A close
circle of heroes gathered round the chief or King,
and spread down to the lowest rank of the army
that gay love of daring, that spirit of the offensive,
which has remained the strength of the Prussian
army in all its great periods.
circle of heroes gathered round the chief or King,
and spread down to the lowest rank of the army
that gay love of daring, that spirit of the offensive,
which has remained the strength of the Prussian
army in all its great periods.
Treitschke - 1915 - Confessions of Frederick the Great
It re-
mained in its constitution-less confusion, Francis
of Lorraine ascended to the Imperial throne on the
death of Charles VII, and the old alliance between
Austria and the Catholic majority on the Imperial
Diet was renewed.
The solution of German dualism miscarried;
more hostile than ever, the parties in the Empire
separated. However, the King remained sure of
a lasting advantage: the position of Prussia as a
Great Power. He had saved the Bavarians from
downfall, had strengthened the forces of his
country by more than a third, had broken with a
bold stroke the long chain of Habsburg-Wettin
provinces which surrounded the Prussian State in
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? Frederick the Great 145
the south and east, and humiliated the proud
Kaiser-House for the first time before a prince of
Germany. For all his victories he had to thank
his own strength alone, and he met the old Powers
with such determined pride that Horatio Walpole
himself had to admit that this Prussian King had
now the scales of the balance of power in Europe
in his hands.
Saxony, Bavaria, Hanover, all the Central-
States, who had till this been contending with the
Crown of Prussia, had been for ever thrown into
the second line through the Silesian wars, and
high above the countless small rivalries which cleft
the Empire, rose the one question: Prussia or
Austria?
The question of Germany's future had taken
definite form. The King now looked down on the
tumult of the German (Imperial) States from a
clear elevation. He liked giving to offensive
demands the mocking answer, did one take him
perhaps for a Duke of Gotha or for a Rhine Prince ?
He played already to the small neighbours the r61e
of the well-meaning patron and protector, which
he had defined as the noble duty of the strong in
his Anti-Machiavellism, and already a small Prus-
sian Party gathered in the Reichstag, and the
North-German Courts let their princes serve in the
army of the King.
In the meantime, the new acquisition grew,
together with the Monarchy, surprisingly quickly ;
the State experienced for the first time on a wide
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? 146 The Life of
sphere those advantages and improvements which
it has since then preserved everywhere in German
and half-German countries. The fresh powers of
the modern world made their entry even into the
most neglected province, held down with temporal
and ecclesiastical oppression; the dominion of the
aristocracy was supplanted by monarchical bureau-
cracy, nepotism by strict justice, intolerance by
religious liberty, the deep soul-slumber of priestly
teaching by German educational systems ; the dull
servile peasant learned to hope for a morning again
and his King forbade him to kiss the robe of the
official, kneeling.
No other State in that century of struggles for
supremacy presented such many-sided, such dig-
nified problems. Only the peaceful work effected
by the government gave the conquest of Silesia
moral justification, and demonstrated that that
much-blamed hazardous enterprise had been a
German achievement. The glorious border-
country, already half flooded with foreign influ-
ences, was given back to the German nation
through the Prussian regime.
Silesia was the only one of the German-Austrian
hereditary countries where the policy of a single
faith could not boast of a full conquest. With
invincible tenacity, the Hght-hearted, gay German
race in the valleys of the Riesen Mountains resisted
the bloody deeds of the Lichtenstein dragoons as
they resisted the persuasive powers of the Jesuits.
The majority of the Germans remained true to the
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? Frederick the Great 147
Protestant faith; oppressed and neglected, robbed
of all its possessions, the Evangelical Church pro-
longed a miserable life; only the threats of the
Crown of Sweden provided them with the few
churches which remained to them, in addition to
the possession of various Gnadenkirchen. ^
The Catholic Poles of Upper Silesia and the
Czech colonists, whom the Imperial Court had called
into the country to battle against the German
heretics, were the supports of the Imperial domin-
ion. On the entry of the Prussian army, German
patriotism again lifted its head gladly. From the
Gnadenkirchen rang joyously the praise of the Lord,
Who had turned His face from them, and Who
now set up a banner for them. Under the protec-
tion of the Prussian religious toleration Pro-
testantism soon won back the consciousness of its
ecclesiastical superiority, Polish nationality lost
ground visibly, and after a few decades the Prus-
sian Silesians stood nearer in thought and customs
to their North-German neighbours than to the
Silesians on the other side of the frontier.
The Protestant conquerors left the Roman
Church in possession of the entire Evangelical
Church property, and while England forced the
Irish Catholics to support the Anglican State
Church by tithes, in Silesia the Protestant had,
as before, to pay taxes for the Catholic Church.
' Churches which Austria allowed the Protestants to build by
the treaty of Altranstadt or Friedenskirchen (1707) at Sagan,
Freistadt, Militsch, Landeshut, Teschen, and Hirschberg.
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? 148 The Life of
Nothing but the traitorous intrigues of the Roman
clergy during the Seven- Years' War made it neces-
sary for the King to withdraw this excessive
indulgence, which led to injustice against the
Evangelicals; but even then the Catholic Church
remained more favourably placed than in any other
Protestant State.
The flourishing condition of the Silesian country
under the Prussian sceptre showed sufficiently that
the new province had found her natural master,
that the crisis in Eastern Germany had terminated
irrevocably. Still, the Court of Vienna was undis-
concerted and held firmly to the hope of avenging
the insult it had suffered, and of pushing down the
conqueror of Silesia once more into the motley
crowd of German Imperial provinces, like all the
other upstart States who before the rebellion had
presumed against the Imperial Power. King
Frederick knew, too, that the last and crucial
clash of arms was still imminent.
During the short years of peace he once tried
to exclude the son of Maria Theresa from the
Imperial dignity, in order to separate the House
of Austria from the Empire for the future. The
plan was frustrated by the opposition of the
Catholic Courts. The irreconcilable opposition of
the two leading powers of Germany decided for
a long time ahead the drift of European politics,
and drew from the Holy (Roman) Empire the last
spurt.
With anxious foreboding, the nation saw another
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? Frederick the Great 149
Thirty -Years' War on the horizon. What had
ripened in the quiet work of hard decades appeared
to the next generation merely as a wonderful
chance, as the happy adventure of an ingenious
brain. Outstanding among the diplomatic cor-
respondence of the period is the prophecy of the
Dane Bemstorff, who, in the year 1759, wrote
sadly to Choiseul: "Everything which you under-
take to-day to prevent the rise of an entirely
military Monarchy in the middle of Germany,
whose iron arm will soon crush the minor princes --
is all labour wasted! "
All the neighbouring Powers, both east and west,
bore a grudge against the lucky prince who alone
had carried off the great prize out of the confusion
of the War of the Austrian Succession, and truly,
not only the personal hate of mighty women wove
at the net of the great conspiracy which threatened
to draw together over Frederick's head. Europe
felt that the old traditional form of the Balance of
Power would totter as soon as the conquering
Great Power established itself in the middle of the
continent.
The Vatican saw with anxiety how the hated
home of the heretics received its liberty again ; only
through the intervention of Rome was it achieved
that those old enemies, the two great Catholic
Powers, Austria and France, united in contest
against Prussia. Its aim was to perpetuate the
impotence of Germany.
By a bold attack the King saved his kingdom
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? 150 The Life of
from certain ruin, and when he had for seven
terrible years defended his German State on the
Rhine and the Pregel, on the Peene and the Riesen
Mountains, against foreign and half -foreign armies,
and in peace had maintained the integrity of his
power down to the last village, Prussia seemed to
stand in exactly the same place as it had stood at
the beginning of the murderous struggle. He had
not won a yard of German soil, half the land lay
devastated, the rich results of three generations of
peaceful industry were almost annihilated, the
unlucky new mark^ had to begin the work of
rehabilitation from the beginning for the fourth
time.
Even the King himself could never think with-
out bitterness of those terrible days, when the
torture of every disaster which one man can bear,
almost beyond human endurance, was heaped on
his shoulders; what he suffered then appeared to
him as the wantonly malicious mood of a spiteful
providence, as a tragedy without justice or ter-
mination. For all that, there lurked a colossal
achievement in the sequel of the struggle which
seemed so unfruitful; -- the new order in Germany,
which, begun with the foundation of the Prussian
power, had stood the severest imaginable test, and
had proved an irrevocable necessity. A hundred
years before Germany was only able to resist the
dominion of the Habsburgs by the struggles of an
'The "Neumark" is a part of the Prussian Province of
Brandenburg.
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? Frederick the Great 151
entire generation, and then had ignominiously to
bribe foreign auxiliaries; now seven years sufficed
for the poorest provinces to repulse the attack of
a world in arms, and German might alone decided
the war, for the sole foreign Power which stood
at the side of the King faithlessly betrayed him. ^
Germany's star was again in the ascendant. The
text which went up exultingly from all Prussian
churches: "They have often oppressed me from
my youth up, but they have not overcome me,"
could be said of Germany.
