Frederick’s diplomacy and his wars

The foreign policy of the Prussian military state was determined by the conditions of its existence. It could not continue to exist permanently as long as it was based, apart from a few parcels of land on the Rhine, solely on the two separated territories of Brandenburg and East Prussia, of which East Prussia was moreover still a fief of the Polish King. To shake off this vassalage, to secure an independent position between Poland and Sweden and to seize for itself domination of the Baltic – the apple of discord between those two powers – by gaining control of the other areas of colonization east of the Elbe, particularly Pomerania and Silesia, possession of which brought the whole politico-economic region of the Oder under Prussian control; to create an economically and politically-rounded commonwealth, this was at the outset the foreign policy of the Prussian military state – a policy that circumstances dictated and which to a certain extent circumstances brought to pass. The greater or lesser ‘genius’ of the individual princes had any influence only to the extent that it enabled them to have a greater or lesser insight into the necessary course of events and thus granted them the choice, as the Latin proverb puts it, of being either carried by the fates or led by them.

We have seen that, quite early on, the Elector Frederick William drafted the plan for the annexation of Silesia and gave the extinction of the male Habsburg line as the time to put this work of conquest into operation. He himself first gained possession of the Duchy of Prussia, on the basis of which his successor, Frederick I, founded the royal dignity. For this purpose the Elector threw himself into the wars between the Poles and the Swedes over the Baltic, first upon one side then upon the other, with a lack of scruple in his choice of means that even makes the Hohenzollern court historians shiver a little. The Elector succeeded, moreover, in gaining control of the larger part of Pomerania, but not of its ports. Eastern Pomerania and Stettin remained in the hands of the Swedes. Twice the Elector thought he had this part of Pomerania also in his hands; twice, in the Treaty of Westphalia and the Treaty of St. Germain , he had to relinquish it, to his bitterest annoyance. As early as 1646 he declared that he would not withdraw from the Oder unless his House was ruined and he contested every foot of the ground around the mouth of the Oder. But just as he did, his enemies also knew what the Brandenburg-Prussian state needed. However undeniable the Elector’s hereditary claims to the whole of Pomerania were, France, Austria and Sweden all opposed them. Rather than permit the Elector a dominating position on the Baltic, they preferred to stop his mouth with the Bishoprics of Kammin, Halberstadt and Minden and the Wardenship of the Archbishopric of Magdeburg, with possessions, that is to say, which in extent as much as in culture were far superior to the part of Pomerania they denied him. Nevertheless, as the Elector signed the Treaty of Westphalia, he sighed that he rued the day he had learned to write. It was much later that his grandson, King Frederick William I, managed to gain possession of Stettin and the mouth of the Oder, as well as part of eastern Pomerania, out of the shipwreck of King Charles XII of Sweden.

The male Habsburg line died out in 1740, only a few months after Frederick II had come to power. Now it was neither a stroke of genius nor a revolutionary insurrection, but the immutable policy of the Prussian military state that led the King to invade Silesia immediately, even before Maria Theresa of Austria had rejected his proposals for a peaceful settlement of the hereditary Brandenburg claims on individual parts of that territory. Understandably, Frederick always spoke ironically of these hereditary claims. He simply wanted to use this unique opportunity to round out the Prussian state so that his army could, to a certain extent, keep pace with the growing military might of the great states. He knew that his hereditary claims would make no impression in Vienna and he only asserted them for tactical reasons, partly to give his policy of conquest a ‘legal’ colouration and partly to overcome the scruples of Marshal Schwerin and his Minister, Podewils. Let us therefore not waste our breath discussing the fact that he occupied Silesia even before he had received a final rejection from Vienna. But these ‘peaceful’ negotiations are one more disproof of the revolutionary insurrection. If Maria Theresa had acceded to Frederick’s offer (support with money and arms against her other enemies, and the Brandenburg vote for the election of her husband as Holy Roman Emperor) and if she had ceded even only Lower Silesia in return, Frederick would have supported the ‘foreign Habsburg rule’ and whatever else the fine-sounding slogans of today call it, with all his strength. Once Vienna had refused him, he had no choice but to go to war, but it could be neither a ‘revolutionary insurrection’ nor a ‘patriotic reform of the Empire’. For if the Habsburg Empire was but a shadow of the Papal blessing, then the banner of a Wittelsbach Empire, which Frederick allegedly now bore, was merely the shadow of a shadow of France. A league with France against the Habsburgs had been Brandenburg dynastic policy of old. Had not Elector Joachim I promised the German Crown to the French King Francis I in 1519, and the Elector Frederick William promised it to Louis XIV in 1679?

