eBook Frederick the Great: A Life in Deed and Letters download

After reading just about everything I can get my mits on when it comes to der Alte Fritz, I've found this work to be EXTREMELY HELPFUL in trying to understand Frederick's early life, his relationship with is father, etc. Granted, the military parts aren't that great--aren't bad either--but that can be found in other works. Totally worth the time and $.

This is a great book! It's over six hundred pages long but you may have trouble putting it down. Unlike too many other biographers, his biography is not an appraisal; rather he deals with the history of Frederick even-handedly, be it positive or negative. I was surprised by many things: that Frederick was gay, that he lost many battles, that he had to escape from his first battle (in which one his brother died), that he was a writer of some note ( he wrote a condemnation of Machiavelli, but then followed his principles), as well as a composer. His battles are discussed in detail and won the admiration of Napoleon, Hitler, Patton to name a few. Put this on your must-read list.

I've read several books by this author and I think he is a terrific writer. This book is no exception.

Excellent book! Really interesting and really useful for helping me with my essay on Frederick the Great!

The uses and abuses to which generations of historians have put Frederick the Great have only served to cloud his reputation. So says Giles MacDonogh, who has no wish to rehash, for instance, Carlyle's Frederick the Hero; if anything, he inclines towards Macaulay's Frederick-the-Not-So-Great. But his overriding objective is to present Frederick the way he really was, as an accomplished flute player, man of letters, and the last European king to personally lead his troops into battle, wearing his familiar tobacco-stained coat. MacDonogh's Frederick is far from the patriotic champion of German nationalism, which he regards as an imposter created by 19th century historians.

One strength of this engaging biography is that MacDonogh is not only well-read in the literature of Frederick the Great, he also has a first-hand, intimate knowledge of Berlin and Potsdam. He has taken the trouble to inspect many of the surviving palaces and residences, though apparently not the battlefields. He writes with wit (the reason Frederick felt the German language had no rules was "because he never learned any," pg. 200), and one imagines that he would make a well-informed tour guide with advice on the best beer and wine cellars, while quoting Frederick's bon mot that "champagne carries happiness to the brain" (pg. 207). Throughout, he shows more interest in architecture, painting and music than in tactics or the dull intricacies of siege warfare.

At the same time he avoids sugarcoating the king. "Frederick was a menace to all those who had the misfortune to come too close" (pg. 243). MacDonogh has a sharp eye for the petty jealousies and intrigues at the far-from-splendid Prussian court, and the way courtiers jockeyed for influence.

He faults Frederick for not appreciating the great German writers of his age. This is perhaps somewhat unfair. When Frederick published his essay on German literature (1780), Goethe and Schiller were still considered iconoclastic young rebels, unlikely to appeal to someone of the king's generation (he was born in 1712). After all, the king's tastes were formed when the Rococo was fashionable. One could chastise him with greater justice for not appreciating Lessing, who was more his own age (born 1729). MacDonogh's treatment of this topic would have been fuller if he had consulted the protocols of Frederick's conversations with Gottsched, the so-called German literary pope, and Gellert, the revered author of popular fables.

Naturally enough, Frederick's relationship with Voltaire takes up a large chunk of this biography. One of the chief reasons the king wanted Voltaire to come to Potsdam was to be his tutor in the art of French poetry. They spent hours upon hours in this undertaking – which eventually paid off. Under Voltaire's tutelage, Frederick turned into a decent versifier if not a first-rate poet. While MacDonogh's translations of French poetry are certainly better than average, he fails to do justice to the strides Frederick took as a poet under Voltaire's guidance. He spends rather more time taking a dim view of their shared anti-clericalism, saying that Voltaire fed Frederick's prejudices.

In a fight, it was an advantage to have Voltaire on your side, though perhaps not exactly at (italics) your side. Frederick's chief mistake was insisting that Voltaire join him in Potsdam. The king tolerated his guest at first, playing the role of a patient father with a wayward son who was always up to some mischief or other. Soon enough, though, he came to think of him as a kind of highly intelligent but incorrigible monkey. Very likely their friendship would have been much less troubled if they had never met face to face.

In the end, Voltaire plotted to make Frederick so angry that he would grant his wish to return to France. As a professional manufacturer of poisonous rumors, he did not find this difficult. If Frederick had had to learn the art of concealment at the rough hands of his father, Voltaire seems to have enjoyed indulging in duplicity as a kind of malicious sport. He carried on his sniping even after gaining Frederick's permission to depart. MacDonogh shares Frederick's skeptical view of the great skeptic, quoting his summary: "It is astonishing … that this man, so admirable for his talented mind, should be so despicable in his conduct." It took years for them to resume cordial epistolary relations.

