《我的生平——第一卷》

By the time I reached the Rampische Gasse, the fighting had already started: the crowd had seized the armoury, and troops had fired grape-shot into the citizen guard. I saw a guard dragging a bleeding leg, and the crowd’s cry rose up: “To the barricades!” I followed the stream of people toward the Town Hall, pushed my way into the council chambers unnoticed, and found them in total chaos. I wandered home through the hastily built barricades of market stalls after dark, and returned the next morning to find the Town Hall had become the heart of the revolution. The King and his court had fled to the Königstein fortress, leaving the town council to summon the remaining Saxon Chamber deputies to form a provisional government. Their deputation to the ministry found no one there, and word came that Prussian troops were marching to occupy the city. News from Württemberg, where troops had sided with the parliament and forced the ministry to accept the Pan-German Constitution, gave the deputies hope that Saxon troops might do the same, avoiding bloodshed.

On May 5 I printed huge placards asking Saxon troops if they would fight the foreign Prussians, using the type meant for Röckel’s Volksblatt, but only informers paid them any mind. I saw Bakunin wandering the barricades in a black frockcoat, disgusted by the sloppy preparation, saying he’d leave if they didn’t get serious about strategy. I ran into sculptor Semper and my friend Rietschel in their citizen guard uniforms; Rietschel fretted about balancing his democratic beliefs with his academic position, and Semper just smiled and walked away without comment.

May 6 the provisional government was formally proclaimed from the Town Hall balcony, swearing allegiance to the Pan-German Constitution. Bakunin scoffed at the ceremony, but when Semper came to me worried about the shoddy barricades in Wild Strufergasse, I sent him to the military commission to fix them. That afternoon Erzgebirge miners, well-armed and organized, marched into the Old Market to cheering crowds, bringing small cannons with them. As I watched them, the old Opera House, where I’d conducted the Ninth just weeks prior, burst into flames, set deliberately as a defensive measure to protect the Semper barricade from a flank attack. I thought of all the critics who had complained for years about the ugly, fire-prone building, and realized practical need always trumped aesthetic complaint.

That evening I went home to Friedrichstadt, where Minna was surrounded by panicked women, including Röckel’s wife, who was convinced her husband had returned to join the fighting. My young nieces were giddy with excitement about the revolution, and we passed the evening joking about the sculptor Hänel, who had begged us to bolt the house against revolutionary entry, then panicked when he saw men with scythes in the street.