Frederick the Great - Controversial King of Prussia

Frederick II of Prussia acquired the sobriquet ‘the Great’ within four years of the commencement of his 46-year reign. One of the sharpest minds ever to grace a European throne, he was impressively well read, passionately engaged as a connoisseur of music, art and architecture and a prolific writer of prose and verse. These are qualities which are unusual but not unknown among hereditary rulers; in Frederick, quite exceptionally, they were combined with fierce executive energy, indomitable will and ruthlessness of action in the service of both civil governance and military matters.

To his contemporaries, Frederick was the most salient and divisive ruler of the eighteenth century, abhorred and adored in equal measure. Subsequent students of German history have also been divided, and controversy continues. Was he one of the greatest generals of all time, or merely the lucky beneficiary of an army he inherited? (Blanning’s verdict: ‘he was an indifferent general but a brilliant warlord.’) Apostle and friend of Voltaire and insistent on equality before the law, he has been lauded as the Enlightenment enthroned; but he was also absolutist, capricious, vindictive and cruelly disdainful of the common people.

What is beyond controversy is that he turned Brandenburg and Prussia from a third-rate power into one that was feared and respected throughout Europe. There is somewhat less wholehearted agreement that he began the process which, if not exactly lineal, led to a united Germany under Prussian leadership becoming the dominant power in continental Europe. That Frederick seems to be at the source of developments that led to the Third Reich still adds a frisson to the mention of his name. This is one of the many themes the tour will explore.

Tim Blanning is the author of a biography of Frederick which has received accolades from all quarters. Formerly Professor of Modern European History at the University of Cambridge, and a renowned lecturer, he has spent a lifetime studying the eighteenth century and the German speaking lands. His depth of understanding of music and the visual arts adds a dimension which is not often provided by political historians.

Any study of Frederick must begin with his monstrous bully of a father, Frederick William I, to whom his intellectual and aesthetic interests as well as his sexual preferences were an anathema (most biographers have drawn a discreet veil over the latter). The son attempted to exorcise the ghost of his uncouth, foul tempered and militaristic parent by exceeding him in agression, beginning within weeks of becoming king by seizing Silesia, the Austrian monarchy’s richest province.

For the twenty-first-century traveller, however, Frederick’s legacy consists most strikingly of a series of palaces – Rheinsberg, Charlottenburg, Sanssouci and the New Palace at Potsdam – which are exquisitely decorated and filled with furniture and works of art.