Death of a Nation

by Stephen R A'Barrow

  While Frederick had achieved miracles and raised Prussia’s status to that of one of Europe’s great powers, Prussia would remain dependent on alliances. Her territories had no natural defences. Thrift and high taxation bought her a large army but could never be enough to save her from the combined and prolonged attentions of her neighbours. An important element of Prussia’s future foreign policy emerged from the Silesian wars, which aimed at keeping on good terms with Russia.lxxxvi (23)

  The consequences of the Seven Years War coloured the future of Europe. Austria and France’s combined failure plunged them back into their old antipathy for one another. Frederick the Great was loved in France for his culture, wit, success and appreciation of all things French. In contrast, Louis XVI’s wife, Marie Antoinette — daughter of the Austrian Emperor — was hated for all the exuberant excesses of Austrian royalty. When Austria took part in the partition of Poland these antipathies only grew stronger. Austria, under its new Emperor, Joseph II, saw Frederick the Great’s model of a unitary state as the reason for his success and sought to emulate it. A policy which in a totally different multiethnic state like Austria eventually proved disastrous and sowed the seeds for its undoing. Prussia recovered remarkably quickly from the war; accepting another 300,000 immigrants, she experienced an increase in birth rates, and by 1765 her previously empty coffers were overflowing again. Prussia’s efficient bureaucrats made her the envy of her neighbours. Once again, Prussia had no debts, strong economic growth, good administration and a strong army. Over the coming two decades, Frederick worked ceaselessly for his state, driven perhaps by the guilt of what his wars had cost his people and out of gratitude at having been spared defeat.

  Frederick’s wars and the economic disruption they caused had hit the Junkers hard. During his reign, circumstance turned the relationship between the crown and the fiercely independent East Prussian Junker Estates on its head. Whereas previous electors and kings had relied upon, but always had to cajole, this Estate, Frederick now created state capitalised agricultural credit unions to save the Junkers from crippling debt, making them increasingly dependent on the Prussian state for support. Frederick also improved the lot of the peasants who lived on the Junkers’ lands by introducing state oversight and appointments to each Patrimonial Court.(24) To spur industry at the outset of his reign, Frederick had set up the 5th General Directory to oversee manufacturing and commerce, which actively recruited wool spinners, helped open silk factories, planted mulberry trees on state lands, set up the manufacture of knives and scissors, and supported the growth of an emerging textile industry. This became particularly important in the newly acquired region of Silesia, which became famous for its linen industry. Silesia also gained Frederick’s support for its iron ore industry, where the first blast furnace in Germany was put into operation. Frederick also set up the royal shipyard in Stettinlxxxvii where the state ran an effective monopoly on tobacco, timber, coffee and salt.(25) But above all, Frederick loved the arts and architecture: he presided over the establishment of many of Berlin’s greatest monuments including the buildings which formed the Federickanum Square (today’s Bebelplatz), Europe’s largest opera house of the time, St Hedwig’s Catholic Cathedral — a monument to tolerance built in a Protestant kingdom by an atheist monarch — and the royal library to which Frederick contributed many of his own books (that had travelled with him even on his military campaigns). Many of the royal palaces, gardens and public buildings in Potsdam also owe much to Frederick’s reign.

