showing the direct descent down to the present time; for from the
Peace of Westphalia (1648) to the French Revolution the German states
were without either men or measures, except Frederick the Great, that
call for other than dreary comment:
Frederick I of Nuremberg, 1417
Frederick II, 1440
Albert III, 1470
Johann III, 1476
Joachim I, 1499
Joachim II, 1535
Johann George, 1571
Joachim Frederick, 1598
Johann Sigismund of Poland (first Duke of Prussia), 1608
George William, 1619
Frederick William (the Great Elector), 1640
Frederick III, Frederick I of Prussia (crowned first King of Prussia
in 1701), 1657-1713
Frederick William I (son of Frederick I of Prussia), 1688-1740
Frederick II (the Great) (son of Frederick William I), 1712-1786
Frederick William II (son of Augustus William, brother of
Frederick the Great), 1744-1787
Frederick William III (son of Frederick William II), 1770-1840
Frederick William IV (son of Frederick William III, 1795-1861), reigned,
1840-1861
William I (son of Frederick William III, brother of Frederick William IV,
1797-1888), reigned, 1861-1888
Frederick III (son of William I, 1831-1888), reigned from March 9
to June 15, 1888.
William II (son of Frederick III and Princess Victoria of England),
born Jan. 27, 1859, succeeded Frederick III in 1888.
These incidents, names, and dates are mere whisps of history. It is
only necessary to indicate that to articulate this skeleton of
history, clothe it with flesh, and give it its appropriate arms and
costumes would entail the putting of all mediaeval European history
upon a screen, to deliver oneself without apology from any such task.
It may be for this reason that there is no history of Germany in the
English tongue, that ranks above the elementary and the mediocre.
There is a masterly and scholarly history of the Holy Roman Empire by
an Englishman, which no student of Germany may neglect, but he who
would trace the beginnings of Germany from 113 B. C. down to the time
of the Great Elector, 1640, must be his own guide through the
trackless deserts, of the formation into separate nations, of modern
Europe. It is even with misgivings that the student picks his way from
the time of the Great Elector to Bismarck, and to modern Germany.
The Peace of Westphalia, 1648, marks the end of the Thirty Years' War,
and finds Germany with a population reduced from sixteen millions to
four millions. Famine which drove men and women to cannibalism, bands
of them being caught cooking human bodies in a caldron for food;
slaughter that drove men to make laws authorizing every man to have
two wives, and punishing men and women who became monks and nuns;
lawlessness that bred roving bands of murderers, who killed, robbed,
and even ate their victims, demanded a ruler of no little vigor to
lead his people back to civic, moral, and material health. The Great
Elector wrested east Prussia from Poland, he defeated and drove off
the Swedes, whom Louis XIV had drawn into an alliance against him, he
travelled from end to end of his country, seeking out the problems of
distress and remedying them by inducing immigration from Holland,
Switzerland, and the north, by building roads, bridges, schools, and
churches, and by encouraging planting, trade, and commerce. He built
the Frederick William Canal connecting the Oder and the Spree, and
introduced the potato to his countrymen. Germany now produces in
normal years fifteen hundred million bushels of potatoes. The splendid
equestrian statue of the Great Elector on the long bridge at Berlin,
is a worthy monument to the first great Hohenzollern.
When Charles II of Spain died, Louis XIV, the Emperor Leopold I of the
Holy Roman Empire, and the Elector of Bavaria, all three claimed the
right to name his successor. In the war that followed and which lasted
a dozen years, the Emperor, Holland, England, Portugal, the Elector of
Hanover, and the Elector Frederick III of Brandenburg, the son of the
Great Elector, were allied against France. Frederick, the Elector of
Brandenburg, was permitted by the Emperor, in return for his services
at this time, to assume the title of King, and he crowned himself and
his wife Sophia Elizabeth, at Koenigsberg, King and Queen of Prussia,
taking the title of Frederick I of Prussia, January 18th, 1701.
