cahn | Frederick the Great post links

More Frederick the Great (henceforth "Fritz") and surrounding ~~spinoffs~~ history! Clearly my purpose in life is now revealed: it is to encourage

mildred_of_midgard and

selenak to talk to me about Frederick the Great and associated/tangential European history. I am having such a great time here! Collating some links in this post:

* selenak's post on Frederick the Great as a TV show with associated fandom; a great place to start for the general history

* I have given up indexing all posts, here is the tag of discussion posts. Someday when I actually have time maybe I'll do a "best of."

Some links that have come up in the course of this discussion (and which I am putting here partially for my own benefit because in particular I haven't had time to watch the movies ~~because still mainlining Nirvana in Fire~~):
Fritz' sister Wilhelmine's tell-all tabloidy memoirs (English translation); this is Part I; the text options have been imperfectly OCR'd so be aware of that (NOTE 11-6-19: THIS IS A BOWDLERIZED TEXT, I WILL COME BACK WITH A BETTER LINK)
Part II of Wilhelmine's memoirs (English translation)
A dramatization of Frederick the Great's story, English subtitles
Mein Name ist Bach, Movie of Frederick the Great and J.S. Bach, with subtitles Some discussion of the subtitles in the thread here (also scroll down)
2017 miniseries about Maria Theresia, with subtitles and better translation of one scene in comments

ETA:
Miniseries of Peter the Great, IN ENGLISH, apparently reasonably historically solid
ETA 10-22-19
Website with letters from and to Wilhelmine during her 1754/1755 journey through France and Italy, as well as a few letters about Wilhelmine, in the original French, in a German translation, and in facsimile
University of Trier site where the full works of Friedrich in the original French and German have been transcribed, digitized, and uploaded:
30 volumes of writings and personal correspondence
46 volumes of political correspondence
Fritz and Wilhelmine's correspondence (vol 27_1)
ETA 10-28-19
Der Thronfolger (German, no subtitles; explanation of action in the comment here)
ETA 11-6-19
Memoirs of Stanisław August Poniatowski, dual Polish and French translation
ETA 1-14-20
Our Royal Librarian Mildred has collated some documentation, including google translate versions of the Trier letters above (see the "Correspondence" folder)!

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Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

selenak

Haven't watched Ekaterina, but I did see the British miniseries about young Catherine starring Catherine Zeta-Jones, in which Maximilian Schell gets to play an older than he actually was Fritz scheming in the background. (Fresh from playing the older Peter the Great, I assume. Now Schell was a good actor, but what amuses me is that he was also distinctly Austrian, with an Austrian accent. How about that, Fritz?)

(That miniseries also had Catherine's advisor being the British ambassador to Moswow, for no other reason than a British series needed to have a sympathetic Brit somewhere, I assume.)

Now, both of these are movies rather than tv shows, but I'd fail my movie buff credentials if I didn't point out two famous German acting performances as Catherine. Marlene Dietrich famously played Catherine in "The Scarlet Empress" for Josef von Sternberg, and Käthe Dorsch played her in the original Münchhausen, where she has a fling with our titular hero the lying baron (or so he says), both of them enjoying themselves thoroughly. What's so unusual about the later is that this movie was made in 1944, in Germany, and positive presentations of Russians, including Prussians-turned-Russians who were also political masterminds owning their female sexuality, were otherwise impossible. And yet. The script for Münchhausen was written by Erich "Emil and the Detectives" Kästner, who wasn't allowed to publish under his own name at the time, was probably the only German writer to see his books burned in front of him at the infamous book burning of 1933, and wrote the script under the alias of "Berthold Bürger" (Berthold Citizen).

Mein Name ist Bach: and, what do you think of Jürgen Vogel as Fritz so far? If you find the time, pray share those thoughts and feelings?

re: your Alexander/Joan of Arc RPF with the numbers filed off, was there any particular reason why Alexander? Were you interested in Russia, or was it that he was the best looking prince available in the era? (That's what Napoleon thought, anyway, who said he'd marry Alex if Alex was a woman.)

From:

selenak

(Argh, I can't believe I was logged out again, why does this keep happening?)

If you're in the market for super cute: you might know this story already, as it's one of the more famous relating to Mozart the wonder child, but when he was six and his father Leopold went on a tour through Europe with little Wolfgang and his sister Nannerl, one of their earliest concerts outside of Salzburg took place in Vienna. Word of mouth got to MT incredibly fast, and the two Mozart children were invited to play for her and her children (twelve at the time tout suite. Young W. showed off, playing blindly, among other things, and charmed the empress by jumping on her lap and kissing her, as father Leopold reports in his letter home to Salzburg in Rokoko German: "Der Wolferl ist der Kayserin auf den Schooß gesprungen, sie um den Halß bekommen, und rechtschaffen abgeküsst." ("Our Wolferl jumped on the Empress' lap, flung his arms around her neck and kissed the hell out of her.") So far, so historical since we have Leopold's letter. In the first biography written after Mozart's death, decades later, the story goes a little bit further, about the Mozart children playing with the arch dukes and arch duchesses, Wolferl falling down and little Maria Antonia, the future Marie Antoinette, who was exactly his age (they're only two months apart), helping him up again, wereupon he says: "Du bist lieb, dich werd ich heiraten!" (You're a dear, I'm going to marry you!"

(This might or might not be true as well; Peter Shaffer uses it in Amadeus when he lets Joseph mention to the courtiers - when adult Mozart first shows up at his court and promptly infuriates Salieri by improving on his greeting march - that they've met before, when Joseph was a teen and Mozart was a Wunderkind.)

