Sanssouci Palace

On 10 August 1744 Frederick II gave the order that the bare rise on the southern slope of the Bornstedt ridge, the „Wüsten Berg“, be brought into cultivation as terraced vineyard. Oaks had stood on the height until the reign of his father Frederick William I, the soldier king, whose men felled them and used the timber to firm the marshy ground as Potsdam was extended. Under the architect Friedrich Wilhelm Diterichs the south slope was cut into six broad terraces, their retaining walls curving inwards at the centre to catch as much sun as possible. Straight faces carrying trellised native fruit and vines alternated with 168 glazed niches in which foreign varieties grew, and vines from Portugal, Italy, France and nearby Neuruppin were planted against the brickwork; Philipp Friedrich Krutisch had charge of the gardening. A flight of 120 steps, today 132, climbed the central axis, broken six times to match the terraces, with a ramp on either side of the hill. The terrace work was largely finished in 1746.

Below the terraces an ornamental garden in the Baroque manner was laid out from 1745, modelled on the parterre at Versailles, and in 1748 a four-lobed basin, the Great Fountain, was set at its centre. Frederick had commissioned Leonhard Euler to make the calculations for it, but the water would not rise; the failure is put down to the state of hydraulic engineering and to the king's parsimony, and it took a steam engine house a century later to bring the fountain into use. From 1750 twelve marble statues, eight gods and allegorical figures of the four elements, ringed the water. Venus and Mercury by Jean-Baptiste Pigalle and two hunting groups by Lambert-Sigisbert Adam were gifts from Louis XV of France; the remaining figures came from the Berlin workshop of François Gaspard Adam. The ring, known as the French Rondel, was not completed until 1764. Frederick set great store by the joining of ornamental and productive garden, and the kitchen garden his father had laid out before 1715, which the soldier king had mockingly called „mein Marly“ after Louis XIV's Marly-le-Roi, was left standing to the south-east.

By a cabinet order of 13 January 1745 Frederick directed the building of a „Lust-Hauses zu Potsdam“. Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff worked the king's own sketches up into designs and proposed raising the building on a plinth storey with cellars beneath it, and standing it nearer the edge of the top terrace so that it would show to better effect from the parterre below. Frederick refused. He wanted no building of display but an intimate rococo dwelling at ground level, its pedestal the hill itself, a maison de plaisance without a flight of steps, from whose rooms he could walk straight onto a broad terrace and into the garden. The foundation stone was laid on 14 April 1745. Diterichs worked Knobelsdorff's drawings up in detail, chose the materials and made the contracts with sculptors and stonemasons before a cabinet order of 2 May replaced him as site manager with the Dutch architect Jan Bouman; by another account it was Knobelsdorff who was dismissed, in 1746, after a disagreement about where in the park the palace should stand, with Bouman finishing the work. Frederick intervened administratively and artistically at every stage, requiring estimates before any work began and demanding to be told every detail, which made for ill feeling with his architects and for work taken down and done again. After two years' building the vineyard palace was inaugurated on 1 May 1747, though not all its rooms were finished.

Except in time of war Frederick lived at Sanssouci from the end of April to the beginning of October. The house was intended for him and for guests of his own choosing, and his sketch marked out balanced suites "pour les étrangers" and "pour le roy". Ceremonial duties belonged to the Potsdam City Palace, rebuilt at the same period and occupied by him in the winter months, so that Potsdam became the working residence while the Berlin palace, where the queen discharged representational duties in his stead, and Charlottenburg fell to second place. He had married Elisabeth Christine of Brunswick-Bevern in 1733 and separated from her after his accession in 1740, assigning her Schönhausen north of Berlin as a summer seat; she had no admittance to Sanssouci and saw the place once only, in October 1757, fleeing from Berlin to Magdeburg during the Seven Years' War. The name of the house, the French sans souci, without care, declared its purpose; Nicolai has it that Frederick, crossing the building site, is supposed to have said to the Marquis d'Argens: « Quand je serai là, je serai sans souci. »

In these rooms the king composed, played music and philosophised. The concert room holds a fortepiano built by Gottfried Silbermann in 1746 that belonged to him, and the music stand made for him in 1767 by the ornament sculptor Johann Melchior Kambly. The round library lies outside the enfilade at the end of his apartment, reached by a narrow passage from the study, and holds some 2,100 volumes of Greek and Roman poetry and history in French translation and French literature of the 17th and 18th centuries, with the works of Voltaire at the centre, bound in brown or red goat leather and richly gilded. German literature drew little of his attention. Two guests are fixed to the house by the names of their rooms. The circular Rothenburg room is named for Count Friedrich Rudolf von Rothenburg, a close confidant of the king, who occupied it regularly until his death in 1751. The Voltaire room carries the philosopher's name, although it is not certain that he ever lodged in the summer palace, since he had rooms in the Potsdam City Palace; he was in any case a frequent guest of the king through his stay in Potsdam from 1750 to 1753.

