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

in the streets. August Borsig, who was soon to become Berlin’s first great industrialist, was one of many who believed in the king’s promises of elections and a new constitutional monarchy. In his impassioned speech by the graves of the fallen street fighters he had announced: ‘the ground which has closed above our beloved heroes has for ever buried all hatreds and fraternal strife. We demand that a brotherly hand of forgiveness be extended to our army. Honour those soldiers who fell in obedience to their oath.’ A ‘new era of co-operation’ between the army, the king and the people would now begin; an era which would be marked by ‘men of goodwill’.¹⁷ He had not seen that the monarch’s romantic gesture was the promise of a man already tottering on the brink of madness, nor had he understood that the military had withdrawn under duress like ‘a great dog which has been slapped on the nose’. The humiliation of the army had only increased the generals’ thirst for revenge against the troublesome citizens. The people had not realized that the reforms were temporary and that a king who could grant them so easily could also take them away. The revolution had stopped before any real change had taken place in the power structure of Prussia. By not taking advantage of the temporary split between the king and the army, they lost their chance for ever.

      Given its power it was perhaps inevitable that the Prussian army would get its way in the end. The officers put pressure on the king to allow the military back into the city, and on 20 September 1848 General Wrangel led 40,000 soldiers, twice the number of the original Berlin garrison, back to their barracks. Berliners did nothing. Instead, they continued to squabble amongst themselves at the new Berlin National Assembly, which had been formed in March.

      The Assembly had been fraught with problems from the beginning. Unlike its counterpart in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt, which was made up of professionals and professors, the Berlin body was one-third peasants and craftsmen and one-quarter low-ranking civil servants. The most important group gathered around Benedikt Waldeck, a jurist who represented the moderate left, and on 26 July the Assembly passed the Waldeck Charter proposing a strong parliamentary system for Prussia. But there were many splits and disagreements, particularly between the liberals and the radical left. On 16 October river-boat workers began to protest at the loss of jobs due to the installation of steam pumps on the Spree; they destroyed one pump and the liberals sent in the moderate people’s militia. Eleven men were killed in the fighting; the radicals in parliament accused the liberals of following in the footsteps of the Prussian army, the fights became more bitter and divisive, and radical demands grew increasingly strident. By the end of August new motions had been introduced calling first for the abolition of hereditary titles and much-prized feudal hunting rights, and finally of the nobility itself. The conservatives grew increasingly nervous. But the real conflict was caused by proposed army reform. The National Assembly wanted to create a state army, a people’s army removed from the king’s command and made up not of Junkers but of the citizens. The king saw this as a direct threat to his power. His sympathy for the reformers began to wane and the military were only waiting to nudge him back into the counter-revolutionary fold.¹⁸

      The moment of truth came on 28 October. The king, now influenced by his conservative council, rejected the liberal candidates proposed by parliament and appointed the conservative Graf von Brandenburg as Prime Minister and Otto von Manteuffel as Minister of the Interior. The parliament did nothing and the young Bismarck concluded that the babbling body had ‘no stomach for a fight’. Meanwhile the arch-conservative General Wrangel, the new commander-in-chief of the Brandenburg region, prepared to use his troops to disband the troublesome parliament for good. Berlin’s democratic experiment was about to come to an abrupt end.

      On 10 November Wrangel’s men marched into Berlin and surrounded the theatre where the National Assembly was in session. It was the beginning of the end. Wrangel ordered a chair to be set up in the middle of the street. A nervous officer of the militia emerged from the playhouse and proclaimed that he was there to ‘defend the freedom of the people and the safety of the National Assembly’, and would surrender ‘only to a superior force’. Wrangel merely nodded to his troops and said in broad Berlinerisch, ‘Tell your militia, force is ready for ’em!’ He added that the members of parliament and the militia had fifteen minutes to leave the building or suffer the consequences. The officer retreated. Within minutes the dignitaries came to the door and meekly left the building in neat rows, never to return. There were no barricades, no fights, no protests, nothing. The Assembly was formally dissolved on 5 December and the king imposed his own constitution. The revolution was over.

      Endless works have been written on the failure of the 1848 revolution in Germany. It has been seen as the point at which Germany took the Sonderweg (the ‘other’ path) and ‘failed to turn’ towards a Western liberal democracy. Its failure has been blamed on liberals or radicals for splitting the opposition; it has been seen as the moment when the unification of Germany under Prussia became inevitable; it has been linked to the First World War, even to Hitler. All this, however, is ahistorical. It is unlikely that the revolution could have succeeded even if the radicals and the liberals had not split; even if they had not been beset with the problem of national unity, or the problem of reconciling freedom and unity in all Germany. Not only were the ‘forces of reaction’ keen to maintain power in Berlin but the monarchy, the aristocracy and the military were stronger than they had first appeared. Furthermore, as Nipperdey has pointed out, the ‘monarchic sense and a sense of legality were still widespread among the people’. If the people were not willing to fight their king and their army in the name of the revolution it was doomed to fail.¹⁹ The revolution could not be won by people who refused to touch the king’s palace because somebody had posted a notice on it declaring it to be the ‘property of the people’. Alexis de Tocqueville remarked bitterly that ‘There are no revolutions in Germany, because the police would not allow it.’²⁰ Unless the Prussian elite were physically removed from power, which in 1848 would have meant civil war, the old power structures were bound to remain. The feudal aristocracy and the military understood that to accede to the people’s demands would have meant the erosion of their own dynastic and feudal privileges – something which they were not prepared to tolerate. Liberals had been terrified of a second revolution akin to the Jacobin uprising in France, and instead of siding with the radicals they moved to the right; but for their part the radicals were as yet too weak to bring about a complete overthrow of the system. When General Wrangel moved to disband the National Assembly in Berlin he did not encounter any resistance from supposedly ‘revolutionary’ Berliners. The would-be activists who had rallied so proudly at the graves of the fallen in March had quietly packed up and gone home.

      The authorities now moved quickly to prevent any unrest. A three-class voting system was imposed, reflecting the new compromise between right-of-centre liberals and the monarchy – the Junker Herrenhaus evolved from this body in the 1850s. The rights of the crown were retained and the king still controlled virtually every aspect of state power. The military was now exempt from the constitution and pushed for the enforcement of a state of emergency.²¹ Once again, Berlin became a centre of repression.

      Known activists and street fighters were rounded up and arrested, a curfew of eleven o’clock was imposed and citizens were forced to carry identification with them at all times. Strict controls were introduced at the city gates and all visitors had to register with the police. House searches became the norm, with 20,000 ‘suspected weapons’ being confiscated in 1848–9 alone. Contemporary drawings show the police bursting into liberal clubs and coffee houses, breaking up political gatherings, arresting agitators and gathering incriminating literature which included liberal newspapers such as Reform and the satirical Kladderadatsch, and the more radical Volksblätter, Republik and Berliner Krakehler. Papers were strictly censored; General Wrangel decreed that articles which were ‘insolent, cheeky, irreverent or disrespectful’, which ‘questioned the implementation of law and order by the state’, which expressed ‘unhappiness or dissatisfaction with the government’ or which ‘criticized the sovereign’ were forbidden. As most liberal and radical articles came under this broad brush editors were constantly harassed and their papers threatened with closure.²² The worst days of the Carlsbad decrees had returned with a vengeance. Berliners could only dream of the time a few months before when Metternich and their ‘cartridge prince’, later to become Kaiser William I, had fled to London in