Now, MT gave the Mozarts a hundred gold ducats for this event, which was more than Leopold earned at his job as leader of the orchestra for the Prince Bishop of Salzburg in a year, to give you some relation. That the kids were presented at court and a success also meant they were booked out in Vienna afterwards, and only left because young Wolfgang got sick. That tour took three years, all in all, and they covered most German states as well as France, most Italian states and England. Young Goethe, a teen at the time, and his sister Cornelia (ditto) saw the Mozarts playing in Frankfurt, for example. There was one notable exception - no concerts in Berlin (or Sanssouci, for that matter). Why not? At a guess, because Fritz was famously thrifty. At any rate, I doubt little Mozart could have charmed him... and there's the sad fact Fritz managed to miss out all the geniuses of the age (other than the Bach encounter) because of his anti-German hangups.

(Seriously, Fritz: founded an academy in Berlin modelled on the Academie Francaise, wanted to be like Louis XIV, managed to miss utterly Louis encouraged the writers, scientists and philosophers of his own realm, apparantly. When the Prussian academy invited Lessing, one of the most important writers of German literature pre Goethe and definitely the best one of Prussia, Fritz was so displeased that he changed the rules to "no German writers" and got Lessing excluded again. German mathematicians just about made the cut, but he paid Euler so badly that when Catherine made a higher offer, Euler moved to Russia like lightning. And when the academy wanted to invite Wieland (second best of the pre-Goethe generation) for a guest lecture at least, Fritz made it known they weren't supposed to offer what French writers got, whereupon Wieland said "Fuck you, I'm staying in Rome". (Until he was invited by Fritz' niece the new duchess of Weimar to teach her kid Carl August.) It only got worse with time; Fritz notoriously complained about German literature being not literature and singled out young Goethe's drama "Götz von Berlichingen" as especially bad (that was when his niece co-founded a journal about German literature and contributed essays, in German) and chided the rest of the young poets for not using French models. (Reaction from young German writers: French drama is boring, Shakespeare is the man!) Meanwhile, the German literary scene exploded with creativity - seriously, this was the golden age - so by the time Madame de Stael wrote "De L'Allemagne", ten years or so after Fritz died, French writers literary toured to the German states to meet them. It's a bit like the Elizabethan age if Elizabeth had insisted on speaking only Latin and reading and watching only medieval morality plays.

The only one who managed to have a vaguely honest converstion with Fritz about this was Gottsched, who only was a so so writer himself but a great reformer of the theatre, and who told Fritz that the nobility cutting itself off from the people by literally speaking another language only (instead of additionally) was no good, and couldn't produce more culture, and Fritz replying: "There is some truth in that, for I haven't read a German book since I was a boy, but now I'm 43, and I don't have the time to learn again."

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Now Schell was a good actor, but what amuses me is that he was also distinctly Austrian, with an Austrian accent. How about that, Fritz?

Lol, but probably preferable to being portrayed by women? Which seems to keep happening to him.

re: your Alexander/Joan of Arc RPF with the numbers filed off, was there any particular reason why Alexander? Were you interested in Russia, or was it that he was the best looking prince available in the era? (That's what Napoleon thought, anyway, who said he'd marry Alex if Alex was a woman.)

It's worse than that. :P It's because Russia was one of the few places my OC protagonist hadn't conquered yet! And my OC (coming from the future and all) knew better than to get involved in a land war in Asia, so she decided to initiate a little conquest-by-marriage through her granddaughter.

It was a little because I had enough of an interest in Russia to be able to fake knowing what was going on at the time, as opposed to, like, the Ottoman Empire--the only places whose political and military history I had a decent command of during my European history studying days were England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Austria-Hungary/HRE (but not most of the principalities in it, god, there are too many), Prussia, and Russia. I had only the vaguest idea of what was going on elsewhere. So after OC had conquered everywhere on that list except Russia by the early 1790s, that left Russia to try to get an alliance with.

Mein Name ist Bach: and, what do you think of Jürgen Vogel as Fritz so far? If you find the time, pray share those thoughts and feelings?

Well, since you ask and all... :D

I can't speak much to anyone's acting, because I keep the sound turned off and the playback speed at 2x, which is how I'm getting around my dislike of movies/television. The fact that all these things I'm watching in small increments are subtitled is the only reason I'm watching so many things. Having this many items on my in-flight watchlist is almost unprecedented for me, and it's because I'm actually reading them.

The depiction of Fritz so far seems to be 90% jerkass, 10% woobie, 0% magnificent bastard. Which, realistically, was probably your experience if you had to interact with him at close range, especially as a musician. Like I've said, I think there's an inverse proportion of admiration and proximity (which is why I think Heinrich looks up to him in the AU where there's a successful escape attempt and no one in his family's had direct interaction with young woobie Fritz in over a decade, compared to RL by 1786 where he was just impatiently waiting for dictatorial older bro to die already). So in a movie about Bach, this portrayal seems reasonable.

The roleplaying specifically: oh, god. I wasn't expecting that Fritz roleplayed *Katte* and the servant roleplayed young Fritz. The reversal just killed me inside. It's actually a pretty spectacular way of showing without telling just how tangled up Katte is with Fritz's emotions and how deep the trauma runs.

I wasn't expecting the spontaneity or the intimacy. I also wasn't expecting it to be that much of a private moment between Katte and young Fritz. I was expecting something rather more distant and plot-based, where Fritz instructs the servant to re-enact one of the public moments (the capture, the interrogation, the execution, something like that), and then they do it. Not the moment when Fritz and Katte were alone together and making the decision to run away. But it makes so much sense!

