THE ‘MEMORY’ OF WAR
On 18 October 1817, some 500 students from at least eleven German universities gathered at the Wartburg, a castle in the Thuringian hills where Luther had spent some time studying after his excommunication by Pope Leo X. They had come together to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the Reformation and the fourth anniversary of the battle of Leipzig. Both anniversaries recalled legendary moments of liberation in the history of the German nation; the former from ‘papal despotism’, the latter from the yoke of French tyranny. In addition to singing patriotic songs, the young men on the Wartburg solemnly burned the publications of a number of reactionary authors. Among the works consigned to the flames was a pamphlet published at the end of the Wars of Liberation by Theodor Anton Heinrich Schmalz, rector of the University of Berlin. In this pamphlet, Schmalz attacked the patriotic secret societies that had formed in Prussia during the occupation and forcefully rejected the view that the war against the French had been fuelled by a wave of popular enthusiasm in Prussia. Those Prussians who had joined the colours, Schmalz argued, had not done so out of enthusiasm for the cause, but rather out of a sense of duty, ‘just as one hurries by when a neighbour’s house is burning down’.62 At the time of its appearance in 1815, the pamphlet prompted a storm of enraged protest from patriotic publicists. Schmalz himself was surprised and shocked at the vehemence of the public response.63 Two years later, his description of a people wearily following its king into war still offended the students on the Wartburg, many of them ex-volunteers, who had timed their meeting to fall on the fourth anniversary of the largest and most decisive military confrontation of the Wars of Liberation.
The symbolic auto-da-fé on the Wartburg reminds us of the controversy and emotion that accompanied public recollections of the Wars of Liberation in the immediate post-war years. The students on the Wartburg had adopted as their banner the black, red and gold colours of the Lützow volunteer corps. They were not commemorating a ‘War of Liberation’ but a ‘War of Liberty’; not a war of regular armies, but a war of volunteers; ‘not a war’, as the fallen volunteer rifleman and poet Theodor Körner put it, ‘that crowns know of’, but rather ‘a crusade’, ‘a holy war’.64 They conceived of the war against the French as an ‘insurrection of the people’.65 These preoccupations contrasted crassly with conservative recollections of the war years. It was ‘the princes and their ministers’, wrote the publicist Friedrich von Gentz in the days following the Wartburg festival, who ‘achieved the greatest [feats]’ in the war against Napoleon.
Not all the demagogues and pamphleteers of the world and of posterity can take that away from them. [… ] They prepared the war, founded it, created it. They did even more: they led it, nourished and enlivened it. [… ] Those who today in their youthful audacity suppose that they overturned the tyrant [Gentz refers to the students on the Wartburg], couldn’t even have driven him out of Germany.66
In part, these divergences in memory were grounded in the hybrid character of the struggle. The Wars of Liberation were wars of governments and monarchs, of dynastic alliances, rights and claims, in which the chief concern was to re-establish the balance of power in Europe. But they also involved – to an extent unprecedented in Prussia’s history – militias and politically motivated volunteers. Of just under 290,000 officers and men mobilized in Prussia, 120,565 served in units of the Landwehr. In addition to the Landwehr regiments, which generally served under officers of the Prussian army, there were a variety of free corps, units of voluntary riflemen recruited from Prussia and other German states. Unlike their colleagues in the regular army, they swore oaths of loyalty not to the King of Prussia, but to the German fatherland. By the end of hostilities, free corps such as the famous Lützow Rangers accounted for 12.5 per cent of the Prussian armed forces, about 30,000 men in all.67 The intense patriotism of many volunteers was tied up with potentially subversive visions of an ideal German or Prussian political order.
