4

Frederick the Great

In 2011, in Berlin, Vanessa de Senarclens, a scholar of the Enlightenment who currently teaches at Bard College, discovered a 1740 poem entitled ‘La Jouissance’ – ‘the pleasure’, perhaps, or ‘the orgasm’.¹ Addressed to Francesco Algarotti, a Venetian poet, art critic, and sodomite, the poem reads, in part:

That night, vigorous desire in full measure,

Algarotti wallowed in a sea of pleasure.

A body not even a Praxiteles² fashions

Redoubled his senses and imbued his passions

Everything that speaks to eyes and touches hearts

Was found in the fond object that inflamed his parts.³

While readers who are familiar with Berlin may think that passage describes an average Saturday night in the German capital, this letter caused a stir because of who appeared to have written it: Friedrich II, King of Prussia and Elector of Brandenburg, known in English as ‘Frederick the Great’ and in German as the diminutive ‘Alte Fritz’. Such a man turned the insignificant electorate of Brandenburg, known as the ‘sandbox of Europe’ for its moory and unproductive terrain, into the centrepiece of a vast and powerful empire. He was also a pioneer of an enlightened style of monarchic rule that combined military campaigning with artistic and intellectual patronage. A self-styled philosopher-king, he wrote a hundred flute sonatas and four symphonies, and hobnobbed with Voltaire and Bach, who wrote the Musical Offering for him in 1747, based off one of the king’s original themes.

Frederick’s sexuality has been the source of heated debate both during his life and later, around the turn of the twentieth century. After Germany unified and sought in the history of its new Prussian overlords examples of both heroic warriors and enlightened philosophers, Frederick’s legend only grew. At the same time, new ideas and understandings of sexuality were being developed by sexologists and activists in that sandy bog from which Frederick once conquered vast swaths of Europe. This combination makes his memory uniquely complicated: a man who could simultaneously serve as an object of masculinist gay identification and, among his supporters, face the marring of a legacy of statecraft and militarism because of his supposedly effeminate ways.

During his life, however, this appears to have been less of a conflict. Frederick’s story helps us understand the complex and shifting relationship between the same-sex erotic and masculinist, military power: how different that relationship could be and feel across time, how historical memory could transform and be shaped by it, and how the making of the modern homosexual was less a taking-up of queer fictions of the past than a scrambling and re-writing of them. Christopher Chitty encourages us to think about the history of homosexuality less as a story of how people did or did not deviate from transhistorical norms and more in terms of their relationship with power.⁴ Frederick – in his life and his memory – helps us do just that.

Brandenburg, the province that surrounds the city of Berlin, forms part of the flat Polish plain that separates the Western German territories and Russia. Misty and marshy, with sandy soil, this land had never been rich. ‘Apart from Libya’, Frederick would write to Voltaire in 1776, ‘there are few states that can equal ours when it comes to sand.’⁵ Since the Middle Ages, Prussia’s core territory was ruled through a feudal, manorial system. A small number of nobles, known as junkers (short for jung Herr, or ‘young lord’), ruled over vast swaths of swampy and unproductive land from one-or two-story brick houses – similar, say, to the system of French chateaux, but without the wealth that made those chateaux sites of opulent luxury. Marx would call these nobles the ‘cabbage-Junkers’, a reactionary and brutish class of petty minor aristocrats dreaming of their imagined origins as Teutonic crusading knights civilizing Slavic land.

It was here, on 24 January 1712, in Berlin, then just a small provincial capital where the Prussian rulers had their winter palace, that Frederick was born to Frederick William I, then the crown prince of Prussia, and his wife, Sophia Dorothea of Hanover. A year later, Frederick William I ascended to the throne.

Although both Frederick William I and his son Frederick the Great proved to be influential rulers who helped transform Prussia from a backwater into a fearsome power, it is inaccurate to say that the process began entirely with them. The Thirty Years’ War, from 1618 to 1648, had torn Europe (and Germany) asunder as the absolutist Catholic Habsburgs tried to put down the Protestant rebels to the north.⁶ Frederick William’s father, Frederick I, had tried to turn muddy Berlin into a proper court, building baroque palaces and wide, tree-lined boulevards, founding a court orchestra, the Staatskapelle, that exists to this day, and inviting Jews (to whom he extended limited tolerance) and Huguenots to settle the city in an aim to grow it. Frederick William – short and gout-riddled – had no time for these niceties upon ascending the throne. ‘The new king’, he told his father’s courtiers, ‘bids you all to go to hell.’⁷

He also ended a long-standing practice in which the excess sons of the Junkers travelled to serve as mercenaries in other armies across Europe. Instead, he decreed, these men had to serve in his army, the ranks of which began to swell. Generals replaced courtiers in the ranks of precedence that defined court life, and the various fineries of the baroque court – powdered wigs, champagne, sumptuous fabrics – were replaced with cabbage and beer.