At the beginning of the second campaign,
Frederick had cherished the proud hope of fighting
his Pharsalia against the House of Austria, and of
dictating peace before the walls of Vienna; at
that pregnant moment the birth of a great new
civilization in the distant future could be recog-
nized, and an alliance of Prussia with Austria's
other rival, with Piedmont, was already attempted.
Then the battle of KoUin threw the King back
on his defences : he had to struggle for the existence
of his State. His attempt to form an Opposition-
Reichstag, a North-German Union to oppose to
the Imperial tie, came to nothing through the
unconquerable jealousy of the small Courts, and
chiefly through the haughty reluctance of the
Guelph ally. For the abolition of German dualism,
for the rebuilding of the Empire, the hour had not
yet come; but through the frightful actuality of
this war the ancient and obsolete forms of the
^ England.
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? 152 The Life of
German community were morally annihilated, the
last veil torn away from the great lie of the Holy
(Roman) Empire.
So far no Kaiser had committed outrages against
the Fatherland in such an irresponsible way as this
Lorraine augmenter of the Empire, who opened all
the gates of Germany to foreign plunderers, de-
livered up the Netherlands to the Bourbons, and
the eastern provinces to the Muscovites. And
while the Kaiser trampled on his oath, and forfeited
every right of his House to the German crown, at
Regensburg the shameless farce of the Reichstag
and its criminal anathemas was played. The
Reichstag cried to the conqueror of Silesia its
Darnach hat Er, Kurfiirst, Sich zu richten ("Ac-
cording to that he, the Kurfiirst, must conform").
The Ambassador of Brandenburg threw the mes-
senger of the illustrious assembly downstairs; the
Imperial army gathered together hurriedly under
the flag of the Bourbon enemy of the Empire, to
scatter at once like chaff in the wind before Seyd-
litz's squadrons of cavalry. The German nation
celebrated with joyous exultation the victor of
Rossbach, the rebel against Empire and Emperor.
With this confused satyr-play the great tragedy
of the Imperial history was brought indeed to a
close; what was left of the old German com-
munity scarcely preserved even the semblance of
life.
But the conqueror who, in the thunder of battles,
had thrown overboard the old theocratic ideas,
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? Frederick the Great 153
was the protector of Protestantism. Exhausted
as the ecclesiastical rivalries appeared to the age
of enlightenment, Frederick recognized that the
permanency of the Westphalian Peace, the equaUty
of the creeds in the Empire, would not be main-
tainable when once the two great CathoHc Powers
triumphed; the common Protestant cause offered
him the only handle to force the faint-hearted
minor princes into war against Austria.
Watchfully his eye followed the intrigues of the
priesthood at the Protestant courts; his authority
protected the freedom of the Evangelical Church
in Wiirttemberg and Hesse, when the successors
to their thrones went over to the Roman faith;
and more clearly than he himself, his minor North-
German allies recognized the religious significance
of the war ; in the letters of the Hessian Minister,
F. A. von Hardenberg, the allies of Prussia were
called simply "the Evangelical provinces," and
faithful adherence to the Prussian party was held
up as the natural attitude of all the Protestant
States of the Empire.
Chanting his Lutheran hymns, the Prussian
grenadier went out to battle; the Evangelical
soldiers of the Swabian district ran away cursing,
because they would not fight against their co-
religionists; in the conventicles of the English
Dissenters pious preachers prayed for the Macca-
beus of Evangelism, the Free-thinker Frederick.
The Pope presented the field-marshal of the Em-
press with a consecrated hat and sword, and every
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? 154 The Life of
new report of victory from the Prussian camp
called up a storm of indignation and fear in the
Vatican.
A hundred and twenty years before, the Protest-
ant world had lain at the feet of Rome, as if
crushed and destroyed, when the flags of Wallen-
stein's army waved on the shores of the Baltic,
and the Stuarts endeavoured to subject their
Parliament to their Roman influences. Now a
great Protestant Power gave the last blow to the
Holy (Roman) Empire, and through the wars on
the Ohio and the Ganges it was decided once for
all that sea and colonial power should belong to
the Protestant and Germanic races.
The struggle for Prussia's existence was the
first European war; it created the unity of the
new association of States, and gave it the aristo-
cratic form of the Pentarchy. When the new
great Central-European Power extorted the recog-
nition of the neighbouring Powers, the two old
political systems of the east and west melted into
one inseparable community ; and at the same time
the less powerful States, which occasionally before,
through their entering into a coalition, had turned
the scale in a great battle, but now could no
longer meet the heavy demands of the new grandi-
ose scale of war, sank in position.
The States of the second rank decided to leave
the control of European affairs to the great naval
and military Powers for the future. Among these
five leading Powers were two Protestant and one
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? Frederick the Great 155
schismatic; that Europe should fall back under
the domination of the Crowned Priest (the Pope)
was unthinkable from now on. The establishment
of the great German Protestant Power was the
heaviest defeat which the Roman Curia had suf-
fered since the appearance of Martin Luther ; King
Frederick had truly, as the English Ambassador
Mitchell said, fought for the freedom of the human
race.
From the school of sufferings and struggles there
sprang for the Prussian people a living sense of
nationality : it justified the King in talking of his
nation Prussienne. To be a Prussian had up to
this been a stern duty : it was now an honour.
The thought of the State, the Fatherland, forced
its way, exciting and nerving, into millions of
hearts; even the crushed soul of the poor felt a
breath of the antique sense of citizenship which
emanated from the simple words of the King: "It
is not necessary that I should live, but very ne-
cessary that I should do my duty and fight for
my Fatherland. " Everywhere in Prussia, under
the stiff forms of an absolute monarchy, stirred
the spirit of sacrifice and the great passion of the
national war.
The army which had been victorious in Fred-
erick's last battles was national; recruiting in
foreign countries was in the nature of things
impossible in the catastrophes of the period. The
provincial estates voluntarily equipped those regi-
ments which had saved the fortresses of Magde-
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? 156 The Life of
burg, Stettin, and Kiistrin for the State; the
Pomeranian seamen banded together to defend
with their small navy the mouths of the Oder
against the Swedes. For six years the officials,
poor as church-mice, received no pay, and yet
quietly discharged their duties as if it were an
understood thing.
Emulously all the provinces rivalled each other
in carrying out their "damned duty," as the
Prussian " phrase ran {ihre verfluchte Pflicht und
Schuldigkeit) ; from the gallant peasant of the
Rhenish county of Mors to the unhappy East-
Prussians, who with quiet tenacious opposition
had stood firm against the Russian conqueror, and
would not be disturbed in their determined faith-
fulness when the inexorable King accused them of
falling-off and overwhelmed them with manifesta-
tions of his displeasure.
The educational power of war awakened again
in these North-German races above all that rough
pride, which once inspirited the invaders of Italy
(Romfahrer) and the conquerors of the Slavs in
the Middle Ages. The alert self-reliance of the
Prussians contrasted strongly with the inoffensive,
kindly modesty of the other Germans. Graf
Hertzberg confidently refuted the doctrine of
Montesquieu on the virtues of republicanism:
where in republicanism had there flourished a
stauncher public spirit than here, under the bracing
northern sky, among the descendants of those
heroic nations, the Vandals and the Goths, who
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? Frederick the Great 157
had once shattered the Roman Empire? The
same spirit existed in the mass of the people; it
was betrayed now in confident bragging, in the
thousand satirical anecdotes of Austrian stupidity
and Prussian Hussar strategies current, now in
pathetic stories of conscientious fidelity.
The young sailor Joachim Nettelbeck comes to
Danzig, and is hired to row the King of Poland
across the harbour; someone claps a hat on his
head with the monogram of King Augustus; for
a long time he resists, for it seems to him a betrayal
of his Prussian King to wear the badge of a foreign
sovereign; at last he has to submit, but the earned
ducat burns in his hand, and as soon as he gets
home to Pomerania he presents the ill-gotten
money to the first Prussian invalid who crosses
his path. So susceptible has the political pride in
this nation become, which a few decades before
was demoralized by its domestic troubles.
It was not to be forgotten that to the two great
princes of war, to C^sar and Alexander, from now
onwards a Prussian was associated as third. In
the character of the North-German, tmited to a
tough perseverance, there is a strain of high-
spirited light-heartedness, which loves to play
with danger, and the Prussians found this charac-
teristic of theirs again in the General Frederick,
raised to the pitch of genius: when he, after a
hard apprenticeship, ripened rapidly into the
master, threw aside the cautious rules of the old
ponderous science of war, and even to the enemy
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? 158 The Life of
"dictated the precepts of war," being always
ready to seek the decision in open battle; when
he again raised the sharpest weapon, cavalry, to
that place which was due to it in great battles;
when he after every victory, and after each of
his three defeats, always maintained anew "the
prerogative of the initiative. "
The successful results show how well the King
and his people understood one another.
