Frederick the Great 143
And soon in Berlin, as in Munich, awakened
again that saving thought of secularization which
inevitably forced itself up as soon as a healing
hand was laid on the languishing body of the
Empire.
And soon in Berlin, as in Munich, awakened
again that saving thought of secularization which
inevitably forced itself up as soon as a healing
hand was laid on the languishing body of the
Empire.
Treitschke - 1915 - Confessions of Frederick the Great
hathitrust.
org/access_use#pd-us
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? The Life of Frederick the Great
By
Heinrich von Treitschke
FREDERICK WILLIAM'S reign fell in the mis-
erable, Boeotian, idea-less age of the Peace of
Utrecht; the small tricks of Fleury, Alberoni, and
Walpole governed European politics. The upright
Prince was helpless amid the cunning intrigues
of the diplomatists. With old-German fidel-
ity he held to his Kaiser, wanted to lay swords
and pistols in the cradles of his children, in order to
banish foreign nations from the Imperial soil.
How often, with the beer- jug of the Fatherland in
his hand, had he cried out his ringing: "Vivat
Germania, Teutscher Nation! " Unsuspecting by
nature, he now had to experience how the Court
of Vienna, with its two ambitious neighbours,
Hanover and Saxony, would come to a secret
understanding on the division of Prussia, and how
they would then help the Albertiners to the crown
of Poland, deliver Lorraine to the French, and in
his own home stir up discord between father and
son, while they at last treacherously tried to wrest
from him his right of succession to Berg and
Ostfriesland.
9 129
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? 130 The Life of
So for his whole life he was pushed backwards
and forwards between enemies and false friends;
only at the end of his days did he see through
Austria's cunning, and admonish his son to avenge
a betrayed father. But at foreign courts it was
said that the King stood continually on the watch
with his gun at full cock, without ever letting it
go ojEf ; and when occasionally a latent fear of the
sentry at Potsdam overcame the other Germans,
they were cheered by the sneer: "The Prussians
won't shoot as quickly as all that! "
But the sneering was silenced when Prussia
found a ruler who, by the happy practical sense
of the HohenzoUerns, with a sense of the possible
united the daring and clear vision of genius.
The bright sunshine of youth illuminates the
beginning of the Frederician period, when at last,
after much faltering and trepidation, the obstinate
mass of the benumbed German world got on the
move again, and the mighty contrasts which it hid
measured themselves in the necessary struggle.
Since the days of that Lion of the Midnight Sun
Germany had had no picture of a hero to whom
the entire nation could look up with awe; but he
who now, in proud freedom, as once Gustavus
Adolphus had done, strode through the middle of
the Great Powers, and forced the Germans to
believe again in the wonder of heroism, he was a
German.
The mainspring in this mighty nature is the
ruthless, terrible German directness. Frederick
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? Frederick the Great 131
gives himself as he is, and sees things as they are.
As in the long row of volumes of his letters and
writings there is not one line in which he attempts
to extenuate his deeds, or to adorn his own picture
for posterity, so his statesmanship, even if it did
not despise the small arts and ruses of the age as
means to an end, bears the stamp of his royal
frankness.
As often as he draws his sword, he announces
with candid exactitude what he demands from
the enemy, and lays down his weapon only when he
has reached his goal. From the moment that he
awakes to thinking, he feels himself glad and
proud that he is the son of a free century, which,
with the torch of reason, shines in upon the dusty
comers of a world of old prejudices and lifeless
traditions; he has the picture of the Sun-god,
who climbs up through the morning clouds, victo-
rious, on the ceiling of his gay Rheinsberger Hall.
With the bold confidence of an apostle of en-
lightenment, he approaches the apparitions of
historical life, and tests each one, to see how it
will stand the judgment of a penetrating intellect.
In the severe struggles of the various States for
power, he notices only realities, and esteems only
force cleverly used with presence of mind. "Ne-
gotiations without weapons are like music without
instruments," he says calmly, and on the news of
the death of the last Habsburg, he asks his advis-
ers, "I give you a problem to solve; when one has
the advantage, shall one make use of it or not? "
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? 133 The Life of
The swaggering impotence which poses as power,
the senseless privileges which make a show of
historical right, the faineants, who mask their
helplessness behind empty platitudes, could never
find a more arrogant contemner; and nowhere
could this inexorable realism operate so cleansingly
and disturbingly, so revolutionarily, as in the great
fable of the (Holy) Roman Empire. Nothing
could be more pitiless than Frederick's derision of
the holy Majesty of the Kaiser Francis, who is
toddled round on the apron-strings of his wife, and
(a worthy King of Jerusalem) executes lucrative
contracts for the armies of the Queen of Hungary :
nothing more fierce than his mocking of "the
phantom" of the Imperial army, of the conceited
futility of the minor Courts, of the peddling formal-
ism of "these cursed old fogies of Hanover," of
the empty pride of the estate-less petty feudal
nobility {Junkertum) in Saxony and Mecklenburg,
of "the whole breed of princes and peoples in
Austria" -- "who bends his knee to the great
ones of this world, he knows them not! "
In full consciousness of superiority, he holds out
the healthy reality of his modern State beside the
shadowy conceptions of the Imperial Law ; a sullen
ill-nature speaks from his letters when he lets "the
pedants of Regensburg" experience the iron
necessity of war. Frederick fulfils in the deed
what the wrangling publicists of the past centuries,
Hippolithus and Severinus, have attempted only
with words; he holds the "fearfully corpse-like
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? Frederick the Great 133
face of Germany" up to the mirror, proves before
all the world the irretrievable rottenness of the
Holy (Roman) Empire.
