Including Comrade Frederick

The German Communists got a new spiritual comrade. He was the soldier-king Frederick the Great of Prussia (1740-86), a flute-playing ally of Empress Catherine the Great of Russia, and a fanatic military disciplinarian who could have made blintzes out of Joe Stalin's toughest commissars.

Berliners are proud of Frederick's bronze statue on Unter den Linden, which, since the start of World War II, had been encased in a brick shell to protect it against air raids. Recently, not fully realizing their kinship to the king, the Communists suggested that the statue be melted down for scrap. An outcry of protest from Berliners taught the Communist bosses that they could put Frederick to better use.

Last week the statue was taken from its shell and gently laid out in a truck to be transported to a grander location in Frederick's graceful palace of Sans Souci at Potsdam. Barely had the trip got under way when the truck broke down; the Reds announced that Frederick would be temporarily restored to his old pedestal, but that glory at Sans Souci still awaited him.

The Communists' new attitude toward a king they once denounced as an evil nationalist was symbolic of a new, all-out appeal by the Communists to extreme German nationalism. At a rally of the Communist-run Social Unity Party in East Berlin last week, German Communist Boss Otto Grotewohl launched a new "National Front." Standing below a picture of North Korean Premier Kim II Sung, Grotewohl announced that henceforth the German Communists would welcome anyone into their ranks. Said Grotewohl: "No patriot . . . will be excluded . . . Our National Front is not limited to democratic elements. We want everybody, including the former Nazis . . ." Old Frederick had been scooped up in an odd netful.

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