Iron Kingdom

by Clark, Christopher

  As in 1805–6, the foreign-policy dilemma facing the state polarized the most influential figures around the monarch. Some argued that it would be suicidal for Prussia to undertake any initiative against France without Russian support. Others, including the leading military reformers, Foreign Minister August Friedrich Ferdinand von der Goltz and Minister of Justice Karl Friedrich Beyme, pressed for an alliance with Austria.3 But the king clung stubbornly to a policy of inaction. His strategy was to avoid any move that might incur the complete extinction of his state. Reputation and honour were unaffordable luxuries; survival was all. ‘A political existence of some kind, no matter how small it be, is better than none, and then [… ] at least some hope remains for the future, but none would remain if Prussia disappeared entirely from the community of states, which will very likely be the case if it shows its hand before the time is right.’4

  In retrospect, Frederick William’s seems the wisest course. The opponents of war were doubtless right when they observed that full Russian support was essential to any successful strategy against Napoleon. It seems highly unlikely that Prussia and Austria, had they joined forces in the spring of 1809, could have prevailed over Napoleon. Yet to many contemporaries, the cautious, waiting stance of the Königsberg court seemed ignoble, culpable. Rumours circulated at court that a plan was afoot to depose Frederick William and replace him with his supposedly more energetic younger brother William. Police and other official reports spoke of widespread frustration and restlessness within the officer corps. A wildcat insurrection by Pomeranian officers was foiled at the beginning of April; on the western boundary of the Altmark, the former Prussian lieutenant von Katte (presumably a distant relative of Frederick the Great’s companion) led an armed band into the neighbouring Kingdom of Westphalia, seized control of the formerly Prussian town of Stendal and commandeered the cash chests.5 It appeared that the majority of Prussian officers favoured a war at Austria’s side. On 18 April, Friedrich Ludwig von Vincke, president of the Kurmark regional government, reported from Berlin that opinion within the army was highly critical of the royal government’s policy and that if the king did not take the initiative, all the young officers were determined to leave ‘and it would scarcely be possible to maintain order’. Vincke concluded with a warning that if the king did not come immediately to Berlin, general dissolution would be the result, ‘for if [the dissolution] emanates from the army, who can resist it?’ Lieutenant-General Tauentzien, a close associate of Scharnhorst, declared that he could not vouch for the loyalty of his troops if Prussia were to remain neutral, and the king’s cousin Prince August warned Frederick William that the ‘nation’ would act without him if necessary.6

  There was further excitement at the end of April when it became known that a Prussian officer had led his regiment out of Berlin with the intention of heading a patriotic insurrection against the French. Major Ferdinand von Schill was famous as a veteran of guerrilla warfare against the French.7 In 1806, he had commanded a corps of volunteers and carried out raids against the French supply lines in the area surrounding the fortress of Kolberg. Such was his success as a raider that in January 1807 he was promoted to captain by Frederick William III and entrusted with forming a free corps. In this capacity, Schill mounted various successful actions against French forces during the spring and early summer of 1807. Following the Peace of Tilsit on 9 July, the Schill Free Corps was dissolved. Schill himself was promoted to major and awarded the ‘Pour le mérite’, Prussia’s highest decoration for bravery. He was soon a celebrated figure. In the summer of 1808, the patriotic Königsberg weekly Der Volksfreund published a biographical essay outlining his exploits and praising him as the ideal of Prussian patriotic manhood. A portrait of the hero, published as a supplement to the Volksfreund, depicted a dark-haired, rather louche man with drooping black moustaches and a hussar’s shako tilted rakishly to one side.