Well-meaning contemporaries may have blamed
him, because he delivers up the time-honoured
community to ridicule; posterity thanks him,
for he brings truth to honour again in German
politics, as Martin Luther once brought it in
German thought and faith.
Frederick had appropriated that severe Pro-
testant view of German history and Imperial
politics which had prevailed among the freer in-
tellects of Prussia since Pufendorf and Thomasius,
and then, with the embittering experiences of his
tyrannized youth, cultivated them further, rigor-
ously and independently.
In the rising of the Schmalkaldener, in the
Thirty- Years' War, in all the confusion of the last
two centuries, he saw nothing but the unceasing
struggle of German freedom against the despotism
of the House of Austria, which governed the weaker
princes as slaves "with an iron rod, " and left only
the strong free to do as they chose. Not without
arbitrariness he arranged the facts of history
according to this one-sided view; one-sidedness
turned towards light and life is, after all, the privi-
lege of the creative genius. To bring the old
struggle to a victorious end seemed to him the
problem of the Prussian State. In his younger
years he remained still true to Protestant things:
he prized the glorious duty of the house of Bran-
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? 134 The Life of
denburg " to promote the Protestant religion every-
where in Germany and in Europe, " and remarked,
full of displeasure, in Heidelberg, how here in the
old dominions of our Church the monks and priests
of Rome again carried on their existence.
Even afterwards, when he estranged himself
from the Church, and disdainfully condemned the
mediocre parsons' outlooks of Luther and Calvin,
from the height of his self-sure philosophical out-
look, the conviction remained alive in him that his
State, with every root of its being, belonged to the
Protestant world. He knew how all the accom-
plices of the Vatican worked secretly for the anni-
hilation of the new great Protestant Power; he
knew that his human ideal of religious toleration,
the right of the individual to attain salvation in
his own fashion, was possible in the first place only
on a footing of Protestantism; he knew that in
new and worldly forms he was carrying on the
struggles of the sixteenth century, and above his
last work, the outline or sketch for the German
Princes' League {Fiirstenhund) , he wrote the ex-
pressive inscription: "After the pattern of the
rules for the League of Schmalkalden. "
The earliest of the political writings of Frederick
preserved for us show us the eyes of the eighteen-
year-old boy already turned to that sphere of
political life in which he was to unfold his highest
and most characteristic powers -- the question of
higher politics. The Crown-Prince examined the
position of his State in the world, found the situa-
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? Frederick the Great 135
tion of his divided provinces heavily imperilled,
and, still half-joking and in high spirits, drew up
bold calculations as to how the remote provinces
were to be rounded off, that they should no longer
find themselves "so lonely, without company. "
Only a short time, and the unripe youthful pro-
jects returned as deep and mighty purposes ; three
years before his ascension to the throne he already
saw, with the clairvoyance of genius, the great
path of his life lying open before him :
It seems [so he writes] that Heaven has appointed
the King to make all preparations which wise pre-
cautions before the beginning of a war demand.
Who knows, if Providence has not reserved it for
me to make a glorious use of these war-means at
some future time, and to convert them to the realiza-
tion of the plans for which the foresight of my father
intended them ?
He noticed that his State tottered in an untenable
position midway between the small States and the
Great Powers, and showed himself determined to
give a definite character to this anomalous con-
dition {decider cet etre) : it had become a necessity
to enlarge the territory of the State, and corriger
la figure de la Prusse, if Prussia wished to stand on
her own feet and bear the great name of Kingdom
with honour.
From generation to generation his ancestors had
given the House of Austria faithful military service,
always conscientiously disdaining to profit by the
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? 136 The Life of
embarrassments of her neighbour; ingratitude,
betrayal, and contempt had been their reward.
Frederick himself had experienced heavily in his
oppressed youth "the arrogance, the presumption,
the disdainful pride of this bombastic Court of
Vienna"; his heart was sworn to hatred against
"the Imperial gang, " who with their crawling and
lying had estranged his father's heart from him.
