284 FINAL YEARS AND IMMORTALITYobservation, and his sympathy for the rococo style was of a different
order from that expressed in the ormolu-laden knick-knackery of the
apartments of the nineteenth-century millionaires.
Menzel's feeling for the individuality of characters, events and
landscapes has its counterpart, in the medium of historical literature,
in Thomas Carlyle's History of Friedrich II of Prussia (1858-65).
Carlyle despised the professional historians, and these prickly gentle-
men have repaid him in similar coinage, but his work represented a
triumph over the inadequacy of the sources, the absence of reliable
maps, and the miseries of contemporary travel. Carlyle set out to visit
the sites of all of Frederick's major battles, and his record of the
landscape of pre-Industrial Revolution Europe is enough by itself to
make his book of enduring value.
Much of what we know about Frederick, in a more 'scientific'
sense, derives from the extraordinary flowering of historical studies
in the later decades of the nineteenth century.
One element in the new Frederician historiography was given
wide prominence by Theodor von Bernhardi, whose Friedrich der
Grosse als Feldherr (2 vols, 1881) became the standard military
biography. Broadly speaking, Bernhardi and the other historians of
the Prussian 'establishment' liked to represent Frederick as the prac-
titioner of a style of warfare which corresponded closely to the
energetic campaigning of Napoleon Bonaparte and von Moltke the
Elder. Thus the invasion of Bohemia in 1757 was hailed as a prefigur-
ing of the events of 1866 and 1870 (Bernhardi, 1881,1, 2; Ollech, 1883,
28).
Another school, predominantly civilian, and headed by Hans
Delbruck, maintained that Old Fritz was a creature of his times and
that he chose as he saw fit from the whole arsenal of weapons
available to him, ranging from ambitious schemes of destruction,
down to the Ermattungsstrategie of waiting and attrition. Reinhold
Koser (the future author of the most scholarly and balanced of the
biographies of Frederick (effected a compromise of sorts, and in 1912
the retired Generaloberst Count Schlieffen made a study which
indicated that the opening of the campaign of 1757 indeed fell short of
what was required for a strategy of annihilation (see Boehm-
Tettelbach, 1934, 24).
Delbruck, however, was one of those people who draw their vital
force from confrontation and controversy, and the argument about
matters of detail was prolonged into the 1920s. The debate had been
given a new lease of life by the alleged shortcomings of the usually
excellent history of the wars of Frederick the Great, by the Second
Historical Section of the German Great General Staff. The first
volume appeared in 1890, and the rest followed at irregular intervals