After the retreat of the French from the frontier the Prussian court repaired again to Konigsberg; the queen and Madame de Kriidener, the wife of the Russian ambassador, the religious friend of Czar Alexander, formed a lasting friendship. They attended frequently to the sick and wounded in the hospitals, and strengthened their faith in a bright future, at least for the unhappy country. After their separation, Louisa wrote to Madame de Krüdener: "I owe a confession to you, my good friend, which I know you will receive with tears of joy. You have made me better than I was before. Your truthful words, our conversations on Christianity, have left an impression on my mind. I have thought with deeper earnestness upon these things, the existence and value of which I had indeed felt before, but I had thought lightly of them, rather guessed at them than felt assured of them. These contemplations brought me nearer to God, my faith became stronger, so that in the midst of misfortune I have never been without comfort, never quite unhappy. You will understand that I can never be perfectly miserable while this source of purest joy is open to me...." And in spite of the loss of one-half of her realm, and in spite of all humiliations, joy was indeed vouchsafed her in the development of her noble children, whom she thus describes to her father: "Our children are our most precious treasures, and we look on them with happiness and hope.... Now you have my whole gallery of family portraits before you, my dear father. You will say they are painted by a foolish mother who sees nothing but good in her children, and is quite blind to their faults or failings. But really, I am watchful, and I do not notice in the children any dispositions or evil propensities which need make us painfully anxious.... Circumstances educate people, and it may be well that they learn to know the serious side of life in their youth. Had they been brought up in luxury they might think it was the natural course of things, that it must be so...."
When we consider that Louisa speaks of the future king and the future Emperor of Germany, many things in the after history of Germany become clear to us! She truly estimated the unfolding dispositions of the future rulers of Germany. Posterity does not agree with her first modest words: "Posterity will not place my name among those of celebrated women, but when people think of the troubles of these times they may say: 'She suffered much and endured with patience,' and I only wish they may be able to add 'She gave birth to children who were worthy of better times, and who by their strenuous endeavors have succeeded in attaining them.'" Queen Louisa is the most famous and the best beloved woman who ever sat on a Hohenzollern throne. Even to-day her portrait adorns nearly every Prussian home, and her beautiful form in Grecian attire, as a symbol of pure and noble womanhood, is found in thousands of American homes where the prototype may not even be known by name.
She died as she had lived. In the agonies of a painful death she preserved her patience and loveliness. When free from pain she lay very tranquil, looking like an angel, and now and then repeating to herself a few words of a very simple hymn which she had learned in her childhood. The unhappy king said at her death: "Oh, if she were not mine, she might recover." The king gazed on her dead form for a moment with a look of anguish which wrung the hearts of all who witnessed it; then he left the room, but soon returned with his sons. Her countenance was beautiful in death, particularly the brow; and the calm expression of the mouth told that struggle was forever past.
Sixty years later, in July, 1870, on the day of her death, William I. (1861-1888) visited her Mausoleum, and prayed before the recumbent statue of his great mother, as he did frequently, this time with a heart burdened with hopes and fears, for again a war of tremendous proportions, the national question of "to be or not to be," was pending with the same country under an emperor of the same ominous name "Napoleon." Before Louisa's statue the aged monarch received the inspiration and the strength which nerved him for the last gigantic struggle.
Leaving the saintly Louisa, an entirely different type of royal womanhood demands our consideration, a type rendered noteworthy by sheer intellectual force. Catherine II., the Great, was the greatest woman, politically speaking, ever produced by the German nation; but her genius benefited, or rather raised to world power, a foreign and rival state, namely, the Russian empire (1762-1796). Born at Stettin in 1729, and the daughter of the petty Prince of Anhalt-Zerbst, Catherine was married to Peter of Holstein-Gottorp, heir to the Russian throne, whose blind admiration for the great Frederick of Prussia alienated from him the affections of the Russian people; while Catherine identified herself with the Russians, whose future she was destined or determined to rule. Even as crown princess she led a notorious life, at first with Count Soltikof, and later with Count Poniatowski, afterward the ill-fated king of dying Poland; but she never forgot to strengthen herself, all the while, politically, and to secure all the instruments of power against her hated and despised husband. Peter was deposed, imprisoned, and strangled by Gregory Orloff, Catherine's paramour, certainly not without her knowledge (July, 1762). As empress, she forcibly obtained for Russia a controlling influence in the councils of Europe, while civilizing her people and mightily fostering the arts and sciences. Her literary and epistolary works and correspondence with the greatest men of her time prove her to have been a woman of extraordinary genius and literary capacity. As all her talents seemed to be out of proportion to womanly limitations, so were her immorality and passion. She ruled with an iron hand, through a succession of favorites or recognized lovers who, it must be confessed, had nothing to recommend them but the physical advantages of form and animal strength. The brutal Orloff, whom she raised from a low station, maintained himself longest in her favor, until his aspiration for the hand of his imperial mistress worked his undoing. Other men, selected partly from the ranks of the common soldiers, followed in rapid succession; finally, Gregory Potemkin became the most powerful of all of them, until he was banished from the court for trying to win Catherine in lawful marriage. Potemkin endeavored, though with barbarous methods, to build up southern Russia, and remained Catherine's favorite, at a distance, till his death. Meanwhile, she chose her later lovers merely for personal gratification, so as not to endanger her autocracy by the presumption of powerful men. She had brought about the election of her favorite Poniatowski as King of Poland, but she tore the kingdom to pieces when she recognized that the conquest of Poland alone could make her beloved Russia a civilized European or Western power. The domestic reforms which she instituted along all the lines of political, economic, and sociological endeavor are stupendous, and, compared with them, the deeds of Elizabeth of England appear insignificant. Only the Titanic success of pushing forward the boundaries of the empire in all directions, adding to it the Crimea, the country as far as to the Dniester, with Courland and Poland, as well as the beneficence of her rule in the reform of justice, administration, and sanitation, the establishment of schools and hospitals, the building of canals and fortresses, and the improvement of the conditions of the peasants and of the lower bureaucracy, can compensate, in the minds of historians and publicists, for her private moral corruption and the gigantic immorality which she carried on without restraint and in open defiance of civilized moral order. She died of an attack of apoplexy in November, 1796. History remains doubtful which was greater, her boundless energy, ambition, and genius, or her superhuman immorality.