The fact that Fritz is on his knees during it OH GOD I'M DYING. And the face-touching. *cry*

Which leads me to, the worst part of all this for me is that he picked Goltz (Goltz? Goltz?!) to be his roleplay partner. Where the fuck is Fredersdorf?! (It's 3 am, I'm sure he's awake.) I would let Fredersdorf* roleplay with Fritz all day long. Because, for me, the biggest problem with this roleplay is that the other party has been conscripted to partake in something he doesn't think is a good idea. And on those terms, it's not. It's clear the film means to portray Fritz's idea as not helping him, and that it's not helping isn't surprising.

But having watched this scene, I feel like Fritz's instincts were on the mark. Under different circumstances, if he felt like doing this kind of roleplay, it had the potential to be really good for him, especially in the absence of better options in the 18th century.

In general, going over your traumas again and again can be healing or can be just a form of wound-picking. In Fritz's case, since he had so much difficulty talking about his trauma, I think repetitive middle-of-the-night roleplay might be a good way to habituate his brain to the memories. With someone who actually wanted to be there with him. With someone who was close enough to him and committed enough to the exercise to encourage it and try to provide a supportive environment for him to be that vulnerable. (Preferably someone who can also keep transference and countertransference from becoming a problem, which is admittedly a tall order for something like this.)

Not someone who's like, "It's 3 am, I just want to go to bed, I don't even like you, nobody in this movie likes you, this isn't my job, why do I live in an absolute monarchy where the king can just decide I need to be his therapist RIGHT NOW, I'm not even qualified to be a therapist, this job sucks." Cause you really shouldn't conscript people to be your therapist; it's not good for them, and it's not good for you. Just like you shouldn't have that much power in general; it's not good for anyone around you, and it's not good for you.

But wow, I now *desperately* want to see good roleplay between Fritz and someone who wants to be there for him. It's now become a *thing* in my brain. Oooff. Thank you for telling me about this movie.

* For the sake of fiction, I would obviously be perfectly fine with someone by the name of Goltz replacing real-life Fredersdorf and exhibiting an equivalent closeness to Friedrich within the movie. But that's not what we get. We get "I don't want to be here." Which is reasonable! Under any circumstances, and especially ones where you know from experience it never ends well and yet you're trapped with a king who won't give up the idea. But the idea had so much potential!

From:

selenak

(

cahn, please delete the anonymous version. Why I keep getting logged out, I do not know, but I suspect some conspiracy involving Prussian cyber agents from the beyond.)

re:replacing real Fredersdorff with fictional Goltz, no, I have no idea what was up with that, either. The first time I watched, I thought something might happen to Goltz, hence the switch, but no, it doesn't, so that can't have been the reason, and it's clear the scriptwriters did their research (there's a great amount of real quotes built into the script, including the one about Voltaire), so it wasn't out of ignorance that there was a real person Fritz could have had this scene with.

However, I would say that your high speed, no sound method of watching gives you a wrong impression about how fictional Goltz regards Fritz. Because the intonation and the way of phrasing makes it pretty clear to me Goltz does care, and when he says "it's not good for you" when trying to talk Fritz out of the roleplay, he doesn't sound cautious or bothered, but seriously concerned (for Fritz, not himself). It's not remotely a relationship of equals, of course, but the actor who plays Goltz does a lot with the expressions and with the way he's watching Fritz in public, too, so the impression I had was that knows he shouldn't care (because when all is said and done Fritz is a mess and his boss, a dangerous combination) but he does.

Also, if you watch a little further you'll get to the scene where Bach and Fritz bare their souls to each other (Bach with his "I'm going blind and also, I shouldn't have burdened my sons with being in the same profession as me" and Fritz with his myriad of issues) and old JB actually does try to comfort Fritz.

From:

selenak

If it's any comfort, Carlyle's reputation - well, not the general one, but the one of his Fritz biography as THE biography - has been going downhill througout the last century, even before most people detoxed on the Great Man of History dogma. But speaking of Wilhelmine's issues with her brothers' boyfriends (i.e. Katte and to a letter degree Keith), my own theory is that it's mostly a case of close siblings jealeaousy issues. Meaning: she and Fritz had arguably been each other's most important emotional relationship (and the only non-abusive one within their family), then post puberty they were cast into mostly separate social spheres, and he started to form intense emotional ties to other people. Which she couldn't consciously blame him for, of course it's good to have friends, but still, it makes for a sense of getting emotionally left behind or at best having to share, and so her subconscious decided that first Keith, then Katte were suspicious characters, so she'd have some reason she could articulate to herself for her resentment.

(Carlysle, of course, has no such excuse.)

I'm currently re-listening to the audio version of the Fritz/Wilhelmine correspondance which I own, and it reminded me that it really does back up Wilhelmine's descriptions not just of her father's but her mother's behaviour years later in the memoirs. In 1733 when the question is whether she should come back to Potsdam for a visit, she writes to Fritz "the Queen hates me, I have been called 'the vomit of humanity'" and that she's not up for an encore of that in combination of their father's behavior if Fritz is simultanously kept away (as he was during the last time she was in Berlin).

