A presentiment of a difficult
decision
went through
?
?
Treitschke - 1915 - Confessions of Frederick the Great
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hathitrust.
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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
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? 172 The Life of
princes, who now sought help in Berlin, could
see in Protestant Prussia only the sworn enemy of
their authority. Since Frederick knew this, since
he penetrated his faithful confederates to the
very marrow with his piercing gaze, he did not
let himself be deceived by the success of the minute
into imagining that this Schmalkaldic League was
anything but a makeshift, a means of preserving
the momentary balance. Karl August, in large-
hearted enthusiasm, sketched bold plans for the
building-up of the new Imperial Association; he
thought of a customs' union, of military conven-
tions, of a German code ; Johannes Miiller extolled
the Princes' Bund in the most high-flown pam-
phlets, Schubart in stirring lyrical effusions, and
Dohm concluded a clever pamphlet with these
words: "German and Prussian interests can never
stand in one another's way. " The discerning
mind of the old King was not moved by such
dreams; he knew that only a colossal war could
break the power of Austria in the Empire; it
sufficed him to keep it within the bounds of justice,
because he needed peace for his country.
For a serious reform of the Empire there were
still lacking all the preliminary conditions; there
was lacking, above all, the will of the nation.
Even the Imperialist defenders of the Princes'
Bund could not get beyond the old chimera of
German freedom. The Josephin policy, so Hertz-
berg stirringly protested, threatened to agglomer-
ate the powers of Germany into a mass, to subject
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? Frederick the Great 173
free Europe to a universal monarchy; and in
Dohm's eyes it appears as a praiseworthy aim of
the new Bund to keep open the western borders of
Austria, so that France can stride into it at any
time on behalf of German freedom.
The nation realized dimly that the existing con-
ditions were not worthy to exist; in Schubart's
writings the small Swabian territories are often
described as an open dove-cot, which lay close to
the claws of the royal weasel. But all these ideas
and presentiments were held under by a feeling
of hopeless resignation which modern energy can
hardly understand ; the Germans felt as if an in-
scrutable Providence had condemned this people
to continue for all eternity in an abnormal State
which had long lost every right to exist.
When the great King departed, it is true, he left
behind a generation which looked on the world
more joyfully and proudly than its fathers, and
enormously had the State power which might in
the future bring Germany a new day been raised.
But the question : By what ways and means could
a vital scheme for the German community be cre-
ated? appeared at Frederick's death still almost
as problematical as it had been at his ascension to
the throne; indeed, it had not once been seriously
raised by the great majority of Germans. The
first beginnings of a formation of parties in the
nation scarcely existed; it seemed as if only a
miracle from heaven could help the helpless. The
terrible confusion of the situation was shown with
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? 174 The Life of
sinister clearness by the one fact, that the hero
who with his good sword had once proved the
futiHty of the institutions of the Empire had come
himself to defend these lifeless forms against the
head of the Empire.
If Frederick could only prepare, and not com-
plete, the settlement of the German constitution,
he had, on the other hand, deeply and lastingly
influenced the inner policy of the German terri-
tories, and brought our nation to a nobler public
spirit and a worthier view of the character of the
State. He stood at the end of the great days
of unlimited monarchy, and yet appeared to his
contemporaries as the representative of a new
conception of the State, an enlightened despotism.
Only genius possesses the strength for propa-
ganda, is capable of gathering the resisting world
round the banner of new ideas. As the ideas of
the Revolution were first circulated effectively by
Napoleon, so was that serious comprehension of
the duties of the kingdom which governed the
Prussian throne from the time of the Great Elector
first transferred to the consciousness of the people
by Frederick. Only after the brilliant successes
of the Silesian wars was the gaze of the world,
which so far had hung wonderingly on the mag-
nificence of the Coiurt of Versailles, turned seriously
to the imostentatious crown of the Hohenzollerns.
In war and in his foreign policy the King showed
the incomparable creative power of his genius;
in the inner administration he was the son of his
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? Frederick the Great 175
father. He invigorated the traditional forms of
the State with the strength of genius, developed
the free and incomplete in a free and comprehen-
sive spirit ; he did not imdertake to erect anything
new. And yet he knew how to unite the idea of
a political kingdom, which his father, as a firm,
practical man, had realized, with the civilizing
influences of the century ; incessantly he gave him-
self and others an account of his doings. Already
as Crown-Prince he had won a place among the
political thinkers of the age; his Anti-Machiavel-
lism remains, in spite of all the weakness of
immaturity, surely the best and deepest exposition
of the duties of the princely office in an absolute
monarchy which was ever penned. Afterwards,
in the first years of the joy of conquest, he wrote
the Furstenspiegel ("Mirror for Princes") for the
young Duke of Wiirttemberg; but louder than all
theories spoke his actions, as he proved his words
in the days of trial, and showed the world what it
meant "to think, live, and die as a King. "
Lastly, Providence showed him that favour
which even genius needs, if it is to impress its
seal on a whole age : the good fortune of adequately
living up to his gifts until a ripe old age. He was
now the Nestor, the recognized first man of the
Eiiropean princes. His fame raised the prestige
of all thrones; from his words and deeds other
Kings learned to think highly of their vocation.
The old-established conception of the minor
princes, that the land and the people belonged to
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? 176 The Life of
the Most Serene Princely House, lost ground after
Frederick drily observed: "The Sovereign has no
nearer relation than his State, whose interests must
always stand before the ties of blood.