This novus homo among sovereigns was now a fellow king with the rulers
of England, France, Denmark, and Sweden, and the only crowned head in
the empire, except the Emperor himself, and the Elector of Saxony, who
had been chosen King of Poland in 1697. By persistent sycophancy he
had pushed his way into the inner circle of the crowned. Those who
have picked social locks these latter days by similar sycophancies, by
losses at bridge in the proper quarter, by suffering sly familiarities
to their women folk, and by wearing their personal and family dignity
in sole leather, may know something of the humiliating experiences of
this new monarch. He was a feeble fellow, but his son and successor,
Frederick William I, "a shrewd but brutal boor," so Lord Rosebery
calls him, and there could not be a better judge, amazed Europe by his
taste for collecting tall soldiers, by his parsimony, his kennel
manners in the treatment of his family and his subjects, and leaves a
name in history as the first, greatest, and the unique collector of
human beings on a Barnumesque scale. All known collectors of birds,
beetles, butterflies, and beasts accord him an easy supremacy, for his
aggregation of colossal grenadiers.
It is temptingly easy to be epigrammatic, perhaps witty, at the
expense of Frederick William I of Prussia. The man, however, who freed
the serfs; who readjusted the taxes; who insisted upon industry and
honesty among his officials; who proclaimed liberty of conscience and
of thought; who first put on, to wear for the rest of his life, the
uniform of his army, and thus made every officer proud to wear the
uniform himself; and who left his son an army of eighty thousand men,
thoroughly equipped and trained, and an overflowing treasury, may not
be dismissed merely with anecdotes of his eccentric brutality.
Only the ignorant and the envious, nibble at the successes of other
men, with vermin teeth and venomous tongue. Those people who can never
praise anything whole-heartedly come by their cautious censure from an
uneasy doubt of their own deserving. The contempt of Frederick William
I for learning and learned men, left him leisure for matters of far
more importance to his kingdom at the time. His habitual roughness to
his son was due, perhaps, to the fact that there was a curious strain
of effeminate culture in the man who deified Voltaire. Poor Voltaire,
who called Shakespeare "le sauvage ivre," or to quote him exactly: "On
croirait que cet ouvrage (Hamlet) est le fruit de l'imagination d'un
sauvage ivre," who said that Dante would never be read, and that the
comedies of Aristophanes were unworthy of presentation in a country
tavern! One is tempted to believe that the father was a man of
robuster judgment in such matters than the son, whose own rather
mediocre literary equipment, made him the easy prey of that acidulous
vestal of literature, Voltaire. However that may be, he left a useful
and unexpected legacy to his son, provided, indeed, the sinews for the
making of a powerful Prussian kingdom.
March the 31st, 1740, this eccentric miser died, to be succeeded by
his son, Frederick II, "the Great," then twenty-eight years old. Here
was a surprise indeed. Of these German kings and princes in their
small dominions it has been written: "And these magnates all aped
Louis XIV as their model. They built huge palaces, as like Versailles
as their means would permit, and generally beyond those limits, with
fountains and avenues and dismally wide paths. Even in our own day a
German monarch has left, fortunately unfinished, an accurate
Versailles on a damp island in a Bavarian lake. In those grandiose
structures they cherished a blighting etiquette, and led lives as dull
as those of the aged and torpid carp in their own stew-ponds. Then, at
the proper season, they would break away into the forest and kill
game. Moreover, still in imitation of their model, they held, as a
necessary feature in the dreary drama of their existence, ponderous
dalliances with unattractive mistresses, in whom they fondly tried to
discern the charms of a Montespan or a La Valliere. This monotonous
programme, sometimes varied by a violent contest whether they should
occupy a seat with or without a back, or with or without arms,
represented the even tenor of their lives."
This good stock was evidently lying fallow, and humanity is neither
dignified nor pleasant in the part of fertilizer. Frederick the Great,
it should be remembered, was a Prussian and for Prussia only. He cared
no more about a united Germany than we care for a united America to
include Canada, Mexico, and the Argentine. He cared no more for
Bavarians and Saxons than for Swedes and Frenchmen, and, as we know,
he was utterly contemptuous of German literature or the German
language. He redeemed the shallowness and the torpidity of those other
mediocre rulers by resisting, and resisting successfully, for what
must have been to him seven very long years, the whole force of
Austria and some of the lesser German powers, with the armies of
Russia and France back of them.
