Frederick the Great post links
Sep. 18th, 2019 01:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahnMore 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 moviesbecause 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)!
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
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)!
Prussian sibling correspondance
Date: 2019-10-08 07:47 am (UTC)Even better, though not in English, is this website, a treasure trove I've just begun to explore. This has 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 a faksimile, so you can see what the actual letters look like. Fritz is the main other correspondant, but there are also three of her other siblings (August Wilhelm, Ulrike and Amalie), which is fascinating to me because for the first time, these give me a sense of what Wilhelmine's relations to the younger sibs might have been like, and there are few letters from her mother, not to Wilhelmine but to the other kids referring her.
Now, about that journey: Wilhelmine and her husband the Margrave - whose first name, btw, was Friedrich, which is just too confusing in this context, so I'll keep calling him the Margrave like she did - were travelling under the nome de plume "Count and Contess von Zollern" because if they'd travelled officially, it would have been a quasi royal state visit to to Wilhelmine being Fritz' sister, and more expensive both for them and their hosts. Wilhelmine was already sick (she only had a few more years to live) and traveled partly for the climate's sake, but wouldn't you know it, Europe collectively was suffering form one of the coldest years around, so it wasn't much warmer in France and only a bit in Italy. She also was a culture tourist, of course, and visiting France and Italy was fulfilling a life long dream.
The Fritz letters show him both at his best and worst. Best: he's worried for her (justly so, as it turns out, like I said, she was already sick), tenderly concerned and smacking down any criticism from people back home complaining that this journey was too expensive to make and the late FW would never have permitted it. (Context: Wilhelmine actually had to ask Fritz for permission to leave Prussian ruled or allied territories because the 7 years war was just around the corner and neither France nor the Italian states, which were mostly Austrian ruled, were considered friendly at this point.) Worst: bear in mind that what was Wilhelmine was doing was actually filfilling a life long dream for both of them. And he never got to do it, and he never would. So a part of him must have found it impossible to let her enjoy it without him. He keeps lecturing her on the note of: "Of course, you can't possibly enjoy Italy because it's just like a stale old whore looking back on her young sexpot days, right? I mean, Caesar would hate it if he came back, right? And yeah, sure, so you have the chance to check out the new diggings at Pompeiji, the most sensational archaelogical discovery of the age, but you can't possibly enjoy it, can you, because surely those unworthy current day Italians suck so much? And as for seeing Michelangelo's statues and Caravaggio's paintings in the original, surely they have only second rate examples left in Italy, and anyway, did I mention my new gallery has some great paintings which are much better than anything you can possibly see in Italy?" And so on, and so forth. Here is a map from Wilhelmine's travel route, so you can see what she visited.
There are about 80 letters Wilhelmine/Fritz letters in that collection (to and from), versus ca. 11 to brother August Wilhelm (he also got some from her husband and wrote back to both her and her husband, but only the letters to her husband are preserved). These are more affectionate (though he's only her cher frère whereas Fritz is tres cher frère) than I'd have thought, even taking into account the style of the day (after all, FW had been mon cher père as well); August Wilhelm gets just about the only landscape descriptions (whereas Fritz gets antiques, the people she's met, and concert descriptions) in addition to some chit-chat about the people she meets (btw, she doesn't copy the descriptions from her Fritz letters into her August Wilhelm letters, each brother gets different descriptions, i.e. she took the time to write individual letters, which, if you consider how long writing by hand took, and hers weren't dictated, they're in her handwriting, says something about her emotions for them, too), and she keeps asking about Heinrich and Amelie, and reminds him to give them her love, begging forgiveness for basically writing to the three of them together). At one point, August Wilhelm has reported that Fritz has had a riding accident, knocking out two teeths, and Wilhelmine basically writes back: "OMG! Thank God he's okay! You know, you sound so honestly concerned in your letter that you should allow me to let Fritz read it, because it would improve relations between you two. He likes you, I swear he does, he just needs reminding you care for him, too. I told you he's just sooo sensitive!" ("I have always told you the King is very sensitive" is the literal quote.)
