Every young genius in the
Empire angled for the eye of the national hero.
Empire angled for the eye of the national hero.
Treitschke - 1915 - Confessions of Frederick the Great
i8o The Life of
traying the hollowness of objectless military fame,
and had the bust of the King of Sweden contemptu-
ously erected beneath the feet of the Muse in the
round hall at Sans Souci.
Already in his impetuous youth he had made
up his mind about the moral objects of power.
This State must become strong [he wrote at that
time], that it may play the lofty role of preserving
peace only from love of justice, and not from fear.
But if ever injustice, bias, and vice gain the upper
hand in Prussia, then I wish the House of Branden-
burg a speedy downfall. That says all.
When at the end of the Seven- Years' War he felt
strong enough to preserve peace out of justice,
then he turned his attention to the restoration of
the national prosperity with such zeal that the
army was actually injured.
It is a fact: the general who had overwhelmed
the Flag of Prussia with laurels left the army in
a worse condition than he had found it on his
ascension to the throne; he could not approach
his father as a military organizer. He needed the
industrial population for his devastated country,
and therefore patronized on principle the enlisting
of troops for his army in foreign countries. The
regimental commanders were to draw up the
register of their recruiting-districts in agreement
with the Landrdte (sheriffs) and surveyors^ of
taxes.
From that time there occurred in every district
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? Frederick the Great i8i
each year that struggle between the military claims
and the civil interests which, afterward, in chang-
ing forms, occurred again and again in Prussian
history. This time the struggle was decided
in favour of political economy. The civil author-
ities sought to preserve every man who was in
any way capable or well-to-do from the red can-
tonal collar. The King himself interfered to
help, and freed from compulsory service numerous
classes of the population -- the new immigrants,
the families of all traders and manufacturers, the
household servants of landowners. Many cities
-- nay, whole provinces, as Ostfriesland -- obtained
privileges. Soon after the peace the majority of
the army consisted of foreigners.
Frederick thought highly of the army, and liked
to call it the Atlas who carried this State on his
strong shoulders; the military fame of the seven
years had an after-effect; the service of the com-
mon soldier, it is true, was counted in Prussia,
as everywhere else in the world, as a misfortune,
but not as a disgrace, as it was in the rest of the
Empire. The King brought the great summer
manoeuvres on the Mockerauer Heath to a tech-
nical completeness which the art of manoeuvres
has probably never reached since then. He was
never tired of impressing on his officers "to love
the detail, which also has its distinction," and
wrote for their instruction his military handbook,
the most mature of all his works.
Not one improvement in military affairs escaped
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? i82 The Life of
him; at a great age he yet adopted a new arm
of the service, the light infantry, the green Fusiliers
according to the pattern of the American riflemen.
The fame of the Potsdamer parade-ground drew
spectators from all countries. In Turin Victor
Amadeus and his generals faithfully copied every
movement of the great Prussian drill-sergeant
down to the bent carriage of the head; and when
the young Lieutenant Gneisenau saw the pointed
helmets of the grenadiers on parade glittering in
the sun, he cried enthusiastically: "Say, which
of all nations could well copy this marvellous
sight. ? "
In spite of that, in Frederick's last years the
army sank undoubtedly. The flower of the old
officers' corps lay on the battle-fields; during the
seven years -- an unprecedented occurrence in the
history of war -- all the renowned generals, with
scanty exceptions, were left on the field or were
disabled; their successors had known war only in
subalterns' positions, and looked for the secret of
the Frederician conquests only in the mechanical
exercises of the parade-ground. Among the for-
eign officers were many doubtful adventurers who
only courted favour; for the proud frankness of a
York or a Bliicher there was no more room.
The King, less friendly to the bourgeoisie than
his father, believed that only the aristocracy had
a sense of honour, and dismissed the bourgeois
officers from the majority of the regiments. In the
noble officers* corps there arose an aristocratic
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? Frederick the Great 183
arrogance (Junkersinn) , which soon became more
intolerable to the people than the coarse roughness
of earlier times. The old hired soldiers lived
in the end comfortably with wife and child, in
civil employment, and abominated war for a
country which had always remained foreign to
them. Frederick had already noticed with aston-
ishment in the war of the Bavarian Succession how
little this army accomplished; the reason for the
deterioration he did not penetrate. The Eudae-
monism of his age made it impossible for him to
recognize the moral forces which swayed the army.
He had once, after the custom of the period, formed
Prussian regiments from Austrian and Saxon
prisoners of war, and could not even learn by the
desertions en masse of these imfortimate men; he
had in the last years of the war sufficiently experi-
enced what an army of his own people was capable
of, yet such forcible calling out of the entire
national strength always remained to him only an
expedient for desperate days, "when the defence
of the Fatherland and an imminent danger depends
on it. "
Of his statesmen, Hertzberg alone had religiously
observed the daring ideas of Frederick William I ;
he wanted to gradually purge the army of all
foreigners. "Then we shall be as imconquerable
as the Greeks and the Romans! " But the old
King saw with satisfaction how his tmfortunate
land was being strengthened agriculturally, and
now defined the ideal of the army with the astound-
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? 1 84 The Life of
ing words: "The peaceful citizen shall not even
notice when the nation is at war. " So one of the
pillars which upheld the edifice of State -- universal
service -- began slowly to totter.
The traditional class-system of the estates of the
realm and the organization of government de-
pendent from it the King upheld more strictly
than his father; he helped with instruction and
ruthless coercion, with gifts and loans, as often
as the role which was prescribed for the peasant,
the citizen, or the nobleman in the household of
the nation no longer seemed to suffice him.
The nobility was to remain the first rank in the
State, since "I need them for my army and my
civil administration. " By the mortgage institu-
tions, and by considerable support with ready
money, Frederick attained the conservation of the
large estates of the nobles after the devastation
of the years of war. Therefore he made as little
attempt as his father to abolish the serfdom of the
peasants, which was so repugnant to his magna-
nimity. By the common law, it is true, the
harsher forms of serfdom were done away with,
but there still remained the somewhat less op-
pressive hereditary rights of the dynasty. The
Government contented itself with modifying the
harshness of the existing lordship.
Unnoticed and undesired by the older princes,
in the meantime there began a displacement of
the conditions of social power, which was rich in
results. The new literatiu-e drew an educated
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? Frederick the Great 185
public from all classes ; the merchants and trades-
people of the great cities, the simple tenants of
the enlarged dominions of the monarchy, gradually-
attained to an assured position and to a conviction
that the privileges of the nobility could not endure
much longer. The nobility lost by degrees the
moral as well as the economic foundations of their
rank. The structure of the old class-organization
was imperceptibly undermined.
The administrative arrangements of the father
remained unchanged under the son, except that
he added to the provincial departments of the
General Direktorium four new ones, embracing the
entire State, for the administration of War, Mer-
cantile Policy, Mining Matters, and Forestry, and
thus made another step on the way to a united
State. The Crown still stood high above the
people. Gensdarmes had to force the peasants to
use the seed-potatoes presented by the King; the
command of the Sheriff (Landrat) and the Board
enforced against the tenacious passive opposi-
tion of the parties concerned communal drainage
and other enterprises, and all improvements of
agricultural appliances. The wholly exhausted
energies of the people for civil industries could
only be reawakened by a violent system of
protection.
The flaws of the Frederician political economy
were not due to the eternal and well-meant inter-
ference of the supreme power, which the age had
in no way outlived, but in the fiscal deceptions
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? 1 86 The Life of
which the King was compelled to resort to through
the embarrassments of his affairs; he had to use
fully three quarters of his revenue for the army,
and sought to make up what was necessary for his
administration by monopolies and indirect taxes.
The finances in their clumsiness resembled those
of a large private household. Almost half the
regular revenues came from the Crown lands and
forests; only this rich property of the State ren-
dered his high expenditure possible; it served at
the same time for the technical education of the
peasants. The amount of the principal taxes was
fixed by statute; the movable revenue of the ad-
ministration had to be drawn on for the extra-
ordinary expenses of settling people on the soil
and cultivating.
