The Arcanum (28 page)

At the first sign of trouble the king and Count Brühl, together with other key members of the royal entourage, fled to Warsaw,
leaving Augustus's doughty queen, Maria Josepha, the Countess Brühl and various other aristocratic ladies behind to confront
the Prussian invaders. In what must have seemed the final humiliation, Frederick himself moved into the splendid Brühl palace.

Incensed at Fredericks overbearing manner, even high-born Saxon ladies were tempted to dabble in espionage. One was caught
smuggling secret papers to her husband inside sausages. The Countess Brühl herself, forced to live cheek by jowl with her
husband's archenemy, was noted one day to have received from Warsaw an unexpected present of a barrel of wine. Frederick allowed
her to drain the wine but orders were given that she should give the cask to him. On examination it was found to have a false
base in which various secret documents were concealed. Upon this discovery Frederick coolly suggested to the countess, “Madam,
it is better that you go and join your husband.”

While Fredericks armies marched on Dresden, desperate messages had been sent by the fleeing Brühl to Meissen, once again ordering
the demolition of the kilns and the removal of all materials. For the second time the factory was indefinitely closed and
Augustus issued a further command ordering the arcanists Herold and Kaendler to escape to Frankfurt am Main. Herold and several
of his colleagues obeyed the order promptly, escaping in Herold's carriage. Kaendler refused to go and remained resolutely
in Meissen to guard his massive porcelain project against the predations of the Prussian king. Over the years of turbulent
strife that followed, Herold, hearing of Kaendler's sufferings, must have been highly relieved at his own decision to flee.
He still received his generous salary while in exile, could afford to keep his carriage, and generally lived a life of ease
and relative luxury. For Kaendler, left in Meissen, it was a very different story.

With the occupation of Dresden all Saxon assets were now diverted to Prussian coffers in order to fund the massive armies
of Frederick the Great. The stocks of the porcelain showrooms in Meissen, Dresden and Leipzig were summarily confiscated by
Frederick, who sold them on to a privy councillor named Schimmelmann for 120,000 thalers in order to raise money quickly.
These vast quantities of porcelain were mostly sold at auction, and Schimmelmann's profits were substantial enough to allow
him to buy a grand city palace, a country castle and a large estate in Denmark, where he later settled for a time.

Frederick, despite his military preoccupations, had never forgotten his dream of possessing the Meissen factory. In the years
of peace before the advent of the Seven Years' War he had encouraged a textile manufacturer called Wilhelm Kaspar Wegely to
establish a porcelain factory in Berlin and provided him with financial backing. The result of this investment had been disappointing.
Accustomed to the sophistication of Kaendler figurines and Herold's delicate painting, Frederick found Wegely's attempts crude
and uninspired and rapidly lost interest in the venture. But now, with the occupation of Meissen, Frederick saw a new ray
of hope. Wegely was summoned to Saxony, with the idea that he would take charge of moving the factory with all its workers
to Berlin.

Berlin was only a good day's travel away—some one hundred miles from Meissen—but by the time Wegely arrived the factory was
already deserted, all the equipment had been hidden, and the arcanists and even the workers had disappeared. There was nothing
to remove and nothing to learn and Wegely was forced to return empty-handed. His own factory foundered soon afterward.

For his part Frederick still refused to give up hope. In the light of Wegely's failure he was more keen than ever to place
commissions with the Meissen factory, and to do that he would have to bring it back to life. With this in mind, and realizing
that the workers would cooperate more readily under Saxon direction, he therefore leased the Albrechtsburg to a Saxon official,
Georg Michael Helbig, who, seeing the chance to profit from collaborating with the enemy, slowly managed to rebuild the kilns,
obtain the necessary raw materials—no easy matter in war-torn Saxony—and entice back enough workers to begin manufacturing
again.

As the factory slowly returned to production, Frederick exploited it mercilessly. He kept increasing both the rent he expected
for use of the premises, which he now deemed Prussian property, and the quantities of porcelain he demanded be supplied free
of charge for his own use. Eventually Helbig could no longer meet Frederick's requirements and a Polish commissioner by the
name of Lorenz stepped in to save the factory and workers from further Prussian intervention and the renewed menace of forcible
transfer to Berlin.

Frederick was a frequent visitor to the factory and during his tours of inspection he constantly plagued Kaendler with offers
of work in Berlin. Terrified of being forcibly extradited, Kaendler was forced to cooperate to some degree. By suggesting
ideas for new commissions to the Prussian king he kept the threat of removal to Berlin at bay, and thus helped ensure the
factory's survival. But when Frederick's back was turned, his giant statue of Augustus continued to obsess him. By 1761, eight
hundred molds for the base were complete, but only the face of the king had as yet been fired in porcelain. It was years since
he had received any payment for this work, and the strain of the project threatened to break him both financially and physically.

Kaendler was not alone in suffering the indignity of having to work for the enemy. The people of Meissen not only endured
acute shortages of necessities such as food and fuel; those who still worked in the factory had their wages reduced by a third
and many others were forced into Prussian service. Some had to build fortifications against their own army; others were impressed
into the Prussian armies “to carry destruction into the bosom of their native country”; defenseless women were “carried off
by violence from their paternal cottages… sent into the remotest provinces of the Prussian Monarchy, and their [sic] matched
with husbands provided for them by the State.” Many skilled former workers in the porcelain factory were “forcibly sent to
Berlin… there compelled, during life, to continue their labours, and to exert their talents, for the profit of a Sovereign,
the inveterate enemy of their country.” Even in war-hardened Europe, such treatment, said Nicholas Wraxall, an eighteenth-century
traveler, was an outrage: “Neither the laws of nations, nor those of modern war, allow of transporting the male and female
manufacturers of a conquered state, into the dominions of the invader. This infraction of natural justice was nevertheless
committed at Meissen in Saxony.…”

But worse was to come. In July 1760 Frederick retaliated against Austrian resistance in Saxony in his most ruthless manner.
In a massive bombardment of the city of Dresden that eerily presaged the events of February 1945, many of the most beautiful
buildings of Dresden were destroyed. The Turkish Palace, one of the settings for Augustus's memorable wedding celebrations,
was reduced to a heap of rubble; so too were some of Dresden's most beautiful churches, the exquisite Brühl Palace and many
others of its grandest houses.

