Most of All I Feel Lonely
On Holy Saturday, the sun closes early, leaving a phantom of warmth for tourists and visitors. The gray light, on this doorway of a day, between death and living again, turns us into some species of ghost, wandering in pairs or groups of beloveds through the Sanssouci Park in Potsdam. Grecian nudes stand guard, looking out from marble eyes; three ducks float along an immense fountain. In the style of exiled ones, we have entered through the back way, the lover and I.
I am only half-listening as he starts to talk about Frederick the Great, upon whose demand these palaces and the surrounding park were made. Around us, the other ghosts are equally engrossed, finding the right angle for photographs that will fully display the tiered staircase beneath the main Sanssouci Palace, complete with the rows of vine waiting to bear their summer fruit. And nearby, three young men ride on bicycles, their rhythm harmonious and elegant on the eye, past a sign which forbids bicycle-riding in the park.
What is forbidden (verboten) on a piece of land becomes the law that binds the bodies situated upon it—a bind of absented possibility. What is forbidden for me, a young exile from West African homosexual repression, is all I can dwell on. My German national visa, valid for the meantime, offers not an enumeration of my privileges and permissions, but a brief and concise summary of what lines I am not allowed to cross—laws of labor, length of stay. Yet, I am freer, in important ways, than in the country where I was born, where the law delimits the nature of my sexuality and love itself. I am thinking of banished possibilities as I roam this great exterior: three million square meters of German aristocratic land and architecture, dwarfed by three thousand fruit trees still getting dressed for springtime. I am caught on the unreachable fruit, forbidden to me.
The lover has the charms of a history book—he is often clever, and at times concise. What he does not know, he smilingly speculates. For instance, a popular and convincing hypothesis of the homosexuality of Frederick the Great, whose effeminacy is better documented. This king was a lover of poetry and philosophy and art; a player of the flute. His palace of Sanssouci, in its French Rococo styling, was conceived as a getaway: a place where his wife of arranged marriage, Elisabeth Christine, was seldom invited, and where he could retreat from the monarchical bureaucracies of Berlin to relax in his preferred company of male aesthetes and intellectuals. No doubt he was a man who was familiar with, and knew his way around, the forbidden.
A story goes that his father, Frederick Wilhelm I of Prussia, entirely disapproving of the young Frederick’s deficit in masculinity, would beat him in public whenever he behaved to his father’s distaste, and, according to biographer Wolfgang Burgdorf, called the heir to his throne a «sodomite» and «effeminate». As an adolescent prince, Frederick is said to have attempted fleeing, together with a friend or lover, from those royal and patriarchal pressures. Frederick Wilhelm’s punishment was exacting. After sentencing both young men to prison, the king decided on a finality, and ordered the accomplice/friend/lover’s beheading, while making Frederick watch the whole scene through a palace window. In this story, the young Frederick’s possibility of romance and escape suffers total obliteration. Yet, I imagine it as the kind of possibility which the mind must immortalize. But his father’s project to harden and make a man out of Frederick ultimately yielded good results. To earn his title of «the Great», Frederick in time established himself by remarkable military campaigns against Austria and other powers, invading Saxony and seizing Silesia. Under his reign, Prussia grew to be one of the great European states. Frederick made the name for himself, beyond a standard King in Prussia, as the first King of Prussia—in all the glory of its territorial increase—by 1772. The legacy of his greatness is extraordinary. I find it boring.