Yet it would be misleading to suggest that the divergence between dynastic and voluntarist recollections of the campaign was rooted solely or even primarily in distinctive modes of enlistment and combat experience. Not all post-war patriots had served in volunteer corps; many had served in the Landwehr militia and in regiments of the line, or not served at all. Nor were the officers and men of the regular army immune to the patriotic ferment of the war years. In January 1816, according to reports from the British envoy in Berlin, there were officers who had been ‘infected’ with ‘revolutionary stirrings’ in almost all regiments of the regular army.68 The Volunteer Rangers (freiwillige Jäger), on the other hand, included noblemen (such as Wilhelm von Gerlach and the sons of Count Friedrich Leopold Stolberg) whose political orientation in the post-war period was conservative or corporate-aristocratic rather than liberal or democratic.69 The controversies of the post-war period were fuelled not simply by diverse memories of wartime experience as such, but by the instrumentalization of memory for political ends.
Prussians found many ways of commemorating the Wars of Liberation in the years after 1815. The provincial archives – in particular the news reports (Zeitungsberichte) filed every month by the provincial governments – describe the ringing of church bells, target-shooting tournaments, processions involving men in militia costumes, and local theatrical events in commemoration of the battles of Leipzig and Waterloo.70 ‘Volunteer clubs’ and ‘funeral associations’ were founded in Prussian towns during the 1830s and 1840s to collect funds for the ceremonial burial of deceased veteran volunteers. These groups not only paid the costs of burial, but also provided men in uniform for the funeral procession, thereby reminding the community of the special status of those – no matter how humble their social standing – who had served their king and fatherland in the wars against the French.71 During the 1840s, according to a report in the Berlin-based Vossische Zeitung, veterans gathered almost every year in various locations to renew contact and remember fallen comrades. In June 1845, on the thirtieth anniversary of the battle of Waterloo, there were numerous meetings of veterans who had served in Landwehr and regular army regiments, as well as a gathering of surviving Lützow volunteers who congregated at the oak tree where the poet and volunteer rifleman Theodor Körner had been buried.72
Throughout the post-war decades, the volunteer, or Freiwilliger, continued to enjoy a special status; in Theodor Fontane’s childhood memoirs for example, we find an account of a public execution that took place in 1826 while his family was living in Swinemünde. Because he was an ‘1813 er’, Fontane senior was selected to march at the head of the municipal procession to the place of execution and supervise the crowd around the scaffold. The condemned murderer, for his part, continued until his last breath to believe that he would be pardoned because of a letter of commendation he had received from the king after the battle of Jena.73 General Yorck, too, remained under the spell of the war against France. His private memorial cult focused on the Convention of Tauroggen and his fall from royal favour. The Convention was never officially recognized as an act of state by the Prussian Crown; it was thus confined, for the short term at least, to the realm of private memory. Although Yorck was exonerated of any offence by a board of enquiry in March 1813, he remained convinced that he had been denied the honour he deserved for his part in the opening phase of the war against Napoleon. The original document bearing the text of the Convention was not returned for deposition among the state papers, but remained a revered heirloom in the Yorck family archive. The full-length free-standing statue that adorned the general’s tomb on the family’s estate was commissioned by Yorck himself; it shows him holding a stone scroll engraved with the words ‘Convention of Tauroggen’.74
This disparate evidence reveals a memory of the Wars of Liberation that was anchored in specific social contexts.75 One can speak, for example, of a distinctively Jewish memory of the Wars of Liberation, in which the story of volunteer enlistment was closely intertwined with the narrative of emancipation. Certainly, when the rabbis o
f Breslau blessed the weapons of Jewish volunteers on 11 March 1813, dispensing them at the same time from the stricter forms of observance for the duration of the campaign, they did not neglect to point out that the ceremony marked the first anniversary of the Prussian Edict of Emancipation.76 Jewish participation in the campaign could be and was invoked as an argument against discriminatory legislation.77 In 1843, when the Militärwochenblatt printed statistics from the Wars of Liberation substantially understating the numbers of Jewish volunteers, there were indignant protests and corrections from Jewish journals such as Der Orient and Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums.78 This Jewish memory of the Wars of Liberation found pictorial expression in the paintings of Moritz Daniel Oppenheimer, the ‘first modern Jewish artist’79, known for his portraits of converts and assimilated Jews. In a painting of 1833–4 entitled Return of the Jewish Volunteer from the Wars of Liberation to his Family Still Living by the Old Custom, Oppenheimer depicted a young man in military uniform surrounded by his family in a room strewn with symbols of domesticity and Jewish worship. Light pours in through the windows of the room, illuminating the braid on his jacket. There could be no clearer illustration of the relationship between the drawn-out processes of assimilation and emancipation and the ‘memory of 1813’.80
36. Return of the Jewish Volunteer from the Wars of Liberation to his family still living by the Old Custom. Oil painting by Moritz Daniel Oppenheimer 1833–34.
