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COPYRIGHT 2004 Modern Humanities Research Association
'Call not the royal Swede unfortunate,' wrote William Wordsworth after Gustav IV was deposed in 1509. That king was, he proclaimed, a 'great Servant of a righteous cause', therefore to be venerated rather than pitied:
wherever virtue is revered, Ne sits a more-exalted Potentate, Throned in the hearts of men.
He was 'the only Royal Advocate of the only truths by which, if judiciously applied, Europe could be delivered from bondage'. Delivery from bondage meant freedom from the yoke of Napoleon: 'Curses are his dire portion, scorn and hate.' (1) The virtue of opposing Bonaparte so evident to Wordsworth was also obvious in Prussian patriotic circles, not least to Heinrich von Kleist in his role as editor of the Berliner Abendblatter in late i8io. He, too, wanted men judged by their moral calibre rather than by their worldly success. If he was not concerned with a choice between sympathy and admiration as the appropriate response to the fate of Gustav IV, that was presumably because both could accompany a readiness to see his dethronement as confirmation of the Corsican's determination to rule all Europe.
Students of Kleist will probably readily recall just one reference in his work to a king of Sweden: it is that in Prinz Friedrich von Homburg to Karl XI, whose forces were defeated in 1675 by the Elector of Brandenburg at Fehrbellin. The victory celebrated in this drama marked the beginning of Prussia's rise to greatness, but the author's militant fervour ('In Staub mit allen Feinden Brandenburgs!') was not directed against the Swedes. When he wrote his play with its glorification of patriotism, France was the enemy against whom, he believed, all Prussians, and indeed all Germans, should be united. The need to fight Napoleon in the sacred name of freedom was reflected in much of Kleist's oeuvre after 1808. It was central to his political writings and fulminatory verses of 1809, to his Die Hermannsschlacht, and to his thoughts when he edited the Berliner Abendblatter. (2)
Hatred of Napoleon, as Reinhold Steig recognized a century ago, is the key to the significance Kleist attached to the Swedish items in his daily paper. But these items, in which Gustav's presence is mostly implicit, merit further consideration as indirect comment on the situation in Prussia in 1810. For it is not clear that Kleist was, as Steig supposed, as fervent a reactionary as his friend Adam Muller. Indeed there are signs that he supported the Prussian reform movement which Muller rejected. (3) One factor relevant to the vexed question of Kleist's political position (reactionary or liberal?) is that the most substantial Swedish piece in the Abendblatter derives from the redoubtable patriot Ernst Moritz Arndt, who, it has been said, stood midway between reactionaries and revolutionaries. (4) In revisiting the Swedish matters in the Abendblatter I shall stress that link between Kleist and this man who was a Swede before he identified with the cause of Prussian liberation and who admired the reformer Gustav IV before he had cause to pity him. As bloodthirsty a hater of French imperialism as Kleist himself, Arndt emphasized national tradition, believed firmly in monarchy, but was no proponent of a return to feudalism, and wrote scathingly of Muller.
Several items on Swedish rulers from the seventeenth century and from Kleist's own time appeared in the Abendblatter in the last quarter of 1810. They were copied by him from other newspapers and have, therefore, been largely ignored in studies of one of Germany's greatest writers. They included very brief news reports which assumed a well-informed public or readers who could be spurred to seek enlightenment. All Kleist's news bulletins were provocatively brief at this time, and very selective. Within that framework the Swedish affairs occupy a not insignificant place alongside the paper's favoured news topics: the conflict on the Iberian Peninsula, Napoleon's measures to prevent British trade with Europe, and the madness of George III. But why did he publish these items which concentrate on the movements of a Crown Prince of Sweden and of a Count Gottorp whom today's readers might not immediately identify? A little historical knowledge is required to appreciate that information about them was newsworthy and, furthermore, had a bearing on the situation of Prussia when Napoleon's hold on the continent of Europe was at its firmest and the government in Berlin had little choice but to profess support for him. More importantly, the same knowledge is needed to grasp the implications of the Abendblatter's more substantial Swedish pieces, feature articles as we would now call them, and to reconstruct their relevance to the thoughts of Kleist and his contemporaries anxious to see Prussia and Germany liberated from foreign domination. We must read between the lines, like Kleist's readers who knew that the censors allowed no public comment on current European affairs other than an echo of Napoleonic propaganda, but who were alert to a covert anti-French slant in his paper. His subtext was the need for a common resolve to save the nation. That unity required the resolution of internal disputes. Yet the very mention of serious clashes of opinion within Prussia could imply that Friedrich Wilhelm III and his ministers had not given them proper consideration. Prudence demanded that the Abendblatter, which was not licensed to deal with political matters anyway, should neither undermine official Prussian foreign policy nor otherwise flout the censorship laws by questioning the wisdom of the King and his government. Its editor did not always heed that demand. But the Swedish items, particularly when they presented curiosities from a by...
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