Could Frederick the Great have prevented the Great War?

A headache-inducing counterfactual

Cropped version of Anton Graff’s famous painting of Frederick the Great aged 68.

On Friday, I did something I hadn’t done in a while. I visited Sanssouci Park in Potsdam, around 16 miles southwest of Berlin. It’s a special place for me. When I lived in Germany, growing up in the state of Brandenburg, of which Potsdam is the capital, I would often visit. There was something special about the picture-perfect landscaping, the spectacular splendour of the Prussian palaces and the careful composition of it all, everything leading to one end: escapism.

The endless gardens were perfect for running wild as a child. I have a very clear memory of racing my best friend down the terraced steps of the vineyard until we were both giddy and breathless, and the worried calls of our parents were far enough away to ignore. But it was more than that. Everything seemed arranged to drag you away from the mundane real world into a fantasy one. One with kings and philosophers, flutes and dogs.

Sanssouci around 1900

For those who haven’t been, Sanssouci is a vast park with the eponymous small palace as its centre-piece. The palace was built in the 1740s by the Prussian King Frederick the Great as his personal summer retreat. The name Sanssouci means “without a care” in French, and that’s exactly what Frederick wanted, an escape from the pressure of court life, a place where he could relax, write, read, play music and host intellectuals (Voltaire being the most famous guest). Unlike other royal palaces that scream power and excess, Sanssouci feels intimate. Almost modest. Well, by royal standards, at least.

The rooms aren’t massive ballrooms, but smaller, filled with light and art and colour. There is a guest room with parrots and monkeys on the walls. In another room, Frederick’s flute rests on a piano that had once been played by C. P. E. Bach, son of Johann Sebastian Bach. There is the armchair that has a special back-supporting cushion fitted to keep the ageing Frederick comfortable. In the end, he became so unwell that he had to sleep in it. He died in it too in 1786. Everything about Sanssouci is personal to the famous Prussian King and deeply human.

At the opposite end of the grounds looms the New Palace, an impressive architectural showpiece of columns, statues, and grandeur. This was also commissioned by Frederick, but primarily to impress foreign dignitaries and his own family members after the Seven Years’ War. He hosted guests there graciously enough, but he never liked it or felt comfortable there. Tellingly, Frederick avoided living in it despite having a royal apartment in the building. When he attended parties with guests at the New Palace, he was taken home at the end of the evening, that is, across the park and back to Sanssouci.

The New Palace. Img: A.Savin, Wikipedia.

But guess which of his successors absolutely loved the big palace with its 200 rooms, its shell-covered Grotto Hall, its giant bed chambers and its ability to make guests look small and humbled? That’s right. The New Palace was right up Kaiser Wilhelm II’s street. While he was barely ever at home, travelling Germany so much that people called him the Reisekaiser or “Travelling Emperor”, when he was at home, that home was the New Palace, especially at Christmas.

On Friday, we visited the New Palace first and then Sanssouci. The contrast between the two is stark, and I couldn’t help but wonder what it said about the two Hohenzollern monarchs, one drawn to measured elegance and private thought; the other, to spectacle, symbolism, and the projection of power. Complex counterfactuals came unbidden into my tired mind, which was beginning to be overstimulated by a day’s worth of exposure to Prussian pomp:

What if the two men had swapped places? How would the more calculating, sensitive and principled Frederick have responded to the challenges in the buildup to the First World War?

Depiction of Wilhelm II.

Frederick the Great’s strategic restraint and political pragmatism stand in stark contrast to Wilhelm II’s impulsive, often theatrical style of leadership. Of course, Frederick waged war, but never for show. He regarded war as a political tool for defending or expanding vital interests. Wilhelm, on the other hand, dismissed Chancellor Otto von Bismarck within two years of his accession, deeming the old man’s geopolitical caution and prudence obsolete.

Wilhelm then appointed less strong-minded successors, abandoned Bismarck’s realpolitik, and plunged Germany into a hazardous new foreign policy: Weltpolitik, which went on to challenge Britain, antagonise France, and unsettle Russia. Frederick, ever the diplomat-king, might have sought to maintain Bismarck’s web of careful alliances, particularly the Reinsurance Treaty with Russia, which Wilhelm allowed to lapse in 1890, opening the door to the Franco-Russian rapprochement that would raise fear of encirclement in Germany.

Frederick’s instincts were those of a balancer, not a disruptor. He prized “Ruhe und Ordnung” or tranquillity and order as prerequisites for prosperity. Unlike Wilhelm, he was neither obsessed with the navy nor with besting Britain. Under his reign, Germany might have avoided the naval arms race, which Wilhelm pursued with reckless ambition. Frederick admired British constitutionalism and Enlightenment ideals; he might have sought alignment or at least cordial neutrality with Britain, not maritime competition. The Kaiser’s High Seas Fleet, which antagonised London and helped solidify the Entente Cordiale, was a monument to his own ambition rather than strategy.

On the flipside, Wilhelm was a man of his time. He wasn’t the only one obsessed with new technologies, seafaring, and social Darwinism. Pro-colonial and pro-naval lobby groups had swelled in size, ambition and power to a point where even Bismarck couldn’t stop them from their reckless ventures. They would have mounted the same pressure on Frederick, and he might have deemed it more prudent to yield than withstand.

In the Balkans, Europe’s perennial powderkeg, Frederick’s realpolitik might have made a difference. In 1914, Wilhelm gave Austria-Hungary the infamous “blank cheque”, promising unconditional support in its confrontation with Serbia, thereby transforming a regional crisis into a world war. Frederick, more mindful of long-term equilibrium than short-term alliance loyalty, might have counselled restraint in Vienna, recognising the perils of inflaming pan-Slavic nationalism and provoking Russia.

But Frederick could not have halted the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, the rise of nationalist fervour, the willingness of interest groups to use violence and the general air of revolution that pervaded many parts of Europe. He, too, would have had a hard time holding a German society together in which socialists and the old and new elites clashed, in which Catholics and Protestants viewed each other with suspicion, in which Polish, Danish and French minorities were unhappy. He, too, may have seen the war as a potent unifier.

Who knows? In the shade of Sanssouci’s colonnades, one senses a ruler who sought quiet reflection over imperial noise. A man who preferred the serenity of a vineyard to the bombast of a marble palace. Such a man at the helm of a nation in crisis might indeed have made a difference for Germany and for the world in 1914. But as much as Sanssouci is a pleasurable escape from reality, that escape is an illusion. Frederick, too, would have had to deal with the world as it was, not as he wanted it to be.

So I’m afraid I’m going to have to leave you with these unsatisfying musings. History, alas, doesn’t allow substitutions, and complex counterfactuals usually deliver more headaches than insights. You’re welcome to this particular one, especially if it inspires a future trip to Potsdam. If you haven’t been in a while, go back. And if you’ve never been, go with open eyes. Sanssouci might not answer all your questions, but it’ll give you plenty of space to ask them.