MAISON BEAULIEUAB ÉDITIONS · CUISINE & LETTRESMAISON BEAULIEUAB ÉDITIONS · CUISINE & LETTRES“Frederick the Great, the first prisoner. — Citadel of Küstrin.”The Prisons of Europe · Volume VIII
From the blood-soaked scaffold of Küstrin to the cursed burrows of Magdeburg: a chronicle of the titanic duel between Frederick the Great and the captive no bolt could tame.
In the grim carceral geography of Northern Europe, Prussia fashioned her dungeons not for vulgar felons, but to break the very souls of her masters. It all commenced on a pallid morning in November 1730, within the fortress of Küstrin, encircled by the brackish waters of the Oder. In the depths of a grated cell, a youth of eighteen years, the Crown Prince Frederick—the future Frederick the Great—awaited his sentence of death. For having sought to flee the corporal rod and raving tyranny of a tormentor father, the Soldier-King Frederick William had consigned him to a court-martial.
The punishment decreed was not the axe for the prince, but a slower and more exquisite torture: his confederate and boyhood companion, Lieutenant Hans Hermann von Katte, was dragged beneath his casement. The gaolers held Frederick by force against the iron bars. The pastor murmured psalms whilst the young officer cast his eyes up to his prince, crying out: “Death is sweet for so dear a master!” The executioner’s sabre clove the frozen air; the severed head rolled in the sand, and Frederick collapsed, swooning in a pool of cold sweat. On that day, the adolescent poet died at Küstrin. The man who arose several months later from the Prussian vaults possessed a heart turned to stone. The foremost martyr of the prisons of Prussia was destined to become their most pitiless architect.
Fifteen years later, the prince, now crowned king, held court in Berlin. Among his favourites shone a nineteen-year-old colossus, Baron Friedrich von der Trenck. An orderly officer endowed with Herculean strength and insolent beauty, Trenck committed the sole crime that a paranoid sovereign never forgives: he found favour in the ardent eyes of Princess Amalia, Frederick’s cherished sister. Without trial, without public mittimus, upon a mere cabinet order scribbled at a gallop, the reckless youth was torn from his bed and hurled into the depths of the citadel of Glatz—an eagle’s aerie perched upon the craggy rocks of Silesia.
Yet Glatz was not constructed to cage a wild beast. Trenck had none of the patience of the resigned; he seduced his wardens, corrupted the garrison, and transformed his captivity into an inverted siege. A first time, having disarmed a sentinel, he cleared the moat before being overtaken in a morass. Far from yielding, he won to his cause Lieutenant Schell, an officer of the guard seized with remorse and threatened with the pillory. On a moonless night in December 1746, the two fugitives breached the parapets. Schell shattered his ankle in leaping from the curtain wall several fathoms high; Trenck hoisted his bloodied companion upon his shoulders, breasted the river Neisse whose waters churned with blocks of drift-ice, sabred the light horse dispatched in their pursuit, and gained the Bohemian frontier. For Frederick II, the affront was mortal: a lone captive had defied the invincible Prussian army.
The rancour of kings has a long memory and the boundless reach of the secret police. Recaptured by treachery upon neutral ground in Danzig some years thereafter, Trenck was conveyed under masked escort to Magdeburg, into the dreaded Fort of the Star—the Sternschanze—expressly conceived for his annihilation. There, within a blind casemate hollowed out beneath the outer ditches, royal vengeance attained its zenith.
« The king ordered irons to be forged for me such as no man had ever borne: an iron collar three inches broad, two rings upon my thighs joined by a bar of solid steel, fetters upon my hands, and an iron girth soldered to the masonry. The whole weighed sixty-eight pounds. »
In the midst of this cell paved with damp sandstone, the king’s masons had laid a sepulchral slab bearing his name incised with a chisel: Friedrich, Baron von der Trenck. He was condemned to sleep upon his own grave. In this pitch-black pit where saltpetre sweated day and night, denied all light, rationed to a pound and a half of mouldering bread and a pitcher of foul water, any other man had lapsed into raving madness. Trenck, however, declared war against the stone. Armed with a point-less artillery knife abandoned in a straw palliasse, he set about sawing through his accursed irons. Each day, once the turnkeys had departed, he slipped off his disarticulated fetters, dislodged the flagstones of his tomb with his bleeding fingernails, and burrowed into the bowels of the fortress.
For nearly ten years, the citadel of Magdeburg reverberated with the subterranean toil of a human mole. Trenck dug narrow crawlways where the air failed to the point of extinguishing his tallow dip. He concealed the sand and rubble beneath the worm-eaten planks of his bunk, swallowed sandstone dust, and fought off the rats that came to dispute his crusts of bread. Twice he pierced the brick counterscarps and reached the rear of the outer palisades, poised to plunge into the Elbe, only to be betrayed by the collapse of a gallery or the incorruptible zeal of a non-commissioned officer.
Each failure earned him an accession of chains and oak doors reinforced with additional ironwork. Yet all Magdeburg trembled before its prisoner. Sentinels fancied they heard the devil himself scratching beneath the ramparts; Prussian officers, mesmerised by such indomitable nobility, eventually smuggled paper, quills, and sealing wax to him, purchasing his pewter engravings executed with the point of an iron nail. The Philosopher-King of Sanssouci, who was then corresponding with Voltaire on universal tolerance, discovered that no arsenal could vanquish the will of a free man.
It required the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War, the desperate entreaties of Princess Amalia, broken by grief, and the formal intervention of Empress Maria Theresa of Austria for the bolts of Magdeburg finally to draw back in 1763. When Trenck crossed the sally port of the Fort of the Star, emaciated, white-haired, his limbs forever bruised by the friction of sixty-eight pounds of iron, he cast a haughty, magnificent gaze upon the Prussian bastions. The despot had thought to bury a culprit; he had succeeded only in forging a legend that centuries of oppression have never been able to extinguish.