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

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СКАЧАТЬ military support in the War of the Spanish Succession and as a reward for a consignment of Prussian troops he elevated the elector of Brandenburg to ‘King in Prussia’.⁵¹ He would henceforth be known as King Frederick I.

      Frederick was delighted with his promotion and was determined to make his coronation a European spectacle. Hundreds of carriages wound their way to Königsberg, and jewels and medals glinted in the sun as he was proclaimed king; this was followed by lavish celebrations in Berlin which were a mere foretaste of what was to come later in his reign. The new king continued to raise revenue by hiring out his army: the English and Dutch paid sizeable subsidies of around 1.5 million thalers to maintain 31,000 of his troops at war in Italy and in the Low Countries, and in all he managed to net around 14 million thalers in this way. Unlike his father, however, he did not use the money to increase his military or economic strength but poured it into the creation of a fabulous baroque court in Berlin. His personal expenditure was staggering. In the years 1705–10 he spent around 5.3 million thalers a year, with over 600,000 on personal expenses; in 1688, the year of his father’s death, more than half of all state expenditure went on luxuries at the Berlin court. An indication of the massive increase in spending is recorded in the excise taxes paid by Berlin Jews, who were the primary traders of luxury goods. In 1696 they paid 8,614 thalers in tax; by 1705 it had reached a massive 117,437 thalers.⁵² The large amount of money in circulation in Berlin gave it the reputation of a fortune-seeker’s paradise, attracting adventurers and opportunists from throughout Europe, and the population raced from a low of 4,000 in the war years to 55,000 by 1710.⁵³ For the first time the city shook off its aura of gloom and began to emerge from years of cultural isolation.

      The Great Elector had done relatively little to revive the culture of the city. His obsession with strict Calvinism had brought improvements to some aspects of life: there was, for example, a rise in literacy as all members of the Church were expected to be able to read before confirmation and hence before marriage; he had founded a library and a number of schools in the city. But his concentration on the military and the economy combined with strict religious beliefs had kept Berlin culturally backward. The popular recreation of dancing had been banned as it was said to lead to debauchery; street singing of ‘smutty songs’ had not been permitted; theatres and taverns had been closed as they led to ‘indecency’; and no recreational activities had been permitted on Sunday. The comparison between Berlin and the rest of Europe was startling and the city had nothing to compare at a time when Italy had already produced Michelangelo, Bernini and Corelli, when Holland had Rembrandt and Vermeer, and Flanders Rubens and Van Dyck, when Spain had El Greco and Velázquez, England Purcell, Milton and Christopher Wren, and when the France of Racine and Poussin revolved around Versailles. It had remained distant from the artistic and philosophical debates of the age and isolated from those intellectuals from Poland to Scotland who had already begun to debate the works of Descartes, Hobbes, Galileo and Kepler; the jurist Samuel von Pufendorf had been enticed to Berlin only in 1688, the year of the elector’s death. The new king was embarrassed by the cultural shortcomings of his capital and, with his consort the Hanoverian princess Sophie Charlotte, bankrupted Berlin in an attempt to make it comparable to other European cities.

      One of his first important projects was the creation in 1696 of the Academy of Arts in Berlin, followed by the Academy of Sciences in 1700. The latter, which brought Leibniz to Berlin, was one of the city’s first intellectual coups. Leibniz, along with the court chaplain, Jablonski, had long been interested in founding a learned society in Germany for men interested in the study of rational science, but many provincial princes had been suspicious of these ideas. It was the consort Sophie Charlotte who gave Leibniz the chance to create a society which would allow men to ‘strive towards the development, improvement, complete understanding and correct application of beneficial studies, the sciences and the arts, useful information, and anything else that is relevant’.⁵⁴ Like the Academy of Arts it was based on the French model and became the third Academy of Sciences in Europe. There were eighty members, including the astronomer Gottfried Kirch, the mathematician Jean Bernoulli, and the architect Andreas Schlüter. A small observatory was constructed and in 1710 the first Berlin scientific journal, the Miscellanea Berolinensia, was published.

