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

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СКАЧАТЬ ‘Hurry!’ Bismarck arrived in the city on 20 September, and two days later, during a walk in the gardens at Babelsberg, persuaded the king to rip up his letter of abdication and promised to govern as Prime Minister without a majority and without parliamentary approval of the budget – in other words, illegally. The king grumbled that the Berliners would ‘cut off your head and later on mine on the Opernplatz beneath my windows. You’ll end up like Strafford and I like Charles I.’ But Bismarck knew Berliners better than that. He remembered the failed revolution of 1848, the lack of action, the fear of real revolution. Berliners were ‘all talk and no action’, and the parliamentarians were worst of all. They were mere ‘chatter-boxes who cannot really rule Prussia … they know as little about politics as we knew in our student days’. The conservative Kreuzzeitung newspaper predicted that he would ‘overcome domestic difficulties by a bold foreign policy’. They were right. When Bismarck stood before the budget committee a short time later he rammed home his triumphant message in his high-pitched voice: ‘Germany does not look to Prussia’s liberalism but to her strength … The great questions of the day will not be decided by speeches and the resolutions of majorities – that was the mistake of 1848 – but by blood and iron!’⁹ The fateful pact at Babelsberg between Bismarck and the king marked the beginning of twenty-eight years of the Iron Chancellor’s rule, and true to his word he set about unifying Germany by force.¹⁰

      Bismarck’s genius shone through in his ability to transform liberal nationalism from an oppositional ideology into an integral one and to make the principle of nationhood the unifying factor for Berlin and for Germany. Before Bismarck the Junkers and conservatives had been overwhelmingly opposed to German unification as they feared it would inevitably diminish their power. It had been left to the liberals, radicals and progressives to try to unify Germany. They had hoped to bring this about under a democratic Prussia, which they assumed would ensure parliamentary democracy, freedom of speech and a host of other rights and privileges – as Arnold Ruge put it, ‘Prussia, with all its repugnant police barbarism, is the only salvation for Germany.’¹¹ Bismarck essentially gave both groups what they wanted: he preserved the traditional power of the Junkers, but he gave the liberals their united Germany, achieving in five months what the people had failed to do in five decades. The fact that he succeeded not by the workings of liberal democracy but through ‘blood and iron’ distressed many, but his success was enough to drown most dissenting voices and turn erstwhile liberals into ardent supporters of the new Reich. He, von Moltke and the Prussian Junkers were destined to become the heroes of the new Germany.

      The first of Bismarck’s three strategic wars was waged against Denmark in 1864. A speedy victory resulted in his ally, Austria, being given the territory of Holstein while he took Schleswig as his own, quickly establishing a German naval presence at the port of Kiel. This war created new enemies and a new fear of Prussia; the Frenchman Émile Ollivier said bitterly that ‘England failed France and France failed England and both failed Europe’.¹² Bernhard von Bülow once commented that for Bertie, the Prince of Wales, the word German became synonymous with ‘the narrow-minded moral preaching, drilling and brute force’, and when his Danish wife Alexandra found out that her second son had been made an honorary colonel in a Prussian regiment she snapped, ‘So, my Georgie boy has become a real life, filthy, blue-coated, Picklehaube German soldier! Well, I never thought to have lived to see that!’

      Denmark had been easily beaten and Bismarck turned his sights on Austria. Many in Berlin were against war with Austria, seeing it akin to Brüderkrieg – a civil war. Bismarck managed to provoke the conflict by denying the Austro-Prussian agreement and claiming that Prussia had as much right to Schleswig as to Holstein. Austria felt it necessary to defend her new territory, and the two states were soon at loggerheads. The historian Wilhelm Oncken was in no doubt that Bismarck had both wanted and provoked war with Austria, calling the disagreement over Schleswig-Holstein tantamount to ‘a declaration of war against Austria and its allies’.¹³

