore overly malicious’.66
Given the pervading climate it is not surprising that Biedermeier Berlin produced little art of note. Sadly many of the great artists who had been drawn to the city during the heady days of the Romantic period now found their careers blocked. Felix Mendelssohn, who in 1820 had re-introduced Bach’s St Matthew Passion to Berlin and who should have succeeded to the directorship of the Singakademie, was passed over for the dull Karl Friedrich Rungenhagen. Carl Maria von Weber, who had inaugurated Romantic opera with the première of Der Freischütz in 1821, was rejected by the court composer Gaspare Spontini and moved to Dresden: the Berliner Giacomo Meyerbeer was forced to leave for lack of work and was only offered the position of director of the Opera in 1842 under Frederick William IV; Hector Berlioz and Richard Wagner both spent time in Berlin but were disappointed by its repressive atmosphere and moved elsewhere. Even the great sculptor and artist Johann Gottfried Schadow, who had created the Quadriga and who had been so scathing about the French occupation of Berlin, received no more commissions in his own city. He was superseded by the more solid Christian Daniel Rauch, who completed the great equestrian statue of Frederick the Great and had statues of the successful generals of the Napoleonic Wars – Blücher, Yorck, Gneisenau, Scharnhorst and Bülow – lined up along Unter den Linden. But Berlin still failed to impress. When Pastor Karl Philipp Moritz first saw London he exclaimed: ‘How great had seemed Berlin to me when I saw it from the tower of St Mary’s and looked down on it from the hill at Tempelhof … how insignificant it now seemed when I set it in my imagination against London!’67 The only field in which Biedermeier excelled and served to change the spartan view of Berlin was in architecture. This was largely thanks to the gift of one man, Karl Friedrich Schinkel.68
In 1826 the Viennese writer and friend of Beethoven’s, Franz Grillparzer, journeyed to Berlin in one of the new post coaches: ‘Finally the towers of Berlin,’ he wrote. ‘Through the gates. Beautiful. The collection of buildings more beautiful than I have seen together. The streets wide. Kingly.’69 Such praise was rare before the arrival of Schinkel, the greatest German architect of the nineteenth century. It was he who, over the space of a long and dynamic career, transformed central Berlin, giving the city centre a unified feel with his elegant neo-classical buildings in the ‘Prussian style’. Schinkel gave form to Unter den Linden, the Platz der Akademie, the Lustgarten and, with Lenné, the Tiergarten. If, as it is said, the first Roman emperor ‘found a city of brick and left it marble’, Schinkel found a city of wood and left it brick. But much of Schinkel’s brick was covered with plaster, swathed in marble and surrounded by columns of Saxon sandstone, sculptures and elaborate wrought iron. His gifts ranged from interior and set design – he created fabulous iron furniture, was one of the first to do lithographs, and designed the magnificent star-studded set for the Queen of the Night in Mozart’s The Magic Flute – to draughtsmanship and painting. But Schinkel’s career also reflected the triumph of reaction in Berlin. He had started out as an ardent Prussian reformer but, like so many of his generation, had retreated from political life after the disappointment following the Wars of Liberation. Instead he became a pillar of the establishment in the apolitical and naive world of Biedermeier Berlin.
Schinkel’s life spanned the era from the end of absolutism to the end of the Biedermeier years. He was born in 1781 in the little garrison town of Neurippen to the north of Berlin. It was a time of extraordinary change. By the time the family moved to Berlin in 1794 Kant had published The Critique of Pure Reason, Frederick the Great had died, and the ideas of the French Revolution were reverberating across Europe. The young Karl was sent to school at the famous Graue Kloster but in 1797 decided to become an architect after seeing Friedrich Gilly’s plans for a vast monument to Frederick the Great. He studied with Gilly and was given his first commission – a garden pavilion – in 1806. The revolution and ensuing turmoil had a powerful influence both on his personal and professional life. Schinkel watched from his rooms on the Alexanderplatz as French troops marched into Berlin in 1806 and like many of his contemporaries he was roused into a patriotic fervour by Fichte’s 1807 Addresses to the German Nation. He joined the Berlin Romantic literary circle and was befriended by Achim and Bettina von Arnim, Clemens von Brentano, Karl von Savigny and others; like many of them he volunteered to serve in the Prussian Landsturm after the declaration of war on France. Schinkel’s ardent patriotism was reflected in his work. By 1805 he had already designed a monument to Martin Luther; he would soon create sets for Undine and Faust and planned to illustrate Brentano’s fairy tales. His paintings, like the melancholy Bohemian Mountain Range at Sunset, were executed in the high Romantic style and were clearly influenced by Caspar David Friedrich’s lonely landscapes which he saw exhibited in Berlin in 1810. During the occupation he painted large dioramas of historic scenes to bolster public morale and in 1812 exhibited the vast Burning of Moscow