Was fredrick the great gay
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I first learned about Frederick the Wonderful when I was assigned to produce a Slides presentation about him in ninth grade. Scrolling through Wikipedia, I happened upon a whole page entitled “Sexuality of Frederick the Great.” I was understandably intrigued and ended up referencing one of Frederick’s lovers in my slideshow. Apparently my history mentor did not authorize of this “fun fact,” because she decided to grab two points off my project grade—something about which I’m so salty that it has inspired an entire Orient column. Take that, Ms. W!
But we’ll get to what I found on that Wikipedia page later on. First, let’s talk about Frederick’s achievements as the king of Prussia, which are certainly nothing to sneeze at, considering he essentially had to be forced into politics. That’s right: Frederick—I’ll summon him Fritz—had a classic case of what we today refer to as “Daddy Issues.” His father, Frederick William, is remembered as a stodgy and practical ruler; his painful gout and his son’s disobedience made him consistently ill-tempered. Disappointed that Fritz’s interests erred more towards literature and art than religion and war, Fred Will frequently humiliated and ins
Bode-Museum
Male homosexual collectors are the focus of the third path
Frederick the Great of Prussia – Noblesse Oblige
It may not be widely recognizable, but Prussia’s King Frederick II (1712–1786) laid the foundation for the Berlin Antikensammlung by acquiring the famous Stosch Gem Collection for the Prussian court in 1764. Unlike other homosexual collectors of his era, who are also to be establish in the Bode-Museum, Frederick, being the future king and commander-in-chief of the Prussian troops during times of war, had to fulfil the societal and dynastic demands that were placed upon him. These requirements are also reflected in most of the depictions of the Prussian king, for example in the marble duplicate of Johann Gottfried Schadow’s monumental sculpture in the petty cupola of the Bode-Museum, which depicts him in the pose of a stern general.
It is very probable that Frederick was same-sex attracted. His marriage to Elisabeth Christine von Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel-Bevern (1715–1797) produced no offspring, and the couple always lived separately. Instead, Frederick maintained particularly intimate relationships with certain men in his court, which was a authentic thorn in the side of his father, Fred
Recently on this series we own been going through the many battles of the Seven Years’ War with one figure, Frederick II of Prussia, being at the forefront. While well-known to contemporaries there was a significant aspect of his life that people tried to erase from history – he was queer . For Pride Month we are doing a special looking into the queerness of Frederick the Great. This post is not intended to be a thorough biography of the Prussian king but rather a look into how we know about his sexuality, how he expressed himself, and the legacies of this.
Early Modern Sexuality
Before we start we have to actually define what we are talking about as labels can be both restrictive and emancipatory. For one, the terms we use today – gay and homosexual – either meant something else or would not be coined for a further century respectively. To first modern Europeans there was just sexuality where same-sex relations were deviations from this sexuality. Preliminary modern sources about same-sex relationships refer to it as ‘sodomy’ or ‘buggery’ which were almost universally persecuted across Europe. Paris had a secret police searching s
Frederick II (in German: Friedrich II), the Hohenzollern King of Prussia, went on to become known as Frederick the Great(Friedrich der Große). His governess and mother spoke French around him, and they reminded Frederick that French was the language of society, while German was used by inferior people. They included his father in that category. So Frederick spoke French as his mother tongue and spoke German with difficulty all his life, in spite of the fact that he eventually ruled over a German-speaking realm.