Schinkel’s patriotic service continued after the defeat of Napoleon. He designed the decorations which streamed from the Brandenburg Gate for the victory parade in 1814 and he helped to organize the great exhibition of war booty returned to Berlin from Paris. He produced a medal for Blücher showing the great general as Hercules in a lionskin on one side and St Michael defeating Satan – a reference to Napoleon – on the other. He designed the Iron Cross – and created the Pickelhaube or pointed helmet, which would later become the very symbol of Prussian militarism. Above all, his patriotism was reflected in his architecture, and in his use of the ‘national style’ – Gothic. Schinkel believed that Gothic architecture represented Romanticism, eternal Christianity, the lost Germany of the Middle Ages, even the ‘German soul’. The Gothic style provided a model for the development of Prussia and embodied the call for liberty and freedom, for reform and for the creation of a unified German state. Most of his early plans were in this style. When Queen Luise died in 1810 Schinkel submitted to the king drawings for a memorial chapel complete with guardian angels, high arches and tracery windows meant to evoke the very entrance to paradise. After the war he designed a vast Liberation Fountain, which had the Germanic chieftain Hermann rearing up on his horse and holding a spear to the belly of the fallen Roman Quintilius Varus who, weighed down by his imperial armour, bore a striking likeness to Napoleon. He designed a great Gothic cathedral to commemorate the Wars of Liberation and submitted plans for the rebuilding of the Petrikirche. But none of these huge projects was ever built. The reasons were political.
During the Napoleonic period Frederick William III had appeared to support the reformers, the German nationalists, the volunteers for the Landsturm, and the liberals who wanted political change, but with the defeat of France he quickly reverted to his old ways. Calls for political reform, for a unified Germany, for a constitution and for a representative government were now considered subversive and dangerous and the Gothic style was intrinsically linked to them. As such, it fell out of favour. Instead, the king now preferred buildings which gave an air of stability and safety, above all those designed in the neo-classical style.
Schinkel’s work was greatly affected by this change in royal preference. Frederick William III chose a Doric mausoleum over a Gothic tomb for his wife and halted plans for the great Gothic cathedral in Berlin because of a lack of funds. Schinkel had to make do with the cast iron Gothic monument in Kreuzberg created under the direction of Major von Reiche, the nephew of the eminent general ennobled after Waterloo, and although the crown prince commissioned a number of small Gothic monuments they did not amount to much. By 1820 Schinkel had been forced to abandon the Gothic in favour of classicism. Some saw this as tantamount to a betrayal of the fight for German unity, but despite his love for medieval architecture Schinkel wanted above all to build. For over a decade his most important work would reflect the needs of the reactionary Prussian state.
To be fair Schinkel did not see the two styles as mutually exclusive. Other artists, from Beethoven to Hölderlin to Möricke – and even Goethe in Faust – had mixed elements of Romanticism and neo-classicism and Schinkel convinced himself that educating people about the values of ancient Greece was the next best thing to evoking the spirit of medieval Germany. For him Greek architecture had been the product of a harmonious, integrated and free society which could be seen as a model for Prussia – ‘the most felicitous state of freedom within the law’. And art and culture were the key: beautiful buildings could, in Schinkel’s words, ‘ennoble all human relations’. But the view epitomized the problem of the Biedermeier world. It was naive to think that the creation of buildings and paintings and sculpture could somehow educate the people in democratic principles. Schinkel had convinced himself that his buildings were somehow ‘liberating’ Berlin. On the contrary he was legitimating the rule of one of the most reactionary regimes in Europe.
Schinkel’s career as an architect began in earnest in 1818, four years after the Congress of Vienna, with the completion of his first great commission – the Neue Wache or New Guard House. It was a small monument to Prussia’s victorious army. Built in the shape of a Roman castrum with a Doric portico of six simple columns it remains the most striking monument on Unter den Linden. The king liked it and it led to new commissions. Within the next two decades Schinkel touched virtually every corner of the city centre, converting the baroque cathedral across from the Schloss, planning the Lustgarten, creating the Schlossbrücke, building the Schauspielhaus or theatre, which opened in 1824, and a number of private houses and palaces, including a residence for Prince William on Unter den Linden and the Palais Redern on Pariser Platz, and drawing up plans for everything from a new library to gatehouses for the Potsdamer Platz. In a letter to Sulpice Boissiére in 1822 he said he hoped his work would create ‘beauty in itself and for the city’.70
His crowning work in the neo-classical style, and the building which he considered his greatest work, was the Altes Museum, which was completed in 1830. It remains a great Berlin landmark. From the outside it looms like a vast Greek stoa with its grand row of eighteen Ionic columns marching in perfect symmetry across the northern end of the Lustgarten. The vast rotunda, modelled on the Pantheon in Rome, is hidden from view from the outside and comes as a marvellous surprise to the visitor. Schinkel intended the rotunda to be a temple to art and culture; a sanctuary where ‘the sight of a beautiful and sublime room must make the visitor receptive and create the proper mood for the enjoyment and acknowledgement of what the building contains’.71 After studying the exhibits the visitor could leave via the Treppenhaus, which connected the museum-temple to the busy secular world of Berlin. The position was vital. The museum was placed across from the Royal Palace, flanked by the arsenal and the cathedral, and next to the Stock Exchange and the Neue Packhof or New Customs House, which was completed in 1832. By placing it here Schinkel was trying to prove that art could fit into the civil order and to demonstrate that culture was indeed equal to the pillars of Prussian society represented by the military, the monarchy, the Church and the new emerging power of industry. It was an absurd delusion. Art was not as powerful as the rival institutions and never would be. When Robert Smirke designed the British Museum in 1824 it was placed miles from Whitehall and St Paul’s and the City, and the English would have thought it absurd that culture could be seen as a rival to parliament or the military or industry in the running of their country. Schinkel’s notion that culture was a substitute for political action was typical of Biedermeier Berlin. However beautiful his symmetrical, clear, austere neo-classical buildings, he had come to mirror that fatal tendency in the Berlin educated middle class: the belief that they could influence politics through culture.
What Schinkel did not seem to recognize was that far from being a political activist he had in fact become a pillar of the Prussian establishment. He was a trusted public servant and in 1838 was considered reliable enough to be elevated to the highest office of public works in Prussia. The sheer number of commissions and projects which came to him through the royal family made him the most famous architect in Prussia, but he was a court architect in all but name. His claims to be leading Prussians to a better, more democratic world through his architecture and his art rang increasingly hollow.
In many ways the Altes Museum heralded the end of pedagogic architecture in Berlin and by the time it was finished the Biedermeier world was beginning to crumble. Even Schinkel foreshadowed the change and in the last decade of his life began to explore other forms of architecture by developing an ahistorical functional style inspired in part by British industrial architecture.72 His new designs included plans for a shopping bazaar on Unter den Linden and the surprisingly modern purple brick Bauakademie, so wantonly destroyed by the East Germans after the Second World War. His late works hinted at a new age to come, when the edifying public buildings of the past would make way for hotels, factories, department stores and train stations, built not to educate or to ennoble the public, but to facilitate trade and commerce.73
By the time Schinkel died in 1840 many of those excluded from the Prussian elite were growing increasingly angry at the censorship and repression which still characterized Berlin. If Schinkel had renounced the fervent nationalism and politics of his youth there were many in Berlin who had not, and the work of those in exile was finding its way back to the city. Groups of reform-minded individuals