Volume 33, Number 2 · February 13, 1986
The Awful Fate of Frederick the Great
By John Keegan
The Military Life of Frederick the Great
by Christopher Duffy
Atheneum, 407 pp., $25.00
Fashions in greatness come and go. Frederick the Great is not a man for our times. Peter the Great, yes, because, like it or not, the Russia that dominates half of our world is a state of his making. Louis le Grand—Louis XIV—also, because the cultural splendor achieved by France under his kingship still speaks to us with a commanding voice. And even Charles the Great—Charlemagne—because he offers Western Europeans a memory, however faded, of a regional unity they have so far failed to re-create. But Frederick? Cultural triumphs were scarcely his métier. The politics he practiced were those of the sword. And to whom, after all, was he a hero? To Wilhelm II and Adolf Hitler. He was, in short, the darling of men we deplore or detest, and the maker of a kingdom from which most of Europe's ills in this century have emanated. Why should we concede him greatness at all?
Review, 2048 words
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