Frederick the Great: A Historical Profile

224 Pages·1968·10.009 MB·English

by  Gerhard Ritter, Peter Paret (ed.)

Fredericks signature [Frch — Friedrich\ is ta\en from a letter to
d'Alembert of I August IJ8O.
Frederic^ in his seventieth year, painted by Anton Graff.
TRANSLATED, WITH AN INTRODUCTION, BY
PETER PARET
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
BERKELEY, LOS ANGELES, LONDON
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
This is a translation of the. third edition of
Friedrich der Grosse: Ein Historisches Profil
published by Quelle & Meyer, Heidelberg, 1954.
Copyright © 1968, by
The Regents of the University of California
First Paperback Edition, 1974
ISBN: 0-520-02775-2
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 68-15815
Printed in the United States of America
5 6 7 8 9 0
A Note on the Paperback Edition
GERHARD RITTER'S biography o£ Frederick the Great origi-
nated in a series of lectures, which were published with scarcely
any revisions in 1936. In my translation, based on the third edition,
published in 1954, I have tried to convey the hard and precise style
that characterizes the German text, while eliminating some of the
numerous adjectives and parallel phrases that a lecturer might have
found useful for emphasis but which seem unnecessary on the
printed page. With the author's agreement I have also excluded the
brief introduction and epilogue of the original, since they are ad-
dressed specifically to the German reader and to German condi-
tions. Gerhard Ritter died in 1967, shortly after the translation was
completed; I shall always remember the kindness and tolerance with
which he responded to my questions and suggestions. I am also
grateful to Mrs. Fannia Weingartner of San Francisco, to the edi-
torial staff of the University of California Press, and most particu-
larly to Herbert F. Mann, Jr., now of the Oxford University Press,
for their help in preparing the manuscript for publication. Some
minor changes and corrections aside, the text of the paperback edi-
tion is the same as that of the original American edition of 1968.
Peter Paret
Stanford, California
April, 1974

