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Aug. 20th, 2019 09:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahnThis 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
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 whoaThings 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 dadOnly 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
Re: Günter Grass
Date: 2019-08-25 09:01 pm (UTC)So you've heard of him, have you? :D
More fascinating material from you (this and Wilhelm and Liselotte), thanks as always!
Danzig, Poland
A memory that always makes me laugh: I happened upon one of those large world maps on the wall of some department hall during my freshman year of college, glanced at it, and was shocked to find Danzig/Gdansk smack in the middle of Poland. "That can't be right! I *swear* it's right near the border with Germany." I walked away with feelings of shame that my European geography wasn't as good as I prided myself on. To the point where I went home and got a second opinion from a different map, which, to my dismay, agreed with the first one.
Later that day, I realized my mental map of Europe, and Germany especially (thanks, Fritz), was heavily skewed toward the second half of the 18th century, the setting of that novel I'd spent most of high school writing. Oops!
Re: Günter Grass
Date: 2019-08-26 06:22 am (UTC)Map problems: yes, I can see how imprinting on late 18th century borders would have been confusing. :)
Re: Günter Grass
Date: 2019-08-26 03:00 pm (UTC)I'm getting the feeling that any time anyone in power 1900-1945 opened their mouth about Old Fritz, he had to turn over in his grave. "Look, there's a reason I asked to be buried with my dogs. It's because you humans are stupid!"
Also, Fritz discussed abdicating after Kunersdorf, yeah? Or does this fall under "Fritz got a miracle, and so will I!"?
Map problems: yeah, it came as no small relief to know that I wasn't misremembering, per se, just remembering anachronistically. Being wrong for the right reasons.
Other Fritz fans of note in German history
Date: 2019-08-26 03:52 pm (UTC)Got it in one. Because destiny was with the House of Hohenzollern, etc. But seriously, 1900 to 1945, Fritz fandom is the kind of fandom where no one makes you cringe as much as your fellow fen. Including Thomas Mann. Which reminds me, there is this Wonderful exchange of letters near the end of WWI, when Wilhelm was ranting about "no descendant of…" etc:
Background: Anglosaxons associate Thomas Mann mostly with the later stage of his existence, as the dignified nobel prize winner in exile, recording speeches against Hitler for the BBC. In 1914, by contrast, he was very much pro-war, and singing the same tune as most people: superiority of German culture, decadent shallow France, perfidious Albion etc., you name it, he said it. Meanwhile, his older brother Heinrich was among the minority of writers firmly anti war. In the lead up, he'd written what is still the best satiric novel about Wilhelmian Germany, Der Untertan (translated as Man of Straw and later as The Subject); he'd also written an essay about Emile Zola (focusing specifically on Zola the political journalist, J'Accuse as the centre) which among other things was very much an attack on the increasingly nationalistic output of many other writers of the day. These of course included his younger brother, who was outraged and stopped talking to Heinrich at that point except through the press. (He also wrote Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen - "Contemplations of an Apolitical Man" - in which he attacks the Zivilisationsliterat (guess who) and which is so anti democratic that it's not surprising Thomas in later years prefered not to talk about it.
In the last year of the war, at a point when even the most fervent of war believers had to face the fact Germany was about to lose, Heinrich attempted to get into contact again. So, a hundred years ago, he wrote thusly:
Dear Tommy,
your article in the Berliner Tageblatt was read out loud in my presence. I don't know whether the other listeners had the same impression, but it seemed to me as if at least in some parts it was addressed to me, almost like a letter. Which is why I feel the need to reply to you, although without the press as an intermediary, if only to tell you how unjustified the accusation of fraternal hatred is.
In my public announcements, there is no "I" and hence also no brother. They are addressed to the public at large, disregard - at least this is my intention - my advantage or disadvantage, and are solely focused on an idea. Love for humanity (which is in its political manifestation: European democracy) is indeed love for an idea; but he who can open his heart this way has to be capable of doing it on a smaller scale. (...)
I've been following all your work with the best intention to understand and empathize with it. NOw I've always been familiar with the antagonism of your mind. If your extreme position during the war surprised you, well, I found it predictable enough. This knowledge of you never stopped me from often loving your work, even more often to penetrate it and to praise or defend it publically, and to comfort you, when you were doubting yourself, as my younger brother.
If you hardly ever returned this, I didn't mind. I knew that in order to define yourself you didn't just need self confinement but the active repelling of the other - and thus I coped with your attacks (...) without much effort. I did not return them, or returned them only once, when the issue at hand wasn't a literary preference anymore, or a intellectual knowing-all-ness, but the most basic threat and misery. My essay titled "Zola" was a protest against those who, as I had it see it, were falling over themselves to do damage. Not against solely yourself, but against a legion of writers. (...)
Perhaps my explanation today will be listened to. This could be possible if your newest lament against myself was dictated by pain. If this is the case, please know you need not think of me as an enemy.
Heinrich
Thomas was, shall we say, not in the mood for what he saw as being patronized by his older brother. His reply (Carla and Lula were their sisters):
Dear Heinrich,
your letter finds me at a moment where it is physically impossible for me to reply to its true sense. (...) Besides, I wonder what the point would be of pressing the mental torture of two years into a letter which of necessity would have to be much longer than your own. Oh, I believe your assurance that you don't hate me. After that absolving outburst of a Zola article and given your current circumstances and the way all is well for you, you don't need to anymore. Using the phrase "fraternal hatred" had been meant more generally anyway. (...)
