The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories (29 page)

When his duties called him away from Sans Souci, Fédéric dreamed of opening the French windows of his bedroom there and walking out into the morning sun with his favorite greyhound, named Madame de Pompadour for the mistress of the king of France. To quell his longing, he read and wrote: letters to Voltaire, poetry, histories of his own res gestae. It has been said that, were he not a king, he would be known as one of the finest French writers of the eighteenth century.

There was one book he always took with him; it was the only novel one could read again and again, he said. Voltaire had written
Candide
after he had fallen out with Fédéric and had left Sans Souci, but the novel, in which a young naïf goes out into the world from his provincial chateau, struck a chord with a king whose inheritance had bound him to do the same. Perhaps Voltaire was thinking of Fédéric when he wrote it, and the king is bound to have smiled and agreed when, at
the end of the novel, Candide, having witnessed all the horrors of the “best of all possible worlds,” retires from it with the maxim: “Il faut cultiver notre jardin.”

Fédéric’s descendant, once the prince of Siam and now the king of Prussia, was only too ready to cultivate his ancestor’s garden and to inhabit the palace that had lain dormant for half a century. Within months of his father’s death, the shutters of Sans Souci were thrown open and the summer sun poured in through the French windows, surprising cherubs and monkeys that had slept for decades. Dust sheets were drawn back to reveal gilded reefs of rocaille, and soon the dining table in the great oval saloon groaned once more under fruits gathered from the garden. (Perhaps it groaned, too, at the earnest witticisms of the new king, who lacked something of Fédéric’s eighteenth-century lightness.)

The king engaged Ludwig Persius, who had assisted Schinkel in his later years, on a building program that dwarfed anything Fédéric had envisaged. On the crest of a ridge within the forest, Persius and the king conjured an apparition of the Villa Medici in Rome. Endless flights of steps and grottoes, rose gardens and
nymphaea
led to the villa itself, which was crowned with tall belvederes. To either side, huge greenhouses were filled with the heady scent of orange and lemon trees, so that not only the sights but the smells of Italy could be enjoyed; in the summer the king could imagine that he was some Renaissance humanist, listening to the vespers bells as they rang out over the Eternal City. A pump house, built to power the fountains of the park, was disguised as an Egyptian mosque, reflected in the reservoir as if it were standing by some distant oasis. Nearby the king built a church in the form of a Romanesque monastery, complete with peaceful cloisters; and a little way away, on the top of a hill known as the Pfingstberg, he constructed a gigantic terrace from whose airy arcades and towers one could view the distant horizon.

In his youth, he had labored to re-create Italy in the loggias of Siam; but the Sans Souci over which the king now ruled had become a panorama, a boundless hallucination, an insubstantial pageant of towers and gorgeous palaces, in which all times and all places were made present through the medium of architecture. At the heart of this magical
demesne the king of Prussia was a Prospero calling forth visions of a universal history—in which, as Schinkel had once said, architecture “ennobles all human relationships.” It was such stuff as dreams are made of.

I
N
A
UGUST
1945, three men sat on the terrace of the Cecilienhof, a half-timbered cottage overgrown with vines that the last of the royal house of Fédéric had built for his daughter-in-law Cécile.

They had been there for a month, and a very nice month it had been. Their residences were close by, in the gardens of Schinkel’s Gothic fortress of Babelsberg. One of their aides described them in his diary.

They consisted of a series of villas, all facing onto the lake, and very pleasant. We have a house for the three Chiefs of Staff, and have Jumbo with us. Attlee is next door on one side and Bridges beyond him and PM beyond that. On the other side Pug. I spent the afternoon settling in and in the evening tried for a pike in the lake.

But the three men were there to do business rather than to go fishing or look at the scenery. The villas did not belong to them. As another of their secretaries recorded:

All the Germans have of course been turned out. Where they’ve gone, no one knows. Can you imagine what we would feel if Germans and Japanese were doing this in England, and if we had all been bundled out to make way for Hitler and Co.?

And their deliberations were not of the philosophical kind. The “Big Three”—the leaders of Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States of America—had come to Potsdam to resolve the German question once and for all, and to bring a particularly unsavory historical episode to an end. They did not agree on much, but they did
agree on one thing: the kings of Prussia had been careless. The follies they had built on their summer holidays were the stuff that nightmares are made of. Outside Sans Souci time had not stood still, history was anything but a mirage, and the world was full of care.

For outside his park Fédéric had been far from a reluctant player on the historical stage: out of Sans Souci he was Frederick the Great, one of the most belligerent princes of the eighteenth century. Within a year of taking the throne he had sent his troops to annex neighboring Silesia, and he spent most of the rest of his life trying to prevent his rival, the empress Maria Theresa, from taking it back. His troops marched over the Oder to Breslau, down into Saxony, all the way to Prague, and nearly to the gates of Vienna itself. Frederick made and unmade counts and kings and even emperors; and at the end of his life, in a piece of extraordinary realpolitik, he connived in the partition of Poland between himself and his erstwhile enemies the empress Maria Theresa and the czar of Russia. The consequences were still playing themselves out in 1945. They still are.

