Leopold von Gerlach

Ludwig Friedrich Leopold von Gerlach, the second-eldest of the four brothers (the eldest being Wilhelm, 1789–1834), was born in Berlin on 17 September 1790. As Aide-de-camp General to King Friedrich Wilhelm IV he was one of the most powerful political advisers in Prussia during the reactionary phase following the Revolution of 1848. The indecisive king preferred his private counsel to that of his ministers – and Leopold von Gerlach was the most influential among them. Together with his brother Ernst Ludwig he shaped the conservative Kreuzzeitung Party, regarding themselves as guardians of a Christian-monarchist state order. He died on 10 January 1861 in Potsdam of a cold caught while walking bareheaded for hours behind Friedrich Wilhelm IV's funeral cortège. He was buried beside his wife Johanna, née Countess von Küssow, on the family estate of Rohrbeck.

Chronicle

1. 1790

   Born in Berlin as the second son of Carl Friedrich Leopold von Gerlach.

2. 1799

   At nine he entered the Joachimsthal grammar school, in 1803 the Académie militaire. Of his school years he later judged himself idle and thoughtless – the introduction to the memoirs puts that down to his precocity. At the academy he at any rate showed curiosity enough to win the affection of his teacher Ancillon, later a minister.

3. 1806

   Five days before the battle, on 9 October, the sixteen-year-old entered the army as an ensign of the von Arnim regiment. The introduction to the 1891 memoirs names the battle of Auerstedt, not Jena, and a capture not on the field: on 15 October he became a prisoner of war at Erfurt by capitulation, and by the end of the month he was back in Berlin. Older accounts say Jena; both battles were fought on the same day.

4. 1808–1810

   His request for discharge in 1808 was refused by the king in gracious terms: His Majesty believed he would make a very useful officer. Permission to study came with the refusal. At Göttingen he attended above all the jurist Hugo; at Heidelberg he moved among friends and, as it is put, women of spirit, and from there visited Schubert and Tieck in Munich and Jean Paul in Bayreuth. The romantic school had stirred him earlier: the interest it awakened in the Middle Ages and their art brought him at least to a historical understanding of Christianity. Only later did it become a living force for him.

5. 1811

   Returned to Berlin, he applied to the government at Potsdam – with the king’s leave, sought at his father’s wish, subject to his military standing and the duty to report as soon as he was called. He passed the examination brilliantly and served as a legal trainee. Politics held him more than the dry business of office, fostered by his dealings with Alexander von der Marwitz, brother of the well-known general, and with the guards officers. United in opposition to liberalism and in hatred of France, the young men followed the course of events closely. As early as 1810, at Napoleon’s marriage to Marie Louise, he remarked that it was a sign of his approaching end: he was looking to provide for a family.

6. 1811/12

   At twenty-one he belonged in Berlin to the circle of the Christian-German dining society, where officers and writers met: Heinrich von Kleist, Achim von Arnim, Adam Müller, Clemens Brentano, his friend Ernst von Pfuel – and Carl von Clausewitz, then newly appointed a teacher at the war academy. An account of this circle calls him "the young Leopold von Gerlach, bubbling with wit and humour", whom Clausewitz described as the drollest and most amiable man he had ever seen.

7. 25. Januar 1813

   When the king left for Breslau on that day, Gerlach and Marwitz took indefinite leave to follow him. From Breslau he wrote: "Here in Breslau no one doubts there will be war … A glorious time is here, everything is coming back to life, everything works towards one end. On the rampart, on the Ring, before the gates troops are drilling, everyone is running about to equip himself, and almost every craftsman is working for the war. … The king rightly calls this time a resurrection." In the assembled crowd he distinguished three parties: the aristocrats, without position and without strength, who dare not show themselves as a party; the democrats, who include "the most distinguished and the most vigorous men of our country", enemies of the nobility, of patrimonial jurisdiction and of feudal labour; and the anarchists, "students, doctors, booksellers who do not know what the world looks like". Their leader, he wrote, was Jahn – "who does not seem to be so, with his bald head and handsome face; he struck me as plain, sound and practical".

