Free Republic

Tim Blanning, Frederick the Great: King of Prussia (New York: Random House, 2016), 688 pp., $35.00. NAPOLEON SWIFTLY conquered Prussia in October 1806, inflicting crushing defeats at Jena and Auerstedt that humbled a realm long known for its military tradition. A bulletin announcing news of the two battles described them as expunging the fifty-year stain left by Frederick the Great’s victory over a French army at Rossbach in 1757. When he visited Frederick the Great’s tomb with a group of his generals, Napoleon purportedly instructed them, “hats off gentlemen, if he were alive we wouldn’t be here today.”

The human cost of the War of 1812 was dramatic. Some 35,000 people were killed, wounded or missing at the end of the war. York (now Toronto), Niagara (now Niagara-on-the-Lake) and Washington, D.C. were torched. Elsewhere, homes and properties were looted and damaged and family lives were thrown into chaos. The borders between British North America and the United States might not have changed when the fighting stopped — the old lines were reconfirmed in the Treaty of Ghent, which ended the war on December 24, 1814. But once the treaty was signed, there wasn’t simply a return to the...

Germans bury Prussia taboo to fete Frederick (Reuters) - Portraits of Frederick the Great line the streets, bookshops are bursting with new biographies, talk shows debate his legacy and toymaker Steiff has made a limited edition teddy bear of the Prussian ruler in his blue uniform coat and tricorn hat. Germans gearing up for a year of celebrations to mark Frederick's 300th birthday are showing a new, relaxed pride in the much-disputed figure and in Prussia itself, long considered a byword for the militarism glorified by the Nazis. Between 1740 and 1786, Frederick the Great transformed Prussia from a small,...