Friedrich’s youth had been, to say the least, rebellious. His father had wanted to mold the prince into his own image of a Soldatenkönig, a hard-bitten warrior and statesman. When the experiment failed, he tried to force him to resign his rights of succession. Finally, after one humiliation too many, Fried-rich attempted to flee to Paris with his friend Lieutenant von Katte. The two young men were caught, Friedrich was locked up in his room, and von Katte was executed under the prince’s window. Friedrich then began to see the merits of dissembling. He bought himself some peace by pretending obedience to his father, inspecting the troops and marrying a niece of the Austrian empress Maria Theresa whom he afterwards visited only once every twelve months, on her birthday. For the few years preceding his accession, he lived in the newly rebuilt Palace of Rheinsberg, reading, writing, composing music, playing the flute, and corresponding with Voltaire. If he had modeled his life on a literary figure, it would have been Shakespeare’s Prince Hal. Voltaire was his Falstaff, and as Hal with Falstaff, Friedrich parted from his master when he chose to truly assume his role as king. The break between the two men occurred in 1753, three years before the start of the Seven Years’ War, which was to grant Friedrich the appellation “Great.”
But from 1750 to 1753, Voltaire was Friedrich’s guide, while Friedrich lent Voltaire the illusion that the myth of the philosopher-king could indeed become reality. With promises of money and applause, Friedrich lured Voltaire to Sanssouci. Here Voltaire, like his host, led a quiet, regulated, retired life, as if following the midrashic principles of Eden. “What do you do here at Sanssouci?” someone was once asked. “We conjugate the verb ‘to be bored,’” was the answer. Voltaire worked at his writing and at pretending to be ill. He was almost sixty years old.
Without truly being conscious of it, Voltaire had granted Friedrich a philosophical justification for being who he was. The small palace of only twelve rooms, with its library, its picture gallery and music room, but above all the gardens, carefully plotted and artfully kept, lent the king the illusion of power over all the forces of nature, allowing him, rather than to explore the vast and secret rules of nature, to render familiar the unfamiliar, that is to say, to translate and simplify, to abridge, explain, and gloss. To ensure an uninterrupted continuity between the palace and the garden, Friedrich had, against the advice of his architect Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff, dispensed with a ground story. In this way, the notions of outside and inside broke down and intermingled, the inside becoming part of the wilderness of nature, the outside domesticated by its connection to the interior.
Friedrich had intuited that we render a place artificial merely by being in it. Our presence (as strollers or as residents) humanizes a landscape, and while topiaries and manicured lawns, patterned flowerbeds and staggered terraces frame that which is essentially alien and wild, these artifices simply confirm the original hierarchies of Eden, when Adam was made lord of all flowers and all trees, with one notorious exception. A cultivated place showed the hand of man — so much so that visitors at Sanssouci sometimes complained that they couldn’t see the trees for all the gold and marble. Wilderness, instead, is that place, as God says to Job, where the rain falls on the earth “where no man is.” It exists by contrast to our presence; it is a closed book whose text does not come into being until it is opened and read.
At about the same time and in other places, gardeners were discovering that same notion. Horace Walpole, writing about the landscape artist William Kent, noted that “he leaped the fence, and saw that all nature was a garden.” Kent did what in another context Marcel Duchamp was to do centuries later: he put a frame around the readymades of nature. He called the wilderness a garden simply because he was there to look upon it, and merely redistributed what he found for better effect in a procedure Alexander Pope was to call “landscape painting.” A rock was moved, a watercourse diverted, but the general aspect of the garden remained decidedly “wild.” Kent’s masterstroke took place in 1735, when, under the patronage of Queen Caroline, he planted a dead tree in Richmond Gardens. The gesture was directly equivalent to the use of unattributed quotations in so much eighteenth-century writing, for instance in the work of Laurence Sterne.
In contrast with Kent’s “recuperation” of the wilderness in England, Friedrich’s Sanssouci was a model of French artifice, a product of human reason. Kent’s wilderness was, in some sense, a response to the English Puritans’ abhorrence of the geometrical forms in gardens, to the logical constructions that, according to them, prevented the soul from finding its narrow path. Sanssouci, on the other hand, obeyed the baroque impulse born with the Counter-Reformation, the intuition that truth can best be revealed in hiding, in the elaborate volutes and spirals that lend presence to a concept by enclosing it. Looking towards the palace, a visitor would have been able to follow the careful lines of terraced gardens which look, especially in winter when the trellises are visible, like rising rows of bookshelves in a dream library; the viewer would probably reflect for a moment on the circumscribed passages of laid-out parterres, enjoy the convoluted swirls that surrounded the central fountain, remember the stories of the ancient gods illustrated by the sculptures. In his Essai sur les moeurs, written at Sanssouci, Voltaire had noted that “it is not in the nature of man to desire that which he does not know” and that therefore he required “not only a prodigious length of time but also felicitous circumstances to rise above his animal state.” Sanssouci allowed the visitor to understand how nature could be reasoned, could be read through its unfurled texts revealed in apparently coded flowerbeds and deliberately arranged views, could be reflected in poetical compositions and musical scores, could be understood through baroque emblems and artifices, thereby encouraging an ardent desire for natural knowledge. At least, that was the intention.
But Friedrich became disillusioned with Voltaire’s teachings, or with Voltaire the man, or with that part of himself that as a youngster had believed that there was wisdom in art beyond the scope of power and accomplishments in the spirit that no imperial armies could conquer. He had opposed his personal vanity to that of his father, the sophisticated, cultured identity of the heir apparent to the brutish, ambitious identity of Friedrich I. Like Prince Hal, Prince Friedrich suddenly realized that “The tide of blood in me / Hath proudly flow’d in vanity till now: / Now doth it turn and ebb back to the sea, / Where it shall mingle with the state of floods / And flow henceforth in formal majesty.” Of such majesty Voltaire wanted no part even though in his Memoirs he was to confess: “I could not but be attracted to him, because he was witty, graceful, and also because he was a king, which always proves very seductive, given our human weakness.”
According to Novalis, when Adam was sent out of Eden, the shattered remains of Paradise were scattered all over the earth, and that is the reason why Paradise is so difficult to recognize. Novalis hoped that these fragments would somehow be brought together, its skeleton filled out. Perhaps the young Friedrich had entertained the same hope since Voltaire had taught him to believe in the uttermost importance of philosophy and art that sought, in a practical, empirical way, to know the world and the human condition. But the older statesman Friedrich had little faith in such cultured notions. For the student prince, gardens, like books, were ordered fragments of Paradise, reflections of what we know of the world, artificial creations that were nevertheless alive and fruit bearing, ordered spaces for our imagination to roam and for our dreams to take root, the means by which our arts and crafts transcribed the story of creation. If all flesh was as grass, as the Bible told us, then the warning could also be read as an exultation, as the revelation that we too had in us some of the grass’s ability to come into being summer after summer, to conquer death by covering the dirt-filled graves, to lead a multitudinous, exuberant, and orderly existence in leaves as numerous as those of the books in the Universal Library. For the middle-aged King Friedrich II, only the political order seemed to matter.