The carefully accumulated treasure sufficed for
several short campaigns; but old Prussia could
not carry on a long severe war without a foreign
subsidy, since the laws of the Landtag, the tradi-
tional views of the bureaucracy, and the crude
financial system, forbade every loan. Strong as
was the growth of the wealth and well-being of
the middle-classes, the greater advance of the
more fortunate neighbouring peoples was not
easily caught up. The Prussian State still re-
mained the poorest of the Great Powers of the
West; essentially an agricultural land, it played a
modest role in international commerce, even after
Frederick had opened up an avenue to the North
Sea by the conquest of Ostf riesland ; for the
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? Frederick the Great 187
mouth of the Ems, like the mouth of the Oder,
had no rich industrial Hinterland.
As a reformer, Frederick was effective only in
those spheres of the inner affairs of the State
which his predecessor had not understood. He
created the new Prussian Bench of Judges, as his
father formed the modern German Bureaucracy.
He knew that the administration of justice is a
political function, which is inseparably connected
with the State; he made all his dominions inde-
pendent of the Imperial High Court of Justice,
forbade the introduction of the interpretations of
the Faculty of Jurists, created a Ministry of Justice
in addition to the General Direktorium, gave the
entire administration of justice into the hands of
a hierarchically organized State Bureaucracy,
which itself educated its rising generation, and
took under strict superintendence that private
(or independent) jurisdiction which still continued
to exist in some minor departments.
The absolute independence of the courts of
justice in relation to the Administration was
solemnly promised, and kept inviolably, with the
exception of a few cases of well-meaning despotic
high-handed justice. The new Bench preserved
in a modest domestic position an honourable
class-feeling, and while the Imperial courts were
full of corruption, the proud saying was coined in
Prussia, and that against the King: II y a des
juges a Berlin. The desire often obtruded itself
upon the friend of Enlightenment, to whom the
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? i88 The Life of
State was the work of the conscious human will,
that not an inherited and traditional law but a
law founded on experience, such as was generally
desired, must reign in the State; all his life Fred-
erick cherished the idea of carrying out the first
comprehensive codification of the law which had
been attempted since the time of Justinian.
Only after his death did the Allgemeine Land-
reclif come in force, which shows more clearly than
any other work of the epoch the double-sidedness
of the Frederician conception of the State. On
the one side, the code preserved the traditional
social distinctions so carefully that the entire
legal system had to accommodate itself to the
class organization, and even -- against the common
law -- the nobilit}^ were granted special marriage
laws, and on the other it carried the idea of the
sovereignty of the State to its logical conclusion
with such daring, that many a passage anticipated
the ideas of the French Revolution, which made
IMirabeau say that with these ideas Prussia hurried
on a century ahead of the rest of Europe.
The aim of the State is the general well-being,
and only for the sake of this end may the State
limit the natural freedom of the citizens -- and
repeal any existing privilege. The King is only
the head of the State, and has duties and rights
only as such -- and this in the days when Biener
and other renowned lawyers were fighting for the
privileges and rights of the German princes to
' The common law of the period.
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? Frederick the Great 189
their land and serfs as an incontestable legal maxim
in the face of the whole country. The supreme
power, exempt from the sphere of the civil law,
interfered, ruling and advising, in all private af-
fairs, and dictated moral duties to parents and
children, landowners and servants; they ventured
through their all-embracing legislative wisdom
to settle every possible lawsuit of the future at
the outset.
With this code the old absolutism said its last
word: it surrounded its power with fixed barr'ers,
raised the commonwealth to a constitutional
State; and at the same time it unsuspectingly
entered upon the path which must lead to a new
juridical union of the German people, in that it
destroyed the validity of the Roman law. The
mechanical conception of the State of the Fred-
erician period was soon afterwards replaced by
a deeply penetrating philosophy, the incomplete
jurist training of Carmer and Suarez by the work
of historical jurisprudence; but the Allgcmeine
Landrecht ^ nevertheless remained for some decades
the firm foundation from which sprang all further
reforms of the Prussian State.
The belief in the authority of the law, a prelimi-
nary condition of all political freedom, became a
living power in the bureaucracy as well as among
the people. If the State existed for the general
welfare, an irresistible necessity, of which Fred-
erick suspected nothing, led to the desire for the
' The common law of the period.
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? 190 The Life of
removal of the privileges of the upper classes and
the participation of the nation in the government
of the State. And sooner or later these conclu-
sions had to be drawn, since already now only the
genius and strength of a great man could deal
with the difficult problems which this enlarged
kingdom presented.
Frederick did not promote the spiritual life of
his people to nearly the same extent. We know
from Goethe's confessions how fruitfully and in
the interests of freedom the heroism of the seven
years operated on the German civilization: how
in those years of military glory a new import, an
increasing sense of vitality, asserted itself in the
exhausted literature, how the impoverished lan-
guage, which had long sought to express mighty
sentiments, now at last struggled up out of the
insipidity an emptiness and found great words
for great emotions: really, the first German
comedy, Minna von Barnhelm, was created be-
neath the beating of the drums of the Prussian
camp. The Prussian people took a rich share in
the wonderful awakening of the spirit, and pre-
sented the literary movement with several of its
pioneers, from Winckelmann down to Hamann and
Herder. And wholly filled with the Prussian
spirit was that new maturer form of German
Protestantism which at last emerged victoriously
out of the philosophical disputes of this "effer-
vescing period" and became a common property
of t' e North-German peoples: the ethics of Kant.
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? Frederick the Great 191
The categorical imperative of Kant could only
be imagined on this ground of Evangelical free-
dom and faithful self-sacrificing work. Where
before rough commands extorted silent submission,
now every free judgment was challenged, through
the example of the King, who relied fearlessly on
the strength of the enquiring mind and gladly
confessed : who grumbles the most, goes farthest.
Frederick carried on the old Prussian policy of
Christian toleration liberally, and he proclaimed
in his code the principle : ' ' The people's conceptions
of God and godly things cannot be the subject
of a coercive law. " Nor did the Free-thinker
give up the attempts at union of his ancestors,
but strongly maintained that the two Evangelical
Churches should not refuse each other the Holy
Communion in case of necessity. The supreme
ecclesiastical authority of the throne, which he
claimed, ensured him against political intrigues
on behalf of the clergy, and even allowed him to
tolerate in his State the Society of Jesus, suspended
by the Pope.
He accorded the Press an almost unlimited
freedom, since "newspapers, in order to be inter-
esting, must not be interfered with. " He defined
all schools as "organizations of the State," and
spoke readily and spiritedly of the State's duty
to bring up the younger generation to independent
thought and a sacrificing love of the Fatherland.
He constantly extolled the illustriousness of learn-
ing and poetry as the greatest ornament of the
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? 192 The Life of
kingdom: he showed himself a German and a
prince of peace in that he regarded the classics,
and not the exact sciences, lilce the soldier
Napoleon, as the spring of all higher education.
Nevertheless, the King accomplished very little
for the promotion of national education directly.
The scarcity of money, the lack of competent
board-school teachers, and the imceasing struggles
now with foreign enemies, now with the economic
question at home, rendered the carrying out of
his plans more difficult; and in the end the dry
utilitarianism of the father always broke out
again in the son. This economical Prince would
provide means for anything rather than for the
purposes of instruction.
When the Germans in the Empire sneered that
this Prussia had starved itself into greatness, they
thought chiefly of the Prussian teachers and
scholars. Only what was absolutely necessary
was done for the national schools; the repeatedly
enjoined discipline of compulsory general attend-
ance at school remained a dead letter for wide
stretches of the country. None of the Prussian
Universities attained the fame of the new Georgia
Augusta. '^ Only towards the end of the Frederi-
cian period, when Zedlitz, the friend of Kant,
took over the direction of the educational organi-
zations, did a somewhat freer impulse enter into
the public instruction. At that time the worthy
Abbot Felbiger reformed the Catholic national
' The University at Gottingen, named after its founder.
