mr" — mimt m ' p mrrm M t»i\*'m w m\, t \ '*« ?T2 vols. cl. 1879 1 ^ ^y ^^ &^«f' FRINCB DISMAKCK IN HIS STl^DV. From a Photograph. Frontispiece. lB E R L I N UNDER THE NEW EMPIRE, ir^ INSTITUTIONS, INHABITANTS, INDUSTRY, MONUMENTS, MUSEUMS, SOCIAL LIFE, MANNERS, AND AMUSEMENTS. liY HENRY VIZETELLY, Author of THZ STORV OF THE DIAMOND NECKLACE, TOLD IN DETAIL FOK THE FIRST TIME," &(J. *' Why are they proud? Because five milliard francs The richer than from wars of former years ? Why are they proud ? Again we ask aloud. Why in the name of patience are they prcud? " Keats' s " Isalella" I>araj>hrased. ILLUSTRATED WITH UPWARDS OF 400 ENGRAVINGS FROM DESIGNS BV GERMAN ARTISTS. IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. I. TINSLEY BROTHERS, CATHERINE STREET, STRAND. 1879. O n "The City of Intelligence, the Athens of the Spree ! "—The Berlinese. " The Sand-box of Germany ! " — T/te VieKiiese. " No, I could not trust myself to this Prussia, this bigoted, gaitered hero, so boastful and gluttonous, with his corporal's cane, which he steeps in holy water before striking with it. I was sovereignly displeased with this nature — a combination of philosophy, Christianity, and militarism — this mixture of white beer, mendacity, and Brandenburg sand. I found especially repugnant this hypocritical Prussia, with its appearance of holiness, this Tartitffe among nations " Whilst all the others were boasting of how proudly the Prussian eagle soared towards the sun, I prudently kept my eyes fixed upon his claws." — Hei.nkich Heine. TO HENRY SUTHERLAND EDWARDS, IN CORDIAL RECOGNITION OF THIRTY YEARS OF UNBROKEN FRIENDSHIP, I DEDICATE THIS BOOK. H. V. PREFACE. The following pages are the result of several prolonged visits paid to Berlin, the first of which took place in the autumn of the year 1872, at the important epoch of the meeting of the three Emperors, no doubt, to arrange their respective lines of action whenever the struggle, already felt to be inevitable, between Russia and Turkey should survene. The aim the writer has had in view has been to convey an accurate idea — in small matters as well as great — of a city out of the regular highway of continental travel, and which, as the capital of the new German Empire, is destined to increase in interest to the other nations of Europe as well as to exercise a greatly extended influence over the rest of the Fatherland. There is an old proverb which says, '* Who has not seen Cologne has never seen Germany," but to-day the proverb has lost its significance, as it is no longer the city of the shrines of the Magi, and the eleven thousand martyred virgins, but the whilom capital of the little Mark of Brandenburg and the present chief city of the powerful German Empire which it is necessary a stranger should see. Of the great Germanic body, Berlin is to-day at once the head and the heart, for in all that relates to the new Empire, it is Berlin that thinks, conceives, frames, organizes, and commands. H. V. London, August, 1879. CONTENTS. I. rA(;E EN ROUTE I II. FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF BERLIN 12 III. ANCIENT BERLIN: NATURAL SELECTION AND NAME 2^ IV. DEVELOPMENT OF BERLIN 32 V. MODERN BERLIN : CONFORMATION AND CHARACTER 6l VI. THE BERLINESE — IN SOCIETY 79 VII. THE BERLINESE — AT HOME 121 VIII. '* BERLIN WFRD WELTSTADT " , 164 IX. UNTER DEN LINDEN 177 X. THE THIERGARTEN ^95 Vlll CONTENTS. XI. HAGS BERLIN EN f£tE. THE MEETING OF THE EMPERORS 2l8 XII. THE AUTUMN MILITARY MANUiUVRES.— FLIGHT OF THE EAGLES .... 238 XIII. WILHELM I., KoNIG AND KAISER 248 XIV. SCIONS OF THE HOUSE OF HOHENZOLLERN 262 XV. REICHS-KANZLER VON 13ISMARC1C 273 XVI. PRUSSIAN GENERALS — MOLTKE, WRANGEL, AND ROON' 302 XVII. THE PRUSSIAN ARMY.— HOW RECRUITED AND OFFICERED 315 XVIII. THE PRUSSIAN ARMY. — BERLIN BARRACK LIFE, DRILL, AND DISCIPLINE . 336 XIX. THE PRUSSIAN ARMY.— ORGANIZATIOV, PAY, UNIFORMS, AND RATIONS . . 350 XX. THE PRUSSIAN ARMY.— INFANTRY AND CAVALRY 35^ XXI. THE PRUSSIAN ARMY. — THE ARTILLERY AND TRAIN. — THE ANNUAL MANCEUVRES 37' XXII. WAR SCHOOLS— THE GREAT GENERAL STAFF , . . . 386 APPENDIX 4'3 NORTH GERMAN ENERGY. BERLIN UNDER THE NEW EMPIRE. I cy^ EN ROUTE. ADDLE of gold on a scurvy steed — the quaint past century simile cha- racterizing the gapital of the Mark of Brandenburg in the midst of a barren sandy plain — recurred to one's mind while deliberating where r to spend an autumn holiday, and coupled with the then approach- ing meeting there of a triad of Emperors, turned the scale in favour of Berlin. At this epoch, with the German r't^^lT troops still in France, and French- 'T^ men brooding bitterly over their uncomfortable reminiscences, the mere repetition at the ticket place of the Paris Gare de I'Est of the words ''A Berlin" sufficed to attract scores of angry B / BERLIN UNDER THE NEW EMPIRE. eyes upon one. Rather more than two years previously one had heard the too-familiar formula shouted for the first time by a mercenary Paris mob. " A Berlin ! " — What scenes those simple words recall ! A population worked into a paroxysm of excitement, verging on to madness, by the yells of disguised police spies ; two battles and two defeats ; the midnight flight of a sovereign, protected by a faithful escort, from Metz ; followed by a greater battle and another reverse, more dis- astrous than all the rest, resulting in the sending of the mock C?esar into captivity and the overturning of his throne. Then ensued a period during which a people — deprived of its armies, its generals, its engines of war, its means of com- munication, of everything indeed that constitutes the strength of a state, save patriotism — struggled hopelessly to retrieve its losses. At last came the end, and France, whose power had made the nations tremble, found herself humbled to the dust. Long resident in the soi-disant capital of civilisation, and a witness of its subjugation by the " barbaric hordes of the modern Attila," as the angry Parisians used to style the flaxen-haired, chubby-faced German youth, who for five months held them in thrall, and when all was over bivouacked so peaceably around the monumental Arc de I'Etoile, inscribed over with long lists of assumed German defeats, without so much as obliterating the name of a single apocryphal one — long resident in Paris, I had determined upon a short sojourn in the capital of this new united Germany, which had " issued from the brain of Count Bismarck, sword in hand, as Minerva came of old from the brain of Jupiter" — a capital whose destiny the Prussians fondly dream is to depose Paris from its continental supremacy, and whose inhabitants complacently describe it as the City of Intelligence, the Athens of the Spree. Bradshaw times the distance between Paris and Berlin at thirty hours, but it was my ill-luck to be several days on the road from the common accident of one's luggage going astray, leading one to the discovery that La Rochefoucauld might have given a wider apjilication to his famous apothegm, the amount of amuse- ment which my fellow-travellers, in common with the railway officials and hotel waiters, derived from my mishap, proving that the misfortunes of perfect strangers, quite as much as those of intimate friends, tend greatly to the gratification of the rest of mankind. Day after day was I doomed to remain in odoriferous Cologne, with the lions of which one had long since been acquainted, from its marvellous modern mediaeval cathedral, with its gimcrack shrine of the Magi and its bones of the pseudo i i,ooo virgins, to the house on the Sternengasse, where Rubens was born, and Marie de Medicis — whose apotheosis by the ambassador-artist forms a gallery of itself in the Louvre — died in exile and in misery. EX ROUTE. After spending five days in Cologne and fifty francs in telegrams, attending the arrival of all the trains, scrutinizing every article of luggage from the railway vans, and envying the fortunate possessor of even a AT THE FRONTIER. solitary sac-de-nuit, my baggage at last turned up — one port- manteau with its lock forced and the other slit with a sharp knife to allow of the in- troduction of a fe- lonious finger and thumb, and the filch- ing of sundry arti- cles of various decrees of value from a pair of patent leather boots to a cake of old brown Windsor. Distance certainly lent enchantment to the view which I obtained of Cologne as the train rolled over the huge iron railway bridge across the Rhine on its way to Dusseldorf — the birthplace, as one remembered, of the poet Heine and the painter Cornelius — and swept through the Rhine " black country," past embranchments with long trains of coal-trucks, -Steaming away to furnace and factory, past Oberhausen and Essen, where the gigantic iron and steel foundries of Jacobi and Krupp are incessantly at work, their forests of tall chimneys belching forth huge clouds of smoke, which hang in dusky canopies over the pair of prosperous and begrimed Westphalian towns. At Essen, which is simply a section of the immense workman's city, covering the entire coal basin from Dusseldorf to Dortmund, and numbering its 5000 inhabitants per square mile, in whichever direction the eyes are turned one invariably sees heavy locomotives constantly coming and going, and huge black hillocks of coal heaped up all around, with endless phantom chimneys rising like lofty antique obelisks out of the surround- ing gloom. To the left is an agglomeration of Babylonian buildings, surmounted by imposing towers and surrounded by a wall high and well nigh solid as a rampart.^ This is the gloomy abode of the true Iron King, Herr Krupp, " the master ^ "Herr Krupp," observes M. Victor Tissot, "is so afraid lest his secret should be surprised that he surrounds his states with a veritable Great Wall of China on which this inscription is incessantly repeated in three languages — ^The public are informed that in asking to view the establishment they expose themselves to a refusal.' " n 2 BERLIN UNDER THE NEW EMPIRE. gunner of the age, who has sent more heroes to Hades than any artillerist of his time." " Prussia's victories," remarks a contem- plative Frenchman," have been shaped by Herr Krupp; and his Cyclops have done more for German unity than Bismarck himselL The military supremacy of the empire is at Essen even more than at Merlin." Less than half a century ago the father of Herr Krupp began business here with a couple of workmen ; five years ago — since which date it has been largely extended — the establishment covered 510 acres of ground, more than one-fourth of which was roofed in, and was connected with three separate lines of railway by branches nearly twenty miles in length, which, with all their rolling stock, were the exclusive property of the firm. There were upwards of 400 furnaces, 250 steam-engines, some of lOOO horse-power, fifty-one steam-hammers, the odd one, weighing fifty tons and costing i^ 100,000 to manufacture, and which sounds like a cannon when at work, being prudently kept employed day and night so as not to lose for a single moment the interest of the capital sunk on it, besides forges, lathes and planing, cutting, shaping, boring, and grinding machines innumei'able. Over 10,000 hands were employed at the works, which, with the plant and stock, v^'ere valued at upwards of a couple of millions sterling. Since this period (1871) the value and productive power of the works have been enormously augmented. In 1874 the number of hands was increased to 16,000, while 65,000 tons of steel are produced annually at the establishment. Great stress is laid on the choice of the raw material — which Herr Krupp transports from his own mines in Spain on board his own ships, — and on the projjer blending of the composite metal. The steel produced is very pure, close, fine-grained, and free from flaws, and its power of resistance is greater than that of Bessemer steel. Last year, with large orders in course of execution for Turkey, Egypt, Russia, China, and Spain, Herr Krupp was nevertheless able to deliver a hundred cannons a week to the different German artillery depots. His last achievement is a cannon of fourteen and a half inches bore, carrying a shot weighing 330 lbs. capable of piercing a plate of solid iron from twenty to twenty-four inches thick. The Krupp workmen ordinarily receive from one and a half to two thalers per day. Wages were lowered