Frederick spent much of his life outside the walls of Sans Souci not only living in a world of care and contemplating ruins, but also creating both. He was well aware of the senselessness of it. When his armies occupied Saxony in 1760, the king wrote: “I spared that beautiful country as far as possible, but now it is utterly devastated. Miserable madmen that we are . . . amusing ourselves with the destruction of masterpieces of industry and of time, we leave an odious memory of our ravages and the calamities that they cause.” Not that it stopped him. He wrote to his friend Henri de Catt: “Admit that war is a cruel thing—what a life for the unhappy soldiers who receive more blows than bread, and who mostly retire with scars or missing limbs. The peasant is even worse off—he often dies of hunger—you must admit that the obstinacy of the Queen of Hungary and myself makes many people wretched.” Obstinate the king was; the queen of Hungary, the empress Maria Theresa, could only pray that “in the end God will take pity on us and crush this monster.” So terrifying was the reputation of Frederick the Great that when Napoleon, having invaded Prussia, visited his tomb, he was moved to say to his officers: “Hats off, gentlemen! If he were still alive, we would not be here.”

Frederick the Great’s descendants followed him in his despotic
militarism, as they did in his enlightened private life at Sans Souci. In 1848 King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, the very prince who had enjoyed the freedoms of Siam, was confronted by his subjects in Berlin, who demanded the same freedoms for themselves. They gathered in the streets, clamoring for the establishment of a constitution, a liberal government, and the unification of all the states of Germany into one nation-state. History presented the king with the opportunity to turn his whole realm into a happy Siam.

On 18 March the enlightened and freedom-loving king sent his troops to disperse the demonstrators. Many lost their lives that day in the streets of the city. But the people believed that history was on their side, and they did not return to their homes as the king had wished. Three days later, they forced him to leave Sans Souci and come back to the city. They draped him in the revolutionary tricolor and marched him to the graveyards, to honor the dead whose deaths he himself had ordered so recently. Perhaps at that moment the king also believed that history was on the side of the people, or perhaps he had no choice. Either way, he stood in front of them all and agreed to their demands for liberty and progress. And then he returned to Sans Souci.

The new Prussia didn’t last long. The king wandered in his park and sat musing in the loggias of his Italian follies; and when autumn came, he dissolved the democratically elected assembly of the people and the modern liberal constitution, and restored his own authority at the point of a gun. The next year, when the general assembly of all the Germans in Frankfurt offered him the imperial crown of all Germany, he dismissed it with disgust as dishonored by “the bestial stench of revolution . . . a phantom crown baked of dirt and mud.” He retired to Sans Souci and contemplated his latest folly. Entirely without irony, he named it the Friedenskirche—the Church of Peace.

Frederick the Great dreamed of attending the French king at his toilette. Friedrich Wilhelm IV preferred dreams of Italy and Siam to the imperial crown. But in 1871, after a great victory over France, their successor, Wilhelm I, was crowned kaiser of all Germany in the Galerie des Glaces at Versailles.

His grandson, Kaiser Wilhelm II, caught the imperial bug at that glittering occasion and had little desire to be
sans souci
. When in
Potsdam he stayed in the Neues Palais—that fanfaronade, as his ancestor Fédéric had called it. He arrived with electric light and all the most modern plumbing appliances. He even built a tunnel between the kitchens and the dining room of the palace, which were several hundred feet apart.

For Wilhelm II, fanfaronade was a way of life. Living amid bombastic splendor, he began to believe his own propaganda. Like some pharaonic inscription, he said of himself: “Deep into the most distant jungles of other parts of the world, everyone should know the voice of the German Kaiser. Nothing should occur on this earth without having first heard him. His word must have its weight placed on every scale . . . Also domestically the word of the Kaiser should be everything.” Just to make sure it was, he led his empire into war with his own cousins, the king of England and the czar of Russia, and, of course, with the old enemy France; and the rest is mud, and shells, and poisoned gas, and ruins of the most unromantic kind. They are still digging up the bodies from the fields today, nearly a century later.

The fanfaronade of Wilhelm II turned out to be just that, nothing more. Faced with utter defeat, he refused to abdicate, and it took his chancellor, Prince Max of Baden, to do it for him. The kaiser made sure he was safe in Holland before the announcement was made; but he sent a train to the royal station at the Neues Palais, and it returned with fifty-six carriages full of treasures. There was his vast collection of snuffboxes, hundreds of military uniforms, pieces of furniture designed for his ancestors by Schinkel and Persius, and of course portraits of Frederick the Great. Forced into peaceful country retreat at the modest Huis van Doorn, the former kaiser of Germany was far from
sans souci
. He remained convinced that a call would come to return him to his rightful station, but it never did, and the old man spent his time venting his frustrations on the wooded garden around his house. In his exile he cut down some six hundred trees, leaving the landscape resembling nothing so much as the fields of Flanders.

Back in Berlin, on 9 November 1919, a socialist republic was declared from the balcony of his vacated palace, and the terrible history of modern Germany was set into motion. Stalin, Churchill, and Truman agreed: Hitler’s Gotterdämmerung was the lineal descendant of
the aristocratic vanity of Frederick the Great, the repressive conservatism of Friedrich Wilhelm IV, and the crass megalomania of Kaiser Wilhelm II. There was something in the Prussian spirit, wasn’t there, that made them like this, something crude, and aggressive, and dangerous. The Germans needed to be cured of their obsession with ruins and follies, or else they’d do it all over again.

It was a convincing story, and it was a very convincing pretext. The Big Three had turned Germany into a landscape of ruins. Whole towns and cities had disappeared in the firestorms of an afternoon, and the palaces of the erstwhile rulers of Dresden, Stuttgart, Munich, and Berlin were wrecked shells. Even as the Big Three chatted away on the terrace of the Cecilienhof, their minions were carting away the paintings, the sculpture, the furniture, and all the other treasures they could find.