(no subject)

[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

[selenak]

This is a perfect and wonderful summary. *applauds*

re: Catherine: among so many other things, what happens if the wife in an unhappy royal marriage isn't an Elisabeth Christine (accepting her lot in exiled life) or a Sophia Dorothea (fighting a marital war, but via the kids mostly), but a politically ambitious woman (with, famously, her own lovers) and one of the best survivalists of the era. Considering Fritz actually had been pushing for her marriage to Peter (as Catherine was born Sophie von Anhalt-Zerbst - her dad had been one of his generals, and whether or not that was responsible for her not hero worshipping attitude towards him, I'll leave to you), there's additional irony here.

re: Nazis and their Fridericus Cult: just to illustrate a bit of how pervasive that one was even before 1945 and Hitler expecting a fanboy letter from Truman any time soon: there was a whole series of Fritz movies, most, though not all starring Otto Gebühr, who made a career out of playing Friedrich II. Said series started in the Weimar Republic, but really picked up later. Now, Stalingrad happens, and even your hardcore Nazi has an inkling this is REALLY BAD NEWS and invading Russia might not have been such a bright idea after all. At first, Goebbels declares all German soldiers died at Stalingrad so he can sell it as some kind of heroic death scenario. Then, it becomes undeniable that General Paullus surrendered. Goebbels' propaganda solution? MAKE A NEW FRITZ MOVIE. Which takes up considerable resources. Bear in mind by now there are bombings of German cities, and really, do you want to devote a lot of money, petrol and people to making a movie, so that Veit Harlan can shoot realistic battle Scenes with real soldiers, I kid you not, and over 5000 horses? In the middle of WWII? Sure. Because hey, you have Otto Gebühr as Fritz in a key scene, an argument between Friedrich and his younger brother Heinrich (also a general, and, historians today argue, a better one than big bro) in which movie!Fritz gets to say it would have been the duty of the regiment who ran at the battle of Kunersdorf to stay and get slaughtered - "to build a shield wall with their dead bodies" is the phrasing - which is absolutely chilling to watch today even if you are not aware of the Stalingrad subtext. Talk About the dark side of historical fiction and fannishness.

[mildred_of_midgard]

Oooh, I knew about the Fritz movies, but not all that context. Thank you so much, that's fascinating.

And Fritz's constant RL scapegoating :/. I actually have psychoanalytic opinions about that, but yeah.

there's additional irony here.
Oh, yeah, Catherine and Fritz had a whooole history that I didn't even go into (but I put on my list of potential talking points for future comments) because I was already joking to my wife that it took me 7 years to summarize the 7 years war. (Running joke because when I came home from my first day of first grade, my mom told me "Tell me everything you did today, honey!" and she realized it was going to take me as long to tell her everything I remembered from school as it did for me to live it, and she quickly learned to say, "Skip to the high points!" My instinct in life is always "What even is this word 'summary' you refer to? Surely everything is equally important!")

[cahn]

ahahaha, yay Catherine!

...wow.