(Speaking of Fritz the sensitive, Wilhelmine did visit Voltaire en route and gives his love to Fritz, swearing Voltaire is sorry for every none to swell behaviour, honest he is, and missing Fritz dreadfully.)
Ulrike (mother of Gustavo/Riccardo of Verdi opera fame) comes across as something of a scheming minx, writing to their mother first that surely, it's not true Wilhelmine is off to France, surely Fritz would see that as gross betrayal, right, and need consoling from his other sisters, and later "so I figure Wilhelmine surely will visit you on her way back, she won't be as hard-hearted as neglecting the chance to see her poor old mother again, I surely wouldn't!". Wilhelmine writes one time to say she'll write to Ulrike when she gets back but she's so overwhelmed with correspondance already that she can't during the journey. Otoh, Wilhelmine's letter to Ulrike when she IS back is actually informative and contains something the boys don't get, i.e. a gender-related observation about the French. Not surprisingly, she's found the French countryside and the villages are very poor (there's a revolution brewing, after all) and most of the culture is absolutely Paris focused. Surprisingly, though, Wihelmine tells Ulrike that what cultured people are in Avignon and other non-Paris towns she's visited are much better acknowledging women have brains and carrying conversations with them whereas the male Parisians are patronising idiots to women and only take other men seriously.
In the facsimiles, you can see that Sophia Dorothea has a distinctly different handwriting style to the entire younger generation. Here are samples from everyone's letters so you can have a look at the actual letters: Fritz to Wilhelmine, Wilhelmine to Fritz, Sophia Dorothea to her youngest son Ferdinand, August Wilhelm to his brother-in-law.
Re: Prussian sibling correspondance
Date: 2019-10-09 02:30 am (UTC)Even without being able to read it straight through, this has been an absolute *gold mine* for me, both for our discussions and my fic writing, especially given my oft-complained-about inability to deal with anything that isn't digitized. The 76 volumes include letters both by Fritz and to Fritz. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe it's complete as far as surviving material, at least at time of publication (I suspect, for example, that it predates the orgasm poem that only turned up in the last decade).
The Fritz/Wilhelmine correspondence is in volume 27_1. The dog letters (not read out loud, that must be delightful!) start here and here.
I linked you to the English translations of the dog letters in another comment. Let me find that. Here we go. Biche is the same one who keeps showing up in my fics (got yet another one in the works where she features even more prominently). She was an Italian greyhound, and one of Fritz's all-time favorites. Folichon was a spaniel, Wilhemine's breed of choice.
*clicks Post, hoping all the links work and go to the right places*
Re: Prussian sibling correspondance
Date: 2019-10-09 09:57 am (UTC)Have now arrived in my audio re-hearing at the big estrangement phase. Turns out that while I had remembered the Marwitz marriage drama and the Maria Theresia meeting drama, I had forgotten there was also Würtemberg marriage drama at the start and in between Marwitz and Maria Theresia there was Erlangen journalist drama, all adding to their growing distance, with the MT meeting just as final culminating event. The Würtemberg stuff were mostly misunderstandings. Context: Fritz wanted Wilhelmine's daughter (at that time 11 years) to marry Karl Eugen, future Duke of Würtemberg, who together with his brother was growing up at his court, as part of his anti-Habsburg policy of aligning as many of the other German principalities as he could with Prussia. The boy's mother wanted to get the boy back under her own supervision in Würtemberg. Fritz saw this as potential conspiracy to not follow through with the marriage and make an alternate match. Wilhelmine was unsure whether or not to look for potential other matches for her daughter or bank it all on the Würtemberg match. (Not least because she could tell a tale about being told you were to marry someone from early age only for it not to happen.) The widowed Duchess wanted control of her sons. (Spoiler: Karl Eugen and Wilhelmine's daughter, who according to Casanova was the most beautiful princess in Europe, got married when the girl was 16. It was such an unhappy marriage that she moved back to her parents in Bayreuth, where she's buried. Karl Eugen bankrupted Würtemberg with his pomp and his mistresses and makes into literary history by being the Duke who banished young Schiller from his realm.