On top of this, there is the remarkable fact that it was not really Frederick who conquered Silesia but his father, a prince piously loyal to Emperor and Empire, who had been held for years in leading strings by the Imperial Ambassador, Seckendorf, to the derision of the whole of Europe. Frederick broke and fled prematurely from the battle of Mollwitz, which he directed very clumsily, after a few successful attacks by the Austrian cavalry on the Prussian, but the Prussian infantry, drilled by Frederick William and the Prince of Dessau, stood like a wall and decided the victory without any particular help from the high command. Frederick’s first attempt at diplomacy was just as unfortunate. In the Treaty of Kleinschnellendorf he betrayed his French allies to Austria, and, ‘for the keys of a single fortress which was not even very strongly defended’, permitted the Austrians to fall on his French confederates, who, as he himself admits in his memoirs, had given him no reason to break his word. Again, let us not waste our breath on the moral of the story. France and Prussia both had the same interest in weakening Austria, but only to the extent that their own ally did not become too strong as a result. It would be difficult to say whether Frederick left the French in the lurch more often than they did him. In the same way the outcry of his contemporaries over Frederick’s ‘treachery’ was generally not moral indignation but the pain of the biter bit. Frederick anticipated Goethe’s winged words in a sentence in a letter to Podewils: ‘If there is going to be dirty work let us be the rascals (fourbes).’ But the Treaty of Kleinschnellendorf was a piece of rascality in which Frederick was duped when he thought he was doing the duping, and a diplomat can do nothing worse than betray an ally in return for no advantages worth mentioning to himself and do it to the greatest advantage of the common enemy. It was then that Frederick earned the reproach, which was not justified by his later diplomacy, that he sacrificed the greatest advantages in the future for a small momentary profit. It is easier to explain his second betrayal of his allies, when Frederick concluded the separate Peace of Breslau, in which Maria Theresa, on the special urging of English diplomacy, ceded Silesia in order to get rid of her most dangerous enemy and to have a free hand to deal with her other opponents. That means, of course: with quiet reservations for the future.

These reservations were still so much in the air that it is easy to explain why Frederick, when Maria Theresa had a series of successes against the French and the Wittelsbach pretender to the German Imperial throne in the continuing War of the Austrian Succession, signed a new pact with France and, as an Estate of the German Empire, brought his troops to the assistance of the German Emperor, who was wounded both in his honour and in his dignity. But this time, too, he committed a serious diplomatic error by secretly reserving for the Prussian state a good slice of the Kingdom of Bohemia that he had considered conquering for the Emperor. The secret soon got out and left the King morally and politically naked, simply for the sake of a completely illusory prospect. This was one of the occasions on which Frederick really was mistaken about the means at his disposal. For however easy it was to incorporate Silesia, given its geographical and economic circumstances, into the Prussian state, the same task was insoluble when it came to even a part of Bohemia. In the conquest of this Kingdom, too, Frederick had some very bitter experiences. This time it was his French allies who left him in the lurch, and old Marshal Traun, whom Frederick himself had the praiseworthy honesty to call his teacher in the art of war, manoeuvred him back over the Silesian border despite the almost complete dissolution of the Prussian army. The winter of 1744 to 1745 was an exceptionally difficult time for Frederick. In the same way that – as the foreign ambassadors testify – he matured outwardly into a man, he freed himself inwardly from all the illusions produced in the field of foreign policy by ambition, the lust for fame and, as he himself occasionally put it, ‘secret instinct’. Although he beat the Austrians and Saxons in 1745 with his reconstructed army in a whole series of battles and engagements (Hohenfriedburg, Soor, Katholisch-Hennersdorf, Kesseldorf), he still offered a second separate Treaty confirming his possession of Silesia at the end of the year, to the painful astonishment of the French and the at first incredulous and later delighted astonishment of Austria. And when his conditions were fulfilled he returned into his possessions determined ‘never to attack even a cat again’ for the rest of life.