His untamable pride sprang up when, at the
paternal court, there was no cold refusal forth-
coming to the presumptions of Austria: he wrote
angrily that the King of Prussia should be like the
noble palm-tree, of which the poet said: "If you
wish to fell it, it lifts its proud crest. " At the
same time he followed with a watchful eye the
dislocation of power in the political system, and
had arrived at the conclusion that the old policy of
the balance of power of the States of Europe had
wholly outlived itself; since the victories of the
War of the Spanish Succession it was no longer the
opportune time to battle with Austria and England
against the Bourbons.
The policy now was to lift the new German State
"through the f rightfulness of its weapons" to
such a degree of power that it might maintain its
independence against every great neighbour, even
against the Imperial House.
So the much misused expression "German
freedom" received a new, nobler meaning in Fred-
erick's mouth. It no longer meant that dis-
honourable minor-princes' policy, which called on
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? Frederick the Great 137
foreign countries for help against the Kaiser and
betrayed the boundaries of the Empire to the alien ;
it meant the uplifting of a great German Power,
which would defend the Fatherland in east and
west, but of its own free will, independent of the
authority of the Empire.
For centuries it had been the rule that he who
was not good Austrian must be good Swede, like
HippoUthus a Lapide, or good French, like the
princes of the Rhine-League, or good English, like
the kindred of the House of Guelph; even the
Great Elector, in the frightful pressure between
superior neighbours, could only maintain an in-
dependent position from time to time. It was
Frederick's work that beside both those equally
ruinous tendencies, the veiled and the unveiled
foreign lordship, a third tendency should arise,
a policy which was only Prussian, and nothing
further ; to it Germany's future belonged.
It was not the method of this hater of empty
words to talk much of the Fatherland; and yet
there lived in his soul a sensitive, gruffly-rejecting
national pride, grown inseparably with his authori-
tative self-reUance and his pride of birth. That
foreign nations should play the master on German
soil was to him like an offence to his personal
honour and the illustrious blood in his veins,
which the philosophical King, naive as genius is,
still prized highly.
When the astonishing confusion of German af-
fairs occasionally drove him to an alliance with
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? 138 The Life of
foreigners, he never promised the foreign Powers
a sod of German land, never let them misuse his
State for their purposes. His whole life long he
was accused of faithless cunning because no treaty
or league could make him resign the right of decid-
ing for himself.
All the Courts of Europe spoke with resentment
of the travailler pour le roi de Prusse; being used
of old to govern the life of Germany, they could
scarcely grasp that at last the resolute selfishness
of an independent German State was again opposed
to their will. The royal pupil of Voltaire had
begun for the German State the same work of
emancipation as Voltaire's rival, Lessing, accom-
plished for our poetry.
Already in his youthful writings he condemns in
sharp words the weakness of the Holy (Roman)
Empire, which had opened its Thermopylae, Alsace,
to the foreigner; he is angry with the Court of
Vienna, which has delivered up Lorraine to France;
he will never forgive the Queen of Hungary for
letting loose the wild pack of hounds, those orna-
ments of the East, the Jazygiens, Croatians, and
the Tolpatschians, on the German Empire, and
for the first time calling up the Muscovite barbari-
ans to interfere in Germany's domestic affairs.
Then during the seven years his German pride
and hate relieves itself in words of furious scorn.
To the Russians, who plunder the peasants of his
new mark (province), he sends the blessing: "Oh,
could they only submerge themselves with one
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? Frederick the Great 139
spring in the Black Sea, headlong, the hindmost
last, they themselves and their memory! " And
when the French overflow the Rhineland, he
sings (in the French language, it is true) that ode
which reminds one of the ring of the War of
Liberation :
Bis in seine tiefste Quelle,
Schaumt der alte Rhein vor Groll,
Flucht der Schmach, dass seine Welle
Fremdes Joch ertragen soil !
(Down to his deepest spring,
The old Rhine foams with rage,
Curses the outrage, that his waves
A foreign yoke must bear. )
"Prudence is very inclined to preserve what one
possesses, but courage alone knows how to ac-
quire" -- with this voluntary confession Frederick
betrayed in his Rheinsberger days how his inner-
most being forced him to quick resolution, to
stormy audacity. To do nothing by halves seemed
to him the first duty of the statesman, and of all
imaginable resolutions, the worst to him was -- to
take none. But he showed his German blood in
that he knew how to restrain his fiery impetuous
activity at the outset with cold, calm calculation.
He who felt the heroic power of an Alexander in
him, assigned himself to achieve something lasting
in the narrow circle in which Fate had placed
him.
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? 140 The Life of
In war he now and then gave rein to his fiery
spirit, demanded the impossible from his troops,
and failed through arrogant contempt of the enemy :
as a statesman he preserved always a perfect
moderation, a wise self-restraint, which rejected
every adventurous plan at the threshold.
Never for a moment was he duped by the
thought of breaking loose his State from the de-
cayed German community ; the position of being a
State of the Empire did not cramp him in the free-
dom of his European policy; it preserved for him
the right to have a finger in the destiny of the
Empire ; therefore he wished to keep his foot in the
stirrup of the German steed. Still less did it oc-
cur to him to reach out for the Emperor's crown
himself.
