Dresden (4 page)

However, at this stage, royal decisions definitely remain final. So the first step toward this distant destination is taken by a new prince elector, a bull-necked young adventurer—Wettins have rarely matched the beauty of their capital—named Frederick Augustus. When he unexpectedly succeeds his sickly brother to the Saxon throne in 1694 at the age of twenty-three, he has already shown a precocious interest in mistresses, architecture, and the art of war. Frederick Augustus has money and gold and jewels, he has an inbuilt confidence and seemingly limitless ambition. Saxony has prospered since the end of the Thirty Years' War. Frederick Augustus, sent on the grand tour by his princely parents as a teenager, had fallen in love with the glories of Renaissance Italy. Above all, though, he had been deeply impressed by the splendor of Versailles and the towering, absolutist figure cut by the great King Louis XIV of France.

Frederick Augustus is determined to carve out an important position for himself not just in Germany, but in Europe as a whole. He will shamelessly exploit his Saxon dominions to achieve this goal. But, truth be told, he needs a larger power base than Saxony alone can provide.

And it so happens that, not far to the east, there is a kingdom for sale.

THE PRIZE THAT ATTRACTED
Frederick Augustus's notice was Poland—or, to give it its proper title, the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania.

Just over a decade earlier, in 1683, its gallant king, John III Sobieski, had led a heavily outnumbered Catholic-Protestant army against the Turkish siege of Vienna. He put the sultan's troops to flight and, in effect, saved the capital of the Holy Roman Empire from becoming an outstation of the Islamic caliphate. One of his comrades-in-arms was Frederick Augustus's father, Prince Elector George of Saxony.

Now, in 1696, the old Polish king lay dying at his family's castle of Wilanow. Emperor Leopold of Austria had repaid Sobieski's help with arrogant disdain; the notoriously fractious nobility of Poland had greeted their king's attempts to revive a weakened Polish state with its usual combination of jealous suspicion and kamikaze arrogance. John had a son, James, but James would never succeed him as king. For Poland was not a hereditary but an elective monarchy, and the nobles who chose their own master wanted a foreigner for the throne. A rich one.

Within months of John III's death, the Polish parliament—called the Sejm—seemed ready to choose the French prince of Conti. However, young Frederick Augustus of Saxony was looking for a kingdom, and he had cultivated powerful friends, including Emperor Leopold of Austria and Czar Peter the Great of Russia. Between them, they had already agreed that the Sejm's decision was not, after all, final. They had large armies waiting on Poland's borders to hint that
the nobility should think again. More than that, Frederick Augustus had amassed huge sums of money by mortgaging his country, imposing new taxes, and selling quantities of precious metals and stones. His representative, the Count von Flemming, busied himself distributing it to influential individuals in Poland itself. A lot of country gentlemen all over Poland suddenly found themselves, it is reasonable to suspect, able to contemplate a new stable block on the estate or a new mistress in town.

All the same, when the election was run, Frederick Augustus and the prince of Conti achieved equal shares of the chaotically organized vote. Each side duly declared itself the winner. Frederick Augustus, twenty-seven and in no doubt, despite all this election nonsense, as to where power really comes from, marched his Saxon troops over the border and on to Warsaw. Settled? Not quite.

There was a final problem to be solved before Frederick Augustus could give his soon-to-be-adopted country the push it needed to recognize the overwhelming, not to say intimidating, justice of his claim. He had to change his religion. This meant a minor political earthquake in central Europe. Since Luther's time the prince elector of Saxony had been recognized as the predominant ruler in Protestant northern Germany, the Reformation's shield and defender. Saxony's sacrifices in the Thirty Years' War were still just within living memory. But under the Polish constitution, only a Catholic could be elected king, and a king is what Frederick Augustus was determined to be.

There were mutterings of rebellion in Saxony at the prince elector's proposed conversion. Frederick Augustus's wife, already forced to put up with his womanizing, stubbornly refused to abandon her Protestant heritage. They separated. She withdrew to a remote castle, where she died thirty years later. All this made no difference. Frederick Augustus stuck to his new faith—though he was politically shrewd enough to reassure his Saxon subjects that no one would be forced to submit to Rome, and set up a council of Protestant worthies to guarantee this. The flames of revolt subsided.

And so a Catholic Frederick Augustus became. He was crowned King Augustus II of Poland amid pomp and celebration on September 15, 1697. The Cathedral of Cracow, traditional city of Polish coronations, was surrounded by Saxon troops.