The war was also commemorated through the erection of monuments. A splendid war memorial was designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, greatest of the Prussian architects, and placed on the summit of the Tempelhofer Berg, later known as the Kreuzberg, in 1821. Perched on the highest point in Berlin’s otherwise flat cityscape and resembling a miniature gothic church tower, it was well placed to become a shrine for the sacralized memory of war. But Schinkel’s monument bore an inscription which made it clear that it spoke for one memory in particular: the dynastic memory of war which placed the king at the head of his people. ‘From the king to the people who, at his call, nobly sacrificed their blood and chattels to the Fatherland’. The message was reinforced by the twelve figures placed in niches around the monument. Initially intended as ‘genii’ representing the great battles of the Wars of Liberation, they were altered to function as portraits of generals and members of the Prussian and Russian ruling houses.81 Commemorative tablets in the churches of Prussia likewise bore the inscription: ‘For king and fatherland’.82 The monuments to the Prussian fallen on the battlefields of Gross-Görschen, Haynau, an der Katzbach, Dennewitz and Waterloo carried the legend: ‘King and fatherland honour the fallen heroes. They rest in peace.’83
By contrast, it seemed that the patriotic-voluntarist memory of war would have to remain without its remembrance in stone. Among those who felt this problem most keenly were the painter Caspar David Friedrich, a patriot and political radical who had grown up in Greifswald (Mecklenburg), but was now living in the Saxon city of Dresden, and Ernst Moritz Arndt, who hailed from the island of Rügen in that portion of the old Duchy of Pomerania that passed from Sweden to Prussia in 1815. Arndt and Friedrich collaborated on a statue of Scharnhorst but received no official support for the project. Both men viewed the Prussian war against Napoleon as a German ‘national’ undertaking and for both the memory of that conflict was intimately bound up with radical politics. ‘I am not at all surprised,’ Friedrich wrote to Arndt in March 1814, ‘that no memorials are being erected, neither to mark the great cause of the Volk, nor to the magnanimous deeds of great German men. As long as we remain manservants to the princes, nothing of this sort will ever happen.’84 The absence of an adequate monument to the ‘people’s’ Wars of Liberation was a theme to which Friedrich repeatedly returned in the paintings he produced during the years after 1815. Not only the voluntarist patriots, but also reformers within the military and bureaucratic establishment were sensitive to the way in which public remembrance of the Wars of Liberation had been weighted in favour of the dynastic-military tradition. In 1822, when Theodor von Schön, the liberal provincial president of West Prussia and a former close associate of Stein, heard that there were plans to erect a monument to the conservative General von Bülow, he proposed a statue be raised instead to the militiaman who had reportedly shouted ‘lick my arse’ when Bülow blew a call for retreat during the advance on Leipzig.85
How does one publicly commemorate a war without monuments? This was one of the problems addressed by Friedrich Ludwig Jahn and his gymnasts. Within a few years of its foundation in the Hasenheide park on the outskirts of Berlin, the movement had spread beyond the borders of the kingdom, attracting new adherents across Protestant central and northern Germany. By 1818, Jahn estimated that there were 150 gymnastic clubs in all, encompassing a membership of around 12,000.86 While the public representation of the past in stone after 1815 remained subject, as it were, to a dynastic monopoly, the gymnasts developed new ways of perpetuating a remembrance of war inflected with their own voluntarist nationalism. They made pilgrimages to the battlefields of the Wars of Liberation. They designed and celebrated memorial feast days, the most important being the anniversary of the battle of Leipzig. The first of these memorial events took place in the Hasenheide on 18 October 1814 and attracted some 10,000 spectators. With its symphony of bodies in disciplined motion, its songs, flaming beacons and torch-lit processions, it set the pattern for subsequent anniversaries until the suppression of the gymnastic movement in 1819.
