The story of this place
Before he was the fearsome 'Old Fritz', Frederick was a bullied crown prince whose father, the Soldier King, once forced him to watch his best friend beheaded. In 1736 Frederick's father gave him Rheinsberg on the Grienericksee, and here, aged 24, the prince found four years of freedom — reading Voltaire, composing flute music, staging plays and gathering intellectuals in what he later called the happiest years of his life. The rococo interiors and the lakeside setting shaped the aesthetic he would later pour into Sanssouci. Fontane immortalised the palace in his 'Rambles through Brandenburg', and Kurt Tucholsky set his tender novella 'Rheinsberg' among its gardens.