There cannot be the slightest doubt that the King was entirely serious about this decision. It is true that, when the Seven Years’ War broke out eleven years later, the reproach was immediately raised against him that he had deliberately taken up arms again for reasons of wanton ambition, and this accusation is all the graver for the fact that it was first raised by Frederick’s own brother, and found secret support from the majority of his Generals and Ministers. His sudden invasion of Saxony and his ruthless battering of that country also appears to be an infamous breach of the peace. But the King only made up his mind to take this violent step very unwillingly and under the inevitable force of circumstances. Through the treachery of Austrian and Saxon officials he had for several years been kept up to date with documentary evidence of the negotiations between Austria, Saxony and Russia aimed at a surprise attack on him and the destruction of the growing military power of the Prussian state. The fact of these negotiations was undeniable even then, but Frederick’s brothers were of the opinion that it was all still hanging in the air, and that, without the King’s untimely intervention it would possibly have dissolved into thin air. Possibly indeed, and Frederick covered this possibility by following the Austro-Russo-Saxon negotiations with rapt attention for several years but without doing anything. There was also, meanwhile, another possibility, and Frederick could not let it become a certainty without falling into the most extreme peril. This possibility grew into a certainty when the conflict of economic interests between England and France broke out into open war in the North American colonies , thus making a war inside Germany inevitable, since it was only logical that France would attack Hanover as England’s weakest point. The Franco-Prussian pact ran out in June 1756, and Frederick’s attempts to renew it had failed. This was not because of the favourable attitude that Maria Theresa showed to Frederick and the unfavourable attitude that Frederick showed towards Madame de Pompadour. Even in the absolutist France of the eighteenth century such things only had a completely incidental effect on the making of great political decisions, or as the courts say, were only ‘accessories after the fact’. On the contrary, neither side had had their expectations fulfilled by the pact. If the party which was still the strongest at the French court, true to the tradition of Mazarin and Richelieu, saw the source of French power in the disunity of Germany, still wanted to maintain the pact with Prussia, and therefore managed to get one more negotiator sent to Berlin, then the latter, the Duke de Nivernois, had too much to ask for and too little to offer for Frederick to be able to agree to the deal. For example, in return for the assistance of Prussian arms in the threatening war with England, the Duke offered Frederick the island of Tobago, to which Frederick replied with justified scorn: ‘The island of Tobago? You mean the island of Barataria, but I can’t play Sancho Panza for that.’ In those days Prussian policy had not yet learned to utter those big-mouthed fanfares with which Herr Bismarck greeted the raising of the flag on some tropical desert or swamp as a deed of national greatness.

Briefly, in order to avoid total isolation, on January 16, 1756, Frederick concluded the Convention of Neutrality of Westminster with England, a mutual agreement to drive away by force any armed non-German intervention on German soil. There followed as a counterstroke the Franco-Austrian defensive pact of May 1 of the same year, and Austria began to rearm on a large scale. Frederick now sent two further diplomatic inquiries to Vienna, one asking the purpose of this rearmament and one seeking assurances that he was safe from Austrian attack for that and the following year. On both occasions he received evasive, meaningless, indeed even contemptuous answers, and now, given the peculiar nature of the Prussian military state, he could not hesitate for a moment longer. In Carlyle’s striking metaphor, he possessed a sword that was incomparably shorter than that of France or Austria, but he unsheathed it three times faster than those two great powers, and he could not wait for this important, but only, advantage of his to be rendered illusory by opponents, who were in every other respect his superiors. From the standpoint of his and his state’s interests, and that is decisive in our subjective estimation of him, one could rather say that he had hesitated too long, and that he could have done without at least the second inquiry to Vienna. Perhaps he would have done so had it not been important to him to delay the beginning of the campaign until as late a season as possible, in order not to have a French army on German soil that year. In any case, his plan to force his nearest and most dangerous opponents, Saxony and Austria, to sue for a lasting peace by stunning them with a series of rapid blows, thus overcame the first obstacle that the Saxons could concentrate their troops at the last moment on the clifftop camp at Pirna.

The Seven Years’ War was therefore not a war of Prussian conquest, but what was it? The Prussian bourgeois historians answer that it was a continuation of the Thirty Years’ War, a religious war, the final salvation of German spiritual freedom, the first foundation of the German national state, and all the other fine-sounding slogans. Let us put on one side all these tirades, which have no intelligible content at all and concentrate on the question of the religious war, which does deserve some consideration. It seems to be completely self-evident. After the power-groupings in the War of the Austrian Succession and the first Silesian War, France and Prussia on one side and England and Austria on the other, after these ‘secular’ wars with their promiscuous mixture of the religions, we now have the ‘religious’ war, in which the religions are sharply distinct: on the one side, the Catholic powers of France and Austria backed by the Papal blessing, and against them the Protestant powers of England and Prussia. Here, darkness, the Middle Ages, spiritual slavery; there light, the future, spiritual freedom. Here, Roman degeneration or Slavic barbarism; there civilization under the banner of all things German. It is only a pity that the war did not arise out of a religious conflict but out of an economic conflict between England and France. It is only a pity that it ended with the political hegemony of a really barbaric state over one nation of fighters for freedom and enlightenment, a hegemony which must be laid at the door of another nation of fighters for freedom and enlightenment’s economic considerations.

