Frederick the Great post links

[cahn]

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)!

Comments

Re: speaking of musical relationships....

[mildred_of_midgard]

: EC's younger brother died apparantly in the same battle after which Fritz was told Wilhelmine (he learned this on October 18th), burst into tears and had a not so minor breakdown.

1) You seem to have left out a word after "Wilhelmine."

2) We may be thinking of different battles and brothers here.

I'm thinking of Albert, at the battle of Soor, the one in 1745 where Fritz lost his dogs (among many other very important things and people) and had a migraine. If the missing word in your comment was "died", Wilhelmine died the day of Hochkirch, one of Fritz's major and very distressing defeats, in 1758.

Let me check if one of EC's other brothers died at Hochkirch. Yep, the youngest one did. So I think we've got two incidents getting conflated here. Fritz may also have written a terrible condolence letter about youngest brother in 1758, I would have to check.

And it's my bedtime, so I can't put together a chronology of Fritz's emotional isolation just now (maybe tomorrow), but yeah, 1758 was definitely a rough year, with his mother having gone in mid 1757, and Fredersdorf dying in January 1758, Wilhelm in June 1758, and Wilhelmine in October 1758 (on the day of Hochkirch, no less).

"What kind of life is this that's left for him, having banished humanity out of it?"

Yep, that's where the being buried by his dogs comes in.

Speaking of burials, did Fritz ever visit Wilhelmine's burial site? That we know of?

Re: speaking of musical relationships....

[selenak]

Yes, died, and poor EC, losing not one but two brothers in Frederician battles...

re: Fritz visiting Wilhelmine's burial site: I don't know. If he ever visited Bayreuth again after her death, he probably did, but just about the only occasion he might have done that I can think of is when the Margrave married again, Wilhelmine's (and Fritz') niece no less, Charlotte's daughter Sophie Caroline. (As if to make a point about Marx' statement re: history repeating itself from tragedy to farce, Sophie Caroline was supposed to marry Prince George of England before ending up with the Margrave to keep up the alliance. They didn't have a son, either, or any kid, the marriage lasted only three years and then he died. Caroline moved to Erlangen as her widow's seat and got chummy with cousin FW II, aka Fritz unloved successor.

Speaking of burials, when I googled I learned that when the German government re-buried Fritz according to his own wishes centuries after the first burial, the "minimal attendance" he requested consisted of a priest, the head of the House of Hohenzollern then (Prince Louis Ferdinand, now deceased; the new head is the guy who wants money from the German state and got a lot of bile about Willy and son of Willy in response) and Chancellor Helmut Kohl. I have no idea who attended FW's reburial, though...

Re: speaking of musical relationships....

[mildred_of_midgard]

the "minimal attendance" he requested

Interesting. Link?

re: Fritz visiting Wilhelmine's burial site: I don't know.

Okay, thanks. Reason I ask: I keep seeing people get so worked up about how Fritz dealt with Katte's death, including but not limited to not visiting his grave. And it just makes me angry how common it is for people to decide that if other people don't react to trauma according to the One True Way they've come up with, the traumatized person is doing it wrong. (Much worse example that my wife ran into in a documentary recently: insisting your daughter is lying about sexual assault, because when *you* were raped, *you* were crying and hysterical, but *she's* numb and in shock. SMH.)

Anyway, Wust is obviously much closer to Berlin than Bayreuth, and under his purview, but I was just wondering if maybe he simply preferred commissioning temples and putting up statues at Sanssouci to visiting burial sites, maybe that was much more therapeutic. But even if you DID go all the way to Bayreuth and avoided Wust because wow the survivor's guilt, that's STILL OK, Fritz. <3

Re: speaking of musical relationships....

[selenak]

The Spiegel being very sarcastic about both Helmut Kohl and the Hohenzollern before the ceremony, Deutschlandfunk - our most intellectual radio broadcast - reporting about the event afterwards (I linked the transcript). Both are in German, and too long for me to translate, so you'll have to employ google. In any event, the gist of it is that it's pointed out the last German chancellor who absolutely wanted a connection to Frederick the Great was you-know-who, and must we? Otoh, Deutschlandfunk also reports that amidst the - mild - protests in Berlin on the day the bodies of Fritz and FW were moved (only the last part of which, the actual solo reburial near midnight as requested was with the minimal attendance, the rest had lots of attending people watching as the coffins passed) , there were also some Fritz friendly people watching and commenting:

„Wir kommen aus Berlin. Wir sind Schwule und sind hierhergekommen, weil Friedrich ein Bruder von uns war, und da haben wir uns im Stil der Jahre zurecht gemacht.“ ("We're from Berlin. We're gay and came here because Friedrich was a brother, and that's why we got into gear the style of his era.")

ETA: In case you're wondering whose idea the entire reburial was, and also reburying FW, too, instead of leaving him where both bodies used to be, that would be Louis Ferdinand, who was lobbying for it since reunificationion. He was Wilhelm II's grandson and was prone to say stuff like "My house has never surrendered its claim to the throne". Very much in the style of Willy's "no descendant of Frederick the Great would ever...", which makes me conclude that dynasty never learns...

Re: different ways of mourning - I hear you. And chances are he didn't go to Bayreuth, either. It was a six days journey, and he'd have had to put up with socializing with his brother-in-law, which otherwise he appears to have dumped on August Wilhelm. (No longer available.) Also, there would have been inevitably celebrity voyeurs, since she's buried in a public church, and who knows whether he'd been able to do any private mourning. Much better to mourn her away from all that.

BTW: leaving aside the blatant playing to the audience, Voltaire actually seems to have liked her. After she died, he wrote an "Ode Sur La Mort De Son Altesse Royale Madame La Markgrave De Bareith" which he published in the first edition of his novel Candide.

Re: speaking of musical relationships....

[mildred_of_midgard]

Oh, okay, I had misinterpreted what you wrote. I knew who was present from my own research, but I read your "The minimal attendance he requested consisted of ..." as *Fritz* requesting there be a priest, his successor, and, well, I couldn't figure out where the Chancellor fit in. I was so confused by the increasingly implausible list of people Fritz supposedly requested that I had to ask for a source. If what you meant was that in 1991, the relevant Germans decided those people should be present and that that would meet Old Fritz's "minimum attendance" requirements, that makes infinitely more sense.

Every time I read his last wishes (and I've read every English article I could find on the 1991 reburial, plus I think some German ones--Chrome is nice because it automatically translates as soon as I open the tab), Fritz's minimal attendance requirements are presented as "one lantern, no one following, and definitely no major television spectacle the next day. :P"

Re: speaking of musical relationships....

[cahn]

I was kind of confused about the whole reburial thing, so I appreciate this :P

Aww, I am glad Voltaire liked her <3 I just have a lot of feelings for Wilhelmine.

Re: speaking of musical relationships....

[mildred_of_midgard]

Fritz and FW have had like 5 "final" resting places. It can get very confusing trying to keep up. (Okay, not all of them were intended to be final, but still.)