New Palace, Potsdam
Frederick the Great did not need another palace. He had Sanssouci, his low intimate retreat in the Potsdam park, built to his own designs in the Frederician Rococo style he loved. He had a working office in the Berlin city palace. He preferred dogs to courtiers and string quartets to balls. So when the Seven Years' War ended in 1763 — Prussia bankrupt, depopulated, surrounded by enemies who had spent seven years trying and failing to dismember it — Frederick built, on the western edge of the Sanssouci park, a deliberately enormous baroque pile with over 200 rooms and 400 sandstone statues, and he privately called it fanfaronade. The word means something close to swagger. The point was for everyone in Europe to see that Prussia had survived, was rich, and was not afraid.
Stage Set as Statecraft
Construction ran from 1763 to 1769. The architect Johann Gottfried Buring began the project; Carl von Gontard finished it after the design disputes that follow any project of this scale. The east and west facades stretch 220 metres. Look closely at the brick patterning between the pilasters — most of it is paint. Repointing the actual mortar joints proved arduous and expensive, so Frederick had the masonry stuccoed and the brick pattern painted on, fooling visitors then and now. Only the king's south wing has real exposed brick. Across the great courtyard stands the Communs, a service block disguised as a second palace, complete with double flights of ceremonial steps and a cupola of its own. From the courtyard it reads as the matching twin of the New Palace; in fact it contains the kitchens and the servants' quarters. The whole composition is a piece of urban theatre.
The Marble Hall
The single most spectacular interior is the Marmorsaal on the upper floor, rising two storeys to a vast curved ceiling under the central copper dome. The ceiling painting — Charles-Amedee-Philippe van Loo's Induction of Ganymede in Olympus, completed in 1769 — covers 240 square metres and is the largest canvas ceiling painting north of the Alps. Twelve life-size statues stand at the pilasters: eight Brandenburg prince-electors and four classical and medieval emperors — Julius Caesar, Constantine, Charlemagne, and Rudolf II of Habsburg. Frederick had himself placed in the lineage. Below the Marble Hall is the Grottensaal, walls encrusted with shells, semi-precious stones, marble fragments, quartz crystals, and — added in 1890 by an enthusiastic Wilhelm II — a piece of rock said to be from the summit of Kilimanjaro, gifted to the Kaiser by the geographer Hans Meyer.
Last Imperial Address
After Frederick's death in 1786 the New Palace fell quiet. It became a summer residence again under Crown Prince Frederick William, later the briefly-reigning Frederick III, who spent the famous Ninety-Nine Days of his 1888 reign here, dying of throat cancer with his wife Victoria — Queen Victoria's eldest daughter — beside him. His son Wilhelm II made the New Palace his preferred residence and stayed until the German Revolution forced his abdication in November 1918. The palace was Wilhelm's last home in Germany. After the abdication the Weimar Republic sent thirty-four train wagons of his furniture across the border to Huis Doorn in the Netherlands, where he lived out his life. Some of those packing crates were rediscovered, unopened, in the 1970s and shipped back to Potsdam. The New Palace escaped Allied bombing in 1945 almost entirely, which is why the rooms today look much as they did when Wilhelm walked out in 1918.
The Chair with the Label
In one of the upper galleries you may notice a chair with a small explanatory plaque. The Stiftung Preussische Schlosser und Garten, which manages the palace today, has chosen to mark the furniture used at the meeting Hermann Goering convened here in 1933, when he installed his new Prussian State Council in the building. Goering chose the New Palace deliberately. He wanted the symbolic mantle of Frederick the Great. The labels are an act of historical hygiene — a refusal to let the palace's grandeur quietly absorb the fact that the Nazi state used it for its own theatre. The point of fanfaronade, Frederick understood, is that anyone can borrow it. So the foundation marks where the borrowing happened.
From the Air
Located at 52.401 degrees north, 13.016 degrees east, at the western end of the Sanssouci park in Potsdam, about 25 km southwest of central Berlin. From the air at 2,000 to 5,000 feet AGL the New Palace appears as a long pink-and-cream block with a green copper dome, facing the matching Communs across a courtyard, all set within the formal terraces and parterres of the larger park. The Havel river curves to the south. Nearest major airport is Berlin-Brandenburg (EDDB), 35 km east-southeast.