In the Treaty of Westminster, which followed a year after the Neutrality Convention we have already mentioned, England had promised, as well as the payment of subsidies to Prussia, to send a fleet to the Baltic – eight ships of the line and several frigates, and more vessels if necessary. The stipulation was clear and unambiguous, as was its purpose. The English fleet in the Baltic would have kept East Prussia and Pomerania for Frederick; above all, by blockading Russia’s ports and destroying her trade, it would have made that barbaric state pay for its intervention in European affairs. But England had never had the slightest intention of sending even a gunboat into the Baltic. Indeed, she kept her Embassy at St. Petersburg throughout the war. It was not the interests of her Protestant allies that were decisive, but the interests of English trade. At that time England did not possess her Indian Empire; her North American colonies were only sparsely populated and cultivated; thus no English minister could interfere with the Baltic trade. When Pitt took overall control he made no attempt to conceal from Frederick the fact that he could never count on seeing that stipulation of the Treaty of Westminster carried out. All the enthusiasm of the English nation for the Protestant cause in general and for Frederick in particular did not alter the fact that an English ministry that sent a war fleet to the Baltic would immediately lose its parliamentary majority. Clever statesmen know quite well that the world is ruled by economic facts, and among themselves they make no bones about it. They leave the ideological disguises to the statesmanlike historians, of whom – much to the edification of all the enlightened and yet-to-be enlightened portions of mankind – there has never yet in any country been a lack.

The interests of the English nation’s trading policy gave the Seven Years’ War its decisive turn. Immune from any attack, Russian Tsardom could indulge to the full its dissolute instinct for conquest and robbery. Three times it took the liberty of changing sides in the Seven Years’ War. In the first and, longest period, the Russian army fought against Prussia, pocketed the Province of East Prussia entirely; laid waste Pomerania and the Mark in the most bestial manner; almost always beat the Prussian troops in the most devastating defeats, for even the battle of Zorndorf was more of an undecided encounter than a victory for Frederick; and, in short, drove the Prussian state to the very edge of the abyss. To this extent they remained true to the decision, raised to the level of a ‘consistent maxim of state’ by the Russian Senate as early as 1753, not only to resist any further growth of Prussian power, but also to seize the first convenient opportunity to suppress the House of Brandenburg by superior force and to return it to its previous mediocrity. But obviously this maxim, which had been adopted under the influence of the alcoholic and tyrannical Empress Elisabeth, went over the mark. The interest of the Russians lay in political domination over the Prussian state, not in its political annihilation. Prussia could not be allowed to become a rival of Russia, but a vassal; but at the same time it had to remain a thorn in the flesh of Austria. This is what was demanded by Russia’s plans for conquest, whether they were directed against Poland, Turkey or Germany itself. One can also follow quite exactly how the Russian Generals, in opposition to the Empress’ will, always avoided giving the coup de grace to the Prussian army, which they could easily have done, for example, after the battle of Kunersdorf. After the Empress Elisabeth’s sudden death there followed the Russo-Prussian pact, which was nothing but a silly caprice of the silly Peter III. A poor ham actor, Lessing calls him’ chosen to cut the clumsy knots of a bloody drama behind the mask of a god. But it was Catherine II who first disentangled the dénouement. When she had villainously murdered her husband, Peter, and ascended the Russian throne without the slightest trace of legality, this clever person immediately grasped where Russia’s interests lay. By her neutrality, she let the Seven Years’ War die of general exhaustion, and then harvested the fruits in the Prusso-Russian pact of April 14 1764, whose secret articles already left the way open for the partition of Poland. King Frederick, who was by no means as thick-skinned in respect of Russian impudence as Herr Bismarck, felt himself to be most deeply humiliated by his position as a Russian satrap, but he could not resist that ‘terrible power’. He had to subsidize Catherine’s wars against the Turks and shoulder the greater part of the odium for the first partition of Poland, while he carried off only the smaller part of the booty. In the Treaty of Teschen of 1779, which ended the War of the Bavarian Succession, he had, along with Austria, to recognize Russia as the ‘guarantor of the Treaty of Westphalia’.

A continuation of the Thirty Years’ War indeed, but not quite in the sense that the Prussian mythologists mean! Just like the Thirty Years’ War, the Seven Years’ War ended with the failure of the attempt to bring the whole of Germany under the rule of the Habsburg Papal Empire. Just like the Thirty Years’ War, the Seven Years’ War died of general exhaustion. Just as the Thirty Years’ War ended with the ‘guarantee of the Treaty of Westphalia’ by France and Sweden, that is to say with the unlimited right of two civilized nations to intervene as much as they liked in German affairs, so the Seven Years’ War closed with the ‘guarantee of the Treaty of Westphalia’ by Russia, that is to say foreign rule by a barbaric state, the evil results of which have still not been overcome, and indeed only now can possibly be overcome, since the German working class has awoken to political consciousness.

Strange, that with all this, through this very same Seven Years’ War, ‘the first higher meaning’ is supposed to have entered the spiritual life of the German people!