After the prophecies of the court astrologers of
the Great Elector, there always remained alive in
the neighbourhood of the Hohenzollerns the vague,
dim, obscure presentiment that this House was
destined at some time to bear the sceptre and
sword of the Holy (Roman) Empire; the fire-
brands, Leopold von Dessau and Winterfeldt,
presumed occasionally to hail ^heir royal hero as
the German Augustus. But he knew that his
secular State could not support the Roman crown,
that it could only involve the parvenu among the
Powers in disputes which there was no prospect of
solving, and remarked drily: "For us it would
only be a fetter. "
Scarcely had he ascended to the throne, when
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? Frederick the Great 141
German affairs entered on that great change which
Pufendorf 's prophetic vision had already denoted as
the only possible ground for a thorough reform of
the Empire. The old Kaiser-House died out, and
before the flaming vision of the young King, who
held the only systematic war-power of Germany in
his hands, there opened a world of alluring visions,
which would have inspired a less profound, less
collected nature to extravagant dreams. Freder-
ick felt vividly the deep solemnity of the hour:
"Day and night," he confessed, "the fate of the
Empire Hes on my heart. I alone can and must
hold it upright. "
He was determined that this great moment must
not fly without giving the Prussian State full
freedom of movement, a place in the council of the
Great Powers; but he divined also how incal-
culably, owing to the covetousness of the foreign
neighbours, and the helpless dissensions in the
Empire, the position of Germany must be affected
as soon as the monarchy of the Habsburgs fell to
pieces. Therefore he wished to spare Austria, and
contented himself with bringing forward the most
important of the carefully pondered pretensions of
his House. Alone, without vouchsafing one word
to the foreign Powers on the watch, with an over-
whelming invading force, he broke into Silesia.
Germany, used to the solemn reflections and
cross-reflections of her Imperial lawyers, received
with astonishment and indignation the doctrine
that the rights of States were only to be main-
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? 142 The Life of
tained by active power. Then the conqueror
offered to procure the Imperial Crown for the
husband of Maria Theresa, and to fight for
the integrity of Austria against France. Only the
opposition of the Court of Vienna drives him
farther to comprehensive plans for the reform of
the Empire which remind one of Waldeck's daring
dreams.
It was not Frederick who created German
duality, with which the contemporary- and after-
world reproached him; the dualism had lasted
since Charles V, and Frederick was the first who
earnestly tried to abolish it.
As soon as the understanding with the Court of
Vienna proved impossible, the King was seized
with the daring thought of wresting the Imperial
Crown for ever from the House of Austria, break-
ing the last chain which linked this dynasty to
Germany. He approached the Bavarian Wittels-
bachs, the only House among the more powerful
German princely families who, like the Hohen-
zoUerns, governed German land alone, and like
them, saw in Austria their natural enemy
He first founded that alliance between the two
great pure German States which has since then
so often, and always for the welfare of the Father-
land, been renewed. The Elector of Bavaria re-
ceived the Imperial dignity, and Frederick hoped
to ensure a firm support for the new Empire, which
he himself called "my work," in the crown of
Bohemia.
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?
Frederick the Great 143
And soon in Berlin, as in Munich, awakened
again that saving thought of secularization which
inevitably forced itself up as soon as a healing
hand was laid on the languishing body of the
Empire. The work of strengthening the power of
the greater secular States of the Empire, which
Frederick recognized as its only vital members, at
the cost of the theocratic and republican territories,
was in progress.
There was an attempt to realize a purely secular
statecraft in the political ideas of the Reformation.
Certain ecclesiastical districts of Upper Germany
(South Germany) were to be secularized, and
various Imperial cities were to be attached to the
dominions of the neighbouring princes.
With good reason Austria complained how seri-
ously this Bavarian Empire, guided by Prussia,
threatened to harm the Nobility and the Church.
If these crude thoughts entered into life, the Ger-
man dualism was as good as done with; the con-
stitution of the Empire, even if the forms remained,
was transformed.
Germany became an alliance of temporal princes
under Prussia's governing influence. The eccle-
siastical States, the Imperial cities, the swarm of
small counts and princes, robbed of the support
of the Habsburgs, fell into decay, and the hostile
element in the heart of the Empire, the Crown of
Bohemia, was conquered for the Germanic civil-
ization. So Germany could by her own strength
accomplish that necessary revolution which the
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? 144 The Life of
decree of foreign countries, two generations later,
insultingly imposed on her. But the House of
Wittelsbach, estranged all the same from German
life by its hereditary connection with France as
by the severity of the Catholic unity of faith,
showed in time a lamentable incapability. The
nation failed to understand the promise of the
moment. On a Rundreise round the Empire the
King gained such a disconcerting insight into
the dissensions, the avarice, the slavish fear of the
small Courts, that he learned to moderate his
German hopes for ever ; even his own power could
not suffice to wholly break the gallant opposition
of the Queen of Hungary.