A close
circle of heroes gathered round the chief or King,
and spread down to the lowest rank of the army
that gay love of daring, that spirit of the offensive,
which has remained the strength of the Prussian
army in all its great periods.
From the provincial nobles and Pomeranian
peasants Frederick drew the feared Ansbach-
Baireuth Dragoons and the Zieten Hussars, who
soon surpassed the wild-riding races of Hungary in
their mad dash and their spirited charges. With
pride the King said that with such soldiers there
was no risk : " A general who in other armies would
be considered foolhardy, is considered by us only
as doing his duty ! " The twelve campaigns of the
Frederician period have given the Prussian people
and army the martial spirit as their characteristic
spirit for ever. Even to-day, when the conversa-
tion turns to war the North-German falls invol-
untarily into the expressions of those heroic days,
and speaks, as did Frederick, of "brilHant cam-
paigns" and "fulminant attacks. "
The good-hearted kindliness of the Germans
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? Frederick the Great 159
outside Prussia needed a long time to overcome
its aversion to the hard realism of this Frederician
theory, which so ungenerously attacked its enemy
when it was least welcome. But when the great
year of 1757 swept over the German nation, when
victorious attack and heavy defeat, new daring
recovery and new glowing victory crowded in
bewildering haste, and when always from the wild
flight of events stood out the picture of the King,
uniformly great and commanding, the people
felt themselves gripped heart and soul, and
were staggered at this vision of sheer human
greatness.
The hard, weather-beaten figure of old Fritz,
as the blows of an inexorable Fate had forged it,
exercised its irresistible witchery on countless
faithful souls, who had regarded the dazzling figure
of the youthful Hero of Hohenfriedberg only with
awe. The Germans were, as Goethe said of his
Frankfurters, Fritz-mad (Fritzishgesinnt) -- ' ' For
what did Prussia matter to us? " -- and watched
with bated breath as the untamable man, year-
out, year-in, warded off destruction. That over-
whelming union of unmixed joy and love which
occasionally illuminates the history of happier
nations with a golden light, was, it is true, still
denied to rent Germany.
As Luther and Gustavus Adolphus, the only
two heroes before that whose pictures had im-
pressed themselves indelibly on the hearts of our
nation, so Frederick was feared in the episcopal
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? i6o The Life of
lands ^ of the Rhine and the Main as the great
enemy. But the vast majority of Protestants,
and wide circles of the Catholic people, and, above
all, certain leaders of the new learning and poetry,
followed him with warm sympathy ; people caught
at his witticisms, and told marvel after marvel
of his grenadiers and hussars. The heart of the
previously so humble race swelled at the thought
that the first man of the century was ours, that the
fame of the King sounded as far as Morocco and
America.
So far few knew that the Prussian battle-fame
was only the ancient military glory of the German
nation come to light again ; even Lessing occasion-
ally spoke of the Prussians as of a half-foreign
nation, and remarked with astonishment that hero-
ism seemed as born in them as in the Spartans.
Gradually even the masses began to feel that
Frederick fought for Germany. The battle of
Rossbach, the hataille en douceur, as he called it
mockingly, was the richest in results for our
national life of his victories.
If in this domesticated race there still lived a
political emotion, it was a silent animosity against
French arrogance, which, so often chastised with
the German sword, had always in the end remained
in possession of the field, and was once again
covering the Rhine-lands with blood and ruin.
Now Frederick's good sword met it, and struck it
down in a pool of shame; a shout of exultation
* In German, crooked-staff lands {Krummstabslande).
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? Frederick the Great i6i
rang through all the German provinces, and the
Swabian Schubart cried: Da griff ich ungestilm
die goldene Harfe, darein zu stUrmen Friedrichs
Lob ("Impetuously I seize the golden harp, to
make it storm Frederick's praise").
For the first time in history the Germans in the
Empire succumbed to a feeling like national pride,
and they sang with old Gleim: Lasst uns Deut-
sche sein und hleihen! ("Let us be and remain
Germans. ") The French officers returning from
the German battle-fields proclaimed naively in
Paris itself the praise of the victor of Rossbach,
since their pride could not yet imagine it possi-
ble that this little Prussia could ever seriously
threaten the power of France; in German come-
dies, however, the once-feared Frenchman now
filled the role either of the butt or the] vain
adventurer.
A political understanding of the character of
the Prussian State had not, it is true, come to
the nation even yet; this learned people lived in
a wonderful ignorance of the deciding factors of
its modern history as well as of the institutions of
its mightiest State-organization.
If the victories of Frederick had somewhat
appeased the old hatred against Prussia, even in
the Protestant provinces of the Empire every
citizen congratulated himself if he was not a
Prussian. The industrious fictions of the Austrian
party found willing listeners everywhere. "This
free people," Frederick Nicolai wrote in the year
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? i62 The Life of
1780 from Swabia, "look down on us poor Branden-
burgers as slaves. "
The force of the mighty State appealed only to
strong and ambitious natures. From the begin-
ning of the Frederician period a distinguished
phalanx of the brilliant young men of the Empire
had begun to enter into the Prussian service;
some were impelled by their amazement at the
King, others by the longing for exuberant activity,
and some had a vague presentiment of the destinies
of this Monarchy.
It had now fully outgrown the narrow-minded-
ness of provincial life and spontaneously absorbed
all the healthy elements in the Empire, and found
in the ranks of the immigrants many of her most
faithful and capable servants, also her deliverer,
the Freiherr Karl von Stein.
With the Peace of Hubertusburg there dawned
for the North-Germans four decades of deep peace ;
that richly blessed time of peace, of which old
Goethe afterwards thought so often with gratitude.
At that time the old tradition of Prussia's
poverty gradually became a fable. Social life,
particularly in the capital, took on richer and freer
forms, the national prosperity received a surprising
impetus, German poetry entered on her great
period. The war had at once simplified and ren-
dered more difficult the position of the Empire.
Of the old order there was nothing left but the
still unsolved opposition of the two Great Powers.
A presentiment of a difficult decision went through
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? Frederick the Great 163
the German world ; the minor Courts discussed in
energetic conferences as to how they should protect
themselves by forming an alliance of the minor
Powers, in case another encounter of the "two
German Colossi" threaten to crush them. But
King Frederick, thoroughly aware of the infinite
power of the inertia in this old Empire, resigned
himself to recuperating the exhausted strength of
his own State; his German policy for the future
had for its only aim to keep out of the Empire
every influence of foreign Powers and to balance
the power of Austria.
A great danger which threatened the German
Power from the east snatched him from his peace-
ful plans. The Polish Republic had been since
the war subject to the will of the Czarina; the
formal union of the shattered State with the
Russian Empire appeared to be only a question
of time.
Then the idea of the division of Poland, which
crossed the designs of the Russians and set bound-
aries to their ambitions, dawned on Frederick.
It was a victory of German policy, at once over
the grabbing land-greed of Russia, and over the
Western Powers, who were pushed aside regard-
lessly by the boldly advancing Powers of the East.
The necessary act, it is true, opened up to view
immeasurable complications, since the decayed
Empire of the Sarmatian aristocracy was now
irretrievably approaching its downfall; but it was
necessary, it saved faithful East Prussia fronj
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? 1 64 The Life of
the return of Muscovite government, and ensured
for the State the bridge between the lands of the
Pregel and the Oder, which the Crown-Prince
Frederick had already recognized as indispensable.
The King appeared for the second time as the
increaser of the Empire; he gave back again to
the Greater Fatherland the stronghold of the
dominions of the Teutonic order, the lovely
Weichsel valley, which in days of yore the German
knight wrested from the barbarians, the German
peasant from the wrath of the elements.
When the provinces of West Prussia "swore
allegiance to the restored government" -- as the
festival medal of the oath of allegiance says
significantly -- in the refectory of the Grand
Master's castle at Marienburg, the outrages upon
this German land, three hundred years ago, from
the arrogance of the Poles and the treachery of
the provincial authorities, were expiated. The
five hundred years' war between the Germans and
the Poles for the possession of the Baltic coast was
decided in favour of Germany.
Then the State, itself still bleeding from the
wounds of the last war, began the hard work of
peaceful re-conquest. The Sarmatian nobility had
committed horrible outrages in the Weichsel dis-
trict, with that insolent disregard of the rights of
others and the nationality of others which dis-
tinguishes the Poles above all the nations of
Europe.
