"Chance... I mean God... brought me here!" aLOL. I could totes see Fritz or Katte saying this.
Thank you for the summary of Posa's nonsensical plots! Omfg, you're right, that is so frustrating. I like manipulative types, but only when they're several orders of magnitude more intelligent than everyone around them. This...does not sound like that.
This is actually the culmination of several other complicated plans Posa has in the play, which go terribly wrong because he doesn't ever TELL, say, his best friend that he's plotting all this stuff involving him.
Oh, Posa, noooooo!! You have to actually tell your BFF about your plots! *facepalm*
Now, I see your fandom's Very Stupid Plot and raise you my own fandom's Very Stupid Plot. :DD
Specifically, the attempted escape attempt that got Katte killed and Fritz imprisoned for years and traumatized for life. This plot was so poorly planned and executed that it stands out to everyone who knows the first thing about Frederick the Great's later life as "How the fuck was this plan devised by the same guy who won a three-front war against three of the biggest European superpowers?"
Now, I'm sympathetic to the idea that we should not expect an eighteen-year-old to come up with an A+ plan for escaping from a lifetime of abuse at the hands of an absolute monarch (which is a level up from your normal abusive father). But the difference in quality is just so drastic that some of his biographers have speculated that it was less of an escape plan than a ploy for attention. Fritz may have wanted to get caught, or at least subconsciously. I think the case for this is definitely plausible, although I think there are a lot of other factors that account for the ridiculously boneheaded plan.
Now here's the boneheaded plan so you can judge for yourself.
First and foremost, Fritz and Katte told practically everyone, well in advance. Between the two of them, so many people knew about this plan that it's only a surprise it didn't reach the King *sooner*. Then everything went comically wrong. Katte was supposed to get permission to leave Berlin. He didn't. So he was stuck there. Fritz decided to make his move anyway. While on a road trip with his father. He made a handful of attempts, none of which made it more than about two feet past the front door? Something like that. He dressed in the most conspicuous manner possible, to the point where everyone knew something was up, even those not in the know, and one guy was like, "*Please* take that off, your father is going to *kill* you if he sees you wearing that."
Reader, he got caught.
Here, look. I have a clip for you! From 21:40 - 22:37. It's taken some creative license with the details, but the spirit of the absurdity should come through. The coat, the getting caught in the front yard, the way everybody knows...
What happened was that one of the many, many people who knew about the plan got cold feet and fessed up to the King, who ordered his son taken into custody.
At this point, Fritz is still dramatically underestimating the extent of his father's batshittery. He taunts him with the fact that he was trying to escape (giving credence to the fact that he may have thought getting caught might get him what he wanted--better treatment--without all the trouble of going to England via France). Then, when asked to name his conspirators, he implicates everyone. (He may have been trying to plea bargain, especially given the fact that no one's tracks were well hidden--more on that later.) He's also supposed to have said something along the lines of "I don't care what you do to me, but I would care very much if something happened to my friends who were involved, whom I have conveniently just named for you."
Friiitz. *facepalm*
Now, once word of the escape attempt got out, it was a huge scandal throughout Europe. Virtually everyone's sympathies were with Fritz (and Katte as an afterthought). Heads of state like Great Britain and the Holy Roman Empire were writing to Friedrich Wilhelm, begging him to please take a chill pill and not kill everyone involved. Katte was apparently mentioned by name by George II.
This is the context in which you should understand that FW's lackey, who was ordered to arrest Katte, in Berlin, was like, "*cough* Katte, I'm coming to arrest you in *cough* three hours. *cough cough*"
Katte: "Yes, yes, getting the hell out of Dodge any minute now."
The arresting official was reported to have been extremely shocked and disappointed that Katte was still there to be arrested three hours later. He had packed and made plans on where he was going to flee to, but in in all that time hadn't actually budged.
Contemporary and modern sources differ on why Katte, with all that warning that his arrest was imminent, dithered until his window of opportunity for escape had closed. My own guess is that he was undecided between whether it was better to be a live dog or a dead lion.
(The third main conspirator, condemned to death, had no such hesitation. He immediately escaped to England, where FW's attempts to have him extradited were unsuccessful, then didn't come back to Prussia until Fritz became king ten years later. Then apparently spent the rest of his life complaining that the money and honors he got from Fritz in gratitude were not commensurate with his sacrifice. Now, Fritz, not known in general for being generous or appreciative on the one hand, but on the other, also probably not impressed by the complaints of the live dog when he was still regularly having nightmares about the dead lion.)
(P.S. I am no making no personal value judgments on the intelligence or courage of the respective strategies. I respect both.)
