A Reader on Reading

When Friedrich II installed his orchard in Sanssouci, he was thirty-two years old. Eight summers earlier, as a young man of twenty-four, he had begun a correspondence with Voltaire, asking him to become his guide. “In the entire universe,” wrote Friedrich gushingly, “no exception could be made of those of whom you might not be the teacher.” Voltaire was almost twenty years the monarch’s senior and the most celebrated philosopher in Europe at the time; Friedrich was only the heir apparent to a secondary European monarchy. Friedrich admired Voltaire’s ideas, his prose, his poetry, his drama, and above all, the fact that he was French. Years later, in 1880, Friedrich was to publish a pamphlet (in French, like all the thirty-one volumes of his extensive writings) titled De la littérature allemande, des défaults qu’on peut lui reprocher, quelles en sont les causes, et par quels moyens on peut les corriger in which he brands his native tongue as “à demi barbare.” Kultur was, for Friedrich, unhesitatingly French.

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.