Sexuality Of Frederick The Great

It is almost certain that Prussian King Frederick the Great (1712 – 1786) was primarily homosexual, and that his sexual orientation was central to his life.;
also see: However, the nature of his actual relationships remains speculative. Though he had an arranged marriage, Frederick produced no children and was succeeded by his nephew. His favoured courtiers were exclusively male, and his art collection celebrated homoeroticism. Persistent rumours connecting the king with homosexual activity circulated around Europe during his lifetime, but there is less surviving definitive evidence of any sexual relationships of his, homosexual or otherwise. However, in July 1750, the Prussian king unmistakably wrote to his gay secretary and reader, Claude Étienne Darget: “Mes hémorroïdes salient affectueusement votre v…” (“My hemorrhoids affectionately greet your cock”), which strongly suggests that he was an active homosexual who practiced passive anal intercourse with men.

Frederick's sexuality was rejected by professional historians for centuries after his death, but was embraced by homosexual publications of Weimar Germany, which featured him on their covers and praised him for governing while homosexual.

Possible relationships

As a young crown prince, Frederick confided to his mentor, Generalfeldmarschall Friedrich Wilhelm von Grumbkow, that he felt too little attracted to the female sex to be able to imagine entering into a marriage. At age 16, Frederick seems to have embarked upon a youthful affair with Peter Karl Christoph von Keith, a 17-year-old page of his father. Rumors of the liaison spread in the court, and the "intimacy" between the two boys provoked the comments of his sister, Wilhelmine, who wrote, "Though I had noticed that he was on more familiar terms with this page than was proper in his position, I did not know how intimate the friendship was." Rumors finally reached King Frederick William, who cultivated an ideal of ultramasculinity in his court, and derided his son's effeminate tendencies. As a result, Keith was dismissed from his service to the king and sent away to a regiment by the Dutch border, while Frederick was sent to Wusterhausen in order to "repent of his sin". King Frederick William may have thought that Frederick's relationship with Hans Hermann von Katte was also romantic, a suspicion which may have played a role in Katte receiving a death sentence. While confined to Kustrin after the Katte affair, Frederick formed an intimate friendship with Michael Gabriel Fredersdorf, whom Frederick romantically corresponded with and demonstrated frequent concern for. Fredersdorf initially became Frederick's valet, and when Frederick became king he was provided with an estate and acted as unofficial prime minister. In 1789, Frederick's garden inspector and Oberhofbaurat ead of the planning department and building control officeHeinrich Ludewig Manger described Fredersdorf as "the king's darling at the time". In 1746 Frederick wrote hateful letters to his openly gay brother, Prince Henry of Prussia, which were characterized by jealousy for the "handsome Marwitz", Henry's chamber junker, whom Frederick accused of suffering from gonorrhea.

Frederick also asked the French philosopher Voltaire to live with him at Sanssouci. Their literary correspondence and friendship, which spanned almost 50 years, began as a flirtation and maintained a mutual intellectual fascination. However, Frederick found Voltaire difficult to live with in person. In addition, Frederick was often annoyed by Voltaire's many quarrels with his other friends. Voltaire's angry attack on Maupertuis, the President of Frederick's academy, in the form of a pamphlet, (''The Diatribe of Doctor Akakia'') provoked Frederick to burn the pamphlet publicly and put Voltaire under house arrest, after which Voltaire left Prussia. When Voltaire left, he took with him poems by Frederick mocking other rulers that could compromise Frederick. Frederick had his agents detain Voltaire in Frankfurt am Main on his way back to France and forced him to surrender the poems. This episode, which has been called a "lover's quarrel", cooled Frederick and Voltaire's friendship. Eventually, they resumed their correspondence, aired their mutual recriminations, and remained on friendly terms until Voltaire's death.

