Iron Kingdom : The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (82 page)

There was only one dark cloud on the crowd’s horizon: under the arches of the palace gates and in the courtyards behind them, lines of troops could be seen. At the sight of this familiar enemy, the mood began to sour. There was some panic on the edges, where people feared to be pushed up against the soldiers. The chanting began: ‘Soldiers out! Soldiers out!’ The situation in the square seemed about to slip out of control. At this point – it was around two in the afternoon – the king transferred the command over the troops in the capital from Pfuel to the more hawkish Prittwitz and ordered that the square be cleared immediately by soldiers and ‘an end be put to the scandalous situation prevailing there’. Bloodshed was to be avoided: the cavalry should advance at marching pace without drawing swords.
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A scene of utter confusion followed. A squadron of dragoons pushed slowly forward into the crowd, but failed to disperse it. Controlling the men was difficult, because the noise was so intense that no orders could be heard. Some of the horses took fright and began to pace backwards. Two men fell when their mounts lost their footing on the cobbles. Only when the dragoons
raised their sabres and made to charge did the crowd flee the centre of the square.

Since substantial numbers of people were still concentrated on the eastern edge of the palace precinct between the Langenbrücke and the Breitenstrasse, a small contingent of grenadiers was sent to clear them. It was during this action that two weapons were accidentally discharged. Grenadier Kühn’s musket caught on the handle of his sabre; warrant officer Hettgen’s gun went off when a demonstrator struck it on the hammer with a stick. Neither shot caused an injury, but the crowd, thinking with its ears, was convinced that the troops had begun to shoot civilians. Word of this outrage passed swiftly through the city. The rather surreal attempt of the palace to correct this misinformation by employing two civilians to walk the streets with a massive linen banner bearing the words: ‘A misunderstanding! The king has the best intentions!’ was predictably futile.

Barricades sprang up across Berlin, improvised from materials to hand. These makeshift barriers became the focal points of most of the fighting, which followed a similar pattern across the city: infantry advancing on a barricade came under fire from the windows of buildings in the vicinity. Tiles and stones rained down from the roofs. The houses were entered and cleared by troops. Barricades were demolished with artillery shot or dismantled by soldiers with the aid of prisoners taken during the fight. Varnhagen von Ense described how the defenders of a barricade near his house responded to the sound of approaching troops: ‘The fighters were instantly ready. You could hear them whispering, and upon the order of a youthful sonorous voice: “Gentlemen, to the roofs!” each went to his post.’
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A Private Schadewinkel who took part in the storming of a barricade in the Breitenstrasse later recalled his role in the action. After the man beside him had been killed by a shot to the head, Schadewinkel joined a handful of soldiers who broke into a building where protesters had been seen. Fired with murderous rage, the men charged up stairways and into apartments, ‘cutting down anyone who resisted’. ‘I am unable to give any precise account of events inside the house,’ Schadewinkel declared. ‘I was in a state of agitation such as I have never been in before.’
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Here, as in many parts of Berlin, innocent bystanders and the half-involved were killed along with the combatants.

It proved much harder to take control of the city than the military commanders had imagined. At around midnight on 18 March,
when General Prittwitz, the new commander-in-chief of the counter-insurrectionary forces, reported to Frederick William IV in the palace, he had to acknowledge that while his troops controlled the area between the river Spree, the Neue Friedrichstrasse and the Spittelmarkt, a further advance was currently impossible. Prittwitz proposed that the city be evacuated, encircled and bombarded into submission. The king responded to this grim news with an almost other-worldly calm. Having thanked the general, he returned to his desk, where Prittwitz observed ‘the elaborately comfortable way in which His Majesty pulled a furry foot-muff over his feet after taking off his boots and stockings, in order, as it seemed, to begin writing another lengthy document’.
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The document in question was the address ‘To My Dear Berliners’, published in the small hours of the following day, in which the king appealed to the residents of the city to return to order: ‘Return to peace, clear the barricades that still stand [… ], and I give you my Royal Word that all streets and squares will be cleared of troops, and the military occupation reduced to a few necessary buildings.’
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The order to pull the troops out
of the city was given on the next day shortly after noon. The king had placed himself in the hands of the revolution.

43
. The Barricade on the Krone and Friedrichstrasse
18 March 1848, as seen by an eyewitness; lithograph by F. G. Nordmann, 1848

This was a momentous decision, and a controversial one. The forced withdrawal from Berlin was the most vexing challenge the Prussian army had faced since 1806. Had the king simply lost his nerve? This was certainly the view taken by the hawks within the military.
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Prince William of Prussia, whose preference for hard measures had earned him the sobriquet ‘the shrapnel prince’, was the most furious hawk of all. Having heard the news of the withdrawal, he marched up to his elder brother and spat out the words: ‘I have always known that you were a babbler, but not that you are a coward! One can no longer serve you with honour’ before flinging his sword at the king’s feet. With tears of rage in his eyes, the king is said to have replied: ‘This is just too bad! You can’t stay here. You will have to go!’ William, by now the most hated figure in the city, was at length persuaded to leave Berlin in disguise and cool down in London.
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In retrospect, there is much to be said for the king’s decision. The early departure of the troops prevented further bloodshed. This was an important consideration, given the ferocity of the fighting during the night of 18–19 March. With a toll of over 300 dead protesters and around 100 dead soldiers and officers, Berlin saw some of the bloodiest urban fighting of the German March revolution. By contrast, the death toll for the March days in Vienna was around fifty.
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Frederick William’s decision also preserved Berlin from artillery bombardment, a fate that was visited upon several European cities during that year. And it allowed the king to emerge as a public figure with his reputation untarnished by the violent confrontations in the capital, a matter of some weight if he intended to seize the opportunity offered by the revolution to reassert Prussia’s leadership role among the German states.