by
Peter Paret
FEW BIOGRAPHIES present convincing interpretations of their
subjects. Even fewer add to our understanding of historical pro-
cesses, and their number is being increased neither by modern tech-
niques of research nor by today's psychological and literary fash-
ions. In each biography the basic difficulties of the genre reappear,
the solutions of which depend less on the historian's methods than
on his insight and sympathy. In the past, biographers were occa-
sionally advised to confine themselves strictly to their subject's per-
sonal and professional experiences. "Broad views," Edmund Gosse
wrote in a famous article in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, "are en-
tirely out of place in biography, and there is perhaps no greater lit-
erary mistake than to attempt what is called the 'Life and Times'
of a man." This leaves the question open of whether the one can be
understood without studying the other; indeed it was the weakness
of Gosse's own biographical writings that they imbued such figures
as Donne and Jeremiah Taylor with all the characteristics of Ed-
wardian literary notables. Today few would agree with him. Far
more common—among general readers, if not historians—is the as-
sumption that biography is a particularly effective tool of general
history. The hero's life-span gives the work its structure; he also
provides it with its interpretive core by functioning as a prism in
which the author captures and refracts the conditions of the age.
And yet nothing is more ambiguous than the connections that exist
between man and his environment; between his psyche and his ac-
tions. Man never fully becomes one with his affairs; no amount of
documentation can ever wholly clarify the relationship between the
external world and the thoughts, wishes, and fears of the individual.
Gerhard Ritter does not completely resolve the problems that
Frederick the Great poses to historical analysis. Indeed his book
vii
viii Introduction
does not even face them all, and its interest and force are derived
partly from its evasions. The text is based on lectures Ritter deliv-
ered at the University of Freiburg in 1933 and 1934. Since he talked
about a figure in the German pantheon, he felt no need to delve
into details; he could risk developing his interpretations from a
few allusions, certain that his listeners' reading and their school
memories would enable them to provide a factual accompaniment
to his variations. The result is an analysis of Frederick and the age
of absolutism, which, although brief and even impressionistic,
brings out with great clarity the themes that are of paramount in-
terest to the author. Nor does his brevity lead to imbalance; on the
contrary, one of the assets of the biography is its comprehensive-
ness. From the king's social conservatism to his theories of litera-
ture, every essential aspect of his life is at least touched on, and the
syntheses, which often compress the result of generations of schol-
arship into one paragraph, are done with such skill that they end
by becoming self-explanatory. The sparse treatment, originally dic-
tated by the needs of the lecture platform, becomes a quality in it-
self, capable of existing in an alien environment. English and
American readers, who do not bring to Frederick the emotional
awareness of Ritter's German audience, may be more critical of his
conclusions; the view of Europe from the vantage points of Berlin
and Potsdam which he offers may seem strange to them, but
should also be fresh and instructive.
Frederic^ the Great is less the product of its author's archival re-
search than of his reflections on the history of political ideas. It
deals with a subject which in different forms occupied Ritter
throughout his long career as a scholar.1 In the sequence of his
writings, the volume followed books and papers on the Renais-
sance, on Luther, on Bismarck's domestic and foreign policies, and
the splendid biography of Stein, completed four years earlier. It re-
turns to questions that these works had raised: the differences be-
tween Germany's past and that of her Western neighbors; the role
of power and its ethical problems, particularly in the development
of political institutions and in the relations between states. At the
1A thoughtful introduction to Ritter's work is contained in Andreas
Dorpalen's article "Historiography as History: The Works of Gerhard
Ritter," Journal of Modern History, XXXIV, no. 1 (1962), 1-18.
Introduction ix
same time the book served as a point of departure for Ritter's im-
portant achievement after 1945, the volumes on The Political Art
and the Craft of War, with their subtitle "The Problem of Mili-
tarism in Germany," which range from eighteenth century Prussia
to the end of the First World War. Power, its responsible use, and
its abuse, was a permanent concern of Ritter, both as historian and
as German citizen, and his biography of Frederick is a concise
essay on one aspect of this general theme.
When Frederick ascended the throne in 1740 he fell heir to the
accumulated resources of generations. It still required exceptional
ability and ambition to give Prussia a voice in the conduct of in-
ternational affairs that accorded with her political and military po-
tential. The risks her ruler took were great, but by the end of the
Seven Years' War Prussia had become one of the major powers on
the Continent. This revolution in the affairs of Europe was
achieved by means that were far from revolutionary. Frederick was
rarely an innovator, and then only in relatively unimportant mat-
ters. He accepted Europe for what it was and he had a clear un-
derstanding of his own strengths and weaknesses; his success came
from his willingness to exploit the potentials of both Prussia and
the age to their limit. He himself later admitted that at the begin-
ning of his reign he was too much influenced by personal ambi-
tion; soon, however, his feelings were sublimated into the demands
of the state, as he interpreted them. His policies might still be ruth-
less, but now were subject to limitations imposed by his cautious
evaluation of what Prussia could and could not achieve. His real-
ism and his identification with the state—a sense of kinship in
which responsibility and service played a role—saved him from
copying Louis XIV's vainglory or the disastrous adventures of
Charles XII. Gradually his youthful egotism was channeled into
paths, which, while always dangerous to neighbors and rivals, at
least proved constructive for the Prussian monarchy. In the course
of his reign, so Ritter sums up the process, Frederick, as much as
any individual can, came to exemplify the rational use of state
power.
The interpretation of Frederick as the personified raison d'état is
given urgency by an unhistorical concern on the part of the author.
The direction Germany was taking under Hitler's leadership con-
x Introduction
firmed Ritter's deepest fears about modern totalitarianism. By un-
derlining the share that prudent government had in Prussia's rise
to power, he cautioned against the irrationality and irresponsibility
of Germany's new masters—a warning expressed with particular
force at the beginning of his discussion of Frederick's conquest of
Silesia. Ritter's audience could be in no doubt about the nature of
his message. The review of the first edition in the Historische Zeit-
schrift declared that the biography's "constant and one-sided em-
phasis of the rational element in the person and work of Frederick
can be interpreted only as a warning against policies based on emo-
tion." 2 Looking back on the book's appearance, Walter Dorn later
wrote in the American Historical Review that its "scholarly tone
and critical temper were also designed to be a sharp repudiation of
the inebriated glorification of Frederick by the frenzied nationalists
of the Nazi era."3 As might be expected, however, Ritter was not
content with simply confronting twentieth-century demagoguery
with Frederician absolutism; a comparison of two such dissimilar
epochs could scarcely do much to further our understanding of ei-
ther. Instead he sought to establish a German tradition of rational
power politics, whose most successful exponents he found in Fred-
erick and Bismarck. Not that joining these two figures was with-
out dangers of its own. As one of the most acute reviewers of the
book has pointed out, Bismarck's Realpoliti\ differed fundamen-
tally from the rationalistic policies of Frederick.4 This is not the
only occasion that Ritter has been condemned for being vague in
his use of basic ideas—a criticism that will always find targets
2 Gerhard Oestreich in the Historische Zeitschrijt, CLXI, no. 3 (1940),
600.
3 In his discussion of the third German edition in the American His-
torical Review, LIX, no. 4 (1954), 1006. In the same vein Klaus Epstein
describes the book as "the most interesting recent one-volume biography
in German . . . stimulating for its scholarship and for the parallels and
lessons that it draws for Nazi Germany." See Epstein's "Bibliographical
Note" in his edition of Sidney B. Fay's The Rise of Brandenburg-Prussia
to IJ86, New York, 1964, p. 133.
4 Eberhard Kessel, in his review of the first German edition in the
Forschungen zur Brandenburgischen und Preussischen Geschichte, XLIX,
no. 2 (1937), 413.