The Erlangen journalist bit went thusly:
Ulrike, writing from Sweden during the second Silesian War: Dear brother, are you aware not one but several articles describing you as a war mongerer and Prussia as the villain have appeared in a newspaper printed in Erlangen? Erlangen, small Franconian town ruled by... who was it again? Hmmmm????
Fritz: I can't believe the Margrave and you are standing by while I get slandered repeatedly by an Erlangen journalist, Wilhelmine.
Wilhelmine: As if the Margrave and I read German newspapers. I am, of course, horrified. The man shall be arrested at once!
Fritz: Okay, I've just recalled I'm an enlightened monarch. The journalist doesn't have to stay in your prison, just make sure his stuff never gets printed again, and we're good.
Wihelmine: Good to know you're not insisting on his imprisonment, because he's mysteriously disappeared when the order for his arrest went out. I trust we'll never hear from him again.
Fritz: *says nothing now, but will bring it up later in his big "how you betrayed me, let me count the ways" letter, at which point it's "and then the Margrave and you let that bastard who slandered me escape"
The MT business: now during the first Silesian War, Wilhelmine is a brother-admiring loyalist who when MT's mother (who happened to be a Brunswick, i.e. Elisabeth Christine's aunt, for all the good that did), wrote her a letter asking for her mediation promptly forwards said letter to Fritz while saying "as if I would interfere, this is just for your amusement, they're so doomed with you against them". During the break between Silesian Wars, there's a cryptic exchange along the notes of Fritz mentioning "The Queen of Hungary, whom you admire so much" and Wilhelmine retorting defensively "I don't admire her at all, I just fairly acknowledge she has her strengths". During the Second Silesian war, when the Wittelsbach Emperor dies and MT gets the German princes (other than Prussia and one or two others) to vote for her husband Franz Stefan as next Emperor, MT travels to Frankfurt for Franz Stefan's coronation and on that occasion makes her fateful Bayreuth visit. (Wilhelmine: IT WAS JUST LUNCH! THE ONE TIME! WE ONLY HAD LUNCH!" (Literal quote: "She was served lunch, and I attended as politeness demanded"). This explanation comes in reply to Fritz' delayed "the reasons you suck" outburst, mind, not immediately after it happened. The letter building up to his big outburst says: "Since you care so much about the Queen of Hungary, it may please you to know I've made peace with her" (with MT accepting Prussia's ownership of Silesia and Fritz accepting Franz Stefan as Emperor and hence MT as Empress), Wilhelmine makes the mistake of writing back "how wonderful and befitting your greatness is this peace making, I dare say it will contribute even more to your glory than your earlier victories" and THEN Fritz cuts loose.
It has to be said, though, MT isn't the most reviled woman in the estrangement years. That's the quondam Countess of Marwitz and married Countess of Burghausen, Wilhelmine's (ex-)friend who became her husband's mistress and whom she married off to an Austrian. Fritz seems to have clued into Marwitz having an affair with the Margrave before Wilhelmine did which leads to this:
F: Why are you defending Marwitz? She's the worst! A Medea, a vile excrement of humanity! You are exactly like a cuckold who learns the truth only after everyone else has already found out.
W: Marwitz isn't dominating me, if that's what you mean. You should know I'm mistress of my own actions and am not likely to be manipulated by a courtier.
F: You being dominated by Marwitz was not what I meant!
(I don't get why he calls Marwitz "Medea", though, because it's really the wrong classical reference. Even if he's not associating child murder but Medea as a sorceress.)
On a more fun note, my checking out individual letters from Wilhelmine's France & Italy travel correspondance years post reconciliation let me discover that she and Fritz were "Who was the Man in the Iron Mask?" geeks. So when she's travelling along the Cote d'Azure (having lunch in "a little town named Cannes"), she's visiting the Island St. Marguerite where the Man in the Iron Mask was supposedly kept, visits his cell and interviews people who swear their parents interacted with him. And gets this bit of sensational news: "(Feri) and others who saw him say that they believe it was a woman, that he had tiny and smallboned hands, and that the skin was very smooth and soft, despite being a bit bronze." The woman in the Iron Mask! That's a new one for me. Wilhelmine finishes her interview report to Fritz by saying the common most featured theories are that it was either the Comte de Vermandois (illegitimate son of Henri IV, i.e. Louis XIV bastard uncle, literally) or "the first Dauphine", by which she means this lady.