? 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
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? 172 The Life of
princes, who now sought help in Berlin, could
see in Protestant Prussia only the sworn enemy of
their authority. Since Frederick knew this, since
he penetrated his faithful confederates to the
very marrow with his piercing gaze, he did not
let himself be deceived by the success of the minute
into imagining that this Schmalkaldic League was
anything but a makeshift, a means of preserving
the momentary balance. Karl August, in large-
hearted enthusiasm, sketched bold plans for the
building-up of the new Imperial Association; he
thought of a customs' union, of military conven-
tions, of a German code ; Johannes Miiller extolled
the Princes' Bund in the most high-flown pam-
phlets, Schubart in stirring lyrical effusions, and
Dohm concluded a clever pamphlet with these
words: "German and Prussian interests can never
stand in one another's way. " The discerning
mind of the old King was not moved by such
dreams; he knew that only a colossal war could
break the power of Austria in the Empire; it
sufficed him to keep it within the bounds of justice,
because he needed peace for his country.
For a serious reform of the Empire there were
still lacking all the preliminary conditions; there
was lacking, above all, the will of the nation.
Even the Imperialist defenders of the Princes'
Bund could not get beyond the old chimera of
German freedom. The Josephin policy, so Hertz-
berg stirringly protested, threatened to agglomer-
ate the powers of Germany into a mass, to subject
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? Frederick the Great 173
free Europe to a universal monarchy; and in
Dohm's eyes it appears as a praiseworthy aim of
the new Bund to keep open the western borders of
Austria, so that France can stride into it at any
time on behalf of German freedom.
The nation realized dimly that the existing con-
ditions were not worthy to exist; in Schubart's
writings the small Swabian territories are often
described as an open dove-cot, which lay close to
the claws of the royal weasel. But all these ideas
and presentiments were held under by a feeling
of hopeless resignation which modern energy can
hardly understand ; the Germans felt as if an in-
scrutable Providence had condemned this people
to continue for all eternity in an abnormal State
which had long lost every right to exist.
When the great King departed, it is true, he left
behind a generation which looked on the world
more joyfully and proudly than its fathers, and
enormously had the State power which might in
the future bring Germany a new day been raised.
But the question : By what ways and means could
a vital scheme for the German community be cre-
ated? appeared at Frederick's death still almost
as problematical as it had been at his ascension to
the throne; indeed, it had not once been seriously
raised by the great majority of Germans. The
first beginnings of a formation of parties in the
nation scarcely existed; it seemed as if only a
miracle from heaven could help the helpless. The
terrible confusion of the situation was shown with
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? 174 The Life of
sinister clearness by the one fact, that the hero
who with his good sword had once proved the
futiHty of the institutions of the Empire had come
himself to defend these lifeless forms against the
head of the Empire.
If Frederick could only prepare, and not com-
plete, the settlement of the German constitution,
he had, on the other hand, deeply and lastingly
influenced the inner policy of the German terri-
tories, and brought our nation to a nobler public
spirit and a worthier view of the character of the
State. He stood at the end of the great days
of unlimited monarchy, and yet appeared to his
contemporaries as the representative of a new
conception of the State, an enlightened despotism.
Only genius possesses the strength for propa-
ganda, is capable of gathering the resisting world
round the banner of new ideas. As the ideas of
the Revolution were first circulated effectively by
Napoleon, so was that serious comprehension of
the duties of the kingdom which governed the
Prussian throne from the time of the Great Elector
first transferred to the consciousness of the people
by Frederick. Only after the brilliant successes
of the Silesian wars was the gaze of the world,
which so far had hung wonderingly on the mag-
nificence of the Coiurt of Versailles, turned seriously
to the imostentatious crown of the Hohenzollerns.
In war and in his foreign policy the King showed
the incomparable creative power of his genius;
in the inner administration he was the son of his
? ? 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 175
father. He invigorated the traditional forms of
the State with the strength of genius, developed
the free and incomplete in a free and comprehen-
sive spirit ; he did not imdertake to erect anything
new. And yet he knew how to unite the idea of
a political kingdom, which his father, as a firm,
practical man, had realized, with the civilizing
influences of the century ; incessantly he gave him-
self and others an account of his doings. Already
as Crown-Prince he had won a place among the
political thinkers of the age; his Anti-Machiavel-
lism remains, in spite of all the weakness of
immaturity, surely the best and deepest exposition
of the duties of the princely office in an absolute
monarchy which was ever penned. Afterwards,
in the first years of the joy of conquest, he wrote
the Furstenspiegel ("Mirror for Princes") for the
young Duke of Wiirttemberg; but louder than all
theories spoke his actions, as he proved his words
in the days of trial, and showed the world what it
meant "to think, live, and die as a King. "
Lastly, Providence showed him that favour
which even genius needs, if it is to impress its
seal on a whole age : the good fortune of adequately
living up to his gifts until a ripe old age. He was
now the Nestor, the recognized first man of the
Eiiropean princes. His fame raised the prestige
of all thrones; from his words and deeds other
Kings learned to think highly of their vocation.
The old-established conception of the minor
princes, that the land and the people belonged to
? ? 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
? 176 The Life of
the Most Serene Princely House, lost ground after
Frederick drily observed: "The Sovereign has no
nearer relation than his State, whose interests must
always stand before the ties of blood.
