Death of a Nation Read online

  There were also other underlying tensions, not least the oppression of Protestant rights in the Austrian Empire; the Pragmatic Sanction having been signed in part to ease the flow of the Salzburg Protestant migrants to East Prussia. Another Prussian grievance that rubbed the Hohenzollerns up the wrong way was the Emperor’s use of his prerogative as the final arbiter of the law in the Holy Roman Empire to hear complaints from the Estates in Brandenburg-Prussia at the Hofgericht (Imperial High Court) in Vienna. The Kaiser had also asked Friedrich for his support in the Kaiser’s claims to the Spanish succession, to which Friedrich had agreed. The succession was bitterly opposed by France who saw herself hemmed in by the Habsburg’s domination of the German Empire to her east, to the southeast by Austria with her possession of northern Italy, and to the south by Spanish Habsburg dynastic links in Spain. A long-term objective of French foreign policy was to break the link between the Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs, push for the Rhine, claim the territories to the west of it, and to supplant Austria’s influence in northern Italy, whilst acquiring more territory for herself in Nice, Savoy and Corsica along the way. When the wars of the Spanish Succession did come, Friedrich again stood loyally at the Emperor’s side. But by the end of Friedrich’s reign, successive Habsburg emperors had abused the Soldier King’s loyalty and disrespected his claims to a point where he seethed with bitterness and resentment against Austria. In 1739, the last year of his reign, he signed a secret treaty with France (Austria’s Continental arch-rival) that accepted his claim to the Duchy of Berg. He taught his son that Austria had done all in its power to hold Prussia back and was never to be trusted again.(18)

  His son had his own bitter memories of Austrian interference with his arranged marriage, which had manoeuvred him into a loveless match. In the last years of his father’s reign, a rapprochement was reached between father and son, largely due to their mutual enmity towards Austria, which had significant consequences for Prussia’s foreign policy, the future of the Holy Roman Empire and the course of European history.lxxxii

  FREDERICK THE GREAT

  Since the time of Alexander, the epithet of ‘Great’ has been a rare one. Frederick the Great is not as well known in Anglo-Saxon circles today as he once was. Perhaps not surprisingly, for like Hannibal, he presides over a Kingdom of Ghosts that no one can find on a map anymore. Nevertheless, in 1991 HRH Queen Elizabeth II and a host of royals attended the reinterment of his bones at ‘Sans Souci’, his summer palace in Potsdam,lxxxiii where, per his last wishes, he was finally interred next to his beloved dogs.

  Frederick the Great’s tormented childhood and adolescence would have broken or bitterly twisted a weaker mortal, but instead it strengthened his character. Frederick junior was a far gentler soul than his father. He appreciated reading, the arts and music, whilst his father’s life was consumed by all things military. As a young man the relationship with his father became increasingly strained. Frederick’s father gave him ever more chores to fulfil on a daily basis to try and toughen him up and draw him away from his less manly pursuits. However, his mother took pity on him, and knowing of his affection for more liberal England, and being of the Hanoverian house herself she was keen to engineer a marriage for her son to the English Princess Amalia, the daughter of the Prince of Wales; a marriage her son was also said to have been keen on. In the end however, Vienna, fearing a stronger alliance between Prussia and England, prevailed on Frederick’s father to arrange a more ‘suitable’ marriage to an Austrian princess. This was the last straw for Frederick. In August 1730, he planned to flee from his gilded cage to England with one of his regimental friends, Hans Hermann von Kathe, a young man from a distinguished military family. However they were found out, caught and incarcerated in the fortress town of Küstrin on the Oder.lxxxiv Frederick’s father regarded his son’s actions not only as a personal betrayal, but as treason, and toyed with the idea of having him executed. In the end, to teach him a lesson, he decided to have Kathe beheaded in the fortress courtyard. He had officers hold young Frederick’s head against the bars in the window of his cell to force him to watch.