The impact of the Berlin events was reinforced by the news of unrest and rebellion across the kingdom. Since the beginning of March there had been a crescendo of unlicensed rallies and mass meetings, riots, violence and machine-breaking. Some protests (mainly in cities) focused on the articulation of liberal political demands such as the call for a constitution,
civil liberties and legal reform. Others were directed against factories, warehouses or machines that were seen as undermining the welfare of districts suffering from high unemployment. Around the Westphalian town of Solingen, for example, cutlery workers attacked and demolished foundries and factories on 16 and 17 March.
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In Warendorf, a textiles town, unemployed weavers and tanners protested against factories using mechanized production methods.
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Along the riverbank towns of the Rhine there were protests against the use of steamers that rendered the small river ports and the services they provided redundant; in some places protesters even fired guns and small cannon at passing boats.
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Sometimes liberals and radicals competed for control of the process of mobilization. In Cologne, for example, on 3 March, a meeting of city deputies who had gathered together to discuss a liberal petition to the monarch was broken up by a large crowd demanding universal manhood suffrage and abolition of the standing army. The deputies fled the chamber, one of them breaking his leg as he leaped from a window. In Silesia, where less had been achieved in the way of agrarian emancipation than in any other province, it was the peasants who took the lead, marching en masse to administrative offices and demanding the total abolition of the ‘feudal’ system.
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The towns were focal points for the labile street politics of the revolution. In Berlin alone there were 125 episodes of public unrest; forty-six were recorded in Cologne, forty-five in Breslau and twenty-one in liberal Königsberg. Smaller towns – especially in the Rhineland and Westphalia – also witnessed intense tumults and conflict.
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The simultaneity and force of this wave of protest, not only across the Kingdom of Prussia, but also across the German states and the continent of Europe, were overwhelming.

In Berlin, the king was now at the mercy of the citizens. The meaning of this was brought home to him on the afternoon of 19 March, when he and his wife consented to stand on the palace balcony while the corpses of those insurgents who had fallen during the night’s fighting were carried across the square laid out on doors and pieces of wood, decorated with leaves, their clothes peeled back to reveal the wounds struck by shot, shrapnel and bayonet. The king happened to be wearing his military cap; ‘Hat off!’ roared an elderly man near the front of the crowd. The monarch doffed his cap and bowed his head. ‘The only thing missing now is the guillotine,’ murmured Queen Elisabeth, white with horror. It was a traumatic ritual humiliation.
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And yet within days the king began to inhabit his new role with a certain gusto. On the morning of 21 March, after placards had appeared in the city calling upon him to take up the cause of the German national movement, Frederick William announced that he had decided to support the formation of an all-German parliament. He then engaged in a spectacular public relations exercise. Mounting his horse in the palace courtyard, he rode out into the city behind a civil guardsman carrying the German tricolour, much to the surprise and horror of his courtiers. The little procession moved slowly through packed and cheering crowds, stopping here and there so that the monarch could deliver short impromptu speeches expressing his support for the German national cause.
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Four days later, the king travelled out to Potsdam to see the commanders of the army, still furious over their removal from Berlin. ‘I have come to speak to you,’ he told the assembled officers, ‘in order to prove to the Berliners that they need expect no reactionary strike from Potsdam.’ The climax came with the king’s extraordinary declaration that he had ‘never felt freer or more secure than under the protection of his citizens’.
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According to one eyewitness, Otto von Bismarck, these words were greeted by ‘a murmuring and clattering of sabre-scabbards such as a king of Prussia in the midst of his officers has never heard and will hopefully never hear again’.
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Few episodes convey more succinctly than this one the complexity of the king’s position in the early days of the revolution. He suspected – rightly, as it turns out – that reactionary conspiracies were beginning to circulate among his alienated commanders and he intended to nip these in the bud by securing a renewed assurance of their loyalty to his person.
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But the meeting also had a broader public function: texts of the king’s address were published almost immediately in the
Vossische
and the
Allgemeine Preussische Zeitung
in Berlin with a view to assuring the city that the king had separated himself (at least for now) from his military, that his commitment to the revolution was genuine.

Over the next few weeks, a new political order began to unfold in Prussia. On 29 March, the distinguished Rhenish businessman Ludolf Camphausen, a leading liberal at the United Diet of 1847, was appointed prime minister. The new cabinet included as finance minister the liberal Rhenish entrepreneur and provincial delegate David Hansemann. Within a few days of its opening session at the beginning of April, the
Second United Diet passed a law providing for elections to a constituent Prussian National Assembly. The franchise was indirect – the voters elected a college of electors, who in turn voted for deputies. Otherwise it was a remarkably progressive arrangement: all adult males were eligible to vote, providing they had resided in the same place for at least six months and were not receiving poor relief. The May elections returned a predominantly liberal and left-liberal assembly. About a sixth of the deputies were artisans and peasants – a higher proportion than could be found in the Frankfurt or Viennese revolutionary assemblies. Conservatives were few and far between; only 7 per cent of the deputies in the new National Assembly were landowners.
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The assembly was correspondingly robust in its handling of key symbolic issues. Over the summer and early autumn of 1848 it passed resolutions proposing narrower limits to the power of the monarchical executive, demanded the subordination of the army to the authority of the constitution and called for the abolition of seigneurial hunting rights without compensation – hunting policy was a potent weapon of class warfare.