This is the letter, and here the German translation.
Re: Prussian sibling correspondance
Date: 2019-10-09 04:20 pm (UTC)(Ihave no idea if I'm going to be able to have much opportunity to respond over the next week or so, but I'm still reading and this is all amazing and I promise I'll come back and respond later)
Re: Prussian sibling correspondance
Date: 2019-10-12 03:57 am (UTC)Also, I will never tire of your recaps/interpretations. IT WAS JUST LUNCH! THE ONE TIME! Poor Wilhelmine :(
You being dominated by Marwitz is not what Imeant!
Awwww! This bit makes me feel sorry for both Wilhelmine and Fritz, while wanting them to have much MUCH better communication.
Re: Prussian sibling correspondance
Date: 2019-10-12 04:15 am (UTC)Speaking of his correspondence in the other thread, apparently his idea of a condolence letter was "I am so sorry your brother died in one of my battles...but I just have to take advantage of this opportunity to say I TOLD YOU SO. I've been saying over and over again that he was going to get himself killed unnecessarily, I'm only surprised it didn't happen sooner."
He wrote this letter to EC about her brother's death *and also* to EC's surviving brother.
Um, Fritz? I'm notoriously bad at condolence letters, but even I know THAT'S NOT HOW YOU DO IT.
In a way, that's even worse than his "but don't be too sad, my problems are much bigger" condolence ("condolence") letter to his own brother Heinrich after their brother Wilhelm's death 13 years later.
Both EC and Heinrich then wrote to their surviving brother, both named Ferdinand, expressing their fury at the "condolence" letters they got from Fritz. I don't have EC's letter, but all my sources agree that even she got mad. Saint EC!
She may have gotten her revenge, as one of my sources says *she* later blurted out the news of Friedrich's mother's death in a letter to him that she sealed with a red seal, instead of one of the black ones indicating bad news, and that's how he found out. Now, I don't have documentary evidence on any of this, and even if it's all thoroughly based in fact, I don't know to what extent she was familiar with the practice of preparing the King for bad news with a different seal, but...after watching him not learn how to write a condolence letter in 13 years, I think it was time for him to be on the receiving end of some insensitivity.
Fritz, unlike every historian ever, I don't expect you to interact with your forced-marriage wife or really any of your family you didn't choose. PLEASE DON'T INTERACT with your forced-marriage wife or really any of your family you didn't choose!! It works wonders for me.
Re: Prussian sibling correspondance
Date: 2019-10-13 03:57 am (UTC)(Is it mean of me that I kind of hope she actually did do the letter thing on purpose?)
Re: Prussian sibling correspondance
From:Re: Prussian sibling correspondance
From:Re: Prussian sibling correspondance
Date: 2019-10-12 04:54 pm (UTC)what was Wilhelmine was doing was actually filfilling a life long dream for both of them. And he never got to do it, and he never would.
So, I've been wondering for a long time now: after 1740, was anything stopping him except his own priorities? Like, I know arranging a royal visit is non-trivial, and traveling incognito doesn't always work when you're a monarch, but...other monarchs managed to travel, and even Fritz made it to the Netherlands. If he hadn't been so obsessed with micromanaging his own country and invading others, would it have been that hard to visit Paris and Italy at some point in 1740-1786?
It's 1740. Fritz has been king for a couple of months. He hasn't invaded Silesia yet (MT's dad is still alive). After visiting Wilhelmine, he decides, "I'm going to France!" Algarotti is with him, along with a few others.
Fritz: Forges a passport under an assumed name, crosses the border* into Strasbourg.
