Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin. Alexandra Richie

literary circles and music societies to defy the ban on the fledgling political parties; works written during the Napoleonic occupation were rediscovered; the longing for national unity was growing stronger. However civilized and sedate the Biedermeier years had been, however gracious Schinkel’s neo-classical masterpieces had appeared, they had represented the artificial calm of a middle class shielded from the political realities of the day. Heinrich Heine was suspicious of the new elegant city with its ‘long stretches of uniform houses, the long wide streets … but with no care given to the opinion of the masses.’⁷⁴ In his famous lines he foreshadowed things to come: ‘Berlin, Berlin, great city of misery! In you, there is nothing to find but anguish and martyrdom … They respect rights as if they were candles.’⁷⁵ Biedermeier, and all it stood for, was set to come to a sudden and violent end in the revolutionary year of 1848.

       IV From Revolution to Realpolitik

      Needs must, when the Devil drives!

      Business and duty rule our lives.

      (Faust, Part I)

      BY THE LATE 1820s the absolutist systems bolstered by the Congress of Vienna were starting to break down. Europe was changing. Its population was growing, industrialization was bringing social and economic change and people were becoming increasingly impatient with the outmoded system which blocked any chance of reform. In Germany young men who had been exhilarated by their experiences in the Wars of Liberation resented retreating to a dull, stifling world. Artists and writers and ex-soldiers fuelled the Young Germany movement led by Karl Gutzkow and Heinrich Laube, who in turn introduced themes of rebellion and emancipation in their Zeitromanen (novels of the times). New oppositional poets and songwriters, including Hoffmann von Fallersleben (who wrote the German national anthem but lost his job because of his political views), Georg Herwegh and Ferdinand Freiligrath (both of whom were sent into exile), and the continuing influence of Heinrich Heine, began to challenge the status quo.¹ The students in the Burschenschaften dressed themselves in medieval clothes, grew long hair and beards, and gathered secretly in old ruins to reaffirm their calls for a unified German fatherland. Then, in the 1830s, revolutions began to erupt all over Europe. News of the fall of the Bourbons in France in 1830 raised hopes that the period of reaction might soon be at an end. The Belgians began to fight for independence from the Dutch, while Poland rose up and fought for independence against Russia. The Polish insurrection was particularly important in Berlin. It lasted nearly a year and despite the fact that the Prussian king backed the tsar’s brutal repression, there was much sympathy for the victims in the city itself. Thousands of Poles found sanctuary in Berlin and were championed by the population; Harro Harring wrote Freedom’s Salvation in their honour and Richard Wagner, then in Leipzig, wrote: ‘The victories achieved by the Poles during a short period in May of 1831 aroused my ecstatic admiration: it seemed to me as if the world had been created anew by some miracle.’² Two years later while staying in Berlin he wrote the overture Polonia and Berlin salons were now filled with music by Chopin and the rousing poetry of Mickiewicz.³

      Then in May 1832 German students organized the Hambach Festival: 20,000 liberal supporters gathered with black, red and gold banners to honour the new political spirit of the age. In Berlin despite constant repression intellectuals again began to call openly for German unity; Dahlmann wrote that the civil service should be open to all, and others called for a representative government. When William Jacob visited Berlin in 1819 he had noted that liberals there seemed uncertain of their goals, but by the mid-1830s a coherent set of calls for political reform found expression.⁴ Some merely wanted to lift the most repressive censorship laws; others wanted to challenge the power of the aristocracy and the military, but for most the underlying hope was that Germany could unify as a nation state based on the rule of law – a state which would represent the common will. Liberals demanded basic rights: freedom of expression, of association, of right to property and education; they wanted to retain the monarchy but have participation of the nation in government. For them the people – the Volk – did not mean the masses but rather an educated elite; universal suffrage was still considered a dangerous idea best left to the radical democrats. But nationalism was a powerful force; the idea of the Kulturnation and the liberal idea of the Staatsnation had begun to fuse, and when the French demanded the Rhine as a frontier in 1840 Germans reacted in a wave of patriotism.⁵ Nikolaus Becker’s Rheinlied became a hit with the lines ‘They shall not have it, the free German Rhine’. Die Wacht am Rhein (Watch on the Rhine) was heard everywhere, as was Hoffmann von Fallersleben’s Deutschlandlied, now the German national anthem, whose sentiments, like Verdi’s Nabucco in Italy, mirrored the longing for unity. Far from being an aggressive song of conquest it called for people to forget their petty differences and put a united ‘Germany, Germany above all’.

      The political changes were reflected in many aspects of culture. Berliners now wanted to discuss politics, to be active, to have news from other nationalist groups in the rest of Germany. This thirst for information contributed to the sharp rise in the number of newspapers. The first liberal newspapers to break through the censorship of the Metternich era had to be smuggled into the city from other German states. Oppositional publications founded by Young Hegelians and Young Germany – including Görres’s Rheinischer Merkur and the Rheinische Zeitung edited by Karl Marx – were under constant threat; Görres was forced into exile in 1827 and Marx’s paper was banned in 1843. In 1846 the liberal Deutsche Zeitung was founded in Heidelberg to cover not a single region, but the whole of Germany. Berlin also produced publications of its own, including the Vossische Zeitung whose circulation doubled to 20,000 between 1840 and 1848; it was also home to conservative papers like the 1831 Politische Wochenblatt, and the Neue Preussische Zeitung, known as the ‘Cross Newspaper’ because of the Iron Cross on its front page.⁶ The cutting, satirical magazine Kladderadatsch was started in 1848 and had reached a circulation of 39,000 by 1860. By 1862 Berlin would publish fifty-eight weekly papers and thirty-two dailies.

      Newspapers were not the only means of spreading information in the era of repression. The university was still a centre of independent thought; Hegel, the champion of the state, held a chair of philosophy at the university from 1817 and his influence was already widespread. Literary societies and educational groups, choral and gymnastic festivals, shooting matches and poetry groups were increasingly used as covers for political meetings, and liberalism flourished in the German coffee houses and Konditereien of Berlin like Josty, Spargnapani and Stehely. Literary societies like the 1824 Mittwochsgesellschaft (Wednesday Society) or its rival Der Tunnel über der Spree, founded by Moritz Saphir in 1827, and newspaper reading rooms like that started by Gustav Julius, provided places where people could meet in relative safety to discuss the works of Hegel, Heine, Ludwig Börne and later Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.⁷ Despite police controls increasing numbers of periodicals, pamphlets and cartoons appeared which were critical of the government. Finally, there was a flurry of excitement in liberal circles in 1840 when the repressive king died and was succeeded by his son Frederick William IV. This, they hoped, was the chance for reform they had been waiting for.

      King Frederick William IV came to the throne on a wave of optimism in the city. He was a humane man and seemed to espouse liberal ideas; indeed one of his first acts was to free political prisoners and to appoint the liberal heroes, the brothers J. and W. Grimm, Savigny, Schelling and Tieck, who had been turfed out of Göttingen by the king of Hanover, to professorships at Berlin University.⁸ Unlike his father he loved the grandiose neo-Gothic architecture then coming into vogue and hoped to build an enormous national cathedral on the banks of the Spree. He loved ceremony and colour and show and used Berlin as a personal parade ground, holding mock manoeuvres and even mistakenly blasting out windows with his cannon. Despite his liberal tendencies, he was first and foremost the king of Prussia. He liked the appearance of freedom and he genuinely wanted to be liked, but he refused to accept any diminution of his power. Frederick William IV was an impulsive man who could be kind and charming one minute and violent and brutal the next; this neurosis ultimately ended in mental collapse. As one observer put it, his people were