Mémoires, 1750

Pirated edition of Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de la maison de Brandebourg, 1750

Unlike his Habsburg adversary Empress Maria Theresia, who exhibited her dynastic prowess in innumerable family portraits celebrating her sixteen children, Frederick projected the strength of the Hohenzollern dynasty through the written word. This volume presents an account of his forebears in the Brandenburg-Prussian line, and it is the first of a series of historical works which increasingly also served to shape his own posthumous reputation. Frederick read the work before the Berlin Academy in 1747–1748, which published it in its proceedings. The exhibited volume is one of many unauthorised popular reprints of that first scholarly edition.