Fritz: Yay, now I get to be an anonymous tourist and enjoy myself just like everyone else. :D
*approximately five minutes later*
Guy in Strasbourg: OMG, it's the new King of Prussia! Hey, everyone! Look!
Fritz: No, no, you're mistaken. I'm the count of something else, definitely not the King of Prussia.
Guy in Strasbourg: Hi, Fritz! Omg, fancy running into you here! You look exactly like your picture, which I conveniently have a copy of right here. Look, everyone!
Algarotti: Listen. I've known this man my whole life, and okay, he's *related* to the King of Prussia, but I promise you, he is *not* the King of Prussia.
Everyone in Strasbourg: Hey, Fritz! Can we get your autograph? Can I host you? No, me, I want to host you!
Fritz: ...
Fritz: *sad panda*
* Someone on tumblr said, "What *is* it with this man and illegally crossing borders?" which made me laugh.
Then he canceled the rest of the incognito France trip (although he also got hit by a bout of malaria around that time, which was probably a major reason for canceling too), and never did that again. In France. A couple decades later, he met his future reader Catt in the Netherlands, while pretending to be a musician.
Catt: You ask a lot of questions for a musician.
Fritz: Um. Yes. Sorry. But I am definitely just a musician, nothing suspicious about me at all, nothing to see here, this is not the king you are looking for. Sorry, gotta go! Bye!
Then as soon as Fritz went back to being the King of Prussia, Catt got a job offer.
I used to say that Fritz was no Odysseus when it came to disguises, but then I remembered the time Odysseus snuck his men out of the Cyclops' cave under an assumed name, then shouted his real name at the heavens as soon as he was free, thus royally pissing off Poseidon and triggering a sequence of events that led to all of his men getting killed and him taking 10 years to get home. Yeah, no, that's Fritz for you, lol.
Anyway, it's always made me sad that Fritz never made it to Paris or Italy, which is why I keep coming up with AUs where he does. WITH KATTE. ;)
So a part of him must have found it impossible to let her enjoy it without him.
Oh, Fritz. :-( Don't do that. Come to my AU, you will like it. <3 I promise.
Re: Prussian sibling correspondance
Date: 2019-10-13 03:53 am (UTC)Re: Prussian sibling correspondance
Date: 2019-10-13 11:17 am (UTC)Consciously? Nothing. Subconsciously, I think in later years, he was scared, precisely because he always wanted to go, it was a dream of youth, and he'd built it up in his mind as wonderful so very much. He was afraid if he went, he'd be disappointed, and then he wouldn't have those dream countries in his head anymore, either. (I'm influenced here by the fact that two German writers I've read a lot of, Karl May and Lion Feuchtwanger, both avoided visiting their dream countries even once they could; in May's case, once he finally did, it was a terrifying experience, and in Feuchtwanger's case, he frankly wrote "I don't want the reality of the moment spoil the country of my imagination" and never went.) All those "here's why current day Italy and the Italians must suck and you can't enjoy them, tell me they suck" comments hail from that, too, imo.
I mean: just think how his meeting with Voltaire went - never meet your heroes or your dream countries? BTW, I've now read the footnotes of some of the letters I already read, too, and the ones to Wilhelmine's report on her meeting Voltaire and how very sorry he is for all he's done wrong and how he sends Fritz his love are priceless, because Voltaire, of course, presented the whole visit very differently in his own letters: "The Margravaine visited me yesterday, trying her best to make up for the damage her brother the king did to our relationship. From this, you can conclude women are better than men."
Re: Prussian sibling correspondance
Date: 2019-10-14 06:56 am (UTC)hugely traumatizedpessimist, and he'd totally been primed to believe the universe wouldn't let him have nice things. I could see him having an emotional "don't set yourself up for disappointment" reaction, and then rationalizing it. Man. And then trying to keep Wilhelmine from that disappointment he saw as inevitable. AUS FOR EVERYONE.And omg, you're right, when he's sour-grapes-ing Wilhelmine, it's *right* after the whole Voltaire debacle went down. Wow. Okay, Fritz, you get like 5% more slack from me. Still try to have some self-awareness and let your sister enjoy her things, though, okay??