at the commencement of the year, but the men participate in the profits of the establishment. An assurance fund pays the doctor and provides medicine in cases of sickness^ besides relieving the widow in the event of death. After sixteen years' service the workman receives an annually increasing allow- ance from the pension fund, and after twenty years he becomes entitled to a retiring pension for the rest of his life. Attached to the establishment are several schools and a hospital founded EN ROIITE. by Herr Krupp, who once laboured at Essen himself working beside his father in the little forge still preserved near the chief entrance to show what industry and energy will lead to. Less than an hour after leaving Essen one passes Dortmund, in the heart of the Westphalian coal and iron district, where the famous Vehmgericht — that powerful secret tribunal which bound its members by fearful oaths blindly to execute its decrees, and for a couple of centuries exercised sway throughout the Empire — had its origin, and where the last of the ancient linden trees of the Konigshof, under which the Emperor Sigismund himself was affiliated to the grim fraternity, may still be seen. Whilst the train stopped for a few minutes at Gutersloh, where there was the usual ravenous rash at the refreshments. one seized the opportunity of tasting the sacchariferous brown bread of the district, the renowned Westphalian pumpernickel, which traces its whimsical name, as the learned in nomenclatures pretend, to the " boji pour NickcV of some French trooper, who detested the over-rated delicacy, but thought it good enough for his horse. Here, as elsewhere along the line, one could not help being struck by the military tone which characterises the Prussian railway service. Almost all the staff have been soldiers, and engine-drivers and guards invariably make a point of saluting the station-master whenever the train enters or leaves the station. It is perhaps these marks of respect received from their subordi- nates which render the higher railway officials so brusque and peremptory towards the travelling public. Apropos of this an amusing story is told. It appears that, as a train was about starting from Berlin, an individual rushed along the line of carriafjes, shoutincr, " Herr Miiller ! Herr Miiller! " when a tra- veller inconsiderately thrust his head out of the window, and, to his intense surprise, received a smart slap in the face. Highly BERLIN UNDER THE NEW EMPIRE. indignant he jumped out and sought the station-master, who, after hstening to his complaint, simply inquired his name. *' Schultze," was the reply. " In that case," rejoined the station- master, " the matter does not concern you at all ; the gentleman, inquires for Herr Miiller, and you, Schultze, very unnecessarily put out your head. Take )'our seat again instantly, or \-ou'll be left behind ;" and with that he signalled for the train to^ start. Hemmed in by trees, under which a few lean kine are solemnly ruminating, one sleepy-looking Westphalian village, with tall tiled roofs and low church spire, is passed after another, the peasants mostly abroad in the neighbouring fields gathering in the final harvests. As the train rushes swiftly by, at one cottage-door we catch sight of a plump young Gretchen sedately knitting, while the kittens gambol with her rolling ball of scarlet worsted ; then of some aged grandsire, embarrassed at having to divide his atten- tion between little Peterkin squatting at his feet and the faithful Tray frisking by his side ; and finally of a plump, fair-haired matron, in red petticoat and black head-dress, who spins and sings while some future conscript of the new Empire, in the shape of a merry, chubby-cheeked baby, rolls half-naked in the dust at her side. We now traverse miles of singularly uninteresting country, "generating hard-handed, broad-backed, stubborn carles, whose whole lives are spent in struggling hard to vanquish the natural infertility of the soil. Enormous plains, of barren aspect, stretch away to the horizon, northwards and southwards ; every here and there a row of melancholy trees breaks the monotony of the landscape ; but other element of the picturesque there is none." EN ROUTE. Here one first encounters that peculiar breed of black and white cattle, which is met with all the country through almost up to Berlin, although one looks in vain for the fatted swine yielding the famed Westphalian hams. The train, on crossing the Weser, enters a hilly district, terminating in a narrow defile known as the Porta Westphalica, on emerging from which we find ourselves at Minden. The historic battle-field lies north of the town and westward of the famous " wood-crowned height," whereon, according to the poet, the venturesome Eliza stood, " o'er Minden's plain, spectatress of the fight " at which an English general, Lord George Sackville, showed the white feather, and some regiments of English infantry accomplished what the French commander believed to be impossible — " a single line breaking through three lines of cavalry, ranked in order of battle, and tumbling them to ruin." One broke the journey at Hanover to glance at Herrenhausen, described by Thackeray as scarcely changed since the unlucky day when the obese Electress Sophia fell down there in a fit, in the avenue her own hands had planted, and went the wsy of all flesh only a few weeks before the death of Queen Anne paved the way for the accession of the Brunswick Stuarts to the British throne. " I made it my business," observes Thackeray, " to visit that ugly cradle in which our Georges were nursed. The old town of Hanover must look still pretty much as in the time when George Louis left it. The gardens and pavilions of Herrenhausen are scarce changed since the day when the stout old Electress Sophia fell down in her last walk there You may see at Herrenhausen the very rustic theatre in which the Platens danced and performed masques and sang before the Elector and his sons. There are the very same fauns and dryads of stone still glimmering through the branches — still grinning and piping their ditties of no tone, as in the days when painted nymphs hung garlands round them, appeared under their leafy arcades with gilt crooks guiding rams with gilt horns, descended from machines in the guise of Diana or Mmerva, and delivered immense allegorical compliments to the princes returned home from the campaign. ' We found the cradle of the Georges slightly different from what it was when Thackeray was there. The Palace of the deposed blind King was falling into decay, and the neglected gardens were subsiding into a wilderness. We threaded their grass-grown rectangular walks, shut in on both sides by lofty walls of clipped foliage, crossed the neglected tapis vert, with its troop of mildewed clumsy high Dutch goddesses sculptured in emulation of the graceful marble nymphs of Versailles, past the careless-ordered geometrical parterres to the mouldy-looking stone basin surrounded by roses, laurels, orange trees and cypresses, symbolical, it seems to us, of the love-making, fight- 8 BERLIN UNDER THE NEW EMPIRE. ing, marrying and d\ing of the race of Hanoverian Guelphs. It is here that we found the petty spiral water-works which George the First used to point out to his guests as something uncommonly fine, and which when set to play for our delectation roused up the plump and laz)' gold fish from the bottom of the slimy turgid pool. An old gardener, smoking a long German pipe, who showed us over the grounds, drew particular attention to the orange and cypress trees of which he appeared to take especial care. Havmg heard that Hanover was by no means reconciled to its absorption by the Hohenzollerns, "'Das ist Praissen ! " said I to try the old fellow, pointing at the same time to the ground. " Das ist nicJu Pniisscn" answered he, stamping his foot violently upon the gravel walk sadly in want of weeding — " das ist Han nova' ! " The city of Hanover is a dull beautified quiet place and the province generally presents all the outward appearances of a sleepy sort of prosperity. Its fertile fields, and wooded hills, and endless sweeps of rolling ground remind one very much of England, and certain parts more especially of the weald of Kent. One mis.ses, it is true, the stately homes of the large landowners and the big thatched barns of the thriving farmers, still all the homesteads have a comfortable well-to-do air, and the invariable tidiness of the peasantry about the heels, shows them to be better off in the matter of shoe leather, not only than the majority of their brethren in Germany, but likewise in France. At Brunswick, the city of the fiery Guelphs who resisted the Emperors of Germany for a couple of centuries, the Altstadt Rathhaus, a graceful late 13th century Gothic .structure un- equalled throughout Germany, is worth coming all the way to see. In front of the pillars supporting its rich arcades of per- forated stone work, stand characteristic life-size statues of Guelphic princes, all in their habits as they lived. The still flickering grand-duchy of Brunswick hardly impressed one so favourably as the recently snuffed-out kingdom of Hanover, nevertheless as regards fertility it appeared to be largely in advance of Prussian Saxony, which the railway enters just as we catch sight of the mountain chain of the Harz, dominated by the witch-haunted Brocken, the traditional scene of the Walpurgis saturnalia. Little more than two hours' ride from Brunswick brought us to Magdeburg on the Elbe, a fortified town of the first class, which during the Thirty Years' War, after standing a two years' siege was taken by storm by the Imperialist general Tilly and burnt to the ground, thirty thousand of its inhabitants, accord- ing to the Protestant version, being put to the sword or perishing in the flames. " Since the destruction of Jerusalem and Troy," wrote the sanguinary commander of this wholesale butchery, " there has never been seen such a famous victory." Kx\ k(jl'tl:. In the citadel of Magdebur-^, constructed on an island in the Elbe, Baron Trenck, the audacious lover of the beautiful and witty Princess Amelia, youngest sister of Friedrich the Great, and the " malevolent fairy" of the family, was confined for nine dreary years, heavily chained to his dungeon walls. Trenck, a handsome subaltern in his majesty's guards, and aide-de-camp to the King, had attracted the princess's regards at some ball, and the result was one of those amorous intrigues such as German princesses of the epoch v/ere prone to indulge in, although Carlyle, in the fulness of his hero worship, cavalierly classes it among the myths. Hints and warnings on the part of Friedrich having failed to put a stop to the perilous intercourse, some breach of military discipline furnished him with an excuse for placing Trenck under arrest, and packing him off to the fortress of Glatz. " Guard well this knave," wrote he to the commandant ; but to no avail, for Trenck succeeded in escaping to Vienna, and an inquiry which followed, elicited that the Princess had been supplying him liberall}' with funds. After some years, spent in one or another northern capital he fell into Friedrich's clutches at Dantzig, when he was transferred to Berlin, and afterwards to Magdeburg, where his dungeon in the Sternschanze forms one of the sights of the place. Lafayette was at one time a prisoner at Magdeburg, while Carnot, the great military administrator of the revolutionary epoch, died there in banishment, — "And borrowed from his enemies Six foot of ground to lie upon." On leaving Magdeburg, the railway crosses a broad sandy plain stretching for miles on either side of the line, with sand hills bounding the view. Dispersed over this barren spot were one or two windmills, while here and there clusters of trees stood likes oases in the midst of a desert. Then suddenly, by an unaccountable freak of ilature, the parched soil was succeeded by a strip of marsh land where long rank grass grew to the very edge of the line. Then the sandy soil again presented itself covered with short scorched grass varied at intervals by a fiield of stubble and an occasional flock of geese, or dotted by clusters of pine trees as if only they were sufficiently hardy to grow in this arid waste. Altogether nothing can be sadder and more desolate-looking than this Mark of Brandenburg, through which the little river Spree winds its way with such inimitable resignation. Well may Berlin wits pretend that their ancestors would never have settled in so forbidding a territory had there not been a deplorable lack of good maps some thousands of years ago. Between Mag- deburg and Berlin we pa.ss no towns but merely some miserable cottages grouped here and there around a neglected steeple ; the lO BERLIN UNDER THE NEW EMPIRE. country, flat and uniform, is broken only by sand-banks and stunted pines with knotted roots, and casual pools of greenish water at which cows, lean as those of Pharaoh's dream, are drinking.