My dearest friend, [… ] I have just come out from hearing the victory sermon of our incomparable [Court Chaplain] Sack. Almost all eyes were weeping for love, for gratitude. [… ] If you would like to read some of our victory sermons, I can send them to you. The one on the victory at Prague and the one he gave today are without doubt the best that Mr Sack has held. Our young men have not stopped firing off victory shots and there is shooting all around me as I write these lines. Our merchants have produced every sort of silk ribbon in honour of both victories and we have festooned our vests, hats and swords with them.69
The upsurge of patriotic sentiment in the Prussian lands during the Seven Years War is one of the most remarkable features of the conflict. Today it seems natural to assume that wars will reinforce patriotic allegiances, but this had not always been the case in Prussia. The devastating conflicts of the Thirty Years War had rather the opposite effect. In the 1630s, the Elector’s subjects did not for the most part identify with him or the territorial composite over which he reigned. Indeed, many felt stronger ties of sympathy with Brandenburg’s Lutheran Swedish enemies than with the Calvinist Elector in Berlin. The Brandenburg army of the later 1630s was hated and feared almost as vividly as the occupying forces of the enemy. Even after the notable victory of the Great Elector against the Swedes at Fehrbellin in 1675, there was little sign of popular enthusiasm for Brandenburg’s cause, or of popular identification with the struggles of its head of state. The exalted sense of history in the making that attended the events at Fehrbellin remained confined for the most part to a tiny court-centred elite. Nor was there much popular interest in Prussia’s contribution to the Wars of the Spanish Succession (1701–14); these were complex coalition campaigns fought for arcane political objectives in which Prussian troops served far from home.
By contrast, the defeats and victories of the Prussian armies in the Seven Years War generated a widespread sense of solidarity with the objectives and person of the monarch. Johann Wilhelm Archenholtz, an officer who had served in the Prussian army for the greater part of the war and later wrote an epic narrative of its course, recalled the wave of enthusiasm that had animated his fellow Prussians during the darkest years of the conflict. Prussian subjects, he wrote, ‘looked upon the king’s ruin as their own’ and ‘took part in the fame of his great deeds’. The Estates of Pomerania had come together of their own accord to raise 5,000 men for the king’s service; their example was emulated in Brandenburg, Magdeburg and Halberstadt. ‘This war,’ Archenholtz concluded, ‘generated a love of fatherland that had until then been unknown in the German lands.’70
The churches played a crucial role in stirring public enthusiasm for the wartime exploits of the monarch, encouraging the faithful to see Frederick as the instrument of a divine providence. After the – in fact rather marginal – Prussian victory at the battle of Prague in 1757, Court Chaplain Sack delivered a thundering sermon from the pulpit of Berlin Cathedral:
The king has won a victory and lives! Give honour to our God! [… ] For what would all our victories and conquests be worth, if we had already lost our father? But the providence that protects us was once again his guard and an angel of God shielded him in the hour of greatest danger from all the darts fired down on him by death.71
Another preacher celebrating the victory declared that God himself had chosen to distinguish Prussia above all lands and had chosen the Prussians as ‘his particular people’, ‘so that we may walk before him in the light as his chosen people’.72 The impact of such performances reverberated far beyond the congregations who heard them. Sack’s sermons in particular appeared in various printed editions and were widely reread at private gatherings across the central provinces of the Prussian lands.73
These efforts to mobilize the population from the pulpit were supplemented by agitation from Prussian literary patriots. There was a striking contrast here: in 1742, Prussia’s acquisition of most of Silesia in the Peace of Breslau was greeted by the publication of a small number of Prussian panegyrical texts. Composed in Latin and published in expensive folio or quarto editions, these were clearly intended for a circumscribed and highly educated audience. By the 1750s, however, propagandist scribes and freelance patriots were churning out large numbers of texts in cheap, German-language octavo editions.74 One highly influential example was the tract On Death for the Fatherland, published in 1761 at the nadir of Prussia’s military fortunes by Thomas Abbt, a professor of philosophy at the University of Frankfurt/Oder. Abbt’s lively and accessible essay argued that the classical values of patriotism, conventionally associated with the ancient republics, were actually better suited to monarchical states, where the monarch personified the abstract power of the state and provided a focus for the loyalty and sacrifice of his subjects. In a ‘well-established’ monarchy, Abbt suggested, the attachment of the subject to the homeland was reinforced by a love for the person of the monarch, a love so intense that it abolished fear and sanctified death in battle.