      Sophie Charlotte contributed to the cultural life of the city in other ways, dedicating her court at the splendid new palace of Charlottenburg to artistic and intellectual life. The princess was influenced by those elements in Pietism which emphasized religious tolerance, personal rebirth and intellectual curiosity; she invited not only Leibniz but a host of European thinkers to the palace, including the English free-thinker John Toland, author of Christianity Not Mysterious. For his part, Toland praised Berlin as a city of peaceful tolerance between communities and a place of ‘happy prosperity’. The queen brought Italian music and opera to the court with performances of Alessandro Scarlatti, Corelli, Giovanni Buononcini and even the young Telemann.⁵⁵ Frederick also encouraged advances in health care: the College of Medicine was founded in 1685 and the Charité-Hospital, initially started for plague victims in 1710, became a centre of medical excellence. In 1713 a vast circular operating theatre was built with rows of benches and a wooden table recessed in the centre, complete with a collection of instruments, jars of preserved organs and various human skeletons propped up on stands.

      Frederick I was now king in Prussia and he was determined to make his residence look like a royal capital. He had much to do. His predecessor had made some minor changes to Berlin, creating Dorotheenstadt and Friedrichstadt for Huguenot settlers, hiring Nering to make small alterations to the old palace, rebuilding the wooden Lange Brücke in stone in 1695, planting the first small avenue of trees which eventually became Unter den Linden, and laying out the Tiergarten as a hunting ground. Nevertheless it was Frederick I who gave Berlin its first grand buildings. When he came to power Europe was steeped in the exuberance of the high baroque inspired by the fabulous Italian palaces and churches and fountains designed by Bernini and Borromini, and by the more correctly classical French style reflected in Salomon de Brosse’s Luxembourg Palace in Paris, Le Vau’s Institut de France and by the Palace of Versailles. Baroque had originated in the Counter-Reformation as an attempt by the Roman Catholic Church to attract people back through the joy and pageantry of its buildings, and the results were delightful. The movement in the architecture was breathtaking, and the curvaceous spires and graceful windows and ornate pastel-coloured facades the product of sheer exuberance; the drama of the chiaroscuro, the gilt and friezes and barrel-vaulted ceilings dripping with cherubs and stylized tendrils and branches came to grace some of the most glorious buildings of Europe. The style was brought to Catholic Germany by the Jesuits, but although villages and hillsides in Catholic Bavaria and Swabia are dotted with dozens of churches in this style sober Protestant northern Germany was less receptive; Berlin got a whiff of the baroque during the reign of Frederick I through the work of a handful of architects and artists invited to the city. The most important were Jean de Bodt, Johann Friedrich Eosander, Arnold Nering and, above all, the architect and sculptor Andreas Schlüter.

      Schlüter was born in Danzig but soon moved to Warsaw, where he worked on a number of important commissions, including the Krasinski and Wilanow palaces. In 1694 he moved to Berlin and the following year began work on the Royal Palace, which was completed in 1707. It was ripped down by the East Germans in 1950 and replaced by the asbestos-ridden modernist disaster, the Palast der Republik.⁵⁶ Sadly, little else of Schlüter’s work survived the war, although a hint of his mastery can be seen in the grand equestrian statue of the Elector Frederick William I, which now stands before the Charlottenburg Palace. The work is based on the Roman model of Marcus Aurelius in the Capitol in Rome and, although derivative, projects vigour and power in its own right. His other surviving Berlin masterpiece is the Arsenal on Unter den Linden, a long elegant building best known for the twenty-two dramatic sculptures of heads of dying warriors with their beautifully carved and emotive faces: one throws his bearded head back and cries out in agony, another bites his lower lip and grimaces in terrible pain, another lies dying with his proud, noble face tilted to one side in so realistic a pose that one feels compelled to reach out to touch the furrowed brow.

      The king also commissioned other important Berlin landmarks; he had Nering build Charlottenburg СКАЧАТЬ