8. März 1813

   "Through General Scharnhorst, who had me called to him, I was attached to old Blücher for service; Scharnhorst, however, regarded me as assigned to his own person. Everyone envied me, and I was happy to be au centre des affaires." When he reported to the king, the king asked after his father, who was already very ill and for whose sake the son had stayed longer in Berlin, and added graciously that he knew Gerlach had acquired much knowledge and hoped he would now put it to good use. On 21 March he followed the headquarters. His judgement on his own career stands beside it: "I soon grew uneasy in my brilliant position, and not without reason, since it estranged me entirely from service with the line, which I have felt throughout my military career."

9. 1813–1815

   Re-enlisted as a second lieutenant on the king's call and attached to Blücher's staff. He fought at Großgörschen, Bautzen, on the Katzbach, at Leipzig, La Rothière, before Paris, at Ligny and Wavre, was wounded several times and received both classes of the Iron Cross. In October 1815 he joined the Great General Staff as a captain.

10. 1819

    Marries Countess Johanna von Küssow (1796–1857) – through her the family descends from the von Sacks, the founders of Rohrbeck. The wedding took place in November at Nedel in Hinterpommern; the young couple then moved into the family’s Berlin house, into the ground-floor flat that had until then been let.

11. 1823–1824

    In these years the major lived in his parents' house: "v. Gerlach, L. F., Major, hinter der katholischen Kirche 1". Between the journeys to St Petersburg and service on the general staff, Berlin remained the fixed address – and the fixed address was his mother's house.

12. 1826

    Aide-de-camp to Prince William of Prussia.

13. 26. März 1826

    With the prince he travelled to St Petersburg for the funeral of Emperor Alexander I. "This morning the prince, General Thile and I took Holy Communion at St Anne’s," he wrote. Then the procession moved from the Kazan church to the church of St Peter and St Paul: the choirs of the priests are magnificent, the dowager empress sobs aloud, and as the coffin is lowered into the black-draped vault the empresses withdraw. They walked home across the ice of the Neva. In Petersburg he took up the cause of the preacher Gossner, who had been sent away from Russia, procured the disputed book for the prince and convinced him of the man’s innocence. On 6 April they drove out to the military colonies, one hundred and forty versts in seven hours.

14. 1828

    On 15 February the son Berndt was born while his father was in St Petersburg. Ernst Ludwig noted: "As I came from the session of the supreme tribunal, Hannchen had just been happily delivered of a son. Everyone was full of joy. Radowitz was as pleased as a child. We thought much of the dead Georg and of the father away in Petersburg." Georg was the eldest son; he died as a child. The newborn was given his name in second place: Berndt Georg Wilhelm.

15. 2. Dezember 1847

    In Berlin it was said that the three brothers ruled the church. He wrote it down: "Today I was told that it is generally put about in the town that we three brothers rule the church, that we have appointed the three consistory presidents and make them dance to our pipe. What truth is there in it? Outwardly none, inwardly very little, a trifle of relative consistency and principle." The next day he noted what he himself held to be right: that a chief task of the politics of the age was to take church government more and more out of the king’s hands. It was plainly too heavy for the king; pressed by his worldly circumstances, he administered it against his own conviction.

16. Februar/März 1848

    The foreign ministry opened a file on the "mission of Major General Leopold von Gerlach to Copenhagen", filed under the national movement in Schleswig-Holstein (III. HA MdA, I No. 8327/4). The journey falls in the weeks immediately before the March rising in Berlin.

17. 11. Februar bis 9. März 1848

    What the foreign ministry files record as a transaction can be followed day by day in the newspapers. The occasion was the change of throne at Copenhagen: Christian VIII had died on 20 January. On 8 February a Berlin correspondent reported that General von Gerlach, "one of our most energetic statesmen", was about to leave on a special mission to Denmark, and that his instructions bore a stamp "answering to the German mind of our sovereign father". A few days later he appears in the Berlin list of departures – the major general and commander of the first Guard Landwehr Brigade, for Copenhagen. The Berlingske Tidende learned of its own guest on 16 February, and learned it from foreign papers. Only on 18 February did a south German paper name the special envoy. On 9 March the Berlin list has him again among the arrivals, from Copenhagen. Nine days after that the barricades went up in the city. In May he was to go to Frankfurt as envoy; the ministry blocked it.