Twenty years after Sanssouci, Frederick built the New Palace at the western end of the park, between 1763 and 1769, far larger and in the Baroque, to demonstrate that Prussia's powers were undiminished after its near defeat in the Seven Years' War. He made no secret of the intention, calling the building his "fanfaronnade", his showing off, and he almost never stayed there except when entertaining diplomats he wished to impress. Nearer the palace he added the Picture Gallery to the east, built from 1755 to 1764 under Johann Gottfried Büring on the site of a greenhouse in which he had raised tropical fruit and described as the oldest surviving museum built for a ruler in Germany, and the New Chambers to the west, put up between 1771 and 1775 to lodge and entertain guests. At Sanssouci itself he lived modestly and without splendour, and with age his modesty grew into miserliness: he allowed no repairs to the outer facade and those inside only with great reluctance, on the ground that the place need last no longer than he did. The absence of cellars, insisted upon against Knobelsdorff's advice, proved a building fault, rising damp spoiling the parquet and leaving the floors permanently cold, and the senior court building official Heinrich Ludwig Manger later wrote in his building history of Potsdam that the great man had lived to see defects in many of his buildings whose repair costs he felt keenly. In 1744, before the palace itself was begun, he had had a walled underground chamber built into the side of the top terrace, and before almost every campaign he renewed the instruction that he be buried there, beside his favourite dogs, without pomp and at night. He died in the chair of his study and bedroom on 17 August 1786.

His nephew and successor Frederick William II did not follow the instruction. He had the coffin laid in the crypt of the Potsdam garrison church, next to that of Frederick's father the soldier king, and showed visitors the grave on the terrace with the words that his predecessor had wished to lie beside his dogs rather than among his forebears. Contemporaries held such a grave unworthy of a king and a mark of his contempt for people, although the vault had been built before the dogs were buried there. In the same year the new king had Frederick's worn study and bedroom, the room in which he had died, altered by Friedrich Wilhelm von Erdmannsdorff, who left only the chimneypiece in place. Erdmannsdorff had built Schloss Wörlitz in the Wörlitz park, the earliest neoclassical building in Germany, while Frederick was raising the New Palace in the forms of the Baroque, and at Sanssouci he produced the first interior among the Potsdam and Berlin palaces carried through consistently in the classical style. Frederick William II occupied the room in the summers of 1787 to 1790, until he moved into the Marmorpalais in the New Garden, which he had built along with it after his accession.

Frederick William III, who came to the throne in 1797, used Sanssouci only for occasional stays and altered nothing in the inventory; his wife Luise lived in the palace for some months in 1794 with her sister Friederike while he was in Poland, and the family preferred to pass the summer at Paretz or on the Pfaueninsel. Palace and contents came through the French occupation of Potsdam in 1806 undamaged, because Napoleon placed the building under his personal protection and so preserved it from plundering.

Almost a hundred years after the palace was built, a king came to the Prussian throne who admired Frederick the Great and his world. Frederick William IV, a draughtsman with a close interest in architecture and landscape gardening, was granted permission in 1835, while still crown prince, to live at Sanssouci, although the summer palace of Charlottenhof, built only a few years earlier, stood at his disposal to the south-west. He and his wife Elisabeth Ludovika of Bavaria took the former guest rooms on the west side, while Frederick's rooms on the east served at first as state and reception rooms and only years later came into private use. After his accession in 1840 the larger household made rebuilding of the side wings necessary. Ludwig Persius drew up the designs from the king's sketches, the old single-storey wings were pulled down, and in 1841 and 1842, under the direction of Ferdinand von Arnim, the new wings were built longer and raised by a storey. The kitchen moved into the east wing and the servants' rooms to the new upper floor; the west wing became the Ladies' Wing, with apartments for ladies-in-waiting and guests. Such accommodation had not existed before, entertaining at Sanssouci having been minimal in Frederick's time, when women were not received at all.

The furniture that remained was kept and missing pieces replaced where possible with pieces of Frederick's period; the armchair in which he had died was returned to the palace in 1843. The plan to restore his death room to its original state was not carried out, because the surviving documents and designs did not seem authentic enough to the king. Out of doors, the topmost terrace, almost bare in Frederick's day but for arbours, trellis pavilions and sculpture, was given water features designed by Persius and Ludwig Ferdinand Hesse in 1845 and closed off with a marble balustrade, while the court gardener Hermann Sello planted the terraces with trees. In the parterre Persius widened the fountain basin into a circle in 1840 and 1841. From about 1842 the Great Fountain played at last, throwing a jet 38 metres high once steam power had solved the problem that defeated the king's engineers; the pumping station was itself built as a garden pavilion, disguised as a Turkish mosque with its chimney for a minaret. In 1866 a reduced copy of the equestrian statue of Frederick the Great was set up at the southern end of the parterre. Frederick William IV died in the palace on 2 January 1861 and was buried in the vault of the nearby Friedenskirche. His widow was the last inhabitant of Sanssouci, living there another thirteen years until her death on 14 December 1873, when she was buried beside him.