Accordingly, Frederick William had aimed to raise his son as a relentlessly practical young general, assigning him Huguenot tutors to teach him a religious and practical education in both German and French. From a young age, however, young Frederick had other plans, secreting away an enormous library of philosophy, poetry, and the classics. One story from his sixth birthday will strike a chord with any homo who’s ever had to navigate the fraught space between parental expectations and forbidden desires that come when presents are opened: after receiving an enormous set of toy lead soldiers, the young prince ignored the gift, opened up his book of French melodies, and began serenading the court ladies with his lute.⁸

Father and son would never get along. Frederick William’s illnesses only worsened – nightmares, swollen genitals, digestive disruptions, intense pain – as would his campaign to fashion his son into a man he was most certainly not. The young Frederick received no praise, no warmth. He was derided by his father for his effeminacy, for his free thinking, for his incompetence at riding and shooting. In 1728 he wrote to his father complaining of the ‘cruel hatred’ between them. In response, his father denounced him. Physical violence increased: Frederick William beat his son with a cane, threw him to the ground, and forced him to kiss his feet.⁹

As he took refuge with his friends – once, at seventeen, writing, ‘I play my flute, I read, and I love my friends more than I do myself’ – Frederick became closer and closer to Hans Hermann von Katte, a young Junker with strikingly bushy black eyebrows eight years Frederick’s senior who hailed from the Brandenburg village of Wust.¹⁰ Katte had travelled in his youth, studying in the Netherlands before joining the Prussian army. He shared Frederick’s interests in poetry and flautistry, and the two men rapidly became closer as they studied philosophy and mathematics. Meanwhile, Frederick William ruled from a ‘tobacco parliament’ in his hunting lodge, a gloomy affair decorated with stag antlers and full of drunken generals.

It is not easy to categorize the budding relationship that was forming between Katte and Frederick. As we have already discussed, the identity category of ‘gay’ as we understand it now, and even the idea of a coherent sexual identity, both date to the late nineteenth century. This does not mean that Frederick’s effeminacy or supposed affinity for ‘Greek’ love went uncommented, merely that such things were considered, in the immortal words of Michel Foucault, an ‘aberration’ rather than evidence that the person committing such acts was of a different ‘species’.¹¹ Accordingly, state regulation of these acts focused on the acts themselves: the Prussian sodomy statutes were strengthened by Frederick William during his reign, who turned it into a capital offense (as well as ordering the strangling of all the Roma/Sinti in his kingdom in a 1725 edict). Both the differences and the continuities between the forms of the regulation of same-sex erotic behaviour then and now are instructive. In 1721, to use one unhappy example, a married former military officer, Anastasius Lagrantius Rosenstengel, was discovered to have been assigned female at birth, and to have ‘simulated’ the male role in intercourse with ‘a penis of stuffed leather … tied to [his] pubes with a leather strap’.¹² Frederick William personally intervened to ensure Rosenstengel’s execution and his wife’s lifelong imprisonment.

Only one year after meeting Katte, the young prince revealed his plan: to flee to Great Britain, which he thought of as a land of liberal enlightenment. This meant not only the abandonment of his throne but also a treasonous defection to the enemy, and it was part of a complex game of diplomacy and subterfuge in which both Britain and France were attempting to install and influence a more compliant and liberal Prussian ruler. Katte advised against Frederick leaving, but he could not be moved. Courtiers spoiled the plot, revealing both Frederick’s plan, which was to flee from a royal tour of various other German principalities, and Katte’s involvement.

