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Frederick the Great Surveying the Field of Battle by Hugo Ungewitter (1906) Contrary to his father's fears, Frederick became a capable military commander. With the exception of his first battlefield experience at the Battle of Mollwitz, Frederick proved himself courageous in battle. [281]
His father, field marshal general Hans Heinrich von Katte, was one of Frederick William I's most regarded cuirassiers. Katte's mother, Dorothee Sophia von Wartensleben, was the daughter of a seasoned and revered field marshal, Graf Leopold Alexander von Wartensleben .
"His father Frederick William called the heir to the throne a 'sodomite' and 'effeminate'", says biographer Wolfgang Burgdorf. The historian bundled the same-sex amours of gay Fritz in his Friedrich book. [71] Even during his lifetime, much of European society assumed Frederick was homosexual.
Originally planning to write four volumes, Carlyle realized that he would need six, as the first two only took the history to 1740 and the death of Frederick's father Frederick William I. After the 1858 journey he expressed hope that the book would be finished in two years, but it ended up taking seven.
Frederick's father, Prince Wilhelm, was the second son of King Frederick Wilhelm III and, having been raised in the military traditions of the Hohenzollerns, developed into a strict disciplinarian. William fell in love with his cousin Elisa Radziwill , a princess of the Polish nobility , but the court felt Elisa's rank was not suitable for the ...
Frederick William died in 1740 at age 51 and was interred at the Garrison Church in Potsdam. During World War II, in order to protect it from advancing allied forces, Hitler ordered the king's coffin, as well as those of Frederick the Great and Paul von Hindenburg, into hiding, first to Berlin and later to a salt mine outside of Bernterode.
In 1730, Crown Prince Frederick of Prussia tried to flee from the tyrannical regime of his father, King Frederick William I, but was caught and imprisoned. To regain his freedom, he was required to marry Elisabeth Christine, daughter of Ferdinand Albert II, Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel and his wife Antoinette , in 1733. [ 1 ]
Frederick the Great, unlike his father, was an aesthete who admired Voltaire and the French Enlightenment, and was not inclined toward Pietism. He nevertheless felt himself bound to many of his father's ideals and deviated only slightly from Frederick William's self-image as the "first sergeant to the King of Prussia", saying that he wished to ...