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? Frederick the Great 193
schools, and found enthusiastic supporters in the
Empire, so that in the end Catholic Germany
participated in the greatest blessing of the Refor-
mation.
It seemed an easy thing to gather in Berlin a
brilliant circle of the best intellects of Germany
for pregnant activity.
Every young genius in the
Empire angled for the eye of the national hero.
Even Winckelmann, who had once fled from the
country in hot hatred, now experienced with what
strong bands this State fettered the hearts of its
sons. "For the first time," he wrote, "the voice
of the Fatherland makes itself heard within me,
which was iinknown to me before. " He burned
with an eager desire to show the Aristotle of mili-
tary art that a born subject could achieve some-
thing worthy, and negotiated for years for an
appointment in Berlin.
But in Frederick's French academy there was no
place for German thinkers. The Medicean days,
which one had once awaited from the inspired
Prince of the Rheinsberger Parnassus, only came
for the foreign intellects at the table of Sans Souci ;
the pupil of French culture would not and could
not understand the young unruly life which stirred
in the depths of his own people. While the Ber-
liner company intoxicated themselves to over-
refinement with the idea of the new literature,
and jeering scepticism and refined epicureanism
were almost crowding out the old strict moral
simplicity, the Prussian administration main-
13
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? 194 The Life of
tained their one-sided utilitarian bias which only
troubled itself about everyday matters. That
intolerably stiff, home-baked, prosaic spirit which
was instilled into the State of the old Soldiei-King
was somewhat humanized by Frederick but not
broken ; only the baroque glory of the New Palace
and the mighty cupolas of the Gensdarmenkirche^
made it possible to recognize that at least the
barbaric culture-hatred of the thirties had begun
gradually to give way.
But still the Prussian State represented only
the one half of our national life; the delicacy and
the yearning, the profoundness and the enthusiasm
of the German character, could not obtain just
recognition in this prosaic world. The centre-
point of the German policy was not the home of
the intellectual work of the nation; the classical
period of our poetry found its scene of action in
the minor States.
In this momentous fact lies the key to many
puzzles of modern German history. To the coolly
averted attitude of King Frederick our Literature
owes the most precious thing it possesses -- ^its
imequalled freedom; but this indifference of the
' I cannot find out about this anywhere, but there is the
Gensdarmenmarkt, with the French Church and the New
Church, because Frederick was fond of French things. But in
Baedeker, it does not say anything about the change of name,
though it does say that the two churches with the theatre form
the finest group of buildings in Berlin. In an 1893 Baedeker, it
says that they are of the last century, which would make it
about the time. -- L. S.
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? Frederick the Great 195
Crown of Prussia during the days which decided
the character of modern German culture was to
blame for the fact that it was for a long time
difficult for the heroes of German thought to
understand the one vital State in Germany. After
Frederick's death two full decades elapsed before
Prussia gave hospitable reception to the intellec-
tual powers of the new Germany; and then more
long decades passed before German learning re-
cognized that it was of one blood with the Prus-
sian State, that the State-organizing power of
our people had its root in the same strong idealism
which inspired the German intellectual curiosity
and artistic industry to bold daring.
Frederick's coldness towards German culture is
perhaps the saddest, the most unnatural pheno-
menon in the long history of the suffering of
modern Germany. The first man of the nation,
who awakened again in the Germans the courage
to believe in themselves, was quite a stranger to
the noblest and most characteristic works of his
people; it cannot be expressed too clearly and
strongly, how slowly and with what difficulty
this people threw off the hard inheritance of
the thirty years, the spiritual supremacy of the
foreigner.
Frederick was not, like Henry IV of France, a
faithful representative of the national vices and
virtues, intelligible to the national disposition
in every undulation of his mood. Two natures
struggled within him: the philosophical scholar,
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? 196 The Life of
who revelled in the sound of music, in the melody
of French verse, who considered poetical fame
the greatest happiness on earth, who cried to his
Voltaire in honest admiration: "Destiny bestowed
on me the empty show of rank, on you every
talent; the better portion is yours" -- and the
robust North-German man, who stormed at his
Brandenburgers with rough Brandenburg Jod,^
a model of martial courage, restless energy, and
iron severity, for the stern, austere people.
The French enlightenment of the eighteenth
century was tainted with a deep insincerity: it
had neither the will nor the strength to make the
life agree with the idea: people raved of the holy
simplicity of Nature, and were unutterably pleased
with the most unnatural customs and costumes
which ever governed the European world; people
jeered at the absurd chance of birth, dreamed of
the original freedom and equality, and yet lived
gaily on in an insolent contempt of humanity,
and all the sweet sins of the old fawning society,
borne up with the hope that sometime in a distant
future Reason would set up her throne on the
fragments of all existing things.
At the Prussian Court, witty, malicious Prince
Henry was a faithful representative of this new
culture; theoretically a disdainer of that empty
smoke, which is called fame and power by the
mob, practically a man of hard and fast concep-
tion of political rulership, unscrupulous, versed
' Idiom.
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? Frederick the Great 197
in all tricks and intrigues. And Frederick, too,
in his way, led this double life of the men of the
French enlightenment. ^ His was that tragic fate
to think and to speak in two languages, neither
of which did he absolutely master. The crude
gibberish which was shouted at the Tahakskolle-
gium (smoking club, or the Tobacco Parliament
of Frederick William I of Prussia) of his father
seemed to the beauty-intoxicated youth just as
offensive as the ponderous literary German of
the learned pedantism which he came to know from
the works of orthodox theologists; good or evil,
he contented himself with this clumsy language,
discharged passing business now in rough dialect,
now in stiff pulpit-style.
For the world of ideas, with which his head
bubbled over, he found worthy expression only in
the language of cosmopolitan culture. He knew
well that his bizarre and Teutonic^ Muse spoke a
barbaric French, and in the consciousness of this
weakness estimated the art-worth of his verses
at a lower value than they deserved. The one
thing, at least, which makes the poet, the protean
gift, was in no way denied him. His Muse com-
manded the whole scale of emotions; she now
expressed with lofty earnestness the great and
noble, now, in a satirical mood, with the mischiev-
ousness of an elf -- or, to tell the truth, with the
' The period of Voltaire, the period preceding the Revolution,
humanistic in character.
* In the original "tudesque. "
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? 198 The Life of
mischievousness of a Berlin street-arab -- teased
and tormented her victim. And yet instinct tells
him that the richness of his mind does not flow so
full and clear in his verses as in the notes of
his flute; the fullest melody, the deepest feeling
were unattainable to the German in the foreign
language.
The philosopher of Sans Souci never became
quite at home in the foreign culture which he so
earnestly admired. Above all, the strictness of
his moral conception of the world divided him
from his French companions. It is the greatness
of Protestantism, that it imperiously commands
or requires the unity of thought and will, the unity
of the religious and moral life.
Frederick's moral training was too deeply
rooted in the German Protestant life not to per-
ceive the secret weakness of the French philosophy.
He viewed the Church with a more liberal mind
than the Catholic Voltaire, who, in his Henriade,
the gospel of the new toleration, in the end arrived
at the conclusion that all respectable people
should belong to the Roman Church ; he had never,
as Voltaire, bowed his neck to religious forms
which his conscience condemned, and could endure
with the calm serenity of the born heretic the fact
that the Roman Curia placed his works on the
Index of forbidden books. Although he from
time to time condescendingly defined philosophy
as his hobby, yet the reflection on the great prob-
lems of existence was far more to him than an
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? Frederick the Great 199
ingenious pastime; in the fashion of the ancients,
he sought and found in intellectual work the rest
of the mind at peace with itself, that lofty superior-
ity of the soul to all vicissitudes of fortune.
