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)!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

cahn

ahahahaha MT, you are totally my hero :D

(I am having a great time imagining Joseph II from Amadeus going Mooooooom!)

there's just one of the younger monarchs who manages the Fritzian mixture of being a reformer and a magnificent bastard, and it's not you.

Wait, who?

A conqueror of the world can not do that.

Have I mentioned lately how much I love your translations? Also, this particular line seems a little pointed towards Fritz...?

ETA: And what is the new biography (is it available in English)? I've been thinking that I should read an actual biography of MT, now that I'm thoroughly infatuated with her :P :)

Edited Date: 2019-10-13 04:05 am (UTC)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

there's just one of the younger monarchs who manages the Fritzian mixture of being a reformer and a magnificent bastard, and it's not you.

Wait, who?

Catherine herself! Catherine was a big reformer and a magnificent bastard. Remember, at the partition of Poland, when MT was having scruples, Fritz wrote, "Catherine and I are simply brigands, but I wonder how the Empress-Queen managed to square her confessor."

Also, from Catherine's verse in the epic rap battles of history:

You're unbalanced like I unbalanced the European powers with the wars I waged.
I brought the Russian empire straight out the olden days and right into the golden age.

She wasn't called Catherine the Great for nothing! (Being a magnificent bastard often gets you called Great much faster than being straight out upstanding. :P)

And what is the new biography (is it available in English)?

Was wondering the same thing, for future reference when books and I are friends again.

A conqueror of the world can not do that.

Have I mentioned lately how much I love your translations? Also, this particular line seems a little pointed towards Fritz...?

ETA: It struck me that way too.

Edited Date: 2019-10-13 04:36 am (UTC)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Speaking of epic rap battles (that counts as a musical relationship and goes in this thread, right?), Fritz-in-my-head keeps getting suuuper annoyed that porcelain gets mentioned in Alexander's verses and not his, seeing as how porcelain wasn't even a *thing* yet in AtG's time, and porcelain was all the rage in the 18th century. Fritz was obsessed with it like he was obsessed with, idk, Italian greyhounds.

Like, "Hey, we seem to have invaded Saxony in the course of my warmongering. That's cool, that's where Dresden and all the people who know the closely-guarded secrets of making the highest quality porcelain are!" obsessed.

So Fritz took advantage of this opportunity to introduce the porcelain industry into Berlin. After the war, he ended up buying the porcelain factory in Berlin and running it himself. You know, in his copious spare time. Says one biographer, "Given his concern to micromanage every other aspect of his state, it will come as no surprise to learn that Frederick was very much an activist proprietor, combining the roles of chairman of the board and chief executive officer. Although he could not always be there in person, he insisted on being sent monthly accounts and often visited the factory."

When did he find the time???! Coffee, peppercorns, and mustard, right. Got it.

Anyway, so I knew all this, and so today, because he was really complaining about Alexander and the porcelain, I thought I would google his factory. Then I found this little gem in Wikipedia:

"On 19 September 1763, Frederick II officially became the manufactory's new owner. He purchased the manufactory for the considerable sum of 225,000 thaler and took over the staff of 146 workers. He gave the business its name and allowed it to use the royal sceptre as its symbol. From then on, it was called the Königliche Porzellan-Manufaktur Berlin ("Royal Porcelain Manufactory Berlin") and became a model of how to run a business. There was no child labour, there were regular working hours, above-average incomes, secure pensions, a healthcare fund and assistance for widows and orphans."

I don't agree with his economics (forcing Jews to buy porcelain to keep profits high, not cool), but I mean, if you're going to run a country 18th-century semi-mercantilist style and use your royal power to acquire profits, I guess there are worse things than using said questionably acquired profits on good labor practices. I hope Wikipedia can be trusted here.

From:

selenak

Yup, it's Catherine herself. And yep, Claudius totally threw shade at Fritz with that verse in his MT poem. Given Matthias Claudius wasn't a Catholic Southern German (who would have been more likely to have sympathized with MT but a Protestant Northern German, it's all the more pointed.

As for MT biographies, there were two new ones published in her anniversary year and I promise to report on at least one of them, but until I've actually read it, I can't rec or anti rec it to you two. As for availability in English: will check.

Meanwhile, since you asked about the Fritz-Heinrich-other Marwitz lust triangle, I still had the two more recent Fritz biographies from the library available I needed to check on some stuff, but alas neither of them provides more intel than online googling does. However, there's a more recent Heinrich biography out (by a female writer, both the Fritz bios are by male ones), and since this affair was presumably more important to Heinrich than it was to Fritz, I expect more detail there.

The two biographies - which I got via the Munich library's online loan on my kindle, and hence could name check - don't exactly go "no homo", but they do go "this is all not very interesting if you're not a gossipy sensationalist, and we're doing serious analysis of Fritz here, so a few lines, no more". Otoh, the longer biography did provide me with new intel on two fronts: EC's younger brother died apparantly in the same battle after which Fritz was told Wilhelmine was dead (he learned this on October 18th), burst into tears and had a not so minor breakdown. It doesn't exactly excuse the terrible condolence letter, but it does provide context for him being distracted by his own miseries. The biographer goes on to point out Fritz' utter emotional isolation post 7 years war, victory and miracle of the House of Brandenburg not withstanding. With Wilhelmine's death died also any chance of reconciliation with his remaining siblings, Heinrich didn't forgive him for August Wilhelm's humiliation and death, and most of the Rheinsberg era friends were dead (Keyserling) or gone, too. Then he provides a Maria Theresia quote about Fritz I wasn't yet familiar with, in a letter to Joseph, no less, who evidently had gone "yes, I know he's our enemy, but isn't he the coolest!" again. She writes in her response:

"Has this hero" - MT uses "heros", i.e. the Greek term, in her letter - "who has won such fame for himself, has this conqueror a single friend left? Doesn't he distrust the entire world? What kind of life is this that's left for him, having banished humanity out of it?"