(The first time I tried to imagine what I would be like if I had depression, in my early 20s, the immediate conclusion I came to was that if I wasn't happy, no one around me was going to be happy either, and that the younger this started, the less I was going to be able to compensate. Thus leading me to the conclusion that I'm more an especially fortunate person than an especially good one.)
Re: Prussian sibling correspondance
Date: 2019-10-15 03:56 am (UTC)Re: Prussian sibling correspondance
Date: 2019-10-12 03:55 am (UTC)And yes, I remember the dog letters, they were awesome <3
Re: Prussian sibling correspondance
Date: 2019-10-12 04:02 am (UTC)That's what I've been doing! I've considered doing it programmatically for the entire umpteen volumes, *cough*. But if I'm writing serious code, I should be doing it for work, so...we'll see.
Re: Prussian sibling correspondance
Date: 2019-10-12 04:05 am (UTC)Re: Prussian sibling correspondance
Date: 2019-10-12 04:10 am (UTC)I've only been doing scattered bits myself as needed for reference and curiosity. I know that if I put a few hours into it, I could significantly improve my French, but then...yesterday I played Yahtzee all day because I was so tired watching The Simpsons was too mentally challenging and yet I couldn't sleep, and today wasn't much better, so...also French is like 4 or 5 on my list of languages to beef up on it when I get the chance. But one day my French will come. :)
Re: Prussian sibling correspondance
Date: 2019-10-13 12:00 pm (UTC)"I just received your letter, dear brother, and I wish you a happy journey with all of my heart. You'll have the joy of living in a warm climate while the winter will reduce the rest of us to trembling knees and grinding teeth. And I do hope my sister's health will get better; I've always noticed that the winters were damaging to her. Please give her my love and don't the two of you forget me during such a long journey! P.S. I hope you aren't irritated when I'm writing to you without having been adressed." (Since the previous letter by the Margrave had been adressed to Fritz.)
Wilhelmine, like many a tourist after her, told all her siblings she'd bring souvenirs and do shopping for them (first in France, then Italy) if they told her what they wanted. What we don't have is a letter from her to her mother offering the same thing. Here's the letter which made me come to certain conclusions about Ulrike in the famliy context. Ulrike to Sophia Dorothea:
"Gossip here talks of a journey which my Bayreuth sister undertakes to France. I cannot believe it. Maybe my disbelief hails from my wish that this news should be false. It seems to me that her rank and status cannot allow such an enterprise. And I fear that the King, my brother, would never condone the role which she would play on such an occasion. My heart always beats in affectionate sympathy with my dear, dear family. And it greatly distresses me if there is the slightest semblance of a disagreement. All the more so since it cannot but displease my beloved Mama. And your contentment is the aim of all my wishes. May God always answer your prayers, and may I never have the misfortune of displeasing you, and may I be able to flatter myself that my beloved Mama takes a benevolent view towards me."
Incidentally, "my Bayreuth sister" isn't an affectation of Ulrike's; Fritz also refers to "my Bayreuth sister" or "my sister in Bayreuth" (and "my Braunschweig sister" etc.) to differentiate his sisters when talking or writing about them to someone else. (Will have to check what that made Amalie, who never married. (That's the sister in Mein name ist Bach.) Have just learned the original inspiration for Fritz writing his anti-German-literature pamphlet of 1780 was a visit by Charlotte and Amalie which ensued in a debate he had with them about German literature and the German language.)
