Historic Revival

On a sunny autumn Sunday a few weeks ago I visited Sanssouci Palace outside Berlin and was astonished by the crowds. If locals in hip neighborhoods like Kreuzberg think they are overrun with tourists, they should try finding a free bench in the gardens of Germany's answer to Versailles.

Prussian history is obviously popular.

Taking the long view

From the First World War and the Weimar Republic to Nazism and communism, the turbulent 20th century left Berlin with such visible scars that its older history tends to get short shrift.

But time heals all wounds, and the last twenty years have seen most of the building facades pockmarked by battle damage treated to pastel-hued facelifts and East Germany's asbestos-riddled architectural monstrosities summarily torn down.

This dramatic deleting of the recent past has proved controversial, but one interesting side-effect is that it's pushed the last one hundred years off center-stage and broadened Berlin's historical horizons.

Long-gone centuries are finally being allowed a look-in - and perhaps understandably, they look pretty attractive from today's standpoint.

Prussia might be painted by some historians as a reactionary militaristic state built on values that paved the way for Nazism, but to others it has always been one of the most liberal of Germany's historic kingdoms. And right now this definitely seems to be the prevailing opinion.

Needless to say, it isn't the Prussia-in-its-dying-days - all muttonchops and pickelhauben - that has caught the public's imagination, but rather its halcyon years as a European superpower in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Wigs and clavichords

This reclaiming of Prussian heritage probably began with the government's 2007 decision to rebuild the 18th century City Palace on Unter den Linden. It was an unpopular move in cash-strapped Berlin but one that set the ball rolling.

Take one of last year's most hyped cultural events - a series of exhibitions about Berlin's very own queen of hearts, Luise of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, the Queen consort of Prussia who famously flirted with Napoleon and was touted as Germany's first It Girl.

The shows were smash hits and Berlin suddenly seemed to realize that Enlightened Absolutism is a public relations gift that keeps on giving. The list of events celebrating the House of Hohenzollern gets longer all the time.

Now not a week goes by without some Prussian extravaganza or other packing in the crowds.

The Orangerie at Charlottenburg Palace, for example, hosts regular evenings that border on high camp of Baroque music and dancing, complete with a menu of dishes once eaten in the Prussian courts, served by French-speaking waiters in full costume.

Intrigued, I went along recently and found myself sharing a table with a couple from the Netherlands.

It was all very entertaining, but I was instantly reminded that Prussia wasn't only fun and games when the master of ceremonies kicked off the evening by asking whether there were any Prussian subjects in the room.

"Well, you did invade us," said my neighbor.

Setting the record straight

And then this summer, we'd barely switched off the TV after watching William and Kate get hitched in London when Georg Friedrich Ferdinand Prince of Prussia, great-great-grandson of Wilhelm II, gave us another royal wedding right on our doorstep, marrying Sophie Johanna Maria Princess of Isenburg at the Friedenskirche in the grounds of Sanssouci.

His notoriously miserly ancestor Frederick the Great would probably have balked at the lavish affair.

But then again, maybe not. He was a man of contradictions - an authoritarian military commander but also a libertine who enjoyed a ribald joke and an aesthete who corresponded with Voltaire and apparently played the flute so much his teeth fell out.

Old Fritz will be the subject of some ambitious celebrations himself next spring, when Sanssouci hosts an exhibition to mark what would have been his 300th birthday.

Ullrich Sachse from the Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation is coorganizing the show called 'Friederisiko' and hopes it will clear up a few misconceptions. Not least the one about Frederick being a cheapskate.

"The New Palace is proof positive that he wasn't as frugal as he's always been described," Sachse pointed out.

I asked him what he makes of this unexpected attraction to Prussian history.

"It's not exactly a trend, but there does seem to be a growing public interest," he said. "In (the past) Prussia tended to be seen from the perspective of the political present and instrumentalized with political intent, whereas today we can approach the topic in an impartial and scientific way. Perhaps that's why the history of Prussia is now recognized as part of our cultural heritage more than it was before."

Whatever the reasons, it's interesting to see Berlin is rediscovering a piece of the past that it's happy to celebrate unequivocally.

Editor: Zulfikar Abbany