It also struck me that the two of them don't appear to have been close to any of their other siblings at any point. I mean, in one letter Fritz reports, re: their father, "Sophie is now the favourite, but only in contrast of her married siblings, and it will only last till her own marriage, while Charlotte is in disgrace", but otherwise they hardly mention their sisters and brothers at all, and never seem to have considered trusting them with their respective secrets, asking for their opinions etc. It's basically a "you and me against the world" thing formed early on.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Oh, very well. I defer to your far superior knowledge of this movie. :)

I will say that, with my deep emotional investment in this scene, I watched these particular few minutes multiple times like a normal person, and also in slow motion, before forming an opinion, but I agree I am handicapped by 1) experiencing it in translation, which affects both phrasing and intonation (you can hear the intonation this way, but not reliably match it up with the words) 2) my refusal to watch the rest of the movie like a normal person and thus absorb the full Fritz/Goltz context for the scene.

But here's why I parsed this dynamic the way I did, and why I would have far preferred Fredersdorf:

It begins with Goltz saying he's tired and wants to go, and Fritz saying, in effect, that he doesn't care what Goltz wants, it's therapy time. That lead-in made it very difficult for me to interpret what came next in light of anything except a power imbalance. And so I took Goltz's apparently genuine concern, "This game does Your Majesty no good," as him appealing to Fritz's self-interest in order to get them both out of this, since his own needs have already been rejected as irrelevant.

And then everything after that is Fritz/Katte roleplay, so all words, intonations, facial expressions, and gestures of tenderness can be assumed to have been micromanaged by Fritz over the course of the previous roleplay occasions, and so none of this is admissible as evidence. (As noted, the facial expressions in the rest of the movie that you have seen and I have not are admissible as evidence and I defer to you.)

Whereas RL Fritz showed at least some concern over Fredersdorf's well-being in their correspondence, and same with Catt's well-being in Catt's memoirs. What I haven't seen in this movie, and stop me if I just missed or forgot it from 2xing the thing in small increments over the course of several weeks, is Fritz showing any concern for Goltz's well-being. Now, granted, *any* relationship between Fritz and another person is going to suffer from a power imbalance, including and up to Wilhelmine and Katte. But when I see some reciprocity, I'm more likely to interpret it as a mutual relationship with potentially positive aspects. That's why, if they had only changed the name to Fredersdorf, and kept all the dialogue and everything else the same, I would have been more likely to parse Fredersdorf as genuinely concerned, as opposed to simply watching his back and trying to keep his job (in the face of Fritz's notorious zero-strike policy).

Also. My experience of the film leaves me taking Goltz's word for it that the roleplaying isn't good for Fritz. Maybe it's not. Maybe he's always in a foul mood afterward and takes it out on everyone around him and never gets anywhere even after numerous repetitions. But what I've actually gotten out of the movie so far with my own eyes and what you've told me is 1) Fritz crying at the end of the roleplay, 2) Fritz confiding in Bach later on. Neither of which convinces me that the roleplay wasn't good for him, given the way his historical number one reaction to Katte's death, after those first few days, was to bottle it all up inside. Obviously, roleplay hasn't solved all of his issues, no one thing is going to do that (especially when the Katte affair was only his most acute trauma, and his chronic trauma had imo far more widespread and ineradicable effects), but that's different from saying it does him no good.

Here's how I would have loved to have seen this play out. It requires absolutely minimal changes.

1) Change Goltz's name to Fredersdorf.

2) Same roleplay scene. We can even keep the line about it not being good for Fritz, on the assumption that Fredersdorf doesn't know that it might be good for him, because I don't expect anyone in the 18th century to know the first thing about psychology.

3) That flute music by moonlight scene immediately after? Have Fritz and Fredersdorf playing their flutes together.

4) Keep the therapy session with Bach later on.

Implication: spontaneous repetitive roleplaying of acute trauma in the dark, with someone he has a close relationship with, functions as exposure therapy, which in turn leads to it being easier for him to open up about his chronic trauma in the daylight with someone whom he knows less well (and Gooood knows, hasn't has the smoothest relationship with so far in this movie!) but who can function as a father figure.

It substitutes one name and makes a slight alteration in one scene, and it changes the whole arc for me.

Btw, question for you, as someone who's seen the whole movie: I've done repeated slow-mo-ing and freeze framing of the shot right after Goltz knocks over the ink, and I'm a bit confused. My interpretation is that it's Fritz having a flashback to what appears to be a beheaded (?) individual in a white shroud (?) lying next to a wheel and a stone wall suggestive of a fortress. Now, I've seen historians suggest that FW threatening Katte and Keith with torture (though he never followed through) might lie behind some of Friedrich II's later mitigation of torture. And that definitely seems to be what this scene is getting at: it starts with Fritz talking to Goltz about his personal horror of torture, and ends with him having a flashback to what has to be Katte.

Am I interpreting this correctly? Is this just artistic license on the part of the film, implying that Katte was broken on the wheel? Is this cleared up in the discussion with Bach? Does Fritz explicitly talk about Katte at all with Bach, or just the many, many other daddy issues?

Thank you for bearing with my dislike of this medium that dates back to when I was 2-3 years old and my mother tried and failed to get me to be a normal kid and watch Sesame Street. :)

I suspect some conspiracy involving Prussian cyber agents from the beyond.

Those sneaky cyber agents, always foiling us! ~~Say hi to Old Fritz from me, agents. :D~~

From:

mildred_of_midgard

If it's any comfort, Carlyle's reputation - well, not the general one, but the one of his Fritz biography as THE biography - has been going downhill througout the last century, even before most people detoxed on the Great Man of History dogma.

So I've gathered, but at one time, it was all I had, and my Katte-shipping heart now regrets that, grrrr. And I love your "detox" word choice!

it makes for a sense of getting emotionally left behind or at best having to share, and so her subconscious decided that first Keith, then Katte were suspicious characters

I agree that was a major reason. I think a secondary reason is that as Fritz got older, he started making more life choices that she couldn't agree with, and it was a lot easier to blame the people he was hanging out with than to blame him for his own bad judgment, or accept that they were starting to have different values and priorities. How often does "He/she's not a bad kid, he/she just hangs out with bad kids?" get invoked for teenagers throughout the world?