However, when Voltaire began writing his in the 1750s, he explicitly detailed the homosexuality of Frederick and his closest social circle. He writes: "when His Majesty was dressed and booted, the Stoic gave some moments to the sect of Epicurus; he had two or three favorites come, either lieutenants of his regiment, or pages, or haidouks ungarian infantrymen or young cadets. They took coffee. He to whom the handkerchief was thrown stayed another quarter of an hour in privacy." A copy of the manuscript was stolen, and after Voltaire's death, pirated excerpts from it were published in Amsterdam in 1784 as ''The Private Life of the King of Prussia''. Publicly, Frederick acted unconcerned about the revelations. However, he had its publication suppressed in France, and attempted to suppress it elsewhere as well.

Frederick's writing and predilection for homoerotic artworks

In 1739, Frederick met the bisexual Venetian philosopher Francesco Algarotti, and they were both infatuated. Frederick planned to make him a count. Challenged by Algarotti that northern Europeans lacked passion, Frederick penned for him an erotic poem, (ambiguously meaning "the pleasure" or "the orgasm"), which imagined what some have described as Algarotti in the throes of sexual intercourse with another partner, a female named Chloris. Not all Frederick scholars have interpreted the poem in such a way; it has also been suggested as describing a liaison between Frederick and Algarotti, especially in view of the fact that the latter was known as "Frederick's swan". Similar poems were written by Frederick. For instance, the fourth canto of his mock-heroic poem ''Le Palladion'' (1749) describes the homosexual adventures of his reader Claude Étienne Darget and includes the following blasphemous lines: "The good Saint John, what do you think he did / To induce Jesus to sleep with him in his bed? / And don’t you feel that he knew his Ganymede." However, none of these poems, including ''La Jouissance'', unequivocally exposes Frederick as being involved in such affairs, though they do highlight his homoerotic artistic tendencies.

Frederick also filled his palaces with erotic artworks that reflected his longing for homosexual relationships. The palace gardens at Sanssouci include a Temple of Friendship (built as a memorial to his sister, Wilhelmine) celebrating the homoerotic attachments of Greek Antiquity, which is decorated with portraits of Orestes and Pylades, amongst others. In the New Palace, a showcase palace also located on the grounds of Sanssouci, Frederick kept the fresco ''Ganymede Is Introduced to Olympus'' by Charles Vanloo: "the largest fresco in the largest room in his largest palace", in the words of a biographer. In 1747, the king acquired the antique bronze statue of the nude ''Boy in Prayer'', which he thought to represent Antinous, the supposed lover of the Roman emperor Hadrian.

After his defeat at the Battle of Kolín, Frederick wrote in a letter: "''La fortune m'a tourné le dos.... le est femme, et je ne suis pas galant.''" This has been translated as "Fortune has it in for me; she is a woman, and ''I am not that way inclined.''" The original phrase "''je ne suis pas galant''" is somewhat ambiguous. While it would not be inaccurate to translate it as "I am not a lover/suitor (of women)", it could also be translated as the rather less suggestive, "I am not chivalrous".

Contemporary opinion

Even during his lifetime, much of European society assumed Frederick was homosexual. According to Johann Georg Ritter von Zimmermann, "Frederick lost a great deal of 'sensual pleasure,' says Mr. Bushing, a Prussian ecclesiastic counsellor, 'by his aversion to women; but he indemnified himself by his intercourse with men, recollecting from the history of philosophy, that Socrates was reported to have been very fond of Alcibiades.' Not only Mr. Bushing, however, but also Voltaire, la Beaumelle, the Duke de Choiseul, innumerable Frenchmen and Germans, almost all the friends and enemies of Frederick, almost all the princes and great men of Europe, even his servants, — even the confidants and friends of his latter years, were of opinion that he had loved, as it is pretended, Socrates loved Alcibiades." Dealing with the "love" of the king, the Austrian writer Joseph Richter felt that Frederick had "lost all feeling for the fair sex" and "believed he could fill the empty moments no better than with Socratic love. Instead of suppressing his lust for a lecherous life, he just gave it another direction. What a woman could have done, a page now did." In his ''Story of My Life'', Giacomo Casanova noted that each member of First Potsdam Battalion "had a gold watch in the fob of his breeches. It was thus that the king rewarded the courage with which they had subjugated him, as Caesar once subjugated Nicomedes in Bithynia. No secret was made of it." When Frederick was in Potsdam, he spent much of his time at Sanssouci with a circle that was exclusively male, and during Frederick's lifetime the phrase was used throughout Europe to describe homosexual courtiers. In addition, William Hogarth's painting '' The Toilette'' may include a satirical depiction of Frederick as a flautist next to a mythological painting in which Zeus, in the form of an eagle, is abducting his male lover Ganymede – thereby publicly outing him as a homosexual as early as 1744.