The new sovereign had to rule with more vigour
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? Frederick the Great 165
than before in Silesia to bring the German character
back to honour in the famous old cities of German
glory and industry, in Thorn, Culm, and Marien-
burg, and to introduce again the rudiments of
agriculture in the devastated land. And as once
the first German conquerors wrested corn-lands
from the marshes, so now out of the swamps, near
the rising town of Bromberg, rose the busy Netze
district, the creation of the second conqueror.
Frederick himself surmised only vaguely what
the re-acquisition of the country of the Teutonic
Knights meant in the great continuity of German
history; but the nation had become quite unfa-
miliar with their own history -- they scarcely knew
that these districts had once been German. Some
cursed with the harsh arrogance of a censor the
ambiguous diplomatic moves which had paved the
way for the partition of the country; others
repeated credulously what Poland's old confeder-
ates, the French, invented to stigmatize the parti-
tioning Powers; the majority remained cold, and
fortified themselves anew with the current idea
that old Fritz had the devil in him {dass der alte
Fritz den Teufel im Leib habe) . For the new bene-
fit which he had conferred on our people, not one
person in the Empire thanked him.
The restless ambition of Kaiser Joseph II led
the King back at the eve of his life to the idea
of the Imperial poHcy which occupied his youth.
The Court of Vienna gave up the appearance of
Conservatism, which alone could ensure for the
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? 1 66 The Life of
Kaiser-House respect in the Empire, and endeav-
oured to compensate itself for the loss of Silesia
in Bavaria. The whole course of Austrian history
for two hundred years, the continually growing
separation between the Imperial State and the
Empire, was to be pulled up all at once by an
adventurous invasion. Then King Frederick for
the second time concluded his alliance with the
Wittelsbachs, and with the sword prohibited the
House of Austria from extending its power on
German soil; more sharply and clearly than ever
before the opposition of the two rivals came to
light.
The War of the Bavarian Succession showed in
its plan of campaign, as in its political aims, sur-
prising resemblances to the deciding war of 1 866,
but Prussia did not draw the sword to free Ger-
many from the dominion of Austria, as it did three
generations later, but only to ward off Austrian
encroachments and for the preservation of the
status quo. Although the ageing hero no longer
possessed the dash to carry out his plan of cam-
paign on so large a scale as he had planned,
Prussia's power proved itself strong enough to
force the Court of Vienna to yield without any
glowing military success. Bavaria was saved for
the second time; the arrogant Imperial Court had
to submit to "plead before the Tribunal of Berlin, "
and the embittered Prince Kaunitz made that
prophecy which was to be fulfilled on the field of
Koniggratz, although not in the sense that the
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? Frederick the Great 167
prophet meant, that if ever the swords of Austria
and Prussia clashed together again, they would
not be retiirned to their sheaths until "the decision
had fallen definitely, completely, and irrevocably. "
Almost more valuable than the immediate result
was the enormous revulsion of opinion in the
Empire. The dreaded disturber of peace, the re-
bel against Emperor and Empire, now appeared
to the nation as the wise shelterer of right; the
small Courts, which had so often trembled before
the Prussian sword, scared by Kaiser Joseph's
restless plans, looked for help to the arbitrator at
Sans Souci. In the peasant farms of the Bavarian
Alps hung the picture of the old man with his
three-cornered hat beside the national (Bavarian)
Saint Corbinian. In the chorus of Swabian and
North-German poets, who told of the fame of the
King, mingled already isolated voices of the deeply
hostile electorate of Saxony; the bard Ringulph
sang in enraptured odes how "from the breast of
the Almighty, ICing Frederick, your great battle-
lusting spirit came. "
Only a short while before had K. F. Moser
avowed that the vision of man was not capable of
following this eagle in its loftiness, that perhaps
hereafter there would appear a Newton of political
science, capable of measuring the orbit of the
Frederician policy. But now the Germans began
to feel that this mysterious policy was wonderfully
simple at bottom, that the Statesman Frederick,
divested of every hatred, every love, quasi-im-
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? i68 The Life of
personal, always desired only what the clearly
recognized position of his State demanded.
When the rebellion broke out in North America,
and the civilized world hailed the new sun which
was rising in the West, Frederick did not conceal
his joy. His own youthful Great Power was a
new State, which had entered the circle of the old
Powers with welcome; it did him good to see
England, which had so shamefully betrayed him
in the last war, and had then impeded him during
the Polish negotiations in the acquisition of Dan-
zig, now in painful embarrassment. He declared
openly that he would not defend Hanover for
ungrateful England a second time: he even once
forbade the passage through his dominions of the
English mercenaries, bought in Germany, because
he was revolted by this sordid traffic in human
beings, and still more because he needed the young
men of the Empire for his own army.
He made use of the distress of the Ocean-Queen
to preserve the naval rights of the smaller Powers
by an alliance of armed neutrality; after the
peace, he, first among the European princes, con-
cluded a commercial treaty with the young Re-
public, and in it acknowledged that free, human
comprehension of international law which has
since then remained a faithfully preserved tradition
of the Prussian State. But neither his hate of
the "God-damn Government," nor the boundless
popularity which saluted him in the (American)
colonies, ever moved him to go one step beyond
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? Frederick the Great 169
the interests of his State. His old enemy Kaunitz
still could explain the proud course of the Fred-
erician policy only as springing from the im-
measurable cunning of a demoniacal nature.
But in the Empire the old mistrust gradually
disappeared; its people observed that nowhere
were their affairs weighed so soberly, so exactly,
so watchfully, and so coldly as in the hermitage of
Sans Souci.
So the impossible happened -- the high nobility
of the Empire gathered round Frederick's flag of
its own free will. Kaiser Joseph resumed his
Bavarian plans -- to shatter Prussia's power, as he
himself admitted. He at the same time threatened
the stability of his ecclesiastical neighbours with
rash thoughts of secularization. A sudden terror
gripped the small States when they saw their
natural protector become an enemy; an alliance
of the Central Powers was discussed, a league of
the ecclesiastical princes, until at last the acknow-
ledgment was forced that nothing could be done
without Prussia's help.
With youthful zeal the old King entered into
the quarrel. All the alluring proposals which were
put forward that he should share the possession of
Germany with the Emperor he rejected as bait
for "the common greed. " He conquered his
contempt for the minor princes, and realized that
only through strict justice could he attach these
people to himself. He succeeded in winning the
great majority of the electors, and most of the
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? 170 The Life of
more powerful princes, for his German Princes*
Bund, and in maintaining the old Imperial Con-
stitutions and the status quo of the Imperial States
against the Kaiser.
"Only the love of my Fatherland, and the duty
of a good citizen," he wrote, "drive me at my
age to this undertaking. " What he had dreamt
in his youth had an even more brilliant fulfilment
for the patriarch: no longer hidden behind a
Bavarian shadow-Emperor, as in the Silesian wars,
but in the face of the whole world, the King of
Prussia now came into the arena as the protector
of Germany. All the neighboiu-ing Powers, who
counted on Germany's weakness, saw the unex-
pected turn of the Imperial policy with grave
anxiety. France and Russia approached the Court
of Vienna; the Alliance of 1756 bade fair to be
renewed. The Tiu*in Cabinet, on the contrary,
hailed the Princes' Bund with joy as "the tutelary
god of the Italian States. "
For two hundred years the policy of federalism
in the Empire had not got beyond a half start;
but now that it leaned on the power of Prussia
it suddenly won a large following. The memory
of the times of Maximilian I and the Elector
Berthold's attempts at reform rose again to the
surface. The Princes' Bimd was formed to up-
hold the Imperial theocratic Germany. But if it
lasted, if Prussia maintained her position of leader
at the head of the great Imperial States, the old
forms of the Imperial Diet had to lose their mean-
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? Frederick the Great 171
ing; the prospect was opened up of shattering the
Austrian system to its foundations, and as Graf
Hertzberg joyfully proclaimed, of excluding the
Archdukes from the great German institutions, of
transferring the Imperial Crown to another house at
the next election, and of placing the guidance of the
Empire in the hands of the most powerful States.
The young Karl August of Weimar proposed to
submit the old privileges which ensured the House
of Austria its unique position to an Imperial test.
It almost seemed as if the great problem of Ger-
many's future would be solved in peace. But the
Princes' Bund could not last; and this bitter truth
was hidden least of all from the common-sensible
mind of the old King. Only a series of chance
circumstances, only the defection of Kaiser Joseph
from the old approved traditions of Austrian state-
craft, had scared the minor princes into Frederick's
arms; their trust of Prussia went no further than
their fear of Austria. With the utmost reluctance
the Electorate of Saxony submitted to the guidance
of the younger and less aristocratic House of
Brandenburg; Hanover showed itself hardly less
mistrustful; even the humblest and weakest of
the allied States, Weimar and Dessau, secretly
discussed, so Goethe tells us, how they could
protect themselves against their Prussian pro-
tector's lust of power.
