Sodom in Potsdam

Reacquaintance with Germany is long overdue for most English people. Before 1914 it was at least as familiar as France and Italy. Tim Blanning, former professor of Modern European History at Cambridge, has already written brilliantly about Germany in books such as The Culture of Power and The Triumph of Music. His latest is a 625-page biography of Frederick II (a hero in his lifetime to many Englishmen), which also illuminates Berlin, Potsdam and Prussia in the 18th century. It is sure to be the standard English-language account for many years. It instructs; it entertains; and it surprises. Blanning shows that this hereditary monarch, born in Berlin in 1712, could be more radical than most leaders today. Atheist and homosexual, he called Christianity an ‘odd metaphysical fiction’, and Jesus the ‘Ganymede’ of the Apostle John.

Thanks to Blanning’s use of newly discovered (or previously ignored) poems and letters, readers learn that the Prussian royal family was so odious that it makes the House of Hanover, to whom it was closely related (Frederick the Great was a cousin, namesake and role model for Frederick, Prince of Wales), seem normal. Frederick’s father, Frederick William I, was a screaming psychopath who traumatised his son by forcing him to witness the execution of his lover, Lieutenant von Katte.

After Frederick’s accession in 1740, he became, in his turn, the tormentor of the family. Although he did not imprison his wife like George I, he repeatedly humiliated ‘this incorrigibly sour subspecies of the female sex’, as he called her. They barely met. His nephew and heir, the future Frederick William II, wrote of him in 1780: ‘That animal is a right scourge of God, spat out of Hell on to earth by God’s wrath.’

After his accession, in Blanning’s words Frederick ‘came out’. He spent most of his time far from prying eyes in Potsdam, south- west of Berlin, and enjoyed ‘intimate relations’ with young officers, as well as his first valet Fredersdorf.