According to his daughter Wilhelmina, Frederick William threatened to kill his son upon finding out about the plan, and had to be implored to spare his life. The prince and Katte were both locked up like common deserters in the military fortress at Küstrin, each in solitary confinement.¹³ The two men were court-martialled. The implications seem to have been clear to Frederick William as well, who reportedly asked Frederick if he had ‘seduced Katte … or did Katte seduce you?’¹⁴ Frederick William at first insisted that Katte have his tongue ripped out with red-hot tongs and then be hanged, which was then the Prussian punishment for lèse-majesté, but, owing to the nobility of Katte’s birth, eventually accepted a simple beheading.¹⁵ Frederick was forced to watch. As Katte was marched up onto the executioner’s platform, Frederick cried out, ‘I beg of you, a thousand apologies!’ Katte replied, ‘Monseigneur, you owe me nothing,’ and when the sword hit his neck, the young prince fainted, spent three days inconsolable, and then never spoke of Katte again.¹⁶

Part of the complex diplomatic machinations around Frederick’s planned escape had to do with the question of the young prince’s marriage: he had first gotten the idea to go to Britain from his mother’s attempt to marry him off to her niece Princess Amelia, the daughter of King George II. Despite Frederick’s own inclination towards marrying one of several powerful and imposing women – including Maria Theresa of Austria, who would become the only female Habsburg regent and for whom he was willing to give up his succession – his father insisted on marrying him off to Elisabeth Christine of Brunswick- Bevern, a distant Protestant cousin. Frederick was distraught. ‘There can be neither love nor friendship between us,’ he wrote to a friend. In another letter, he wrote: ‘If I am forced to marry her, I will reject her away as soon as I am master … No man can blame me for it, knowing that I was made to do something that was totally against my inclinations … I feel myself too flighty, and insufficiently attracted to the female sex.’¹⁷

At this point he was still being imprisoned in Küstrin, and was only released when he agreed to the match, realizing that once married he could ensure his liberty, and see his new bride as infrequently as possible. He set up court in the Brandenburg town of Ruppin and focused on garden remodelling, home and interior decoration, the creation of an orchestra, and the building of architectural follies in the Greek style. Careful to keep his spending habits a secret from his father, he developed at this time a reputation for having rapacious and libertine sexual appetites. The two men slowly reconciled and when Frederick William I died at the end of May of 1740, Frederick was able to credit him with having died ‘with the steadfastness of a philosopher and the resignation of a Christian’.¹⁸ Upon his assumption of the throne, the first problem Frederick busied himself with was his wife, to whom he wrote, on the first of June, ‘When you arrive [in Berlin] you will go first to the Queen [Mother] to pay your respects, and you will try to make a better job of it than in the past; after that you may remain here, your presence being necessary, until I write to tell you what to do.’¹⁹ Queen Elizabeth would live out her days in a palace in Schönhausen, eighty kilometers (and a full day’s carriage ride) from Frederick’s palace in Potsdam, which she would only see once, and briefly, in 1751. While he paid her bills, he ignored their anniversaries, refused to refer to her as his wife, and the two never had children. Frederick turned over many official court duties to his wife’s court at Schönhausen while neglecting and underfunding it; nevertheless, she made lifelong donations of significantly more than half her income to charity.

At Ruppin, Frederick’s right-hand man became Michael Gabriel Fredersdorf, for whom he immediately purchased a nearby estate and who became his lifelong privy treasurer – attending to money matters, home life, interior decorations, music, and essentially managing the outside world for the king. He served as ‘a kind of prime minister’;²⁰ Voltaire called him Frederick’s ‘grand factotum’.²¹ Fredersdorf oversaw the construction and opening of Frederick’s new summer palace Sanssouci, a yellow-pink confection with lavishly painted and panelled rooms decorated to various themes, featuring an enormous staircase of terraced fruit vines, set in a palace park including thousands of fruit trees, statuary, obelisks, rococo follies, and a Temple of Friendship, built in honour of his sister, which celebrated the manly love of the Greeks. ‘He has a very pretty face,’ Frederick wrote of Fredersdorf, who Voltaire once described as ‘young, handsome, well-made’, saying he ‘served to entertain [Frederick] in more than one fashion’.²²

Around the same time he became king, Frederick met and became infatuated with Francesco Algarotti, the philosopher to whom he wrote a poem as an answer to the charge that northern Europeans lacked passion (the same poem that appears at the beginning of this chapter). Partially in response to rumours about this affair, the artist William Hogarth painted The Toilette, in which a flute player (perhaps Frederick?) is positioned next to a painting of Ganymede being pursued by Zeus; Giles MacDonogh, one of Frederick’s biographers, understands this as a joke about Frederick’s (homo)sexuality.²³