 

“THE STRONG”
may be what his subjects called him—a reference to his physical robustness and amatory prowess—but the reign of Augustus II would not be considered a success in political terms. The general historical verdict was that the final death throes of Poland began with the accession of its first Saxon ruler, and by the time the second was done with it, almost seventy years later, the country was coughing its last.

While this might not turn out to be Poland's greatest hour, or Saxony's easiest (Augustus uses it as a military cash cow—and that is before he starts on the mistresses, the hunting lodges, and the collections of really nice things), it is certainly good news for the craftspeople, merchants, artists, and influence peddlers of Dresden, the privileged Saxon royal city or
Residenzstadt
. Because, if he is going to be a European monarch, Augustus needs a capital that gives the right impression, he needs it in short order, and he is determined to spend whatever it takes to make that happen.

As a contemporary wrote: “Augustus the Strong can boast of having found Dresden a small city made of wood, but to have left it a large, glorious city built of stone.” These few exhilarating, some would say crazy, opening decades of the eighteenth century are when pretty, postmedieval Dresden becomes grand, iconic “Dresden”: a visitor destination, center for the arts and crafts, and perforce (given the monarch's delicate religio-political situation) a showcase for Protestant-Catholic understanding.

The capital that Augustus the Strong built. The Florence of the North. City as work of art.

Forty years later, on the king's death hundreds of miles away in Poland, Dresden glowed with sophisticated sandstone palaces and churches, surrounded by Baroque apartment buildings and squares, mostly made of that same native stone. It is curious—to rush forward more than two hundred years to Dresden's nemesis—that a British RAF pilot could be said to have observed, as he swooped over the darkened city center to mark it for bombing, that he had glimpses of the river Elbe lined with “old half-timbered houses.” There were in fact none in the heart of the city, only in the outer suburbs where hardly any bombs were dropped. This was not quaint, wooden Hildesheim or Würzburg.
Augustus the Strong had made sure of that. The British pilot was imagining, based on his own preconceptions about how old German cities ought to look. Dresden was and is different.

It was the combination of royal interference and municipal pride that was to make Dresden unique. Dresden was a case where, well into the twentieth century, the useful and the beautiful—function and fashion—nourished each other. Saxony's rulers wanted a fine showcase, but they also wanted a functioning capital that supplied them with all the practical needs of war and manufacture that even the most aesthetically obsessed monarch requires.

 

BUT HOW TO PAY
for it all? Augustus the Strong's wars ate up more money than even a rich manufacturing and mining state like Saxony could provide. Like a lot of rulers between the late Middle Ages and the first dawning of the Age of Reason, the king elector believed—or maybe half believed—in alchemy. Were it really possible to transmute base substance to gold, clearly the budget could be balanced no matter the circumstances. So when Augustus was introduced to someone who could, it was claimed, turn base metal into gold, he was understandably tempted to look into it.

It should have been a clue that the young man in question, an apothecary's assistant and goldsmith by the name of Johann Friedrich Böttger, was at the time a fugitive. He was in full flight from the king of Prussia, to whom he had already promised the secret of alchemy, and thereby eternal solvency, but who had proved impatient. Augustus II, though a natural optimist, was no fool. He gave Böttger protection, but at the cost of his freedom. From his cell, first in Dresden but soon at the Albrechtsburg, the ancient Wettin fortress perched above Meissen, the fast-talking would-be miracle worker was instructed to press on with the experiments he had already been conducting in Berlin. The king elector sat back and waited. And waited.

Three years passed while Böttger boiled and burned and battered combinations of lead and mercury and other traditional alchemical materials. He was always on the brink of a breakthrough, but the crucial transmutation somehow never came. No gold. There was an unfortunate escape attempt by Böttger in 1703. Augustus hung the
threat of execution over his recalcitrant protégé. Still a result remained just out of reach.

Infuriated, the king elector put Böttger under the supervision of a trusted servant of the Saxon state, Count von Tschirnhaus. Tschirnhaus, a prolific mathematician and scientist, was eager to develop new industries that would make the king elector's realm more prosperous and self-sufficient. For years he had been investigating ways of producing a hard, vitreous porcelain to match the famous white China pottery that had long been imported into Europe (at enormous expense) from its country of origin. A softer porcelain had been manufactured in Florence since the sixteenth century and imitated elsewhere, including Germany. Although it superficially resembled the famous “china” kind, it could be cut with a file and still, unfortunately, absorbed dirt—while true porcelain did neither.

