Old Fritz

FREDERICK THE GREAT: THE RULER, THE WRITER, THE MAN (376 pp.) -- G. P. Gooch--Knopf ($5).

In 1940, just two centuries after Frederick succeeded to the throne of Prussia, superb German armies were flanking the Maginot Line and swiftly conquering France. Their spirit and their motive were still, to an almost incredible degree, the same as Frederick's in his great campaigns.

The archetype of Prussian character and statecraft, "Old Fritz" inspired Goethe, has been almost adored by a long line of German historians. Carlyle, Macaulay and Lytton Strachey wrote of him with fascination and even with admiration. Present-day scholarship has little to add to the full-dress biographies now in existence, but British Historian Gooch, a master of all the sources, has strung the story together with authority.

Frederick was a European prince of the Enlightenment, and not, like Adolf Hitler, a psychopathic noncom. He paid noble homage to Voltaire until the crafty genius abused his friendship by promising to report confidentially to the French court on what Frederick was up to. Frederick patronized the arts, practiced philosophy, loved poetry and composed for the flute. Just as significant as any of these gifts, however, were his personal candor and his lack of principle; he fooled and defrauded others, but he willingly, if secretly, admitted the frauds. Frederick was secretive and an adept at dissimulation ("If I thought that my shirt or my skin knew anything of my intentions," he said, "I would tear them off"); he was capable of barefaced sophistry in diplomacy, but he frankly admitted in a private letter and in his memoirs that one reason for his seizure of Silesia at the beginning of his reign was sheer vanity.

For this "rape of Silesia," however, he proclaimed justifications that were echoed in every subsequent Prussian and German aggression. The mere legal rights were the least important. Prussia, he argued, was entitled to territory commensurate with her stature as a state; Prussia could govern Silesia better than Austria could; it was Prussia's destiny, and anyway he was only striking first, for it was a defensive war designed to "prevent others [from] seizing" Silesia, and to bulwark Prussia against her enemies. The works of Prussia's enemies, then and in the dreadful Seven Years' War that followed, were represented by Frederick as "a conspiracy"; but if they conspired against him, he had led them into it. As in 1914 and in 1940, Prussia's enemies soon included most of the states of Europe.

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