The Berlin Wall Read Free Page A

city, but his soldiers’depredations proved every bit as appalling as those of the emperor’s desperadoes.
    Berlin’s civilians were routinely tortured by roasting, boiling, and mutilation, to force them to confess the whereabouts of ‘treasure’ or food hoards. One method favoured by Gustavus Adolphus’s men was to pour raw sewage down the throats of victims; for many years afterwards this type of waste was known as the ‘Swedish drink’. In 1631-2, starvation in Berlin grew so widespread that knackers’ yards were raided for food. Even the city’s gallows were plundered. One report described fresh human bones found in a pit with their marrow sucked dry.
    The foraging demands of huge, wandering armies, and the combatants’ determination to drain their conquests of every last gold piece and ear of corn, left Brandenburg, like the rest of Germany, impoverished, brutalised and stalked by famine. At the end of the war, only 845 dwellings still stood in the whole of Berlin. Cölln, on the western bank of the Spree, had been put to the torch in 1641 and all but destroyed. The population of Brandenburg had been reduced to 600,000.
    Only with peace did Berlin’s and Brandenburg-Prussia’s luck begin to turn. Succeeding in 1640, Elector Frederick William I, turned out to be the first of a series of energetic and talented rulers who would turn their barren, devastated homeland into a European power of some consequence.
    There had been no real winner in the Thirty Years War, no one strong enough to impose his own version of ‘victor’s morality’. The Treaty of Westphalia, which ended the war, declared that there should be no question of blame or war-guilt, or punishment for atrocities. The Latin phrase used was Perpetua oblivio et amnestia (eternal forgetting and amnesty—simply put, ‘forgive and forget’). Europe had paid a terrible price for intolerance.
    At the peace, young Frederick William I acquired more territory: Eastern Pomerania, filling in the gap between Prussia and Brandenburg; the former bishoprics of Magdeburg and Halberstadt; and some lands in the west of Germany.
    He took away what traditional rights and liberties the populace still enjoyed, and his war-weary subjects did not resist. Brandenburg-Prussia embraced the form of efficient, measured and (for most people) benevolent despotism that became its hallmark.

    The ‘Great Elector’, as Frederick William became known, also founded an institution that would have enormous significance: the Prussian army. When he succeeded to the throne, his army had been a small, rather ineffectual mercenary operation. He determined to build a permanent, professional fighting force that would gain Brandenburg, known contemptuously elsewhere in Germany as ‘the sandbox’, some respect among his peers. By 1648, the Elector commanded a professional army of 8,000 men, enough to turn him into a useful ally and to ensure a share in the spoils of peace.
    Though authoritarian, the new, post-1648 Electorate emphasised religious tolerance. There were practical reasons for this. The Thirty Years War had caused a catastrophic reduction in the population. Ruined and deserted farm and manor houses dotted a neglected landscape. Brandenburg-Prussia desperately needed people, whatever their original nationality or personal creed.
    Towards the end of Frederick William’s reign, the Catholic French King Louis XIV began, in a fit of piety, to persecute his country’s sizeable Protestant minority. In 1685, Louis officially banned Protestantism and began the destruction of its churches. The French Protestants, known as Huguenots, were skilled craftsmen and tradesmen, diligent and hardworking—exactly what Brandenburg-Prussia needed. Frederick William issued the Edict of Potsdam, in which he openly invited Huguenot refugees to come to Brandenburg.
    More than 20,000 Huguenots settled in Brandenburg. By 1687, when the Elector died, they amounted to 20 per cent of Berlin’s