  The more ‘suitable’ Austrian marriage that was subsequently arranged for Frederick by his father was to a cousin of the Austrian Habsburg Empress, Princess Elisabeth Christina of Brunswick-Bevern. It was a marriage of convenience and some assume it was never consummated. They certainly did not have any children. The princess was in fact banished to her own gilded cage at Schloss Schönhausen just north of Berlin. They saw each other only once a year on her birthday at Frederick’s palace in Potsdam. Having had his desires broken by his reactionary father, Frederick became emotionally withdrawn, cool and cynical. The only woman he remained close to throughout his life was his older sister by three years, Wilhelmine. It has often been rumoured by historians, with little evidence to show for it, that Frederick was either bisexual or homosexual but in practice he showed little enthusiasm for any kind of sexual activity and may even have been celibate throughout his reign. His energies and passions would find new outlets elsewhere: outlets that would surprise many of his contemporaries.

  Despite his tortured adolescence, Frederick was not only the Rousseauian Charterman of his age; he was also a man of exceptional tolerance. He outlawed torture for crimes other than treason. He undertook judicial measure to reduce censorship, forbade brutality on the parade ground and made examples of those who refused to desist, enacted policies of religious toleration, set up an office for the poor, and made great strides in expanding access to education. His efforts to establish compulsory school attendance for children aged seven to fourteen led to the creation of the first large-scale educated middle class in Europe. Frederick also continued to encourage more Protestant refugees to settle in the kingdom, oversaw improvements in agriculture, began the first stirrings of industry, encouraged all forms of trade and commissioned the building of the first canals. Above all he worked tirelessly throughout his reign for his state and his people, supervising all his ministries and reading all diplomatic correspondence personally, often getting up before dawn and working till midnight.

  Frederick was also known as ‘the Philosopher King’, inviting Voltaire to his palace in Potsdam, where he resided for three years, before they famously fell out, only to be reconcilied in later life. Frederick left thirty volumes of his own writings on history, war, philosophy and music. He had a life-long love of most things French including its food, literature and culture in general and he could be most disparaging about the German language, once saying, ‘A German singer! I should sooner expect to get pleasure from the neighing of my horse.’ While his mother tongue was German, like many monarchs of the period he was educated in French and it is said by some more literary historians that he was never entirely at ease in writing in either language. As a patron of the arts, he opened Berlin’s new opera house in 1742 and a string of new theatres thereafter. Frederick also became an accomplished musician and composer of music for the flute. He was unique among kings, even of the Enlightenment era, in that he sat, ate and drank at the table with writers, poets, musicians and philosophers. Frederick was temperamental, yet he matched this with an uncharacteristic sense of self-deprecation and cynical wit. It is said that he educated Prussians, and they in their turn set out to educate German society as a whole: Goethe certainly acknowledged this and Germany’s debt to the philosophy of Kant, and the writings of Prussians such as Herder, which Frederick’s Enlightenment allowed to blossom.

  Culturally Frederick’s reign presided over the birth of a vibrant new Prussian Philosophical Englightenment and Counter-Englightenment spearheaded by Immanuel Kant who summarised the purpose of the Enlightenment as being, ‘To question everything, to submit everything to the rigour of reason and experiment, to take nothing on faith…’ but who in his Critique of Pure Reason went on to destroy the idea of cosmic certainty and where Gottfried Herder would go on to argue against reliance on pure reason alone in a world where different cultures had different perspectives on truth
and where the human mind was capable of envisaging many different conceptions of the universe. Frederick raised the Prussian Academy of Sciences on a par with its equivalents in Paris and London, putting Prussia at the centre of the struggle to understand belief in an age of reason and at the heart of the debate between the adherants of rationalism and the counter englightment forces of the romantic movement which prized intuition and emotion over cold rationalism; the latter gaining even greater currency following the terrors of the French Revolution. Prussian philosophy can be said to be the incubator that gave life to the Romantic Movement which inspired the writings of Goethe, Byron and Victor Hugo and the art of Caspar David Friedrich, Francisco Goya and J.M.W. Turner. An age in which the rich weaves of counterpoint music, as perfected by Johann Sebastian Bach, were giving way to new more emotive forms of music and where Gottfried Silbermann, the distinguished organ builder, created the precursor to the modern piano. Where Johann Joachim Winckelmann established a hitherto unprecedented level of classification and cataloguing of classical architecture for the modern era and where Frederick inspired the best examples of rococo architecture in northern Germany, often dubbed Frederican rococo.

