The arc of German history seems to run through Potsdam.
- At the center of the city is Sanssouci, favorite home of the 18th Century’s Frederick the Great and a reflection of his vision for Prussia, which nearly a century later created the German Empire.
- Across town is the Tudor-style mansion Cecilienhof, where victorious American, British and Soviet leaders met near the end of WWII and executed the Germany that Prussia built.
Potsdam is ideal for a short visit. The terrain is relatively flat and the attractions are mostly within walking distance of each other. But I spent three weeks here to try to absorb Frederick’s lessons about the risk and rewards of great-power foreign policy and the critical importance of competent government that actually delivers.
Today, Sanssouci is the chief tourist attraction here. The palace sits at the center of a World Heritage site of 150 buildings on more than 1,200 acres. And the center of Sanssouci is Frederick.
Frederick
Frederick II von Hohenzollern won the honorific “the great” for military exploits that expanded his country and elevated it to one of the world’s great powers. But since childhood, he also had been steeped in the same Enlightenment liberalism that provided the foundations for American politics. That meant individual rights, rule of law, relaxed censorship, real but limited religious tolerance, education and reason instead of received authority, especially from the church.
Historians rate Frederick’s Prussia as genuinely effective at core state functions such as tax collection, preventing famine, increasing equality in courts and post-war rebuilding. But public goods largely supported population growth, tax revenue and a strong army, and nobility profited most.
There was no legislature to be paralyzed by partisan politics; when the king issued an edict, it was law. Government was efficient for the time. Some historians have asserted that Prussia’s administrative machinery — studied throughout Europe like his military tactics — helped give Prussia the organizational muscle in the next century to create the German Empire out of remnants of the Holy Roman Empire.
Wikimedia Commons.
Frederick reigned for 46 years (1740-86). He nearly doubled Prussia’s population by musket and bayonet, grew its size (purple in before/after photos above) by 60% through diplomacy and joined East Prussia and West Prussia into a potent single nation.
He was a battlefield commander, often on horseback in the front ranks. Frederick’s victories, such as those over numerically superior armies of Austria and France, became the stuff of legend.
The Battle of Leuthen in 1757 is considered one of Frederick’s masterpieces — his Prussian force decisively defeated an Austrian army twice its size. His army’s discipline, speed and unexpected battlefield tactics (especially “oblique attacks” — striking the enemy’s flank where its line was weakest) were studied even by Napoleon.
At home, Prussia boasted one of the less corrupt administrations in Europe, staffed more by trained officials than friends and family. Famously calling himself the state’s first servant, Frederick personally supervised a competent government, focusing on administration, population growth and overseas trade.
But delivering came at a cost. To keep the support of the landed gentry in the East, Frederick didn’t try to abolish the serfdom crucial to their estates. Moreover, some researchers estimate as much as 10% of the population died from his wars and devastation of the countryside.
Sanssouci
Frederick sketched Sanssouci (French for “without care”) as an airy, intimate, single-story Rococo retreat from pomp and pageantry at court in Berlin. Sanssouci’s interior mirrors Frederick’s Enlightenment ideals, but the architecture delivers in a light, arty Rococo style.
Some Enlightenment ideals seem to operate outside, too. The six vineyard terraces, angled to catch the sun, have been called an example of man’s leveraging nature through reason.
A windmill, reconstructed after WWII, stands just outside Sanssouci. Inside, the un-fact-checked story is that Frederick wanted the land the windmill stood on. The miller declined and said he would go to the Kammergericht (Prussian High Court) if the mill were taken. The miller lost, but Frederick overruled the judges, and the story says he left the windmill standing as a tribute to the man’s courage and as a symbol of justice and independent courts.
Frederick allowed commoners to become judges and senior officials and introduced a state civil service exam. He limited the arbitrary power of nobles over peasants; began the organization of laws, customs and precedents from throughout the kingdom; and abolished judicial torture.
Frederick saw himself as ruler via reason, not divine right. He corresponded with the French philosopher Voltaire and hosted him in Prussia for three years (until the two huge egos fell out). Frederick’s French-speaking mother and French tutor had been strong early influences, and the king filled his study and library with French Enlightenment texts. He used French when he could, German when he had to. An author of military strategy, political theory and history, the king wrote almost everything in French, language of Voltaire, Rousseau and Montesquieu.
Sanssouci includes a music room. The king believed Prussia needed culture, not just military might, if it was to take its place among the world’s great powers. Frederick was an accomplished flute player and composer of more than 100 flute sonatas and four concertos; his D minor flute sonata is regarded as his best. He employed C.P.E. Bach, a son of the immortal Johann Sebastian Bach, for three decades and often played with him.
The picture gallery adjacent to the palace displays Frederick’s patronage. The king chose many of the more than 100 paintings, including masterpieces by Rubens, van Dyck, Caravaggio and others.
The king loved his dogs. Some historians call Frederick cold and impersonal in his mature years and say he trusted animals more than people after decades of public humiliation and brutal treatment by his authoritarian father. Especially around Sanssouci, Frederick was trailed by his beloved small, slender Windspiele (greyhounds). The dogs accompanied Frederick everywhere, sometimes even on state occasions.
Frederick, called with some affection “der Alte Fritz” (the old Fritz), died in his armchair at Sanssouci at 74. He left instructions that he should be buried next to his precious Italian greyhounds on the terraces outside. But his successor thought burial with dogs unseemly for a king and had Frederick’s body laid beside Frederick’s father’s in Potsdam’s Garrison Church.
During and after WWII, first the Germans and then the Americans moved the royal bodies to protect them. In 1991, after reunification of eastern and western Germany (Potsdam had been in the communist East), Frederick’s body, wrapped in the old Prussian flag, was interred after dark without ceremony on the terraces. It took more than 200 years for his final wish to be carried out. The flat stone slab marker says in script “Friedrich der Grosse” (Frederick the Great).
Frederick ordered widespread cultivation of the potato during one of his agriculture reforms, and today you regularly find potatoes on the grave of the king often mentioned in the same breath as Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar and Napoleon.
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