^ Little windmills perched on piles of stones rise up here and there, agitating their sails as moths do their wings, but not a human being and scarcely a bird meets the eye. Occasionally a few poppies impart a touch of colour to the dreary landscape, rendered all the more melancholy-looking by the lowering grey autumnal sky. Well might the Brandenburg poet sing : — " Oh, wliat a bare and dreary land ! No hill, no vale, only dry sand, No roses, not an oak !" After another sandy waste, inducing the belief that we are approaching a seaport town, several beautiful lakes, with fleets of ])unts and flocks of swans and wild fowl in the distance, burst suddenly upon our view. Next we pass a forest of pines, then another strip of sand and a few villages, and we are at Potsdam, watered by the Havel and rendered highly picturesque by extensive plantations which thread alike the valleys and cross the surrounding hills ; also by vast and beautiful gardens and elaborate architectural embellishments, for Potsdam counts almost half a score of palaces. Some involuntary exclamations of surprise at the pleasing transformation the scenery had under- gone aroused our weary fellow-travellers, most of whom sensibly enough had taken refugeln slumber while the train was traversing the seemingly interminable dreary waste, and heads were at once eagerly thrust out of windov/ to obtain a glimpse of Potsdam and its attractions. In another half hour the train stopped at a small wooden station to which no name was affixed. As every- l, ' Voyat^e aux Fays des MiUi^irds, par M. Victor Tissot. EN ROUTE. II body appeared to be quitting the carriages, I hailed a porter and demanded if it were Berlin. He seemed as much astonished as one of his fellows at Cannon Street would be on being asked how far it was from London, and it was not until he had thoroughly satisfied himself he was not being joked with that he replied, " Ja, Ja." This was in 1S72, before the vast and hand- some station near the Potsdamer Thor, where we alighted on the occasion of subsequent visits to Berlin, was com.pleted. 1 -■" A IJhhL/N '.lAC.MAN. II. FIRST IMPRKSSIONS OF BERLIN. WITH the platform crowded with lugc^a^e and merchandize, and densely packed with strugglinfj passengers, it was hopeless in the prevailing confusion to attempt at securing the services of any one of the small staff of porters which the Mag- deburger and Potsdamer Eisenbahn appeared to have in its employ. Consequently I and the friend by whom I was accom- panied decided upon driving at once to some hotel and sending subsequently for our luggage. Descending the flight of wooden steps leading from the railway platform to the open space in front of the station, where a file of shabb}'-looking vehicles — average specimens of the Berlin droschken — were drawn up, and running our eyes rapidly along the line, we hailed the most respectable-looking ; but the unconcerned individual lolling on the bo.x with a cheap cigar between his teeth — the Berlin cabby never smokes pipes — responded to our signal with complete dis- dain. Imagining the "kutschcr" of the new Empire, like the FIRST IMI'KESSIONS OF UKKLIX. rest of the natives of tlic fatherland, to be unduly elevated on the national stilts, and perhaps more indolent and less civil than his coiifi-rrcs in other parts of Europe, we opened the door of the vehicle and threw in our "wraps," a proceeding against which the driver protested and gesticulated, flinging his arms about like a semaphore, and winding up by rolling himself off his box, only, however, to declare that he could not take us. Fancying he might have a weakness for picking his fares we simply rejoined by directing him to drive to the Hotel de Rome, but to no purpose. On trying to secure another vehicle we met with refusal after refusal, and as the crowd of droschken was rapidly diminishing we appealed to one of two tall policemen, in spiked helmets and with dangling cut- lasses. He referred us to an aged military-looking individual who from his towering stature might have been a direct descendant from one of Friedrich Wilhelm the First's gigantic guards, and on whose brass badge the word !l^ro[c&fcnbc[tcIhm(3 could with a proper amount of patience be read. From him we received a metal ticket stamped with a number, with directions to secure the droschke with a corresponding number, the driver of which on the production of this talisman made no difficulty in accepting us as his fare. Subsequently one learnt that these so-called drosch- kenbestellung are attached to all the Berlin railway stations, where vehicles — abundant enough within the city — are usually lacking whenever a crowded train chances to arrive, leading to an energetic struggle to secure one of these little tablets the possession of which alone confers the privilege of being driven home in a decrepit Berlin droschke. The next instant we were rumbling in the direction of Unter den Linden, at once the Boulevards, Rue de Rivoli and Champs Elysees of Berlin, where are found broad open squares and mili- tary monuments, the royal palaces and principal public buildings, the higher class hotels and the most attractive shops, the dearest restaurants and the more frequented conditoreien, for at this epoch cafes such as exist in Paris and Vienna were unknown in the Prussian capital. The vehicle we had secured was drawn by a miserable-looking horse, old, ill-cared for, lame of his near fore- leg, and blind of his off eye, while the driver, who by means of 14 BERLIN UNDER THE NEW EMPIRE. horse cloths and some bits of board had arranged his seat into a kind of easy chair, was a pecuharly ill-fa\-ourcd specimen of humanity. Putting his physiological defects however aside, one may remark that his livery of Prussian blue, in common with all the visible portions of his linen and his face and hands, was so begrimed with accumulated dirt as to approximate to rusty iron grey, and that the only thing which gave him an air of respectability was the big bright brass escutcheon in front of his hat, to the polishing of which he had devoted an amount of time which might have been more advantageously bestowed on other portions of his toilet. Slowly as our decrepit vehicle rumbled along we were soon crossing the turbid waters of the Landwehr canal, crowded with barges laden with bricks and fuel, while its banks were lined with stately-looking houses standing back in small but pleasantgardens. The day being remarkably warm that empyreumatic odour for which Berlin is notorious was speedily recognisable. In the height of summer you are scarcely v^ithin the city, have barely had time to catch a glimpse of its spacious tho- roughfares, border- ed by lofty and often elegant-look- ing edifices, before " the rankest com- pound of villainous smell that ever offended nostril " arises on all sides and persistently tracks your steps. Proceed in which- ever direction you will, from theThier- garten to Fried- richshain, or from Monbijou palace to the Belle Alli- ance-platz, along the frequented Lin- den Avenue, or the shunned Konigs- mauer, before the palace of the Em- peror or the Ar- beitshaus of the poor, in the most elegant as in the most repul- sive quarters, of the city, it accompanies you everywhere. At certain times it is more offensive than at others, according as FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF BERLIN. 15 the fetid filth is in sluggish motion or stagnant at the bottom of the open and inefficiently flushed drains, still the poisonous gases are for ever mingling with the atmosphere and infecting the city with their unwholesome fumes. Passing along the spacious streets and the pleasant green leafy avenue skirting the Thiergarten — the Hyde Park of Berlin — to the Linden promenade you discover the sewers to be superficial instead of subterranean, the roads being bordered on either side by open drains, a couple of feet deep by a foot and a half broad, at the bottom of which a thick layer of mire is festering in the sun or flowing languidly towards the river Spree, a mere glance at whose waters makes one shudder when one thinks that all the coffee one will sip and the soup one will swallow will be made with this repulsive fluid. In the more populous quarters, or where the streets intersect each other, or the foot-paths are extremely narrow, or the houses chance to be inhabited by people with an ordinary keen sense of smell, these gutters have been partially covered in with stout planks, removable at will, and more or less rotten with age. They are also frequently bridged over in face of the principal portcs-cocJicres to admit of vehicles crossing in security, but with these exceptions the several hundred miles of Berlin drains are completely exposed, and Berlin mud larks and baby "bangel"^ find no end of amusement in stirring up the liquid impurity, in constructing dams to arrest its progress, and in swimming fleets of tiny boats with paper sails upon its oleaginous surface. In broad day-light sleepy droschke drivers, in turning the street corners too sharply, occasionally topple the hind wheel of their vehicles down these gullies' abrupt banks, dragging the forewheel and sometimes the horse after it, the driver ordinarily getting unseated and his fare being possibly precipi- tated on to the pavement. It is no rare thing too for strangers not hav- ing the fear of these yawnmg trenches continually before their eyes to slip suddenly into them while crossing the road at night, and to be conducted home with possibly a dislocated ankle. Middle-class Berlincrs moreover after ROVAL GUARD-HOUSE. ^ The Berlin bangel is equivalent to the London ro igli. i6 BEKl.lN UNDER THE XEW EMPIRE. makiiiL; a nic^ht of it roll into these drains in the earl}' hours of the morning, and working men, whom a too liberal imbibition of '' weissbier mit kiimmel " has rendered unsteady, regularly tumble into them on their way home and wallow there until day- break, unless compassionately assisted out by some night watch- man going his rounds. The late King, whose olfactory organs never became completely reconciled to the over pungent odours of his capital, had the happy thought of planting the borders of these drains with lines of acacias, the delicious scent from which, when in bloom, sensibly moderates the mephitic exhalations. Sanitary enthusiasts, with the view of arousing the authorities to remedy the existing evil, are for ever pro- phesying the outbreak of some epidemic such as depopulated the cities of the middle ages ; but, as is commonly the case, their well-meant warnings fall unheeded on deaf official ears. Beyond the pestiferous odours, which during the warm season of the year render a residence in the Prussian capital the reverse of at- tractive to individ- uals with delicate- ly strung olfactory nerves, strangers meet with another though less serious inconvenience in the clouds of sand which in dry wea- ther, at the slightest puff of wind, rise into the air and envelope every- thing they encoun- ter in their pro- gress. The Berlin streets are rarely watered, because the companies de- mand such an ex- orbitant sum that the newspapers pretend the city might be sprinkled with eau de Cologne for the money — which could it only be accomplished would certainly have the effect of moderating its existing noisome odours. Whenever a water-cart makes its apparition all the juvenile bangel of the neighbourhood ^re gambolling in the wake of it. On gusty days these clouds of s ot o H (A Q X < I FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF BERLIN. 