200th anniversary of death King Friedrich the big one - Germany / Federal Republic of Germany 1986 - 80 Pfennig

On January 24, 1712 Friedrich was born in the castle of Berlin. The military and stern education given him by his father, the "soldier king" Friedrich Wilhelm I, was directed more to suppression than to the care of his equipment. After the stormy youth crisis of the time of the crown prince Frederick subdued his father outwardly, but never bowed. Not in the hard school of the soldier king, he has risen to the ruler, but in a unique self-education process. This is not exhausted in the cultivation of intellectual interests and musical inclinations; He receives his meaning only from the fact that he is also self-education to the state. The ambitious student of Voltaire in French style art enters early into the spell of Prussian power. The thought of her unused possibilities and her future use is behind the political considerations with which he is crown prince. Only a few months after his accession to the throne (1740), the extinction of the Habsburg male tribe gave him the opportunity, which could be used boldly to enlarge Prussia. The decision to occupy Silesia has become decisive for Frederick's entire later career. He has appointed him to a most restless and warlike life, and all his later campaigns are essentially the inevitable consequence of this first great attack. This also applies to the longest, the so-called "Seven Years War" (1756-1763), in which he had to assert the possession of the new Silesian province against the overwhelming superiority of almost all European powers. In spite of a series of great victories in which his generals' talent proved to be brilliant, after five years of fighting he found himself in a hopeless situation from which only an unimaginable stroke of luck-the change of throne in Russia (1762) -cancied him. After the hard-won political and military success, the healing of war damage and the gathering of new forces became the main concern of Frederician economic and domestic policy. As under his father, the entire state apparatus remained with Frederick under the ever increasing army. It is now all the more a flywheel of the entire economic life, the engine of a planned protectionist industrialization policy. The integration of new territories of different size and structure, such as Silesia, Friesland and, most recently, West Prussia (1772) presented the Frederician administrative state with growth difficulties that could only be mastered through the increasing refinement of the authorities. The great machinery of the administration became more and more complicated, and only the king's almost superhuman work force could succeed in uniting the disparate branches of administration and penetrating it with his will through the system of government adopted by the father from the cabinet. Frederick has taken upon himself the heavy burden of his daily duties as a natural condition. What moved him at heart was not the world of his poetic and literary work, but the great reality of the state. Frederick's life was fulfilled in his strict service, not "in the arms of philosophy," in which he so gladly rested. In the "enlightened absolutism" of Frederick the Great, the contemporaries seemed to express the possibilities as well as the internal contradictions of their century most clearly. Therein lay the exemplary significance of Frederician Prussia for them, for better or worse. A state governs with hardness and joylessness among heavy victims of human happiness, but also a state in which the demands of the time for religious tolerance and individual legal certainty were already largely realized, in which the omnipotence of the absolute state set itself moral limits. The lonely old man in the worn uniform tunic, which kept the huge state machinery going, stood too high above his people to really trust him, even though he lost his aloofness in the anecdotal disguise of the Old Fritzen. It is never really popular, but in a deeper sense it has become the great example figure of the 18th century. Like the "Janus-head" of his state, his ambiguous personality also embodies the antinomy of an age in which the Enlightenment cultural ideal and princely macho-egoism suddenly met. The fact that he not only lived through the full thrill of his century, but also thought through and suffered through it, makes him truly great for all times. (Text: Professor Dr. Stephan Skalweit, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-University, Bonn)