He had a turbulent home life; his father on one occasion even
attempted to hang him with his own hands with the cords of the window
curtains, and when he fled from home he captured him and proposed to
put him to death as a deserter, and only the intervention of the Kings
of Poland and Sweden and the Emperor of Germany prevented it. His
accomplice, however, was summarily and mercilessly put to death before
his eyes. There is no illustration in all history, of such a
successful outcome of the rod theory in education, as this of
Frederick the Great. The father put into practice what Wesley
preached: "Break their wills betimes, whatever it costs; break the
will if you would not damn the child. Let a child from a year old be
taught to fear the rod and to cry softly."
The meanness and cruelty, the parsimony and the eccentricities, of the
father left the son an army of eighty thousand troops, troops as
superior to other troops in Europe as are the Japanese infantry to-day,
to the Manchu guards that pick the weeds in the court-yards of
the palace at Mukden; and he left him, too, a kingdom with no debts
and an overflowing treasury. It is seldom that such insane vanities
leave such a fair estate and an heir with such unique abilities for
its skilful exploitation. Of Frederick's wars against Austria, against
France, Russia, Saxony, Sweden, and Poland; of his victories at
Prague, Leuthen, Rossbach, and Zorndorf; of his addition of Siberia
and Polish Prussia to his kingdom; of his comical literary love affair
with Voltaire; of his brutal comments upon the reigning ladies of
Russia and France, which brought upon him their bitter hatred; of his
restoration and improvement of his country; of his strict personal
economy and loyalty to his own people, scores of volumes have been
written. The hero-worshipper, Carlyle, and the Jove of reviewers,
Macaulay, have described him, and many minor scribes besides.
It is said of his victory of Rossbach, in 1757, that then and there
began the recreation of Germany, the revival of her political and
intellectual life, and union under Prussia and Prussian kings.
Frederick the Great deserves this particular encomium; for as Luther
freed Germany, and all Christendom indeed, from the tyranny of
tradition, as Lessing freed us from the tyranny of the letter, from
the second-hand and half-baked Hellenism of a Racine and a Corneille,
so Frederick the Great freed his countrymen at last from the puerile
slavery to French fashions and traditions, which had made them self-
conscious at home and ridiculous abroad. He first made a Prussian
proud to be a Prussian.
This last quarter of the eighteenth century in Germany saw the death
of Lessing in 1781, the publication of Kant's "Kritik der Reinen
Vernunft" in the same year, and the death of the great Frederick in
1786. These names mark the physical and intellectual coming of age of
Germany. Lessing died misunderstood and feared by the card-board
literary leaders of his day, men who still wrote and thought with the
geometrical instruments handed them from France; Kant attempted to
push philosophical inquiry beyond the bounds of human experience, and
Frederick left Prussia at last not ashamed to be Prussia. Napoleon was
eighteen years old when Frederick died, and he, next to Bismarck, did
more to bring about German unity than any other single force.
Unsuccessful Charlemagne though he was, he without knowing it blazed
the political path which led to the crowning of a German emperor in
the palace at Versailles, less than a hundred years after the death of
Frederick the Great. In 1797 at Montebello, Napoleon said: "If the
Germanic System did not exist, it would be necessary to create it
expressly for the convenience of France."
II FREDERICK THE GREAT TO BISMARCK
Frederick the Great died in 1786, leaving Prussia the most
formidable military power on the Continent. In financial, law, and
educational matters he had made his influence felt for good. He
distributed work-horses and seed to his impoverished nobles; he
encouraged silk, cotton, and porcelain industries; he built the Finow,
the Planesche, and Bromberger Canals; he placed a tariff on meat,
except pork, the habitual food of the poor, and spirits and tobacco
and coffee were added to the salt monopoly; he codified the laws,
which we shall mention later; he aided the common schools, and in his
day were built the opera-house, library, and university in Berlin, and
the new palace of Sans Souci at Potsdam.
Almost exactly one hundred years after the death of Frederick the
Great, there ended practically, at the death of the Emperor William I,
in 1888, the political career of the man, who with his personally
manufactured cement of blood and iron, bound Germany together into a
nation. The middle of the seventeenth, the middle of the eighteenth,
and the middle of the nineteenth centuries, with the Great Elector,
Frederick the Great, and Bismarck as the central figures, mark the
features of the historical landscape of Germany as with mile-stones.
