The abundant writings of Frederick II of Prussia were one of the unique traits of his rule, clearly distinguishing him from fellow eighteenth-century rulers. Whatever his specific purposes were in the act of writing, he made authorship itself a pivotal tenet of his public persona. Fellow monarchs in the late eighteenth century (such as George III in Britain or Joseph II in Austria) abandoned some of the traditional aspects of representational court culture and fashioned themselves as patriots, reformers, family men, or servants of their state. Yet none presented himself so openly in the public sphere as a philosopher, a poet, an expert-writer, a historian, or what we would today call a ‘public intellectual’ – all roles which Frederick eagerly assumed. As Andreas Pečar notes in this study, such roles were usually incompatible with the traditional attributes of a roi connétable; heavy damage could have been wrought on the monarch’s stature had Frederick been less skilful in harnessing a wide array of genres to the promotion of such self-fashioned images. „BUCHBESPRECHUNG / BOOK REVIEW: Andreas Pečar, Die Masken des Königs. Friedrich II. von Preußen als Schriftsteller, campus, Frankfurt a.M. / New York 2016, 236 S., ISBN: 978-3593505329“ weiterlesen