The form of subjugation had a further sting in its tail. During the revolution Berliners had fought hard to increase local police powers. The force had been enlarged, but instead of protecting the new laws and freedoms it was now reorganized along paramilitary lines and became a highly effective instrument of control. Intimate knowledge of the local landscape and a huge network of informers made the force adept at tracking down political suspects. Police presidents became powerful figures and were given jurisdiction over many other aspects of city life, such as the fire department and street cleaning, the construction of public baths and sewer and water systems and the granting of building permits, all of which made control of ‘enemies of the state’ even easier. Contemporary manuals described the ‘Prussian policeman’s foolproof arm-lock for troublesome detainees’ and outlined where new recruits should look in people’s homes for hidden magazines and newspapers. A journal called In the Police School showed the ‘old Prussian Police grip’, with an officer bringing in a well-dressed but clearly very uncomfortable ‘liberal’ by the scruff of his neck and the back of his trousers.24 The first police president to be appointed after 1848 was Carl Ludwig von Hinckeldey, who had already made himself unpopular through his unrelenting harassment of the ‘Red Democrats’ and his determination to erase all traces of revolution from the city. Even the famous Berlin ‘Litfass columns’ were put up as a means of social control. On a visit to Berlin in 1891 Mark Twain described them as ‘pretty round pillars … 18 foot high and about as thick as a boar’s head’, and even recommended that they be brought to the United States. The columns had in fact been invented by Ernst Litfass, Frederick William’s court printer, who put one up in front of his house to protest against the new ban on public notices. To his chagrin the columns were used by the very people against whom he had protested. Hinckeldey had seen their potential and had columns put up all over the city and Berliners were now forbidden to put posters elsewhere but had to apply for permission to use the columns; those requesting space for politically dubious material were noted on police files.
The repression went further. The new police system saw trials against communists and democrats; the press was controlled through taxation and a new system of licences, all those in the civil service with liberal tendencies were dismissed, school teachers were carefully monitored, factory inspectors were sent round to check political unrest, even the courtiers and the king were spied on. It was at this point that the Berlin civil service became the true organ of the conservative government; advancement now depended not merely on a neutral political attitude but on positive proof of commitment to its policies; Prussia might have had a constitution and respected the rule of law, but in practice the bureaucracy and the military were controlled by the conservative forces of reaction. Ironically the new system was accepted by many Berliners as being ‘for the best’ or good for their ‘own protection’ against the increasing tide of radicalism. This shift was visible in the change of attitude to Hinckeldey, whose rule ended in a duel which turned him from a hated figure into a hero of the city.25
Hinckeldey’s transformation began in 1856, when the police chief organized a raid at the exclusive gambling club in the Hotel du Nord. While there he got into a heated exchange with the arrogant young Count von Rochow-Plessen, who objected to the intrusion. The argument ended when Rochow-Plessen threw down the gauntlet. Duels were not uncommon in Berlin at the time but were fought between ‘men of honour’ or men of equal social rank; Carl Gottlieb Svarez, the author of the Prussian General Legal Code, wrote in 1794 that only ‘officers and noblemen’ should be permitted to duel; ‘when persons who belong neither to the nobility nor to the officer corps issue or accept a challenge to a duel, such action shall be deemed to be attempted murder and be punishable as such’. By the nineteenth century duels between members of the middle class had become more common but these were also governed by a strict code of honour. When two Berlin waiters fought a pistol duel in 1870 they were not allowed into ‘honourable detention’ in a castle but were sent to a ‘dishonourable’ prison because, as the Prussian Minister of Justice Eulenberg had put it, ‘the condemned belong to a class of society in which it is not customary to settle one’s affairs in a duel’.26
Given the social difference between the nobleman and the police chief the challenge was seen by many as somewhat unfair. Furthermore, duels to the death with pistols were usually reserved for grave offences such as cuckoldry, with less lethal swords being preferred for insults such as this. Nevertheless on a cold March morning in 1856 the two men and their seconds met at the Berlin Jungfernheide; the pistols were chosen, the men walked, turned, and fired. The police chief missed, but von Rochow-Plessen, a crack shot, hit his target squarely in the chest. Hinckeldey didn’t utter a word, but ‘quietly made a half turn, fell to the earth, and died’. Suddenly the hateful image changed. Now the police chief was hailed by Berliners as a ‘great protector of freedom’, a ‘fair Prussian bureaucrat’, who had, after all, done a great deal to modernize the city. Had he not introduced a new water system to curb disease, and brought in a ‘new fangled sewer system’ which despite making the city reek to high heaven had modernized waste management? Had he not also introduced new laws governing factory health and safety, and brought in strict fire regulations? Had he not defended the rights of poor Berliners against the Junkers and ‘paid for it with his life’? Ten thousand tearful Berliners attended his funeral.27
Bitterness and disappointment prevailed in the aftermath of the revolution. The makeshift Berlin parliament had been dispersed and the all-German Frankfurt parliament had effectively collapsed before the Prussian king rejected their ‘crown from the gutter’. A quarter of a million people left Germany every year throughout the 1850s and many of her most energetic, forward-looking and innovative citizens forsook their depressing country and went to North America in search of the freedoms denied them at home.
Most of the liberals who remained in Berlin now abandoned their futile struggle for political reform. They felt powerless against the mighty state and convinced themselves that the restrictive three-class voting system and constitution were preferable to a bloody revolution or to the harsh system still in place in Austria. The Bildungsbürgertum, the educated middle classes, reverted to their comfortable pre-revolutionary lives, enjoying the prestige associated with posts in academia and in the bureaucracy, while some found an outlet for their liberal ideas in the quieter world of administrative reform. Theatres reopened and families enjoyed outings to their favourite parks and lakes. Schopenhauer and Wagner were fashionable.28 Even General Wrangel became popular; he was renamed ‘Papa Wrangel’ and his uses of the Berlin wit and dialect were fondly quoted. A contemporary joke told of a little boy who bumped into the general while walking down Unter den Linden. He was whistling but immediately fell silent when he saw the general. Touched by this show of respect Wrangel asked him to carry on, whereupon the boy said, ‘When I see you I have to laugh, and when I laugh, I cannot whistle!’ A cartoon in Kladderadatsch showed a hilarious series of drawings of Wrangel being transformed from a priggish young Junker into a kindly old man. But in the end these jokes were a sign of powerlessness; Wrangel might have become a likeable figurehead but it was he, and not the liberals, who controlled Berlin. The failure of 1848 had meant that even rapid industrialization and the rise of the economic bourgeoisie would not result in fundamental change in the social or political structure of Prussia. The number of aristocrats in the officer corps continued to rise so that they controlled all top positions and 65 per cent of the officer corps, police power was strengthened, the old estates remained in place.29 It seemed as if the Junkers would keep the city a sleepy capital on the edge of Europe,