Sanssouci: Frederick the Great's Palace of No Worries

On a terraced hill outside Potsdam, a king who had spent his adult life at war built himself a place to be left alone. He called it Sanssouci, French for 'without worries', and the name was a programme. Frederick II of Prussia, the soldier-king of the Enlightenment, wanted a summer retreat where court ceremony stopped at the garden gate. What he built between 1745 and 1747 was not a palace in the usual sense at all. It was a long, low, single-storey villa of ten principal rooms, set like a jewel box above vineyards that climb the hill in sweeping terraces. Everything about it was a refusal: of grandeur, of protocol, of the life he was obliged to lead everywhere else.

Most palaces express a dynasty. Sanssouci expresses a person.

The refusal was deliberate, and it was personal. Frederick had grown up under a martinet father who despised his love of music, books, and French philosophy. Sanssouci was the answer, decades in the making: a house for the man he actually was. He read and played and corresponded here, entertained Voltaire and the leading minds of Europe at his famous round table, and otherwise kept the machinery of the Prussian state at a careful distance. The palace is small enough that a visitor today can feel the intimacy of it within minutes. This was not a stage. It was a study with a view.

The vineyards as architecture

Approach Sanssouci properly, from below, and the first thing you see is not the palace at all. It is the hill. Six broad terraces of vines step up the slope in a great curved fan, each retained by brick walls, with 132 steps climbing the centre between them. The terraces are the real facade of Sanssouci, a piece of landscape architecture as composed as anything the king's architect ever drew. Frederick took his wine seriously; the south-facing slope was planted for production, not decoration. That a king's summer palace should present itself first as a working vineyard tells you everything about the place. Utility and beauty were not separate categories here.

The effect, from the parterre at the foot of the hill, is theatrical in the best sense: the eye travels up the green steps of the terraces to the long pale line of the palace on its crest, its colonnaded garden front catching the light. It is one of the great composed views in European architecture, and it cost Frederick's architect his job. Or rather, the king's impatience and his certainty about what he wanted cost the architect his job, which amounts to the same thing.

Frederician Rococo, by royal command

Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff was Frederick's architect of choice, the man who gave the king's taste its built form. But Frederick was not a client who accepted counsel gracefully. When the two men disagreed over the siting and the design, the king dismissed Knobelsdorff in 1746, before the palace was finished, and the Dutch architect Jan Bouman completed the work. The result is nonetheless the defining statement of what historians call Frederician Rococo: lighter and more playful than the French manner it descends from, intimate where Versailles is overwhelming, a Rococo scaled to conversation rather than coronation.

Walk the enfilade of the ten rooms and the style declares itself. The Marble Hall, the Concert Room, the small library where Frederick actually read: each is a complete composition of stucco, gilding, and painted ceiling, exuberant but never vulgar. This was the king's personal architectural statement in a way few royal buildings ever are. Most palaces express a dynasty. Sanssouci expresses a person: cultivated, exacting, and determined to be amused.

The flute in the music room

Frederick played the flute every evening, and he played well. The Concert Room at Sanssouci, where he performed with his court musicians, was the centre of his private life in a way no council chamber ever was. Adolph von Menzel's famous painting of one of these evenings, the king at his flute among his guests, has fixed the scene in the German imagination: candlelight, polished wood, and a monarch who would rather be a musician. It is worth remembering that this was the same man who had, in his youth, been forced to watch the execution of his closest friend for helping him attempt to flee his father's court. The music room was not decoration. It was survival.

The collection Frederick assembled here was serious in the same way. The Picture Gallery, built in the park to house his paintings, is described as the oldest surviving museum building erected for a ruler in Germany, a reminder that the king's retreat was also a working institution of Enlightenment culture. He bought old masters the way other monarchs bought regiments, and he hung them for his own pleasure first.

The king comes home

Frederick died in 1786, in the palace he loved, and left instructions to be buried at Sanssouci, beside his dogs, without pomp. The instructions were ignored for two centuries: his successors interred him with ceremony elsewhere, and the wars of the twentieth century scattered even that. It was only after German reunification that his remains were finally brought back and laid to rest on the terrace above the palace, as he had wished. Visitors leave potatoes on the grave, a nod to the king who is said to have forced the potato on a sceptical Prussia. It is an odd tribute, and somehow the right one: practical, earthy, and entirely in the spirit of the place.

Today Sanssouci is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, inscribed in 1990 as part of the Palaces and Parks of Potsdam and Berlin, and it is administered by the Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation Berlin-Brandenburg. Admission is timed and advance booking is recommended, which is fitting. The king who wanted to be without worries now receives several hundred thousand visitors a year, all of them queuing politely to see how he managed it. Go early, climb the 132 steps slowly, and stand on the terrace where he is buried. The view over the park is the one thing about Sanssouci that has not changed at all.