How difficult was the task to bring at last an emperor of all Germany
to his crowning at Versailles, January 18, 1871, and how mighty the
artificer who accomplished the work, may be learned from a glance at
the political, geographical, and patriotic incoherence of the land
that is now the German Empire.
Germany had no definite national policy from the death of Frederick
the Great till the reign of Bismarck began in 1862. Hazy discussions
of a confederation of princes, of a Prussian empire, of lines of
demarcation, of acquisitions of German territory, were the phantoms of
a policy, and even these were due to the pressure of Prussia.
The general political torpidity is surprisingly displayed, when one
remembers that Goethe (1749-1832), who lived through the French
Revolution, who was thirty-seven years old when Frederick the Great
died, and who lived through the whole flaming life of Napoleon, was
scarcely more stirred by the political features of the time than
though he had lived in Seringapatam. He was a superlatively great man,
but he was as parochial in his politics as he was amateurish in his
science, as he was a mixture of the coxcomb and the boor, in his love
affairs. Lessing, who died in 1781, Klopstock, who died in 1803,
Schiller, who died in 1805, Kant, who died in 1804, Hegel, who died in
1831, Fichte, who died in 1814, Wolf, who died in 1824, "Jean Paul"
Friedrich Richter, who died in 1825, Voss, who died in 1826,
Schelling, who died in 1854, the two Schlegels, August Wilhelm and
Frederick, who died in 1845 and in 1829, Jacob Grimm, who died in
1863, Herder, Wieland, Kotzebue, what a list of names! What a
blossoming of literary activity! But no one of them, these the leaders
of thought in Germany, at the time when the world was approaching the
birthday of democracy through pain and blood, no one of these was
especially interested in politics.
There was theoretical writing about freedom. Heine mocked at his
countrymen and at the world in general, and deified Napoleon, from his
French mattress, on which he died, in 1856, only fifty-seven years
old. Fichte ended a course of lectures on Duty, with the words: "This
course of lectures is suspended till the end of the campaign. We shall
resume if our country become free, or we shall have died to regain our
liberty." But Fichte neither resumed nor died! Herder criticised his
countrymen for their slavish following of French forms and models in
their literature, as in their art and social life. And well he might
thus criticise, when one remembers how cramped was the literary vision
even of such men as Voltaire and Heine. We have already mentioned some
of Voltaire's literary judgments in the preceding chapter, and Heine
ventured to compare Racine to Euripides! No wonder that Germany needed
schooling in taste, if such were the opinions of her advisers. Such
literary canons as these could only be accepted by minds long inured
to provincial, literary, and social slavery.
Just as every little princeling of those days in Germany took Louis
XIV for his model, so every literary fledgling looked upon Voltaire as
a god, and modelled his style upon the stiff and pompous verses of the
French literary men of that time.
Not even to-day has Germany escaped from this bondage. In Baden three
words out of ten that you hear are French, and the German wherever he
lives in Germany still invites you to Mittagessen at eight P. M.
because he has no word in his own language for diner, and must still
say anstaendiger or gebildeter Mensch for gentleman. To make the German
even a German in speech and ideals and in independence has been a
colossal task. One wonders, as one pokes about in odd corners of
Germany even now, whether Herder's caustic contempt, and Bismarck's
cavalry boots, have made every German proud to be a German, as now he
surely ought to be. The tribal feeling still exists there.
Fichte's lectures on Nationality were suppressed and Fichte himself
looked upon askance. The Schlegels spent a lifetime in giving Germany
a translation of Shakespeare. Hegel wrote the last words of his
philosophy to the sound of the guns at the battle of Jena. Goethe
writes a paragraph about his meeting with Napoleon. Metternich, born
three years before the American Revolution, and who died a year before
the battle of Bull Run, declared: "The cause of all the trouble is the
attempt of a small faction to introduce the sovereignty of the people
under the guise of a representative system."
