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A king in hiding

The equestrian statue of the Prussian king Frederick the Great only survived due to a conspiracy. The monument to the principal of Sanssouci had endured the bombing of Berlin during World War II without damage – immured in his original position “Unter den Linden”. In 1950, however, the Magistrate of “Greater Berlin, Democratic Sector” (thus the official name for East Berlin which due to the Four Power Status always held a special position), run by the Socialist Unitarian Party (SED) targeted the statue deemed unfit for real-life socialism; they caused it to be cut into pieces and transported to Potsdam. When the sculpture was about to be melted down during the Stalinist furor, the minister of culture of the GDR and a few art lovers – upon approval by the Director of the Potsdam Palaces and Gardens – developed a cunning plan for the rescue of the monument. “The king was loaded onto a flat-bed vehicle … then, in a rainy night in Potsdam, they drove it once around the block and unloaded their treasure in another part of the park.” (Hans Bentzien, minister of culture, 1997)
Until the king was rehabilitated by the government the statue was well hidden in Sanssouci; it was then reinstalled at the Hippodrom near the summer palace Charlottenhof and finally erected again in its original position in Berlin.
A scaled down marble copy of the equestrian sculpture showing the statesman with uniform, ermine and tricorne was erected in 1865 near the New Orangery in Sanssouci and remained uncontested until today.