A Brill Calendar: January 24

Frederick the Great

Few national states received from historiography such dissimilar assessments as Prussia.

These assessments range from the paradigm of crass Teutonic arrogance to the world’s first truly modern state.

Almost instantly after the fall of Spain as a planet-encompassing nation at the end of the 17th century, the feudal domain of Brandenburg underwent a political metamorphosis into a kingdom, prepared by the patient sagacity and sound financing of Friedrich Wilhelm von Hohenzollern (1620 – 1688), nick-named ‘Der Grosse Kurfürst’ (‘the Great Elector’), His son, another Friedrich (1657 - 1713), first King in Prussia, crowning himself January 18 1701 in Königsberg. His militant grandson, Friedrich Wilhelm (1688 – 1740), succeeded on the brand-new throne as Prussia’s second King. When it all began, Berlin was a provincial town, incomparable to cosmopolitan cities like Vienna, Frankfurt or Amsterdam.

No lack of royal Friedrichs in German history then, but the one born on January 24 1712 in Berlin and passing away in nearby Potsdam on August 17 1786 – great-grandson of the Great Elector – became the only Friedrich indicated by posterity universally as ‘Frederick the Great’. In some eighty years a small German ‘Land’ - a back-water in European politics - became a paragon of enlightened despotism, especially during the reign of ‘Der alte Fritz’ in the middle of the 18th century. Voltaire’s flute-playing ‘soul-mate’ valued the power-balance in Europe as highly and consistently as he cherished French literature, arts & sciences.

The shockwaves from this epoch could be felt not so very far away. In the contemporary Republic of the Seven United Provinces, a rapidly increasing general (and scholarly) interest in the German-speaking world was seen. It is seldom explicitly acknowledged that the pre-eminence of German academic learning, scholarship and ‘Bildung’, prevailing during the 19th century could hardly have come into being without the rise of Prussia to the status of a great nation in Europe.