The second Silesian war ended, in spite of the
triumphs of Hohenfriedberg and Kesselsdorf, in
the restoration of the Austrian Empire. 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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? The Life of Frederick the Great
By
Heinrich von Treitschke
FREDERICK WILLIAM'S reign fell in the mis-
erable, Boeotian, idea-less age of the Peace of
Utrecht; the small tricks of Fleury, Alberoni, and
Walpole governed European politics. The upright
Prince was helpless amid the cunning intrigues
of the diplomatists. With old-German fidel-
ity he held to his Kaiser, wanted to lay swords
and pistols in the cradles of his children, in order to
banish foreign nations from the Imperial soil.
How often, with the beer- jug of the Fatherland in
his hand, had he cried out his ringing: "Vivat
Germania, Teutscher Nation! " Unsuspecting by
nature, he now had to experience how the Court
of Vienna, with its two ambitious neighbours,
Hanover and Saxony, would come to a secret
understanding on the division of Prussia, and how
they would then help the Albertiners to the crown
of Poland, deliver Lorraine to the French, and in
his own home stir up discord between father and
son, while they at last treacherously tried to wrest
from him his right of succession to Berg and
Ostfriesland.
9 129
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? 130 The Life of
So for his whole life he was pushed backwards
and forwards between enemies and false friends;
only at the end of his days did he see through
Austria's cunning, and admonish his son to avenge
a betrayed father. But at foreign courts it was
said that the King stood continually on the watch
with his gun at full cock, without ever letting it
go ojEf ; and when occasionally a latent fear of the
sentry at Potsdam overcame the other Germans,
they were cheered by the sneer: "The Prussians
won't shoot as quickly as all that! "
But the sneering was silenced when Prussia
found a ruler who, by the happy practical sense
of the HohenzoUerns, with a sense of the possible
united the daring and clear vision of genius.
The bright sunshine of youth illuminates the
beginning of the Frederician period, when at last,
after much faltering and trepidation, the obstinate
mass of the benumbed German world got on the
move again, and the mighty contrasts which it hid
measured themselves in the necessary struggle.
Since the days of that Lion of the Midnight Sun
Germany had had no picture of a hero to whom
the entire nation could look up with awe; but he
who now, in proud freedom, as once Gustavus
Adolphus had done, strode through the middle of
the Great Powers, and forced the Germans to
believe again in the wonder of heroism, he was a
German.
The mainspring in this mighty nature is the
ruthless, terrible German directness. Frederick
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? Frederick the Great 131
gives himself as he is, and sees things as they are.
As in the long row of volumes of his letters and
writings there is not one line in which he attempts
to extenuate his deeds, or to adorn his own picture
for posterity, so his statesmanship, even if it did
not despise the small arts and ruses of the age as
means to an end, bears the stamp of his royal
frankness.
As often as he draws his sword, he announces
with candid exactitude what he demands from
the enemy, and lays down his weapon only when he
has reached his goal. From the moment that he
awakes to thinking, he feels himself glad and
proud that he is the son of a free century, which,
with the torch of reason, shines in upon the dusty
comers of a world of old prejudices and lifeless
traditions; he has the picture of the Sun-god,
who climbs up through the morning clouds, victo-
rious, on the ceiling of his gay Rheinsberger Hall.
With the bold confidence of an apostle of en-
lightenment, he approaches the apparitions of
historical life, and tests each one, to see how it
will stand the judgment of a penetrating intellect.
In the severe struggles of the various States for
power, he notices only realities, and esteems only
force cleverly used with presence of mind. "Ne-
gotiations without weapons are like music without
instruments," he says calmly, and on the news of
the death of the last Habsburg, he asks his advis-
ers, "I give you a problem to solve; when one has
the advantage, shall one make use of it or not? "
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? 133 The Life of
The swaggering impotence which poses as power,
the senseless privileges which make a show of
historical right, the faineants, who mask their
helplessness behind empty platitudes, could never
find a more arrogant contemner; and nowhere
could this inexorable realism operate so cleansingly
and disturbingly, so revolutionarily, as in the great
fable of the (Holy) Roman Empire. Nothing
could be more pitiless than Frederick's derision of
the holy Majesty of the Kaiser Francis, who is
toddled round on the apron-strings of his wife, and
(a worthy King of Jerusalem) executes lucrative
contracts for the armies of the Queen of Hungary :
nothing more fierce than his mocking of "the
phantom" of the Imperial army, of the conceited
futility of the minor Courts, of the peddling formal-
ism of "these cursed old fogies of Hanover," of
the empty pride of the estate-less petty feudal
nobility {Junkertum) in Saxony and Mecklenburg,
of "the whole breed of princes and peoples in
Austria" -- "who bends his knee to the great
ones of this world, he knows them not! "
In full consciousness of superiority, he holds out
the healthy reality of his modern State beside the
shadowy conceptions of the Imperial Law ; a sullen
ill-nature speaks from his letters when he lets "the
pedants of Regensburg" experience the iron
necessity of war. Frederick fulfils in the deed
what the wrangling publicists of the past centuries,
Hippolithus and Severinus, have attempted only
with words; he holds the "fearfully corpse-like
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? Frederick the Great 133
face of Germany" up to the mirror, proves before
all the world the irretrievable rottenness of the
Holy (Roman) Empire.
