The Unorthodox Nature of Frederick the Unique

Frederick the Great (1712-1786) (also Frederick II and the King of Prussia from 1740 to 1786) perhaps epitomized the 'Great Men' of history, whose force of personality and charisma left lasting impression on the German legacy. Possessed of a mysterious character whose true nature cannot be fully discerned from his writings, Frederick was a loquacious yet mysterious persona. Frederick harbored personal animus toward his militaristic, controlling father (Frederick William), not least because of the trauma he suffered under his care. The conflict between controlling father and wayward son was a recurring theme in the story of succession of the Hohenzollern family. Yet even in light of the perennial tensions between Hohenzollern monarch and Crown Prince, according to the renown historian Christopher Clark, ‘never had the struggle between father and son been waged with such emotional and psychological intensity’.

In attempting to fit ourselves into the mold society has prepared for us, we cannot forsake our ability for creativity, the same creativity that makes us unique. We must take the example of Frederick the Great, who despite extenuating circumstances preserved his eloquence and heterodoxy by dissembling his true emotion.

The Trauma of Friendship

Hans Hermann von Katte was a close friend and intimate of then Crown Prince Frederick. The young, cultivated man was the perfect companion to Frederick’s secular, philosophical and reflective personality and there were reports that ‘they carried on together like a lover with his mistress’. The episode which led to Katte’s unfortunate execution on the orders of Frederick William was a classic Oedipal struggle between father and son. The pathos of the relationship inevitably shaped Frederick II’s personality, for better or for worse. Regardless, the man who would eventually take on the title of “Great” had a penetrating, introspective intellect that colored all his writings.

The then Crown Prince was rebellious and intransigent, at least in the eyes of his brutish father, the ‘Soldier King’ Frederick William. The future Frederick the Great could hardly be more different from his father: he did not take well to soldierly duties, slept late, had messy hair, liked reading novels in his mother’s or sister’s room and was possessed of a cunning, oblique civility. He had first learned to hide his true feelings from the glare of his father, who was wont to express nothing but contempt for his son’s lapses in discipline, slapping and humiliating the lad in public at the slightest provocation or when he engaged in circuitous doublespeak.

Perhaps motivated by his impossible fate at the hands of his father, Crown Prince Frederick plotted clandestinely, with the aid of Katte, to make his escape from palace intrigues altogether, albeit in such a careless manner as to alert his father to his designs. Frederick William ordered the Crown Prince to be put under constant surveillance, and foiled their planned flight by engineering the withdrawal of Katte’s leave during which they intended to escape across the border. It is perhaps a testament to his state of mind and the resolution with which he intended to escape that the Crown Prince decided of his own accord one fateful night in August, 1730 to leave his father’s retinue (which he was accompanying on a journey to South Germany). Needless to say, he was easily captured, setting the stage for the trauma that he was about to experienced.

The Crown Prince was imprisoned immediately at the fortress at Kustrin by his livid father, who cracked down upon the prince’s friends and collaborators. The brunt of his rage however was directed at Katte, that close friend of Frederick’s. By attempting to turn him against the throne and plotting ‘high treason’, Katte had committed the very worst form of lèse majesté; for him the only redemption could be death.

Thus, Katte was sentenced to death. His execution by decapitation would take place in the fortress at Kustrin, in full view of the Crown Prince’s cell. As recounts have it, Frederick fainted into the arms of his guards just before the very moment of his friend’s decapitation. For days after that he would hover in a state of mental anguish, perhaps fueled by a sense of his imminent death.

It is easy to think that such an incident was the cause for the ossification of Frederick’s personality, turning him acerbic and hard, unwilling even in his private discourse to expose his true self. Yet it is impossible to know the true form of the pressure his father put him through that resulted in his affected personality. So it is that his greatness passed into posterity an enigma, confounding historians with a mystery that cannot be unraveled.

Philosopher King

As the Prussian monarch that would become immortalized as Frederick the Great, the King’s literary passions, the same infatuations of his youth, would evolve and exert a profound influence on his writings (works like his Anti-Machiavel, which in purely calculative fashion set the conditions that should galvanize a pre-emptive war). Throughout his war years, Frederick never stopped reading, devouring the works of Fenelon, Descartes, Bayle, Voltaire, Locke, Cicero and Rousseau among a multitude of others. He managed during his military expeditions by setting up field libraries and practicing not only his literary hand but also his musical skills (manifest in his love for playing the flute) through his many long, cold campaigns.