Re: Prussian sibling correspondance
Date: 2019-10-15 03:56 am (UTC)Re: Prussian sibling correspondance
Date: 2019-10-12 03:55 am (UTC)"I have always told you the King is very sensitive"
<3 Wilhelmine, also, as usual: oh Fritz. Really, for all of this -- poor Wilhelmine, I sort of feel simultaneously like it's good that she at least had Fritz in her rather terrible life, and then at the same time, but did Fritz have to be so Fritz?! :)
Re: Prussian sibling correspondance
Date: 2019-10-13 06:59 am (UTC)Both on the good and bad side, and to be fair to Fritz: Wilhelmine could be needy. This was the most intense emotional relationship she had with anyone in her life. (It's not that she didn't reconcile with her husband post Marwitz, but she didn't trust him again, and she hadn't been in love with him in the first place, so... Odd but true: FW had raised his kids to believe in marital fidelity. This fit very ill with marital fidelity.) Anyway, here's a letter from Wilhelmine to Fritz, not dated, when apparantly the mail was late. It's a rare critical outburst and at the same time a passionate love declaration:
"My dearest brother, I write today solely to scold you. You are unbearably lazy, and one has to kill oneself writing letters before you bother to reply. I already can guess what you will reply to this letter: that there is nothing new to report, that you were too busy and didn't have a moment to spare, and what other lousy excuses you can offer. If you wrote to me a thousand times, I love you, my sister, my sister, I love you, then I will be full of joy, and it will more than make up for any news which you could possibly tell me. As for my part, since I have the pleasure to tell you that I love you, I am not so scrupulous, and if you get bored by this - your problem, for I permit you to throw my letters away unread, as long as you leave me the satisfaction of writing them. Now who of us does love the other one more?"
Re: Prussian sibling correspondance
Date: 2019-10-13 07:11 am (UTC)Fritz totally loved fruit and went to no small expense to get a lot of fresh fruit grown locally for his table, which now that I think of it, may partly account for how he survived his litany of health problems plus 18th century medicine for 74 years, lol. Good to know he shared some of his bounty with Wilhelmine!
Re: Prussian sibling correspondance
Date: 2019-10-15 03:55 am (UTC)Also, I think this makes it a little more clear why Wilhelminedidn't have nice things to say about Keith or Katte! It clarifies for me that she must have found it (subconsciously) threatening.
(I want Wilhelmine fix-it fic too :P Can she escape with Fritz and Katte?
or with Maria Theresia)Re: Prussian sibling correspondance
Date: 2019-10-15 05:26 am (UTC)Have relistened further, and post-reconciliation (quoth Fritz "in an argument between head and heart, my heart will always argue in your favor", and hence he accepts she didn't mean to betray him and really loves him), they've fallen in their old co-dependence. He's actually rather sweet when she finally does come clean about her reasons for the Marwitz debacle. Which she has to, because Marwitz, whose first name was Wilhelmine Dorothee (this, like the Margrave being called Friedrich, is just mean to future fiction writers and readers!), upped the ante. Background: her father, who was old Prussian nobility and once was left for dead after a Fritzian battle but came back from that, had died. Because Wilhelmine had arranged the Marwitz/Burghaus Austrian marriage, Fritz refused to let Marwitz have her inheritance (no Prussian money or Prussian goods go to the Austrians!). Given Marwitz' Austrian husband, it then turned out, had counted on that money - he was a gambler -, Marwitz remained in Bayreuth and continued to be the Margrave's mistress. Post sibling reconciliation, she point blank told Wilhelmine that if Wilhelmine wanted her to go to Vienna as opposed to spending her mornings fucking the Margrave, she'd better get her that inheritance money. (Marwitz is totally played by Joan Collins in my head.)
Fritz: after that explanation, provides the money without a single "I told you so" and only warns Wihelmine that Marwitz and her husband the gambler are just the types to ask for more later.
(She did go to Vienna, and was quite succesful in creating a salon there, attended, among others by young Joseph, eagerly listening to stories about the Prussian court.)
Some years later, when Fritz has the impression the Margraves cheats again, he tries marriage counselling by creating a fable about a butterfly which can't help visiting all the flowers, and so our heroine who loves the butterfly is only making herself sad when wishing it not to be a butterfly (thus says a fairy he names "Moral"). To which Wilhelmine responds with: "Love your fable, but it doesn't apply right now: luckily my own butterfly is finding the local flowers to be roses, with thorns." (This was during their long journey.)