As soon as the Hofburg (the Court of Vienna)
dropped their covetous plans, the old natural
formation of parties must revive ; the ecclesiastical
?
mained in its constitution-less confusion, Francis
of Lorraine ascended to the Imperial throne on the
death of Charles VII, and the old alliance between
Austria and the Catholic majority on the Imperial
Diet was renewed.
The solution of German dualism miscarried;
more hostile than ever, the parties in the Empire
separated. However, the King remained sure of
a lasting advantage: the position of Prussia as a
Great Power. He had saved the Bavarians from
downfall, had strengthened the forces of his
country by more than a third, had broken with a
bold stroke the long chain of Habsburg-Wettin
provinces which surrounded the Prussian State in
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? Frederick the Great 145
the south and east, and humiliated the proud
Kaiser-House for the first time before a prince of
Germany. For all his victories he had to thank
his own strength alone, and he met the old Powers
with such determined pride that Horatio Walpole
himself had to admit that this Prussian King had
now the scales of the balance of power in Europe
in his hands.
Saxony, Bavaria, Hanover, all the Central-
States, who had till this been contending with the
Crown of Prussia, had been for ever thrown into
the second line through the Silesian wars, and
high above the countless small rivalries which cleft
the Empire, rose the one question: Prussia or
Austria?
The question of Germany's future had taken
definite form. The King now looked down on the
tumult of the German (Imperial) States from a
clear elevation. He liked giving to offensive
demands the mocking answer, did one take him
perhaps for a Duke of Gotha or for a Rhine Prince ?
He played already to the small neighbours the r61e
of the well-meaning patron and protector, which
he had defined as the noble duty of the strong in
his Anti-Machiavellism, and already a small Prus-
sian Party gathered in the Reichstag, and the
North-German Courts let their princes serve in the
army of the King.
In the meantime, the new acquisition grew,
together with the Monarchy, surprisingly quickly ;
the State experienced for the first time on a wide
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? 146 The Life of
sphere those advantages and improvements which
it has since then preserved everywhere in German
and half-German countries. The fresh powers of
the modern world made their entry even into the
most neglected province, held down with temporal
and ecclesiastical oppression; the dominion of the
aristocracy was supplanted by monarchical bureau-
cracy, nepotism by strict justice, intolerance by
religious liberty, the deep soul-slumber of priestly
teaching by German educational systems ; the dull
servile peasant learned to hope for a morning again
and his King forbade him to kiss the robe of the
official, kneeling.
No other State in that century of struggles for
supremacy presented such many-sided, such dig-
nified problems. Only the peaceful work effected
by the government gave the conquest of Silesia
moral justification, and demonstrated that that
much-blamed hazardous enterprise had been a
German achievement. The glorious border-
country, already half flooded with foreign influ-
ences, was given back to the German nation
through the Prussian regime.
Silesia was the only one of the German-Austrian
hereditary countries where the policy of a single
faith could not boast of a full conquest. With
invincible tenacity, the Hght-hearted, gay German
race in the valleys of the Riesen Mountains resisted
the bloody deeds of the Lichtenstein dragoons as
they resisted the persuasive powers of the Jesuits.
The majority of the Germans remained true to the
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? Frederick the Great 147
Protestant faith; oppressed and neglected, robbed
of all its possessions, the Evangelical Church pro-
longed a miserable life; only the threats of the
Crown of Sweden provided them with the few
churches which remained to them, in addition to
the possession of various Gnadenkirchen. ^
The Catholic Poles of Upper Silesia and the
Czech colonists, whom the Imperial Court had called
into the country to battle against the German
heretics, were the supports of the Imperial domin-
ion. On the entry of the Prussian army, German
patriotism again lifted its head gladly. From the
Gnadenkirchen rang joyously the praise of the Lord,
Who had turned His face from them, and Who
now set up a banner for them. Under the protec-
tion of the Prussian religious toleration Pro-
testantism soon won back the consciousness of its
ecclesiastical superiority, Polish nationality lost
ground visibly, and after a few decades the Prus-
sian Silesians stood nearer in thought and customs
to their North-German neighbours than to the
Silesians on the other side of the frontier.
The Protestant conquerors left the Roman
Church in possession of the entire Evangelical
Church property, and while England forced the
Irish Catholics to support the Anglican State
Church by tithes, in Silesia the Protestant had,
as before, to pay taxes for the Catholic Church.
' Churches which Austria allowed the Protestants to build by
the treaty of Altranstadt or Friedenskirchen (1707) at Sagan,
Freistadt, Militsch, Landeshut, Teschen, and Hirschberg.
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? 148 The Life of
Nothing but the traitorous intrigues of the Roman
clergy during the Seven- Years' War made it neces-
sary for the King to withdraw this excessive
indulgence, which led to injustice against the
Evangelicals; but even then the Catholic Church
remained more favourably placed than in any other
Protestant State.
The flourishing condition of the Silesian country
under the Prussian sceptre showed sufficiently that
the new province had found her natural master,
that the crisis in Eastern Germany had terminated
irrevocably. Still, the Court of Vienna was undis-
concerted and held firmly to the hope of avenging
the insult it had suffered, and of pushing down the
conqueror of Silesia once more into the motley
crowd of German Imperial provinces, like all the
other upstart States who before the rebellion had
presumed against the Imperial Power. King
Frederick knew, too, that the last and crucial
clash of arms was still imminent.
During the short years of peace he once tried
to exclude the son of Maria Theresa from the
Imperial dignity, in order to separate the House
of Austria from the Empire for the future. The
plan was frustrated by the opposition of the
Catholic Courts. The irreconcilable opposition of
the two leading powers of Germany decided for
a long time ahead the drift of European politics,
and drew from the Holy (Roman) Empire the last
spurt.
With anxious foreboding, the nation saw another
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? Frederick the Great 149
Thirty -Years' War on the horizon. What had
ripened in the quiet work of hard decades appeared
to the next generation merely as a wonderful
chance, as the happy adventure of an ingenious
brain. Outstanding among the diplomatic cor-
respondence of the period is the prophecy of the
Dane Bemstorff, who, in the year 1759, wrote
sadly to Choiseul: "Everything which you under-
take to-day to prevent the rise of an entirely
military Monarchy in the middle of Germany,
whose iron arm will soon crush the minor princes --
is all labour wasted! "
All the neighbouring Powers, both east and west,
bore a grudge against the lucky prince who alone
had carried off the great prize out of the confusion
of the War of the Austrian Succession, and truly,
not only the personal hate of mighty women wove
at the net of the great conspiracy which threatened
to draw together over Frederick's head. Europe
felt that the old traditional form of the Balance of
Power would totter as soon as the conquering
Great Power established itself in the middle of the
continent.
The Vatican saw with anxiety how the hated
home of the heretics received its liberty again ; only
through the intervention of Rome was it achieved
that those old enemies, the two great Catholic
Powers, Austria and France, united in contest
against Prussia. Its aim was to perpetuate the
impotence of Germany.
By a bold attack the King saved his kingdom
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? 150 The Life of
from certain ruin, and when he had for seven
terrible years defended his German State on the
Rhine and the Pregel, on the Peene and the Riesen
Mountains, against foreign and half -foreign armies,
and in peace had maintained the integrity of his
power down to the last village, Prussia seemed to
stand in exactly the same place as it had stood at
the beginning of the murderous struggle. He had
not won a yard of German soil, half the land lay
devastated, the rich results of three generations of
peaceful industry were almost annihilated, the
unlucky new mark^ had to begin the work of
rehabilitation from the beginning for the fourth
time.
Even the King himself could never think with-
out bitterness of those terrible days, when the
torture of every disaster which one man can bear,
almost beyond human endurance, was heaped on
his shoulders; what he suffered then appeared to
him as the wantonly malicious mood of a spiteful
providence, as a tragedy without justice or ter-
mination. For all that, there lurked a colossal
achievement in the sequel of the struggle which
seemed so unfruitful; -- the new order in Germany,
which, begun with the foundation of the Prussian
power, had stood the severest imaginable test, and
had proved an irrevocable necessity. A hundred
years before Germany was only able to resist the
dominion of the Habsburgs by the struggles of an
'The "Neumark" is a part of the Prussian Province of
Brandenburg.
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? Frederick the Great 151
entire generation, and then had ignominiously to
bribe foreign auxiliaries; now seven years sufficed
for the poorest provinces to repulse the attack of
a world in arms, and German might alone decided
the war, for the sole foreign Power which stood
at the side of the King faithlessly betrayed him. ^
Germany's star was again in the ascendant. The
text which went up exultingly from all Prussian
churches: "They have often oppressed me from
my youth up, but they have not overcome me,"
could be said of Germany.