Well-meaning contemporaries may have blamed
him, because he delivers up the time-honoured
community to ridicule; posterity thanks him,
for he brings truth to honour again in German
politics, as Martin Luther once brought it in
German thought and faith.
Frederick had appropriated that severe Pro-
testant view of German history and Imperial
politics which had prevailed among the freer in-
tellects of Prussia since Pufendorf and Thomasius,
and then, with the embittering experiences of his
tyrannized youth, cultivated them further, rigor-
ously and independently.
In the rising of the Schmalkaldener, in the
Thirty- Years' War, in all the confusion of the last
two centuries, he saw nothing but the unceasing
struggle of German freedom against the despotism
of the House of Austria, which governed the weaker
princes as slaves "with an iron rod, " and left only
the strong free to do as they chose. Not without
arbitrariness he arranged the facts of history
according to this one-sided view; one-sidedness
turned towards light and life is, after all, the privi-
lege of the creative genius. To bring the old
struggle to a victorious end seemed to him the
problem of the Prussian State. In his younger
years he remained still true to Protestant things:
he prized the glorious duty of the house of Bran-
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? 134 The Life of
denburg " to promote the Protestant religion every-
where in Germany and in Europe, " and remarked,
full of displeasure, in Heidelberg, how here in the
old dominions of our Church the monks and priests
of Rome again carried on their existence.
Even afterwards, when he estranged himself
from the Church, and disdainfully condemned the
mediocre parsons' outlooks of Luther and Calvin,
from the height of his self-sure philosophical out-
look, the conviction remained alive in him that his
State, with every root of its being, belonged to the
Protestant world. He knew how all the accom-
plices of the Vatican worked secretly for the anni-
hilation of the new great Protestant Power; he
knew that his human ideal of religious toleration,
the right of the individual to attain salvation in
his own fashion, was possible in the first place only
on a footing of Protestantism; he knew that in
new and worldly forms he was carrying on the
struggles of the sixteenth century, and above his
last work, the outline or sketch for the German
Princes' League {Fiirstenhund) , he wrote the ex-
pressive inscription: "After the pattern of the
rules for the League of Schmalkalden. "
The earliest of the political writings of Frederick
preserved for us show us the eyes of the eighteen-
year-old boy already turned to that sphere of
political life in which he was to unfold his highest
and most characteristic powers -- the question of
higher politics. The Crown-Prince examined the
position of his State in the world, found the situa-
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? Frederick the Great 135
tion of his divided provinces heavily imperilled,
and, still half-joking and in high spirits, drew up
bold calculations as to how the remote provinces
were to be rounded off, that they should no longer
find themselves "so lonely, without company. "
Only a short time, and the unripe youthful pro-
jects returned as deep and mighty purposes ; three
years before his ascension to the throne he already
saw, with the clairvoyance of genius, the great
path of his life lying open before him :
It seems [so he writes] that Heaven has appointed
the King to make all preparations which wise pre-
cautions before the beginning of a war demand.
Who knows, if Providence has not reserved it for
me to make a glorious use of these war-means at
some future time, and to convert them to the realiza-
tion of the plans for which the foresight of my father
intended them ?
He noticed that his State tottered in an untenable
position midway between the small States and the
Great Powers, and showed himself determined to
give a definite character to this anomalous con-
dition {decider cet etre) : it had become a necessity
to enlarge the territory of the State, and corriger
la figure de la Prusse, if Prussia wished to stand on
her own feet and bear the great name of Kingdom
with honour.
From generation to generation his ancestors had
given the House of Austria faithful military service,
always conscientiously disdaining to profit by the
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? 136 The Life of
embarrassments of her neighbour; ingratitude,
betrayal, and contempt had been their reward.
Frederick himself had experienced heavily in his
oppressed youth "the arrogance, the presumption,
the disdainful pride of this bombastic Court of
Vienna"; his heart was sworn to hatred against
"the Imperial gang, " who with their crawling and
lying had estranged his father's heart from him.
His untamable pride sprang up when, at the
paternal court, there was no cold refusal forth-
coming to the presumptions of Austria: he wrote
angrily that the King of Prussia should be like the
noble palm-tree, of which the poet said: "If you
wish to fell it, it lifts its proud crest. " At the
same time he followed with a watchful eye the
dislocation of power in the political system, and
had arrived at the conclusion that the old policy of
the balance of power of the States of Europe had
wholly outlived itself; since the victories of the
War of the Spanish Succession it was no longer the
opportune time to battle with Austria and England
against the Bourbons.