After 1873 Wilhelm I gave the palace and its contents over to museum use, which places it among the oldest palace museums in Germany. The end of the monarchy after the First World War left it in the possession of the Hohenzollerns, and on 1 April 1927 it passed into the care of the newly founded Prussian Administration of State Palaces and Gardens. Under its director Ernst Gall, and with the support of the Berlin state museums, the administration set about restoring the interiors as they had been in Frederick's time; Frederick's desk, among other things, came back to the study and bedroom. The same conservation thinking was applied to the whole Frederician part of the park, entrusted to Georg Potente, garden director of the Sanssouci district from June 1927, who from that year had the heavily overgrown vineyard terraces cleared and replanted, removed two of the semicircular benches from the central axis of the French Rondel, and took the water features and sculpture of Frederick William IV's day off the topmost terrace.

When Allied air raids on Berlin began, the windows were bricked up from April 1941 and works of art were moved out to Rheinsberg in Brandenburg and to Bernterode in Thuringia: French paintings of the 18th century, console vases of Meissen porcelain, almost all the furniture of the Little Gallery and Frederick's library. The rest of the furniture, nearly all the sculpture and the picture frames stayed in the palace. The building came through the fighting for Potsdam in April 1945 undamaged, although in the course of the fighting on the north side, between the approach to the palace and the historic mill, the gallery windmill burned down; a windmill had stood on the height since 1739, and Frederick had thought it an ornament to the palace. After the Red Army entered Potsdam on 27 April 1945 the park was placed under the control of Guards Lieutenant Colonel Yevgeni Fyodorovich Luchuweit and closed to the public until 4 June 1946. Most of the works sent to Rheinsberg, and of those that had stayed in the palace, went to the Soviet Union as spoils of war, and only a small part came back in 1958. What American soldiers found at Bernterode went first to the Central Art Collecting Point at Wiesbaden and in 1957 to Charlottenburg Palace in West Berlin.

Set against much else in Potsdam, the palace fared well through nearly fifty years of East German administration. The City Palace, which contained work by Knobelsdorff, was demolished in 1960 and the garrison church, already under reconstruction, was pulled down in 1968; the Church of St Saviour at Sacrow and parts of the historic centre of Potsdam were neglected or destroyed. Sanssouci came through unscathed, a full restoration of the building began in 1966, and the East German government worked to have the site placed on the World Heritage list. That was achieved in 1990, the citation calling the palace and park, often described as the Prussian Versailles, a synthesis of the artistic movements of the 18th century in the cities and courts of Europe and a unique example of architectural creation and landscape design against the intellectual background of monarchic ideas of the state. In the same year two paintings by Jean-Baptiste Pater that had been sent to Rheinsberg were bought back from the art trade with help from the Kulturstiftung der Länder and the German Class Lottery foundation; Frederick's book collection returned from Charlottenburg in 1992, and thirty-six oil paintings and two marble busts by Lambert-Sigisbert Adam followed between 1993 and 1995. The Foundation of Prussian Palaces and Gardens Berlin-Brandenburg, formed in 1995, administers Sanssouci and the other former royal palaces in Berlin and Brandenburg, and the palace is protected as a Kulturdenkmal. The west wing has been open to visitors since 1981 and the kitchen in the east wing since 1993, its fixed equipment intact because it was used only from 1842 to 1873 and never altered afterwards. With some 330,000 visitors, Sanssouci was the most popular sight in Potsdam in 2018.

Frederick's coffin, meanwhile, had been travelling. Wehrmacht soldiers took it and his father's out of the garrison church for safety, to an underground bunker at Geltow in March 1943 and to the salt mine at Bernterode in March 1945; the garrison church and the graves it had held burned out in the heavy air raid on Potsdam in April 1945. American soldiers moved the coffins in May 1945 to the Landgraves' castle at Marburg, in February 1946 to the Hessian state archive and in August 1946 to the Elisabethkirche, and in August 1952 they went to Burg Hohenzollern near Hechingen. After German reunification the king's testamentary wish was carried out, on the initiative of Louis Ferdinand, Prince of Prussia, head of the House of Hohenzollern, who had had the coffins moved into the castle's Christ chapel in 1953. The underground chamber on the terrace proved largely intact after almost 250 years; the masonry was repaired and a watertight roof fitted. On 17 August 1991, the 205th anniversary of Frederick's death, the sarcophagus with his remains lay in state in the cour d'honneur of Sanssouci under a Bundeswehr guard of honour, and because he had directed that he be buried there without pomp and by night, the interment took place at midnight, in the presence of Chancellor Helmut Kohl and members of the House of Hohenzollern, and was broadcast on television. His father, whose garrison church had by then been demolished, was reburied in the Kaiser Friedrich mausoleum at the Friedenskirche in the park. Visitors lay flowers on the plain stone inscribed „Friedrich der Große“, and potatoes, in memory of his potato order.