  In the autumn of 1808, Schill’s regiment was the first unit of Prussian troops to enter Berlin since the defeats of 1806. ‘The jubilation,’ his adjutant later recalled, ‘was indescribable. Crowns of laurels and bunches of flowers rained down upon us; from every window, prettily adorned women and girls welcomed us. Wherever Schill was seen, jubilant crowds surrounded him.’8 Perhaps the excitement turned his head. Schill began to believe that Germany was ripe for a mass insurrection against the French, and that he was the man to lead it. This delusion was nourished by his contacts with the various clandestine networks of patriots that had sprung up across Prussia – the League of Virtue based in Königsberg, over 80 per cent of whose members were military men of all ranks, and the Society of the Fatherland, based in Pomerania, whose agents urged him to take over the leadership of the patriot movement. In January and February 1809, there were even secret messages from patriot circles in the Kingdom of Westphalia beseeching him to command an insurrection in western Germany. The clandestine network of the German patriots may have been numerically small, but it was zealous, well connected and emotionally intense. Once inside, it was easy to lose touch with reality, to believe that the people were behind you, that victory was certain and liberation imminent. In April 1809, Schill agreed to lead the planned Westphalian insurrection. A proclamation was drawn up and sent to Westphalia urging all patriots to rise against the occupiers, but it was intercepted by the French. On 27 April Schill learned that his own arrest was imminent and decided, without consulting his superiors, to take his men out of Berlin on the following day and launch an insurrectionary campaign.

  31. Anon., Major von Schill

  The news of his departure caused an immense sensation. In a report of 1 May to Interior Minister Count Dohna, the provincial president of Brandenburg, Johann August Sack, observed that the agitation in the capital could scarcely be described; throughout the city the talk was of nothing but Schill; a Prussian declaration of war against Napoleon was felt to be imminent. In order to forestall the impression that the king was no longer in control of the country, the city authorities decided to encourage, for the time being, the belief that Schill was acting with official sanction.9 On 7 May, the king was presented in Königsberg with a report from the Berlin Police President Justus Gruner warning him that he could rescue his own authority in the kingdom only by entering immediately into an alliance with Austria or by coming to Berlin and personally endorsing a policy of peace at the side of France.

  For the army is teetering – and what good is the authority of the administration then? [… ] All the tireless zeal of individuals [on the king’s behalf] will be swallowed up in a sea of restlessly agitated passions, unless the venerable pilot Himself grasps the tiller to calm the masses. The throne of the Hohenzollerns is at stake.10

  Gruner was exaggerating. Schill’s venture ended in abject failure. On 31 May 1809, he was sabred by a Dane and shot dead by a Dutchman, both fighting with the French, in the city of Stralsund. The Dutchman, according to one account, cut off his head, preserved it in ‘spirits of wine’ and placed it on display in the public library at Leyden, where it remained until 1837, when it was buried in Brunswick. Twenty-eight of his surviving officers and men were subsequently executed by firing squad on Napoleon’s orders for their role in the uprising.11 Although there were many Prussian officers who sympathized with Schill and the patriot networks, there were few who were willing to break their oath of obedience to the king. The great majority of ordinary subjects in Prussia – as in the rest of Germany – were content to be passive observers of the patriots’ exploits. Schill’s experience, like the failed and almost simultaneous revolt of Colonel Ferdinand Wilhelm Caspar Freiherr von Dörnberg against King Jerôme in Westphalia, revealed that the patriotic zeal of the German masses, such as it was, could not be converted into political action.

  Yet this moment of panic among the Prussian authorities is revealing none the less. It demonstrated how much had changed in the relationship between the monarchy and its public since the reign of Frederick the Great. What was remarkable about the reports from Tauentzien,
Gruner, Sack and Vincke was their plebiscitary logic. For the first time in the history of the dynasty, we find senior Prussian officials and high-ranking officers invoking public opinion in order to force the hand of the monarch. Phlegmatic as ever, Frederick William kept a calm head, insisting that things were not as bad as the alarmists claimed. ‘I do not fear illegal disturbances from my people,’ he told Foreign Minister von der Goltz on 9 May, adding inconsequentially that he had no intention of going to Berlin, where ‘anarchical explosions’ might distract him from devoting his time and energy to more important questions.12

  But Frederick William himself seems at some points to have internalized the arguments of his officials. In an extraordinary undated handwritten note, composed some time during the crisis of 1809, he reflected on the possibility of a forced abdication, observing morosely that if he were to be deposed in favour of another individual ‘more favoured by opinion’, then he would not protest, but readily ‘hand over the reins of government to him whom the nation believes worthier’.13 This was partly just sulking, but it also conveys a fleeting sense of how the upheavals of the revolutionary era were transforming the self-understanding of traditional monarchy.

