Prussian and powerful

Frederick the Great: King of Prussia. By Tim Blanning. Allen Lane; 672 pages; £30. To be published in America by Random House in March; $35.

FREDERICK II of Prussia was one of the most singular men ever to sit on a throne—he played music with Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, debated with Voltaire and produced a stream of learned treatises of his own. He won a succession of wars, transforming Prussia from a mere “sandbox of the Holy Roman Empire” into a great power. He also prided himself on his enlightened rule at home. At a time when monarchs were regarded as semidivine beings who could cure diseases with the royal touch, he despised religion as a farrago of nonsense, avoided court life, doffed his hat to ordinary Prussians and encouraged inoculation against smallpox.

Yet Frederick’s judgment was frequently wayward. He had a low opinion of both Shakespeare and Goethe. He underpaid C.P.E. Bach and quarrelled with Voltaire, whom he brought to Prussia to be his court philosopher. His own writing was frequently “confused in structure, feeble in execution, commonplace in poetic style”, to quote one contemporary critic. He was also a bundle of contradictions. He wrote a vigorous treatise, “Against Machiavelli”, enjoining kings to be peacemakers. Less than three months after it was published he invaded a neighbouring state, Silesia. He was one of the grandfathers of German nationalism. But he almost always used French, sharing Voltaire’s view that German was a language fit to be spoken only by peasants and to horses. Frederick preached toleration. But he tried to control the press and disliked Jews, Poles, Russians and, when the mood took him, any other group of people. The only creatures he really liked were dogs, in particular his Italian greyhounds: he invented the phrase “a dog is a man’s best friend” and left orders that he should be buried in a tomb next to his dogs, instructions that were finally fulfilled, after a long odyssey, in 1991.

So why does he deserve to be called Frederick the Great? Both Carl von Clausewitz, a Prussian military thinker, and Napoleon regarded him as among the most talented commanders ever. He took a patchwork of territories and knitted them into a great power. He turned the Prussian army into the most disciplined fighting machine in the world, developed new military techniques such as attacking divisions from the side, and cleverly turned foe against foe to Prussia’s advantage.

He was also a dynamo of activity. He got up long before dawn and set immediately to work. In wartime he rode at the head of his army, taking a library of books with him so he could continue his scholarly work. In peacetime, he circumnavigated his kingdom, calling on local bigwigs to make sure they were doing their jobs properly. He believed firmly in the landed aristocracy, insisting it had to forgo the luxuries that emasculated the French nobility and devote itself instead to serving the state, particularly the army.

Here lay his biggest contradiction: this paragon of Spartan virtue was also a devotee of Athenian luxury. Frederick built a baroque pleasure palace in Potsdam called Sanssouci, and surrounded himself exclusively with men, most of them young, handsome and dressed in tight trousers. There is some debate about how active Frederick was sexually—several contemporaries speculated that he was more of a voyeur, having lost the use of his penis to a sexually transmitted disease and a botched operation. But he made little attempt to conceal his preferences. He built a palace for his boyfriend and visited his wife less than once a year.

How to explain this bundle of energy and contradictions? One answer was his father. Frederick William I was a monster: a pigheaded bigot who forced his son to spend his childhood on the parade ground and regarded his interest in books and music as a sign of effeminacy. He bullied him so badly that the boy tried to flee the country with his best friend. Frederick the elder punished him by having his friend beheaded in front of his eyes. He later forced him to marry Elisabeth Christine of Brunswick Wolfenbüttel-Bevern, who, according to young Frederick’s sister Charlotte, smelt so rank that “she must have a dozen or so anal fistulas”. Everything Frederick did was designed both to defy his father and to get the better of him. Even as he flaunted his love of learning, he expanded Prussia’s power far beyond anything the old man could have imagined. This anti-father fixation put the great into Frederick. But it also turned him into a brute who bullied his siblings just as he had been bullied himself and turned his most talented brother, Henry, into an implacable enemy.

Frederick’s life has been chronicled many times: Thomas Carlyle wrote a six-volume study of the great man designed to illustrate his thesis that history is the work of heroes rather than impersonal forces. Tim Blanning, an emeritus professor of history at Cambridge University, has provided a valuable service by distilling the latest scholarship for the general reader—he does an excellent job of making sense of the intricacies of 18th-century diplomacy and subjecting the ideological zeal of earlier historians to the cool eye of modern scholarship. Sadly the distilling has not gone far enough. Mr Blanning switches from the home front to foreign policy and back in a way that is both confusing and repetitious. He says almost nothing about Frederick’s posthumous reputation, proclaiming loftily that “his eventful afterlife has been recounted many times and does not need to be repeated here”, directing readers, in a footnote, to a couple of books in German.

He does not even bother to mention the fact that Hitler frequently compared himself to Frederick; Goebbels commissioned portraits of the three architects of the Reich: Hitler, Frederick and Bismarck. Professional historians like to quote Herbert Butterfield’s injunction against writing history with “one eye, so to speak, upon the present”. But writing a biography without considering the question of whether he prepared the ground for Germany’s worst 20th-century demagogue is taking professional self-denial a little too far.