It also struck me that the two of them don't appear to have been close to any of their other siblings at any point.

I agree, I've always been struck by this. And...

It's basically a "you and me against the world" thing formed early on.

This, yes, exactly!

Those poor, poor kids.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

And also. Regardless of Goltz's feelings about Fritz, it remains the case that he doesn't want to be there, he gave two reasons for not wanting to be there and was ignored, he doesn't think the roleplay is a good idea, and he's still being forced to do it. This means two things. One, it's an abuse of power by a monarch, no two ways about it. Two, maybe it's because Goltz has already tried everything he can think of to make this roleplay work better for Fritz and nothing's worked, but his lack of encouragement is not actually helping the roleplay succeed. Of course, it's not his job to help! See point one, about the abuse of power. But I still want to see this same roleplay done by someone who's encouraging Fritz to do what he needs to do.

Which leads me to, either Goltz is right or wrong that this is another one of Fritz's patented Really Bad Ideas (TM). If he's right, it means Fritz genuinely feels worse as a result of doing this, in not just the short but the long term. I find it difficult to believe, given both the RL man and the theme of this movie, that Fritz feeling worse wouldn't have any effect on the way he treats the people around him, and therefore that Goltz doesn't have some vested interest in talking Fritz out of the roleplay. There are many ways for this roleplay to go wrong, with and without the power differential, and Goltz may be spot on.

But he may also be wrong. And if he's wrong, it means Fritz would actually benefit from having someone to do this with him, and what he's got is someone who's sending "don't do this" messages. Now this may be because Goltz totally cares about Fritz and doesn't want to see him crying at the end. It may be the case that Fredersdorf would have had the same reaction, purely out of caring and his own discomfort at seeing Fritz cry. That still doesn't mean the roleplay was a bad idea.

[Okay, this turned into a ramble about trauma psychology, which is one of my interests.]

It's actually extremely common, and a big problem for trauma survivors, for the people closest to them to feel radically uncomfortable with them reliving their traumatic memories. Sometimes people tell the survivor it's better to let it go, or sometimes they try to listen, but get increasingly and visibly upset at hearing about these awful things and/or watching the survivor cry. At that point, the survivor is now having to manage the emotions of the person they're talking to as well as their own emotions, which is not something you can do while reliving a traumatic experience. So the whole thing starts shutting down.

Both these approaches mean the survivor ends up feeling like they're not allowed to talk about what they need to talk about, even when they want to, which is really, really bad for their recovery prospects. Now! It is no one's responsibility to listen to anyone else's traumas, much less participate in a roleplay. You can absolutely find someone else's traumas too upsetting to listen to and tell them so. Self-care comes first.

But telling someone it's bad for *them* to relive their memories is absolutely the wrong thing to say. I realize pretty much everyone who says this is well-meaning, and God knows I don't hold random laypeople responsible for understanding psychology in this century, much less 3 centuries ago. But they're still misinformed and spreading misinformation. (As noted, this specific roleplay between Fritz and Goltz may be going horribly wrong in many ways, and I'm not saying Goltz was necessarily concluding it was bad for Fritz just because of Fritz's emotions during the roleplay. But if that's what he meant, then that's an extremely common mistake.)

The most helpful thing you can do, if someone you care about is reliving a trauma, is to realize that they're dealing with their own emotions right now and can't deal with yours, to understand that just because your own emotions are in revolt at the thought of them suffering doesn't mean that it's bad for them to relive it, and to try to manage your own secondhand emotions out of their sight.

That's IF doing so isn't going to cause you unhealthy amounts of distress, of course. But sometimes it's enough just to know that it's okay to let them experience their own distress without you having to fix it or try to make it stop. If you're not a trained professional, quiet support and validation is usually the best thing you can do. If we're talking the present day, suggestions that they find someone qualified to help if they need to. Above all, not pressure to talk, but acceptance and encouragement when they do. And, of course, navigation of boundaries: distinguish between "I can't hear about X right now/ever because it's inherently upsetting/I don't have the spoons/I don't want to do this/I don't need to explain" and "I balk at hearing about X because I have misconceptions about what the other person needs."

TL;DR: I didn't come up with this specific roleplay for Fritz, but I've been having him roleplay with trusted loved ones in my head for months because it has a lot of potential to help if done right, and this scene hit pretty close to home in that respect.

From:

cahn

I mean, I mostly thought Carlyle's problem (having only read these bits out of context) was that he depended rather too slavishly on Wilhelmine as a source without thinking that she might have had her own (psychological) agendas.

I agree that was a major reason. I think a secondary reason is that as Fritz got older, he started making more life choices that she couldn't agree with, and it was a lot easier to blame the people he was hanging out with than to blame him for his own bad judgment, or accept that they were starting to have different values and priorities.

I agree with both of these -- I definitely got both of those vibes from Wilhelmine. (Though to be honest if I hadn't had context provided by you guys, I'd probably have been just like Carlyle and taken her at her word.)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

I mean, I mostly thought Carlyle's problem (having only read these bits out of context) was that he depended rather too slavishly on Wilhelmine as a source without thinking that she might have had her own (psychological) agendas.

You can see him slavishly depending on her! He might as well have "Wilhelmine Is My Source" blazoned on every page. I'm also not sure, even from his Wikipedia page (maybe

selenak knows more, she often does), how comfortable he was with Fritz's sexuality, which tends to seriously color how people present his favorites.