The gymnastic festival was a high holiday in the gymnastic year, and its function as a populist memorial of the Wars of Liberation could hardly escape the notice of contemporaries. But the gymnastic art itself was a kind of memorial enactment. It was more than a fitness programme; it was the disciplined maintenance of readiness for struggle and conflict. In the early post-war period, this posture of preparedness could not fail to evoke the years of the French occupation. It was not, as we have seen, the stance of the soldier, but that of the civilian volunteer. The uniforms worn by the gymnasts, and designed by Jahn himself, further reinforced these commemorative associations. The gymnastic uniform belonged within an early nineteenth-century sartorial code that linked the patriotic ‘Old German costume’ (altdeutsche Tracht) popularized by Jahn around the turn of the century with the loose jackets worn by the volunteer riflemen, and connected both with the student garb of the Burschenschaften (nationalist student fraternities), in whose early history Jahn had also played a role.
The fraternity students, whose membership overlapped with that of the gymnastic movement, were a memorial cult, preoccupied by the great deeds of the recent past. Through their networks, the Prussian war against Napoleon was woven into the fabric of a broader German memory. When, in December 1817, the Burschen of Jena set out to explain in writing the meaning of their movement, they reminded their public of the remembered experiences that still held them together. ‘For we have all seen the great year 1813’, they wrote, recalling wounds suffered and friends lost on the field of battle. ‘And would we not be contemptible before God and the world if we had not tended and sustained such thoughts and feelings? We have tended and sustained them and [we] return to dwell on them again and again and will never forsake them.’87
Wrapped up within this cult of memory was the possibility of a new kind of politics. The emphasis of the post-war patriots upon lived experience as a force capable of binding human beings together and endowing their bonds with meaning may appear transparent and unremarkable to us; it was, however, an invention of the period that bore all the marks of early nineteenth-century romanticism.88 The festival on the Wartburg was ‘a new form of political action’,89 not least because it represented the quest of the inward-looking ‘bourgeois self’ imagined by the language and thought of romanticism for a new kind of political community, welded together by a shared emotional commitment. To remember was to forge bonds with one’s fellows; forgetfulness was betrayal. The appeal to a past held in common did not exclude those who had never been volu
nteers, since the very purpose of festivals and rituals was to enable people to ‘remember’ events, even if they had never experienced them. The result was a form of public spectacle that could release powerful emotions in spectators and participants alike. Its politics were not rational and argumentative, but symbolic, cultic and emotional.90
PRUSSIANS OR GERMANS?
Since its inception as a largely literary phenomenon within the educated middle classes during the Seven Years War, Prussian patriotism had always signified more than just a willingness to defend one’s fatherland. It had blended emotional commitments with political aspirations. This was much more threateningly the case in the Napoleonic era than it had been during the Seven Years War, partly because the social constituency capable of sustaining patriotic enthusiasms was far larger, and partly because the rhetorical environment in which these were articulated had been radicalized by the French Revolution and the controversy over reform. ‘One thing is now clear,’ the young Leopold von Gerlach wrote as he observed the frantic preparations for war in Breslau in February 1813. ‘The prevalent outlook among the most independent men is extremely Jacobin and revolutionary. Anyone who talks of the need for a future built upon historical foundations, anyone who seeks to graft the shoots of the new on to the still-healthy stems [of the past], is laughed at, so that even I feel myself wavering in my convictions.’91
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