18. Oktober 1849

    A verdict on the brothers which he wrote down himself. The dismissed minister von Schwerin, furious at the prospect of a returning absolutism, said the Gerlachs were the completest reactionaries of all. Leopold adds only half a sentence: Bismarck had tried to refute him.

19. 1850

    How the family name sounded during the ministerial crisis he noted without softening. Stockhausen, the future war minister, had written to Rauch that Kleist was impossible as a minister; and further: "at the name Gerlach people take fright, Ludwig would be quite impossible." His answer, addressed to Rauch, follows immediately: "As long as people are afraid of Christianity, a proper ministry is impossible."

20. Juli 1850

    His quarrel with Radowitz over the Union led him to a self-examination which he wrote down. He put it to the minister that he could not in conscience justify a policy that seemed to go with the revolution, which he himself held to be criminal; Radowitz conceded that he would not have accepted that alliance had a choice been left him. Then Gerlach turned on himself: he was grateful to God for having been kept from all contact with the revolution – not like the publican in the parable, but grateful for undeserved grace. And immediately after, two sentences of remorse: "How much more I might have done on the morning of 19 March in the castle courtyard. I had also let myself be led into approving the calling of the United Diet in March, though that was sure to carry us towards the revolution." On 11 July he noted that the previous day had been a bad one, which brought him near the resolve to go.

21. 1850 (ein Brief von 1844)

    Among the letters he gathered after the attempt of 1850 about the earlier one of 1844 is one from the king to the Kammergericht president von Kleist, in his own hand, Charlottenburg, 13 December 1844: it mattered to him beyond words that the unhappy man should know that he forgave him with all his heart, as a man and as a Christian; the exercise of his office had become unspeakably hard to him, yet he must not forget that it was laid on him by God. "Tell him so, or have it told him by Bultmann or Gerlach." And at the end: "Then burn this sheet, so that the spirit of the age may never misread it." Which of the brothers is meant the letter does not say; the sheet was not burnt.

22. 1850 (ein Ministerium Gerlach)

    That a cabinet under the family’s name was considered stands in black and white in his diary. Of the king he noted: "He will not bring himself to a Gerlach ministry, and with Arnim he would be no better off." And going through the possibilities he concluded that on the right there was only "Voß, Gerlach, Stahl – Pietists"; even Rauch as prime minister would have to reach for these. The upshot of his reckoning is sobering: nothing remains for us but to keep the present ministry. What he thought about it he wrote to his brother Ludwig in a long letter which the memoirs print.

23. Dezember 1850

    At the end of the year he learned how the king spoke of him behind his back: often and always with great affection – though complaining "of the rebellious and contradicting Gerlach manner". Those words are the king’s verdict on the household’s way of speaking, and Leopold wrote them down without objection.

24. Mai 1851

    At the meeting in Warsaw Emperor Nicholas I spoke with him at length about the situation; afterwards he learned from Fräulein Rauch in what terms the emperor had spoken of him and of the conversation: "Gerlach est un brave et digne homme."

25. 1852

    Two verdicts from the same year, far apart. The Russian emperor told Massow that he well knew that in the worst of times Rauch and Gerlach alone had kept their heads with him. And the "Preußisches Wochenblatt" of the Bethmann-Hollweg party attacked him publicly by name: "General von Gerlach! In one of your latest articles you not only confess that you approved of the fateful turn of November 1850 and of the policy of Olmütz, you even boast of having initiated that policy" – and went on to ask whether his friend Hassenpflug had helped him and whether he had also drawn up the plan for the skirmish at Bronzell. The same paper shortly afterwards publicly tied him to two names that were to become more famous still: Kleist-Retzow, Bismarck-Schönhausen and General Gerlach were, however much their bearers might resist it, inseparable from Manteuffel, Lecoq and Quehl; no later disavowal could free them from that solidarity. There follows the proverb about the company one keeps. This article too Leopold copied into his diary – it stood in the police report laid before him.

