ABSTRACT
The social and cultural climate of Brandenburg-Prussia is usually portrayed as harsh, coarse and philistine. North German society was imbued with a sense of inferiority as contemporaries drew unfavourable comparisons with France and Italy, but even neighbouring Protestant states like Saxony and the courts of Brunswick and Hanover surpassed Brandenburg as centres of cultural patronage and learning. To the cultivated Austrian rulers the Great Elector had the reputation of a ‘vandal of the north’. His successor, the melancholy Elector-King Frederick, was ridiculed in the European courts for being an ‘ape of Louis XIV’, while King Frederick William I was an irascible boor with no cultural sensitivity.
