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[cahn]

This is totally too good to keep to myself: on my "I showed my family opera clips" post, mildred_of_midgard and selenak are talking about Frederick the Great (by way of Don Carlo, of course) and it is like this amazing virtuoso spontaneous thing and whoa

Things I knew about Frederick the Great before a year ago: he was king of... Prussia??

Additional things I knew about Frederick the Great before the last couple of days: selenak informed me last year that he and his dad may well have been at least somewhat the inspiration for Schiller's Don Carlos, and everything that goes with that: his dad (Friedrich Wilhelm, henceforth FW) was majorly awful, he had a boyfriend (Katte) who was horribly killed by his dad

Only a partial list of the additional things I now know about Frederick the Great (henceforth "Fritz") and associated historical figures due to mildred and selenak:
-Fritz and Katte's escape plan (which resulted in Katte's execution) was... really, really boneheaded. As boneheaded as opera plots! :P
-Katte was in the process of destroying 1,500 letters when he got caught (! puts all those letters in Don Carlos into perspective) (ETA: but also see mildred's comment below)
-Fritz wrote opera libretti and so did his sister
-Fritz decided to use himself as an experimental test subject to see if it was entirely possible to do without sleep via the application of coffee WITH PEPPERCORNS AND MUSTARD
-Fritz wrote a poem about orgasm that also reads as if he's never actually, like, had sex (although that was not in this post, it was in the comments to this one)
-FW apparently beat up George II when they were kids
-I am totally not even going to try to summarize the discussion about FW's "rationalized sadism" and sexual hangups and the reeeeeally bizarre Dresden interlude (go down a couple of comments for the really insane stuff)
-Fritz' sister Wilhemina wrote tell-all memoirs about her totally insane family which I am SUPER going to read now, watch this space

Also, there is apparently some subplot involving Russian fanboys that introduces an entirely new cast of people which I am dying to find out about

Comments

[mildred_of_midgard]

he was king of... Prussia??

Little known fact! He started out with the counterintuitive title King *in* Prussia, not King *of* Prussia. As you probably know, the Holy Roman Empire was this grab-bag of little principalities of varying degrees of size and importance, all technically (some only nominally) under the Holy Roman Emperor. The Hohenzollerns gradually got more and more powerful and the Emperor less and less powerful, until finally Fritz's grandfather got to call himself a king.

But King *in* Prussia, not King *of* Prussia. In part because the region that had been called Prussia from olden times was now divided up, and the Hohenzollerns only ruled part of it. The rest was part of Poland. So it wasn't accurate to say the Hohenzollerns were kings of the whole *of* Prussia, but only kings of some territory *inside* it. (If your eyes are glazing over, just know that this was the most I could simplify it.)

But, as Fritz would later say about being "Duke" of his newly conquered province Silesia, "I don't give a fuck about titles as long as I have the territory." F 1, FW 1, and F 2 were all kings and acted like it.

Enter Old Fritz. He's won the Seven Years' War and is trying not to get involved in another one. He figures out the best way to achieve his current political goals is to get his neighbors Catherine the Great and Maria Theresa involved in grabbing parts of Poland as opposed to fighting each other.

Many Europeans are appalled, because it's cool to divide up the Americas and Africa and places like that, but when you start dividing up countries in *Europe*, omg, who's next? Me???

But when Russia, Austria, and a Prussia that's just elbowed its way in with the big boys all agree on something, what're you going to do? Well, nothing, and certainly not if you're Poland.

So the three rulers sit down, draw up a map, and everybody takes the part of Poland that's of most interest to them that they think they can hold. Fritz gets the smallest part, but it's very strategically chosen. Now he's got all of Prussia! Tada, congratulations, Your Majesty, King OF Prussia.

Maria Theresa was one of the "but this is terrible! What have the poor Poles ever done to us??" Europeans. But when you're a monarch and your principles come up against what you convince yourself is necessary for your country...you find a way.

Inspiring Fritz to this jewel of cynicism:

“Catherine and I are simply brigands; but I wonder how the Queen-Empress managed to square her confessor!...She wept as she took, and the more she wept, the more she took.”

Words of wisdom from the man who shed *no* recorded tears over the discarding of the Anti-Machiavel before the ink was dry.

After Fritz's death, more partitions of Poland continued, because it was, like, sitting RIGHT THERE.

[cahn]

Wow, okay! Hee, Fritz. Also, lol, some large part of what I know about history comes from Dave Barry (the humorist)'s book A Sort-of History of the United States (which was the book my roommate and I used to study for the US History AP -- if you can judge from this that our history teacher and textbook were both terrible, you would be right; Dave Barry was way better than either of them). I don't have access to my copy right now, but he says something like, "One of the lessons of history is that anything, including summer thunderstorms, leads to Germany invading Poland."

[mildred_of_midgard]

Wow, I'm so sorry. My AP US History teacher was one of the only good teachers I had in my mediocre high school, and we chatted a few times after I graduated. :/ That book sounds interesting, though!

"One of the lessons of history is that anything, including summer thunderstorms, leads to Germany invading Poland."

When my partner and I did our central Europe trip, we joked that we were entering Germany from Poland and not the other way around, because otherwise we'd be invading Poland. :P