After the errors of his passionate youth, he soon
learned to subdue that impulse of artistic tender-
ness and sensuality, which threatened to drive
him to epicurean pleasures. Boldly as scorn and
scepticism stirred in his head, the moral order of
the Universe, the idea of duty, remained inviolable
to him. The terrible earnestness of his life, wholly
dedicated to duty, was divided as by all the breadth
of heaven from the effeminate and loose morals
of the Parisian enlightenment. As his writings
-- in that clear and sharp style, which at times
becomes trivial, but never vague -- always irre-
sistibly aimed at a certain decided and palpable
conclusion, so he wished to fashion his life accord-
ing to what he recognized as truth; as far as the
opposition of a barbaric world allowed, he sought
to ensure in State and Society a humane concep-
tion of things, which he called the cardinal virtue
of every thinking being, and went to meet death
with the calm consciousness "of leaving the world
loaded with my good deeds. "
For all that, he never succeeded in wholly over-
coming the duality of his mind. The struggle
within betrays itself in Frederick's biting wit,
which came out so harshly because the hero in
his arrogant directness never thought of hiding it.
The life of genius is always mysterious, but seldom
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? 200 The Life of
does it appear so difficult to understand as in the
richness of this dual mind. The King looks down
with superior irony on the coarse ignorance of his
Brandenburg nobility; he breathes freely when
he can refresh himself from the boredom of this
unintellectual company with the one man to
whom he looks up admiringly, the Master of the
French poetry; at the same time he recognized
what he owed to the sword of that rude race, he
could not find sufficient words to praise the cour-
age, the fidelity, the honourableness of his nobility;
he curbs his jeering before the stern Biblical
faith of old Zieten. The French are welcome
guests for the cheerful after-dinner hours; his
respect belongs to the Germans.
No one of the foreign companions got so near
to the heart of Frederick as that " Seelenmensch " ^
Winterfeldt, who courageously maintained his
German nature even against his royal friend. In
his letters Frederick often yearned for the new
Athens away on the Seine, and bewailed the envy
of jealous gods, who had condemned the son of
the Muse to rule over slaves in the Cimmerian
land of the North. And yet he shared as patiently
as his father the troubles and cares of this wretched
people, glad from the bottom of his heart of the new
life which was springing up under the rough fists
of his peasants, and cried proudly: "I prefer our
simplicity, even our poverty, to those damned
riches which corrupt the dignity of our race. "
^ A man of great feeling and tactful understanding.
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? Frederick the Great 201
Woe to the foreign poets if they presumed to give
the King political advice; hard and scornful he
waved them back to the limits of their art.
Vigorously as he was occupied with the ideas of
the modern France, he was only a great author
when he was expressing German thoughts in
French words, when he spoke as a German Prince
and General in his political, military, and historical
works. Not in the foreign school, but through his
own strength and an unrivalled experience, Fred-
erick became the first publicist of our eighteenth
century, the only German who approached the
State with creative criticism, and spoke of the
duties of the citizen in lofty style: no one before
of that people without a country had known how
to speak so warmly and deeply as the author of the
Letters of Philopatros about the love of the Father-
land.
The old King no longer considered it worth the
trouble to climb down from the height of his
French Parnassus into the lowlands of the German
Muse, and judge with his own eyes whether the
poetical art of his people was not awakened at
last. In his essays on German Literature, six years
before his death, he repeated the old impeach-
ment of the fastidious Parisian critic against the
undisciplined wildness of the German language,
and dismissed the horrible platitudes of Gotz von
Berlichingen, which he had hardly read, with
words of contempt. And yet this infamous dis-
cussion itself gives an eloquent proof of the passion-
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? 202 The Life of
ate national pride of the hero. He prophesied
for the future of Germany a period of intellectual
fame, which already irradiated the unsuspecting
nation with its dawning glory. As Moses he sees
the Promised Land lying in the distance, and
concludes hopefully: "Perhaps the late-comers
will surpass all their predecessors. " So close and
so distant, so foreign and so familiar, was the
relationship of Germany's greatest King to his
people.
The great period of the old monarchy was set-
ting. Round the King it became more and more
silent; the heroes who had fought his battles, the
friends who had laughed and revelled with him,
sank one after the other into the grave ; loneliness,
the curse of the great, came over him. He was
never accustomed to spare with his irony any
single human emotion ; for all the rapturous dreams
of his own youth had been trampled underfoot by
his pitiless father. In old age inconsiderate auster-
ity became inexorable harshness. The stern old
man, who in his rare leisure hoiH"s paced along the
picture-gallery at Sans Souci with his greyhounds,
or in the round temple of the Park dwelt dejectedly
on his dead sister, saw far beneath his feet a new
generation of tiny human beings growing up
aroimd him : they must fear him and obey him ; he
was indifferent to their love. The preponderance
of one man weighed oppressively on the people.
On the rare occasions when he went to the Opera
House, opera and the singers seemed to the audi-
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? Frederick the Great 203
ence to be swallowed up; everyone gazed towards
that place in the parterre where sat the failing old
man, with the large, hard eyes. When the news
of his death came, a Swabian peasant, from the
hearts of countless Germans, cried: "Who will
rule the world now? "
To his last breath all the will-power of the
Prussian Monarchy emanated from this one man;
the day of his death was the first day of rest of his
life. His will told the nation once more how differ-
ently from the domestic politics of the minor
courts was the HohenzoUerns' idea of kingship:
"My last wishes at the moment of my death will
concern the happiness of this State ; may it be the
happiest of States through the mildness of its
laws, the most justly administered in its internal
affairs, the most valiantly defended by an army
which breathes only honour and noble fame, and
may it last and flourish imtil the end of time. "
A century and a half had elapsed since a Fred-
erick William sought among the fragments of the
old Empire the first materials for the building of
the modern Great Power. Hundreds of thousands
of Prussians had found a hero's death, colossal
labour had been expended on the establishment
of the new German kingdom, and at least one
rich blessing of these terrible struggles was felt
forcibly in the Empire: the nation felt at home
again, mistress on her own soil. A long-missed
feeling of safety beautified life for the Germans in
the Empire; it seemed to them as if this Prussia
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? 204 The Life of
was destined by Nature to protect the peaceftil
industries of the nation with its shield against all
foreign disturbers. Without this strong feeling
of national ease our German poetry woiild never
have found the joyous courage to achieve great
things.
Public opinion began gradually to be reconciled
to the State which had grown up against their will;
one took it up as a necessity of German life, with-
out troubling much about its future. The difficult
question : how such a bold conception of the State
could be maintained without the invigorating
strength of genius? -- was only seriously raised by
one contemporary, by Mirabeau, The old and
new epochs gave each other a friendly greeting
once more, when the tribune of the approaching
revolution stayed at Sans Souci, shortly before
the death of the King. With the glowing colour-
splendour of his rhetoric, Mirabeau portrayed the
greatest man he had ever beheld; he called Fred-
erick's State a truly noble work of art, the one
State of the present which could seriously occupy
a brilliant mind; but it did not escape him that
this daring building unfortunately rested on much
too weak a foundation. The Prussians of those
days could not understand such uncertainty; the
glory of the Frederician epoch seemed so wonderful
that even this most fault-finding of all European
peoples was blinded by it.
For the next generation the fame of Frederick
proved fatal; men lived in delusive security, and
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? Frederick the Great 205
forgot that only renewed hard labour could uphold
the work of unutterable toil. But when the days
of shame and trial came, the Prussian again
experienced the surviving efficacy of Genius; the
memory of Rossbach and Leuthen was the last
moral force which kept the leaking ship of the
German Monarchy above water; and when the
State once more took up arms for the struggle of
despair, a South-German poet saw the figure of
the great King descend from the clouds, and call
to the people: "Up, my Prussians! Under my
flag! and you shall be greater than your ancestors ! "
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? TREITSCHKE AS A HISTORIAN
Lord Acton says of Treitschke :
"He is the one writer of history who is more bril-
liant and more powerful than Droysen: he writes
with the force and incisiveness of Mommsen. "
Heinrich von Treitschke (1834- 1896) was a
Saxon who in 1863 became Professor at Freiburg, in
Baden, and in 1866 became a Prussian subject and
editor of the Preussische Jahrbiicher. After being a
Professor at Kiel and Heidelberg, in 1874 he became
Professor at Berlin.
traying the hollowness of objectless military fame,
and had the bust of the King of Sweden contemptu-
ously erected beneath the feet of the Muse in the
round hall at Sans Souci.