Returning to Prussia, we find weakness to contrast with Russia's strength. Fifteen years after the death of Frederick the Great, we have seen that Prussia was politically in a state of decadence. As of politics, so of morals; and even the good example of the royal family was unable to redeem society from the demoralization that had seized upon the higher classes, and especially upon a great number of the officers of the army. Regarding them a credible report of a contemporary states: "The ranks of officers, already for a long time given over to idleness and estranged from science, are farthest sunk in debauch. They those privileged disturbers trample under foot everything which was formerly called sacred: religion, marital faith, all the virtues of domesticity. Among them their wives have become common property, whom they sell and exchange and seduce mutually. The women are so corrupted that even ladies of noble birth degrade themselves by becoming procuresses and panderers, to attract young women of rank in order to procure their seduction. One finds in the public houses true Vestal virgins as compared with many distinguished ladies who are the leaders in society. There are women of high rank who are not ashamed to sit in the theatre on the benches of public women, to procure for themselves lovers to go home with them. Many dissolute women of rank even unite and hire furnished quarters in company, whither they invite their lovers, and celebrate without restraint bacchanalia and orgies which would have been unknown even to the regent of France. Since Berlin is the central point of the monarchy from which all good and evil spreads over the provinces, the corruption has gradually expanded even thither." Forsooth, the ignominious defeat of Jena was indeed quietly preparing many years before it took place.
Prince Louis Ferdinand, a cousin of the king, a chameleon-like character, composed of some good and many evil qualities, who is still sung in German folklore, owing to his heroic death on the battlefield against Napoleon, was an exponent of that frivolous life. Like his prototype, the Athenian Alcibiades, he was a devotee now to wine, woman, song, now to the strenuous life of a brave soldier and heroic patriot. One woman of wonderful beauty and of the temper of a Messalina, to use Scherr's words, Pauline Wiesel, held him under her demoniacal sway of never satisfied passion. But a woman of an entirely different type, the extraordinary Jewish authoress, and ingenious, spirited conversationalist and epistolographer, Rahel Levin, served him as a true Egeria in pure friendship and intellectual affinity. Rahel Levin is a great factor in the later time of restoration and one of its foremost personalities. Rahel, as the wife of Varnhagen von Ense, and Bettina von Arnim are the leaders of those women who exercised such a tremendous influence in the evolution of German womanhood during the first half of the eighteenth century. Their influence is enduring and makes even to-day for good.
It is incumbent upon us to retrace our steps to give a more orderly account of the literary, intellectual, and artistic woman. The initiators of that class, the Gottschedin and the Neuberin have been mentioned. Since the day of Frau Caroline Neuber, the status of the German stage had risen considerably. The theatrical companies of Schonemann, of Koch, of Ackermann had attained fame through their liberation from French types. Simplicity and naturalness became the ideal of playwrights. Friederike Hensel won the reputation of being the greatest German actress of her time, as Konrad Eckhof became foremost among the actors. These two, and Ackermann, with his daughter, Frau Lowen, and others, became so to speak the charter members of the newly founded National Theatre of Hamburg, for which Lessing was appointed dramaturgiste. After two years the enterprise failed, but nevertheless the ideal of what a German national theatre ought to be, was created and expressed. Gifted women and Lessing an extraordinary combination indeed! had founded it!
Female literary work began more modestly. While a great poet like Lessing celebrated the great era of Frederick, while Ewald von Kleist sang his king and the Prussian army and of death for the fatherland which glory fell to his share at the battle of Kunersdorf, there arose also a female poet, Anna Louisa Karsch, of the newly won province of Silesia, who, in spite of her mediocrity, was celebrated as a Prussian Sappho. The experiences of her life, springing from abject poverty, or rather misery, her service as a stable maid, her marriage to a brutal old husband, and yet her constant endeavors to improve her mind under the most trying circumstances of menial labor and want, her divorce and remarriage with a drunken, lazy tailor, Karsch, who sold even the clothing of her children to indulge in his vice of drunkenness, read almost like a terrible nightmare. But the hour of salvation came. When her good-for-nothing husband was obliged to go to the Seven Years' War, the Silesian Baron von Kottwitz noticed her talent and took her to Berlin. In Berlin she soon became the fashion; she was received in literary circles, and her poetry was encouraged. The "German Horace, the thought-singing Ramler," informed her that Gleim, the poet of Prussian war songs, desired to know "his sister in Apollo." She hastened to write to the "Apollinian brother." Her friends secured her even an interview with Frederick the Great, who promised to take care of her, a promise which he forgot, however, in spite of her repeated rhymed exhortations. Later, he sent her a royal present of two Prussian thalers, which she promptly returned by mail. Frederick's successor directed "that a house should be built for her adorned with all the allegories of the Muses." In this she lived until 1791.
The estimate of her poetic gifts cannot be very high. She was a ready rhymester of a rather mechanical sort, but she was the first of the line of Germanic poetesses of the modern time, and as such her work deserves study and, it may be, praise.