The Seven Years' War in Europe drew to its close in 1763 with the signing of the Treaty of Hubertusburg. Before taking his
final leave of Saxony, which once again he agreed to relinquish, Frederick celebrated his victory by holding a musical concert
at Meissen, and by emptying the factory's stockrooms of a hundred more crates of porcelain.

Behind him he left a devastated kingdom in which 100,000 people had perished and the artistic achievements of an era had been
laid waste. “The royal palaces lay in ruins, Brühl's glories were destroyed and all that remained was a splendid and severely
ravaged countryside,” Goethe later wrote with impassioned anger. Even the Saxon king and his profligate prime minister, Count
Brühl, who had lived in exiled comfort in Warsaw throughout the war, were utterly overcome by the evidence of Frederick's
aggression; both died within months of their return to Dresden.

Only the Meissen factory, it seemed, against all odds had survived.

I believe I neglected to mention in any of my letters from Berlin, that when I visited the manufactory of Porcelain, I was
so much struck with the beauty of some of it, that I ordered a small box for you.… I did not imagine that this manufactory
had arrived at such a degree of perfection as in several places in Germany.… The parcel I have ordered for you is though equal
to the finest made at Dresden.

J
OHN
M
OORE,
A View of Society and Manners in France, Switzerland and Germany,
1779

T
he year was 1750. Seated in a Meissen alehouse, Johann Gottlieb Ehder, one of Kaendler's most talented modelers, was enjoying
himself.

The company was congenial, the tankards of ale and pipes of tobacco plentiful, and so engrossed was Ehder in the boisterous
revelries that he failed to notice the chimes of the cathedral bell tower. It was only when groups of his fellow drinkers
began to spill onto the cobbled street and stagger unsteadily homeward that he realized that the hour at which he was supposed
to have returned to his lodgings had long passed.

As he drained his
Walzenkrug
of beer, Ehder must have cursed the fact that unlike most of Meissen's workers, who lived in the jumble of medieval houses
nestling on the slopes of the Elbe, he had accommodations within the cathedral courtyard, inside the castle's walls. This
meant that while his companions could enjoy some measure of freedom after the long working day was over, he was still bound
to observe the strict regime introduced by the castle's guards. Their rules included a rigorously enforced curfew hour—one
that he had now missed.

Ehder knew that if he was caught trying to reenter the guarded courtyard after hours he was liable to be punished with several
weeks' imprisonment. A jail sentence would not only involve considerable physical hardship, it would also cost him his salary
for the time he was incarcerated, a punishment he could ill afford; he might even lose his job. Obviously he had to get back
to his lodgings undetected.

Avoiding the main approach to the castle, he must have climbed the steep footpath up the hill. Looming at the summit he could
make out the castle's Gothic pinnacles and ramparts silhouetted against the night sky. To avoid detection he decided to wait
in the shadows by the outer wall; when the soldiers guarding the main gate were distracted, or left their posts to patrol
the courtyard, he would steal in undetected.

Unfortunately the plan miscarried. Perhaps a guard turned unexpectedly and, glimpsing a shadowy movement, called out to his
fellow soldiers and came to investigate. What is certain is that Ehder, realizing he had been seen, panicked. Perhaps instilled
with false courage from the alcohol he had consumed, he must have decided that the only way to avoid imminent arrest was to
jump from the ramparts. It was a suicidal misjudgment.

He plummeted some ten meters and landed heavily on the sheer slope below, so severely crippled by the fall that he could do
nothing but lie helpless in agony while the guards descended the rocky path and recovered his broken body. He died a few days
later as a result of the appalling injuries he had sustained.

Ehder's tragic leap to his death in 1750 seems doubly pitiful considering that by then the tyrannical guards' efforts to protect
the arcanum were utterly futile. Elsewhere in Europe at least half a dozen other factories had discovered the secret of hard
paste porcelain. Within the next decade a dozen or more others were to follow suit.

The damage had been done three decades earlier, in 1719, when Samuel Stölzel had absconded from Meissen to help du Paquier
and Hunger begin production of porcelain in Vienna. Struck with remorse for his disloyalty, Stölzel had memorably tried to
destroy the factory's stock of paste, smashed its molds and stolen its enamels, assuming that such sabotage would put it out
of business almost before it had begun.

But that was not what happened. Du Paquier refused to see the life of his prized Vienna factory so easily extinguished. Faced
with the scene of overwhelming destruction that confronted him in the workshop, he became grimly determined to resume production.
Du Paquier had secretly observed Stölzel at work and, with his already considerable knowledge of chemistry, felt confident
that he now knew enough to replicate the mixture and compound the paste on his own.

Trial firings proved him right. Within a few months of Stölzel's flight, the factory had moved to a new, larger building in
a street now called the Porzellangasse, where improved kilns were quickly built. A year later du Paquier was back in business;
twenty workers were on his payroll and production was in full swing. Stölzel's efforts to destroy the factory had failed.
Furthermore the Meissen monopoly on the arcanum was irretrievably lost.