At the beginning of the second campaign,
Frederick had cherished the proud hope of fighting
his Pharsalia against the House of Austria, and of
dictating peace before the walls of Vienna; at
that pregnant moment the birth of a great new
civilization in the distant future could be recog-
nized, and an alliance of Prussia with Austria's
other rival, with Piedmont, was already attempted.
Then the battle of KoUin threw the King back
on his defences : he had to struggle for the existence
of his State. His attempt to form an Opposition-
Reichstag, a North-German Union to oppose to
the Imperial tie, came to nothing through the
unconquerable jealousy of the small Courts, and
chiefly through the haughty reluctance of the
Guelph ally. For the abolition of German dualism,
for the rebuilding of the Empire, the hour had not
yet come; but through the frightful actuality of
this war the ancient and obsolete forms of the
^ England.
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? 152 The Life of
German community were morally annihilated, the
last veil torn away from the great lie of the Holy
(Roman) Empire.
So far no Kaiser had committed outrages against
the Fatherland in such an irresponsible way as this
Lorraine augmenter of the Empire, who opened all
the gates of Germany to foreign plunderers, de-
livered up the Netherlands to the Bourbons, and
the eastern provinces to the Muscovites. And
while the Kaiser trampled on his oath, and forfeited
every right of his House to the German crown, at
Regensburg the shameless farce of the Reichstag
and its criminal anathemas was played. The
Reichstag cried to the conqueror of Silesia its
Darnach hat Er, Kurfiirst, Sich zu richten ("Ac-
cording to that he, the Kurfiirst, must conform").
The Ambassador of Brandenburg threw the mes-
senger of the illustrious assembly downstairs; the
Imperial army gathered together hurriedly under
the flag of the Bourbon enemy of the Empire, to
scatter at once like chaff in the wind before Seyd-
litz's squadrons of cavalry. The German nation
celebrated with joyous exultation the victor of
Rossbach, the rebel against Empire and Emperor.
With this confused satyr-play the great tragedy
of the Imperial history was brought indeed to a
close; what was left of the old German com-
munity scarcely preserved even the semblance of
life.
But the conqueror who, in the thunder of battles,
had thrown overboard the old theocratic ideas,
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? Frederick the Great 153
was the protector of Protestantism. Exhausted
as the ecclesiastical rivalries appeared to the age
of enlightenment, Frederick recognized that the
permanency of the Westphalian Peace, the equaUty
of the creeds in the Empire, would not be main-
tainable when once the two great CathoHc Powers
triumphed; the common Protestant cause offered
him the only handle to force the faint-hearted
minor princes into war against Austria.
Watchfully his eye followed the intrigues of the
priesthood at the Protestant courts; his authority
protected the freedom of the Evangelical Church
in Wiirttemberg and Hesse, when the successors
to their thrones went over to the Roman faith;
and more clearly than he himself, his minor North-
German allies recognized the religious significance
of the war ; in the letters of the Hessian Minister,
F. A. von Hardenberg, the allies of Prussia were
called simply "the Evangelical provinces," and
faithful adherence to the Prussian party was held
up as the natural attitude of all the Protestant
States of the Empire.
Chanting his Lutheran hymns, the Prussian
grenadier went out to battle; the Evangelical
soldiers of the Swabian district ran away cursing,
because they would not fight against their co-
religionists; in the conventicles of the English
Dissenters pious preachers prayed for the Macca-
beus of Evangelism, the Free-thinker Frederick.
The Pope presented the field-marshal of the Em-
press with a consecrated hat and sword, and every
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? 154 The Life of
new report of victory from the Prussian camp
called up a storm of indignation and fear in the
Vatican.
A hundred and twenty years before, the Protest-
ant world had lain at the feet of Rome, as if
crushed and destroyed, when the flags of Wallen-
stein's army waved on the shores of the Baltic,
and the Stuarts endeavoured to subject their
Parliament to their Roman influences. Now a
great Protestant Power gave the last blow to the
Holy (Roman) Empire, and through the wars on
the Ohio and the Ganges it was decided once for
all that sea and colonial power should belong to
the Protestant and Germanic races.
The struggle for Prussia's existence was the
first European war; it created the unity of the
new association of States, and gave it the aristo-
cratic form of the Pentarchy. When the new
great Central-European Power extorted the recog-
nition of the neighbouring Powers, the two old
political systems of the east and west melted into
one inseparable community ; and at the same time
the less powerful States, which occasionally before,
through their entering into a coalition, had turned
the scale in a great battle, but now could no
longer meet the heavy demands of the new grandi-
ose scale of war, sank in position.
The States of the second rank decided to leave
the control of European affairs to the great naval
and military Powers for the future. Among these
five leading Powers were two Protestant and one
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? Frederick the Great 155
schismatic; that Europe should fall back under
the domination of the Crowned Priest (the Pope)
was unthinkable from now on. The establishment
of the great German Protestant Power was the
heaviest defeat which the Roman Curia had suf-
fered since the appearance of Martin Luther ; King
Frederick had truly, as the English Ambassador
Mitchell said, fought for the freedom of the human
race.
From the school of sufferings and struggles there
sprang for the Prussian people a living sense of
nationality : it justified the King in talking of his
nation Prussienne. To be a Prussian had up to
this been a stern duty : it was now an honour.
The thought of the State, the Fatherland, forced
its way, exciting and nerving, into millions of
hearts; even the crushed soul of the poor felt a
breath of the antique sense of citizenship which
emanated from the simple words of the King: "It
is not necessary that I should live, but very ne-
cessary that I should do my duty and fight for
my Fatherland. " Everywhere in Prussia, under
the stiff forms of an absolute monarchy, stirred
the spirit of sacrifice and the great passion of the
national war.
The army which had been victorious in Fred-
erick's last battles was national; recruiting in
foreign countries was in the nature of things
impossible in the catastrophes of the period. The
provincial estates voluntarily equipped those regi-
ments which had saved the fortresses of Magde-
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? 156 The Life of
burg, Stettin, and Kiistrin for the State; the
Pomeranian seamen banded together to defend
with their small navy the mouths of the Oder
against the Swedes. For six years the officials,
poor as church-mice, received no pay, and yet
quietly discharged their duties as if it were an
understood thing.
Emulously all the provinces rivalled each other
in carrying out their "damned duty," as the
Prussian " phrase ran {ihre verfluchte Pflicht und
Schuldigkeit) ; from the gallant peasant of the
Rhenish county of Mors to the unhappy East-
Prussians, who with quiet tenacious opposition
had stood firm against the Russian conqueror, and
would not be disturbed in their determined faith-
fulness when the inexorable King accused them of
falling-off and overwhelmed them with manifesta-
tions of his displeasure.
The educational power of war awakened again
in these North-German races above all that rough
pride, which once inspirited the invaders of Italy
(Romfahrer) and the conquerors of the Slavs in
the Middle Ages. The alert self-reliance of the
Prussians contrasted strongly with the inoffensive,
kindly modesty of the other Germans. Graf
Hertzberg confidently refuted the doctrine of
Montesquieu on the virtues of republicanism:
where in republicanism had there flourished a
stauncher public spirit than here, under the bracing
northern sky, among the descendants of those
heroic nations, the Vandals and the Goths, who
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? Frederick the Great 157
had once shattered the Roman Empire? The
same spirit existed in the mass of the people; it
was betrayed now in confident bragging, in the
thousand satirical anecdotes of Austrian stupidity
and Prussian Hussar strategies current, now in
pathetic stories of conscientious fidelity.
The young sailor Joachim Nettelbeck comes to
Danzig, and is hired to row the King of Poland
across the harbour; someone claps a hat on his
head with the monogram of King Augustus; for
a long time he resists, for it seems to him a betrayal
of his Prussian King to wear the badge of a foreign
sovereign; at last he has to submit, but the earned
ducat burns in his hand, and as soon as he gets
home to Pomerania he presents the ill-gotten
money to the first Prussian invalid who crosses
his path. So susceptible has the political pride in
this nation become, which a few decades before
was demoralized by its domestic troubles.
It was not to be forgotten that to the two great
princes of war, to C^sar and Alexander, from now
onwards a Prussian was associated as third. In
the character of the North-German, tmited to a
tough perseverance, there is a strain of high-
spirited light-heartedness, which loves to play
with danger, and the Prussians found this charac-
teristic of theirs again in the General Frederick,
raised to the pitch of genius: when he, after a
hard apprenticeship, ripened rapidly into the
master, threw aside the cautious rules of the old
ponderous science of war, and even to the enemy
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? 158 The Life of
"dictated the precepts of war," being always
ready to seek the decision in open battle; when
he again raised the sharpest weapon, cavalry, to
that place which was due to it in great battles;
when he after every victory, and after each of
his three defeats, always maintained anew "the
prerogative of the initiative. "
The successful results show how well the King
and his people understood one another.
