Friedrich August von der Marwitz

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Friedrich August Ludwig von der Marwitz

Friedrich August Ludwig von der Marwitz (29 May 1777 – 6 December 1837) was a Prussian nobleman, officer and opponent of the Prussian reforms of Heinrich Friedrich Karl vom Stein.

Origins

He was descendant of the illustrious Marwitz family, a noble family from the Neumark region. It was first mentioned in a document in 1259 and came from the village of Marwitz (today Polish Marwice and part of Lubiszyn) near Landsberg an der Warthe. For centuries, many male descendants of this family chose a military career: hundreds of them became officers in the Prussian army, among them 14 reached the rank of general. Besides Friedrich August Ludwig, two of his uncles became very famous: Gustav Ludwig von der Marwitz and Johann Friedrich Adolf von der Marwitz, who fell from grace because he refused to plunder the captured hunting lodge at Hubertusburg. The Prussian Infantry Regiment No. 61 bore the family's name until 1918.

Friedrich August Ludwig von der Marwitz was one of five children of the Royal Chamberlain and later Hofmarschall Behrendt Friedrich August von der Marwitz (1740–1793) and his wife Susanne Sophie Marie Louise née von Dorville (1756–1808).

Biography

Born in the family palace on Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin, Friedrich August joined the Prussian Gensdarmes regiment in 1790 — at the age of 13. A year later he already became a Cornet and took his leave in 1802 with the rank of Oberleutnant. But already in 1805 and 1806 he rejoined the regiment as Rittmeister and adjutant to Prince Hohenlohe. In this position he played an important role in the Napoleonic Wars: for example in 1806 in the Battle of Jena–Auerstedt. After the surrender of the Prenzlau fortress he was captured by the French together with Hohenlohe. But he managed to escape via Denmark and Sweden to Memel in East Prussia. There he initially tried in vain to get permission from King Frederick William III, who had also fled there, to found a Freikorps.

In 1807, Marwitz finally received the longed-for permission and founded a Freikorps that was to take part in the fight against Napoleon. This consisted of 300 infantrymen and 500 horsemen, which was quite large by the standards of the time. With this corps he reached Rügen and planned to participate in the advance of the Prussians, English and Swedes against the French and Saxons to the March of Brandenburg. However, when the Peace of Tilsit was concluded, he had to disband his corps, as the Prussian army was considerably reduced by the terms of the peace. He now retired as a private citizen to the devastated Friedersdorf, where he settled.

In view of its defeats at the hands of Napoleon, Prussia attempted in the following years to improve its internal stability and to catch up with the changing modern warfare through a number of comprehensive administrative, educational and military reforms. The initiators were the politically independent Reichsritter vom Stein and — in a weakened form — the later Karl August von Hardenberg. However, their measures, especially the abolition of peasants' hereditary servitude, met with bitter resistance from the aristocrats of the March. Marwitz, as land marshal of the landowning Lebuser Estates, was one of the leaders of this opposition. In 1811, Hardenberg had him arrested together with Friedrich Ludwig Karl Finck von Finckenstein as Frondean rebels and imprisoned in the fortress of Spandau, but he was released after only five weeks, partly due to the intervention of the crown prince, later Friedrich Wilhelm IV.

In 1813, Marwitz rejoined the Prussian army and now participated in the training of a Landwehr. He successfully led one of its brigades in the Battle of Wittenberg on June 7, 1813, and was awarded the Iron Cross, 1st Class, after the fighting at Magdeburg. Promoted to colonel in 1815, he now commanded a cavalry brigade and fought with the 8th Uhlan Regiment in the battles of Ligny, Wavre and Waterloo and in the engagement at Namur against the Napoleonic army of the Hundred Days, for which he received the Order Pour le Mérite with oak leaves. After the end of the Napoleonic Wars he became commander of the 5th Cavalry Brigade. In 1817, he was promoted to major general and held this post for ten years. In 1827, he retired from the army highly respected as a lieutenant general.

Marwitz then lived privately as farmer at his Friedersdorf estate until his death in 1837. In addition, he was politically active as a marshal of the Brandenburg provincial parliament. In his old age, he was presented with gifts and honors by the crown prince, later King Frederick William IV.

Marwitz was afraid of being buried alive and therefore left very precise instructions regarding his burial. The body was to lie "in an airy room" until "clear traces of decomposition appeared," only then was it allowed to be buried. He wanted to be buried in his "full general's mundanity along with his medals," and his saber was to lie on a pillow next to the coffin during the funeral service. There were also meticulous regulations regarding the funeral ceremony, processional order in the funeral procession, etc., which were followed. His ancestors were still buried in the family vault of the von Marwitz family in the church of Friedersdorf, he himself, his two wives, his brothers and sons are buried in the family cemetery, which he created, at the wall of the church. The oldest gravestone is that of his first wife, who received the following epitaph from him: "Here lies my happiness. Caroline Franziska Gräfin Brühl was born in 1783, March 23, married in 1803, May 12, to Friedrich August Ludwig von der Marwitz Erbherrn auf Friedersdorf. He left her in good health on March 14, 1804. Fourteen days after a happy delivery, he returned on the 16th and found her dead! She was the joy of all who knew her."

Politics

As a politician, Marwitz represented the old Prussian nobility. Like most of these nobles, he was a vehement opponent of the reform policies of the ministers Freiherr vom Stein and Prince Hardenberg, in whom — like Ludwig Yorck von Wartenburg — he saw a threat to the privileges of the nobility and the Prussian state supported by the nobility. In his view, the kingdom had to remain dominated by the nobility.