So far, so gay, right? Yes, and no: while it seems clear that Frederick had significant erotic and romantic attachments to men and virtually none to women – ‘fortune has it in for me’, he once wrote, ‘alas, she is a woman, and I am not that way inclined’ – it is also important to remember that our contemporary regimes of sexuality are just that.²⁴ Looking back with today’s eyes, we put two and two together and make four: which is fair. But it is also fair to note, as Bodie Ashton does in a recent article on Frederick, that something as complicated and historically contingent as sexuality can’t be solved as if it were simple arithmetic. It seems that Frederick’s homoerotic predilections, along with his love of gardening and music and literature, were actually understood as part of a ‘constant definition of Prussian masculine character’, and being a proper Prussian man ‘required a man to embody “sensitive” traits that later generations would come to view as “effeminate” ‘.²⁵ If it would have been beyond the pale – illegal, even – for a king to be openly practicing sodomy, a bit of flute-playing and some temples to Greek Love fit right in. Understood as embodying a kind of Attic masculinity, Frederick would become part of a vision of Berlin as the ‘Athens of the Spree’ (referring to Berlin’s Spree river) in the nineteenth century, a city dedicated to humanistic pursuits at the centre of a militaristic empire.

Of course, the expanding empire was just as important as the palatial rococo repose. Frederick William’s conscription of the Junker failsons had made the Prussian army enormous: 1 in 80 were soldiers, as opposed to only 1 in 300 in Great Britain. In addition to Brandenburg, Frederick inherited the prosperous city of Magdeburg along with several other cities near what is now the German border with the Netherlands. Another duchy, centred around the city of Königsberg farther east, had been consolidated under Prussian control in 1770.

Frederick’s first rapid territorial expansion came immediately after ascending to the throne, when he invaded and occupied Silesia, then ruled by Austria, which had just been taken over by Maria Theresa, the Habsburg empress whom Frederick had once attempted to wed. His troops rapidly overtook the indebted and poorly trained Austrians, and after several years of squabbling, in 1745 he signed the Treaty of Dresden, firmly placing Silesia in his control.

After the collapse of the alliance between Austria and Great Britain, Frederick aligned Prussia with England against the Catholic alliance of France and Austria, and launched the Seven Years’ War in 1756 by attacking Saxony and forcibly incorporating the Saxon forces into his own army. While Frederick didn’t manage to hold on to any of his initial conquests, the broader geopolitical effects of the Seven Years’ War were vast. This was a truly global conflict defined by squabbles between France, Britain, and their proxies on several continents, including the French-Indian War in North America, and became a key tipping point for both the French and American Revolutions. The absolutist monarchies of France and Austria could not compete with the dynamic, early modern capitalist economy of Britain, which Frederick greatly admired and towards which he sought to reform the Prussian state.

At home, between the wars, Frederick continued to rule over a court of at least partial and self-understood enlightenment. His court modulated between British liberalism and the ancient traditions of continental European monarchy. Freed from his father’s restrictions on spending, Frederick was able to engage the best musicians in Europe for his court orchestra, including CPE Bach, the son of JS, as his harpsichordist. In 1747, JS Bach visited Sanssouci to see his son and was, upon his arrival, immediately summoned to the court of the great king.

Frederick greeted Bach by sitting down at his piano and playing a theme. Frederick then asked Bach to write him a fugue in three parts, a complex composition in which a given musical theme is introduced, repeated, and transformed. Certain kinds of themes, like the one Frederick suggested to Bach, are particularly difficult to set as they cannot be combined with other themes in canons without breaking the rules of functional harmony. It would be, to paraphrase the historian James R. Gaines, like giving a poet a line with which to begin a rhymed poem that ended with ‘salad’.²⁶ Bach sat himself down at the piano and immediately improvised a three-part fugue. (Again, this would be as impressive as a poet hearing a line ending with ‘salad’ and immediately improvising a villanelle.) Frederick, taken aback, demanded a six-part fugue. Bach indicated that he needed some time, but ended up composing in two weeks The Musical Offering, a collection of keyboard music ending with a ‘Prussian Fugue’ in six parts, which, like the rest of these pieces of music, are all based on Frederick’s impossible theme. Musicologists and historians, including Gaines, have deduced extramusical meanings in the work: Bach, deeply religious and suspicious of the secularist clarity of the enlightenment, had transformed the king’s provocation into the godly music of the spheres.