A close
circle of heroes gathered round the chief or King,
and spread down to the lowest rank of the army
that gay love of daring, that spirit of the offensive,
which has remained the strength of the Prussian
army in all its great periods.
From the provincial nobles and Pomeranian
peasants Frederick drew the feared Ansbach-
Baireuth Dragoons and the Zieten Hussars, who
soon surpassed the wild-riding races of Hungary in
their mad dash and their spirited charges. With
pride the King said that with such soldiers there
was no risk : " A general who in other armies would
be considered foolhardy, is considered by us only
as doing his duty ! " The twelve campaigns of the
Frederician period have given the Prussian people
and army the martial spirit as their characteristic
spirit for ever. Even to-day, when the conversa-
tion turns to war the North-German falls invol-
untarily into the expressions of those heroic days,
and speaks, as did Frederick, of "brilHant cam-
paigns" and "fulminant attacks. "
The good-hearted kindliness of the Germans
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? Frederick the Great 159
outside Prussia needed a long time to overcome
its aversion to the hard realism of this Frederician
theory, which so ungenerously attacked its enemy
when it was least welcome. But when the great
year of 1757 swept over the German nation, when
victorious attack and heavy defeat, new daring
recovery and new glowing victory crowded in
bewildering haste, and when always from the wild
flight of events stood out the picture of the King,
uniformly great and commanding, the people
felt themselves gripped heart and soul, and
were staggered at this vision of sheer human
greatness.
The hard, weather-beaten figure of old Fritz,
as the blows of an inexorable Fate had forged it,
exercised its irresistible witchery on countless
faithful souls, who had regarded the dazzling figure
of the youthful Hero of Hohenfriedberg only with
awe. The Germans were, as Goethe said of his
Frankfurters, Fritz-mad (Fritzishgesinnt) -- ' ' For
what did Prussia matter to us? " -- and watched
with bated breath as the untamable man, year-
out, year-in, warded off destruction. That over-
whelming union of unmixed joy and love which
occasionally illuminates the history of happier
nations with a golden light, was, it is true, still
denied to rent Germany.
As Luther and Gustavus Adolphus, the only
two heroes before that whose pictures had im-
pressed themselves indelibly on the hearts of our
nation, so Frederick was feared in the episcopal
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? i6o The Life of
lands ^ of the Rhine and the Main as the great
enemy. But the vast majority of Protestants,
and wide circles of the Catholic people, and, above
all, certain leaders of the new learning and poetry,
followed him with warm sympathy ; people caught
at his witticisms, and told marvel after marvel
of his grenadiers and hussars. The heart of the
previously so humble race swelled at the thought
that the first man of the century was ours, that the
fame of the King sounded as far as Morocco and
America.
So far few knew that the Prussian battle-fame
was only the ancient military glory of the German
nation come to light again ; even Lessing occasion-
ally spoke of the Prussians as of a half-foreign
nation, and remarked with astonishment that hero-
ism seemed as born in them as in the Spartans.
Gradually even the masses began to feel that
Frederick fought for Germany. The battle of
Rossbach, the hataille en douceur, as he called it
mockingly, was the richest in results for our
national life of his victories.
If in this domesticated race there still lived a
political emotion, it was a silent animosity against
French arrogance, which, so often chastised with
the German sword, had always in the end remained
in possession of the field, and was once again
covering the Rhine-lands with blood and ruin.
Now Frederick's good sword met it, and struck it
down in a pool of shame; a shout of exultation
* In German, crooked-staff lands {Krummstabslande).
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? Frederick the Great i6i
rang through all the German provinces, and the
Swabian Schubart cried: Da griff ich ungestilm
die goldene Harfe, darein zu stUrmen Friedrichs
Lob ("Impetuously I seize the golden harp, to
make it storm Frederick's praise").
For the first time in history the Germans in the
Empire succumbed to a feeling like national pride,
and they sang with old Gleim: Lasst uns Deut-
sche sein und hleihen! ("Let us be and remain
Germans. ") The French officers returning from
the German battle-fields proclaimed naively in
Paris itself the praise of the victor of Rossbach,
since their pride could not yet imagine it possi-
ble that this little Prussia could ever seriously
threaten the power of France; in German come-
dies, however, the once-feared Frenchman now
filled the role either of the butt or the] vain
adventurer.
A political understanding of the character of
the Prussian State had not, it is true, come to
the nation even yet; this learned people lived in
a wonderful ignorance of the deciding factors of
its modern history as well as of the institutions of
its mightiest State-organization.
If the victories of Frederick had somewhat
appeased the old hatred against Prussia, even in
the Protestant provinces of the Empire every
citizen congratulated himself if he was not a
Prussian. The industrious fictions of the Austrian
party found willing listeners everywhere. "This
free people," Frederick Nicolai wrote in the year
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? i62 The Life of
1780 from Swabia, "look down on us poor Branden-
burgers as slaves. "
The force of the mighty State appealed only to
strong and ambitious natures. From the begin-
ning of the Frederician period a distinguished
phalanx of the brilliant young men of the Empire
had begun to enter into the Prussian service;
some were impelled by their amazement at the
King, others by the longing for exuberant activity,
and some had a vague presentiment of the destinies
of this Monarchy.
It had now fully outgrown the narrow-minded-
ness of provincial life and spontaneously absorbed
all the healthy elements in the Empire, and found
in the ranks of the immigrants many of her most
faithful and capable servants, also her deliverer,
the Freiherr Karl von Stein.
With the Peace of Hubertusburg there dawned
for the North-Germans four decades of deep peace ;
that richly blessed time of peace, of which old
Goethe afterwards thought so often with gratitude.
At that time the old tradition of Prussia's
poverty gradually became a fable. Social life,
particularly in the capital, took on richer and freer
forms, the national prosperity received a surprising
impetus, German poetry entered on her great
period. The war had at once simplified and ren-
dered more difficult the position of the Empire.
Of the old order there was nothing left but the
still unsolved opposition of the two Great Powers.
A presentiment of a difficult decision went through
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? Frederick the Great 163
the German world ; the minor Courts discussed in
energetic conferences as to how they should protect
themselves by forming an alliance of the minor
Powers, in case another encounter of the "two
German Colossi" threaten to crush them. But
King Frederick, thoroughly aware of the infinite
power of the inertia in this old Empire, resigned
himself to recuperating the exhausted strength of
his own State; his German policy for the future
had for its only aim to keep out of the Empire
every influence of foreign Powers and to balance
the power of Austria.
A great danger which threatened the German
Power from the east snatched him from his peace-
ful plans. The Polish Republic had been since
the war subject to the will of the Czarina; the
formal union of the shattered State with the
Russian Empire appeared to be only a question
of time.
Then the idea of the division of Poland, which
crossed the designs of the Russians and set bound-
aries to their ambitions, dawned on Frederick.
It was a victory of German policy, at once over
the grabbing land-greed of Russia, and over the
Western Powers, who were pushed aside regard-
lessly by the boldly advancing Powers of the East.
The necessary act, it is true, opened up to view
immeasurable complications, since the decayed
Empire of the Sarmatian aristocracy was now
irretrievably approaching its downfall; but it was
necessary, it saved faithful East Prussia fronj
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? 1 64 The Life of
the return of Muscovite government, and ensured
for the State the bridge between the lands of the
Pregel and the Oder, which the Crown-Prince
Frederick had already recognized as indispensable.
The King appeared for the second time as the
increaser of the Empire; he gave back again to
the Greater Fatherland the stronghold of the
dominions of the Teutonic order, the lovely
Weichsel valley, which in days of yore the German
knight wrested from the barbarians, the German
peasant from the wrath of the elements.
When the provinces of West Prussia "swore
allegiance to the restored government" -- as the
festival medal of the oath of allegiance says
significantly -- in the refectory of the Grand
Master's castle at Marienburg, the outrages upon
this German land, three hundred years ago, from
the arrogance of the Poles and the treachery of
the provincial authorities, were expiated. The
five hundred years' war between the Germans and
the Poles for the possession of the Baltic coast was
decided in favour of Germany.
Then the State, itself still bleeding from the
wounds of the last war, began the hard work of
peaceful re-conquest. The Sarmatian nobility had
committed horrible outrages in the Weichsel dis-
trict, with that insolent disregard of the rights of
others and the nationality of others which dis-
tinguishes the Poles above all the nations of
Europe.
The new sovereign had to rule with more vigour
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? Frederick the Great 165
than before in Silesia to bring the German character
back to honour in the famous old cities of German
glory and industry, in Thorn, Culm, and Marien-
burg, and to introduce again the rudiments of
agriculture in the devastated land. And as once
the first German conquerors wrested corn-lands
from the marshes, so now out of the swamps, near
the rising town of Bromberg, rose the busy Netze
district, the creation of the second conqueror.