In 1811, he wrote the Lebus Memorandum. In it, he had the estates of the Lebuser Land ask the king whether "our old, venerable Brandenburg-Prussia should become a newfangled Jewish state? Marwitz opposed the idea of replacing the peasants' hereditary servitude to the lord of the manor with monetary payments and making noble estates available for purchase by commoners as well. Marwitz feared that the then emerging urban middle classes or banks — hence the peculiar formulation "Jewish state" — would displace the less financially strong nobles from their ancestral estates by buying up landed property.

Against this, he agitated for his legal position that the aristocratic large landholdings were at the same time the inalienable power base of the ruling Hohenzollerns. In Marwitz's opinion, the innovations broke old unwritten contracts (including with Frederick William III when he took office) that the nobility had once concluded with the Prussian king and with which they had delegated their claims to power to the king.

Marwitz was convinced that the nobility should hold all officer positions in the army, as had always been the case in the old Prussian tradition, and that this supremacy should be maintained in the social structure of the state. This corresponded to the interests of many noble families: in Prussia, a division of land into estates was uneconomical because of the barren, infertile soil. Thus, in the noble families, the only career path open to the younger brothers of the heirs was often an officer's career.

Marwitz remained true to these positions even after the reforms had been implemented. Even in the last years of his life, he tirelessly fought the results of Stein-Hardenberg's reforms. Therefore, Theodor Fontane said about him:

The Marwitzes have given the country many a good soldier, many a firm character, but none more good and firm than Friedrich August Ludwig von der Marwitz, whose appearance signifies a turning point in our state life. It is only from Marwitz's time that a political battle of opinions has existed in Prussia.

Marwitzen's contemporary, Friedrich Erhard von Röder, wrote about him in his 1807 memoirs:

He was an unusual man and soldier, vigorous in body and soul, chivalrous, full of intellect and perspicacity, witty, lively, endowed with thorough knowledge, a true Christian.

Heinrich von Treitschke, well-known liberal historian, characterized Marwitz around 1880 as follows:

The archetype of the Brandenburg Junker, one of the bravest officers and the greatest horseman in the army, rough, gruff and gnarled, (...) full of fiery love for the fatherland, but also full of harsh prejudices, so naive in his pride of station that he was hardly ever able to believe in the legal opinion of his opponent.[1]

The aforementioned prejudices and pride of class were precisely those old legal positions that Marwitz clung to, even though they had long since ceased to correspond to social reality. The fatherland he loved remained Prussia, which was dominated by the nobility, not a German nation-state, which the bourgeois national movement aspired to before 1848 — although both fought side by side against Napoleon.

Historian Gordon A. Craig therefore sees Marwitz as a typical representative of territorial feudalism against bourgeois liberalism and assesses his impact as follows:

Even in defeat (if the only partial realization of his hopes can be called that), Stein remained a dominant figure on the German political scene, a symbol of hope that Prussia would after all follow the path taken by the countries of Western Europe. He was the founding father of a new German liberalism, the man whose "Testament" was invoked and republished every time the forces of the movement began to stir again in Germany. But perhaps Marwitz was the more significant of the two after all, at least in the context of a book entitled "The End of Prussia."

The fact that the later King of Prussia, Frederick William IV, honored Marwitz so strongly in the last years of his life pointed ahead to the future role of the agrarian nobility in the empire of 1871, where the nobility's interests had been organized since 1890 in the German Agrarian League. Even after 1918, the Central German aristocratic landowners, whom Marwitz represented at the time, retained political influence, especially during the last years of Reich President Paul von Hindenburg.

Family

He married Caroline Francisca Gräfin von Brühl[2] (1783–1804), daughter of the General Carl Adolph von Brühl and granddaughter of Minister Count Heinrich von Brühl. The couple had one daughter.

With his second wife, Charlotte née Gräfin von Moltke (1780–1848), whom he married in 1809, he does not seem to have lived in such a happy marriage, but had nine children with her, eight of whom survived the postpartum period. Of his three sons, the youngest, Bernhard (1824–1880) became a majorat lord at Friedersdorf, the second was a student at the Knight's Academy of Brandenburg and died at age 15, and the oldest died as an infant. Also survived by four daughters. The eldest daughter Karoline Franziska (1804–1888) married on 1824 the then Rittmeister Albert von Arnstedt (1794–1875, a grandson of Adam Friedrich von Arnstedt). The daughter Maria (born 5 March 1821) married Hermann Rochus zu Lynar (1797–1878).

Works

  • Aus dem Nachlasse Friedrich August Ludwig's von der Marwitz auf Friedersdorf, Königlich Preußischen General-Lieutenants a. D. (1852)
  • Ein märkischer Edelmann im Zeitalter der Befreiungskriege, Gesammelte Schriften (1908)
  • Jena 1806. Aus gleichzeitigen Tagebuchaufzeichnungen (1937)
  • Nachrichten aus meinem Leben 1777–1808 (1989)

Notes

  1. ↑ Heinrich von Treitschke, Deutsche Geschichte im 19. Jahrhundert. Essen: Phaidon-Verlag (1997).
  2. ↑ Regarding personal names: Until 1919, Graf was a title, translated as Count, not a first or middle name. The female form is Gräfin. In Germany, it has formed part of family names since 1919.

References

External links

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