The policy now was to lift the new German State
"through the f rightfulness of its weapons" to
such a degree of power that it might maintain its
independence against every great neighbour, even
against the Imperial House.
So the much misused expression "German
freedom" received a new, nobler meaning in Fred-
erick's mouth. It no longer meant that dis-
honourable minor-princes' policy, which called on
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? Frederick the Great 137
foreign countries for help against the Kaiser and
betrayed the boundaries of the Empire to the alien ;
it meant the uplifting of a great German Power,
which would defend the Fatherland in east and
west, but of its own free will, independent of the
authority of the Empire.
For centuries it had been the rule that he who
was not good Austrian must be good Swede, like
HippoUthus a Lapide, or good French, like the
princes of the Rhine-League, or good English, like
the kindred of the House of Guelph; even the
Great Elector, in the frightful pressure between
superior neighbours, could only maintain an in-
dependent position from time to time. It was
Frederick's work that beside both those equally
ruinous tendencies, the veiled and the unveiled
foreign lordship, a third tendency should arise,
a policy which was only Prussian, and nothing
further ; to it Germany's future belonged.
It was not the method of this hater of empty
words to talk much of the Fatherland; and yet
there lived in his soul a sensitive, gruffly-rejecting
national pride, grown inseparably with his authori-
tative self-reUance and his pride of birth. That
foreign nations should play the master on German
soil was to him like an offence to his personal
honour and the illustrious blood in his veins,
which the philosophical King, naive as genius is,
still prized highly.
When the astonishing confusion of German af-
fairs occasionally drove him to an alliance with
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? 138 The Life of
foreigners, he never promised the foreign Powers
a sod of German land, never let them misuse his
State for their purposes. His whole life long he
was accused of faithless cunning because no treaty
or league could make him resign the right of decid-
ing for himself.
All the Courts of Europe spoke with resentment
of the travailler pour le roi de Prusse; being used
of old to govern the life of Germany, they could
scarcely grasp that at last the resolute selfishness
of an independent German State was again opposed
to their will. The royal pupil of Voltaire had
begun for the German State the same work of
emancipation as Voltaire's rival, Lessing, accom-
plished for our poetry.
Already in his youthful writings he condemns in
sharp words the weakness of the Holy (Roman)
Empire, which had opened its Thermopylae, Alsace,
to the foreigner; he is angry with the Court of
Vienna, which has delivered up Lorraine to France;
he will never forgive the Queen of Hungary for
letting loose the wild pack of hounds, those orna-
ments of the East, the Jazygiens, Croatians, and
the Tolpatschians, on the German Empire, and
for the first time calling up the Muscovite barbari-
ans to interfere in Germany's domestic affairs.
Then during the seven years his German pride
and hate relieves itself in words of furious scorn.
To the Russians, who plunder the peasants of his
new mark (province), he sends the blessing: "Oh,
could they only submerge themselves with one
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? Frederick the Great 139
spring in the Black Sea, headlong, the hindmost
last, they themselves and their memory! " And
when the French overflow the Rhineland, he
sings (in the French language, it is true) that ode
which reminds one of the ring of the War of
Liberation :
Bis in seine tiefste Quelle,
Schaumt der alte Rhein vor Groll,
Flucht der Schmach, dass seine Welle
Fremdes Joch ertragen soil !
(Down to his deepest spring,
The old Rhine foams with rage,
Curses the outrage, that his waves
A foreign yoke must bear. )
"Prudence is very inclined to preserve what one
possesses, but courage alone knows how to ac-
quire" -- with this voluntary confession Frederick
betrayed in his Rheinsberger days how his inner-
most being forced him to quick resolution, to
stormy audacity. To do nothing by halves seemed
to him the first duty of the statesman, and of all
imaginable resolutions, the worst to him was -- to
take none. But he showed his German blood in
that he knew how to restrain his fiery impetuous
activity at the outset with cold, calm calculation.
He who felt the heroic power of an Alexander in
him, assigned himself to achieve something lasting
in the narrow circle in which Fate had placed
him.
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? 140 The Life of
In war he now and then gave rein to his fiery
spirit, demanded the impossible from his troops,
and failed through arrogant contempt of the enemy :
as a statesman he preserved always a perfect
moderation, a wise self-restraint, which rejected
every adventurous plan at the threshold.
Never for a moment was he duped by the
thought of breaking loose his State from the de-
cayed German community ; the position of being a
State of the Empire did not cramp him in the free-
dom of his European policy; it preserved for him
the right to have a finger in the destiny of the
Empire ; therefore he wished to keep his foot in the
stirrup of the German steed. Still less did it oc-
cur to him to reach out for the Emperor's crown
himself.