Speaking of godless secularism, Voltaire was a regular at Sanssouci: he and Frederick had kept up their correspondence since Frederick’s young adulthood and it was Voltaire who first referred to Frederick as ‘the Great’.²⁷ Voltaire was, of course, an icon of enlightenment, and admired many of Frederick’s legal reforms. This new legal code, finished in 1780 but not published until 1794, when the king had already died, attempted to moderate between feudalism and capitalism, curbing the absolute power of the monarch and maintaining the privileges of the aristocracy while introducing more principles of equality under the law, to the horror of the Junkers.²⁸ During his reign, Frederick supported a relatively free press, the abolition of torture, the admission of non-nobles to the highest levels of the bureaucracy and judiciary, the reorganization of the Prussian Academy of Science, and severe restrictions on the death penalty.

But Voltaire was also a vicious satirist, and Frederick still an absolutist monarch. Voltaire began writing his memoirs in 1750, including sections detailing Frederick’s homosexual exploits. ‘He sent for two or three minions’, Voltaire wrote, ‘lieutenants, pages … or young cadets, and took coffee with them. The one to whom he threw a handkerchief remained alone with him for an hour.’²⁹ When these descriptions made it from Voltaire’s memoirs into the realm of public gossip – eventually appearing in altered form in a pamphlet published in London in 1752 – the two men’s friendship significantly cooled, although they had reconciled by Frederick’s death.

As Frederick grew older, he became increasingly solitary; as friends died, including his beloved Fredersdorf, he made few new ones. Shying away from people, he preferred to spend his days with his flute and with his Italian greyhounds. As early as 1747, he had made requests for Italian greyhounds to be sent from England; the diplomat Thomas Villiers reported back that this would be difficult: ‘That sort of dog is rare and much desired … Few have any but Ladies, and it is not to be expected that they will part with what is fitted to their laps.’³⁰

These dogs, and his horse Condé, were his most faithful companions as he grew old, gouty, and began to exhibit some of the same signs of illness that had plagued his father. He died, unattended by either his wife or any clergyman, on 17 August 1786.

Despite all the art and music that Frederick enjoyed at his court, it was opulent only compared to the austere standards of his father (and of course, to the daily life of most people who have ever lived). In fact, he inherited from his father somewhat of a suspicion of the overly padded French and Austrian aristocratic courts, with complex hierarchies of state and precedence and backstabbing. Therefore, when Frederick died, leaving no heir, he requested that he be buried in a simple grave next to Sanssouci, with his beloved greyhounds. He also desired that his resting site be next to a statue of Antinous for which he had a particular fondness; Antinous, as Blanning points out, ‘had sacrificed himself for his lover’ just as Katte had done for Frederick.³¹ His nephew, who ascended the throne as King Frederick William II of Prussia, disregarded these instructions, as he would disregard many of Frederick’s enlightenment legacies. Attempting to shore up the monarchy after the threat of the French Revolution made the guillotine seem a real threat to Europe’s pampered aristocrats, the new king dulled many of the liberal innovations in Frederick’s legal code and was content to fritter away his time gambling while the Junkers ran the country and even the military. He insisted that Frederick the Great be buried in state next to Frederick William I in the Garrison Church in Potsdam, where his tomb became, throughout the nineteenth century, a regular symbol of Prussian and later German nationalism.

As the eighteenth century rolled into the nineteenth, industrialization and the accompanying economic transformations associated with it – urbanization, the separation of the peasants from the land, the increasing power of the bourgeoisie and the reactionary response of the Junkers – only increased the pressure on the cluster of small principalities and kingdoms that made up what we now call Germany. By the 1840s, small uprisings and protests were regular affairs, and liberals and radicals were regularly publishing political programs calling for the reunification of the German nation along the lines of equality and brotherly love. Liberals overtook radicals in 1848 – Marx and other ‘stagist’ leftists controversially supported this, believing that the bourgeoisie needed its turn at the wheel before the proletariat could be formed, and then take power – and were themselves overtaken by monarchists who put down the uprisings. When Germany eventually did reunify, after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, it was under the same line of Prussian kings, with the same class of reactionary Junkers rising swiftly into key military and political leadership roles.

By this time, however, significant changes had occurred in the dominant regimes of masculinity and sexuality. If Berlin still liked to think of itself as the ‘Athens of the Spree’, Frederick’s Attic masculinity, in which homoerotic and homosocial signifiers could be a point of amusement or even scandal but not define him as unmanly or seriously threaten his rule, was no longer possible. The increasing movement of people off the land and into cities created new living arrangements and classes of people, urban dwellers with disposable income and the ability to make their own lives. This only increased the amount of same-sex erotic and romantic contact, much of which happened on dangerous and difficult-to-control streets and in the new spaces created by mass urban life. Sexologists and psychiatrists, newly empowered with the method and the mission to peer into the souls of the masses and try to make them better and more productive workers – and to reproduce the next generation in highly policed nuclear families – began to transform these rebels against the sexual order into a class of being: the homosexual.