  One of Frederick’s most enduring legacies was the work he started on Prussia’s General Law Code that became a proto-constitution for the state. It made citizens out of subjects and bound everyone in the kingdom by the same law, from the monarch downward, supplanting the mess of the old imperial system with its overlapping interests, effectively consigning the outdated legal shambles of the Holy Roman Empire and its legal rights over Prussia to the scrap heap. His Prussian Enlightenment saw the extension of religious freedom, at a time when in France a blasphemer would still have had his right arm torn off and his tongue cut out before being burned at the stake.(26) He also extended the freedom of the Jews, his being the only court city in German Europe where the Jews were not confined to live in ghettos. The Jews of Prussia began their own Enlightenment, or Haskalah, and emerged from their closed communities to build bridges with the gentile world, leading ever more of them into secular professions such as medicine and law. Prussian Jews such as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Moses Mendelssohn came into their own under his reign. The modern Jewish Enlightenment in Europe started in Prussia, which caused large numbers of Jews from Poland and Russia to emmigrate to Prussia; many of whom ended up becoming so entirely integrated and assimilated into Prussian society that they became secularised and even adopted German names. Frederick also did not forget or neglect his old soldiers as so many leaders and governments do after asking their men to risk all for their adventures. He set up a war chest that paid benefits to soldiers and made payments to those returning to their land who fell on hard times. He set up a home for war invalids in Berlin and reserved all Customs & Excise, tobacco monopoly jobs and other government posts for former servicemen. Frederick increased the grain magazine and excise system to protect his population from famine or price fluctuations. This was so successful that it saved Prussia from a continent-wide famine between 1771–72. Despite expending all of this energy, at the age of sixty he was ready for his next adventure.

  West Prussia, or ‘Royal Prussia’ as it had been dubbed by Polish kings, had been separated from East Prussia since 1466, when the Order of the Teutonic Knights had been defeated by Poland. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Poland had risen to great power status, shedding its Piast dynastic desires for hegemony in the West, in favour of the creation of a great Polish-Lithuanian Jagellonian dynastic empire in the East. However, from the late seventeenth century Poland’s power began to wane. The Polish monarchy was elected, which in Poland’s weakening state left it open to increasing international manipulation. The Polish Constitution also allowed any member of the Polish diet a veto, making effective government virtually impossible. Its oversized nobility, given to airs and graces, was impoverishing itself and thereby also the state it purported to lead. The Polish nobility became a major force of disintegration during the eighteenth century by insisting on its right to form armed associations or confederations. This amounted to no less than legalised and continual civil war within the kingdom. The squabbling nobility played a major role in Poland’s demise as a great power. Poland, by the late eighteenth century, impoverished and with no defensible borders, began to look like easy prey to her neighbours. Imperial Russia posed by far the greatest threat, regarding Poland as no more than a Russian satellite and so she constantly interfered in her internal affairs.

  Russia, Austria and Prussia were all concerned that one of them might try to grab the whole for themselves. In an act of extreme political cynicism, and to avoid conflict among themselves, they calmly calculated the partition of Poland, dividing the carcass into three separate sections. Exactly where the inspiration for this came from is still argued about by historians. Some focus on the Austrian monarchy’s desire to replace its losses in Silesia; others point the finger at Catherine the Great’s Russia, which gobbled up the lion’s share of Poland. As Catherine casually said to Frederick, ‘It would seem that in Poland one has nothing to do but stoop to pick up whatever one pleases.’(27) Others claim that the initial suggestion came from Frederick himself. Austria’s Queen, Maria Theresa, is said by Frederick to have been reluctantly persuaded. He remarked with his usual cynical wit, ‘She wept but she took nonetheless!’

  During the first partition in 1772, Prussia received the smallest, but very significant piece — West Prussia — compiled of over 6,000 square miles of territory linking Brandenburg to East Prussia (part of which later became infamously known as the Polish Corridor). Incredibly, after over 300 years of Polish colonisation, the territory stil
l had a majority German-speaking and largely Protestant population, making up over two-thirds of the urban population and 54 per cent of the population as a whole.(28) When Frederick surveyed his new domains, he was shocked at the state they were in. He wrote to Voltaire, ‘These provinces cannot be compared with any European country… it is not reasonable that the country which produced Copernicus should be allowed to moulder in such barbarism.’