Already in his impetuous youth he had made
up his mind about the moral objects of power.
This State must become strong [he wrote at that
time], that it may play the lofty role of preserving
peace only from love of justice, and not from fear.
But if ever injustice, bias, and vice gain the upper
hand in Prussia, then I wish the House of Branden-
burg a speedy downfall. That says all.
When at the end of the Seven- Years' War he felt
strong enough to preserve peace out of justice,
then he turned his attention to the restoration of
the national prosperity with such zeal that the
army was actually injured.
It is a fact: the general who had overwhelmed
the Flag of Prussia with laurels left the army in
a worse condition than he had found it on his
ascension to the throne; he could not approach
his father as a military organizer. He needed the
industrial population for his devastated country,
and therefore patronized on principle the enlisting
of troops for his army in foreign countries. The
regimental commanders were to draw up the
register of their recruiting-districts in agreement
with the Landrdte (sheriffs) and surveyors^ of
taxes.
From that time there occurred in every district
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? Frederick the Great i8i
each year that struggle between the military claims
and the civil interests which, afterward, in chang-
ing forms, occurred again and again in Prussian
history. This time the struggle was decided
in favour of political economy. The civil author-
ities sought to preserve every man who was in
any way capable or well-to-do from the red can-
tonal collar. The King himself interfered to
help, and freed from compulsory service numerous
classes of the population -- the new immigrants,
the families of all traders and manufacturers, the
household servants of landowners. Many cities
-- nay, whole provinces, as Ostfriesland -- obtained
privileges. Soon after the peace the majority of
the army consisted of foreigners.
Frederick thought highly of the army, and liked
to call it the Atlas who carried this State on his
strong shoulders; the military fame of the seven
years had an after-effect; the service of the com-
mon soldier, it is true, was counted in Prussia,
as everywhere else in the world, as a misfortune,
but not as a disgrace, as it was in the rest of the
Empire. The King brought the great summer
manoeuvres on the Mockerauer Heath to a tech-
nical completeness which the art of manoeuvres
has probably never reached since then. He was
never tired of impressing on his officers "to love
the detail, which also has its distinction," and
wrote for their instruction his military handbook,
the most mature of all his works.
Not one improvement in military affairs escaped
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? i82 The Life of
him; at a great age he yet adopted a new arm
of the service, the light infantry, the green Fusiliers
according to the pattern of the American riflemen.
The fame of the Potsdamer parade-ground drew
spectators from all countries. In Turin Victor
Amadeus and his generals faithfully copied every
movement of the great Prussian drill-sergeant
down to the bent carriage of the head; and when
the young Lieutenant Gneisenau saw the pointed
helmets of the grenadiers on parade glittering in
the sun, he cried enthusiastically: "Say, which
of all nations could well copy this marvellous
sight. ? "
In spite of that, in Frederick's last years the
army sank undoubtedly. The flower of the old
officers' corps lay on the battle-fields; during the
seven years -- an unprecedented occurrence in the
history of war -- all the renowned generals, with
scanty exceptions, were left on the field or were
disabled; their successors had known war only in
subalterns' positions, and looked for the secret of
the Frederician conquests only in the mechanical
exercises of the parade-ground. Among the for-
eign officers were many doubtful adventurers who
only courted favour; for the proud frankness of a
York or a Bliicher there was no more room.
The King, less friendly to the bourgeoisie than
his father, believed that only the aristocracy had
a sense of honour, and dismissed the bourgeois
officers from the majority of the regiments. In the
noble officers* corps there arose an aristocratic
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? Frederick the Great 183
arrogance (Junkersinn) , which soon became more
intolerable to the people than the coarse roughness
of earlier times. The old hired soldiers lived
in the end comfortably with wife and child, in
civil employment, and abominated war for a
country which had always remained foreign to
them. Frederick had already noticed with aston-
ishment in the war of the Bavarian Succession how
little this army accomplished; the reason for the
deterioration he did not penetrate. The Eudae-
monism of his age made it impossible for him to
recognize the moral forces which swayed the army.
He had once, after the custom of the period, formed
Prussian regiments from Austrian and Saxon
prisoners of war, and could not even learn by the
desertions en masse of these imfortimate men; he
had in the last years of the war sufficiently experi-
enced what an army of his own people was capable
of, yet such forcible calling out of the entire
national strength always remained to him only an
expedient for desperate days, "when the defence
of the Fatherland and an imminent danger depends
on it. "
Of his statesmen, Hertzberg alone had religiously
observed the daring ideas of Frederick William I ;
he wanted to gradually purge the army of all
foreigners. "Then we shall be as imconquerable
as the Greeks and the Romans! " But the old
King saw with satisfaction how his tmfortunate
land was being strengthened agriculturally, and
now defined the ideal of the army with the astound-
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? 1 84 The Life of
ing words: "The peaceful citizen shall not even
notice when the nation is at war. " So one of the
pillars which upheld the edifice of State -- universal
service -- began slowly to totter.
The traditional class-system of the estates of the
realm and the organization of government de-
pendent from it the King upheld more strictly
than his father; he helped with instruction and
ruthless coercion, with gifts and loans, as often
as the role which was prescribed for the peasant,
the citizen, or the nobleman in the household of
the nation no longer seemed to suffice him.
The nobility was to remain the first rank in the
State, since "I need them for my army and my
civil administration. " By the mortgage institu-
tions, and by considerable support with ready
money, Frederick attained the conservation of the
large estates of the nobles after the devastation
of the years of war. Therefore he made as little
attempt as his father to abolish the serfdom of the
peasants, which was so repugnant to his magna-
nimity. By the common law, it is true, the
harsher forms of serfdom were done away with,
but there still remained the somewhat less op-
pressive hereditary rights of the dynasty. The
Government contented itself with modifying the
harshness of the existing lordship.
Unnoticed and undesired by the older princes,
in the meantime there began a displacement of
the conditions of social power, which was rich in
results. The new literatiu-e drew an educated
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? Frederick the Great 185
public from all classes ; the merchants and trades-
people of the great cities, the simple tenants of
the enlarged dominions of the monarchy, gradually-
attained to an assured position and to a conviction
that the privileges of the nobility could not endure
much longer. The nobility lost by degrees the
moral as well as the economic foundations of their
rank. The structure of the old class-organization
was imperceptibly undermined.
The administrative arrangements of the father
remained unchanged under the son, except that
he added to the provincial departments of the
General Direktorium four new ones, embracing the
entire State, for the administration of War, Mer-
cantile Policy, Mining Matters, and Forestry, and
thus made another step on the way to a united
State. The Crown still stood high above the
people. Gensdarmes had to force the peasants to
use the seed-potatoes presented by the King; the
command of the Sheriff (Landrat) and the Board
enforced against the tenacious passive opposi-
tion of the parties concerned communal drainage
and other enterprises, and all improvements of
agricultural appliances. The wholly exhausted
energies of the people for civil industries could
only be reawakened by a violent system of
protection.
The flaws of the Frederician political economy
were not due to the eternal and well-meant inter-
ference of the supreme power, which the age had
in no way outlived, but in the fiscal deceptions
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? 1 86 The Life of
which the King was compelled to resort to through
the embarrassments of his affairs; he had to use
fully three quarters of his revenue for the army,
and sought to make up what was necessary for his
administration by monopolies and indirect taxes.
The finances in their clumsiness resembled those
of a large private household. Almost half the
regular revenues came from the Crown lands and
forests; only this rich property of the State ren-
dered his high expenditure possible; it served at
the same time for the technical education of the
peasants. The amount of the principal taxes was
fixed by statute; the movable revenue of the ad-
ministration had to be drawn on for the extra-
ordinary expenses of settling people on the soil
and cultivating.
