#friedrich wilhelm

Germans don’t start overt revolutions like those Frenchmen, here we prefer to write calm acoustic songs about our monarchs, pointing out all their flaws, after they’re long gone. 

An excerpt from the lyrics for the non-Germanophone people out there: 

I leisurely stroll through the Friedrichsstraße [Fredericks-Street] and ask myself

Which of the many Fredericks is it actually named after?

Well, maybe Frederick William I, who they call the “Soldier King”

Who we know from the forced recruitment of the “Langen Kerls” [”tall guys”, a Prussian regiment of taller-than-average men]

A stingy military-head, know for his art of squeezing money out of people

And the invention of the Prussian virtue of beheading children

Who locked his son, together with his cherished buddy Katte,

Into the fortress in Küstrin, because they had run off once

Where he let poor Katte’s head be chopped of

Before his son’s eyes, as they say, just as a rebuke

And if he hadn’t been held back, then he would’ve immediately

Beheaded his own son, unperturbed, so that he’ll turn into a proper man someday

It has to be a different Friedrich, for in this pious country

One wouldn’t have named a street after such a hoodlum

Maybe after Frederick II, Old Fritz, tough and authoritarian

And nothing on his mind except his dogs and his military

And especially not his wife, “I will cast her out”

“As soon as I am the master in this house”, is that why one calls him Frederick the Great?

Well granted, it was he who brought the potato to Germany

But it was also he who put our neighbour off our literature

In eleven year of war he fought fifteen bloody battles

And carried the damn militarism over into our time

Even today he still causes trouble under the earth

With the order that he be buried with his dogs

Only King Helmut [Helmut Kohl, German Chancellor from 1982 to 1998] obeyed, now his dogs have him

The old bone, and we have his Equestrian statue in the middle of Berlin