Friedrich der Große in Europa—gefeiert und umstritten Edited by Bernd Sösemann (review)

The 200th anniversary of the birth of Friedrich II of Prussia occasioned in Germany what one popular news magazine termed the “Friedrich-Hype” among broad segments of the educated public. The publication by Die Zeit of a newly discovered erotic poem dubbed the “orgasm poem” unleashed a public reception of the jubilee that revealed more about contemporary twenty-first century middlebrow popular culture than about scholarly engagement with the life and times of Friedrich.

This slim volume edited by Bernd Sösemann seeks to balance the treatment of Friedrich II by making accessible to that same general reading public some of the fruits of a Europe-wide research project, three years in preparation, which bore fruit in events and exhibits throughout 2011 in Hamburg, London, Como, Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Wroclaw, Turin, and Moscow. The project produced a massive, 1128-page two-volume work of fifty essays for the use of scholars (Bernd Sösemann and Gregor Vogt-Spira, eds., Friedrich der Große in Europa. Geschichte einer wechselvollen Beziehung [2012]), and Sösemann selected the essays in the volume under review to reach a broader public. In fourteen contributions that range from overviews to scholarly analysis, from a translation of the erotic poem to a transcription of a field letter from Friedrich to a commander during the Second Silesian War with a postscript in French in Friedrich’s own hand, the contributions in this volume provide a useful and accessible overview to any scholar who wishes to find a quick update on the latest scholarship on Friedrick II.

An opening essay by Peter Paret provides both a survey of Friedrich’s life and of the history of his depiction in biographies. Working from the assessment by the British ambassador to Berlin, James Harris, of the “great contradictions in the character of this monarch” (14), Paret explores how Friedrich compartmentalized his life, which permitted great personal grace and tenderness to be combined with ruthless and brutal instrumentalism as he shifted roles between enlightened individual and monarch charged with the pursuit of raison d’état. Characterizing Friedrich as rooted firmly in the ancien régime despite all of his enlightened attitudes, Johannes Kunisch’s essay analyzes Friedrich’s first work of political theory, which brought him Europe-wide notice, the Antimachiavell, which appeared in 1740, the year of his succession, as well as his disputation with Baron d’Holbach over the latter’s Essay on Prejudice of 1770. Michel Kerautret contributes from a French perspective an analysis of Friedrich as author and as the “king-philosopher,” drawing upon Friedrich’s published works and his correspondence with Voltaire.

Other essays in the opening section, notably one by Swiss scholar Ursula Pia Jauch, treat the erotic poem by Friedrich to and about Francesco Algarotti, explaining the story of how that Venetian scholar crossed Friedrich’s path—a very eighteenth-century story of cosmopolitanism—and of how Friedrich came to write his poem in a competitive correspondence with Algarotti. Hans-Ulrich Seifert’s essay shows how the poem’s 2011 “discovery” ignored its earlier publications as long ago as 1933. Jauch also provides a German translation from the original French. The material ultimately demonstrates both the playfulness of Friedrich II, as well as the triviality of contemporary popular fascination with sex.

The third section of the volume consists of essays by non-German scholars who consider Friedrich II’s relations with and attitudes toward France (Jean-Paul Bled) and Austria (Carsten Kretschmann). Two fascinating additional essays warrant mention. Peer Vries of the University of Vienna provides a fascinating comparison between Friedrich II and his almost exact contemporary, the Qianlong Emperor of China (1711–1799) of the Qing dynasty. Like Friedrich, the Qianlong Emperor expanded his kingdom, annexed and had to administer new territories, and presided over a blooming and prosperous era in China’s history. A reformer of law and administration like Friedrich, the...