  Charles Roy sums up Frederick’s challenge and achievements in West Prussia, stating, ‘New farms were planned, new towns established, new estates carved up, new settlers brought in, many of whom retained Polish workers as their cheap labour. These natives were often joined by hundreds of their compatriots from the south during harvest time. Conditions immeasurably improved by German administrators, made the lot of the farmhands far superior to that endured at home.’(29) And there lies the rub. Poland had gone from being a feared and respected adversary to an impoverished, crumbling edifice, and one of its own making. Herein perhaps was born the beginning of an ingrained prejudice against the Poles that gave rise to the term ‘polnische Wirtschaft’ (Polish economic activity), a derogatory term that is still in use today and is somewhat akin to the use of the term ‘military intelligence’ — a contradiction in terms. West Prussia became Frederick’s favourite pet project. Money was pumped in to drain marshes, build canals, revive towns and increase trade and public works. Serfdom was abolished and an efficient administration was introduced, as was an independent functioning judiciary. A new cadet school was opened in Kulm (Chelmno), which was attended by many children of the local Polish nobility. Hundreds of new schools were built, and in majority Polish areas the tuition was in Polish. Both Polish and German were used as official languages in the province. Intermarriages between the communities were not unusual, creating many of the double-barrelled German-Polish names that became common in the region. Shocking as this territorial carve-up might seem today, the Poles themselves had not shrunk from annexing Lithuanian, Byelorussian, Ukrainian or German-speaking territories during their great rise to power. These kinds of divisions were commonplace during and after the Thirty Years War. They did not arouse the indignation of the great powers, and had Napoleon been successful in Russia, not only would France have permanently annexed Westphalia and all the German provinces west of the Rhine, much of Prussia would have been carved out of existence some 135 years earlier than this ultimately came to pass.

  It must also be remembered that Prussia and the states of Europe were all, to a greater or lesser degree, multiethnic. As yet, the urge to build largely ethnically homogenous nation states had not yet overtaken the priorities of the royal houses of Europe to continually expand their dynastic holdings, irrespective of the different communities they contained. There was no forced Germanisation of Poles at this time. Prussia remained the most tolerant state of the age, allowing religious freedom and the same rights for all, whether Lutheran or Calvinist German, Catholic Pole or Silesian or Huguenot Frenchman. Poles were allowed to continue to practise their own language. They had far more access to Polish-speaking schools and teachers in the Prussian administered regions of Poland than they had previously had on their own, and certainly far more than in the areas annexed by Russia and Austria. There was no bar on the Polish upper classes joining the Prussian civil service or even the officer corps. In Prussia a subject’s duty was to the state and its monarch, not to ‘the nation’. As one Polish commentator put it over a hundred years later, ‘Prussians we Poles could have become, but Germans never!’(30) Prussia represented order, justice and tolerance from above. This was something that neither Russia, nor Austria, were likely to aspire to and France was busy giving Europe a demonstration of chaos from below. Being a Prussian subject for a Pole in this era was therefore certainly the lesser of three evils, if obviously less preferable than living in an independent Poland.

  In 1792, war broke out between Poland and Russia which helped precipitate a further carve-up in 1793, as part of which Prussia received the old crusader cities of Thorn and Danzig. Significantly, this strangled Polish trade with the outside world, as she had lost what had been her most important ports. In 1794, the Poles rose up again against the Russians who brutally put down their rebellion and even hung the Bishop of Warsaw. Finally, in 1795, Poland was completely swallowed up. At the time Napoleonic France was already at war with Austria (and soon would be with the whole of Europe) and Russia was tiring of the ongoing trouble and strife in trying to tie down her Polish provinces. Therefore, Russia, Prussia and Austria decided to dispense entirely with an independent Poland and proceeded to carve her out of existence. This time Prussia got the lion’s share of what had remained of Poland. Prussia acquired the province of Posen (Poznan) and a number of thoroughly Polish provinces further south-east, including the city of Warsaw and Polish territory as far east as the Bug river. Although the bulk of Polish territory still remained part of Russia, Prussia absorbed so much of the Polish population that it would not have been unfair to call this a dual nationality state made up of Germans and Poles. However, this situation was to be short-lived. The tumultuous changes of the Napoleonic Wars soon overturned the borders of Europe and threatened the very existence of Prussia. Napoleon stripped Prussia of her Polish gains acquired during the third partition and these briefly formed the basis of a reinstated Polish state from 1807–13. However, following Napoleon’s defeat at the Battle of Waterloo, the Congress of Vienna decided not to reconstitute the state of Poland and once again the bulk of Poland’s territories became part of Russia, while Prussia only retained West Prussia and part of the province of Posen. Until the end of the First World War, the bulk of Poland remained a province of the Russian Empire and it was in a Russian-administered Poland that the worst uprisings of Polish despair continued to erupt.