[When I behold the king surrounded by his brave soldiers, living and dead,] I am overcome with the thought that it is noble to die fighting for one’s fatherland. Now this new beauty that I am reaching for comes more sharply into focus: it delights me; I hasten to take possession of it, tear myself away from anything that could hold me back in an effeminate tranquillity; I do not hear the call of my relatives, but only that of the fatherland, not the din of the fearful weapons, but only the thanks that the fatherland sends me. I join the others who form a wall around the defenceless [king]. Perhaps I will be torn down, satisfied that I have given another the chance to take my place. I follow the principle that the part must, when necessary, be lost in order to preserve the whole.75
Death in battle was also an important theme for Christian Ewald von Kleist, a poet, dramatist and melancholic who also served as an officer in the Prussian army. In 1757 he composed a poem in the form of an inscription for the grave of Major von Blumenthal, a friend who was killed during a skirmish with Austrian troops near the town of Ostritz in Upper Lusatia. His verses for the fallen major acquired a certain poignancy in retrospect, because they seemed to foretell Kleist’s own death only eighteen months later as a result of a wound received at the battle of Kunersdorf:
Death for the fatherland is worthy
Of eternal veneration!
And how gladly will I die
This noble death –
When my fate summons me.76
Kleist subsequently became an early prototype of the fallen patriot poet – his poetry and his death merged to become part of the same oeuvre. The verses bestowed unique meaning upon the death by transforming it into a voluntary and conscious act, while the death wove a glimmering halo of sacrifice around the writings and the narrative of his life.
Among the most vociferous of the patriot publicists was the Halberstadt poet and dramatist Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim. Gleim followed the campaigns of the Prussian armies with passionate interest, relying on reports sent to him from the field by his old friend Kleist. Before the outbreak of war, Gleim was best known as the author of esoteric, classically inspired poems on the themes of love, wine and the pleasures of sociability, but after 1756 he became a military balladeer and cheerleader for the Prussian troops in the field. His Prussian War Songs in the Campaigns of 1756 and 1757 by a Grenadier, published in 1758 with a supportive foreword by the dramatist Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, represented an innovative attempt to achieve immediacy and emotional impact by adapting the idiom and tone of the marching song. Gleim evoked the movement and confusion of battle; his imaginary protagonist, the Prussian grenadier, provided him with a hinge on which to swivel the perspective of the battle narrative – the grenadier looks to his commander, then to the flag, then to the king, then to his fellow soldiers, then to the enemy. The result was a succession of scenes delivered with a disorienting immediacy, as if through a hand-held camera. This technique seems hackneyed to us, but to contemporaries it was fresh and arresting. It took the reader into th
e theatre of battle in a way that was new for the Prussian reading public.
The impact of this kind of patriotic literary production was broader than one might imagine. Abbt’s On Death for the Fatherland quickly sold out in its first edition and appears to have had a powerful mobilizing effect upon readers. Johann Georg Scheffner, a former volunteer who served in the years 1761–3, later recalled that as young men he and his friends in his native city of Königsberg had walked with copies of Abbt’s tract in their pockets to the recruitment offices of the Prussian army.77 In a novel published over a decade after the war, the Berlin publicist Friedrich Nicolai described the wife of a pastor – the main protagonist – who had fallen under the spell of Abbt’s rhetoric and demanded that her husband preach the gospel of patriotic sacrifice from his pulpit.78 Gleim’s ‘Grenadier Songs’ sold out in individual editions and were subsequently reprinted as an anthology.
