The German Genius

best be achieved under conditions of order, such order being maintained by an established authority, in the person of the monarch.
    Although he was a conservative by European standards, Friedrich did bring about great change. After his accession in 1740, his many battlefield successes (achieved because of the strength and excellence of the army he inherited from his father, built up still further by him), combined with other civic reforms, completed Prussia’s great transformation into Germany’s foremost state and one of Europe’s great powers. 74
    Friedrich’s mother, Sophie Dorothea, was a Hanoverian princess whose brother was King George II of England. Her husband’s Pietist, masculine world, effective though it was, was not by any means to her taste and she was anxious lest it smother her children. Friedrich’s education was placed first in the hands of Huguenot soldiers, who introduced him to mathematics, economics, Prussian law, and modern history but also to fortification, tactics, and the other arts of war. His mother nevertheless insisted he be given his own library of several thousand books. As a result, even in his teens Friedrich became familiar with the leading French, English, and German writers (in more or less that order). 75
    As soon as he became king, he set up an Academy of Arts and Sciences in Berlin. Directed by a distinguished French mathematician, Pierre de Maupertuis, one aim of the academy was to attract to Berlin the best minds, who would form a learned circle around Friedrich. Day-to-day government was run from the Charlottenburg Palace on the outskirts of Berlin, while Friedrich’s circle of intellectuals met at Sans Souci, a specially built retreat in an area of lakes southwest of Berlin in Potsdam. Here the king entertained and argued with great minds such as Voltaire and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, one of the editors of the multivolume French Encyclopédie . 76 Five copies were bought of every book that Friedrich wished to read, since he possessed identical libraries at Potsdam, Sans Souci, Charlottenburg, Berlin, and Breslau. 77
    Amazingly, to our modern way of thinking, the Prussian king and his courtiers always spoke French to one another (Voltaire wrote home that he never heard German spoken at court). 78 Friedrich shunned his native tongue as “barbaric,” feeling its literary time had not yet arrived. In 1780 he went so far as to publicly criticize the German language in a pamphlet and admitted that the German books he wanted to read must be translated into French first. This was a man whose own writings included poetry, political and military tracts, philosophical treatises, and hundreds—if not thousands—of letters exchanged with leading intellectuals (645 letters with Voltaire alone, spanning forty-two years and filling three volumes). 79
    Friedrich was, nevertheless, unable to appreciate great swaths of contemporary culture. He was, for example, ignorant of Mozart and dismissed Haydn’s music as “a shindig that flays the ears.” He complained to Voltaire in 1775, the year after Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers ( The Sufferings of Young Werther ) was published, that German literature was nothing more than a “farrago of inflated phrases.” He despised new forms—the drama bourgeois , for instance—and he equally loathed ancient German epics such as the Nibelungenlied . 80 In his notorious 1780 essay, Concerning German Literature; the faults of which it can be accused; the causes of the same and the means of rectifying them , Friedrich argued that in material terms Germany was flourishing, having recovered finally from the ravages of the Thirty Years’ War, but that its culture was still suffering. What was needed now, he argued, was geniuses, but until they revealed themselves Germans must continue to rely on translations from classical and French authors. Friedrich thought that Germany’s cultural level was about two-and-a-half centuries behind that of France. “I am like Moses, I see the promised land from afar, but shall not enter it myself.” 81
    Despite Friedrich’s pessimism, many German artists and intellectuals were convinced that it was the king’s forging of Great-Power status for Prussia that had given German culture the decisive kick-start. Goethe even thought that the widespread infiltration of French culture into Prussia, through Friedrich’s tastes, was “highly beneficial” for Germans, spurring them on by provoking a