  However, it is Frederick the Great’s military legacy for which he is best remembered. His greatest admirers included Napoleon, Wellington and Hitler. He wrote that professional armies should do battle with one another in such a way that civilians would not even know a war was going on in their midst. When one of his soldiers was court martialled for sodomising a horse (any kind of sodomy was punishable by death across Europe at the time) he said, ‘Condemn the man to an infantry regiment!’(19) His bravery in battle was legendary and at times seems almost too fantastical to be true. He was always at the head of his troops and in the thick of the battle, he had countless horses shot out from under him, and used to proudly show off his uniforms for their bullet holes. At the Battle of Zorndorf, when the battle standard fell and his troops started to flee, Frederick picked the standard from the ground, thrust it in the direction of the enemy and shouted at his troops, ‘Dogs! Would you live forever?’ He was also not afraid to face the consequences of his wars, often remaining on the battlefield after the battle to ensure the injured on both sides received medical treatment. But by the time of his funeral in 1786, few of his fellow cadets remained alive to give him a good send-off. Possibly the greatest writer on warfare, Carl von Clausewitz, in his treaties On War was an admirer and wrote of Frederick that he was not just brave, but was also clever, a great strategist who always kept his wits about him on an ever-changing battlefield. Famous for many quotes that have been translated into countless languages, Frederick’s most famous military quote to have resonated into the modern era was, ‘He who defends everything defends nothing,’ a quote a future Austrian corporal clearly forgot.

  Above all, he set a new standard for war, having dispensed with lengthy postulations as to dynastic or other legal claims for starting one, he no longer imagined a direct link between one issue and the cause for war on another to be necessary and he returned to the crusaders’ policy of going straight into attack without actually declaring war. It was a new and low standard in international diplomacy and one from which many future wars in Europe would take a lead.

  As previously described, Frederick harboured a family grudge against the Austrian Habsburg Emperor. He took a huge gamble by attacking a coalition of far superior force: taking on Austria, then France, and then Russia. By 1759, with much of Prussia overrun and just grimly holding on, it looked as though his gamble would fail. Heavily outnumbered at the battle of Kunersdorf on the Oder, the combined armies of Russia and Austria dealt Frederick’s armies a heavy defeat and Prussia’s fate hung in the balance.

  PRUSSIA’S HIGH WATER MARK

  Frederick the Great’s gamble began with incredible haste. His father, the Soldier King, died on 31st May 1740 and this was followed by the death of the Holy Roman Emperor, Karl VI, on 21st October the same year. Prussia’s old rival Saxony, in the person of the Saxon elector Friedrich Augustus III, who was also serving as King of Poland, held territories either side of Silesia. Frederick feared that if Saxony were to gain the rich territories of Silesia, this would pose a substantial threat to Prussian interests. So on 7th November 1740 Frederick told his generals to prepare for an attack on Silesia and on 12th December the First Silesian War began.

  Frederick fought his first two Silesian wars during the ongoing European conflict over the Austrian succession from 1740–42, 1744–45. He was victorious in both. Austria was reluctantly forced to agree to accept Frederick’s annexation of Silesia. And in 1748, at the Peace of Aachen, France and Britain also ratified Frederick’s claim to Silesia. These wars ended with Maria Theresa being accepted on the Austrian throne and Frederick in control of Silesia, formerly Austria’s richest province. This was a fascinating period in history, a prelude to an almost forgotten world war, the Seven Years War, when France and Britain were playing for higher stakes in global dominion in both Canada and India, whilst the two strongest German-speaking powers on the Continent were engaged in a power play for Central Europe, with Russia, as ever, looking to enhance its insatiable appetite for territorial expansion at anyone’s expense. But Frederick’s greatest test still lay ahead of him. He had made enemies by establishing a separate peace with Austria during the wars of her succession. Austria nevertheless remained resentful at the loss of Silesia, and her new Foreign Minister, Kaunitz, reoriented her foreign policy in the unlikely direction of an alliance with France, whilst Russia, under Tsarina Elizabeth, had further designs on the Baltic, including East Prussia, and saw Prussia as a block on her westward expansion. Frederick’s keen instincts told him the circle around him was tightening.

