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Two hundred years ago today the time had come.

The new French ambassador went to court for the first time.

That means, of course, he had already paid the king's inaugural visit, after all, that was the right thing to do.

And the poet-diplomat Francois-René de Chateaubriand noticed a first difference to his homeland: No thought of a complicated ceremony as he was used to from the Bourbons.

With them you had to laboriously work your way through long corridors and many ante-rooms, eyed and possibly even smiled at by all kinds of court curtains.

With Prussia things looked different.

King Friedrich Wilhelm III.

did not even reside in the city palace.

He still lived in the Kronprinzenpalais.

There you had immediate access.

And when Chateaubriand paid his first visit to him, His Majesty had immediately drawn him into a conversation so casually that the ambassador was almost speechless.

The fact that he was approached by the king about his novel “Atala”, which at the time was admired in Germany as the French answer to Goethe's “Werther”, had of course also had an effect on the newcomer to Berlin.

But that was all more or less private.

So now the first ball. Now the invitation to the castle.

At the moment we are experiencing its resurrection as the Humboldt Forum and we are wondering what we will see when we are finally let in.

Exactly two hundred years ago, the answer would have been: next to nothing.

The ballroom had been adorned and there was also dancing.

Otherwise, on that March evening in 1821, the castle was dark, uninhabited, and the rooms were empty.

The white lady

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Only a ghost has settled here permanently, said Chateaubriand jokingly, the Duchess of Cumberland, sister of the late Queen Luise, who would later go down in the annals as Queen Friederike of Hanover.

Unfortunately the ghost called "the white lady" appeared, but not that evening.

Maybe she hadn't made it in time?

Because in Berlin they went to a party between five and six.

"At nine o'clock in the evening it was all over", Chateaubriand would write twenty years later in his "Memories from Beyond the Grave".

No question about it, glamorous life, as he was used to in Paris, looked different.

Ghost town Berlin around 1820. Here the Gendarmenmarkt with the French Cathedral on a contemporary lithograph

Source: akg-images

When we think of post-Napoleonic Prussia today, we think of Stein-Hardenberg's reforms or the founding of the Berlin University.

Those nostalgic for Prussia probably also remember steel engravings that used to hang on the wall of many a Borussian-minded household and on which the victorious entry of Prussian troops into Paris in 1815 could be seen.

But that was big politics.

Sure, the scourge of Europe, the Corsican Bonaparte, had been got rid of.

But just 15 years ago, after the catastrophic defeat at Jena and Auerstedt, Prussia's existence was hanging by the proverbial thread.

The French occupied Berlin for years and mercilessly plundered it.

Then came the tremendous effort of the Wars of Liberation.

But even in 1821, the Prussian capital was only a shadow of itself. If you had known then the play by a certain Thornton Wilder, which caused a sensation in us after the collapse of 1945, the situation could have been summed up with the words: “We are Got away again. ”But nothing more.

Economical, frugal

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The new ambassador from France felt this at every turn.

During the quarter for which he was accredited in Berlin, from mid-January to mid-April, he was amazed at how unpopulated the streets here, how frugal the lifestyle, how frugal the merrymaking up to the highest lords were.

Once a month a trip to the zoo, that was actually the highest of emotions.

Even the king would not let that be taken from him.

However, how incomprehensible he did so, with a vehicle so old-fashioned and rickety that not even a Parisian citizen would have dared to go into the Bois de Boulogne with it.

King Friedrich Wilhelm III.

of Prussia ruled from 1797 to 1840

Source: Getty Images

And then it was still so cold!

Was it a very special winter, or did you always have to endure freezing temperatures in Berlin until March?

Chateaubriand's thermometer on the window of his office on Unter den Linden showed 22 degrees below zero for days.

He read in the newspaper that the guards in front of the royal family's castles froze to death.

Just fell dead from the cold!

Only the ravens, who fluttered incessantly around his city palace, seemed to feel comfortable at the temperatures, as Chateaubriand notes.

Social life was limited to a minimum.

After all, there was an opera to which Chateaubriand once took the Duchess of Cumberland, who looked after him very nicely anyway.

The diplomat-poet did not experience the world premiere of Weber's “Freischütz”, which was to begin its triumphal procession through Europe from Berlin on June 18 that same year.

But he attended a Rossini performance.

During the break he met the king, who was all alone again and was about to leave the house secretly.

Embarrassed, he confessed to the ambassador that he was not in favor of Italian bel canto;

he love luck.

But he had appointed the Italian opera manager Spontini himself.

Do anyone understand these Prussian kings, Chateaubriand had to think again.

Don't even have the say in matters of taste!

Close to the bore-out

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Chateaubriand, there is no other way to interpret it, was close to the bore-out in Berlin.

In his dispatches he reported little about life in Berlin, which hardly existed, and preferred to intrigue for the cause of the royalist ultras in France, which he saw as his political home.

However, he couldn't help reporting that other people were bored here too.

For example Wilhelm von Humboldt, whom he knew from his time as ambassador in Rome.

Meanwhile frozen, he is now killing time in his Tegel castle by learning "all languages ​​and even all dialects on earth".

“If you came on the right day, you could hear Sanskrit at the table!” But bizarre special erudition was very typical for the Germans anyway, as Madame de Stael had already noted in her book “De l 'Allemagne” from 1809.

Queen Luise of Prussia died at the age of 34 on July 19, 1810

Source: Getty Images

After all, there were a few French expats in and around Berlin whom Chateaubriand visited during his three months in Berlin.

Through windswept heather (thunderstorms and storms followed on snow and ice), for example, he once went overland to the village of Schöneberg.

There was the botanical garden, which supplied the courtyard with plants, but also with fruit and vegetables (on the site of today's Kleistpark).

He was headed by a refugee from the revolution of 1789: the poet and circumnavigator Adelbert von Chamisso.

Chateaubriand wondered why he was staying in Prussia instead of returning to France.

“Here I have my freedom, I can do what I want”, the author of “Peter Schlemihl” is said to have replied in a similar manner.

However, he was relatively needless, but then again skillful enough to enjoy his privileges as a celebrity in a depressed metropolis.

And suddenly something dawned on Chateaubriand: Didn't the lack of allure, yes, of the level of civilization in Berlin also have its good sides?

Prussian Madonna

After all, there had been a queen here who had bravely opposed Napoleon, even challenged him: Luise.

She was on his last outing before he went back to Paris, because her mausoleum in the park of Charlottenburg already existed.

The castle, said the spoiled cosmopolitan from France, “was not Windsor, not Aranjuez, not Caserta, not Fontainebleau”, but just “a villa” from which one had “a view of the wasteland”.

But the grave sculpture of Queen Luise moved him to tears.

He had already been told that the deceased was venerated in Berlin like a guardian angel, even as a “Prussian Madonna”.

Now he saw the charm of the features of a 34-year-old, which the sculptor Christian Daniel Rauch had congenially carved out.

And with this impact, the French nobleman left Germany, which he was never to see again.

But his memories bear testimony to the fact that he had an educational experience here that he had neither in the Holy Land, nor in America, nor in the other European capitals: namely the experience of a culture and society that is ready to "reset" is posed.

And he took home the conviction that Prussia was well on the way to regenerating.

What he heard from Prussia up to the beginning of the 1840s when he wrote his Berlin experience could only strengthen him.

He was no longer informed of the new Prussia that was established in 1871;

Chateaubriand died at the age of 80 in 1848. He would certainly have had some interesting things to say about it;

an educational experience would probably not have grown out of it.

Anyone who wants to get a distantly fascinated picture of Berlin's simplicity 200 years ago has to read this French man.