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: Sanssouci

[mildred_of_midgard]

Oh, I thought you knew, or I totally would have! It's in my blog entry from August where I rambled about my Sanssouci trip and posted my pics and everything. Oh, wait, you replied to that post. Time to refresh your memory, then. :)

For completeness' sake, the statue near his grave is Flora, Roman goddess of flowers, and Zephyr, Greco-Roman god of gentle breezes.

I almost labeled that "Fritz's chill" in the last slide, but I was being all serious business about death and stuff, so I didn't. But seriously, that statue is the one I'm referring to in my Could Not Chill comment about Fritz.

Re: Sanssouci

[cahn]

ahhhhh I totally did apparently know once upon a time! In my defense, there has been quite a lot of stuff to remember :P :D

Re: Sanssouci

[mildred_of_midgard]

Haha, in your defense, there has been a heck of a lot to remember! (I should recompute the word counts at some point.) Honestly, you're keeping up impressively well, and I mean it.

[ETA: I've honestly been afraid for a while now that I'm going to start repeating myself without realizing it, and you two are going to be rolling your eyes at me. "You already said that, mildred_of_midgard!" It's getting to the point where I wonder at least three times a day if what I'm about to hit reply on is something I already said, lol. The perils of such a fast-moving fandom!]

Notice how many potatoes there are on his grave in the slideshow compared to the pic I took in 2012. That's what I meant by my visit having some of the lowest potato count I've ever seen in pictures.

Also, this pic I found online is hilarious. Somebody's a Fritz potato fan!

Re: Sanssouci

[mildred_of_midgard]

Oh, now that we're in a selenak-inhabited space, maybe she can answer the unanswered questions in that entry!

1) How did Fritz convince everyone that potatoes were awesome? Are the legends apocryphal, or true? (It's Fritz, it could go either way.)

2) How and when did the whole potato-grave thing start? Do we have a specific person to attribute the idea to? Was it a grass roots thing that caught on? Did it, or the concept, predate the 1991 reburial?

Re: Sanssouci

[selenak]

I'm really really really busy right now, so in all brevity, try these links and have Chrome translate them:

https://www.die-kartoffel.de/31-blog/stories/191-friedrich-der-grosse

https://www.br.de/radio/bayern2/sendungen/kalenderblatt/2403-friedrich-ii-empfiehlt-kartoffeln-100.html

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kartoffelbefehl

Gist: the "potato order" is historical, but that he tricked people by having his soldiers guard potato fields in order to make them look desirable to the farmers is a legend which can't be proven one way or the other. Whatever he did, it worked, whereas Dad FW had already tried to introduce the potato to Prussia and failed.

Potato grave: no idea, could not discover by quick googling. Must dash!