Erotic poem by Frederick after 200 years in Germany

An erotic poem by Frederick the Great that was long believed lost has been discovered in a secret Berlin archive, more than 200 years after the Prussian monarch’s death, the weekly Die Zeit newspaper reported.Written in French a few weeks after Frederick became king, the poem is called “La Jouissance,” which can refer to pleasure in the general sense or to a sexual climax. A copy of the original manuscript was found among some of the king’s letters, where it had been for more than 100 years.Frederick sent the poem to Voltaire, with whom he regularly corresponded on philosophy and topics of the day, Die Zeit said in today’s paper. In an accompanying letter, Frederick said it was the only poem he’d had time to write since ascending to the throne. The king also explained that he’d written it for an Italian friend, Francesco Algarotti, who claimed that northern Europeans were less capable of feeling than southerners.“I have had feelings and described them as best I could to show him that we are capable of sentiment despite our constitution,” Frederick wrote to Voltaire. “Tell me whether my description works or not. Remember that there are moments that are as difficult to describe as the sun in its splendor.”Frederick appointed Algarotti the romantic hero of his poem, describing a steamy encounter with a woman he names as Chloris, a beautiful virgin of Greek mythology.The hero is “beside himself with love, trembling with impatience” as he falls into her arms. Frederick describes “kisses dissolving into lust, sighs and death,” and “arising again in a kiss, to become lust once more.”He concludes by observing that the next morning, it is all over, though “a moment of lust is worth as much to him who enjoys it as a century of honor.”The poem was not included in a 19th-century publication of Frederick the Great’s verse which encompassed 31 volumes, Die Zeit reported. No one knew then what had become of it.Though it later resurfaced, the poem was deliberately omitted from a 10-volume edition of his verse published in 1912 to mark Frederick’s 200th birthday, the paper said. A poem praising sensual lust as the “mistress of the world” may have been considered inappropriate for the king and deliberately “forgotten,” the paper said.