If this was the attitude of the intellectual nobility of the time,
what are we to suppose that Messrs. Muller and Schultze and Fischer
and Kruger, the small shop-keepers and others of their ilk, and their
friends thought? Even forty years later Friedrich Hebbel, in 1844,
paid a visit to the Industrial Exposition in Paris. He writes in his
diary: "Alle diese Dinge sind mir nicht allein gleichgueltig; sic sind
mir widerwaertig." Germany had not awakened even then to any wide
popular interest in the world that was doing things. As Voltaire
phrased it, France ruled the land, England the sea, and Germany the
clouds, even as late as the middle of the nineteenth century. This is
the more worth noting, as giving a peg upon which to hang Germany's
astounding progress since that time. Even as late as Bismarck's day he
complained of the German: "It is as a Prussian, a Hanoverian, a
Wuertemberger, a Bavarian, or a Hessian, rather than as a German, that
he is disposed to give unequivocal proof of patriotism." The present
ambitious German Emperor said, in 1899, at Hamburg: "The sluggishness
shown by the German people in interesting themselves in the great
questions moving the world, and in arriving at a political
understanding of those questions, has caused me deep anxiety." What
kind of material had the nation-makers to work with! What a long,
disappointing task it must have been to light these people into a
blaze of patriotism! In those days America, though the population of
the American colonies was only eleven hundred and sixty thousand in
1750, talked, wrote, and fought politics. The outstanding
personalities of the time were patriots, soldiers, politicians, not a
dreamer among them.
England was so nonchalantly free already, that the betting-book at
White's Club records that, "Lord Glengall bets Lord Yarmouth one
hundred guineas to five that Buonaparte returns to Paris before Beau
Brummel returns to London!" Burke and Pitt, and Fox and North, and
Canning might look after politics; Hargreaves and Crompton would take
care to keep English industries to the fore, and Watt, and the great
canal-builder Brindley, would solve the problem of distributing coal;
their lordships cracked their plovers' eggs, unable to pronounce even
the name of a single German town or philosopher, and showed their
impartial interest, much as now they do, in contemporary history, by
backing their opinions with guineas, with the odds on Caesar against
the "Beau."
Weimar was a sunny little corner where poetry and philosophy and
literature were hatched, well out of reach of the political storms of
the time. The Grand Duke of Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach with his tiny
court, his Falstaffian army, his mint and his customs-houses, with his
well-conducted theatre and his suite of litterateurs, was one of three
hundred rulers in the Germany of that time.
The Holy Roman Empire, consisting, in Napoleon's time, of Austria,
Prussia, and a mass of minor states, these last grouped together under
the name of the Confederation of the Rhine, and wholly under French
influence, lasted one thousand eight hundred and fifty-eight years, or
from Caesar's victory of Pharsalia down to August the 1st, 1806, when
Napoleon announced to the Diet that he no longer recognized it.
This institution had no political power, was merely a theoretical
political ring for the theoretical political conflicts of German
agitators and dreamers, and was composed of the representatives of
this tangle of powerless, but vain and self-conscious little states.
This Holy Roman Empire, with an Austrian at its head, and aided by
France, strove to prevent the development of a strong German state
under the leadership of Prussia. After Napoleon's day it became a
struggle between Prussia and Austria. Austria had only eight out of
thirty-six million German population, while Prussia was practically
entirely German, and Prussia used her army, politics, and commerce to
gain control in Germany. Even to-day Austria-Hungary contains the most
varied conglomeration of races of any nation in the world. Austria has
26,000,000 inhabitants, of whom 9,000,000 are Germans, 1,000,000
Italians and Rumanians, 6,000,000 Bohemians and Slovacs, 8,000,000
Poles and Ruthenians, 2,000,000 Slovenes and Croatians. Of the
19,000,000 of Hungary there are 9,000,000 Magyars, 2,000,000 Germans,
2,500,000 Slovacs and Ruthenians, 3,000,000 Rumanians, and nearly
3,000,000 Southern Slays.
Weimar was one of the three hundred capitals of this limp empire, with
tariffs, stamps, coins, uniforms, customs, gossip, interests, and a
sovereign of its own. When Bismarck undertook the unifying of the
customs tariffs of Germany, there were even then fifteen hundred
different tariffs in existence!