The carefully accumulated treasure sufficed for
several short campaigns; but old Prussia could
not carry on a long severe war without a foreign
subsidy, since the laws of the Landtag, the tradi-
tional views of the bureaucracy, and the crude
financial system, forbade every loan. Strong as
was the growth of the wealth and well-being of
the middle-classes, the greater advance of the
more fortunate neighbouring peoples was not
easily caught up. The Prussian State still re-
mained the poorest of the Great Powers of the
West; essentially an agricultural land, it played a
modest role in international commerce, even after
Frederick had opened up an avenue to the North
Sea by the conquest of Ostf riesland ; for the
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? Frederick the Great 187
mouth of the Ems, like the mouth of the Oder,
had no rich industrial Hinterland.
As a reformer, Frederick was effective only in
those spheres of the inner affairs of the State
which his predecessor had not understood. He
created the new Prussian Bench of Judges, as his
father formed the modern German Bureaucracy.
He knew that the administration of justice is a
political function, which is inseparably connected
with the State; he made all his dominions inde-
pendent of the Imperial High Court of Justice,
forbade the introduction of the interpretations of
the Faculty of Jurists, created a Ministry of Justice
in addition to the General Direktorium, gave the
entire administration of justice into the hands of
a hierarchically organized State Bureaucracy,
which itself educated its rising generation, and
took under strict superintendence that private
(or independent) jurisdiction which still continued
to exist in some minor departments.
The absolute independence of the courts of
justice in relation to the Administration was
solemnly promised, and kept inviolably, with the
exception of a few cases of well-meaning despotic
high-handed justice. The new Bench preserved
in a modest domestic position an honourable
class-feeling, and while the Imperial courts were
full of corruption, the proud saying was coined in
Prussia, and that against the King: II y a des
juges a Berlin. The desire often obtruded itself
upon the friend of Enlightenment, to whom the
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? i88 The Life of
State was the work of the conscious human will,
that not an inherited and traditional law but a
law founded on experience, such as was generally
desired, must reign in the State; all his life Fred-
erick cherished the idea of carrying out the first
comprehensive codification of the law which had
been attempted since the time of Justinian.
Only after his death did the Allgemeine Land-
reclif come in force, which shows more clearly than
any other work of the epoch the double-sidedness
of the Frederician conception of the State. On
the one side, the code preserved the traditional
social distinctions so carefully that the entire
legal system had to accommodate itself to the
class organization, and even -- against the common
law -- the nobilit}^ were granted special marriage
laws, and on the other it carried the idea of the
sovereignty of the State to its logical conclusion
with such daring, that many a passage anticipated
the ideas of the French Revolution, which made
IMirabeau say that with these ideas Prussia hurried
on a century ahead of the rest of Europe.
The aim of the State is the general well-being,
and only for the sake of this end may the State
limit the natural freedom of the citizens -- and
repeal any existing privilege. The King is only
the head of the State, and has duties and rights
only as such -- and this in the days when Biener
and other renowned lawyers were fighting for the
privileges and rights of the German princes to
' The common law of the period.
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? Frederick the Great 189
their land and serfs as an incontestable legal maxim
in the face of the whole country. The supreme
power, exempt from the sphere of the civil law,
interfered, ruling and advising, in all private af-
fairs, and dictated moral duties to parents and
children, landowners and servants; they ventured
through their all-embracing legislative wisdom
to settle every possible lawsuit of the future at
the outset.
With this code the old absolutism said its last
word: it surrounded its power with fixed barr'ers,
raised the commonwealth to a constitutional
State; and at the same time it unsuspectingly
entered upon the path which must lead to a new
juridical union of the German people, in that it
destroyed the validity of the Roman law. The
mechanical conception of the State of the Fred-
erician period was soon afterwards replaced by
a deeply penetrating philosophy, the incomplete
jurist training of Carmer and Suarez by the work
of historical jurisprudence; but the Allgcmeine
Landrecht ^ nevertheless remained for some decades
the firm foundation from which sprang all further
reforms of the Prussian State.
The belief in the authority of the law, a prelimi-
nary condition of all political freedom, became a
living power in the bureaucracy as well as among
the people. If the State existed for the general
welfare, an irresistible necessity, of which Fred-
erick suspected nothing, led to the desire for the
' The common law of the period.
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? 190 The Life of
removal of the privileges of the upper classes and
the participation of the nation in the government
of the State. And sooner or later these conclu-
sions had to be drawn, since already now only the
genius and strength of a great man could deal
with the difficult problems which this enlarged
kingdom presented.
Frederick did not promote the spiritual life of
his people to nearly the same extent. We know
from Goethe's confessions how fruitfully and in
the interests of freedom the heroism of the seven
years operated on the German civilization: how
in those years of military glory a new import, an
increasing sense of vitality, asserted itself in the
exhausted literature, how the impoverished lan-
guage, which had long sought to express mighty
sentiments, now at last struggled up out of the
insipidity an emptiness and found great words
for great emotions: really, the first German
comedy, Minna von Barnhelm, was created be-
neath the beating of the drums of the Prussian
camp. The Prussian people took a rich share in
the wonderful awakening of the spirit, and pre-
sented the literary movement with several of its
pioneers, from Winckelmann down to Hamann and
Herder. And wholly filled with the Prussian
spirit was that new maturer form of German
Protestantism which at last emerged victoriously
out of the philosophical disputes of this "effer-
vescing period" and became a common property
of t' e North-German peoples: the ethics of Kant.
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? Frederick the Great 191
The categorical imperative of Kant could only
be imagined on this ground of Evangelical free-
dom and faithful self-sacrificing work. Where
before rough commands extorted silent submission,
now every free judgment was challenged, through
the example of the King, who relied fearlessly on
the strength of the enquiring mind and gladly
confessed : who grumbles the most, goes farthest.
Frederick carried on the old Prussian policy of
Christian toleration liberally, and he proclaimed
in his code the principle : ' ' The people's conceptions
of God and godly things cannot be the subject
of a coercive law. " Nor did the Free-thinker
give up the attempts at union of his ancestors,
but strongly maintained that the two Evangelical
Churches should not refuse each other the Holy
Communion in case of necessity. The supreme
ecclesiastical authority of the throne, which he
claimed, ensured him against political intrigues
on behalf of the clergy, and even allowed him to
tolerate in his State the Society of Jesus, suspended
by the Pope.
He accorded the Press an almost unlimited
freedom, since "newspapers, in order to be inter-
esting, must not be interfered with. " He defined
all schools as "organizations of the State," and
spoke readily and spiritedly of the State's duty
to bring up the younger generation to independent
thought and a sacrificing love of the Fatherland.
He constantly extolled the illustriousness of learn-
ing and poetry as the greatest ornament of the
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? 192 The Life of
kingdom: he showed himself a German and a
prince of peace in that he regarded the classics,
and not the exact sciences, lilce the soldier
Napoleon, as the spring of all higher education.
Nevertheless, the King accomplished very little
for the promotion of national education directly.
The scarcity of money, the lack of competent
board-school teachers, and the imceasing struggles
now with foreign enemies, now with the economic
question at home, rendered the carrying out of
his plans more difficult; and in the end the dry
utilitarianism of the father always broke out
again in the son. This economical Prince would
provide means for anything rather than for the
purposes of instruction.
When the Germans in the Empire sneered that
this Prussia had starved itself into greatness, they
thought chiefly of the Prussian teachers and
scholars. Only what was absolutely necessary
was done for the national schools; the repeatedly
enjoined discipline of compulsory general attend-
ance at school remained a dead letter for wide
stretches of the country. None of the Prussian
Universities attained the fame of the new Georgia
Augusta. '^ Only towards the end of the Frederi-
cian period, when Zedlitz, the friend of Kant,
took over the direction of the educational organi-
zations, did a somewhat freer impulse enter into
the public instruction. At that time the worthy
Abbot Felbiger reformed the Catholic national
' The University at Gottingen, named after its founder.