MEANWHILE. It's also possible that Katte, in addition to maybe not wanting to leave Fritz to face the music all alone (again, my guess, but at least one biographer agrees), may have not had time to escape before destroying all the evidence. There was apparently a shit ton of material evidence of the conspiracy. To the extent that we can trust Fritz's sister's memoirs, she reports herself and their mother--who were both in on the plan--frantically destroying all the incriminating letters and writing new ones. She records that there were 1,500 such letters and they only had time to get to about 700 of them in the three days they had. Yes, you read those numbers right. No, that was not a typo.
Interesting thought: if Schiller was having his characters play games with letters, he may have based that on this episode.
So Katte may have had a bunch of letters of his own to destroy, plus all those valuables Fritz had given him for safekeeping to hide, before he could leave, who knows. This is the theory of some biographers for why he lingered so long when he knew his arrest was imminent.
Then, under interrogation, Katte couldn't very well deny that he was in on the plan or that he hadn't told anyone. He did say that he had tried to talk Fritz out of it, but Fritz was determined to leave with or without him. But then when asked if he would have left the country with Fritz, if push came to shove, he answered yes. He said he loved Fritz too much and couldn't tell him no.
KAAAATTE! That sort of thing is deniable! Especially given that the official death penalty charge was desertion from the army. Just say you wouldn't have gone! Lie a little! Fritz will forgive you.
Sigh.
As for Katte's motivations, I don't think he saw himself as a martyr for anything except his love of Fritz. And a reluctant one at that. See: trying to talk Fritz out of the escape attempt, not sneaking out of Berlin when his commanding officer refused him permission to go legally, probably hoping the whole thing would blow over. And then I think he couldn't decide whether to save his skin or stick by Fritz, and made a sort of non-decision that was effectively the latter.
According to Fritz's sister, Katte had said to her before all the shit hit the fan, "I have written to him and clearly stated that I refuse to follow him. If he undertakes such a move, I shall answer with my head. It will be for a pretty cause, but the crown prince will not abandon me." But then Fritz seems to have been a more strong-willed personality than Katte in general, as well as having something to gain from this specific move.
In the end, as you know, Katte died with all the fortitude of a martyr. He made a very conspicuous display of courage and loyalty, and if you ask me, he was playing simultaneously to three audiences. One, doing his family proud (his last letters show him trying to comfort them). Two, sending Fritz the message every way he could that he didn't blame him and wasn't suffering. Three, as we've discussed, trying to get a last-minute change of heart from Friedrich Wilhelm.
All of which is to say, at great length, here lies another major difference between Katte and Posa, the reluctant follower of his friend's stupid plot vs. the enthusiastic deviser of stupid plots involving his friend. But the parallels are just as clear.
Oh! I was going to ramble about the huge contrast with Fritz's later fame as master deviser of less stupid plots. So, of course he was much older, and he had an army, and he had absolute power instead of being under the thumb of someone with absolute power, and all that good stuff. But here's one thing that, in all my reading about the Katte affair, I have not seen anyone comment on, including all the people boggling about how FREDERICK the freaking GREAT came up with that escape attempt, and who are you and what have you done with Frederick the Great?
Well, Fritz later became pathologically secretive about all his plans. Notoriously so. He said things like, "Three can keep a secret if two be dead," and "If I discovered my own skin knew what I was going to do, I would have it peeled off and thrown away," and how he didn't worry about foreign powers spying on him during his wars, because "in order to know my secrets, you need to corrupt me personally, and that isn’t easy." Things like this get quoted everywhere by everyone.
Well, I've seen ONE biographer comment that this probably comes from having to keep so many secrets from his father for so long. And yes, this was the man who, in his twenties, would later sneak all his friends outside the palace and into a wood or cave so they could practice their forbidden chamber music.
But NO ONE has apparently considered that MAYBE the time when he told EVERYONE about his Very Secret Escape Attempt and he was imprisoned and forced to watch his best friend/possible love of his life get beheaded before his very eyes was RELEVANTLY TRAUMATIC. The thing about trauma is that people take away ideas about how the world works from their extremely memorable experiences, often ideas more subtle than this, and then proceed to over-apply those ideas in their most extreme version to everything that ever happens to them for the rest of their lives (or until they get therapy). "Telling people your plans ends in catastrophe for everyone involved" seems like a pretty obvious candidate for this phenomenon.
/ExcessiveUseofCapslock
So, wow, yeah, I kind of wonder how much this particular plot was at the forefront of Schiller's mind.
Ohhhhh I didn't know that about Katherine Parr! (I knew she was the survivor :) ) That's awesome.
It is! It's one of my favorite anecdotes about Katherine. She was, by all accounts, a highly intelligent and strong-willed woman who had a significant influence on her stepdaughter, future Elizabeth I.
