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The Paris streetfights of February 1848 were to have repercussions in the whole of Europe. In Germany, the unrest began in Baden, spreading from there to other German states; on 13 March Vienna also joined in, and five days later armed conflicts took place in the Prussian capital, Berlin. In Schopenhauer's residency, Frankfurt on the Main, that famous Assembly gathered that took it upon itself to write a constitution for a united Germany. For all its peaceful rhetoric (which, as is well known, produced no result; still better known are Bismarck's devastating comment and the alternative path along which he was later to forge German unity), in September riots took place in Frankfurt, too. Schopenhauer's response to these events is likewise well known, especially the picturesque detail of his lending his doppelten Operngucker (opera-glasses) to an Austrian officer in command of the twenty soldiers who had occupied his study (and who, in spite of the unwelcome disturbance, were hailed by him as "good friends"), so as to be better able to shoot at what our philosopher chose to call "the sovereign rabble" ("die souveräne Canaille"). A few years later, in his will, he granted a significant sum to the "fund for the relief of the Prussian soldiers who… had become disabled in their struggle for the maintenance of law and order in Germany, and of the next of kin of those who had fallen in this struggle".^*519

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-015-9369-4_10

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