After the prophecies of the court astrologers of
the Great Elector, there always remained alive in
the neighbourhood of the Hohenzollerns the vague,
dim, obscure presentiment that this House was
destined at some time to bear the sceptre and
sword of the Holy (Roman) Empire; the fire-
brands, Leopold von Dessau and Winterfeldt,
presumed occasionally to hail ^heir royal hero as
the German Augustus. But he knew that his
secular State could not support the Roman crown,
that it could only involve the parvenu among the
Powers in disputes which there was no prospect of
solving, and remarked drily: "For us it would
only be a fetter. "
Scarcely had he ascended to the throne, when
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? Frederick the Great 141
German affairs entered on that great change which
Pufendorf 's prophetic vision had already denoted as
the only possible ground for a thorough reform of
the Empire. The old Kaiser-House died out, and
before the flaming vision of the young King, who
held the only systematic war-power of Germany in
his hands, there opened a world of alluring visions,
which would have inspired a less profound, less
collected nature to extravagant dreams. Freder-
ick felt vividly the deep solemnity of the hour:
"Day and night," he confessed, "the fate of the
Empire Hes on my heart. I alone can and must
hold it upright. "
He was determined that this great moment must
not fly without giving the Prussian State full
freedom of movement, a place in the council of the
Great Powers; but he divined also how incal-
culably, owing to the covetousness of the foreign
neighbours, and the helpless dissensions in the
Empire, the position of Germany must be affected
as soon as the monarchy of the Habsburgs fell to
pieces. Therefore he wished to spare Austria, and
contented himself with bringing forward the most
important of the carefully pondered pretensions of
his House. Alone, without vouchsafing one word
to the foreign Powers on the watch, with an over-
whelming invading force, he broke into Silesia.
Germany, used to the solemn reflections and
cross-reflections of her Imperial lawyers, received
with astonishment and indignation the doctrine
that the rights of States were only to be main-
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? 142 The Life of
tained by active power. Then the conqueror
offered to procure the Imperial Crown for the
husband of Maria Theresa, and to fight for
the integrity of Austria against France. Only the
opposition of the Court of Vienna drives him
farther to comprehensive plans for the reform of
the Empire which remind one of Waldeck's daring
dreams.
It was not Frederick who created German
duality, with which the contemporary- and after-
world reproached him; the dualism had lasted
since Charles V, and Frederick was the first who
earnestly tried to abolish it.
As soon as the understanding with the Court of
Vienna proved impossible, the King was seized
with the daring thought of wresting the Imperial
Crown for ever from the House of Austria, break-
ing the last chain which linked this dynasty to
Germany. He approached the Bavarian Wittels-
bachs, the only House among the more powerful
German princely families who, like the Hohen-
zoUerns, governed German land alone, and like
them, saw in Austria their natural enemy
He first founded that alliance between the two
great pure German States which has since then
so often, and always for the welfare of the Father-
land, been renewed. The Elector of Bavaria re-
ceived the Imperial dignity, and Frederick hoped
to ensure a firm support for the new Empire, which
he himself called "my work," in the crown of
Bohemia.
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?
Frederick the Great 143
And soon in Berlin, as in Munich, awakened
again that saving thought of secularization which
inevitably forced itself up as soon as a healing
hand was laid on the languishing body of the
Empire. The work of strengthening the power of
the greater secular States of the Empire, which
Frederick recognized as its only vital members, at
the cost of the theocratic and republican territories,
was in progress.
There was an attempt to realize a purely secular
statecraft in the political ideas of the Reformation.
Certain ecclesiastical districts of Upper Germany
(South Germany) were to be secularized, and
various Imperial cities were to be attached to the
dominions of the neighbouring princes.
With good reason Austria complained how seri-
ously this Bavarian Empire, guided by Prussia,
threatened to harm the Nobility and the Church.
If these crude thoughts entered into life, the Ger-
man dualism was as good as done with; the con-
stitution of the Empire, even if the forms remained,
was transformed.
Germany became an alliance of temporal princes
under Prussia's governing influence. The eccle-
siastical States, the Imperial cities, the swarm of
small counts and princes, robbed of the support
of the Habsburgs, fell into decay, and the hostile
element in the heart of the Empire, the Crown of
Bohemia, was conquered for the Germanic civil-
ization. So Germany could by her own strength
accomplish that necessary revolution which the
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? 144 The Life of
decree of foreign countries, two generations later,
insultingly imposed on her. But the House of
Wittelsbach, estranged all the same from German
life by its hereditary connection with France as
by the severity of the Catholic unity of faith,
showed in time a lamentable incapability. The
nation failed to understand the promise of the
moment. On a Rundreise round the Empire the
King gained such a disconcerting insight into
the dissensions, the avarice, the slavish fear of the
small Courts, that he learned to moderate his
German hopes for ever ; even his own power could
not suffice to wholly break the gallant opposition
of the Queen of Hungary.
The second Silesian war ended, in spite of the
triumphs of Hohenfriedberg and Kesselsdorf, in
the restoration of the Austrian Empire. 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
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-08-05 01:02 GMT / http://hdl.