[ETA: I should also note that Carlyle may have shared Wilhelmine's intense subconscious desire to distribute as much blame as possible to Fritz's companions instead of Fritz, because Carlyle's whole philosophy toward life, as exemplified by but not limited to his bio of Fritz, was "Great Men Rule (Both Figuratively and Literally)." Fritz was a great man and ruler; therefore we need to explain away the things we don't like as much as possible. So I suspect Wilhelmine's take on things really resonated with Carlyle.]

I'd probably have been just like Carlyle and taken her at her word

It's easy to do! I myself, every time I went to Carlyle looking for shipping material, came away with, "Well, maybe I'm over-romanticizing the whole thing and young Fritz actually really had bad judgment about boyfriends at that age. There's no reason he couldn't have, after all. I still *wish* I could have a proper ship for them, though!" It was only after examining multiple sources recently, some of which called attention to the biases of others, that I managed to arrive at my own opinions (and awareness of where the boundaries of my knowledge lie).

Edited Date: 2019-10-07 05:43 am (UTC)

From: (Anonymous)

Now it's been decades since I read Carlyle's biography (my grandfather had a - shortened - German edition in his library), but here's the irony: he had no problem being wary of Wilhelmine as a source when it came to her actual criticism of her brother, pointing out that the memoirs were written during their three years enstragement and thus likely coloured by her emotional state at that time. Otoh, I would caution against assuming homophobia, not least because Carlyle, cranky Scot that he was, didn't held back on the -isms he actually had, which were plenty, so if he'd any hangups in that direction he'd have ranted about them, not being coy. Plus the mid-Victorians, of which he was one, were actually wild about "passionate friendships" between men. (Think Tennyson's poem In Memoriam - and Tennyson was a friend.) Considering Carlyle's first biographer (also a friend) thought he (Carlyle) was impotent, his Albee-esque marriage to Jane Welch not withstanding, it's more likely that if C thought about Fritz' sexuality at all, he considered him a fellow asexual (not in those terms; I'm always trying to avoid putting current-day framings of sexuality into historical figures' heads), basically seeing his hero Above It All.

Back to Wilhelmine for a moment, I've just listened to one of those exchanges which make me salute her, when she and Fritz are discussing new books - these two were such endearing geeks in that regard, constantly talking about music and books in between news and family drama:

W: Have just come across a book that really made me furios. The author says women are not capable of rational thought, only men are. So we've been put on a level with sheep.

F: Gotta agree with the author. You, dearest sis, are of course an exception and Not Like Other Girls, but then I don't consider you a woman. You are one of the first men of Europe.

W: Thanks but no thanks. I'm a woman. I don't want to be thought as an exception. (literal quote is "I don't want to be held apart from my sisters"). Maybe rethink your criteria?

F: *changes subject*

Then there's this gem:

W: OMG have just heard you wrote to Voltaire and HE WROTE YOU BACK! A-plus fanboy achievement, bro. I'm so envious. But, um. Gossip says you've also invited him. Are you sure that's wise? He's supposed to a bit on the vain side in person, not quite living up to his writings.

F: Pffff. I'm also interest in him for his writings, don't care about his personal quirks at all, what could possibly go wrong?

And, around 1737:

W: Have just heard rumors that Mom and Dad have done a 180%. She's supposed to have gone religious while he's supposed to have discovered music. What the hell?

F: Don't worry, it's not true. Mom's no more religious than before and Dad has discovered painting, not music. That can still be our thing.

BTW, they always refer to their parents as "the King" and "The Queen", never as their mother and father. But to be fair, that might be writing custom of the day as much as reflecting their emotions, considering Wilhelmine refers to her husband first as "the Prince" and then, after his father's death, as "The Margrave", never by his first name or as "my husband". Fritz the very few times he mentions her refers to Elisabeth Christine as "the Crown Princess", but that's less surprising. Oh and, one of these times is a downright sympathetic reference, when telling Wilhelmine "Potsdam and Berlin are hell right now, the King is having a go at me again, and even the Crown Princess has lost nearly all her standing with him and gets similar treatment".

From:

selenak

From:

selenak

Relatedly, of course it makes sense to check the background of biographers for how it may influence their attitude re: Fritz, boyfriends and politics, FW and parent issues. Here's me providing you with one for Theodor Fontane.

Attitude towards parents and parental authority in general:

Complicated. His father and mother married young and regretted it for the ensuing decades. Dad was Henri Louis Fontane, lover of anecdotes, fun and games, inveterate gambler and thus cause of bankruptcy and worries; the fun parent. Mum was Emilie Labry (yup, both of Fontane's parents have French names; Fritz' great grandfather had invited all those Huguenots Louis XIV had kicked out into Prussia, which benefited the principality a great deal and meant there was an important minority of French speakers around), often mortally embarrassed by her husband making a fool of himself socially even before he gambled away the family money (again) and fond of physical punishment; the discipline parent. As a boy, Theo resented her for it. Later, he came to respect her and see her difficult situation, but he still thought beating your kid was a lousy form of education and didn't do it with his own.