Calling my behaviour during the war extreme is a lie. Your behavior was extreme, and despicable, completely so. I haven't suffered and struggled for two years, neglected my dearest plans, investigated, tested and contemplated myself, and condemned myself to artistic silence just to sobbingly hug it out with you - after a letter which exudes understandable triumph and was dictated in no line by something other than self righteousness and ethical smugness. (...)
You can't comprehend the rightness and the ethics of my life, because you are my brother. Why didn't either Hauptmann or Dehmel who even praised German horses to the skies or Harden who demanded a preventive war need to feel the insults of the Zola article adressed to them? Why was its entire sensational invective tailored to fit myself? The fraternal Welterlebnis (untranslatable term roughly meaning "way of experiencing the world and life") forced you to do it. (...)
Let the tragedy of our brotherhood complete itself. Pain? Ah, well. One gets hard and numb. Since Carla committed suicide and you broke off relationships with Lula, separation for all time isn't anything new for our community anymore, is it? I haven't made this life. I despise it. One has to live it out as good as one can.
Farewell.
T.
Heinrich drafted a reply:
Dear Tommy,
against such bitterness, I should fall silent. (...)But I don't do separations intentionally, and never forever. (...) I regard myself as a self reliant being. My Welterlebnis is not a fraternal one, it is simply mine. I don't mind you. As far as I can see, you have underestimated what you mean to me emotionally and overestimated your intellectual impact. (...) For example: if you ever wrote something other than childishness about French subjects, I'd be honestly delighted. But you know what you'd do if I suddenly decided to declare myself a follower of old Prussia? You'd throw your notes for a Frederick the Great into the fire. (...)
Don't see my life and actions as being all about you, they are not revolving around you and would be literally the same if you didn't exist.
Your inability to take seriously another life finally births monstrosities. And thus you find that my letter, which was meant as a gesture of simple kindness, "exudes triumph". Triumph because of what? "All being well for me" - i.e. the world smashed to pieces and ten million dead bodies in the ground. What a justification! How promising of satisfaction to the ideologue! But I am not the man to fashion the misery and death of nations after my intellectual pet peeves, not I. I don't believe the victory of any cause is worth discussion at a point where humanity itself is getting destroyed. All that will be left after the last, most terrible ending will taste of bitterness and sadness. I don't know whether any of us are able to help our fellow humans to "live better", but I should hope our literature will never again help them to die more eagerly.
They're still dying. But you, who approved of the war, who still approves of it and calls my attitude (...) "despicable, completely so" can have, God willing, another 40 years to "investigate and test", if not to reclaim yourself. The hour will come, I hope, in which you'll see human beings, not shadows, and then you will see me, too.
Heinrich
Re: Other Fritz fans of note in German history
Date: 2019-08-28 04:38 pm (UTC)To be fair, as an older sister myself *ahem*, it's a fine line between coming across as loving and coming across as patronizing, and the whole time I was reading Heinrich's first letter I was like, "...this is not going to end well." Though Thomas certainly... exceeded my expectations, there.
When you say Heinrich drafted a reply, does that mean he never actually sent it?
Also, lol to Heinrich's mention of Frederick the Great. What happened with Thomas Mann's Frederick the Great?
Re: Other Fritz fans of note in German history
Date: 2019-08-28 05:21 pm (UTC)"The Koalition may have changed a Little, but it is his Europe, the Europe allied in hate, which does not want to endure us, does still not want to endure him, the King, the Europe which has to learn again in lengthy Detail, maybe even through another seven years, that it will not manage to murder him."
("Die Koalition hat sich ein wenig verändert, aber es ist sein Europa, das im Haß verbündete Europa, das uns nicht dulden, das ihn, den König, noch immer nicht dulden will, und dem noch einmal in zäher Ausführlichkeit, in einer Ausführlichkeit von sieben Jahren vielleicht, bewiesen werden muß, daß es nicht angängig ist, ihn zu beseitigen.")
Oh, Tommy, as Heinrich would have said and did say. Just last year, I discovered there's a Fritz novel which is also a Brothers Mann novel, with a great premise: in their exile years, at which point they've long been reconciled (but the past is unforgotten), they decide to write a Friedrich novel together, only it's going to be a Fritz-and-his-brother-Heinrich novel. Guess who gets two write whom? Heinrich is uncertain whether roleplaying feuding Hohenzollern brothers is really a good idea, given, you know, but can't resist, and they start writing chapters, at which point the novelist does a credible parody of both Thomas Mann's style and Heinrich Mann's style, but then, alas, the whole thing collapses and stopped being credible, and I stopped reading.
No, Heinrich didn't send the second letter. They were reconciled in 1922 or 23 (I Forget which), when Heinrich was really dangerously ill and Thomas made a tearful appearance at his hospital bed.
Re: Other Fritz fans of note in German history
Date: 2019-08-30 05:05 am (UTC)I got rather excited about the Fritz-Brothers-Mann novel from the first part of your description -- that's really too bad it didn't live up to its premise.