251 By 1813, the resistance to Napoleon had reached the Körner household. The poet Theodor Körner (Christian Gottfried Körner’s son) joined the Lützowsche Freikorps, a mounted free corps, and the painter Georg Friedrich Kersting, Friedrich’s friend and painter of the studio portraits (figs. 3, 4, p. 329), decided to follow his example. Conventional wisdom19 has it that Friedrich financed Kersting’s personal equipment, but this is based purely on a supposition expressed by Körner’s father.20 Although Friedrich was a supporter of the Wars of Liberation, he nevertheless fled from Dresden to the remote village of Krippen, fearing the fighting, the quartering of soldiers and the threat of food shortages.21 After an initial period of being unable to work, he produced many drawings on his wanderings, most of all of trees. One drawing in particular (fig. 10, p. 79) stands out. Above a row of open spruces, Friedrich wrote the following: “Arm yourselves / today for the new battle German men / hail your weapons!” After the victory over Napoleon in 1814, the general mood was one of patriotic euphoria, so that for once the annual Academy Exhibition was dedicated to the Russian tsar rather than the Saxon king. Works by Ferdinand Hartmann, Gerhard von Kügelgen and Caspar David Friedrich were on display, which the author of an exhibition review in the Beiträgen zur Belehrung und Unterhaltung described as “patriotic works of art”.22 In that year, there was a notable increase in monument designs in Friedrich’s oeuvre, such as one in honour of the since-fallen Theodor Körner.23 Some of these were war memorials,24 as for example a design that Friedrich sent to Ernst Moritz Arndt on 12 March 1814.25 In the accompanying letter, Friedrich explicitly took a stand: “It does not surprise me at all that no monuments are being erected, neither those which symbolise the great cause of the people, nor the noble deeds of individual German men. As long as we remain the serfs of princes, nothing great of this kind will ever happen. Where the people have no voice, they are also not allowed to have any sense of themselves or to honour themselves.”26 After being found in the possession of Ernst Moritz Arndt five years later, in 1819, this letter became a damning piece of evidence leading to political reprisals for Friedrich’s friends.27 RESTORATION In the years that followed, the patriotic enthusiasm sparked by the Wars of Liberation began to wane. Liberal aspirations were frustrated by the policies of the Restoration, as defined by the Congress of Vienna in 1815. In contemporary parlance, anyone who continued to advocate liberty was branded a ‘demagogue’ and risked political persecution in a crackdown against dissenters known in German as the Demagogenverfolgung.28 This was reflected in the Carlsbad Resolutions of 1819, which aimed to restore feudal political structures. Friedrich’s distrust of hierarchical social structures must be understood in the context of this political climate; in a letter to his brother in 1817 he remarked: “There is no authority I trust” ([D]enn ich traue keiner Obrigkeit übern Weg).29 Writing in a letter to the Stralsund City Council regarding his designs for an altarpiece in 1818, he expressed his vision of the church as a political utopia of social equality. For him, the church was a “building where people gather to humble themselves before God, before whom one man is as good as another, where all distinctions of class should justly cease. In this place, at least, the rich must feel that they are no better than the poor, and (there) the poor must have a visible consolation: that we are all equal before God.”30 It was around this time that wanderers wearing Altdeutsche Tracht (‘old German costume’) started appearing in the artist’s work. After the Wars of Liberation, this costume, based on what was known of the fashions of Dürer’s time, was prized as being something uniquely German – and, by extension, distinctly anti-French. As early as 1814, Friedrich’s friend Ernst Moritz Arndt published a work describing and advocating a ‘German national costume’ (deutsche Kleidertracht) – at a time when ‘Germany’ as a single political entity was still a radical, anti-monarchist idea.31 The subject of a ‘national’ folk costume (as opposed to the various regional largely peasant costumes) continued to be debated in the following years,32 but by 1815 it had largely disappeared from public discourse, as a nation-state determined by bourgeois interests was at odds with the Restoration of the dynastic order decreed by the Congress of Vienna.33 In student circles, however, the German folk costume continued to be worn as an expression of liberal values, and was particularly conspicuous at the Wartburg Festival in 1817. Friedrich started clothing his figures in this kind of costume34 (which contemporary viewers would have picked up on) at a time when it was considered an ‘affront to the politics of the Restoration’ and a marker of opposition.35 It is therefore conspicuous that in 1817, when Friedrich first exhibited a painting of two men in Altdeutsche Tracht at the Dresden Academy Exhibition,36 contemporary reviews made no mention of the figures’ attire.37 This reticence on the part of the media may have been an early indication of what would become reality in 1819, when the Carlsbad Resolutions imposed a general ban on the wearing of Altdeutsche Tracht. Friedrich continued to depict the protagonists of his paintings in this type of costume, but henceforth refrained from submitting a painting such as Two Men Contemplating the Moon (fig. 3) to the Academy Exhibition. Half in jest while keeping a cautious distance, he summed up the apparent political views of the two moon-gazers on their nocturnal excursion, as manifested by their clothing, in a remark passed on by Carl Förster: “They are engaged in demagogic mischief” (Die machen demagogische Umtriebe).38 One reviewer’s comment on another painting in 1822 reveals how controversial it was for the contemporary public to see a painting showing “friends lost in contemplation,” “recognisable by their cloaks and fouragier berets” and who “often haunt the artist’s studio and sneak into his pictures”.39 The reviewer goes on to point out the “caution with which they always show themselves to the public only from behind.”40 Friedrich had every reason to be cautious. On 11 July 1819, as part of the Demagogenverfolgung in Berlin, the Prussian authorities searched the home of the political publisher Georg Andreas Reimer, a friend of Friedrich since their days in Greifswald, “on grounds of revolutionary mischief”.41 Among the things that the authorities confiscated were letters from Friedrich. Reimer had recently re-established contact with the painter and visited him in Dresden in September 1818, together with Friedrich Schleiermacher and Leopold von Plehwe. The latter had attended the Wartburg meeting in 1817 and was subsequently arrested and interrogated.42 Three days after the events in Berlin, on 14 July 1819, Ernst Moritz Arndt’s lodgings in Bonn were also searched for incriminating writings and his correspondence was confiscated by the sack-load,43 including Friedrich’s letter on his design for a monument to the heroes of the 1814 Wars of Liberation. The extent of this political surveillance and persecution is reflected by the fact that even Friedrich’s friend the history professor Karl Schildener in Greifswald was interrogated and threatened with dismissal.44 These events may also explain a small painting by Friedrich, which was
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