The Berlin Wall Read Free Page B

population. Berlin became an immigrant city, and would remain so until the twenty-first century.
    Frederick William’s successor reacted against his father’s budgetary stringency. Government became lax. There was an air of indulgence around Berlin that would not be seen again until the 1920s. The new Elector’s only political achievement came in 1701, when the Holy Roman Emperor awarded a royal crown for Prussia. Henceforth, he became also ‘King in Prussia’ (the word ‘of’ came into use only later in the century).
    The palace’s free-spending ways put a lot of money into circulation in Berlin. The city’s population increased from 4,000 at the end of theThirty Years War to 55,000 in 1713, when the merry monarch died. Unfortunately, Prussia went bankrupt in the process.
    Ascending the throne as King Frederick William I, the new ruler was coarse and narrow-minded. Not in the slightest interested in the arts, science (except the military kind) or the usual royal pleasures, he nevertheless transformed his state in many ways for the good, reforming education and the state machinery and making the army even more formidable.
    An impressive, even remarkable monarch. But the strangest thing was that, although he put up to 80 per cent of the budget into his army, and would go down in history as ‘the soldier king’, Frederick William was in practice a man of peace. Brandenburg Prussia’s population increased to over two million, and massive strides were made in economic development.
    The King’s personal behavior, however, was obsessive, neurotic, even sadistic. His officials scoured Europe for men over six feet tall, who were inducted into his army. When ill or depressed he would have these ‘tall fellows’ ( lange Kerle ) paraded for his delectation, even marching them through his bedchamber. Seeing the army as a model for society, and yearning for that society to be perfectly ordered, he inflicted brutal discipline.
    In 1730, Frederick William also built the most comprehensive wall Berlin had so far seen. Its aim was not just to defend Berlin against enemies, but to act as an ‘excise wall’, enabling the King to tax travellers, commercial shipments, or any consumer goods being moved in and out of the city. The wall was also intended to prevent frequent desertions from the king’s army. A sentry was posted every hundred metres, and if any unhappy soldier was seen escaping, a cannon shot would alert the nearby villagers. Captured deserters faced a brutal running of the gauntlet, while a second attempt meant death. 2 A similar wall was built at nearby Potsdam, to keep the garrison there in as well.
    Frederick William sired ten children. In a continuation of the turn-and-turn-again tradition in the Hohenzollern family, his eldest son, Frederick, was a complete contrast to his father: a slightly-built, sensitive boy, interested in the arts and philosophy. Keen to toughen up his heir and ensure his fitness for the throne, Frederick William had him wokeneach morning by the firing of a cannon. At six years old, young ‘Fritz’ was given his own unit of child cadets to drill, and soon granted his own arsenal of real weaponry. The boy was beaten for letting himself be thrown by a bolting horse; and again for showing weakness by putting on gloves in cold weather.
    At eighteen, the Crown Prince tried to flee the kingdom with an older aristocratic friend, Hans Hermann von Katte. They were caught. Fritz was kept under arrest at a fortress, and forced to watch from a window as his friend was beheaded on the parade ground below. Within a couple of years, the Crown Prince was married off to a pleasant, pious princess, Elisabeth Christine of Brunswick. The marriage proved childless. After his succession, they lived apart. Fritz kept no mistresses. His possible homosexuality has been the subject of keen historical gossip ever since.
    When the ‘soldier king’ died, many of his subjects heaved a sigh of relief. However, in one