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

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СКАЧАТЬ difference. His troops entered Berlin for the first time on 15 November 1627 and ransacked the city, looting and raping. They returned a year later, bringing another wave of terror. Forty thousand troops arrived in February 1630, and this time they remained for over a year, leaving a legacy of destruction, hunger and disease in their wake. Each occupation meant more brutality for the people, who prayed: ‘Is there no God in heaven that will take our part? Are we then such utterly forsaken sheep? Must we look on while our houses and dwellings are burnt before our eyes?’¹³ This is one reason why there is only one late Renaissance building still standing in central Berlin.¹⁴

      After four years of occupation by the Catholic forces Berlin’s fortunes appeared to be changing. The apparent salvation came in the form of one of the great heroes of the Protestant cause, the king of Sweden, Gustavus Adolphus, who had landed at Usedom in Pomerania in July 1630 and had begun to march south. The imperial commander, Tilly, had already taken the outer fortifications of Magdeburg by April, but as the Swedes approached he feared that he might be caught between the city and the Swedish forces. He gave the order to attack, but tragically could not control his own insubordinate, bloodthirsty troops, and on 20 May 1631, in one of the most outrageous acts of the war, 30,000 of the people of Magdeburg were hacked or burned to death in a matter of hours. The news of the massacre infuriated the Swedish king, who was spurred on by the desire to avenge the disaster. By the end of May 1631 his men, wearing the telltale yellow and blue ribbon around their hats, had driven the imperial troops south and had reached the gates of Berlin. Gustavus Adolphus now demanded that the dithering Elector George William sign a Treaty of Alliance with Sweden. The elector’s attempts to try to evade his obligation so infuriated the Swedish king that on 21 June he brought his army to the gates of Berlin and aimed his cannon directly at the electoral palace. George William cowered inside, sending his wife and mother-in-law out to pacify the king, but on 23 June the treaty was finalized, putting Berlin firmly under Swedish rule. Brandenburg and the fortresses of Spandau and Küstrin were placed at the disposal of the Swedish king, Berlin was occupied, and Gustavus Adophus himself took up residence there for a time, demanding 30,000 thalers a year for the upkeep of his troops.

      Any hopes Berliners might have had for an improvement in their lives were quickly dashed. The new occupation force, which remained until 1634, behaved as badly as Wallenstein’s men had done. The situation would worsen again. In 1635 the emperor’s forces began to move north once more; armies swept into the Mark Brandenburg from the south and Berlin became part of the central battlefield of the war. That year marked the beginning of the last and most horrible phase of the conflict in the Mark Brandenburg; fighting between Sweden and the emperor was constant and the city changed hands and was plundered and occupied on numerous occasions. In 1638 George William fled to Königsberg, leaving Berlin under the control of the imperial Catholic general Adam Graf zu Schwarzenberg and stripping it of its Residenz status. Schwarzenberg was detested by Berliners. Not only did he treat the city as his own, but he took to burning down part of Berlin every time an enemy army approached to try to dissuade them from attacking; much of the city was destroyed in this manner – particularly in a raging fire of 1640. In January 1641 word spread that the Swedes were moving towards Berlin once again, and this time Schwarzenberg gave the order to burn Cölln. As the buildings blazed it was discovered that the Swedish ‘army’ consisted of only 1,000 poorly equipped men, 360 of whom were easily captured. To Berliners’ delight Schwarzenberg died suddenly in March 1641, releasing them from his grim hold, but by now Berlin had only 845 houses left, 200 of which were empty. Cölln had been almost completely destroyed.