17 sand sail swiftly down the long streets penetrating into the houses through all the apertures, obliging the double windows to be kept closed, and blinding and stifling everyone who faces them. Occasionally a pillar of sand will rise at the Halle Thor on the southern side of Berlin and whirl down Friedrichs-strasse smother- ing all it comes in contact with, receiving compensating reinforce- ments on the road, and passing leisurely out an hour afterwards on the opposite side of the city, merely however to give place to a second one already capering at its heels. The Berlin sand inflames the eyes and irritates the skin like so much pounded glass, or as Mr. Sala categorically put it, " powders your clothes, gets down your throat, cracks your lips, excoriates your mucous membrane, bakes your tongue, irritates your tonsils, and insinuates itself into your eyes, ears, and nostrils." Unquestionably one of the first things that strikes a stranger in Berlin is the large number of people wearing spectacles. A considerable proportion of the men encountered in the streets wear glasses of one kind or another, and many women and chil- dren even have recourse to them. These affections of the eyes are possibly attributable to Berlin being situated in the midst of an immense sandy plain, and to the irritation to the organs of vision consequent upon the sand being continually in motion. Berlin enjoys the reputation of being a handsome city. It counts a perfect host of outdoor statues and monuments, about half-a-score of palaces, numerous striking public buildings, many elegant modern private residences, and vast barracks in the style of stately feudal castles, while even its gas works, which elsewhere are ordinarily such hideous obiects, assume the form C i8 BERLIN UNDER THE NEW EMPIRE. DRAGOON BARRACKS NEAR THE HALLE GATE. of grand gothic round towers. Its churches, however, both Catholicand Pro- testant are not merely insignifi- cant but fre- quently hideous, and both extern- ally and intern- ally are but in- differently cared for. Berlin is perhaps the most mathematically arranged capital in all Europe. Thestraightness, length, breadth, and rectangular arrangement of its streets, excepting the tortuous thoroughfares in the older portions of the city, are proverbial. These spacious thoroughfares form grand strategetical arteries designed for the free passage of columns of horse, foot, and artillery, and the manoeuvering of brigaded masses of men. In traversing Friedrichs-strasse, several miles long in a direct line, and with the drawback common to nearly all the Berlin streets, of being execrably paved, one is reminded of Sydney Smith's jocular lament that there was an end to everything in this world excepting Upper Wimpole street, which compared to Friedrichs-strasse is brevity itself. Some few Berlin thoroughfares are macadamized, but the great majority are paved, not, however, after the fashion of Oxford Street or the Strand, or even the Paris faubourgs, but with that peculiar pointed kind of stone in favour in the old continental towns. Indeed, so execrable are the Berlin pavements that a special shoe has been invented for the horses, while so ill kept are the macadamized roads that formerly the authorities used to be constantly having their attention directed by the newspapers to particular streets where men and cattle sank ankle deep in the mire. Provided, however, the tax-gatherer could only manage to pick his way through the mud to collect the city rates remonstrances were of no avail. In certain streets there are no footpaths, and even where these conveniences do border the roadways, instead of broad pavements of flag- stones or asphalte, there is at most a single row of flags, just sufficiently wide for one pedestrian to walk on, the space on either side being either left unpaved or else studded with small pointed stones of the kidney potato and more angular types — in other words, just the kind of stones which one is always ready to fling into the garden of one's neighbour. It must be confessed FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF BERLIN. 19 however that occasionally they are considerately disposed points downwards. As the extent of the repairs to the roads and footways of Berlin is dependent on the amount realised from the dog-tax, in the old days the stones used to be economically turned and returned every few years, like a miser's coat, by the thrifty municipality. Formerly a few yards of pavement would be widened in one street, next time another street would enjoy this advantage, improvement proceeding so slowly that a Berlin newspaper calculated it would take several hundred years at the then rate of progression to provide the entire city with respectable foot-pavements. Since the influx of the French milliards the advance has been more rapid, and asphalte has been partially laid down in the Linden and other important thoroughfares. Spite of this, the peculiar conformation of most of the existing stones necessitates heavy double-soled boots being worn in all seasons by those accustomed to the asphalte of the Paris boulevards or the flags of Pall-Mail, unless they are content to traverse Berlin in a sluggish droschke. It is perhaps to the execrably paved roads and the equaly abominable footways that one should attribute the extraordinary development of female feet in this part of Europe, a physio- logical phenomena which we commend to the attention of our neighbours outre Mancke, who, intent as they are on discovering alike motes and beams in the eyes of their detested rivals, are likely to make the most of it. The French, while rendering ample homage to British female beauty, have always contended that every Englishwoman, no matter how flaxen her hair, how blue her eyes, or how transparent and roseate her complexion, has large feet. They have written it in their newspapers, illustrated it in their comic journals, and declaimed it upon the stage, and it was with feelings akin to satisfaction that one observed this remarkable development of the pedal extremities which characterises the Berlin belles. In the Prussian capital, scaffoldings and buildings in course of construction constantly arrest the eye. In the outskirts of Berlin new quarters are still being laid out, new streets planned, new houses rising up everywhere. Until quite recently even in the heart of the city so many new structures were in course of erection that one was led to imagine the capital of the new Empire had been handed over to some Prussian Haussmann to expend a handsome share of the French milliards in its extension and improvement. The newer thoroughfares undoubt- edly have the merit of presenting some architectural novelties in the variety of design which the different edifices, usually in the Renaissance 5tyle, exhibit, and which, while avoiding the tedious sameness and utter want of taste displayed in our Tyburnian terraces, are in no degree incongruous with one another, A principal characteristic of Berlin domestic architec- C 2 20 BERLIN UNDER THE NEW EMPIRE. ture of the present day is the elegant overhanging bay windows, which, springing from the first floor, extend to the uppermost storey, breaking up the formal Unc of the long faqades at frequent intervals, as well as ornamenting the principal street corners. And yet ninety-nine of every hundred of these houses are merely of stucco. The Berlinese, when enlarging their city, were ambitious of something grandiose, but found stone too. costly, so they put up with the imitation. Select any one of the more pretentious modern Berlin houses, and your first impression will be that it is a stately stone mansion. The gateways and win- dows are surmount- ed and surrounded with rich carvings ; sculptured cornices and friezes run round the upper part of the edifice, and in all proba- bility a group of statuary rises above its summit. Acloser inspection reveals the stucco to be already peeling off the older walls, the supposed stone carvings to be mere plaster of Paris, and the groups, Roman cement ; while in- side these edifices there will be any amount of sham marble and coun- terfeit mosaic, with even imitation car- peting painted up the flights of stairs. One cannot re- main long in Berlin without being impressed by the abundance of its out-door statues of a bellicose type. Effigies of military or mythological heroes embellish the Linden and the Lust-garten, surmount most of the palaces and public buildings, crown the Brandenburg-gate, grace the entrance to the old Schloss and adorn its courts, scale the steps of the Museum, flank the classic MILITAKV MONUMENT IN THE INVALIDEN PARK. FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF BERLIN. 21 guard-house and the opera, face the king's theatre, Hne the more important bridges, crowd most of the open spaces, and guard the sites of the more ancient city gates, while figures of saints receive you beneath the portico of the Cathedral and survey Berlin from several of its church steeples. In the same way busts of the Emperor, the Prince Imperial and Bismarck decorate all the theatres, tanz-siile, bier-hallen, and restaurants. A perfect forest of flag-staffs dominates the Berlin edifices and the Prussian spread- eagle soars in all directions. You encounter it perched on the top of marble and metal columns, hovering over palaces and public buildings, fixed above the doors of postal and police offices, and its spiked distending wmgs on the helmets of soldiers and policemen, and the hats of the post-van drivers. If one's ears are assailed with less drumming and trumpeting in Imperial Ber- lin than used to be the rule in Imperial Paris, there is certainly as much, if not more, marching of troops and dragging of cannon through the principal thorough- fares, as manoeuvres in which infantry, cavalry, and artillery alike take part, are performed early every morning in some open sandy space outside the city. Officers in droschken or on foot throng the Linden throughout the day, requiring sentinels to be con- stantly on the alert that they may not neglect to salute them ; and under the lime-tree avenues helmetted aides-de-camp and smart-looking orderlies are trotting to and fro from morn till night. The military element so far preponderates that at many restaurants more officers than civilians are encountered. They crowd the opera, throng most places of public resort, sweep the pavement of the Linden, the flags of which resound with " — their sabres' cursed clank ; Their spurs are jinghng everywhere ! " If at Berlin the martial propensity of the nation is constantly present, its system of universal education is not the less so, for although the gown timidly gives place to the sword, schoolmaster and drill-sergeant as a rule go hand in hand. In the morning, 22 BERLIN UNDER THE NEW EMPIRE. from seven until nine the streets are positively thronged with children of both sexes and all ages and conditions, their satchels on their backs or their rolls of music and such-like matters in their hands, not creeping ^ 14- 1 . ' ' '^' VICTUrtLlEN IH^NDLUMC W.PiJSECKE. like snails unwill ingly, but hurrying cheerfully to school. One thing sur- prises a foreigner. In the majority of Berlin streets he finds all the cellars either inhabited by the poorer classes or else converted into convivial cav- erns such as bier- locale and the like, or occupied by the smaller tradespeo- ple, notably milk- men, buttermen, bakers, grocers, pork-butchers, and shoemakers, and even crockery and furniture dealers. In the suburbs moreover you have often to dive down into a cellar to get your hair cut, or provide yourself with a pair of gloves. Apropos of the Berlin grocers, petroleum would appear to be their leading article, if one may judge by the size of the letters in which the name of the combustible is in- scribed on their shops, and the continual re- currence of which would certainly make a Par's communard's mouth water if he only dared trust himself inside Berlin. W^ith reference to the subterranean pork- butchers a joke is current to the effect that late one nigflit some newly-arrived foreigner of over lively imagination on hearing subdued guttural sounds proceeding from these profound depths instantly concluded murder was being committed, and excitedly appealed to a passing watchman to hasten to the rescue. " Calm yourself, vicin herr," replied the FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF BERLIN. 