Historic Mill of Sanssouci

Following the accession of Frederick William IV in 1840, the landscape architect, Peter Joseph Lenné, smartened up the area around the mill.

At the end of the Second World War, on 27 April 1945, a Soviet tank was hit by a panzerfaust between the mill and the drive up to Sanssouci Palace.

It had to be planned from photographs and measurements of the mill foundations, because the construction drawings by Cornelius Wilhelm van der Bosch were no longer available.

Grävenitz pointed to the fact that, as a result of the construction of the palace, the post mill no longer stood in the open, but was partly shielded from the wind.

In 1768 there was a legal dispute at another location over water rights and the remaining lease between Christian Arnold, the tenant of a mill in Pommerzig in the Neumark, and his landlord, the Count of Schmettau.

This legal battle and the story of the Sanssouci miller were woven together in the legend and were intended to emphasize the king's justice towards all his subjects.

His nephew and successor, Frederick William II decided in a compromise that: In the years that followed there continued to be disputes between the reigning kings and the millers for different reasons.

Among others, a shortened version appeared in 1788 in the work About Friedrich the Great and my discussions with him shortly before his death by the doctor Johann Georg Zimmermann and in 1797 the story Le Meunier de Sans-Souci written in verse by the lawyer and playwright François Andrieux.

In Germany, Johann Peter [de] took further the legend in 1811 in his Treasure Chest of the Rhenish House Friend and reproduced it in a modified form under the title King Friedrich and his neighbor.

The Miller of Sanssouci can be found in several publications to this day, was filmed and performed as a play, such as the comic opera by Karl Goepfart [de] (1907) and the comedy by Peter Hacks (1958).