For the first time, there was widespread interest in the contours of specific battles, not only among academically trained literati, but also within the artisan classes of the towns. The Berlin master baker Johann Friedrich Heyde is a case in point: his diary interspersed notes on the price of rye and other grains (a matter of existential interest for a master baker) with often detailed descriptions of the movements of the Prussian army and of its deployments in key battles. Heyde’s involvement in these often distant events is testimony not only to the expansion of patriotic commitments, but also to the rapid popularization of military knowledge. For Heyde there was also a personal dimension; like many Prussian subjects, he had sons serving in the field. The symbiotic relationship between the Prussian garrisons and the towns in which they were stationed and the deep roots that the canton system had put down within the villages ensured a wider and deeper form of sympathetic engagement with the Prussian military enterprise than had ever been witnessed in the Hohenzollern lands before.79
In the western provinces, too, there were expressions of sentimental attachment to Prussia, or at least to its ruling dynasty. In Kleve and Mark, for example, there were many who provoked the Austrian occupation authorities by demonstratively wearing black to mark the death of Frederick’s brother, August William, heir to the Prussian throne, in 1758. In 1761 there were newspaper reports of a ‘patriotic soirée’ on the occasion of the king’s name day, but the Austrians never succeeded in finding out where it had been held. These manifestations of solidarity with the dynasty were confined to an elite consisting of officials, academics and Protestant clergy, but patriotic images and messages were also transmitted through more popular media. The most striking example must be the famous tobacco tins manufactured for the mass market in Iserlohn (Kleve) during the war. These enamelled containers, decorated with images depicting the victories of the Prussian and allied armies or idealized portraits of the Hohenzollern king and his generals, were enormously popular, not only in the Hohenzollern territories, but across north-western Germany and the Protestant Netherlands. In silk-producing Krefeld, the manufacturies churned out silken ‘long-live the-king sashes’ (Vivatbaänder) bearing patriotic slogans and emblems.80 Patriotism was good business.
Prussian patriotism was a complex, polyvalent phenomenon that expressed much more than a straightforward love for homeland. It reflected a contemporary esteem for extreme affective states – this was, after all, an age of the sentimental, in which a capacity for empathetic emotional response was regarded as a mark of superior character. Tied in with the patriot wave was also the idea that love of fatherland might form the basis for a new kind of political community. As Thomas Abbt argued in his tract on death for the fatherland, patriotism was a force that could overcome the boundaries between the different estates of society. ‘Seen from this perspective, the difference between peasant, burgher, soldier and nobleman disappears. For every burgher is a soldier, every soldier a burgher and every nobleman a burgher and a soldier…’81 In this sense, patriotism expressed a yearning for that ‘universal society of burghers’ that would become the political ideal of generations of nineteenth-century liberals. There was also much enthusiasm for the idea that the bond honoured by the patriot was founded not on compulsion or obligation, but on an entirely voluntary allegiance. As she read Abbt’s lines, the pastor’s wife in Nicolai’s novel experienced ‘rapture at the thought that even the subject of a monarchy was not a mere machine, but rather had his own particular value as a person, that love for the fatherland of a nation could vouchsafe a great and new way of thinking…’82
In other words, patriotism resonated because it bundled together various contemporary preoccupations. Not all the ingredients in the mix were positive or emancipatory. The flip-side of a heightened allegiance to the beleaguered Prussian polity was an intensified derision or even hatred for its foes. The Russians in particular (and especially the Cossacks) figured in most patriotic narratives as bestial, cruel, brutal, bloodthirsty, wretched and so on. Such stylizations drew to some extent on the actual behaviour of Cossack light troops, but they were also rooted in an older set of stereotypes about ‘Asiatic’ and ‘barbarian’ Russia that would resonate in Prussian and German culture over the next two centuries. The French were mocked as cowards and braggadocios who talked big but turned tail when the going got tough. Even the German territories fighting in alliance with Austria came in for a drubbing. Gleim’s victory hymn after Rossbach includes a long list of strophes lampooning the German contingents; they feature (among others) a Palatine trooper who stands wailing on the field because he has burned his finger; a soldier from Trier who falls while fleeing and mistakes his bleeding nose for a war-wound; a Franconian who squeals ‘like a cat in a trap’; a soldier from Bruchsal who tries to evade capture by donning a woman’s bonnet; a Paderborner who dies of sheer fright when he sees the Prussians, and many more.83
