Sanssouci was Frederick the Great's personal retreat, built against the wishes of his father Frederick William I and completed in 1747. The DDR's decision to commemorate it in 1986 was characteristically awkward — the East German state was celebrating the summer palace of an 18th-century Prussian militarist king it had otherwise spent decades ideologically distancing itself from. By the 1980s, the regime had quietly rehabilitated Frederick II as a usable national symbol, culminating in the return of his equestrian statue to Unter den Linden in 1980.
Sanssouci was Frederick the Great's personal retreat, built against the wishes of his father Frederick William I and completed in 1747. The DDR's decision to commemorate it in 1986 was characteristically awkward — the East German state was celebrating the summer palace of an 18th-century Prussian militarist king it had otherwise spent decades ideologically distancing itself from. By the 1980s, the regime had quietly rehabilitated Frederick II as a usable national symbol, culminating in the return of his equestrian statue to Unter den Linden in 1980.