Frederick himself surmised only vaguely what
the re-acquisition of the country of the Teutonic
Knights meant in the great continuity of German
history; but the nation had become quite unfa-
miliar with their own history -- they scarcely knew
that these districts had once been German. Some
cursed with the harsh arrogance of a censor the
ambiguous diplomatic moves which had paved the
way for the partition of the country; others
repeated credulously what Poland's old confeder-
ates, the French, invented to stigmatize the parti-
tioning Powers; the majority remained cold, and
fortified themselves anew with the current idea
that old Fritz had the devil in him {dass der alte
Fritz den Teufel im Leib habe) . For the new bene-
fit which he had conferred on our people, not one
person in the Empire thanked him.
The restless ambition of Kaiser Joseph II led
the King back at the eve of his life to the idea
of the Imperial poHcy which occupied his youth.
The Court of Vienna gave up the appearance of
Conservatism, which alone could ensure for the
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? 1 66 The Life of
Kaiser-House respect in the Empire, and endeav-
oured to compensate itself for the loss of Silesia
in Bavaria. The whole course of Austrian history
for two hundred years, the continually growing
separation between the Imperial State and the
Empire, was to be pulled up all at once by an
adventurous invasion. Then King Frederick for
the second time concluded his alliance with the
Wittelsbachs, and with the sword prohibited the
House of Austria from extending its power on
German soil; more sharply and clearly than ever
before the opposition of the two rivals came to
light.
The War of the Bavarian Succession showed in
its plan of campaign, as in its political aims, sur-
prising resemblances to the deciding war of 1 866,
but Prussia did not draw the sword to free Ger-
many from the dominion of Austria, as it did three
generations later, but only to ward off Austrian
encroachments and for the preservation of the
status quo. Although the ageing hero no longer
possessed the dash to carry out his plan of cam-
paign on so large a scale as he had planned,
Prussia's power proved itself strong enough to
force the Court of Vienna to yield without any
glowing military success. Bavaria was saved for
the second time; the arrogant Imperial Court had
to submit to "plead before the Tribunal of Berlin, "
and the embittered Prince Kaunitz made that
prophecy which was to be fulfilled on the field of
Koniggratz, although not in the sense that the
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? Frederick the Great 167
prophet meant, that if ever the swords of Austria
and Prussia clashed together again, they would
not be retiirned to their sheaths until "the decision
had fallen definitely, completely, and irrevocably. "
Almost more valuable than the immediate result
was the enormous revulsion of opinion in the
Empire. The dreaded disturber of peace, the re-
bel against Emperor and Empire, now appeared
to the nation as the wise shelterer of right; the
small Courts, which had so often trembled before
the Prussian sword, scared by Kaiser Joseph's
restless plans, looked for help to the arbitrator at
Sans Souci. In the peasant farms of the Bavarian
Alps hung the picture of the old man with his
three-cornered hat beside the national (Bavarian)
Saint Corbinian. In the chorus of Swabian and
North-German poets, who told of the fame of the
King, mingled already isolated voices of the deeply
hostile electorate of Saxony; the bard Ringulph
sang in enraptured odes how "from the breast of
the Almighty, ICing Frederick, your great battle-
lusting spirit came. "
Only a short while before had K. F. Moser
avowed that the vision of man was not capable of
following this eagle in its loftiness, that perhaps
hereafter there would appear a Newton of political
science, capable of measuring the orbit of the
Frederician policy. But now the Germans began
to feel that this mysterious policy was wonderfully
simple at bottom, that the Statesman Frederick,
divested of every hatred, every love, quasi-im-
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? i68 The Life of
personal, always desired only what the clearly
recognized position of his State demanded.
When the rebellion broke out in North America,
and the civilized world hailed the new sun which
was rising in the West, Frederick did not conceal
his joy. His own youthful Great Power was a
new State, which had entered the circle of the old
Powers with welcome; it did him good to see
England, which had so shamefully betrayed him
in the last war, and had then impeded him during
the Polish negotiations in the acquisition of Dan-
zig, now in painful embarrassment. He declared
openly that he would not defend Hanover for
ungrateful England a second time: he even once
forbade the passage through his dominions of the
English mercenaries, bought in Germany, because
he was revolted by this sordid traffic in human
beings, and still more because he needed the young
men of the Empire for his own army.
He made use of the distress of the Ocean-Queen
to preserve the naval rights of the smaller Powers
by an alliance of armed neutrality; after the
peace, he, first among the European princes, con-
cluded a commercial treaty with the young Re-
public, and in it acknowledged that free, human
comprehension of international law which has
since then remained a faithfully preserved tradition
of the Prussian State. But neither his hate of
the "God-damn Government," nor the boundless
popularity which saluted him in the (American)
colonies, ever moved him to go one step beyond
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? Frederick the Great 169
the interests of his State. His old enemy Kaunitz
still could explain the proud course of the Fred-
erician policy only as springing from the im-
measurable cunning of a demoniacal nature.
But in the Empire the old mistrust gradually
disappeared; its people observed that nowhere
were their affairs weighed so soberly, so exactly,
so watchfully, and so coldly as in the hermitage of
Sans Souci.
So the impossible happened -- the high nobility
of the Empire gathered round Frederick's flag of
its own free will. Kaiser Joseph resumed his
Bavarian plans -- to shatter Prussia's power, as he
himself admitted. He at the same time threatened
the stability of his ecclesiastical neighbours with
rash thoughts of secularization. A sudden terror
gripped the small States when they saw their
natural protector become an enemy; an alliance
of the Central Powers was discussed, a league of
the ecclesiastical princes, until at last the acknow-
ledgment was forced that nothing could be done
without Prussia's help.
With youthful zeal the old King entered into
the quarrel. All the alluring proposals which were
put forward that he should share the possession of
Germany with the Emperor he rejected as bait
for "the common greed. " He conquered his
contempt for the minor princes, and realized that
only through strict justice could he attach these
people to himself. He succeeded in winning the
great majority of the electors, and most of the
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-08-05 01:03 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/loc. ark:/13960/t5h99vc8g Public Domain in the United States / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-us
? 170 The Life of
more powerful princes, for his German Princes*
Bund, and in maintaining the old Imperial Con-
stitutions and the status quo of the Imperial States
against the Kaiser.
"Only the love of my Fatherland, and the duty
of a good citizen," he wrote, "drive me at my
age to this undertaking. " What he had dreamt
in his youth had an even more brilliant fulfilment
for the patriarch: no longer hidden behind a
Bavarian shadow-Emperor, as in the Silesian wars,
but in the face of the whole world, the King of
Prussia now came into the arena as the protector
of Germany. All the neighboiu-ing Powers, who
counted on Germany's weakness, saw the unex-
pected turn of the Imperial policy with grave
anxiety. France and Russia approached the Court
of Vienna; the Alliance of 1756 bade fair to be
renewed. The Tiu*in Cabinet, on the contrary,
hailed the Princes' Bund with joy as "the tutelary
god of the Italian States. "
For two hundred years the policy of federalism
in the Empire had not got beyond a half start;
but now that it leaned on the power of Prussia
it suddenly won a large following. The memory
of the times of Maximilian I and the Elector
Berthold's attempts at reform rose again to the
surface. The Princes' Bimd was formed to up-
hold the Imperial theocratic Germany. But if it
lasted, if Prussia maintained her position of leader
at the head of the great Imperial States, the old
forms of the Imperial Diet had to lose their mean-
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-08-05 01:03 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/loc. ark:/13960/t5h99vc8g Public Domain in the United States / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-us
? Frederick the Great 171
ing; the prospect was opened up of shattering the
Austrian system to its foundations, and as Graf
Hertzberg joyfully proclaimed, of excluding the
Archdukes from the great German institutions, of
transferring the Imperial Crown to another house at
the next election, and of placing the guidance of the
Empire in the hands of the most powerful States.
The young Karl August of Weimar proposed to
submit the old privileges which ensured the House
of Austria its unique position to an Imperial test.
It almost seemed as if the great problem of Ger-
many's future would be solved in peace. But the
Princes' Bund could not last; and this bitter truth
was hidden least of all from the common-sensible
mind of the old King. Only a series of chance
circumstances, only the defection of Kaiser Joseph
from the old approved traditions of Austrian state-
craft, had scared the minor princes into Frederick's
arms; their trust of Prussia went no further than
their fear of Austria. With the utmost reluctance
the Electorate of Saxony submitted to the guidance
of the younger and less aristocratic House of
Brandenburg; Hanover showed itself hardly less
mistrustful; even the humblest and weakest of
the allied States, Weimar and Dessau, secretly
discussed, so Goethe tells us, how they could
protect themselves against their Prussian pro-
tector's lust of power.
As soon as the Hofburg (the Court of Vienna)
dropped their covetous plans, the old natural
formation of parties must revive ; the ecclesiastical
?
