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: Nomination coordination redux

[cahn]

This whole chain is AMAZING and you guys are AMAZING and at first I was thinking I might ask for this AU for Yuletide too only, like, it's all right here so I don't even need to ask for it

Question for you guys. How over the line would it have been if in this MT/Fritz AU where Fritz isn't having sex with her, MT had found someone else (Franz Stefan?) to father her kids? You've told me that Fritz was not cool with it with his brother's wife, but then again this is a situation where it's her heir too...? Is this something they could have worked out? (Both from the political and the psychological sides.) Or is it just completely off the table?

Re: Nomination coordination redux

[mildred_of_midgard]

You're back! Yay!

at first I was thinking I might ask for this AU for Yuletide too only, like, it's all right here so I don't even need to ask for it

Hee! I've been thinking this too! Sometimes a plot outline is almost as good as a fic, and they're a lot easier to generate.

How over the line would it have been if in this MT/Fritz AU where Fritz isn't having sex with her, MT had found someone else (Franz Stefan?) to father her kids?

I've been wondering the same thing, only with brother Wilhelm, if an annulment was out of the question. Yesterday I entertained the idea of Fritz allowing Franz Stefan to father his heir, for about two seconds, and then went, "Naaaahh. DDD-:" But if I squint, I could almost just barely see some parallel universe where Fritz is telling his brother and MT, "Okay, you two, heirs from my wife and my next of kin, get to it, I have better things to do." Fritz is just enough of a "I do what I want" person that if he decides he wants something, societal expectations be damned. That's the scenario in which I see him agreeing to this.

Problem is, even in the rather unlikely scenario where MT/her family/the Austrians put up enough of a fight against Fritz's reluctance to father heirs that he concedes there needs to be a child of the marriage, *and* he decides that it doesn't need to be of his body if everyone involved is discreet about it, I see MT's piety and sense of duty as the sticking point. selenak can tell me if she disagrees, as she knows MT rather better than I do, but I have a hard time imagining it.

And that's *if* Fritz goes along with it, which 1) probably requires it to be his idea, and 2) requires him to have his back to the wall in terms of admitting he needs an heir via MT and not be willing to do it himself. (If he really is incapable of getting it up with a woman, I see an annulment agreed to or better yet, insisted on, by MT as the most likely scenario.)

Interesting point re all this, though: Goldsmith interprets "C'est pourquoi, si je me marie en galant homme, c'est-à-dire laissant agir madame comme bon lui semble, et faisant de mon côté ce qui me plaît, et vive la liberté!" from one of his letters to Grumbkow to mean that Fritz might have been okay with EC having discreet affairs. Now, as noted, Goldsmith puts a lot of weight on evidence that won't hold it up, imo, and my eyebrows immediately flew up. Especially since the preceding text is "Once I get married, I'm in charge, no woman ever tells *me* what to do."

Plus, even if Goldsmith's right (curious what you two think), what desperate Crown Prince Fritz thinks and what autocratic King Friedrich II thinks are two different things. *Plus*, a child is not the same thing as a discreet affair, although if it's his idea and it's discreet enough that no one knows/no one talks about it, and he's keeping up appearances enough that it's plausibly his...I would be interested in what selenak thinks, because my own gut reaction is that having someone else quietly father MT's children is a very sensible solution to a political problem, but Fritz's resistance to having his hand forced in any way combined with MT's piety means that, even if one of them manages to come up with the idea, the other one most likely isn't going to go along with it.

AUs are fun!

Re: Nomination coordination redux

[cahn]

"C'est pourquoi, si je me marie en galant homme, c'est-à-dire laissant agir madame comme bon lui semble, et faisant de mon côté ce qui me plaît, et vive la liberté!"

So from everything you guys have told me about Fritz, and reading this totally without context, I actually think he might have meant that he was OK with EC having affairs, but I also am getting Anti-Machiavel vibes here in a big way :P It's the kind of thing where I can totally see him going around saying "Everyone should have freedom to have affairs and do their own sex thing, vive la liberté!" and then when presented with the actual thing from his actual wife... maybe might not feel the same way about it.

Re: Nomination coordination redux

[mildred_of_midgard]

That is entirely plausible. I'm actually startled by the idea of him implying sexual freedom for his wife in the first place, but hey. Anti-Machiavel.

I can totally see him going around saying "Everyone should have freedom to have affairs and do their own sex thing, vive la liberté!" and then when presented with the actual thing from his actual wife... maybe might not feel the same way about it.

You almost literally quoted from Mein Name ist Bach there. In that case (since I don't think you've seen it) it's his unmarried sister having an affair, Fritz throws a fit, and she says, "You're always saying everyone is master of their own fate and arse in this kingdom, but by 'everyone' you mean 'you'." :P

So like I said, that's why I can see him deciding that his wife needs to sleep with someone of his choosing, but not that she's allowed to sleep with someone of her choosing.

His side

[selenak]

Same here. I mean, even that bit from his memoirs where he sides with future FW II's first wife cheating on him and says it's totally his nephew's fault for "neglecting her charms" and cheating on her first strikes me more as an (hypocritical) insult to his nephew than an actual acceptence of a woman's right to sexual freedom. Also: note that he agreed to his nephew seeking a divorce from said first wife when the woman got pregnant by definitely not his nephew, i.e. a non-Hohenzollern future heir was not on the menu.

He might have tried to marry August Wilhelm off to MT's younger sister (who in rl married Franz Stefan's younger brother, so it's a plausible match under the circumstances) and get a Habsburg/Hohenzollern heir the respectable way. But that's supposing said younger sister was still free to be married off by the time Emperor Karl dies instead of Karl making a match for his younger daughter before that. Also, again, I think MT would have been invested into getting a child of her own as heir, especially if she has a miserable marriage and no or not much power.

Now, best case scenario: we take Fritz at his word that he did have an affair (in the physical sense as well) with Orzelska as a teen in Dresden and when she later secretly visited him in Berlin, i.e. he's able if he's willing, he is motivated post-Küstrin to make a success of his new life in Vienna. Maria Theresia wouldn't get the 16 kids she had in rl out of that, but she was certainly fertile, and if she and Fritz manage an heir and a spare instead of or in addition to girls in the first few years, that would be enough to make any more future marital sex superflous, so by the time both their fathers are dead, they've come to an arrangement that suits them.

Re: His side

[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

Her side

[selenak]

Separately, re: would have MT gone along with having an affair to get an heir especially if Fritz was unwilling/unable from the get go and annulment was not an option?

Definitely not if he'd advised her to sleep with his brother. That would have been spiritual incest (since, post-marriage, his siblings were her siblings as well) in addition to being adultery, and a MT unhappy in her marriage would have been more likely to throw herself into her religion to compensate, not less.

However: in rl she never was in the situation of being in love with someone she absolutely could not have. So I'm not completely sure she wouldn't have had an affair with Franz Stefan (who definitely was okay with adultery) if he'd tried, because she really was deeply in love with him already at the point where the timelines would have diverged. Not immediately, I think she would have given this marriage an honest, dutiful try, but some frustrating years later? Just about possible for young MT, foiled in love, no realm ruling to put her energies into and stuck with Fritz as a husband.

Re: Her side

[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