Berlin and Sans-Souci

Frederick at home: Voltaire arriving, Voltaire quarreling, Voltaire leaving; the flute, the greyhounds, the Berlin theater, the brothers who cannot please him, and the ministers who dare not contradict. Mühlbach was Klara Mundt, who wrote nearly three hundred volumes; here the wars are offstage and the court is the whole subject, which suits her exactly — she is a gossip with archives. Fifty-six plates, from Menzel's eighteenth-century court to Munch's northern light, trace the same theatre of power and its aftermath that Mühlbach stages at Sans-Souci.