23 * VV^/Y." guardian of the night, whose practical ear detected the origin of the shrieks which had so alarmed the stranger ; " it's only the fieischer killing a pig ready for the morning." Although Berlin possesses no precise equivalent to the London public-house or the Paris viarcJiand de vins, still every fourth house in the more populous districts either dispenses some kind of intoxicating liquor, is a bier-local, a wein-stube, a rum- fabrik, or a distillation establishment, or else sells tobacco and cigars. Inscriptions such as "Bier und friihstiicks local," "AUe sorten biere und brantwein," " Tabak and cigarren fabrik," and "Distillation," meet the eye at every turn. The duty on all kinds of tobacco being exceedingly trifling, cigars of a certain quality may be purchased six for a penny, consequently pipes are rarely smoked even by the very poorest class. At night-time the number of red lamps seen in all quarters of the Pru.ssian capital is something remarkable, and the stranger curious as to their object soon dis- covers that the red light which in Paris indicates 'bacco, at Berlin signalizes beer. If beer is abundant here, beef and mutton scarcely are so, for it is only the early comers at the popular restaur- ants who have the smal- lest chance of securing them. Things, however, have improved of late, for formerly one might have scoured Berlin through without discovering so much as a .single sheep or a solitary side of beef in any one of its butchers' shops. The Berlin flcischcr of the old school have a fancy for decorating their establishments with trailing ivy in pots, though what the connection can be between the ivy green and butcher's meat one is at a loss to divine. Fine fruit is remarkably rare and correspondingly dear at Berlin ; flowers, however, are plentiful enough, and florists' shops thrice as common in the Prussian as m the French capital, the inhabitants of which have, as we all know, a mania for bouquets. From the moment a Parisienne is engaged to be married, \\&x fiance is bound to present her with a floral tribute daily until the wedding takes place. No sooner, however, is this 24 BERLIN UNDER THE NEW EMPIRE. accomplished than the husband hastens to carry his floral offerings elsewhere. The arrangement of the lierlin bouquets is formal but tasteful, flowers of one kind and colour being disposed in circles or other strictly mathematical figures after a fashion that seems peculiar to Germany. The greater business activity developed at Berlin since the war with France, has changed the aspect of its street traffic, which is no longer limited mainly to droschken, omnibuses, beer drays, primitive country waggons having one horse between the shafts, and another yoked by its side, and diminutive carts drawn by dogs. It is true that even to day huge piled up vans and ponderous waggons of the London type are never by any chance seen, still the numerous heavily laden rail- way trucks encountered in the mer- cantile quarters of the city show the immense impetus which Berlin trade has of late received. Beer drays of remarkable length adapted to being horsed at either end, owing to the impossibility of their turning, and carrying nearly half a hundred casks are familiar objects in Berlin thorough- fares, as are also carts laden with ice for cooling the national beverage. As the post conveys not merely letters, but bulky packages and heavy cases as well, and is in fact a kind of Pick- ford and Parcels Delivery Company, post-oflice vans are exceedingly numerous in the Berlin streets, where dog-carts for transporting milk, fish, and vegetables may be counted by thousands. Private carriages, on the other hand, are a perfect novelty even in the most fashionable Berlin thoroughfares. After the recent war the Berlinese in a disdainful way affected to discard everything French, and the newspapers to keep them from backsliding, periodically opened campaigns against Gallicisms in ideas or language. Certain patriotic restaurateurs, whose establishments of a higher grade than ordinary are commonly resorted to by strangers, abandoned the practice of print- ing their mentis in the cosmopolitan language of France, much to the embarrassment of the general run of foreigners who failed to recognise Hors cTmivrcs \\\ Q.?orfJTfn, Legumes in ©cmiiff, Entries in 3.1{ittr(ciTcn, Roti in i^nitfii and Dessert in 9?arf)tiU(). Spite of these puerile attempts at the suppression of French phrases, Paris fashion still exercises sway over the LOTTERY TICKET OFFICE. FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF BERLIN. 25 women of Berlin ; French inscriptions too surmount many of the shops, Parisian notiveauth being always prominently ticketed ; bad French wines with pretentious labels have moreover usurped the place of native vintages, photographs of French actresses and Bois de Boulogne anonynias are as common in the print- sellers as French novels are in the booksellers' windows, French dancers likewise star it in the ballets, and French pikes a grand spectacle run their hundreds of nights at the popular theatres. At Berlin, where huge posting bills are unknown, no enterpris- ing Prussian Willing has utilised either the dead-walls, hoardings, omnibuses, railway carriages, or stations for advertising purposes. Announcements of all kinds are restricted to the newspapers, or to the dumpy Litfass columns dotted over the central avenue of the Linden and scattered about a few other prin- cipal thorough- fares, and which though they are placarded almost exclusively with programmes of the theatres, and other places of amusement, will commonly attract a ragged group around them, in the early part of the day. Publi- city is given to lotteries, the curse of the new Empire, chiefly by placards exhibited in the shop windows, where thousands of tickets are exposed for sale, and invariably at a premium, such is the mania for speculation among the Berlinese. Berlin with all its misery has nothing approaching to our London rookeries, the poor are huddled densely together, as in other large cities, but out of sight and generally under-ground. The prim street fronts of thousands of houses also conceal no end of wretchedness within the court at the rear, thus accounting for the absence of any such dreadful squalor as is visible 26 BERLIN UNDER THE NEW EMPIRE. in our own metropolis. Berlin moreover is free from the plague of street cries, beggars, German bands, Italian pifferari, conjurors, and acrobats. Street stalls and hawkers' barrows are equally prohibited. The few organ-grinders only venture to ply their calling by stealth, in the more retired neighbourhoods. Even Punch and Judy appear not to be tolerated in the capital of the new Empire, where moreover all the dogs are scientifically muzzled not merely during the hot weather but throughout the year, and, strange to say, the droschken-kutscher as a rule is neither extortionate nor uncivil. EAKLY SETll.ERS IN THE MARK III. ANCIENT BERLIN : NATURAL SELECTION AND NAME. The Mark of Brandenburg — at the time when German swords and German sagacity sought to wrest it from the heathenish Wends who had emigrated here from the east — presented a series of dreary flats partly covered with shifting sand and heath and partly with forests, which, excepting some oaks and a few other deciduous trees, were exclusively composed of the indigenous pine. The underwood formed dense thickets through which the axe only made a way with difficulty. Solitary gigantic blocks of granite carried thither in ages long past by the waves of the sea, lay scattered over the vast expanse, and were the sole stone to be found there. Broader than ever the rivers traversed the land, expanding for long stretches into lakes, or confined by extensive swamps, almost bottomless and hidden beneath a layer of turf and marsh plants. This configuration of the soil offered the greatest difficulties alike to military operations and commercial intercourse, confining them, as in a greater degree in mountainous countries, to a small number of passes of which the most important crossed the Spree at the very point where the oldest existing parts of Berlin are situated. On the right bank where the ancient mill-dam crosses the river, there was a pointed 28 BERLIN UNDER THE NEW EMPIRE. tongue of land which narrowed the bed of the stream ; on the other bank was a low hill, surrounded by a narrow arm of the Spree, and thus turned into an island. Between Kopnick and bpandaUj two well-known ancient Wendish settlements, this was the only point at which the passage was not prevented by lake, marsh, and thicket. It is therefore probable that partly with a view to the protection of this important passage and partly through the traffic created by it, settlements existed here at a very early period. The most ancient part of Berlin, occupying the high ground between two arms of the Spree, was a favourable point for a settlement of fishers. Certain slight eminences on the banks of the river in front of it admitted of the inhabitants building watch towers, and erecting defensive works ; the locality, moreover, furnished capital sites for water-mills, while the narrowness of the stream at this point facilitated the construction of bridges and the establishment of ferries. The situation, comparable in a measure to the Paris Cite, was therefore altogether an excellent one for an important fisher community, and although Berlin is first mentioned in history towards the beginning of the twelfth century, it is probable that its origin dates from the earliest peopling of the surrounding country. Still the little fishing hamlet would not have been in the least degree better off than a score of other localities of North Germany had it been merely a simple ferry easy to defend ; — had it possessed no other natural advantages it would never have filled an important historical role. But Berlin is situated almost in the exact centre of the region circumscribed by the Elbe and the Oder, and of the lakes and rivers connected with those two great watercourses : and thus it has become the natural entrepot of the various commodities produced within this extensive area. It is true that neither the Spree nor the Havel are imposing streams, still they have the requisite advantages of being both deep and navigable. At the close of the thirteenth century, Berlin — at that time a Republic and the rallying-point of a veritable federation — had already become the principal town of the Mark of Brandenburg, and here most of the popular assemblies were held. Raised in the middle of the fifteenth century to the dignity of a capital, it increased little by little its circle of action, and profited by the geographical advantages of a vaster region. It then became evident that not only was Berlin the great commercial station between the Oder and the Elbe, between Magdeburg and Frankfurt-on-the-Oder, but that it was also the centre of gravity between the basins of these two rivers — and that the commercial movement of the two regions could there be best centralized. According to the ingenious comparison of J. G. Kohl, Berlin has disposed its system between the Elbe and the Oder in much ANCIENT BERLIN. 