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? Frederick the Great 193
schools, and found enthusiastic supporters in the
Empire, so that in the end Catholic Germany
participated in the greatest blessing of the Refor-
mation.
It seemed an easy thing to gather in Berlin a
brilliant circle of the best intellects of Germany
for pregnant activity.
Every young genius in the
Empire angled for the eye of the national hero.
Even Winckelmann, who had once fled from the
country in hot hatred, now experienced with what
strong bands this State fettered the hearts of its
sons. "For the first time," he wrote, "the voice
of the Fatherland makes itself heard within me,
which was iinknown to me before. " He burned
with an eager desire to show the Aristotle of mili-
tary art that a born subject could achieve some-
thing worthy, and negotiated for years for an
appointment in Berlin.
But in Frederick's French academy there was no
place for German thinkers. The Medicean days,
which one had once awaited from the inspired
Prince of the Rheinsberger Parnassus, only came
for the foreign intellects at the table of Sans Souci ;
the pupil of French culture would not and could
not understand the young unruly life which stirred
in the depths of his own people. While the Ber-
liner company intoxicated themselves to over-
refinement with the idea of the new literature,
and jeering scepticism and refined epicureanism
were almost crowding out the old strict moral
simplicity, the Prussian administration main-
13
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? 194 The Life of
tained their one-sided utilitarian bias which only
troubled itself about everyday matters. That
intolerably stiff, home-baked, prosaic spirit which
was instilled into the State of the old Soldiei-King
was somewhat humanized by Frederick but not
broken ; only the baroque glory of the New Palace
and the mighty cupolas of the Gensdarmenkirche^
made it possible to recognize that at least the
barbaric culture-hatred of the thirties had begun
gradually to give way.
But still the Prussian State represented only
the one half of our national life; the delicacy and
the yearning, the profoundness and the enthusiasm
of the German character, could not obtain just
recognition in this prosaic world. The centre-
point of the German policy was not the home of
the intellectual work of the nation; the classical
period of our poetry found its scene of action in
the minor States.
In this momentous fact lies the key to many
puzzles of modern German history. To the coolly
averted attitude of King Frederick our Literature
owes the most precious thing it possesses -- ^its
imequalled freedom; but this indifference of the
' I cannot find out about this anywhere, but there is the
Gensdarmenmarkt, with the French Church and the New
Church, because Frederick was fond of French things. But in
Baedeker, it does not say anything about the change of name,
though it does say that the two churches with the theatre form
the finest group of buildings in Berlin. In an 1893 Baedeker, it
says that they are of the last century, which would make it
about the time. -- L. S.
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? Frederick the Great 195
Crown of Prussia during the days which decided
the character of modern German culture was to
blame for the fact that it was for a long time
difficult for the heroes of German thought to
understand the one vital State in Germany. After
Frederick's death two full decades elapsed before
Prussia gave hospitable reception to the intellec-
tual powers of the new Germany; and then more
long decades passed before German learning re-
cognized that it was of one blood with the Prus-
sian State, that the State-organizing power of
our people had its root in the same strong idealism
which inspired the German intellectual curiosity
and artistic industry to bold daring.
Frederick's coldness towards German culture is
perhaps the saddest, the most unnatural pheno-
menon in the long history of the suffering of
modern Germany. The first man of the nation,
who awakened again in the Germans the courage
to believe in themselves, was quite a stranger to
the noblest and most characteristic works of his
people; it cannot be expressed too clearly and
strongly, how slowly and with what difficulty
this people threw off the hard inheritance of
the thirty years, the spiritual supremacy of the
foreigner.
Frederick was not, like Henry IV of France, a
faithful representative of the national vices and
virtues, intelligible to the national disposition
in every undulation of his mood. Two natures
struggled within him: the philosophical scholar,
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? 196 The Life of
who revelled in the sound of music, in the melody
of French verse, who considered poetical fame
the greatest happiness on earth, who cried to his
Voltaire in honest admiration: "Destiny bestowed
on me the empty show of rank, on you every
talent; the better portion is yours" -- and the
robust North-German man, who stormed at his
Brandenburgers with rough Brandenburg Jod,^
a model of martial courage, restless energy, and
iron severity, for the stern, austere people.
The French enlightenment of the eighteenth
century was tainted with a deep insincerity: it
had neither the will nor the strength to make the
life agree with the idea: people raved of the holy
simplicity of Nature, and were unutterably pleased
with the most unnatural customs and costumes
which ever governed the European world; people
jeered at the absurd chance of birth, dreamed of
the original freedom and equality, and yet lived
gaily on in an insolent contempt of humanity,
and all the sweet sins of the old fawning society,
borne up with the hope that sometime in a distant
future Reason would set up her throne on the
fragments of all existing things.
At the Prussian Court, witty, malicious Prince
Henry was a faithful representative of this new
culture; theoretically a disdainer of that empty
smoke, which is called fame and power by the
mob, practically a man of hard and fast concep-
tion of political rulership, unscrupulous, versed
' Idiom.
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? Frederick the Great 197
in all tricks and intrigues. And Frederick, too,
in his way, led this double life of the men of the
French enlightenment. ^ His was that tragic fate
to think and to speak in two languages, neither
of which did he absolutely master. The crude
gibberish which was shouted at the Tahakskolle-
gium (smoking club, or the Tobacco Parliament
of Frederick William I of Prussia) of his father
seemed to the beauty-intoxicated youth just as
offensive as the ponderous literary German of
the learned pedantism which he came to know from
the works of orthodox theologists; good or evil,
he contented himself with this clumsy language,
discharged passing business now in rough dialect,
now in stiff pulpit-style.
For the world of ideas, with which his head
bubbled over, he found worthy expression only in
the language of cosmopolitan culture. He knew
well that his bizarre and Teutonic^ Muse spoke a
barbaric French, and in the consciousness of this
weakness estimated the art-worth of his verses
at a lower value than they deserved. The one
thing, at least, which makes the poet, the protean
gift, was in no way denied him. His Muse com-
manded the whole scale of emotions; she now
expressed with lofty earnestness the great and
noble, now, in a satirical mood, with the mischiev-
ousness of an elf -- or, to tell the truth, with the
' The period of Voltaire, the period preceding the Revolution,
humanistic in character.
* In the original "tudesque. "
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? 198 The Life of
mischievousness of a Berlin street-arab -- teased
and tormented her victim. And yet instinct tells
him that the richness of his mind does not flow so
full and clear in his verses as in the notes of
his flute; the fullest melody, the deepest feeling
were unattainable to the German in the foreign
language.
The philosopher of Sans Souci never became
quite at home in the foreign culture which he so
earnestly admired. Above all, the strictness of
his moral conception of the world divided him
from his French companions. It is the greatness
of Protestantism, that it imperiously commands
or requires the unity of thought and will, the unity
of the religious and moral life.
Frederick's moral training was too deeply
rooted in the German Protestant life not to per-
ceive the secret weakness of the French philosophy.
He viewed the Church with a more liberal mind
than the Catholic Voltaire, who, in his Henriade,
the gospel of the new toleration, in the end arrived
at the conclusion that all respectable people
should belong to the Roman Church ; he had never,
as Voltaire, bowed his neck to religious forms
which his conscience condemned, and could endure
with the calm serenity of the born heretic the fact
that the Roman Curia placed his works on the
Index of forbidden books. Although he from
time to time condescendingly defined philosophy
as his hobby, yet the reflection on the great prob-
lems of existence was far more to him than an
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? Frederick the Great 199
ingenious pastime; in the fashion of the ancients,
he sought and found in intellectual work the rest
of the mind at peace with itself, that lofty superior-
ity of the soul to all vicissitudes of fortune.