  PATRIOTS AND LIBERATORS

  What was at stake in the crisis of 1809 was not simply the question of whether and when to strike against the French, but also the nature of the war that Prussia would ultimately wage against Napoleon. Frederick William and the more conservative figures among the military leadership continued to think in terms of a traditional Kabinettskrieg in which the key weapons were dynastic diplomacy and a well-trained regular army. By contrast, the reformers envisaged a new insurrectionary mode of warfare involving armed masses of citizen-soldiers inflamed by love of their fatherland. ‘Why should we believe ourselves inferior to the Spaniards and Tyroleans?’, General Gebhardt Leberecht von Blücher asked Frederick William in October 1809, as he urged him to embrace the risk of war at Austria’s side. ‘We are better equipped than they!’14

  The issue lost some of its urgency after the war crisis passed, but it resurfaced in 1811, as the prospect loomed of a major war between France and Russia. In a memorandum submitted to the king on 8 August 1811, Gneisenau set out a detailed plan for a popular partisan war in the Spanish manner that would be unleashed on the French army from behind the front lines. This mass uprising (Aufstand in Masse) would harry French units, disrupt supply routes and destroy resources that might otherwise fall into the enemy’s hands. Gneisenau had observed the débâcle of his sometime subordinate Schill and was aware that ordinary Prussians might need some additional encouragement before they risked life and limb against the French. To ensure that the necessary patriotic commitment was not lacking, Gneisenau suggested, the state should employ clergymen to mobilize local communities.15 Stein (now in exile in Prague) and Clausewitz arrived at similar proposals, though they placed more emphasis on the need for clear leadership from the monarchical executive.

  The concept of an insurrectionary war against the French never enjoyed wide support within the officer corps. Only a minority of officers was comfortable with an approach to warfare that risked unleashing forces beyond the control of the regular army. But beyond the army itself, in the educated circles of the Prussian patriot intelligentsia, there were many who found the idea exhilarating. In a poem composed in 1809 and inspired by the Austrian campaign against Napoleon, the sometime Prussian guardsman Heinrich von Kleist imagined Germans from all corners of the old Reich rising against the French and evoked in remarkably uncompromising language the brutality of an all-out war:

  Whiten with their scattered bones

  Every hollow, every hill;

  From what was left by fox and crow

  The hungry fish shall eat their fill;

  Block the Rhine with their cadavers;

  Until, plugged up by so much flesh,

  It breaks its banks and surges west

  To draw our borderline afresh!16

  Perhaps the quirkiest expression of the insurrectionary idea was the Turnbewegung, or gymnasts’ movement, founded by Friedrich Ludwig Jahn in 1811 in the Hasenheide park in what is now the Berlin suburb of Neukölln. The aim of the movement was to train young men for a coming war against the French. The objectivewasnot to train paramilitaries, but to evolvespecifically civilian forms of bodily prowess and patriotic commitment in preparation for a struggle in which the people as a whole would be pitted against the enemy. The gymnasts were not ‘soldiers’, a term that Jahn despised for its mercenary associations (‘Sold’ is the German word for wage), but citizen-fighters whose participation in the struggle was entirely voluntary, because it was motivated by love for the fatherland. Gymnasts did not ‘march’, Jahn pointed out in The Art of German Gymnastics, the official catechism of the early movement, because marching killed the autonomous will and was intended to degrade the individual to the mere tool of a higher authority. Instead they ‘walked’, swinging their legs in a flowing, natural motion, as befitted free men. The art of the gymnast, Jahn wrote, ‘is an enduring site [eine bleibende Stätte] for the building of fresh sociable virtues [… ] of a sense of decency and law and [of a feeling for] cheerful obedience without prejudice to freedom of movement and high-spirited independence’.17