From the beginning in the late 1800s, the homosexual was constructed together with the figure of the worker and the savage – theorized as backwards, inverted, or primitive, he/it was distanced from the ‘straight time’ of productive work.³² In a world in which men were increasingly seen as industrial labour machines, with a similarly mechanistic and nationalistic understanding of history rolling inexorably forwards, the homosexual was anti-national and anti-progress. This led to several complex memory cultures growing up around Frederick: a culture of shame in which his supposed homosexuality was suppressed or dismissed in order to make him a more attractive national/ nationalist hero, and a culture of homosexual masculinism that pioneered a misogynistic celebration of his homosexual-inclusive masculinity.

For the devoted Prussian nationalists, Frederick’s homosexuality became an embarrassment even as his legacy grew. The German nationalism of the late nineteenth-century reuni-fied empire was conservative, anti-liberal, and anti- Catholic: the Junkers’ myths of Teutonic glory, of the subjugation of the savage Slavs, only increased. Given that the German-speaking lands (with the exception of Austria) were reunified under the Protestant Prussians, it became important for Frederick the Great to become, according to the historian Hagen Schulze, ‘the model for a German hero … who, in Goethe’s words, had “saved the honour of part of the Germans against an allied world” ‘.³³

It did not matter, Schulze points out, that Frederick’s actual life found him opposed to German culture, favouring the French, and inhabiting a glittering and homoromantic intellectual world. ‘The Frederick myth still had a profound effect’, Schulze writes, ‘especially among the Reich’s young men … who felt “Fritzisch” – as the young Goethe did.’³⁴ Schoolbooks included pictures of Frederick’s court and of the great man on horseback, placing him at the heart of Germany’s national heritage. He was presented as the predecessor to the political system that developed under Bismarck and the Kaiser, in which monarchy was combined with modernity and militarist discipline. If, as Bodie Ashton points out, in the era of his rule Frederick’s homo sexuality did not stand in the way of his becoming ‘Great’ – a ruler, a national hero – after the reunification it was dismissed by historians as so much maliciousgossip-mongering.³⁵

For the subset of homosexual men in reunified Germany who wished to identify with their maleness, however, Frederick the Great became a key figure. Even before the First World War, the German homosexual movement had divided. While they still shared many publishing outlets, and both movements were vanguardist and relatively small, some homosexual men, like the 1870s pioneers in the terminology of homosexuality Karl-Maria Kertbeny and Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, preferred to think of homosexuality as a form of gender inversion, a framework that survived into Magnus Hirschfeld’s early twentieth-century model of sexual ‘steps in-between’. Others, however, preferred to understand homosexuality as a form of hypermasculine comradeship.

Adolf Brand’s small anarchist group, the ‘Community of the Self-Possessed’, idealized war and male bonding as a spiritual plateau, looking back to ancient Greece as their model. Often misogynist and anti- Semitic, these men framed Frederick as a model for homosexual integration into, and leadership of, the Nation and its specific form of history. Later, in the 1920s, a homosexual writer named Friedrich Radszuweit would attempt to use Frederick’s image along these lines to defend the national honour of homosexuals.³⁶

Frederick’s tomb, and indeed the Garrison Church in Potsdam, became a key site of national identification for the Nazis. After Hitler was elevated by conservatives to the chancellorship in 1933, he chose to open his first session of Parliament outside the Garrison Church, the site of Frederick’s burial, where he was greeted solemnly by then president Paul von Hindenburg. Hitler personally glorified Frederick, calming himself down from political defeat by reminding himself of Frederick’s losses and keeping an oil painting of Frederick above his desk in his bunker throughout the war. Goebbels and other Nazi propagandists repeatedly portrayed Frederick as the predecessor to the glorious German empire they were trying to build.³⁷ At the end of the war, Hitler had Frederick exhumed and moved to a salt mine lest bombs destroy the Garrison Church.

The Church survived the war but was demolished in 1968 by the East German Communists, who saw it as a site of right-wing nationalism. Frederick’s body was then spirited off to West Germany to a family castle during the years that Germany was divided. In 1991, after reunification and on the 205th anniversary of his death, Frederick was laid to rest in his chosen spot of the side terrace at Sanssouci, in a tomb marked with only a small plaque, where his greyhounds had once been interred.