Count Tschirnhaus and Friedrich Böttger began experimenting with mixtures of native Saxon earth and minerals. Clearly, the count was pushing the research away from the cul-de-sac of classic alchemy and more in his own preferred direction. The harnessing of the, shall we say, overimaginative craftsman with the stolid pillar of science produced a breakthrough. Together they discovered the secret of making real hard paste porcelain. By 1707 Böttger's workshop, now in Dresden once more, was producing pottery made from red-brown stoneware. It was hard and glasslike, and possessed all the characteristics of classic china except its white coloring. Sadly, with the work at this crucial stage, and Augustus scraping the bottom of his already depleted treasure chest, Tschirnhaus contracted dysentery, curse of the early modern city, and died.

What happened next is not entirely clear. One popular story claims that Böttger had a “eureka” inspiration when his manservant used a hitherto unknown type of native Saxon china clay as an experimental wig powder. Another, more cynical, explanation has it that, after months of desperate inactivity following Tschirnhaus's death, Böttger finally managed to lay hands on his late colleague's scientific notes. Anyway, not too long afterward, Böttger came up with a kaolin-based white porcelain identical in every respect to the Chinese variety. It did the trick.

In 1710 a factory was opened under conditions of extreme secrecy within the confines of the Meissen castle, where it was to remain for more than a century. Five years later, the king elector even
deigned to release Böttger from fortress arrest. It was a little late. Böttger died in 1719, still not yet forty years old. The incessant exposure to trapped fumes, the close contact with poisonous chemicals—and perhaps the stress of serving a capricious and remorseless master—had consigned him to an early grave.

Meanwhile, what became known as Meissen porcelain (and abroad as Dresden china) had been born. It was dubbed the “white gold” of the eighteenth century, much imitated elsewhere but rarely equaled for its perfection of material and its delicacy of style. After Böttger's death, efficient managers of money, men, and talent greatly expanded the factory's production. Dresden figurines were everywhere. As a royal monopoly, the State Porcelain Manufacture became hugely profitable for the Saxon crown. So perhaps the king elector's wayward alchemist fulfilled his brazen promise after all.

 

WHEN AUGUSTUS II
came to the throne of Saxony in 1694, whole areas of Dresden had recently been laid waste in a great fire. True to his energetic, controlling nature, a few years later the king set up a building administration responsible to the city's governor—the same Count Flemming who had organized his election to the throne of Poland. In other capitals, such as London and Paris, where great fires gave rise to attempts at rational city plans that were never fulfilled, medieval chaos was simply replaced by Renaissance chaos. In the case of Dresden, regulations were strict and—it has to be said—wise. Wooden buildings disappeared from the center of the city. Churches, palaces, and private houses alike were subjected to planning laws and limitations unique in eighteenth-century Europe.

In the heart of the city, south of the river, lay the Zwinger (outer ward of the castle). In 1710 a pleasure palace began to be constructed there in stone. Matthäus Daniel Pöppelmann, the brilliant architect who served Augustus during the first part of his reign, and his court sculptor Permoser combined their talents to create a fabulous festive sculpture garden and outdoor stage contained within an extravagant, wonderfully lighthearted set of ornate buildings. These could be entered from the city side via a bridge and a magnificent covered gateway, the Kronentor, which was topped with a golden sculpted crown supported by four golden eagles, symbols of Polish royalty.

The Zwinger (as it continued to be called) housed the royal art gallery, a collection of amazing scientific instruments, a theater, an opera house, and an orangery. In the extravagantly domed assembly rooms, balls and festivities were housed in the winter. It became one of the most famous buildings in Europe, mentioned in the same breath as Versailles in Paris and Schönbrunn in Vienna.

When the king elector was resident in Dresden, the constant round of court festivities centered on this place. Within twenty years the other major buildings of Dresden had been created. The new royal palace, still named the castle, or
Schloss
. The Dutch Palace just across the river in the area known as the Neustadt (new town), which as fashions rapidly changed, became the Japanese Palace. The other great Baroque town palaces, built for the king's advisers, mistresses, and bastard and legitimate children alike. The Catholic Court Church was also begun, with its crypt where the bones of the Wettin rulers of Saxony would rest until 1945, though it was not finished until the reign of Augustus's successor. A bridge, akin to the Bridge of Sighs in Venice but crossing a street rather than a canal, connected it with the royal palace, so that the royal family and its Catholic courtiers need not expose themselves to the vulgar Protestant gaze on their way to Mass. In wary deference to the feelings of the Protestant majority, the doors were locked during the consecration of the church in 1751, and no bells were rung in the Court Church's tower until 1806.