  In 1756 a third Silesian war loomed (also known as the Seven Years War) when Frederick signed an alliance with England, namely the Convention of Westminster. England was primarily interested in protecting its interests in Hanover and agreed not to assist Austria in any renewed conflict with Prussia over Silesia, as long as Prussia agreed to protect English interests in Hanover from encroachment by France. But any agreement with England, in the ceaseless balance of power game between Europe’s great powers (no matter that the terms were not fully known), was guaranteed to provoke Austria and France. Frederick lost no time in launching what he hoped would be a knock-out first strike against the alliance Austria was building against him, but he paused en route to Austria to attack and annex Saxony. Frederick believed Prussia’s old north German rival was about to join the alliance of his enemies, Saxony was swiftly overrun and her resources were then milked relentlessly during the campaign, which left a lasting resentment in Saxon Germany towards Prussian overlordship. But this diversion cost him precious time. By the time he turned his attentions to the real threat and invaded Austrian Bohemia, his adversaries were ready to meet him on equal terms at the battle of Prague. In the ever-escalating pitch of war, this became the largest battle of its day with over 60,000 men on each side.(20) Frederick lost, and had to withdraw from Bohemia. Effectively he was now on borrowed time. His strategy had failed, and it seemed as though the superior forces pitted against him were set to prevail. However, this did not prevent Frederick from going on to achieve three of Prussia’s greatest military victories in quick succession. These victories have been marked in history as feats of great military strategy and won him the admiration of generals down the ages. First he beat superior French forces in the late autumn of 1757 at the Battle of Rossbach in Saxony, where his troops were outnumbered two to one, yet the toll was 10,000 losses to the French against Prussia’s 550. France effectively quit the coalition thereafter. He then beat the Austrians at the Battle of Leuthen in Silesia, and finally the Russians at Zorndorf in the Neumark (Brandenburg) in the summer of 1758.(21) Then in 1759, he lost 19,000 casualties at the Battle of Kunersdorf against the Russians and remained on the back foot thereafter. Just as it seemed certain his enemies would win he was saved by the death of the Russian Tsarina and the
succession of Tsar Peter. Peter was a great admirer of Frederick’s and imploded the alliance against him, withdrawing Russian troops without setting any terms. Many saw the outcome as nothing short of a miracle.

  Frederick the Great did not believe in ‘providence’ but it had appeared to save him nonetheless.lxxxv However, the war had been costly. In Thuringia and Hesse, on their retreat from the Battle of Rossbach, French troops committed atrocities against local populations as did Russian Cossack troops after the Battle of Kunersdorf. The diseases carried by the occupying armies also spread quickly to the areas they occupied. The war and disease cost Prussia over 400,000 lives, almost 10 per cent of her population; a cost that was nevertheless easier to bear in victory than in defeat.(22)

  Fighting three of the great powers of the day — France, Russia and Austria — for seven years and winning, and securing the rich province of Silesia to boot, was certainly a great achievement. However, Frederick’s war has been regarded as crass and without moral justification. But in an age where war was the norm and peace the exception, Frederick had done no more and no less than any and all of Europe’s great powers had done in the years preceding the Seven Years War. France had taken advantage of a weakened Holy Roman Empire to seize Elsass (Alsace) after the Thirty Years War, a territory that France had no historical, geographical, ethnic or linguistic justification in taking. Sweden had claimed Pomerania as booty for assisting the Protestant north German states in their battle with the Emperor following the same conflict. An Anglo-Dutch raid had seized Gibraltar from Spain in 1704. As the Turkish Ottoman Empire declined, the Russians and Austrians began to battle it out for the lion’s share of the Balkans. Beyond this, Revolutionary France went on to add to her territories at the expense of Flanders and Italy.