Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin. Alexandra Richie
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Название: Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin
Автор: Alexandra Richie
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Историческая литература
isbn: 9780007455492
isbn:
Suddenly a group of figures appeared in the distance, and the crowd began to cheer. The first in line was not Kaiser William I but their real hero of the day, Prince Otto von Bismarck. He was followed by Field Marshal Count Helmuth von Moltke and General Albrecht von Roon, the representatives of Prussian military might. Only then did the old Kaiser come into view, progressing slowly down the road followed by his sons. Behind them were the non-commissioned officers holding aloft the eighty-one captured French flags and eagles, which were laid at the feet of the new monument to Frederick William III, the man who had been so humiliated by Napoleon Bonaparte half a century earlier. Then came 42,000 men in full battle dress, some crowned with laurel wreaths, looking for all the world as if they were at a procession in ancient Rome. The parade lasted a full five hours, and for Berlin it marked the dawning of a new age, a time of peace and prosperity, of flamboyance and energy, of greatness and power, industrial growth and modernity.
Berlin was in the process of re-inventing itself yet again, this time transforming itself into a powerful world capital. Even the liberal-minded Fontane, the greatest and most critical of Berlin’s nineteenth-century writers, was overwhelmed by a sense of pride and patriotism. The mood was lighthearted and later, as the Landwehr battalions returned home, the writer Sebastian Hensel watched as the men walked up Unter den Linden arm-in-arm with their wives and children.3
But such relaxed displays of civilian life would soon disappear under the worst aspects of Prussian military culture. The last Kaiser would give Prussian officers virtually unlimited powers to behave as they wished in ‘his’ city; indeed the Kaiser saw himself rather like a warrior chief who alone stood above the General Staff, the Ministry of War and the Military Cabinet. Wilhelm von Hanke, chief of the Military Cabinet between 1888 and 1901, maintained that the army ‘should remain a separate body, into which no critical eyes should be permitted to gaze’.4 The officers under their control would become ever more abusive, bolstering the foreign stereotype that the city was the very heart of narrow-minded Prusso-German nationalism. The writer Jankowski spoke for the world when he said that Berlin ‘fed itself by war and became fat through war’, and Churchill would later refer to this Prussia as the embodiment of German evil. The military success which made the 1871 triumph possible was brought about by one of Berlin’s most influential and controversial sons, the man who had led the parade, Otto von Bismarck.5
Shakespeare said of Julius Caesar,
he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus; and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs, and peep about
To find ourselves dishonourable graves.
Men at some time are masters of their fates.
It was a fitting description of Bismarck. Germany might never have been unified and Berlin might never have become Germany’s capital without this crafty political genius at Prussia’s helm, guiding it to power through his own particular brand of Realpolitik. Bismarck was able to create and maintain a system riddled with contradictions and preserve a semi-feudal style of government within an otherwise modern state. When he left his careful system of checks and balances unravelled and paved the way for the rampant aggressive nationalism of William II. But Bismarck was not a warmonger, as is often thought, and he did not engage in conflict for its own sake. He was a masterful technician of power, and used it first to create a nation state and then to protect it. And at the heart of his system was the capital, Berlin.
Bismarck was born outside Berlin on his father’s estate in Schönhausen on 1 April 1815. He cultivated his Junker image and harboured a deep suspicion of Berlin, but it was his mother, the daughter of a well-known Prussian bureaucrat and one-time adviser to Frederick the Great, who adored the city and who introduced him to urban life. It was she who had him educated at the great Berlin school the Graue Kloster, and who taught him that there was more to life than tending his father’s run-down estates and drinking at the officers’ club. Although Bismarck would later deny his middle-class roots it was his mother who first opened his eyes to the fascinating world of politics.6
Bismarck’s early career contained few clues to his future success. His first port of call was Göttingen University, where he was stirred not by the words of his liberal colleagues, but by literature, particularly the fiery work of Sir Walter Scott. After Göttingen he studied in Berlin, sat the rigorous Prussian civil service exams, spent a year in the military and then suddenly took eight years off to help manage his father’s crumbling estate. Despite the much professed love of his Junker heritage the years at Schönhausen dragged slowly by and according to his brother he spent hours dreaming of great battles and future glory to come. When the 1848 revolution broke out he decided that it was time to act. He rounded up the peasants on his estate and prepared to march them to Berlin to save his beleaguered king. Although his mission ended in failure he decided from that moment on to become actively involved in affairs of state. He rejoined the civil service and managed to get himself appointed as ambassador to the Frankfurt Diet, where he nurtured a budding contempt for parliamentarians. His next posting in St Petersburg taught him the advantages of the tsar’s autocratic regime, which he admired, while his stint in Paris made him despise the effete French. But wherever he went his love for all things Prussian continued to shine through; he wrote to a friend in Berlin that ‘as soon as it was proved to me that something was in the interest of a healthy and well-considered Prussian policy, I would see our troops fire on French, Russians, English or Austrians with equal satisfaction’. His tough patriotism endeared him to his fellow Junkers – already threatened by the rise of the industrialists and the urban working class – and when a fight began to brew between the liberal parliamentarians and the king Bismarck was eager and ready to act on their behalf.7
The conflict which propelled Bismarck to power, and which ultimately crippled the might of the Prussian bourgeoisie, centred around the question of army reform. This confrontation emerged in 1860 when a new law was put before the Diet to implement reforms introduced by von Roon which included the provision for a three-year term of compulsory military service, for an annual intake of 63,000 recruits, and the weakening of the popular Landwehr, which had been created by the Scharnhorst-Boysen reforms during the Napoleonic Wars. The old liberal parliamentarians were against the reforms but both sides held firm until the king tried to break the deadlock by dissolving the Assembly and holding new elections. He actually did this twice, but to his chagrin the new Deutsche Fortschrittspartei, which included a number of liberal civil servants, became the largest political grouping.8 William was deeply troubled – what was the point of being king if he could not determine basic military policy? Finally he could stand it no longer, and when the second election result was announced he stormed to the palace and drafted a letter of abdication. The struggle between the Berliners and the Hohenzollerns appeared to be turning in the civilians’ favour when a conservative ultraroyalist candidate was proposed for the office of Prussian Prime Minister. His name was Otto von Bismarck, and this time the parliament had met its match.
The news of the possible abdication had terrified the Junkers, who knew that if William left he would be succeeded by his liberal-minded son Frederick William, who could not be relied upon to protect their feudal privileges. In a last-ditch effort to save William, the СКАЧАТЬ