To muddy Frederick's homosexual reputation, Frederick's physician Johann Georg Ritter von Zimmermann claimed that Frederick had convinced himself that he was impotent due to a minor deformity he had received during an operation to cure gonorrhea in 1733. According to Zimmermann, Frederick pretended to be homosexual in order to appear as still virile and capable of intercourse, albeit with men. This story is doubted by biographer Wolfgang Burgdorf, who is of the opinion that "Frederick had a physical disgust of women" and therefore "was unable to sleep with them".Wolfgang Burgdorf, ''Friedrich der Große: Ein biografisches Porträt'' (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 2011), pp. 102–103. The surgeon Gottlieb Engel, who prepared Frederick's body for burial, indignantly contested Zimmerman's story, saying the king's genitalia were "complete and perfect as those of any healthy man".

Legacy and historiography

Frederick's homosexuality was rejected by professional historians for centuries after his death. In 1921, doctor and amateur historian Gaston Vorberg wrote an essay to debunk ongoing rumors around Frederick's sexuality, asserting that he was heterosexual. In contrast, his homosexuality was embraced by the homosexual publications of Weimar Germany, which featured him on their covers and praised him for governing while homosexual. Vorberg's conclusions were sharply criticized by another amateur historian, Ferdinand Karsch, in the gay publication '' Die Freundschaft''. In 1931, homosexual activist published the book ''Intrigue and Love: On Politics and Sexual Life'' which spent nine pages discussing Frederick and his sexuality.

References

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Frederick the Great
Frederick the Great
LGBT history in Germany

Further reading

*Alings, Reinhard (2012). “ ‘Don’t ask – don’t tell’ – War Friedrich schwul?” In ''Friederisiko: Friedrich der Große'', exh. cat., Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg, Neues Palais and Park Sanssouci, 28 April–28 October 2012 (Munich: Hirmer, 2012), "Die Ausstellung", pp. 238–247.
*Burgdorf, Wolfgang (2011). ''Friedrich der Große: Ein biografisches Porträt'' (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder), 76–103.
*Burgdorf, Wolfgang (2020). "Königliche Liebschaften: Friedrich der Große und seine Männer", in Domeier, Norman / Mühling, Christian (eds.), ''Homosexualität am Hof: Praktiken und Diskurse vom Mittelalter bis heute'' (Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus), pp. 133–150.
*Krysmanski, Bernd (2022). "Evidence for the homosexuality and the anal erotic desires of the Prussian king", in ''Does Hogarth Depict Old Fritz Truthfully with a Crooked Beak? — The Pictures Familiar to Us from Pesne to Menzel Don’t Show This'', ''ART-dok'' (University of Heidelberg: arthistoricum.net), 24-30. https://doi.org/10.11588/artdok.00008019
*{{cite journal, last=Shoobert, first=Jackson, year=2021, title=Frederick the great's sexuality- New avenues of approach, journal=History in the Making, volume=8, url=https://historyitm.files.wordpress.com/2021/06/frederick-the-greats-sexuality-e28093-new-avenues-of-approach-by-shoobert-jackson-1.pdf, archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20211030235749/https://historyitm.files.wordpress.com/2021/06/frederick-the-greats-sexuality-e28093-new-avenues-of-approach-by-shoobert-jackson-1.pdf, archive-date=30 Oct 2021, ref=none