287 FINAL YEARS AND IMMORTALITYwould not have recognised himself as the same individual who, in the
film Der Grosse Konig (1942), presided over a victory parade of the
homecoming veterans. This question of style is not without some
importance, for the genuine old Prussian military tradition was one
of understatement. Hans Bleckwenn recalls the fate of the mortal
remains of Frederick's court dancer Barbara Campanini, which were
re-buried with full military honours in 1857 in mistake for the body of
Winterfeldt. 'It is only too evident that Prussia is not the right setting
for displays of bombastic romanticism. Winterfeldt himself, who was
not averse to jokes and charades, would probably have found it
extremely funny' (Bleckwenn, 1978, 190).
In the decades following the Second World War, the name of
Frederick was repeatedly invoked in the debates as to whether it was
possible to discover elements of continuity between the old Prussian
state and Hitler's new order. In West Germany these arguments
engaged the attention not only of the professors but of mass com-
municators of the calibre of Rudolf Augstein and Marion Donhoff. It
is relevant to call to mind that the population of the Bundesrepublik
embraces large numbers of refugees from the historic lands of the
Prussian monarchy, and that these folk and their descendants form a
significant part of the leadership of army and state. In 1967 the
'Prussians' comprised almost exactly half of the officer corps of the
Bundeswehr (Nelson, 1972, 73). Frederick himself, and his father,
now rest in the castle of Hohenzollern in Wiirttemberg, whither the
bodies were removed in 1945.
The other Germany has inherited more of the physical legacy of
the royal regime (Mittenzwei, 1979, 212), a nde veiy year brings fresh
evidence of the search for formulae that will reconcile Marxism-
Leninism with the growing popular interest in Frederick and his
Prussia. In the German context every historical statement is inevit-
ably a political statement, and it was not possible for the East German
authorities to take a course as simple as the one adopted by the
Soviets, of warming up an entire nineteenth-century school of
nationalistic historiography. Instead we have the process of 're-
historisation', by which Luther, Bismarck and other figures are found
to have displayed tendencies that were 'progressive' by the standards
of their time.
In the East German popular mind the standing of Old Fritz is
directly associated with the fate of the great equestrian statue by
Christian Daniel Rauch, which was first unveiled in the Unter den
Linden in 1851. This monument escaped the destruction which over-
took the Berlin Schloss and Arsenal, but the symbolism of the
eastward-striding figure was so strong that in 1950 it was banished to
a remote corner of the Sans Souci park. Those who made the effort to