After the errors of his passionate youth, he soon
learned to subdue that impulse of artistic tender-
ness and sensuality, which threatened to drive
him to epicurean pleasures. Boldly as scorn and
scepticism stirred in his head, the moral order of
the Universe, the idea of duty, remained inviolable
to him. The terrible earnestness of his life, wholly
dedicated to duty, was divided as by all the breadth
of heaven from the effeminate and loose morals
of the Parisian enlightenment. As his writings
-- in that clear and sharp style, which at times
becomes trivial, but never vague -- always irre-
sistibly aimed at a certain decided and palpable
conclusion, so he wished to fashion his life accord-
ing to what he recognized as truth; as far as the
opposition of a barbaric world allowed, he sought
to ensure in State and Society a humane concep-
tion of things, which he called the cardinal virtue
of every thinking being, and went to meet death
with the calm consciousness "of leaving the world
loaded with my good deeds. "
For all that, he never succeeded in wholly over-
coming the duality of his mind. The struggle
within betrays itself in Frederick's biting wit,
which came out so harshly because the hero in
his arrogant directness never thought of hiding it.
The life of genius is always mysterious, but seldom
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? 200 The Life of
does it appear so difficult to understand as in the
richness of this dual mind. The King looks down
with superior irony on the coarse ignorance of his
Brandenburg nobility; he breathes freely when
he can refresh himself from the boredom of this
unintellectual company with the one man to
whom he looks up admiringly, the Master of the
French poetry; at the same time he recognized
what he owed to the sword of that rude race, he
could not find sufficient words to praise the cour-
age, the fidelity, the honourableness of his nobility;
he curbs his jeering before the stern Biblical
faith of old Zieten. The French are welcome
guests for the cheerful after-dinner hours; his
respect belongs to the Germans.
No one of the foreign companions got so near
to the heart of Frederick as that " Seelenmensch " ^
Winterfeldt, who courageously maintained his
German nature even against his royal friend. In
his letters Frederick often yearned for the new
Athens away on the Seine, and bewailed the envy
of jealous gods, who had condemned the son of
the Muse to rule over slaves in the Cimmerian
land of the North. And yet he shared as patiently
as his father the troubles and cares of this wretched
people, glad from the bottom of his heart of the new
life which was springing up under the rough fists
of his peasants, and cried proudly: "I prefer our
simplicity, even our poverty, to those damned
riches which corrupt the dignity of our race. "
^ A man of great feeling and tactful understanding.
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? Frederick the Great 201
Woe to the foreign poets if they presumed to give
the King political advice; hard and scornful he
waved them back to the limits of their art.
Vigorously as he was occupied with the ideas of
the modern France, he was only a great author
when he was expressing German thoughts in
French words, when he spoke as a German Prince
and General in his political, military, and historical
works. Not in the foreign school, but through his
own strength and an unrivalled experience, Fred-
erick became the first publicist of our eighteenth
century, the only German who approached the
State with creative criticism, and spoke of the
duties of the citizen in lofty style: no one before
of that people without a country had known how
to speak so warmly and deeply as the author of the
Letters of Philopatros about the love of the Father-
land.
The old King no longer considered it worth the
trouble to climb down from the height of his
French Parnassus into the lowlands of the German
Muse, and judge with his own eyes whether the
poetical art of his people was not awakened at
last. In his essays on German Literature, six years
before his death, he repeated the old impeach-
ment of the fastidious Parisian critic against the
undisciplined wildness of the German language,
and dismissed the horrible platitudes of Gotz von
Berlichingen, which he had hardly read, with
words of contempt. And yet this infamous dis-
cussion itself gives an eloquent proof of the passion-
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? 202 The Life of
ate national pride of the hero. He prophesied
for the future of Germany a period of intellectual
fame, which already irradiated the unsuspecting
nation with its dawning glory. As Moses he sees
the Promised Land lying in the distance, and
concludes hopefully: "Perhaps the late-comers
will surpass all their predecessors. " So close and
so distant, so foreign and so familiar, was the
relationship of Germany's greatest King to his
people.
The great period of the old monarchy was set-
ting. Round the King it became more and more
silent; the heroes who had fought his battles, the
friends who had laughed and revelled with him,
sank one after the other into the grave ; loneliness,
the curse of the great, came over him. He was
never accustomed to spare with his irony any
single human emotion ; for all the rapturous dreams
of his own youth had been trampled underfoot by
his pitiless father. In old age inconsiderate auster-
ity became inexorable harshness. The stern old
man, who in his rare leisure hoiH"s paced along the
picture-gallery at Sans Souci with his greyhounds,
or in the round temple of the Park dwelt dejectedly
on his dead sister, saw far beneath his feet a new
generation of tiny human beings growing up
aroimd him : they must fear him and obey him ; he
was indifferent to their love. The preponderance
of one man weighed oppressively on the people.
On the rare occasions when he went to the Opera
House, opera and the singers seemed to the audi-
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? Frederick the Great 203
ence to be swallowed up; everyone gazed towards
that place in the parterre where sat the failing old
man, with the large, hard eyes. When the news
of his death came, a Swabian peasant, from the
hearts of countless Germans, cried: "Who will
rule the world now? "
To his last breath all the will-power of the
Prussian Monarchy emanated from this one man;
the day of his death was the first day of rest of his
life. His will told the nation once more how differ-
ently from the domestic politics of the minor
courts was the HohenzoUerns' idea of kingship:
"My last wishes at the moment of my death will
concern the happiness of this State ; may it be the
happiest of States through the mildness of its
laws, the most justly administered in its internal
affairs, the most valiantly defended by an army
which breathes only honour and noble fame, and
may it last and flourish imtil the end of time. "
A century and a half had elapsed since a Fred-
erick William sought among the fragments of the
old Empire the first materials for the building of
the modern Great Power. Hundreds of thousands
of Prussians had found a hero's death, colossal
labour had been expended on the establishment
of the new German kingdom, and at least one
rich blessing of these terrible struggles was felt
forcibly in the Empire: the nation felt at home
again, mistress on her own soil. A long-missed
feeling of safety beautified life for the Germans in
the Empire; it seemed to them as if this Prussia
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? 204 The Life of
was destined by Nature to protect the peaceftil
industries of the nation with its shield against all
foreign disturbers. Without this strong feeling
of national ease our German poetry woiild never
have found the joyous courage to achieve great
things.
Public opinion began gradually to be reconciled
to the State which had grown up against their will;
one took it up as a necessity of German life, with-
out troubling much about its future. The difficult
question : how such a bold conception of the State
could be maintained without the invigorating
strength of genius? -- was only seriously raised by
one contemporary, by Mirabeau, The old and
new epochs gave each other a friendly greeting
once more, when the tribune of the approaching
revolution stayed at Sans Souci, shortly before
the death of the King. With the glowing colour-
splendour of his rhetoric, Mirabeau portrayed the
greatest man he had ever beheld; he called Fred-
erick's State a truly noble work of art, the one
State of the present which could seriously occupy
a brilliant mind; but it did not escape him that
this daring building unfortunately rested on much
too weak a foundation. The Prussians of those
days could not understand such uncertainty; the
glory of the Frederician epoch seemed so wonderful
that even this most fault-finding of all European
peoples was blinded by it.
For the next generation the fame of Frederick
proved fatal; men lived in delusive security, and
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? Frederick the Great 205
forgot that only renewed hard labour could uphold
the work of unutterable toil. But when the days
of shame and trial came, the Prussian again
experienced the surviving efficacy of Genius; the
memory of Rossbach and Leuthen was the last
moral force which kept the leaking ship of the
German Monarchy above water; and when the
State once more took up arms for the struggle of
despair, a South-German poet saw the figure of
the great King descend from the clouds, and call
to the people: "Up, my Prussians! Under my
flag! and you shall be greater than your ancestors ! "
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? TREITSCHKE AS A HISTORIAN
Lord Acton says of Treitschke :
"He is the one writer of history who is more bril-
liant and more powerful than Droysen: he writes
with the force and incisiveness of Mommsen. "
Heinrich von Treitschke (1834- 1896) was a
Saxon who in 1863 became Professor at Freiburg, in
Baden, and in 1866 became a Prussian subject and
editor of the Preussische Jahrbiicher. After being a
Professor at Kiel and Heidelberg, in 1874 he became
Professor at Berlin.