  Frederick the Great passed away before the second and third partitions of Poland, alone in the palace of Sans Souci with his beloved dogs at his side on 17th August 1786. His forty-six-year reign did more than that of any other Prussian monarch to establish Prussia’s place among the great powers. By the time of his death Prussia may only have been the thirteenth largest European state in terms of population, but she had a thriving and expanding economy, efficient government, an increasingly educated citizenry and Europe’s third largest and most professional military.(31) The territorial gains that Prussia had made under Frederick the Great in Silesia and West Prussia had almost doubled the size of her territory and she would continue to expand under his successors. Prussia had begun her challenge of Austria’s hegemony within the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, and emerged as the champion of Protestant interests within the smaller German states. Over the coming century Prussia would spread out like an ink blot across the map of German-speaking Europe.

  Prussia had unquestionably become a force to be reckoned with, but Frederick had set the bar dangerously high for his successors. Benevolent absolutism may be tolerated when run by a genius whose raison d’être is to serve the state and its people, but most nations are fortunate to have one such genius in any given century.

  NAPOLEONIC TONIC AND GERMAN WHISPERS

  French culture had been much admired in both Prussia and Germany. However, admiring something at a distance and having it forced down your throat are two quite different things. For well over a century, France has cast herself purely in the role of the victim of Prussian aggression; an act which can best be summarised as the pot calling the kettle black. The ruins of castles and palaces that litter the Rhineland and dot its hinterland are testimony to countless French incursions into a territory they came to regard as their back yard, or in modern terminology their ‘sphere of influence’. French troops criss-crossed Germany during the Thirty Years War, and afterwards, as Sweden’s ally in the Polish-Swedish Wars, the Palatinate War, the Silesian Wars and again during the Napoleonic Wars. If you stand under the Arc de Triomphe and read out the names of cities in which French armies claimed battle honours, there are more German place names lis
ted than any other, each with their unwritten human toll.

  Following the death of Frederick the Great in 1786, Friedrich Wilhelm II, (the son of Frederick the Great’s younger brother, Prince Henry) came to the throne.lxxxviii Friedrich Wilhelm II was not really prepared or cut out for the role of monarch, or the challenges that would confront him. He also had the impossible task of following in the footsteps of a truly unique and inspirational monarch. Friedrich Wilhelm II could not have been more different from his uncle; he loved peace and the ladies. He did not fear France or the ideals of the French Revolution. It was not that he regarded many of the ideals of the revolution as incompatible with the aims of the Prussian Enlightenment; he just disagreed with the chaotic way in which they were being implemented in France. One could summarise his view as seeing Prussia as the model of Enlightened Absolutism as opposed to the Democratic Absolutism of France. He stated, ‘Democrats were after all affected by the whims of political parties and populism let alone those of the media, who whip up passions to the detriment of reasoned debate.’ The French Revolution appeared to Prussia as a sign of its weakness and the fact that its great power status was on the wane, whilst Prussia appeared to be in the ascendancy. Prussia was a very different country from France, not yet sick from the malaise of the modern era. She was still 87 per cent agrarian with a functioning feudal nobility, a relatively contented peasantry, a minimal bourgeoisie and a virtually non-existent proletariat.