Perhaps the most striking feature of the patriot wave of the 1750s was its fixation on Frederick II. For Abbt, it was above all the flesh-and-blood person of the monarch – rather than the political order that he represented, or the character of the homeland – that commanded the love of the patriot.84 Throughout the war years there was a flood of poems, engravings, biographies, pamphlets and books celebrating the achievements of the Prussian king, ‘Frederick the Great’, or in another widely used contemporary epithet, ‘Frederick the Unique’. The victories of the Prussian armies were universally celebrated – reasonably enough – as victories of the king. The king’s birthdays – formerly rather down-beat events – served as occasions for demonstrative celebrations involving the firing of rifles and the wearing of various royalist memorabilia. In many representations, the king appeared as a towering, almost supernatural figure, as in this dreamlike, almost cinematic passage from Gleim’s Ode to the Muse of War, written after the slaughter at Zorndorf:
From a stream of black murderer’s blood
I trod with timid foot upon a hill
Of corpses, saw about me far and wide
That none was left to kill, stood up
And peered, and searched with craning neck
Through pitch-black clouds of battle-smoke
For the Anointed One, fixed upon him
And the envoy of God, his guard,
My eyes and thoughts…
The reference to Frederick as ‘the Anointed’ (der Gesalbte) is noteworthy – Frederick I had been anointed as part of his coronation ceremony, but as there were no further coronations, this ritual was not performed upon his successors. Here we discern muted echoes of the exalted conception of monarchy inaugurated by the first king.85 Frederick was frequently apostrophized, moreover, with the familiar form ‘du’, a usage that suggested a utopian intimacy with the person of the monarch while awakening associations with the language of prayer and liturgy. In a verse composed for the occasion of Frederick’s return from the Seven Years War, the celebrated poet Anna Louise Karsch blended panegyric with the private intensity of prayer, invoking the intimate mode of address no fewer than twenty-five times over forty-four lines.86 In other cont
exts, the king could appear pitiable, suffering, self-sacrificial, masked in perspiration and dust, trembling for his men, drenched in tears for the slain, a man of pains in need of comfort and protection. It was one of the central themes of Abbt’s tract that the subject’s love for the king arises not from the fear of his power, but from the desire to shield him against the overwhelming might of his enemies.
There was a sharp irony here, for the king, though sensitive to public opinion in a general way and aware of the need to impress (especially when it came to foreign potentates and envoys) appears to have found this adulation deeply distasteful. He refused, for example, to play any part in the celebrations organized by the city of Berlin to mark his return to the capital at the end of the Seven Years War. On 30 March 1763, a delegation of worthies gathered at the Frankfurt Gate and guards of honour of mounted burghers and liveried torchbearers formed up to accompany the royal carriage as it re-entered the city and made its way to the palace. Appalled by the prospect of this welcome, Frederick delayed his arrival until dusk, slipped away from his hosts and drove unaccompanied to the palace by an alternative route.87
This epic display of diffidence set the tone for the rest of his reign. Frederick had spent much of his year away from the Berlin court since the late 1740s, but after 1763 he withdrew almost entirely from the capital and retreated to the residential complex in Potsdam, spending his winters in the Potsdam city palace and the summers in Sans Souci.88 The king was content to project the majesty of the state with representative buildings, such as the Neues Palais (which was built at great expense after the Seven Years War but reserved solely for official purposes), but hostile to efforts to focus adulation on his own person.89 Frederick refused, for example, to sit for official portraits after his accession to the throne. When the renowned engraver Daniel Chodowiecki produced an elaborate image showing the king returning in triumph from the Seven Years War, Frederick rejected it as excessively theatrical.
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