      When the Seven Week War started Prussia was by far the smaller of the two combatants. The Habsburg empire had a population of 35 million subjects, bolstered by a further 14 million from some of the smaller German states. Prussia had a mere 19 million. But papers in Berlin were confident. For them Prussia had ‘the most modern army’ headed by the ‘brilliant strategist’ Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke, and their technology, transportation networks, troops and armaments were ‘second to none’. The decisive battle took place at Königgrätz (Sadowa), where 500,000 men and 3,000 guns faced one another in the first modern battle in history. Within a few hours the Austrian side had collapsed. In a single battle Prussia had destroyed Austria’s bid to lead Germany to unification and the Grossdeutch solution was forgotten.¹⁴ Berlin’s dominance over her arch rival Vienna was won on the bloodstained battlefield of Sadowa. A liberal leader, Mevissen, wrote of the Prussian troops’ return to Berlin: ‘I cannot shake off the impression of the hour. I am no devotee of Mars … but the trophies of war exercise a magic charm even upon the child of peace. One’s view is involuntarily chained and one’s spirit goes along with the boundless rows of men who acclaim the god of the moment – success.’¹⁵

      The Prussian victory shocked the world, but it shocked the French most of all. A sorrowful Adolphe Thiers concluded that ‘it is France which has been beaten at Sadowa’, and his countrymen were now even more terrified of Prussian might than they had been after the Danish war. Their only hope of maintaining a dominant position in Europe was to keep the German states divided, but they knew that Bismarck wanted to unify Germany under Prussia and rule from Berlin. They also knew that to do this he had to win a decisive victory against France. Neither William of Prussia nor Napoleon III wanted war and it is testimony to Bismarck’s ingenuity, his cunning and his ruthlessness that, despite their own wishes, the two men would face one another on the battlefield in less than four years. Berlin’s new status was just within her grasp.

      ‘War’, said the General Helmuth von Moltke, ‘is a necessary part of God’s arrangement of the world.’¹⁶ Men could also arrange war, and that is precisely what Bismarck set out to do. In the days before all-consuming nationalism it was common for countries to invite foreign princes to take over their empty thrones, and when Walachia and Moldavia united to form Romania the kingdom was offered to a Swabian Hohenzollern, a distant cousin of the Prussian ruling family. Prince Carol I of Romania was crowned in 1866. At the same time the Spanish deposed their bumbling debauched Bourbon and were also in search of a new king. The crown was offered to another Hohenzollern prince and the French were furious. The loss of the first throne had been bad enough, but the Spanish offer was too much for a nation terrified that they would be boxed in by Prussia or her allies to the south and east without having fired a single shot. Napoleon III’s Foreign Minister, the duc de Gramont, declared that ‘The honour and interests of France are in peril’, and threatened that if the Hohenzollern accepted the Spanish throne France would go to war.¹⁷ William of Prussia was a peaceable man and encouraged his cousin to back down, but when Bismarck heard that war had been averted he went white with anger. War with France was essential to his plan, not least because he knew that only this would persuade the south German states to join the new Reich. Somehow he had to provoke conflict with France.¹⁸

      William was confident that the crisis was over, and decided to recover at the elegant Ems Spa. But the duc de Gramont, who had apparently just achieved one of the great coups in diplomatic history, was not satisfied and was determined to get Prussia to promise to keep out of Spain for ever. A few days later he sent the ambassador Benedetti to Ems where, during a pleasant garden stroll, he contrived to bump into the king. On Gramont’s orders Benedetti demanded that Prussia not only renounce all present family claims to the Spanish throne, but that it should do so in perpetuity. The king politely refused and had his aide Abeken send a telegram to Bismarck outlining the conversation. Thinking no more of it, he went off to bed.

      As it happened, Bismarck was dining at home in Berlin with Moltke and Roon that evening. The three men had spent their time complaining that war with France seemed further off than ever; Bismarck and Roon shared Moltke’s sentiment that God could ‘take my old bones’ if only СКАЧАТЬ