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Date: 2019-08-13 11:10 pm (UTC)"Chance... I mean God... brought me here!"
aLOL. I could totes see Fritz or Katte saying this.
Thank you for the summary of Posa's nonsensical plots! Omfg, you're right, that is so frustrating. I like manipulative types, but only when they're several orders of magnitude more intelligent than everyone around them. This...does not sound like that.
This is actually the culmination of several other complicated plans Posa has in the play, which go terribly wrong because he doesn't ever TELL, say, his best friend that he's plotting all this stuff involving him.
Oh, Posa, noooooo!! You have to actually tell your BFF about your plots! *facepalm*
Now, I see your fandom's Very Stupid Plot and raise you my own fandom's Very Stupid Plot. :DD
Specifically, the attempted escape attempt that got Katte killed and Fritz imprisoned for years and traumatized for life. This plot was so poorly planned and executed that it stands out to everyone who knows the first thing about Frederick the Great's later life as "How the fuck was this plan devised by the same guy who won a three-front war against three of the biggest European superpowers?"
Now, I'm sympathetic to the idea that we should not expect an eighteen-year-old to come up with an A+ plan for escaping from a lifetime of abuse at the hands of an absolute monarch (which is a level up from your normal abusive father). But the difference in quality is just so drastic that some of his biographers have speculated that it was less of an escape plan than a ploy for attention. Fritz may have wanted to get caught, or at least subconsciously. I think the case for this is definitely plausible, although I think there are a lot of other factors that account for the ridiculously boneheaded plan.
Now here's the boneheaded plan so you can judge for yourself.
First and foremost, Fritz and Katte told practically everyone, well in advance. Between the two of them, so many people knew about this plan that it's only a surprise it didn't reach the King *sooner*. Then everything went comically wrong. Katte was supposed to get permission to leave Berlin. He didn't. So he was stuck there. Fritz decided to make his move anyway. While on a road trip with his father. He made a handful of attempts, none of which made it more than about two feet past the front door? Something like that. He dressed in the most conspicuous manner possible, to the point where everyone knew something was up, even those not in the know, and one guy was like, "*Please* take that off, your father is going to *kill* you if he sees you wearing that."
Reader, he got caught.
Here, look. I have a clip for you! From 21:40 - 22:37. It's taken some creative license with the details, but the spirit of the absurdity should come through. The coat, the getting caught in the front yard, the way everybody knows...
What happened was that one of the many, many people who knew about the plan got cold feet and fessed up to the King, who ordered his son taken into custody.
At this point, Fritz is still dramatically underestimating the extent of his father's batshittery. He taunts him with the fact that he was trying to escape (giving credence to the fact that he may have thought getting caught might get him what he wanted--better treatment--without all the trouble of going to England via France). Then, when asked to name his conspirators, he implicates everyone. (He may have been trying to plea bargain, especially given the fact that no one's tracks were well hidden--more on that later.) He's also supposed to have said something along the lines of "I don't care what you do to me, but I would care very much if something happened to my friends who were involved, whom I have conveniently just named for you."
Friiitz. *facepalm*
Now, once word of the escape attempt got out, it was a huge scandal throughout Europe. Virtually everyone's sympathies were with Fritz (and Katte as an afterthought). Heads of state like Great Britain and the Holy Roman Empire were writing to Friedrich Wilhelm, begging him to please take a chill pill and not kill everyone involved. Katte was apparently mentioned by name by George II.
This is the context in which you should understand that FW's lackey, who was ordered to arrest Katte, in Berlin, was like, "*cough* Katte, I'm coming to arrest you in *cough* three hours. *cough cough*"
Katte: "Yes, yes, getting the hell out of Dodge any minute now."
The arresting official was reported to have been extremely shocked and disappointed that Katte was still there to be arrested three hours later. He had packed and made plans on where he was going to flee to, but in in all that time hadn't actually budged.
Contemporary and modern sources differ on why Katte, with all that warning that his arrest was imminent, dithered until his window of opportunity for escape had closed. My own guess is that he was undecided between whether it was better to be a live dog or a dead lion.
(The third main conspirator, condemned to death, had no such hesitation. He immediately escaped to England, where FW's attempts to have him extradited were unsuccessful, then didn't come back to Prussia until Fritz became king ten years later. Then apparently spent the rest of his life complaining that the money and honors he got from Fritz in gratitude were not commensurate with his sacrifice. Now, Fritz, not known in general for being generous or appreciative on the one hand, but on the other, also probably not impressed by the complaints of the live dog when he was still regularly having nightmares about the dead lion.)
(P.S. I am no making no personal value judgments on the intelligence or courage of the respective strategies. I respect both.)