29 k the same fashion as a spider would spin its web between two trees. From the great market of the Upper Oder to the most important city of the Upper Elbe, — that is to say, from Breslau to Hamburg- — the natural route is by Berlin, as is also that leading from Leipzig to Stettin. Further, Berlin is situated precisely midway between both of these routes, and is also equidistant from the Rhine and the Vistula, from the Dutch and the Russian frontiers. Moreover, by a remarkable coincidence, the commercial line from the Oder to the Elbe is precisely that valley which geologists recognize as having been in prehistoric times the great fluvial bed of Northern Germany. Formerly, the Oder on reaching the spot where Frankfurt now exists did not suddenly turn to the right and throw itself into the Baltic, but continued its course towards the north-west, and uniting with the Elbe, became a tributary of the North Sea. The immense river, upwards of 600 miles in length, passed precisely by the spot where Berlin rises to-day — towards the centre of the ancient valley. The Spree, bordered by marshes, flows still in the bed of the powerful watercourse, "a dwarf that has slid into a giant's armour." The isthmus separating it from the actual course of the Oder is very narrow and the old connection could be easily re-established by a canal. Favourably situated with regard to the rivers of North Germany and their basins, Berlin is equally well located in reference to the seas which wash the northern shores of the new Empire. While belonging by the direction of the Elbe course to that region of Germany which is bathed by the North Sea, it should be borne in mind that Berlin communicates equally freely with Hamburg, the great Elbe port, as with Stettin, the most important emporium of the mouth of the Oder, and that it commands at once both coasts. Better than any other city it can influence and survey the commercial operations which are carried on between the ports of Embden and Cuxhaven, and from Kiel to Konigsberg and Memel. To employ a military comparison, the city may be likened to a general occupying a commanding position behind his army and directing its manceu- vres. West, east, south — in all parts of the immense plain, stretching from the mouths of the Ems to the waters of the Niemen, the cities of Germany occupy commercially — as well as politically and militarily — the same subordinate position in regard to the central city which watches over and governs them. Through its network of converging canals and railways, Berlin increases daily its power of attraction, the recent conquests of Prussia largely precipitating the movement of this immense suction pump in the plains of Brandenburg.^ A crowd of immigrants of all kinds, workers and idlers, rich Die Ceog7'aphische Lage der Hauptstaedte Eitrcpa's, von J. G. Kohl. 30 BERLIN UNDER THE NEW EMPIRE. and poor, men of wealth and pleasure, seekers of adventures and of fortune, rush towards Berlin with a kind of frenzy. The progress of the city in population, wealth, and industry, has been far more rapid than even that of Prussia in political importance, and Berlin, already peopled with nearly a million inhabitants, promises to become like London a province covered with houses. It will be seen from the foregoing that favourable local conditions had everything to do with the founding of Berlin, and that like conditions materially promoted its subsequent development and eventually transformed the chief city of the Mark of Brandenburg into the metropolis of Prussia, and finally into the capital of the new German Empire. The origin of the name, Berlin, has given rise to endless surmises, occasionally ingenious but more frequently puerile. For instance, from the simple supposition that the sandy forest glades in which the first Berliner set foot produced berries, it has been deduced that the word Berlin comes from Beer lein, signifying a small berry. A wilder conjecture proceeded from the brain of a classic philologist, who, by reason of the calling of the original settlers — who it is necessary to assume were familiar with Greek because the Greeks happened to come to the distant Pomeranian coast in search of amber — derives Berlin from barys linos (heavy net). With no more reason the city is supposed to have been originally called Barlein, meaning " little bear," not however after the four-footed brute, but from Albrecht der Bar, or the Illustrious, who is said, on no kind of authority, to have founded the city in the year 1 140, the truth being that Berlin had existed long before his day as a Wendish village. An astrological topographer of the i6th century was undecided as to whether the word was derived from the above-named Margrave or from the constellation of the Little Bear, under which he asserted Berlin was situate. Another conjecture assumed ber and wehr to be identical, and derived the name from the latter word, which signifies "dyke." Others assert that Berlin simply means "ford," and that the city obtained its name, like P>ankfurt, from a shallow in the river. Numerous attempts have been made to trace the word Berlin to a Sclavonic source, improbable as the theory is that the capital of the German Empire should have been founded by Sclaves. One of the boldest of these philological flights derives the word from /r/, meaning "near," and //;/, a "hill," for where, we may ask, is the hill in the neighbourhood of Berlin to be found .-' Even a still more ludicrous suggestion is the combination of ero, "feather," with ItJiati, "to moult," to produce the word Berlin, on the assumption, as has been humorously suggested, that the original site of the city was a goose-common. Other conjectural combinations are bor, " forest," either with rola, ANCIENT BERLIN, 31 "field," or with glina, "clay." A more ingenious supposition connects the word Berlin with the Sclavonic brljina, applicable to slow water with a muddy bottom, which would no doubt have admirably described the locality in prehistoric times. The honour of conferring a name on the city is not merely claimed for the Sclaves but for the Celts as well, although it has never been pretended that so much as a single Celtic tribe ever settled in the Mark of Brandenburg. In the Celtic language Berlin has been derived both from biorlinn, a ferry, and from hairlinn, a dam, as well as from compounds of ber, a curve, and lin, a river, ox paiir, a willow, and lliiyn, a wood. Unquestionably the most uncomplimentary derivation is that suggested from the Czech word berla, signifying " crutch," while the most flattering etymology is that of the Jesuit Bisselius, who maintained that Berlin evidently signified a pearl, and ought therefore to be spelt Berlin. The latest suggestions on the subject come from Dr. Otto Beyersdorf, who has requir-ed an entire pamphlet ^ to arrive at the conclusion that the city on the Spree was simply called Berlin because it was Berla's place, just as Stettin was Stetta's place, Czernin, Czerna's place, &c., and he thinks the name may have been originally that of some national Sclavonic saint, to whom other localities likewise owe their name. He cites as instances public squares both at Nordheim and Frankfurt-on-the-Oder named Berlin ; two other squares in Halle called respectively the great and little Berlin, two lakes at Wittstock similarly named, several villages in Mecklenburg and Holstein called Berlin or Barlin ; and a town near Frankfurt-on-the-Oder bearing the graceful name of Berlinchen. It has, however, been pointed out that the Wends have a prior claim to have given the name to the town which everyone admits them to have founded, and that one need go no further than their language to find the word " Berlin," which simply means an open space. 1 " Der Ortsname Berlin aus dem Slavischen erkldrt." A ROBBER KNIGHT EQUIPPING FOR A RAID. IV. DEVELOPMENT OF BERLIN. ST. NI':HOLAS CHURCH. THE first Berlin houses are supposed to have sprung up in the Molken- markt, the common market- place of the city, at the earliest period of which any records exist. Adjacent stands the gloomy grey church of St. Nicholas, ad- mitted to be the most an- cient ecclesiastical edifice in the capital, Berlin, a town of fishers, sailors, and traders, havingplaced itself under the patronage of St. Nicholas the tutelary saint of seafar- ing men. By the commence- ment of the thirteenth cen- tury, when this church was built, the twin towns of Ber- lin and Koln had both risen to some importance, and DEVELOPMENT OF BERLIN. 33 subsequently chose a common municipal council to administer their joint affairs. Among other privileges then conceded to them by the Mar- graves of Brandenburg, was the right of using a joint seal, on which was displayed the red eagle of Brandenburg on a silver field. Ere long, however, the Berlin burghers decided on having a coat of arms to them- selves, and, speaking escutch- eons being the fashion in those days, a bear was introduced into the Berlin shield, either because it was supposed that the name Berlin came from the bear, or in reference to Albrecht the Bear, the bold conqueror and founder of the Margravite of Brandenburg, who, sweeping away the heathenish Wends, peopled it with colonists from Holland whom an inroad of the sea had rendered homeless. In the year 1320 the ducal line of Albrecht the Bear having died out, Duke Rudolf of Saxony received the homage of the Berlin citizens, to whom, however, the new ruler soon became obnoxious, and some disturbances ensuing, two of his adherents lost their lives. Shortly afterwards Nicholas Cyriax, prior of Bernau, a partisan of the unpopular duke, and a constant dangler in his train, came to Berlin, and ventured in the Marienkirche on some demand in his behalf, which the citizens were indisposed to grant. Loud murmurs having arisen, the irascible prior hurled forth his angry anathemas, when the people closed in upon him with fury, and his death at the church door was the result The brutal burg- hers, not content with slaying their victim, kindled a fire and burnt his body on the spot. So incensed was the Bishop of Brandenburg at this savage outrage, that, after peremptorily ordering the Berlin churches and chapels to be closed, and all religious rites to be suspended, he proceeded to excommunicate the citizens eu masse, and it was not until two-and-twenty years afterwards that the repentant burghers prevailed upon the Pope to remove the interdict. For many years subsequently a light was kept perpetually burning before a stone cross, which, by way of atonement for their 34 BERLIN UNDER THE NEW EMPIRE. offence, the citizens had been compelled to erect upon the fatal spot. Rudolf dying after a brief rule, Kaiser Ludwig transferred the Brandenburg Margravitc to his son. named after himself, and at that time a mere stripling, but who in subsequent years fought beside our own Edward III. at the siege of Cambray. A year or two after his return home from the wars he found his right to the Mark — where he was exceedingly unpopular — disputed by the ghost of some former Margrave named Waldemar, who was believed to have been comfortably interred at least a quarter of a century before. To-day however, it was pretended that he had simply been absent all this while in the Holy Land, but had now returned, and placed himself at the head of an army to assert his rights. Kaiser Karl IV., son of the blind King of Bohemia, who was slain at Crecy, and whose famous plume and motto were assumed by the Black Prince, had in the meanwhile succeeded Ludwig as Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, and, to spite the Bavarian party, proceeded to take the pretended Waldemar under his patronage. The citizens of Berlin, with whom the original Waldemar had been very popular, affected to regard the new comer as their true prince, and warmly espoused his cause ; but soon a rumour arose that it was Margrave Waldemar's former servant, some miller's boy, whom the Emperor was taking through the country with the object of wresting the Brandenburg Mark from the house of Bavaria. The King of Denmark, brother-in-law of the reigning Margrave, flew to the assistance of his relative, and laid siege to Berlin, which was promptly recalled to its allegiance by the levy of a large war contribution. Spite, however, of this pecuniary mishap, Berlin still continued opulent, and so addicted were its citizens to habits of extravagance that it was found requisite to repress them by sumptuary laws. It was at this epoch that a singular fraternity of priests and laymen, known as the Guild of Mercy, was instituted at Berlin. Its ostensible objects were the relief of poor ecclesiastics and the succouring of travellers in distress in foreign countries ; but it gradually secured extensive privi- leges, and attained to considerable power and importance. The towns of Berlin and Koln owed their development exclu- sively to the energy and commercial activity of their citizens. The reigning prince for the time being came to exact suit and service from the burghers on his accession, but was rarely popular enough to keep his court among them. Friedrich I., of the house of Hohenzollern, had been thrust upon the states of the Mark, throughout which great lawlessness prevailed, by Kaiser Sigismund, the same who gave Huss a safe conduct to the Council of Constance, and then suffered him to be seized and burnt for heresy, and who first of all pawned, and, as he could not redeem it, afterwards sold the Brandenburg Mark to DEVELOPMENT OF BERLIN. 