Meanwhile, Wilhelmine tries her best to reconcile him with his frenemy. Incidentally, his reaction to Wilhelmine's Voltaire letter is "I'm not surprised at the comedy he played for you. Why oh why has such a genius to be such a jerk!" (All of Europe: starts coughing.)
I think for a Wilhelmine fix-it (which alas would make our Franconian landscape poorer - it's my home province she contributed a lot of nice buildings and nature parks to), it would have needed someone who accomplished such a myriad of feats: being trustworthy, in love with her, interesting, able to outshine or at least equal Fritz in her eyes, with patience and understanding, and at least a noble because she definitely wasn't ahead of her time enough to go for a citizen, that no candidate among her ontemporaries comes to mind. Not to have married at all might have worked for her in that she never appears to have considered cheating on the Margrave on return and once writes to Fritz when he does his thing about female virtue again (i.e. she's one of the few, everyone else at the spa where she's currently staying is a slut) that it's no virtue without temptation and her passion is for music, not guys. But otoh, this is a girl who's been told her purpose in life was to be a royal spouse and mother and only married woman who procreate are pleasing in God's eyes from toddlerdom onwards by both parents (who just disagreed on whose spouse she was supposed to be), and no matter her own inclination, she probably would have felt like a failure if she hadn't gotten married at all.
A romantic friendship with another woman would have been a plausible non-anachronistic way to be happy, perhaps, but alas for Marwitz' nature (that letter where Wilhelmine finally explains about her also has her writing "I truly thought I had found a friend, a true and beloved friend in her"). No other lady-in-waiting ever seems to have gained similar stature in her eyes, other than her beloved "Sonsine" - i.e. Fräulein von Sonsfeld, her governess (the non-abusive one) who'd come with her to Bayreuth and remained with her until her death, but that's a very different type of relationship.
Re: Prussian sibling correspondance
Date: 2019-10-15 05:42 am (UTC)Haha, I have my own matching anecdote! Fritz once told Catt that he had reprimanded Voltaire for quarreling, and that Voltaire had countered with "We're exactly alike, Sire."
Fritz: Can you BELIEVE it? About ME?!
[How I like to imagine Catt reacting: Sorry, Sire, it's just this cold I'm catching. You might hear me coughing a lot tonight. Don't take it personally.]
Re: Prussian sibling correspondance
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Date: 2019-10-15 06:01 am (UTC)Haha, "expert", but yeah, they definitely banded together in the face of a traumatic situation. Some siblings do this; other siblings go in the opposite direction. Like most trauma coping mechanisms, this one had its downsides, but honestly, despite the many and obvious downsides, my opinion is that, given the situation and their limited options, their relationship was really the best thing in the world for them. In that, without it, they would have been much, much worse off, both of them.
(I want Wilhelmine fix-it fic too :P Can she escape with Fritz and Katte? or with Maria Theresia)
I know, right?! Every time I do a Fritz/Katte successful escape attempt, it turns dark the moment Fritz starts worrying about those left behind (which is like paragraph 2 in the one I'm currently working on). Seriously, you know what FW said to Fritz about what would have happened if he'd made it to England? I only have indirect discourse from a biographer here, but it goes like this:
"Had he thought of the consequences? his father asked. His mother would have suffered the greatest misfortune; Wilhelmina would have been imprisoned for life. Finally, 'I would have invaded Hanover and burned and ravaged it even at the cost of my life and kingdom.'"
(That's so incredibly common in abusive situations. There are so often hostages holding you back from escaping, and then if you do make it out, half the people you meet later in life are going to blame you, the fucking victim, for not caring about the ones left behind. Ugh.)
Keith and Katte: she has so many reasons for holding her brother's bond with them against them that it's not even funny.
Fix-it fic: the only one I've found is that modern AU, where Wilhelmine is not abused (except insofar as she has to watch her brother get abused, which is a form of abuse), gets married, has a kid, gets divorced, and becomes a successful conductor and composer. No estrangement period with Fritz, lives happily ever after.
W and MT fix-it fic: I like it! I don't think I can write it, but I like it! (I'm sorry I'm not up for doing research these days, I would totally get my hands on some books and give you MT fic. :/)