The Painter 248 Holger Birkholz “AS LONG AS WE REMAIN SERFS TO PRINCES” FRIEDRICH’S POLITICAL CONVICTIONS During the Napoleonic Wars, Caspar David Friedrich was a supporter of the German Wars of Liberation, both by his own testimony and in his art. After Napoleon’s defeat in 1813, the restoration and subsequent resurgence of the European monarchies led to a change of emphasis in this political stance. Friedrich became a supporter of the struggle for freedom championed by the fledgling student movement of the time. The tenth anniversary of the victory at the Battle of Leipzig in 1823 was particularly significant in this political outlook, as was the resignation that the ideals of national renewal were unlikely to be realised under the prevailing political and social order of the day. The revolution of 1830 and the enactment of the Saxon Constitution of 1831, however, offered a brief glimmer of hope. THE ROBBERS In Dresden, Friedrich seemed keen from an early stage to express his political views in his art. In 1801, at one of the first of many annual exhibitions at the Dresden Academy in which he would participate, he showed his artistic rendering of the final scene of Schiller’s drama The Robbers.1 The play had caused a sensation at its first performance in Mannheim, as it was seen as a revolutionary critique of the feudal social order, and its first performance in Dresden in 1784 had also left the audience in a state of shock.2 By choosing this of all subjects, Friedrich revealed for the first time the anti-monarchist views that would remain fundamental to his political convictions.3 He may have been introduced to Schiller’s drama and political ideas by Christian Gottfried Körner, whose house in Dresden was an important meeting place for critically minded intellectuals and artists,4 and where Schiller himself had found a refuge a few decades earlier, from 1785 to 1787.
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