35 his protege, Kurfiirst Friedrich. The latter received the fealty of the states at Berhn amid considerable opposition, before which, resolute as he was, he had to bend, retiring from the ELECTOR FRIEDRICH I. AND HIS ELECTRESS. (From pai7itings in ttie church of Radolzburg.) Hohe-haus, now known as the Lager-haus, where he had taken up his residence, to the Kaiser's castle at Tangermunde, and from time to time occupying himself in repressing the anarchy to which, at this epoch, when power was the only measure of right, the Mark was unhappily a prey. The second Hohenzollern, likewise a Friedrich, profited by some dispute betweeen the united councils of Berlin and Koln and the burghers, to make his appearance before the city at the head of 600 horsemen ; and after compelling the inhabitants to surrender up the keys of the different gates, summarily divested them of various ancient rights and privileges. To effectually subdue future opposition he commenced building a castle within Koln itself, a proceeding which the irritated burghers resented by open rebellion. Peace, however was speedily brought about, after the last modern fashion, by arbitration ; and everything being made pleasant, the Elector rode into the city with a great display of pomp. In 145 1 he took up his residence at the new castle, which had strong walls and high towers for defence or D 2 36 BERLIN UNDER THE NEW EMPIRE. aggression if need were — one of these towers, the great Wendel- stein (Winding-stone) being constructed with a winding ascent, without steps, to allow of the transit of heavy ordnance. Under the warlike Elector Albrecht Achilles, whose rule commenced in 1471, the twin towns rose considerably in importance, numbers of strangers being attracted to them by the knightly games and tournaments which were continually being held on the banks of the Spree. This importance was permanently maintained by the Electors making Koln their fixed place of residence. The last organized bands of robbers are said to have disappeared from the Mark on the apparition of the first Hohenzollern ; still there were plenty of high-born gentlemen, like Eberard of Wlirtcmberg, of the blasphemous device, " Friend of God, Enemy of all," who continued to live ROBBER KNIGHTS. from the saddle, and the Elector Johann Cicero — so called from his latinity and his eloquence — pounded no end of baronial robber towers about their owners' cars. Half a century of energetic rule had produced vast changes for the better, yet travelling merchants might still have prayed, as of old, — " From Kockeritze and Liideritze, From Krocher, Kracht, and Itzenplitze Good Lord deliver us !" The successor of Johann Cicero, Joachim I. — elder brother of the Cardinal Albrecht of Mainz, notorious as having set on foot the sale of those unlucky indulgences which provoked the Reformation — was himself a stout Catholic, whose wife fled the country in terror on his discovering that she had secretly received the sacrament at the hands of a Protestant priest. It was he who stole off to the Kreuzberg, a little hill in the environs DEVELOPMENT OF BERIJN. 37 I of Berlin, the more quietly to contemplate the destruction of the world, which had been foretold by the astrologer Carion. The event not coming off as predicted, Elector and astronomer satisfactorily accounted for the omission by an error in their calculations. Under Joachim the law of " might makes right " was all but suppressed so far as Christians were concerned, but it was different with the unfortunate Jews, thirty-eight of whom were burnt at the stake, while the rest were driven out of the Mark of Brandenburg. A predatory act committed at this epoch by some marauding Saxon noble kindled a little war between a defiant Berlin citizen and the Elector of Saxony. Hans Kolhase, a dealer in horses, whose connections extended into Lovver Germany, had a couple of his finest animals seized by the noble freebooter. His complaints to the Elector of Saxony securing no redress, he sent the latter a challenge, following it up by an inroad into Saxon territory with a troop of horse. This brought about a compact, which was, however, broken by the Saxons, and the irate horsedealer proceeded to levy war in earnest, and even burnt the little town of Zahna, near Jijterbogk, in the church of which, a few years afterwards, the Dominican Tetzel publicly sold those indulgences which aroused the indignation of Luther, then a professor in the neighbouring University of Wittenberg. The Elector Joachim came forward as mediator in the quarrel, but all in vain. Dr. Martin Luther next intervened on behalf of his patron, the Elector of Saxony, and wrote an admonitory let- ter to the daring horsedealer, which is said to have so power- fully affected him that he rode over to Wittenberg and visited Luther by night. The latter summoned all the leading theo- logians of the town, and, under the heavy battery of dialectics which they opened upon him, the Berlin horsedealernaturally gave way, and, promising to keep the peace, rode back over the Saxon border. A short time afterwards hostilities were rekindled, and Kolhase seized a number of silver bars on their way from the Mannsfield mines to the Imperial mint, and flung them into the river from the bridge at Potsdam, which still retains the name of Kolhasen BUTTRESS OF THE OLD BERLIN JUSTICE-HALL. bridge. This piece of audacity 3S ];i:klix under thk xkw empire could not be overlooked, and the Berlin executioner, a useful if not respected member of society in those turbulent times, had orders to arrest the citizen Kolhase. Knowing, however, the desperate character of the man, he prudently enticed him to Berlin where he suddenly seized on him and one of his com- rades. At the trial which followed Kolhase defended himself with much natural eloquence, but to no avail. His judges ruled that the Kaiser's uncoined ingots must be respected, and Kolhase was condemned to be broken on the wheel. An offer to com- mute the sentence to decapitation was declined by him because his comrade was excluded from the benefit of it. " Brothers in life," exclaimed the gallant horsedealer, " in death we will be cleft together." MEN-AT-ARMS. Joachim II., who was fond of displays of splendour and the holding of festivals, celebrated the christening of his daughter by a grand tournament in the tilt-yard of the Schloss, at which knights with a multiplicity of quarterings emblazoned on their HKKALDS. shields contended in the lists. The Elector was not averse to fighting in earnest, having had some practice that way against the Turks, and to arouse a like combative spirit in his subjects he set the citizens of Berlin and Spandau to make mock war upon each other. The battle known as the club-war of Spandau began with an engagement on the river Havel, under the walls of the fortress. Both fleets fought with becoming valour, but the DEVELOPMENT OF BERLIN. 39 KNIGHTS. Berlinese conquered and commenced bombarding the citadel, whereupon the women of Spandau, thinking the fighting had commenced in earnest, rushed out and implored the Elector to release their besieged husbands, and on his refusal became so irate that Joachim found himself in a critical position. Eventu- ally the Spandauers cleverly enticed their adversaries into an ambush, and gave them a sound drubbing, which brought the battle to a satisfactory close, so far as the victors were concerned. Berlin at this epoch was Catholic, and miracle plays used to be periodically performed by the city scholars in the Town-hall, but the Elector, whose mother had been previously zealous in the Protestant cause, openly embraced the reformed faith, and Buchholzer, a pupil of Luther's, preached in the Cathedral as the first Protestant prior of Berlin. Subsequently, on November 2nd, 1539, after the reformed service had been inaugurated in the church of St. Nicholas, the town council and many of 40 BERLIN UNDER THE NEW EMPIRE. the principal citizens received Lutheran form. THK KLOS IKli-KrKi, HE. the sacrament according to the Joachim II. pa- tronised the fine arts just as certain of his predecessors had fostered sci- ence. He imported aspecial court paint- er from Milan, who painted the admir- able portraits of him- self and wife, which are preserved at the Berlin Schloss; provided occupa- tion for sculptors and goldsmiths ; and gave a marked impetus to the ar- chitectural embel- lishment of the castle of the Elector a lordly pleasure- razed the fortified its site " built himself capital. In 1540 he Friedrich II., and on house, wherein at ease to live for aye," decorating it inside with historical panels by Lucas Cranach, and gracing the court with life-size statues of the various German Electors. Under Joachim Berlin witnessed the introduction of the Renaissance style, which simply heralded in the reign of stucco. True, for some time to come stone was employed as heretofore for the more important buildings, but gradually bricks, disguised under compo, usurped its place. Johann Georg was a sober, steady-going ruler, who set his face equally against feasts, festivals, luxury in apparel, and strong liquor in excess, which latter he sought to wean his subjects from by tax- ing it heavily. He moreover busied him- self with the completion of the statute- book, commenced by his father, and in furthering education ; united the two schools of jSt. Nicholas and St. Mary into one large national establishment, installing it in an ancient Franciscan monastery, of which the existing Klosterkirche at one time formed part. During CORtlEL IN THE KLOSTER- KIKCHE. DEVELOPMENT OF BERLIN. 4I the reign of Johann Sigismund, who declared in favour of Calvinism, violent disputes arose between the contending Lutheran and Calvinist factions, which naturally interfered with the even flow of Berlin life. The fact is the Hohenzollerns of this epoch were somewhat shifty in matters of faith, con- veniently maintaining, — " That which is, or why 'tis so, Few can conjecture, none can know." On the breaking out of the Thirty Years' War, GeorgWilhelm. son of Johann Sigismund, would willingly have declared for the Catholic party had not motives of prudence restrained him ; his lemaining neutral, however, did not prevent the Mark from being overrun with foreign hordes. It was at this exciting epoch that Berlin witnessed the appearance of its first newspaper. As the war proceeded it had to put up with the demolition of all the houses along the city walls, and subsequently with the burning of a considerable portion of its suburbs, on the approach of Gustavus Adolphus, who professed to occupy the Mark as a matter of strategy, and ended by pretty well devastating it. When Berlin was really threatened the shifty Elector, not daring to offer resistance limited himself to running hither and thither with his grey-bearded counsellors, exclaiming, " What is to be done.' they have got cannon !"^ this dreaded artillery possibly being the identical two leathern cannon known to have belonged to Gustavus Adolphus and still preserved in the Berlin armoury. It was under such disheartening circumstances as these that, in 1640, Friedrich Wilhelm, the Great Elector, came into posses- sion of his inheritance. " A prince without territory, an Elector without power, and an ally without an army," he not only succeeded in ridding his country of the last Swede, but laid the foundations of Prussia's future greatnes.s. An able and intrepid warrior, an adroit diplomatist, and a grand adminis- trator, he succeeded in repairing the disasters of preceding years. Having faith in the axiom that "care and industry will accomplish everything," he opened negotiations in one direction, concluded alliances in another, made war and peace by turns, and always to his own aggrandizement, until he managed to get himself recognized as an independent ruler instead of a mere fief, and to play a role in Europe which grew more important from year to year. From the commencement of his reign he took the keenest interest in the progress of the capital, encouraged all who were in the service of the State, and the wealthier burghers to build new quarters of the city, one result being the Friedrichwerder-stadt erected on lands of his own, of which he made concessions with the object of promoting building enterprise. He improved the Schloss, enlarged its pleasure-grounds, and ' Carlyle's Frederick the Great. 