  In order to facilitate this freedom of movement, Jahn developed a special costume, whose loose jacket and wide-legged trousers of grey unbleached linen were designed to accommodate and encourage the free forms of bodily movement so prized by the gymnasts. Here again, there was an antimilitary dimension: ‘The light and austere, unpretentious and thoroughly functional linen costume of the gymnast,’ Jahn wrote, ‘is unsuited to [… ] braids, aiguillettes, armbands, dress swords and gauntlets on the leaders of processions etc. The earnest spirit of the fighter (Wehrmannsernst) is thereby transformed into idle play.’18 Coupled with this hostility to the hierarchical order of the traditional military was an implicit egalitarianism. Jahn’s followers were encouraged to address each other as ‘du’, and their distinctive costume helped to dissolve barriers of status by removing the outward signs of social difference.19 The gymnasts were even known to sing songs proclaiming that all members were ‘equal in estate and rank’ (‘An Rang und Stand sind alle gleich’).20 Jahn’s outdoor displays, in which young men swung, twirled and twisted on raised bars that were the prototypes of today’s gymnastic equipment, attracted huge crowds. Here was a clear demonstration of how patriotism could provide the key to a reconceptualization of political culture as rooted in voluntary allegiances rather than hierarchical structures of authority.

  It was precisely the subversive potential in patriotic discourses that alienated the monarch from the more radical prescriptions of the military reformers. On 28 December 1809, Frederick William at last returned to Berlin, where crowds cheered him through the city. But he remained opposed to patriotic experiments of any kind. Now that he was reestablished in the capital, he was more completely under the eye of the French authorities than ever – indeed Napoleon had demanded that he leave Königsberg for this very reason. Moreover, after 1809, the position of the French seemed totally impregnable. By 1810, nearly all the German territories left over from the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire had joined the Confederation of the Rhine, an association of states whose members were obliged to contribute military contingents in support of Napoleon’s foreign policy. In the face of such might, resistance seemed hopeless.

  Frederick William’s reluctance to risk precipitate military action was further reinforced by personal tragedy. On 19 July 1810, the unexpected death of his wife Luise, at the age of only thirty-four, plunged him into a long depression in which his only comforts were seclusion and prayer. He had no faith in the idea of insurrectionary warfare; the reformers were allowed to proceed with various improvements to military administration and training but Frederick William blocked their efforts to mobilize a ‘people’s army’ (Volksarmee) through the introduction of universal conscription. To Gneisenau’s proposal that clergymen be
employed to urge the people to rise up against their conquerors the king appended the laconic marginal note: ‘One executed preacher and the whole thing will be over with.’ On Gneisenau’s proposals for a system of citizen militias he commented simply: ‘Good – as poetry.’21 Nevertheless, the king agreed one important concession to the war party. During the summer of 1811, he approved plans for the enlargement of the Prussian army and the reinforcement of key strongholds. There were also tactful feelers in the direction of Russia and England.

  Fortunately for Frederick William, most of his senior advisers (including Hardenberg) supported his policy of wait-and-see. The king thus had little difficulty in resisting the entreaties of the ‘war party’. But with the cooling of relations between France and Russia from 1810 onwards, the external pressures on the Berlin decision-makers gradually increased. It had always been difficult to imagine a European future in which Napoleon and Alexander I could get along as brothers. Tensions had been accumulating between the two for some time, but the breach came in December 1810, when Napoleon annexed the north-west German Duchy of Oldenburg, whose integrity had been guaranteed in the Peace of Tilsit and whose sovereign was Tsar Alexander’s uncle. Alexander responded with the ukaz of 31 December, by which he closed Russian markets and ports to French products (except wines and silks). During the spring and summer of 1811 the two powers drifted apart, neither committing itself to war. By the winter of 1811–12, however, it was clear that a major French offensive was imminent. Napoleon reinforced his armies in eastern and central Germany, occupied Swedish Pomerania and transferred thirty-six battalions from Spain.22