The Berlin Wall Read Online Free PDF Page A

involving the middle classes and the rapidly growing industrial proletariat, resulted in bloody clashes with the city’s garrison. None the less, King Frederick William, a well-meaning reactionary, agreed to elections and the appointment of a liberal government.
    The liberals formed a ‘civil guard’ that bore more than a passing resemblance to the old militia from the War of Liberation. They took the black, red and gold banner of the pre-revolutionary radicals (itself based on the uniform of a famous Prussian unit from the War of Liberation) as their flag instead of the black and white of the old regime. They promised themselves a new Prussia as part of a united Germany, with a democratic, free Berlin at its heart.
    Again the optimists were fated to disappointment. The civil guard was used against workers demanding a social as well as a political revolution. For centuries now, the city had more or less willingly traded civic freedoms for security. There were signs that Berliners were already becoming wary of democratic experiments.
    The reactionaries, who had been sulking on their estates and plotting revenge, saw their moment. In November 1848, the King called thearmy back to Berlin and dissolved the elected assembly. Faced with the royalist general Baron von Wrangel and his troops, the commander of the liberal militia defending the parliament building declared that he would ‘only react to force’. The baron replied with brutal simplicity: ‘Well, force is here.’
    Force would, sadly, always ‘be here’ in Berlin from now on, whether from left or right.
    Prussia retained a parliament of sorts, heavily rigged in favour of the aristocracy and the wealthier classes, and without control over ministerial appointments. Frederick William IV’s new-found passion for a united Germany faded in the face of Habsburg opposition. For almost twenty years more, the Emperor in Vienna would still dictate what happened in Germany, even though the actual political and economic balance of power there had long tipped in Prussia’s favour.
    It would take another reactionary, the cleverest one in German history, to translate this fact into power-political reality. In 1861, Otto von Bismarck became prime minister of Prussia.
    Soon the Germans got a united nation, but on very different terms to the ones the Berlin revolutionaries of 1848 had imagined, and certainly not at all what they would have wished.
     
    In January 1861, Frederick William IV died. His brother, now King William I, faced constitutional deadlock. Despite elections’ being loaded in favour of the propertied classes, since 1848 the liberals, or ‘Progressives’, had gained a majority. They were demanding powers that the Prussian establishment did not want to give them. To force the situation, they were blocking the annual budget, which included funding for a reorganisation of the army.
    William’s solution, instead of appointing a liberal prime minister, was to give the post to 46-year-old Otto von Bismarck, a bluff Pomeranian landowner and keen proponent of the divine right of kings.
    As a former ambassador to Russia and France, Bismarck knew how to play the political game. He found ingenious ways around the budget issue. For eighteen months he hung on in office, generally hated but retaining the support of the King.
    Bismarck’s breakthrough came when the Danish King died. Aninternational disagreement emerged regarding the status of the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, adjoining Denmark, which were held by the Danish crown but remained technically part of the German Confederation. The new Danish King proposed to annex the northern territory of Schleswig directly to his kingdom. The Germans objected. It was a complicated problem. As the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, commented waggishly, there were only three men in Europe who understood the complexities of the Schleswig-Holstein question: Queen Victoria’s consort, Prince Albert, who was dead; a