26. Kinder

    Four children: Agnes (1820–1901), who later edited his memoirs; Georg, who died young; Ulrike, called "Det" in the family, confirmed on 5 May by the preacher Kaiser in the lower church at Frankfurt; and Berndt (1828–1889), Landrat at Rohrbeck and Nordhausen. Georg and Ulrike had not been in the family tree before.

27. 1838

    As colonel chief of the general staff of the III Army Corps at Frankfurt (Oder); returns to Berlin in 1842 (Kraus 1994). In 1841, the year the Rohrbeck manor house burned down, "Colonel v. Gerlach of the Rohrbeck estate" receives a support loan from the von Schöning foundation fund; the file runs until 1943 (Brandenburg State Main Archives, Rep. 3B III D no. 3149).

28. 1844

    Promoted to Generalmajor.

29. 1844

    An anecdote handed down by Varnhagen von Ense: in church matters as in politics he stood on the far right, and on that ground the gulf between him and Alexander von Humboldt was deeper still than in politics. He liked to tease Humboldt. Having once seen him in a church, he asked him at the court table at Sanssouci: "Your Excellency goes to church quite often now, I suppose?" Humboldt answered at once: "The word ‘now’ is very kind of you – you mean to show me the road by which I might make my career." The same collector remarks in passing that in another Humboldt story Gerlach, for all his partisanship, is "the more exact reporter".

30. 1849

    Lieutenant general and adjutant general to King Frederick William IV; the crown's most influential adviser in the era of reaction.

31. 1849

    In January the king charged him with laying a report before him on Mecklenburg affairs; both Mecklenburg governments had just submitted proposals for military conventions in Berlin. On 5 February he noted what he met with in the work. On 20 November the diary reads: "Yesterday I was very downcast, politically that is, at the way the ministry deals with the king."

32. 1854

    Writes to Bismarck on 25 January that he has changed his "Rohrbeck building plan" and is starting on the dwelling house at once instead of barns and stables – so that it is ready "for our political burial"; Bismarck replies that a house is not built as quickly as that (correspondence, 1893). He spends his leave at Rohrbeck. On 31 July he writes from Rohrbeck to Hermann Wagener about the lack of support from Minister-President von Manteuffel (Wagener, Erlebtes, 1885).

33. 1855/56

    In November 1855 his valet and that of cabinet councillor Niebuhr are arrested at Potsdam: they had stolen confidential papers from their masters – allegedly on Russian war plans – and sold them to agents of the Western powers (Hallische Zeitung 20 November 1855). Seiffart, vice-director of the Chamber of Accounts, is dismissed in 1856 for complicity; in October 1856 the general has to testify before the Potsdam district court in the trial of the editor Lindenberg, who had written him a letter lost in the theft (Westfälischer Merkur 30 September, Aachener Zeitung 23 October 1856).

34. 1856

    On 20 September he marks his fifty years of service "in complete quiet" at Rohrbeck; the Neue Preußische Zeitung calls him one of the most distinguished generals of the army and "one of the high pillars of true Prussianism" (Dortmunder Kreisblatt 25 September 1856). On the jubilee he asks the King to be retired – the King refuses "decisively" (Dresdner Journal 14 October 1856). In December the adjutant general is absent from the opening of the Diet – he stays at Rohrbeck because of his daughter's illness (Aachener Zeitung 3 December 1856).

35. 1857

    After a longer stay at Rohrbeck he returns to Berlin at the beginning of January (Hamburgischer Correspondent 10 January 1857); in October, in the days when the Prince of Prussia takes over the regency, the ailing King receives him at Sanssouci (Magdeburgische Zeitung 27 October 1857).

36. 1858

    Establishes, by royally confirmed deed, a foundation of 2,400 Taler "for the villages of Rohrbeck and Nordhausen in the Königsberg district" under the supervision of the Order of St John (Berliner Revue, 11 July 1858) – proof that Nordhausen was already his. The interest on 2,000 thalers is to place needy sick and infirm people of both villages in hospitals and infirmaries, preferably those of the Order of St John, or to provide medical care at home; the interest on the remaining 400 thalers forms a reserve fund (Berliner Revue 11 July 1858).

37. 1859

    General of Infantry.