Attitude towards Prussia: Complicated. "the beloved and hated Prussia", is how he phrases it at one point. Young Theo, influenced both by Dad's enthusiasm for Napoleon and his own political ideas, took part in the 1848 revolution and even wrote an essay titled "Why Prussia must perish", by which he meant that the Prussian state was so codified as a military and authoritarian state by now that in order to achieve a unified Germany with the other German states, it would have to be either so thoroughly reformed that it wouldn't be Prussia anymore or get dissolved into a larger Germany. Then the 1848 revolution was defeated. Theo's mother: Told you so. Now you're out of job. And you've got a new wife and your first kid. If you don't want to end up like your father, you better take the job at this arch-conservative ultra Prussian journal I've asked my local preacher to get you! Theo: swallows, takes job. Writes, among other things, the basics for what would become "Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg", aka the book the Katte tragedy excerpt is from, for this very conservative journal. Later, once he had achieved some name recognition, switches to another, moderate journal. (Fontane didn't make it big time as a novelist until he was well into his 60s.) Once he finally achieved fame and very late fortune in his 70s, he amazed and delighted the younger writers by supporting the aventgarde theatre of his day instead of putting down new stuff, and politically arguing for reform again.

Like his father, he loved anecdotal historical ramblings (he'd be a great contributer to this journal, too), and he'd always enjoyed stories about Prussian nobles and kings, it wasn't that he suddenly discovered them post revolution. But his favourites among the Hohenzollern were not so coincidentally the ones who never got on the throne (i.e. Fritz' brother Heinrich, but also nephew Louis Ferdinand).

In terms of contemporary (i.e. contemporary to his lifetime) Prussian society, Fontane still is regarded as THE realist novelist, depicting said society from the inside with a mixture of affection and acid observation of its flaws.

Attitude towards sex in general and m/m in particular: as a person, had two (early dead) pre-marital illegitimate kids. His wife Emilie (another one, bearing the same first name as his mother just to confuse casual biographers) has been an illegitimate daughter herself (with a horror childhood; she got adopted, then her adopted mother died, and her adopted father took up with a prostitute who tied little Emilie to a post in the courtyard while servicing soldiers in her rooms). As a writer, Fontane was famous for his three dimensional female characters, several of whom have non-marital sex. So much for the het side of things. Re: m/m, he had a bff called Wilhelm Wolfssohn who wrote him a love poem when they were young and passionate letters with "I am your Carlos, you are my Posa" etc. (that definitely was a 19th century passionate friendship), but fictionally speaking, there's not much reflection of that. There's no intense male friendship in a Fontane novel that I can think of (there are of course male friendships, but as a writer Fontane genuinely seems to have been more interested in exploring female characters and the way they relate to men and each other).

Is he likely to have projected a contemporary political figure into Fritz? Not into Fritz the crown prince, but Old Fritz the remote shadow in Schach von Wuthenow, possibly, to wit: Bismarck. Fontane went to and thro between "magnificent bastard" and "reactionary bastard" on Bismarck through most of his life, ever since they were on opposite sides in the 1848 revolution in their youth.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Oh, GOOD for you, Wilhelmine! *applauds*

(I see the Prussian cyber agents are at it again. They're very dedicated to their jobs!)

[Hit reply too soon]

but here's the irony: he had no problem being wary of Wilhelmine as a source when it came to her actual criticism of her brother

Ah, yes, I reread what I wrote and realized it reads like a globally applicable comment. I meant specifically about Katte and Keith. And that is also why I think it's partly his own pro-Fritz biases showing: he follows W blindly when what she says *resonates* with him.

And when I said "homophobic," I phrased it as "reflexes of homophobic mindsets" deliberately, without specifying *whose* mindset. I need to read Wilhelmine's memoirs more closely, instead of skimming (it's next on my list), but just from recent rereading of the Katte affair, she comes across as unhappy with both his freethinking (which Carlyle would not be), and his and Keith's "inappropriate" relationships with her brother, which I've been taking to mean sexual. If I am way off the mark, let me know. Maybe she really was just worried about FW's homophobia, and distressed at her brother having intense emotional relationships with people who are not her...but her whole language about his boyfriends comes across as homophobic: "debauched," "dissolute," "irregular."

But whereas Carlyle was on board with the whole freethinking thing, and as I said I had no idea about his attitude toward sexuality one way or the other (thank you for clarifying!), I've been assuming that a lot of biographers are sometimes just not questioning what might lie behind the portrayals in their sources. And he always seemed like one of them when I was rereading this section looking for shipping material.

Edited Date: 2019-10-07 04:01 pm (UTC)

From:

cahn

Wilhelmine is awesome! <3

...it sounds worth reading these letters. Are they translated into English? I can read enough French that in theory it would be possible for me to read it untranslated, although in practice I would probably just not bother until that mythical time I have more free time.

BTW, they always refer to their parents as "the King" and "The Queen", never as their mother and father. But to be fair, that might be writing custom of the day as much as reflecting their emotions, considering Wilhelmine refers to her husband first as "the Prince" and then, after his father's death, as "The Margrave", never by his first name or as "my husband".

This confused the heck out of me in her memoirs for quite a long time until I figured this out. I was all "Where's her husband?" :)

I've sort of hit pause on the memoirs for a while, partially because I've been reading other things to figure out what to nominate for Yuletide, and partially as it got kind of depressing while she was navigating her in-laws. I don't know why it's more depressing than her flat-out family-of-origin abuse, though it's perhaps cumulative. And maybe because it's more mundanely awful than her original family's over-the-top craziness. And also probably because I was reading it in large part for the Wilhelmine-Fritz relationship, which is of course not as much of a thing once she's been married.

