Thoroughly Modern Freddy.

• Author: Howard, Michael

Giles MacDonogh, Frederick the Great (London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1999), 416 pp., [pounds]25.

Frederick the great has always puzzled posterity. "We hardly know any instance of the strength and weakness of human nature so striking and so grotesque", Macaulay famously wrote of him, "as the character of this haughty, vigilant, resolute, sagacious blue-stocking, half Mithridates and half Trissotin, bearing up against a world in arms, with an ounce of poison in one pocket and a quire of bad verses in another." Giles MacDonogh points out in this latest biography how each generation has formed a different image of Frederick, all equally false. For nineteenth-century Germany he was the great Founder of their Nation - in spite of the fact that he hardly spoke a word of German, thought that German singers sounded like "the neighing of a horse", and regarded his own subjects as "nasty animals" who had to be ruled in their best interests by an enlightened elite. For Germany's enemies, he was the creator of the "Prussian militarism" that was to disturb the peace of Europe for two hundred years. For military buffs he is one of the "Great Captains" of history, whose campaigns should be studied to find the philosopher's stone of military success; while for some he was the archetypal Hero sketched by Carlyle, a Nietzschean Superman grimly battling against impossible odds, whose picture hung on the wall of the Fuhrerbunker in Berlin and whose example was to inspire Adolf Hitler in the last days of the Third Reich.

In all these images, other aspects of Frederick's character are suppressed; his gifts as a flautist and a composer, his wide reading, his patronage of the arts, his friendship with Voltaire and other luminaries of the Enlightenment, his huge literary and epistolary output, and the circle that he created around himself of a talented and witty group of men friends, the sexuality of at least some of whom was highly ambiguous. Giles MacDonogh makes a gallant effort to escape from the traditional stereotypes, and to depict Frederick in the round by "letting him speak for himself." The result is a pleasantly written and very readable biography based largely on Frederick's printed writings and correspondence; but the author's very lack of selectivity means that, in spite of all his efforts, he ends up by presenting yet another misleading picture of his subject.

Frederick sought relief from the huge pressures of office, partly through his music (he played the flute for at least an hour every day and composed about two hundred concertos for it), partly through manic composition of very indifferent poetry, but very largely through a huge correspondence with the illuminati of Europe as a whole, and a group of intimates in particular, among whom Voltaire was pre-eminent. MacDonogh allows this correspondence to mold his own portrait of him. Frederick's military exploits are dealt with very summarily indeed, and his administrative achievements get a bare...