Minor shortcomings to this generally first-rate book: First, owing to a dropped footnote, the last forty or so notes in Chapter Four are misnumbered. Also, Hephaestion was not a Greek god (pg. 104) but one of Alexander the Great's closest friends and a commander in his army; generals may at times confuse themselves with gods, but historians should be more careful. Finally, Rudolf Augstein, the publisher of the newsmagazine "Der Spiegel," wrote a thought-provoking and well-researched biography (in German), "Prussia's Frederick and the Germans," which MacDonogh archly brushes off in a single sentence on the next-to-last page.

A somewhat more serious problem is MacDonogh's reliance on certain sources. He is rightly suspicious of the memoirs of Frederick's sister Wilhelmina and Baron Pöllnitz, saying they "may have exaggerated" (pg. 47). As for the allegations that Frederick was homosexual, he is dismissive of Voltaire and skeptical of Roger Peyrefitte. But when it comes to foreign affairs and its relevance to the relationship between Frederick and his father Frederick William, he relies uncritically on books published in the Third Reich (two by Carl Hinrichs, one by Ernst Poseck). Generally speaking, the Nazi agenda was to present Frederick William and his son as wise precursors of Hitler, as leaders who sought to advance the national interests of Germany. This idea would have seemed alien to both kings, whose goal was to consolidate not German but Prussian power and advance Hohenzollern dynastic interests. As MacDonogh himself points out in the opening chapter, the idea of unifying all the German lands under Prussian leadership was not even on Frederick's horizon. So maybe Frederick William really did say, "No English people or Frenchmen should [have control] over German territories, and I will put pistols and daggers into the cradles of my children so that they can help keep foreign nations out of Germany" (pg. 42), but I would feel more secure about it if this quotation did not come from a book published in Hamburg in 1936.

Wow, this is the kind of popular history that one likes to find, for it is an easily read, quite original and highly entertaining piece of work. Most treatments of important historical figures are, of necessity, heavily-laden with names, dates, geography, and the minutiae of day to day and month to month activities. This is, after all, what a history is meant to be: An accurate recording of the events described. Most pleasure-readers want a lively, entertaining read that is also factually accurate. Unfortunately, an accurate history almost requires all of the relevant details. On the other hand, by including all of the detail the lively and entertaining parts are left out of the equation. (A marvelous exception to this rule is Robert Caro's singular and unrivaled biography of LBJ which, by the way, is still uncompleted three volumes and twenty years later).
Giles MacDonogh has crafted a solution by focusing on Frederick's social and intellectual life. Essentially this is a kind of monograph in which the machinations of the war campaigns, for instance, are summed up in a few lines or a paragraph rather than parsed in painful, niggling detail in mind-numbing liturgical fashion. Likewise, many important characters in Frederick's life are glossed over or mentioned in passing (with the exception of a fine exposition of his father's life, and a rather hilarious on-going description of the decades-long sometimes charming sometimes brutal battle of wills between Voltaire and Frederick). The unspoken premise is a familiarity with Frederick the Great. MacDonogh's mission is to uncover aspects of Frederick's character -those things that went into making him great- that weren't fully developed in other treatments of the man, so be prepared to read another to get one's fill of mind-numbing tactical data and a full calender of events and daily briefings. We find the essence of the man through an examination of the ideas that motivated him, a reasonable explanation of how they were inculcated and developed and how they were applied. It is, if you will, a pointillist portrait done in broad brush strokes.
Although you will likely come away from this book marveling at the genius of Frederick, the book suffers from not having at least a couple of maps to enable one to picture the puzzle-piece character of Frederick's home geography (one also wishes for more pictures of the players in Frederick's life, 16 pps. of pictures is just not enough). Also it doesn't supply quite enough for war campaign material for one to fully apprehend the awesome strategist that Frederick undoubtedly was (perhaps the author expects that this follows logically from a look at the man himself). It would also help to have a working knowledge of written French because the book is liberally sprinkled with lines in the French. The author seems to go out of his way to use obscure words so that one will frequently consult a dictionary. Funny enough because of the author's odd word choice I found myself looking up words that while completely familiar were still surprisingly ill-defined in my mental dictionary. I genuinely learned some new words and came to appreciate others which I believed I already knew. The biggest complaint I have is that the author expresses far too much interest in Frederick's sex life. Admittedly Voltaire's numerous scurrilous allegations against Frederick make for entertaining reading, but it seems that the author worries the issue like a small dog on a large bone.
My complaints are small-beer when compared to the list of very interesting details included one finds fascinating but would never have thought to wonder about. Frederick's taste in music, food, architecture, literature and philosophers, for instance: An overview of Frederick's views on the economy, law, education, agriculture and manufactory: Immersion in the life of Frederick's mind and numerous examples of his sharp, incisive wit and rather deep observations about people and culture. Finally, the author does a brilliant job of bringing various lines of poetry to life with his translations of material issuing from Frederick, Voltaire, and a slew of people within Frederick's orbit. This couldn't have been accomplished by anybody but a person with a flair for language and literature. This engaging read is sure to bring a good few hours of pleasurable reading.