LETTERS From CAMP Rehoboth |
Past Out: Who Was Frederick the Great? |
by Wik Wikkholm |
Frederick the Great was such a complicated man that one biographer dubbed him "The Magnificent Enigma." He was a warrior who championed tolerance, a humanist who started wars that killed hundreds of thousands, and a sodomite who ruled a land where sex between men was punishable by death. Frederick earned the title "the Great" by building his German kingdom's army into the conquering terror of 18th Century Europe. But as a child, he showed few signs of military prowess. His father, King Frederick William I, wanted his son to grow into a fighting Prussian, but young Frederick preferred the french novels and music he learned about from his tutors to the military lessons ordered by his father. The king regularly thrashed his son to force him to toughen up. Frederick, still less than 10 years old, surrendered to the king's demand that he excel in daily military drills, and he learned to hide from his father when he played the flute and read his favorite books. Still, the beatings continued. In 1730, the 18-year-old prince colluded with two soldiers, one his friend, the other his lover, to escape from his father and flee to England. The king discovered the plot, and sent soldiers to arrest the three. Frederick's friend escaped, but the soldiers captured the prince and his lover, Lt. Hans von Katte, and jailed them. The king had long believed that his son and Katte were lovers, but what enraged him now was their disloyalty to him. After a military tribunal convicted Katte of desertion, the king ordered the lieutenant killed. On the morning of the execution, Frederick William dispatched soldiers to his son's cell to force him to watch Katte die. Frederick fainted in front of his cell's window moments before an executioner chopped off his lover's head in the courtyard below. The king considered killing Frederick, but friends dissuaded him. Instead, he forced his son into a year's service as a low-level bureaucrat to humiliate him. Katte's death showed Frederick that he could not escape his father's control, so when Frederick William ordered him to marry a noblewoman three years after the execution, he complied, though he told friends that he detested the idea. The 1733 wedding cemented a political alliance, but the bride and groom disliked each other. Although Frederick claimed that they tried, the couple never produced an heir. In 1740, Frederick William died and the crown prince became king. Just after he took the throne, Frederick issued a flurry of orders that made Prussia more humane. Inspired by the Enlightenment philosophy expressed in the French books he loved, the king outlawed censorship of the press and encouraged religious tolerance. Even Jews, a people excluded from much of life in Europe at the time, enjoyed new freedoms. At first, Frederick's rule seemed to promise a more comfortable existence for the Prussian people, but Frederick plunged Prussia into war within a year of his coronation. Frederick had absorbed his father's vision of Prussia as a great power and invaded neighboring Silesia, a wealthy country, to expand Prussia's borders and to help pay for a larger military. After two years of fighting, Silesia fell. The Silesian campaign was only the first of many wars of territorial expansion that Frederick won, but the Prussian people paid dearly. Commerce stagnated under army and navy financial demands and taxes were raised even on the poor. But the financial costs were small compared with the price in human lives. In a single bloody year, 1759, 60,000 soldiers died on the Prussian side alone, a staggering loss for a country inhabited by less than 3 million people. Frederick's battlefield successes earned him the fear and respect of many of Europe's other monarchs, but his royal court provoked rumors and jokes. At Sans Souci, his Potsdam palace, he rarely invited women to court, and his wife was never welcome. The all-male environment he created was infamous for homoerotic banter, and Frederick's own sexual affairs with men were an open secret. The worst punishment he suffered was the knowledge that his sexual predilections drew snickers among his fellow royals. Had Frederick been a common sodomite, or "warm brother" as Prussia's sodomites were called, he could have been executed. In spite of his power to change it, the law that mandated the death penalty for sodomy stayed on the books throughout Frederick's reign. Frederick the Great died of a fever on August 17, 1786. He left behind an army 180,000 strong and more than 30 volumes of original writing. His nation had doubled in size during his rule, and the liberal reforms he championed saved his subjects from torture and censorship. The more humane climate may have reduced the number of sodomy arrests, but since conviction could still mean death, Prussia's warm brothers had little reason to mourn the passing of their sodomite king. Wik Wikholm produces http://gayhistory.com, an introduction to modern gay history. He can be reached on the site's discussion boards, or by e-mail at wik@gayhistory.com. For more Past Out, visit www.planetout.com. |
LETTERS From CAMP Rehoboth, Vol. 10, No. 11, Aug. 11, 2000. |