42 BERLIN UNDER THE NEW EMPIRE. completed the fortifications. The twin churches in the Gensdar- men-markt and the finer old houses — residences of the statesmen of the period — still existing in the city belong to this epoch, whence the systematic development of Berlin architecture takes its rise. In the year 1675 the erection of the Dorotheen-stadt was commmenced on some farm lands belonging to the Elector's second wife, Dorothea, at whose instigation the renowned Unter den Linden was planted. Other districts were projected or extended, and all these various additions to the city were protected by moats and ramparts. The principal streets too were paved and lighted, and generally as much attention was bestowed on the internal arrangements of the city as upon its enlargement. At the peace of Mlinster and Osnabriick the bells had rung in thanksgiving throughout the Mark, still Brandenburg suffered for years to come from the effects of those disastrous times. The Elector, however, did his best to bring about a return to prosperity, and had roads made, canals dug, and marshes drained, besides establishing colonies of foreigners in the midst of the sandy wastes surrounding Berlin, which in due time were forced into fertility. When Louis XIV. revoked the Edict of Nantes the Great Elector replied by the Edict of Potsdam offering to the French emigrants a second country. Five-and-twenty thousand men alone profited by the invitation ; the Elector's representatives abroad had received orders to smooth down the difficulties of their journey, and whatever property they brought with them was admitted free of duty. Lands abandoned during the war were given up to the agriculturists and temporarily exempted from taxation, while the operatives had rights of citizenship con- ferred upon them and were at once admitted to the different trade guilds. Many among them took up a position in the highest ranks of commerce and industry. Credit institutions were established to provide for the first wants of the immigrants, who were moreover allowed their own courts of justice, consistories, and synods. Finally all affairs referring to them were conducted in their own language, and even so recently as the present century there were seven churches in Berlin, the services at which were conducted exclusively in French. The Great Elector further created the elements of a navy, developed commerce, and established manufactures. After the peace of Westphalia had been signed, the Berlinese again resorted to their amusements of target and poppinjay shooting at Whit- suntide and during August ; the Christmas fair was also duly celebrated in the Koln fish-market, and the avidity with which the burgher class betook itself to tea and tobacco indicated the return of national prosperity. The French refugees introduced the habit of snuff-taking, and carrying out their universal mission, substituted French fashions in dress, an innovation which led to DEVELOPMENT OF BERLIN. 43 the suppression both of the rich Spanish court costume and the picturesque attire of the old German burgher. By the end of the reign of the Great Elector, Berlin had grown to twice the size it was at the commencement, and its population had increased to nearly three fold. His states were augmented in almost an equal degree ; their half a million of inhabitants had become a million and a half; his little army of three thou- sand men had expanded into one of twenty-four thousand, while his revenue of half a million had swollen to two and a half millions of crowns, beside which he left six hundred thousand crowns in his treasury. At his splendid funeral no less than forty am- bassadors were present, an evident proof of the regard in which this able ruler was held at foreign courts. The Elector Friedrich III. afterwards King Friedrich I. was deficient in all his father's greater qualities but followed in his footsteps so far as the embellishment of Berlin was concerned. With the aid of able architects whom he had the judgment to select he remodelled and enlarged the Schloss and imparted to it much of its present external grandeur. He moreover erected the arsenal and other public buildings, raised the fine equestrian statue to the Great Elector on the KurfUrsten-briicke and commenced the Friedrichs-stadt on a regular plan ; while the Electress promoted the building of the earliest houses in the Spandauer and Stralauer suburbs. Friedrich HI. gave to the different districts, into which the city was divided, a single government and council. At the instigation of the handsome and intellectual Electress Sophia, pictured by Carlyle as something between an earthly queenandadivineEgeriawhose inquiring mind was always v/anting to know the wherefore of the why, he founded the Berlin Academ.y of Sciences after the plan of Leibnitz, and named the great philosopher its perpetual president. The Elector's main failing was his excessive complacency towards the Emperor of Germany whose interests he served and whose quarrels he espoused in order to secure the one object of his heart's desire, the coveted title of King, which the Kaiser at last consented to his assuming. Setting out from Berlin in great state with a train of nearly two thousand carriages, which — although no less than thirty thousand post-horses had been provided for them — were as many as twelve days proceeding to Konigsburg, he placed with his own hand the coveted royal crown on the top of his flowing periwig and then crowned his charming Electress. His coronation accomplished he was ac- claimed by his delighted subjects as a self-made king, and Berlin never before witnessed such a spectacle as was presented on his return. The royal pair, attended by the guilds and corporations of Berlin and Koln in the gayest of liveries, rode under triumphal arches through the city, all the church bells ringing out merry peals and hundreds of cannon thundering 44 BERLIN UNDER THE NEW EMPIRE. forth salutes from the city walls and even from the shipping in the Spree. Carlyle describes the first King of Prussia, whom an unlucky jerk in infancy had rendered hump-backed, as struggling all his days, regardless of expense, to render his existence magnificent, if not beautiful. He took for his model the court of Louis XIV. SCHLUTEk S STATUE OF THE GREAT ELECTOR. then the most brilliant in Europe, wore a grand Spanish wig like Le Roi Soleil, surrounded himself with a troop of chamberlains and maintained a little army of cooks. Beyond perpetual cere- monies and solemnities, attended with more or less splendour, and the continual ministering to his own effulgent existence, the DEVELOPMENT OF BERLIN. 45 expensive King indulged in profuse plans of all kinds that cost the state immense sums, to raise which he even taxed wigs, shoes, and cats. At his death no sooner was his funeral over than his son and successor leapt into the saddle and commanded the troops drawn upon the Schloss-platz to fire three salvoes from their guns ; from which it was foreseen that a . perfectly new order of things was about to be inaugurated.^ The austere, eccentric, and parsimonious Friedrich Wilhelm I. had none of his father's expensive elegant tastes and extravagant love of splendour and display. With one stroke of the pen he abolished all court offices, swept the palace clear of a regiment of chamberlains and lackeys, reduced the pension list to less than one fourth, and even pared down the salaries of the few attend- ants he retained in his service. Government and house-keeping were carried on by him on like economical principles. This hero of the Carlylean Olympiad " regulated the daily outlay for his table to half a thaler, higgled with his Queen over the market price of eggs, and forbade his cooks under pain of death to pilfer the dishes on the pretence of tasting them." Under him French re- finement and luxury came to an end and a purely Dutch simplicity set in. To render everything of French extraction unpopular at Berlin, the King had anti-Gallic pieces performed at the theatre and his jailors dressed up in the latest Paris fashions. All great architectural works were suspended. The new King's heart was in his army, and gigantic and well-drilled soldiers were his hobby. To secure the former, seven feet and upwards in height, his agents scoured Europe, kidnapping those who were proof against persuasion. It is not surprising, therefore, that his recruiting ser- geants occasionally got hanged. The premium offered by him for tall men proved sufficient to tempt the governor of Augs- burg to arrest all travellers of the requisite height who ventured through the town on foot and to sell them to his agents. Friedrich Wilhelm likewise bought his guards regularly of the Countess Wiirben, mistress of the Duke of Wiirtemberg, and the same to whom on her demanding to be included in the prayers of the Church, the cutting reply was made, " Madame, we pray daily — O Lord ! deliver us from evil." On one occasion he bartered four Japanese vases with Augustus II. of Saxony — the begetter of three hundred and fifty-four children and bender of horse- shoes with his bare hand — for four regiments of dragoons, which came to be known as the regiments of porcelain. At another time he made a present of a useless yacht which his father had had built, to Peter the Great, who had paid him a visit at Berlin, and who sent him in return a hundred and fifty Muscovite sons of Anak. Every autumn the Czar transmitted another hundred of these giants to Berlin, and the Prussian King acknowledged ^ Berlin von Robert Springer. 46 BERLIN UNDER THE NEW EMPIRE. the gift by forwarding to St. Petersburg smiths, mill-wrights, engineers, and drill sergeants. The drilling of his troops was due to Dessau — rough, passionate, and a drunkard, but beloved by the soldiers — the " inventor alike of the iron ramrod, of the equal step, and indeed of modern militarj^ tactics ; out of whose rough head " remarks Carlyle " proceeded the essential of all that the innumerable drill sergeants in various languages daily repeat and enforce, and who drilled the Prussian infantry to be the wonder of the world." Further, so perfect was the discipline which existed that, as Carlyle emphatically puts it, " from big guns and waggon-horses, down to gun-flints and gaiter straps, nothing was wanting or out of its place at any time in Friedrich Wilhelm's army."^ So excessively jealous was the King of his hobby being interfered with that, on one of his giants being sentenced by the Berlin Criminal Court to be hanged for house- breaking, he sent for the judges and replied to their explanations and excuses by a shower of blows from his flexible ratan, " crack- ing the crown of one, battering the nose of another, and knocking out a few teeth from a third." The provident King turned the palace Lustgarten into an exercising ground for his guards, and put a sudden stop to the internal decorations of the Schloss which had been commenced by his predecessor. Nothing but what was absolutely indispensable was finished. A completed suite of apartments on the third floor were made to serve for the state receptions of the court. The grand banqueting hall simply had a coat of whitewash given to it and remained thus for years, whence arose the name of the Weisse Saal which to this day it retains. Though the King was a great stickler for uniformity, and insisted on all new houses being of the same size and height, yet he could surrender his predilection for architectural symmetry when his own convenience was concerned. In the portion of the palace which he inhabited, looking into the Lustgarten, he had several of the windows made larger in order to admit more light and air, thereby marring the regularity of the facade. In the same way, for the sake of readier communi- cation, he had common wooden galleries constructed, leading through one of the gates of the garden and the palace entrance under the grand triumphal arch. Friedrich Wilhelm was not on good terms with the Berlinese, v/ho were averse to maintaining the large garrison he wished to install within the capital. For this reason he patronised I'otsdam, which he greatly extended and improved, still he contributed materially to the enlargement of Berlin by the interest which he took in the building of the Friedrichs-stadt, the houses of which stood lonesomely here and there when he entered on his task. The immi