His superior intellect in things abstract combined with the raw power of the Hohenzollern throne to create the ‘Philosopher King’ whom was widely respected and glorified through panegyrics, encomiums and hagiographies – even by Hitler, who hoped, albeit untruthfully, to leverage Prussian patriotism in this way. In Frederick all worldly gifts seem to have converged. They were utilized ostensibly to their fullest extent in expanding the borders of Prussia and through three Silesian Wars, the first of which was executed in the very year of his accession, firmly established the Hohenzollern lands as one of the lesser powers operating on the world stage.

In analyzing Frederick the Great as a person, one cannot ignore his intensely philosophical and reflective personality. Deeply considering the travails of his era and specifically of his as yet fledgling kingdom gave him confidence, or perhaps more accurately the understanding as to how much that confidence should be tempered, in discharging his duty. He understood how to justify and rationalize his actions and applied these judiciously in his definitive histories of his many campaigns. Such a man is unique, no doubt. Yet as a unique specimen experiencing all the estrangement and alienation of his condition, he was never diverted from his goal, relying on his intense personal reflection to shape his actions and impact history.

Rebellious Deviant

As a sui generis specimen even amongst great men, Frederick the Great’s penchant for deviant attitudes is well-documented but not fully scoped out as a result of his silence with respect to his true self. Throughout his life he had possessed firm disregard of religious notions, describing the main confessional denominations such as Christianity as ‘an old metaphysical fiction, stuffed with miracles, contradictions and absurdities, which was spawned in the fevered imagination of the Orientals and then spread to our Europe, where some fanatics espoused it, some intriguers pretended to be convinced by it and some imbeciles actually believed it.’ Here was a rationalist – and exception rather than the norm – who would not be influenced by fanciful notions and superstitions.

In an age where non-conformity to religious sensibilities isolated oneself, Frederick the Great bravely stuck to his beliefs and personal, albeit atheistic, reflections. Even more shocking perhaps was the relaxed attitude he took to questions of sexual morality, in an age where Victorian-style conservatism dictated taboos. A man allegedly sentenced to death for engaging in repugnant bestiality with a she-donkey was personally pardoned by Frederick, who proclaimed rather wittily that ‘in his lands one enjoyed freedom of both conscience and penis’. While its veracity (it was a story recounted by Voltaire) is suspect, it conveys the sense of sexual freedom one had as a part of Frederick’s milieu.

Frederick’s own sexuality is cast in doubt by his friend Voltaire, who claimed that the King enjoyed daily bouts of ‘schoolboy amusement’ and had clandestine sessions with young cadets and stable hands. While there were likewise rumors of his heterosexual dalliances, these all came from the world of courtly gossip; Frederick himself confided to a Grumbkow that he felt ‘too little attracted to the female sex’ to be able to imagine marriage.

Whatever the case, it is certain that this was a very different sort of King, of a definitely differentiated stock from the usual heirs to the throne. His stubbornness in persisting in his conception of himself is laudable, much more so because of the era in which he lived.

Masculinity

What could not have been in doubt was the intensely masculine nature of Frederick the Great’s Court, an unlikely successor to his father’s Tobacco Ministry by virtue of the former’s intense antipathy. Nevertheless, decrying his father’s brutish character seems not to have extended to his misogyny: throughout Frederick’s reign, women came to disappear almost entirely from courtly life.

In this, and perhaps also as a result of his possible homosexuality Frederick the Great found himself free from the confines imposed by womanly temptation. Even his wife, Elisabeth of Brunswick-Bevern, he consigned to a sort of twilight existence at one of his many abodes. In 22 years, he was present at only two of her birthdays, commenting rather laconically that ‘Madame has grown fat’.

While Frederick the Great was certainly a larger-than-life figure, he broke so many conventions in his own era and even in relation to contemporary norms, that there is no shortage of novelty to be found from recounts of his life. Perhaps ‘Old Fritz’ had immortalized himself by living life to the extreme: always on terms solely his own.