      The devastation of the city and the surrounding area was beyond comparison with anything which had gone before, and although some parts of Germany, including much of Saxony and Holstein, were untouched there was a huge swathe of desolate land which stretched from Swabia and the Palatinate through Thuringia and Brandenburg to Mecklenburg and Pomerania. The destruction was not just the result of the battles. There have been countless wars in European history; territories have changed hands, provinces have been won and lost and cities like Berlin have been occupied many times, but few pre-twentieth-century conflicts have created so much damage as the Thirty Years War. The loss of life was proportionally even greater than that sustained in the Second World War.¹⁵ The reason lay in part with the nature of the armies themselves. In the seventeenth century no European state had a national force; there was little in the way of conscription, proper training or effective control of troops’ behaviour. Emperors, princes and others in need of a fighting force held recruitment drives in some areas, but few could afford to support an army for long – not least because the war was a death sentence for thousands of young men: in the small village of Bygdea in northern Sweden, 215 of the 230 men who fought were killed in battle, and five of the survivors returned home crippled.¹⁶ Instead, most hired professional generals to recruit mercenaries. Many armies were made up of outcasts, criminals, vagabonds, homeless men, professional soldiers and psychopaths; some longed for adventure while others felt that it would be safer to be a soldier than a civilian. National and religious loyalties were irrelevant for most mercenaries. Poles fought for Germans, Swiss for Austrians, Dutch for the Swedes, Scots for the Danes, and former enemies often met to discuss the relative merits of an employer – contemporary reports held that the German emperor did not provide adequate shelter while the Polish king scrimped on food for the troops.¹⁷ Such men fought only for a banner; if it was captured they simply changed sides. Autumn desertion was common but generals tended to waive the mandatory death sentence, knowing that many of the men would return for fresh booty in the spring. Armies were expensive; they were kept relatively small, the strategy of attrition dominated and campaigns were dependent on finances. Generals assumed that occupied territory was the property of the army and gave troops free rein to loot, rape and plunder at will; indeed, those soldiers lucky enough to survive often returned home wealthy men – the Swedish general Königsmark, who had started out as a common soldier, returned with assets of almost 2 million thalers (4.8 thalers were worth around £1 sterling), while the once impoverished imperial commander Henrik Holck returned home to Denmark and paid 50,000 thalers in cash for an estate in Funen.¹⁸ The war became a relentless quest for fresh plunder – a self-perpetuating nightmare of destruction. The unruly troops rarely showed mercy to civilians; even when Berlin was occupied by her own allies she was laid waste.

      Nikolaas van Eyck’s Occupation of a Village, which hangs in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, offers a glimpse of an everyday occurrence during the war. Van Eyck shows a hamlet surrounded by troops set on plunder, and while some soldiers push their way into houses others loll around on the cannon on the main dirt track waiting their turn to search for food, women and treasure. Helpless villagers wander aimlessly past the incoming wagons; one man comforts his wife and child while another sits beneath a tree, crying. The plundering of villages and towns was the norm. Nothing was spared. Church spires were melted down for lead, farms were stripped and set on fire, villages were burnt for amusement. Peasants were considered fair game for sport: it was common for them to be captured, rounded up like animals and tortured; some had cords tied around their heads so that their eyes were forced out, others had their thumbs pushed deep into gun barrels. Innocent people were bound and tossed into the rivers, thrown out of windows, roasted on spits or boiled in their own cauldrons. Prisoners were sometimes tied in rows and bets placed on how many bodies a bullet would penetrate. Some armies became known for particular forms of abuse: when Wallenstein took hostages in the Mark Brandenburg burghers were repeatedly tortured so that they would reveal the location of ‘treasure’ which had long since been plundered; priests were tied under wagons and made to crawl on all fours like dogs until they died; others were dragged ‘for miles along the rough roads bound to the tails of horses’.¹⁹

      Despite official attempts to curb the violence to civilians the Swedish occupation was equally horrific. By 1632 there were no young women left in Berlin as all had been taken by the troops; children were reportedly killed in front of their parents in order to elicit the whereabouts of the family valuables. The soldiers, keen to amuse themselves, murdered unknown numbers of Berliners by sprinkling gunpowder on their victims and setting them alight; they also poured raw sewage down the throats of prisoners, a practice so widespread that the foul mixture came to be known as the ‘Swedish drink’. The hatred between СКАЧАТЬ