MEANWHILE. It's also possible that Katte, in addition to maybe not wanting to leave Fritz to face the music all alone (again, my guess, but at least one biographer agrees), may have not had time to escape before destroying all the evidence. There was apparently a shit ton of material evidence of the conspiracy. To the extent that we can trust Fritz's sister's memoirs, she reports herself and their mother--who were both in on the plan--frantically destroying all the incriminating letters and writing new ones. She records that there were 1,500 such letters and they only had time to get to about 700 of them in the three days they had. Yes, you read those numbers right. No, that was not a typo.
Interesting thought: if Schiller was having his characters play games with letters, he may have based that on this episode.
So Katte may have had a bunch of letters of his own to destroy, plus all those valuables Fritz had given him for safekeeping to hide, before he could leave, who knows. This is the theory of some biographers for why he lingered so long when he knew his arrest was imminent.
Then, under interrogation, Katte couldn't very well deny that he was in on the plan or that he hadn't told anyone. He did say that he had tried to talk Fritz out of it, but Fritz was determined to leave with or without him. But then when asked if he would have left the country with Fritz, if push came to shove, he answered yes. He said he loved Fritz too much and couldn't tell him no.
KAAAATTE! That sort of thing is deniable! Especially given that the official death penalty charge was desertion from the army. Just say you wouldn't have gone! Lie a little! Fritz will forgive you.
Sigh.
As for Katte's motivations, I don't think he saw himself as a martyr for anything except his love of Fritz. And a reluctant one at that. See: trying to talk Fritz out of the escape attempt, not sneaking out of Berlin when his commanding officer refused him permission to go legally, probably hoping the whole thing would blow over. And then I think he couldn't decide whether to save his skin or stick by Fritz, and made a sort of non-decision that was effectively the latter.
According to Fritz's sister, Katte had said to her before all the shit hit the fan, "I have written to him and clearly stated that I refuse to follow him. If he undertakes such a move, I shall answer with my head. It will be for a pretty cause, but the crown prince will not abandon me." But then Fritz seems to have been a more strong-willed personality than Katte in general, as well as having something to gain from this specific move.
In the end, as you know, Katte died with all the fortitude of a martyr. He made a very conspicuous display of courage and loyalty, and if you ask me, he was playing simultaneously to three audiences. One, doing his family proud (his last letters show him trying to comfort them). Two, sending Fritz the message every way he could that he didn't blame him and wasn't suffering. Three, as we've discussed, trying to get a last-minute change of heart from Friedrich Wilhelm.
All of which is to say, at great length, here lies another major difference between Katte and Posa, the reluctant follower of his friend's stupid plot vs. the enthusiastic deviser of stupid plots involving his friend. But the parallels are just as clear.
Oh! I was going to ramble about the huge contrast with Fritz's later fame as master deviser of less stupid plots. So, of course he was much older, and he had an army, and he had absolute power instead of being under the thumb of someone with absolute power, and all that good stuff. But here's one thing that, in all my reading about the Katte affair, I have not seen anyone comment on, including all the people boggling about how FREDERICK the freaking GREAT came up with that escape attempt, and who are you and what have you done with Frederick the Great?
Well, Fritz later became pathologically secretive about all his plans. Notoriously so. He said things like, "Three can keep a secret if two be dead," and "If I discovered my own skin knew what I was going to do, I would have it peeled off and thrown away," and how he didn't worry about foreign powers spying on him during his wars, because "in order to know my secrets, you need to corrupt me personally, and that isn’t easy." Things like this get quoted everywhere by everyone.
Well, I've seen ONE biographer comment that this probably comes from having to keep so many secrets from his father for so long. And yes, this was the man who, in his twenties, would later sneak all his friends outside the palace and into a wood or cave so they could practice their forbidden chamber music.
But NO ONE has apparently considered that MAYBE the time when he told EVERYONE about his Very Secret Escape Attempt and he was imprisoned and forced to watch his best friend/possible love of his life get beheaded before his very eyes was RELEVANTLY TRAUMATIC. The thing about trauma is that people take away ideas about how the world works from their extremely memorable experiences, often ideas more subtle than this, and then proceed to over-apply those ideas in their most extreme version to everything that ever happens to them for the rest of their lives (or until they get therapy). "Telling people your plans ends in catastrophe for everyone involved" seems like a pretty obvious candidate for this phenomenon.
/ExcessiveUseofCapslock
So, wow, yeah, I kind of wonder how much this particular plot was at the forefront of Schiller's mind.
Ohhhhh I didn't know that about Katherine Parr! (I knew she was the survivor :) ) That's awesome.
It is! It's one of my favorite anecdotes about Katherine. She was, by all accounts, a highly intelligent and strong-willed woman who had a significant influence on her stepdaughter, future Elizabeth I.