From:

cahn

Ha, yes, I did once know that story about Mozart, due to being a violin nerd who was fed various composer anecdotes once upon a time, also due to violin teacher telling my parents we should watch Amadeus, which I'm glad now that I've watched (multiple times, at this point), but which at the time I was waaaaaay too young for. I'm glad you reminded me of it again, though, as I'd entirely forgotten :D

I feel like I should have known that story about Euler (having also been a math nerd as a child) but I have no memory of it, and my history was sufficiently bad that if someone had told me something like that, I would not have recollected any of the monarchs in question anyway :)

Which is to say, this is all super fascinating :D Oh Fritz. I like that comparison to Elizabeth, it really brings out the visceral OMG NO reaction in me :)

From:

cahn

Ah, right. I also did know about the spiritual incest thing, courtesy of Henry VIII logic, but had entirely forgotten, thanks for reminding me.

But, ugh, this is sounding really awful, MT driven by frustration into an affair that she would have been super against religiously. This is making me so glad she and Franz Stefan got to have each other <3

From:

cahn

This, on the other hand, sounds... not... absolutely 100% terrible. I mean, maybe 80% terrible? But it seems like at least from this standpoint it might be just possible to make it more-or-less workable in the sense of "not going up in apocalyptic flame."

But poor MT, still. <3

From:

cahn

...this is really cool, he seems like rather an awesome character. I kind of love that he's famous for his 3D female characters :D

From:

mildred_of_midgard

It's a bit like the Elizabethan age if Elizabeth had insisted on speaking only Latin and reading and watching only medieval morality plays.

Just in terms of him being a throwback, or in terms of quality?

From:

cahn

Not

selenak, but, like, when she said that, my mind immediately went to Shakespeare and Marlowe and so on having to (a) write their plays in Latin, which alone (as an English speaker) is kind of freaking me out (to unpack that a little, English can be beautiful and interesting, and it's that exploration that can't be done if you insist on writing in a non-native language), but even more so (b) something like, oh, Hamlet, the characters are entirely too three-dimensional and realistic and why aren't they called Greed and Wrath and Justice, let's kick Shakespeare out of the English lit scene.

Basically, everything that made Shakespeare Shakespeare (and Marlowe, and heck, William Byrd and Thomas Tallis, and...) would have been cut out. I mean, presumably we would have gotten some nice Latin medieval morality plays out of it... that no one would care about or read or put on, compared to how we feel about Shakespeare. So I assume what selenak means is, Fritz basically was encouraging stagnation in terms of artistic technique, and was against all the things (including the German language itself) that were actually at the time working to make German literature great.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

That makes more sense. Where my mind immediately went was equating Corneille and Racine, Fritz's gold standard for drama, to morality plays, and I had to raise my hand and ask for clarification. Stagnation: yes, absolutely. Loss of everything actually working for German lit: ditto.

From:

cahn

Haha, this is because you know too much :P

It worked for me as I know nothing about Fritz' drama or about Corneille or Racine :D

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Haha. :) I know only slightly more: just enough to wonder if morality plays were really that good or if Racine and company* were really that bad, not enough to have formed an independent opinion on the quality of either.

* Not suggesting Fritz was patronizing anything of that quality in practice, just that he was *trying* to.

From:

selenak

Hey, I’ll have you know morality plays were nothing to sneeze at! :) We got one of the biggest ongoing spectacles of 20th/21st century German language theatre out of them. (Context: fin du siecle writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal it on the idea of writing Jederman, a play modelled on medieval morality plays like Everyman, Max Reinhardt staged it in Salzburg getting the cooperation of the local arch bishop for having every church ringing their bells at a key point, and it has been staged every year since. (Well, okay, not when the Nazis were in charge, but other than that.) (Most German language actors and actresses have “must play Everyman - male - or Lust - female in Salzburg” in their CV.)

Okay, but seriously now, [Bad username or unknown identity: “cahn”] put the problem very well. Bear also in mind that Racine and Corneille were already a century old in Fritz’ youth; he wasn’t into Beaumarchais now, was he? And by blindly following Voltaire’s doctrine that Shakespeare (or any of the Brits) wasn’t any good, he didn’t himself any favours, either. (The young Sturm und Drang poets of the 1770s going through a Shakespeare craze and coming out inspired to do their own stuff also started the German love affair with Shakespeare that later, when the 1800s turned more and more nationalistic, went to such ridiculous extremes as scholars trying to prove Will really had been German. Such idiocy aside, though, that love affair never ended, and both Goethe and Schiller would not have become the writers they did if they hadn’t been full fledged participants. It wasn’t that they disliked Corneille and Racine, or didn’t know their work well, btw, Schiller tried his hand at a Phedre translation, and Goethe had Cid discussions with visitors. But good old Shakes was their passion.)

Back to Fritz: while I had known about his refusal to acknowledge German literature, I hadn’t known, until reading the Fritz & music book and catching up with more recent biographies, that he wasn’t much better with modern (to his day) composers. I mean, he was anti-Gluck, for God’s sake. (Don’t even ask whether the existence of Haydn or young Mozart registered.) He liked Hasse well enough, but anything later was bad, and Gluck’s opera innovations were of the devil. (Well, the vaguely deist equivalent thereof.)

Now reforming your country’s laws etc. is all very well, but if you really want your country to become leading in culture, than that’s not how to do it. (His nephew wasn’t a genius - nor was he the utter idiot Fritz saw him as, following his father’s tradition of humiliating the crown prince in public - but he did much better in terms of encouraging the arts, and it was then that Berlin started to be home to salons, writers and painters.)

ETA: for contemporary contrast, what Catherine did in Russia: write comedies in Russian, to encourage others to write in Russian. Bear in mind that Russian hadn’t been her native language, or indeed the language of the court (which was French, as everywhere else in Europe).

Edited Date: 2019-10-08 05:47 am (UTC)