38. 1860/61

    His name stands on the map of the north-eastern Transvaal. In July 1860 Boers of the Lydenburg district introduced the Berlin missionaries Alexander Merensky and Heinrich Grützner to the Bakopa chief Maleo; on 14 August the two moved onto the abandoned farmstead of Riet-Hoof. The station was given the name Gerlachshoop because the general, who had just died, had repeatedly pointed to that region as a promising mission field. It was the beginning of the Berlin mission in the Transvaal. A Swazi raid destroyed it in the late autumn of 1864; in 1904 the society took the place up again and in 1909 handed it to the Sotho pastor Jan Sekoto (Julius Richter, history of the Berlin Missionary Society, 1924).

39. 1861

    Dies on 10 January at Sanssouci of erysipelas contracted while keeping vigil at the coffin of Frederick William IV. After a memorial service in the Friedenskirche at Sanssouci (14 January) his body is taken via Berlin and Angermünde to Rohrbeck and laid to rest in the family vault beside Johanna on 17 January; Ernst Ludwig, the only surviving brother, accompanies him (Magdeburgische Zeitung 14 January, Bonner Zeitung 19 January 1861).

40. 1891/92

    His daughter Agnes (1820–1901) publishes the "Denkwürdigkeiten aus dem Leben Leopold von Gerlachs" in two volumes – reviewed in dozens of newspaper articles; the correspondence with Bismarck follows in 1893. Agnes dies at Oschersleben in June 1901.

41. Nachlass

    His diaries 1809–1860 with travel supplements (St Petersburg 1825–28, Vienna, Warsaw, The Hague), the autograph manuscript "Rohrbeck. Description and administration by us" (some 230 pages, 1830–1860) and memoranda for the king are held in the Gerlach Archive at Erlangen; Bismarck's letters to him were published in 1893 (correspondence) and 1912 (Kohl).

42. Ein Wort seines Schwagers

    Ernst Senfft von Pilsach, governor of the province of Pomerania, once said of him that at court in Sanssouci he behaved "like a clever child". Ernst Ludwig, who records it, would then ask that his brother behave like a clever man as well – "he was happier as a child than as a man". Decorations and the like were a burden to him; but his clever child’s face was irresistible, and at court a real refreshment. In Sanssouci, where Senfft had seen him so, he died in 1861.

43. Sein Rechenschaftsbericht

    At the end of the family history which he himself called his "account of the management of the property" he set a reason why Rohrbeck remained undivided so long: "I wanted to show on what foundation the unity of our family rested, particularly in our line, since only so can the treatment of the property and the community continued to this day be justified. Property is a side matter, dust beneath the foot; the foot itself and what is above it is the main thing." That this unity was no illusion he proves by what others said of the brothers – they were thrown together or mixed up, and, he adds, the brothers were glad of it every time.

44. Vier Beispiele

    He lists them. Ludwig was credited with his own answer to Emperor Nicholas, although his brother had never seen the emperor: when Nicholas mocked Louis Philippe as a citizen-king, Leopold had replied that Europe had recognised him all the same. Of himself it was said in 1848 that he had preached for Otto in the Bohemian church. In 1857 the Evangelical Supreme Church Council cited all three in a report on divorce – Ludwig for his treatise on marriage law, Otto for refusing to perform marriages, himself for a vote on the Brandenburg provincial law. And after 1848 the Paris papers repeatedly made the adjutant-general and the platform orator into a single person, in order to accuse that one person of influence. The remark about the brothers saying the same things, which the memoirs ascribe to an unnamed friend, comes here from Leopold Stolberg, a friend of Otto’s.

45. Was Petersdorff sammelte

    The historian Herman von Petersdorff, who worked on the family, had Agnes von Gerlach supply him with material. His papers in the Privy State Archive contain under number 22 his correspondence with her from 1898 to 1901 on the "history of the von Gerlachs" – and with it what she gave him: thirteen letters of Leopold to his parents from the years 1806 to 1814, an undated manuscript "Our family history", and a manuscript "The Creation" (VI. HA, Nl Petersdorff, No. 22). The thirteen letters appear in none of the printed editions.

Sources and literature