And there I have a serious line for her at the fictional super secret summit of fiction.

Edited Date: 2019-10-13 06:44 am (UTC)

From:

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?

From:

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...

From:

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

From:

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.

Edited Date: 2019-10-14 05:12 pm (UTC)

From:

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"

From:

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.

From:

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.)

From:

cahn

But what about being a gossipy sensationalist????

Lol, Joseph's Rational Fanboy thing cracks me up every time. But yes, absolutely, she has to say that in the SecretSummit. Maria Theresa is just so great, so emotionally healthy compared to... well, most people at that time, but particularly Fritz. With some reason, of course. Yay no-super-traumatic childhoods and romances :P

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Yeah, what about us?! (Honestly, I think there are much better reasons to be interested, not the least of which is that if his favorites were women, no one would call you a gossipy sensationalist for being interested in his relationships with them. There's also the question of "just how did being gay in the 18th century affect people?")

Maria Theresa is just so great, so emotionally healthy compared to... well, most people at that time, but particularly Fritz. With some reason, of course. Yay no-super-traumatic childhoods and romances :P

Yeah, I mean, she may not hit a bunch of my specific buttons, but she's definitely got her shit together as a human being. Go, MT!

Re Fritz, though: we spend a lot of time talking about the ways in which his trauma fucked him up emotionally, but honestly, it's possible to look at it from the flip-side, and I do that a lot. As you know, Bob, I think there's a tendency to overestimate the extent to which the trauma shaped him. And regardless, even if, for the sake of argument, you agree with the historians about every single thing about him that's ever been attributed to the trauma...I continue to be fairly impressed by how intact he came out of all this. Compared to a lot of other people in a whole gamut of other traumatic experiences.

Part of this is genetic, of course, and his personality, but a huge part of it, I think, was that FW was an outlier. The number of people who agreed with FW and wholeheartedly joined in with the abuse are vanishingly small. Even Fritz's earliest influences, his mother and sister, were all, "Yeah arts! Yeah French!" Even the *society* in which they lived overwhelmingly disagreed with FW.

FW: Music is effeminate.
Male musicians in Europe: abound. Are respected. Are often in the military as well.

Etc., etc.

So Fritz was getting validated like crazy every time he turned around. The number of validation/mitigation anecdotes is astounding. Even Katte's executioner had to be ordered three times, and was apologizing profusely to Katte! And as a result (I would argue), a lot of Fritz's time as an abuse victim was spent waiting for Dad to die already so he could join the rest of the world in Sane Land. And that kind of ability to externalize the abuse makes a world of difference to your prospects as a survivor, and is why I start twitching every time I see a biographer use the word "broken" to describe what FW did to Fritz. Hurt? Absolutely. Damage? Sure, at this point we'd be arguing semantics. But break?

I maintain that Fritz came out of his abuse difficult, frequently abusive to others, and unhappy, but with a basically intact core. And that is part of why in the other comment I said his relationship with Wilhelmine was the best thing for both of them: as far as I can tell, they both came out with basically intact cores, and without that close relationship (and at least some of the positive aspects with their mother, amongst all her terrible acts of parenting), it would have been much more unlikely for both of them.

But fix-it fics for everyone!

From:

cahn

Heh, I'd feel equally like a gossipy sensationalist for being interested in the relationships with women. (hiiiii there, August the Strong!) But, yeah.

Oh, I agree with you that he came out functionally intact, although damaged and also verrrrrry bad at relationships. I do appreciate that view of all the external validation he was getting -- and also his relationship with Wilhelmine. (As I've mentioned before, my relationship with my sister is very close, and a large part of how we weathered parents that were (a) not nearly as bad as Fritz's and (b) not nearly as wacko as yours, but who still I think could have messed up either of us -- though particularly my sister -- rather worse. So I feel that very much.)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

But yes, absolutely, she has to say that in the SecretSummit.

Does anyone else feel like author reveals are going to be a little bit redundant in this fandom? :P I mean, I know other people have written Fritz/Katte in past Yuletides, but, like, there are going to be some dead giveaways amongst the three of us. Anything that has at least four Classics references and only passing mentions of music is me, obvs. :P Secret summits are Selena. If anything turns up about Countess Orzelska, I'm going to have my suspicions about Selena. If it's a surprisingly specific fic about Fritz's dogs after the Battle of Soor...Etc. ;)

From:

cahn

heeeeeee!

I, uh, have something of a tradition at this point of giving and receiving highly non-anonymous exchange fic. Last year it was Don Carlo(s) fic -- one giftfic of mine which I didn't know, to be fair, but highly suspected was by

selenak (and it was).